Pub Date : 2023-11-29DOI: 10.1353/abr.2023.a913421
E. Ethelbert Miller
<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span> <p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> The Poet as Cartographer <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> E. Ethelbert Miller (bio) </li> </ul> <p>During a recorded Zoom conversation with Miho Kinnas, a Japanese poet and translator, I found myself thinking about why we had begun collaborating on writing poems together. Was this the result of a pandemic hangover? Had we become addicted to the daily exchanging of emails and the discussion of the work by Chilean novelists? What brings writers together when they step outside workshops and cafés? What is the relationship between collaboration and community organizing? What does it mean to share lines and stanzas of poems when walls are being constructed to keep migrants and refugees out? In our poem "One of Us Is Missing" Miho and I write:</p> <blockquote> <p><span>I no longer know where I am going.</span><span>I should sell my shoes for food.</span><span>I cannot find a map.</span></p> </blockquote> <p>I've always been curious about the cartography of collaboration. How does one follow another without a map? Which tends to bring me back to governmental policies adopted to deal with a crisis. How often does our leadership seem to be clueless or just lost? What is the connection between collaboration and democracy? What is the price of collaboration, and what must one sell to be successful?</p> <p>Once when I wrote to Miho and told her I missed her, she responded back that she didn't know she was missing. I chuckled after she told me this, but reflecting on her comments much later, her response seemed to summarize the poem "One of Us Is Missing." We began the second stanza of the poem with this intriguing line:</p> <blockquote> <p><span>How will I survive without the others?</span></p> </blockquote> <p>So much is broken in today's world. War shatters peace. People become scattered pieces. There is a longing to connect, to return home, or to discover new homes. The invention of self is performance art. Every narrative is a <strong>[End Page 89]</strong> potential passport into newness and a conversation with oneself or another. Miho and I used the term "twoness" to describe what we were doing. We started exchanging lines back and forth by email. Since our work is very different in style and tone, Miho described our collaboration as improvisational while I considered it to be more call-and-response. I found our exchanges spiritual and, at times, having a Zen quality. But how does one construct a poem together? How does one build a shelter or home? What are the politics of collaboration? Is it shaped by form or content? Do we need a map to help us explore? I believe there might be four levels required for collaboration:</p> <blockquote> <p>Intent</p> <p>Process</p> <p>Result</p> <p>Transformation</p> </blockquote> <p>Every collaboration has an origin story. Intent begins with desire. The wanting to create something new and different.
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Pub Date : 2023-11-29DOI: 10.1353/abr.2023.a913409
Barbara K. Gold
<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span> <p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> The Elasticity and Capaciousness of Classics <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Barbara K. Gold (bio) </li> </ul> <p>Perhaps the most amazing thing about Classics/Classical Studies/Greek and Roman Studies (whatever we want to call it—the jury is still out) is its elasticity; its ability—indeed its urgency—to reach out temporally, spatially, materially, semantically, theoretically; its inability to be confined to one theory, one subdiscipline, one approach; and its desire to constantly evolve and to become something else. Classicists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would barely recognize what Classics has become, and I suspect that the same will be true of classicists after us in the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth centuries.</p> <p>Every one of us has our own version of what Classics is, or ought to be. But as confirmed as we might be in our beliefs, those versions change along with our embeddedness in the culture. Classics used to mean philology and the study of Latin and Greek. It was heavily based in textual work, and any analysis of those texts was historical or philological. The American Philological Association was the major North American Classics organization for many years until it changed its name in 2014 to the Society for Classical Studies, a nod to the effort to broaden the scope and appeal of Classical Studies.</p> <p>I am going to engage in a brief autobiography here to show how much Classics has changed for me at least since I started studying it back in the 1960s and 1970s. I read my way through all the major (and some minor) Greek and Roman authors with little sense of asking any of the questions I would start with today (or of being allowed to ask such questions. One friend told me that when she tried to bring up a possible reference to rape in Greek tragedy, she was shut down). I realized after graduate school that I had taken courses in Greek tragedy without anyone highlighting the role of women. How is that possible? I read Roman satire without really thinking much about sexuality in satire. I read the elegists without thinking about the role of desire and the erotic in Propertius and Ovid. I did not read any literature from late antiquity, medieval times, or Christianity. While I got what was, I suppose, a good education in the basics, I realized later that what interests me <strong>[End Page 33]</strong> most now about these authors, texts, and cultural moments was almost entirely left out of my early connection with the classical world.</p> <p>Things began to change in the 1970s (at least for me), largely because of the founding of the Women's Classical Caucus in 1972 (fifty years ago) and the increased presence of bright, powerful women who paved the way for the exciting feminist scholarship that began to see the light. Journals like <em>Helios</em> and <em>Arethusa</em> were publishing nontrad
代替摘要，这里有一个简短的内容摘录:经典的弹性和容量芭芭拉K.戈尔德(传记)也许关于古典/古典研究/希腊和罗马研究(无论我们想叫它什么——陪审团还没有出来)最令人惊奇的事情是它的弹性;它在时间、空间、物质、语义和理论方面的能力——实际上是它的紧迫性;它不能局限于一种理论、一门分支学科、一种方法;它渴望不断进化，变成另一种东西。18世纪和19世纪的古典主义者几乎认不出古典文学已经变成了什么，我猜想，在我们之后的24世纪和25世纪，古典主义者也会是这样。我们每个人都有自己的版本的经典是什么，或者应该是什么。但是，就像我们对自己的信仰深信不疑一样，这些观点也会随着我们在文化中的嵌入程度而改变。古典文学过去指的是文献学和对拉丁语和希腊语的研究。它在很大程度上基于文本工作，对这些文本的任何分析都是历史的或语言学的。美国文献学协会(American Philological Association)多年来一直是北美主要的古典学组织，直到2014年更名为古典学学会(Society for Classical Studies)，这是对拓宽古典学范围和吸引力的努力的认可。我要在这里写一篇简短的自传，来展示至少从我上世纪六七十年代开始学习古典文学以来，它对我的影响有多大。我通读了所有主要的(和一些次要的)希腊和罗马作家的作品，却没有意识到我今天一开始要问的任何问题(或者被允许问这样的问题)。一位朋友告诉我，当她试图提到希腊悲剧中可能出现的强奸时，她被拒绝了。研究生毕业后，我意识到我上过希腊悲剧的课程，但没有人强调女性的角色。这怎么可能呢?我读罗马讽刺作品时，并没有认真思考讽刺作品中的性。我读挽歌时没有考虑到普罗提乌斯和奥维德的欲望和情色的作用。我没有读过任何古代晚期、中世纪或基督教的文学作品。虽然我认为我得到了良好的基础教育，但后来我意识到，现在我对这些作者、文本和文化时刻最感兴趣的东西，几乎完全被我早期与古典世界的联系所忽略了。20世纪70年代，情况开始发生变化(至少对我来说是这样)，主要是因为1972年(50年前)女性经典党团会议(Women’s Classical Caucus)的成立，以及越来越多聪明、有权势的女性的出现，为令人兴奋的女权主义学术研究铺平了道路。《Helios》和《Arethusa》等期刊发表了一些非传统的文章，倾向于女权主义和理论;现在Eugesta在国际上做了很多这样的工作。1992年，三年一次的女权主义和经典会议开始了(第八届于2022年举行)。我的研究从关于赞助的书籍和文章(社会历史的，但不是女权主义或理论的)到女权主义理论、女性作为赞助人、关于女性人物和作家、性和性别的书籍和文章的出版物，以及最近关于中世纪和拜占庭时期变性圣徒和被奴役的烈士的工作。这只是一个人的进化。但是，要了解Classics真正发生了多大的变化，以及它的树冠已经变得多么广阔，人们只需要看看每天收到的电子邮件，里面有世界各地的人参加的会议、会谈和书籍的通知(COVID-19和zoom的出现与许多不同的人能够参加这些活动有很大关系)。这是2022年冬天的一张快照，展示了经典音乐已经变成了什么，现在是什么，以及可能会变成什么。一所著名大学向潜在申请者做了博士课程的广告。他们的课程和专长包括(除了语言、文学、文化、历史、艺术和考古)古代科学想象、新拉丁语和接受研究、酷儿理论和性的历史、种族和种族化……
{"title":"The Elasticity and Capaciousness of Classics","authors":"Barbara K. Gold","doi":"10.1353/abr.2023.a913409","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/abr.2023.a913409","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> The Elasticity and Capaciousness of Classics <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Barbara K. Gold (bio) </li> </ul> <p>Perhaps the most amazing thing about Classics/Classical Studies/Greek and Roman Studies (whatever we want to call it—the jury is still out) is its elasticity; its ability—indeed its urgency—to reach out temporally, spatially, materially, semantically, theoretically; its inability to be confined to one theory, one subdiscipline, one approach; and its desire to constantly evolve and to become something else. Classicists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would barely recognize what Classics has become, and I suspect that the same will be true of classicists after us in the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth centuries.</p> <p>Every one of us has our own version of what Classics is, or ought to be. But as confirmed as we might be in our beliefs, those versions change along with our embeddedness in the culture. Classics used to mean philology and the study of Latin and Greek. It was heavily based in textual work, and any analysis of those texts was historical or philological. The American Philological Association was the major North American Classics organization for many years until it changed its name in 2014 to the Society for Classical Studies, a nod to the effort to broaden the scope and appeal of Classical Studies.</p> <p>I am going to engage in a brief autobiography here to show how much Classics has changed for me at least since I started studying it back in the 1960s and 1970s. I read my way through all the major (and some minor) Greek and Roman authors with little sense of asking any of the questions I would start with today (or of being allowed to ask such questions. One friend told me that when she tried to bring up a possible reference to rape in Greek tragedy, she was shut down). I realized after graduate school that I had taken courses in Greek tragedy without anyone highlighting the role of women. How is that possible? I read Roman satire without really thinking much about sexuality in satire. I read the elegists without thinking about the role of desire and the erotic in Propertius and Ovid. I did not read any literature from late antiquity, medieval times, or Christianity. While I got what was, I suppose, a good education in the basics, I realized later that what interests me <strong>[End Page 33]</strong> most now about these authors, texts, and cultural moments was almost entirely left out of my early connection with the classical world.</p> <p>Things began to change in the 1970s (at least for me), largely because of the founding of the Women's Classical Caucus in 1972 (fifty years ago) and the increased presence of bright, powerful women who paved the way for the exciting feminist scholarship that began to see the light. Journals like <em>Helios</em> and <em>Arethusa</em> were publishing nontrad","PeriodicalId":41337,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW","volume":"6 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138526953","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1353/abr.2023.a913438
G. Yancy
{"title":"Charles W. Mills: The Self-Incurred Ignorance of White Philosophy","authors":"G. Yancy","doi":"10.1353/abr.2023.a913438","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/abr.2023.a913438","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41337,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW","volume":"121 1","pages":"173 - 179"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139345461","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1353/abr.2023.a913431
R. Tally
{"title":"Marxism and Spatiality","authors":"R. Tally","doi":"10.1353/abr.2023.a913431","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/abr.2023.a913431","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41337,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW","volume":"46 1","pages":"137 - 141"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139343697","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1353/abr.2023.a913426
N. G. Haiduck
{"title":"This Insubstantial Pageant by Estha Weiner (review)","authors":"N. G. Haiduck","doi":"10.1353/abr.2023.a913426","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/abr.2023.a913426","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41337,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW","volume":"48 1","pages":"116 - 119"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139345760","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1353/abr.2023.a906493
Frederick Luis Aldama
An Interview with Matt Madden Frederick Luis Aldama Educator, curator, editor, translator—all-around polymath—Matt Madden is also one of the most formally innovative and inspiring of our contemporary comics storytellers. From his first comics, such as Black Candy (1998) and Odds Off (2001), his best-selling and multi-translated 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style (2005) and his haiku comics to his latest Bridge (2021) and Ex Libris (2021), Madden brings an unparalleled precision of style and innovation to the comic storytelling arts. With every carefully inked line and panel configuration, he crafts stories that push the envelope on erstwhile thresholds of form and content. He awes his readers with his elevation of visual storytelling forms. He transports us into exquisite labyrinths of existential conundrums: truth and illusion, suffering and transcendence. Just as vanguardistas such as Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, and more recently Giannini Braschi and Carmen María Machado are writer's writers, so too might we consider Madden a cartoonist's cartoonist, using the visual-verbal storytelling arts to create marvels of innovation and inspiration. His work challenges global comics creatives to up their game. We see in Madden's comics how his use of varied generative constraints leads to the crafting of stories that make new readers' perception, thought, and feeling about the known and enigmatic—the quotidian and transcendent. With Madden I think readily of Borges's "The Aleph." Here Borges famously set himself the challenge of solving through fictional means the finite (human) encountering the infinite: how a human might perceive in a gestaltic instant everything in the universe from every angle simultaneously. Madden sets himself similarly seemingly impossible challenges that he not only solves through his dexterous visual-verbal storytelling expertise but does so in ways that lead to solutions to storytelling problems and the discovery of new storytelling techniques and forms. In addition to Madden's works already mentioned, he's also coauthor with [End Page 49] Jessica Abel of Drawing Words & Writing Pictures (2008) and Mastering Comics (2012). From 2008 to 2013 he was series editor with Jessica Abel of The Best American Comics. His illustration work has appeared in WIRED, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal, among many other publications. Madden's translations of comics include Aristophanes's The Zabîme Sisters (2010), Edmond Baudoin's Piero (2018), and Blutch's Mitchum (2020). Not surprisingly, Madden's work has caught the attention of many around the world. He's the US correspondent of the French Oubapo, a comics movement in France linked to the Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle) group. Exhibitions of his work have appeared in the United States, Spain, France, Switzerland, and Italy. Madden has been invited to teach courses and workshops around the world, including in France, Switzerland, Denma
教育家、策展人、编辑、翻译——全能的博学家——马特·马登也是我们当代漫画故事讲述者中最具正式创新性和启发性的人之一。从他的第一部漫画，如《黑色糖果》(1998)和《Odds Off》(2001)，到他的畅销作品《99种讲故事的方式:风格练习》(2005)，再到他的俳句漫画，再到他的最新作品《桥》(2021)和《图书馆》(2021)，马登为漫画叙事艺术带来了无与伦比的风格精确性和创新。通过每一条精心绘制的线条和面板配置，他精心制作的故事突破了过去形式和内容的极限。他对视觉叙事形式的推崇令读者肃然起敬。他把我们带入了存在主义难题的精致迷宫:真实与幻觉，痛苦与超越。正如豪尔赫·路易斯·博尔赫斯(Jorge Luis Borges)、胡里奥(Julio Cortázar)以及最近的贾尼尼·布拉斯基(Giannini Braschi)和卡门·María马查多(Carmen Machado)等先锋作家是作家中的作家一样，我们也可以将马登视为漫画家中的漫画家，他使用视觉语言叙事艺术创造了创新和灵感的奇迹。他的作品挑战了全球漫画创作者的游戏。在马登的漫画中，我们可以看到他是如何利用各种生成约束来精心制作故事，让新读者对已知的和神秘的——平凡的和超越的——产生感知、思考和感觉。说到马登，我很容易联想到博尔赫斯的《阿列夫》。在这里，博尔赫斯给自己设定了一个著名的挑战，即通过虚构的方式解决有限(人类)遇到无限的问题:人类如何在一个格式塔式的瞬间同时从各个角度感知宇宙中的一切。Madden为自己设定了类似的看似不可能的挑战，他不仅通过灵巧的视觉语言叙事技能解决了这些挑战，而且还通过解决故事问题和发现新的叙事技巧和形式的方式解决了这些挑战。除了前面提到的Madden的作品，他还与Jessica Abel合著了Drawing Words & Writing Pictures(2008)和Mastering Comics(2012)。从2008年到2013年，他是美国最佳漫画的杰西卡·阿贝尔的系列编辑。他的插图作品曾出现在《连线》、《纽约客》、《纽约时报》和《华尔街日报》等许多出版物上。马登翻译的漫画包括阿里斯托芬的《扎布姐妹》(2010年)、埃德蒙·鲍多安的《皮耶罗》(2018年)和布鲁奇的《米彻姆》(2020年)。毫不奇怪，Madden的作品吸引了世界各地许多人的注意。他是法国乌巴波的美国记者，这是法国的一个漫画运动，与Oulipo (Ouvroir de littratature potentielle)组织有联系。他的作品曾在美国、西班牙、法国、瑞士和意大利展出。Madden被邀请到世界各地教授课程和研讨会，包括法国、瑞士、丹麦、西班牙和芬兰。2012年，马特·马登获得了法国最高荣誉之一的“艺术与文学骑士勋章”。弗雷德里克·路易斯·阿尔达玛:马特，你谦虚地展现了你在视觉和语言上的惊人天赋。马特·马登:像大多数漫画家一样，我不会对自己大惊小怪。尽管漫画在整个文化中取得了巨大的进步，但在基本层面上，漫画家们仍然没有感到自己的价值得到了提升。我们没有像在当地酒吧演奏的摇滚音乐家那样的接待和招摇。人们不会想，哦，他们有纹身，长发，戴着很多戒指，所以他一定是个漫画家。当然也有例外。我想到了同为漫画家的朋友保罗·波普。他理解流行明星形象中魅力和浪漫的双重作用:一方面，是的，一切都是虚荣，但另一方面，拥有一个酷的角色可以提高你的作品的接受度，特别是如果它实际上是好的——没有人会因为卢·里德只穿黑色衣服，对摇滚记者表现得像个混蛋，在90年代做了一个老土的摩托车广告而贬低他的天才!你一直都知道你会成为一个……
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Pub Date : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1353/abr.2023.a906497
Jane Rosenberg LaForge
Reviewed by: Ire Land (a Faery Tale) by Elisabeth Sheffield Jane Rosenberg LaForge (bio) IRE LAND (A FAERY TALE) Elisabeth Sheffield Spuyten Duyvil https://www.spuytenduyvil.net/ire-land.html 188 pages; Print, $18.00 Call it dumbing down, appealing to the lowest common denominator, or Disneyfication. For generations of American children, the land of enchantment has long since been drained of its subtleties, as the traditions of the Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault, among others, have been sanitized for a querulous mass market. In technicolor, these tales of transformation—from rags to riches, from man to mammal and back again, from fish woman to silenced female—become mere recollections of a moral education. The protagonist must learn a lesson of humility or selflessness to earn the psychic or fiscal reward that is their due. The narrator of Elisabeth Sheffield's new novel, Ire Land (a Faery Tale), confronts this lack of nuance head-on during a ménage à trois in an Upstate New York hotel room. Having adjourned to the "woodland paradise" suite after a conference, the women's studies professor Sandra Dorn and her sex partners of the moment find themselves haunted by this essentially American reinvention: "Maybe there was something provoking about that wallpaper with its Disneyfied forest scene, as if there cartoon critters peering through the trees," she says while divining what inspired the "antic play of moist cavities and thrusting appendages" that lasted for three days, until the waterbed broke. [End Page 72] Despite the fervency of her efforts, Dorn fails on this occasion, and others, to restore what has been lost by the homogenization of earthy folklore into an industry exercising a fraught cultural dominance. Whether she ever gets beyond the forces arrayed against her, or if the price she pays trying is too steep, will likely make for a diverting discussion on how any human being, particularly a woman of a certain age, can make meaning out of their life in the postmodern era. In the meantime, Sheffield delivers a frequently hilarious and finally heartbreaking dive into contested spaces in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Much of this romp, which begins in western Colorado, jumps to New York City and parts north, and crosses back and forth into the (now) far reaches of the British Empire, centers on the female body—how it looks, or should look; who controls it, and for what purpose—but to reduce Ire Land to a story about gender is to ignore its fundamental criticism of the so-called binary world and the vicious divisions we struggle through in its wake. Though Dorn is ostensibly the novel's narrator and protagonist, Ire Land is an epistolary novel, the leavings of a daughter of Irish immigrants who has become unhoused, and possibly unhinged, as she records her final metamorphosis. She recalls beginning her adult life as a "big ripe pimple of potential" and is alternately referred to as a "hag," a "cutting edge bitch," a
书评:Ire Land (a fairy Tale)作者:伊丽莎白·谢菲尔德简·罗森伯格·拉福吉(传记)Ire Land (a fairy Tale)伊丽莎白·谢菲尔德斯普滕·杜维尔https://www.spuytenduyvil.net/ire-land.html 188页;印刷版，$18.00可以称之为简化版，迎合最低公分母，或者迪斯尼化。对于一代又一代的美国孩子来说，这片充满魅力的土地早已失去了它的微妙之处，因为格林兄弟(Brothers Grimm)和查尔斯·佩罗(Charles Perrault)等人的传统已经被净化，以适应抱怨的大众市场。这些五彩缤纷的转变故事——从穷到富，从人到哺乳动物再到哺乳动物，从鱼女人到沉默的女人——变成了道德教育的回忆。主角必须学会谦卑或无私，才能获得应得的精神或经济奖励。伊丽莎白·谢菲尔德(Elisabeth Sheffield)的新小说《仙境》(Ire Land，一个童话)的叙述者，在纽约北部一家酒店的房间里，面对着这种细微差别的缺乏。女性研究教授桑德拉·多恩(Sandra Dorn)和她的性伴侣在一次会议结束后前往“林地天堂”套房，他们发现自己被这个本质上是美国人的重塑所困扰:“也许那张带有迪斯尼森林场景的壁纸有什么令人兴奋的地方，就好像有卡通动物在树林里窥视一样，”她说，同时猜测是什么激发了“潮湿的空洞和刺入的附着物的滑稽游戏”，这种游戏持续了三天，直到水床破裂。尽管多恩的努力很热情，但在这个场合，以及其他场合，她都没能恢复由于将俗气的民间传说同质化而失去的东西，使之成为一个发挥着令人担忧的文化主导作用的行业。无论她是否能摆脱反对她的力量，或者她付出的代价是否太大，这可能会引发一场有趣的讨论，即任何一个人，尤其是一个特定年龄的女人，如何在后现代时代从他们的生活中获得意义。与此同时，谢菲尔德在20世纪末和21世纪初的竞争空间中提供了一个经常令人捧腹，最终令人心碎的潜入。这场嬉闹从科罗拉多州西部开始，跳到纽约市和北部的部分地区，然后来回穿越到(现在)大英帝国的偏远地区，主要集中在女性的身体上——它看起来是什么样子，或者应该是什么样子;谁来控制它，为了什么目的——但是把《愤怒的土地》简化成一个关于性别的故事，就是忽视了它对所谓的二元世界和我们在它之后挣扎的恶性分裂的基本批评。虽然多恩表面上是小说的叙述者和主人公，但《爱尔兰》是一部书信体小说，是一个爱尔兰移民的女儿留下的遗书，她无家可归，可能精神错乱，因为她记录了自己最后的蜕变。她回忆起自己刚成年时是一个“成熟的大疙瘩，充满潜力”，她自己和其他人都称她为“妖婆”、“前卫的婊子”和“老妪”。她的悲惨故事引起了她的通讯员Madmaeve17@gmail.com的冷淡回复，Madmaeve17@gmail.com是一个博客的管理员，也是英国家庭暴力受害者在线支持小组的成员。对这些邮件的评论，可能是多恩最后一个教学职位上的一位同事的作品，并不是对未来不可靠叙述的标准警告，但它经常是诙谐的，充满了多恩对每个人(包括她自己)同样的讽刺语气:“我们在对话中省略了引用，”其中一个注释解释说，因为编辑“似乎在‘说’桑德拉无法识别自己之外的任何外部现实。”对于她来说，除了作为满足自己需求和欲望的手段之外，还有其他人存在吗?”这些报纸的读者是多恩疏远的女儿，麦基万·坎比(McKewan Kambi，简称Kew)。如果小说结尾处所传达的信息可以被归类的话，那么这本书的结构谜题的原因就在于此，而结构谜题支撑着它的道德。在回忆那次导致酒店酒宴的会议时，多恩说那次会议有些……
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Pub Date : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1353/abr.2023.a906510
Daniel T. O'Hara
Reviewed by: Capricorn, Venus Descendant: 50 Poems of Pandemos, Karkinos, & Eros by Michael Joyce, and: Light in Its Common Place by Michael Joyce Daniel T. O'Hara (bio) CAPRICORN, VENUS DESCENDANT: 50 POEMS OF PANDEMOS, KARKINOS, & EROS Michael Joyce Broadstone Books https://www.broadstonebooks.com/shop/p/capricorn-venus-descendant-50-poems-of-pandemos-karkinos-eros 64 pages; Print, $22.50 LIGHT IN ITS COMMON PLACE Michael Joyce Broadstone Books https://www.broadstonebooks.com/shop/p/light-in-its-common-place-poems-by-michael-joyce 96 pages; Print, $22.50 In recent psychoanalytic theory, when revisiting Freud's later speculations on the death drive, the idea of unbinding the tangled bundles of erotic and destructive, even self-destructive impulses (and their memories and fantasies), is a way of talking about what happens in the cases of patients who succumb to their suicidal compulsions. When untangled by analysis, unbound by it, unless there is an object readily available toward which those destructive (or erotic) feelings can be directed, they turn immediately around on the self, with, in the former cases, too often tragic results. Imagine, if you will, the famous fort/da game invented by Freud's grandson Ernst for the times when his mother, Sophia, leaves him alone. Ernst in his crib ties a string to a toy and throws it over the side and reels it back in, saying as he does so what sounds like fort (there) and da (here). For a poet, disinvestment, unbinding impulses of an erotic or a destructive kind, can be a dangerous, delicate process. This is not to claim that Ernst ties the string [End Page 128] around his neck, changes the toy at its end to a heavy weight, and hangs himself in his crib, rather than suffer the periodic losses of his mother's presence. But as Olivia Laing, in The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking (2013), outlines it usefully in her chapter on John Berryman, his disinvestment in his parents, especially his father, informs and shapes his alcoholism definitively throughout his life, sacrificing himself even as his poetry rises to major status, especially in his personal epic, The Dream Songs (1969). Rossella Valdre's Psychoanalytic Reflections on the Freudian Death Drive: In Theory, the Clinic, and Art (2019) is the best guide to this recent theoretic development, which I single out as I find it most useful in reading the poems in Michael Joyce's both important and subtly disturbing volumes. Two poems, one from each of these volumes, can exemplify what I mean. "North Wildwood" is the first poem, from Light in Its Common Place. It adopts the commonplace tone of this volume, and its run-on syntax is typical of Joyce as it paints a beach scene at two a.m. of three brothers observing "a lone crane," feeding "amidst lapping waves," as "false dawn traces a horizon beyond the blackness." The brothers, as they move along the boardwalk under the "bright wand" of the lighthouse, fall silent and disturb two lovers who are whi
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Pub Date : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1353/abr.2023.a906486
Jay Neugeboren
The Morning LineA Writer's Odds Jay Neugeboren (bio) By the time I was twenty-four years old, when I sold my first short story to the now defunct Colorado Review for ten dollars, I had accumulated, by my count, 576 rejections. I had also written seven unpublished novels. One cold winter morning, about six months before I received the good news from Colorado Review, and after a particularly disheartening series of rejections, I decided to wallpaper my one-room flat in Bloomington, Indiana, with my rejection slips. I read through them and sorted them out—the form letters to one side, the personal notes to the other—and arranged the slips and letters in stacks by size and color, after which I began taping and stapling them to the wall directly above my desk. In some perverse way, I believed these pieces of paper would prove to me that I was what I doubted most of all: a real writer. I would create a dazzling, ingeniously quilted patchwork made up of the words of those who were resisting me, and by having their words in front of me while I was writing, I would do them battle. I'll show the bastards! I screamed silently. I'll show them by writing stories and novels whose brilliance and power will be undeniable, and someday, when my work is published and praised, and these same editors, publishers, and magazines come around to solicit my fiction . . . To my surprise—I was, as ever, at least as naive as I was persistent—it took less than an hour of taping and stapling before I found myself falling into the blackest of depressions. I took all the rejection slips down and put them in the bottom drawer of my desk, and I brooded on my nonexistent literary career: I would never be published, and—an inevitable consequence—I would never be happy again. I did not, however, take down two sheets of paper that had been on the wall before my antic impulse took over—one that contained a quote by George Gissing I read each morning to encourage me to stay the course, and one on which, to keep track of submissions, I listed where my various books, stories, and articles were, and when I had sent them out. Then, one morning not long after I'd gotten out of the wallpapering business, when I was typing up a fresh list of what I had out on submission, and [End Page 18] after I'd typed the title of my most recently completed novel, the name of the publisher I'd sent it to, and the date on which I'd sent it out, I hit the tab key, let the cartridge slide to the left, and typed in odds—9,999 to 1. Then I typed in odds for each item, and when I got to the bottom of the page, under the column in which I'd posted odds, I listed a Best Bet, Long Shot, Hopeful, Sleeper, and Daily Double. To the left of these selections, in order to keep a running score of how my work was faring in the world, I typed in the words "THEM" vs. "US." I've kept a scoreboard on a wall near my desk for the sixty years that have passed since then, and though the odds can fluctuate wildly from day to day, de
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Pub Date : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1353/abr.2023.a906517
Charles Alexander
Carrying on in CuneiformAn Interview with Kyle Schlesinger Charles Alexander (bio) In previous columns I have explored some past practitioners of poetry and the printing and publishing arts, and wanted, now, to turn attention to some things happening at present, among printers, poets, and bookmakers, beginning with the profoundly thoughtful and innovative practice of the proprietor of Cuneiform Press, Kyle Schlesinger. Schlesinger has worked with poets and artists including Jim Dine, Gil Ott, Alistair Johnston, Trevor Winkfield, Ron Padgett, Johanna Drucker, Lisa Rogal, and many more. By "has worked with" I mean a range of practices, but mostly pushing toward, and often becoming, full collaborations. In his poetry, too, he has tended to collaborate with others, though his individual volumes, such as A New Kind of Country (Chax 2022), show his decidedly individual, independent, and bold practices in the arts of the word. His version/vision of the arts (and life) embodies uncertainty and poses questions. The last stanza of the title poem reads: Motion as a verbSound not a wordLike wild jasmineA long way hereWhich way is AmericaSound not a wordWhich way is America I posted a set of questions to Schlesinger about his work and about inhabiting the roles of poet, printer, and publisher. Or, in truth, I sent these questions to him and asked him to simply "hang out" in their spaces, and while doing so, write something in response. He did that, and more. Here are those questions and his responses. [End Page 158] 1. Metal, paper, ink—what do these elements have to do with your work, and with how you think about printing? Do they creep into your poetry, too? Metal, paper, and ink are the bedrock of civilization as we know it. Without the printing press, literacy would still be a privilege of the aristocracy alone. It is easy to forget that just a few hundred years ago a book was a rare, valuable, mysterious object. As a reader, writer, and printer, I am grateful to be a small part of that glorious tradition. Of course I've never been one to adhere to any particular purist lineage, nor am I interested in period pieces per se, but there is a reverence for words, materials, and their construction ingrained in me. As a poet I have an insatiable curiosity about the materials of writing, the embodiment of ideas. I'm interested in the tools poets used, artifacts and artifice. As a scholar, I need history to anchor literary theory, "no ideas but in things," like Williams said. The practice of typography taught me an economy of language in my poems, which I get from Creeley and Dickinson as well. When I read a poem, I want to know all about the poet, printer, papermaker, artist, typographer, publisher, et cetera, to see the book as a unique form of collaboration, a sum far greater than a disembodied text. 2. I think you are self-taught as a printer/bookmaker. Is that true? Can you talk about your beginnings? What sparked you? What did you have in mind? What surprise
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