AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW最新文献

Reviewed by:

• Kid Coole by M. G. Stephens, and: King Ezra by M. G. Stephens
• John Schertzer (bio)

Poet, novelist, critic, memoirist, and playwright, Michael Gregory Stephens has written over twenty-five books in just over fifty years. He grew up in Brooklyn and on Long Island, and after teaching at Princeton, NYU, and Columbia he spent a number of years in London, where his plays were performed, as they were as well as in Chicago and Los Angeles. His novels Kid Coole and King Ezra were recently published by Spuyten Duyvil.

Kid Coole is cool, meaning you can trust him with your fifteen-year-old daughter. Ya think, though you have your suspicions. He doesn't drink, smoke, or stay out late at night, and he might prefer you, her thirty-year-old mom, who thinks she wants nothing to do with him. Nah, Kid is living the straight and narrow, though he at times cannot find his way back to his corner, maybe because he is punch drunk, or has blood in his eye.

His story is a boxing story, and that's because boxing is his way of being, of navigating his way through life. But his trainer, Bill Flaherty, or Billy Farts, still needs to hire the massive Ralph Half-Dog as the third corner guy, the spit guy, because he's something you can't miss, and Kid does seem to have a bit of trouble finding his way back to his corner after taking a few punches. [End Page 67]

Ralph is Mike White's son-in-law, and Mike works for Billy. Mike's face is pretty scarred up, as is his body, from fights, but also from things unrelated to the ring, living on the street as a man of color, getting stabbed, shot at. He's much safer in the gym. But his biggest scar is the one he has on his chest down to his gut from heart surgery, a thing he shares with Billy.

Compared to them, Kid is young and fresh. And always cool. A likable guy, always respectful, very coachable, works out all the time, running this way and that through the streets of some small town called Sticks in Upstate New York, throwing punches at the wind, at no one, as he skitters to and fro when he's not at his job cleaning up the park or mopping floors at the Catholic school.

The characters of Kid Coole are embodied with a credible grit, a novel that follows from Stephens's much earlier Season at Coole (1972) and The Brooklyn Book of the Dead (1994), about a large, problematic, and freakish Irish American family from Brooklyn, Long Island, and

Reviewed by:

• Divine Blue Light (for John Coltrane) by Will Alexander
• Allan Graubard (bio)

Will Alexander is well known for his poetry, criticism, and plays. If brevity of any kind can encompass his literary oeuvre—which is questionable—then "explorer" comes to mind, particularly of liminal states charged by convulsive metaphor, visionary scope, propulsive rhythms, and a lexicon that ranges from micro to macro. His interest in quantum phenomena parallels his fascination with biota, insects, fish, birds, mammals, humans, and the historical and cosmic breadth we are part of. That he is the recipient of several prestigious awards that recognize this compass, the last in 2022 as finalist for the Pulitzer, has not altered his path—although it has enlarged his audience. Evidence a cold December evening in Manhattan when he packed the room for a launch reading of Divine Blue Light (for John Coltrane) way downtown at Aeon Books.

Alexander wrote Divine Blue Light's forty-five poems over several years from 2017 on, with the final selection done mid-pandemic. As he has put it, during the pandemic, perhaps prompted by the isolation we all endured, a "wave of poetry" inspired him to write ceaselessly, making of the poetic, in this and other books, a vivacious "living force"—for him and for us.

Divine Blue Light opens rather quietly, however, with a brief preface that identifies an antagonist: reason's "tyranny of causality" and the cultural and sociopolitical logics that back it up. The poems possess an elusive quality in response. On the surface, not all, but some, can read as unconcerned with the coordinates we identify with, including the dimensions that flesh out sensorial reality. Alexander is more at home in an imaginal zone where the language that forms his poems evolves from or provokes "a blazeless blazing."

That phrase, with its Zen-like overtones, rings fairly true. In one sense, it refines a traditional view of inspiration. Receptivity to phenomena is as important as or more important than heightened sensation, passion, and intention. [End Page 110] In another sense, the phrase bridges each of those avidities for poetic ends with variable results: gravitas infused with weightlessness, passion clarified by intellection, solemnity cut with humor. Equally so, Alexander is rarely blindsided by these couplings or the dance he gives them. Of course, whether or not readers keep up, or can, is up to them. Alexander is not one to pace his works for those who read them. The "other" is not the reade

Reviewed by:

• Blue Rhinoceros, or Pedestrian Verses by Jesse Salvo
• Alexander Luft (bio)

In 2019 the United Nations issued a report estimating around one million species are in danger of extinction, largely due to human activity. The scale of this mass death is beyond reckoning, which is perhaps why one finds it easier to think about an individual animal, the last of its kind, passing into history. Consider the fictional Beebop, the last remaining African blue rhinoceros and the nominal focus of Jesse Salvo's Blue Rhinoceros, or Pedestrian Verses. The rhino has long been dead when the novel's story begins, but the question of why exactly he had to die—or what his death meant—draws together a compelling cast of characters in a world simultaneously strange and painfully familiar.

The novel is often narrated by Thomas Entrecarceles, a former reporter disgraced after he fabricated stories from a war zone, who is hired by the mysterious Sairy Wellcome, a zoologist trying to figure out why she, at the [End Page 85] age of twelve, murdered the last blue rhinoceros on the planet. Wellcome explains that she was orphaned during the Littoral County Maple Syrup Disaster, which directly preceded the rhino's murder, and she has no clear memory of why she, an animal lover, would have done such a thing. She's worried that information about what happened seventeen years earlier could now be used to blackmail her, and she considers Entrecarceles an ideal detective because, should he find something incriminating, no one is likely to believe him.

The world-weary Entrecarceles, flanked by his loyal canine, Goober, sets out to investigate the events culminating in the factory explosion that sent waves of scalding maple syrup and molasses through the streets of Littoral, New York (which is neither on the water, as it name would suggest, nor a literal place in New York). Salvo manages to repeatedly invoke the horror of scalded, drowning townsfolk with descriptions as poetic as they are gruesome. Entrecarceles must not only uncover the history of the syrup disaster—a deadly day no one wants to remember—but must also explain why, in the aftermath, the townspeople help Sairy kill Beebop.

The story unfolds in multiple narrative modes, most often through what are presumably Entrecarceles's reconstructions of events described to him by interview subjects. The disgraced reporter's ennui surfaces in bits of editorial musing amid his reportage, and he doubts even why he'd hazard to write his story. "I am writing this down," he says of his account; "do not a

• Future-Proofing Humanistic Study
• Joy Connolly (bio)

Let me begin with a proposition that might sound excessive or utopian:

We can ensure that the study of the ancient world has a strong presence in every institution of higher education in the country.

This is very far from the case today. Given current trends in enrollments and majors across many fields in the humanities and social sciences in the United States, you may think it impossible. I agree—if we choose to stick with the current design for the distribution of knowledge in the American research university, where scholars are sequestered by language, region, or country in divisions that passed for common sense in the nineteenth century, where students and scholars were mostly well-off men of European descent.

True, liberal arts colleges, particularly the less selective ones, tuition-dependent schools, large teaching-focused publics, and community colleges, increasingly feature Departments of Languages and Literatures, Departments of Humanities, Departments of Liberal Studies, and the like. But many members of faculty, trained at PhD-granting universities, tend to resent the fact that these generalized groupings are the product of a tangle of budget constraints and undergraduate preference, not scholarly design; and they find serious shortfalls in their own preparation for a career focused on undergraduate teaching. If they wish to publish, they must follow the rules for specialized research set by departments with totally different funding and reward structures. Any major change in their teaching practice risks putting them at odds with their PhD-granting colleagues. And just like their counterparts in PhD-granting schools, faculty in this diverse group of institutions typically pursue their study far from colleagues in the sciences and in departments or schools of fine art, architecture, business, public health, social work, engineering, medicine, public policy, and law.

This almost universally practiced sequestering leads to indefensible lags in the development of scholarship. Take one of the most traditional of humanistic pursuits, textual criticism. Today textual critics must overcome countless intellectual and administrative hurdles if they want to study graphic design, computer science, or the computational edges of linguistics—all fields with [End Page 19] direct relevance to the advancement of how we determine true and false readings and design better ways to interpret and publish texts. Consider the question of why scholars choose to make comparative scholarship so difficult by persistently preferring individual over collaborative work in all the ways we train and reward students and faculty—despite the fact that complex transregional or transtemporal questions cry out fo

• Of All the People
• Jeffrey R. Di Leo (bio)

PANDĒMOS (Πάνδημος), i.e. "common to all the people," occurs as a surname of Aphrodite, and that in a twofold sense, first describing her as the goddess of low sensual pleasures as Venus vulgivaga or popularis, in opposition to Venus (Aphrodite) Urania, or the heavenly Aphrodite. She was represented at Elis by Scopas riding on a ram. The second sense is that of Aphrodite uniting all the inhabitants of a country into one social or political body. In this respect she was worshipped at Athens along with Peitho (persuasion), and her worship was said to have been instituted by Theseus at the time when he united the scattered townships into one great body of citizens.

—Leonhard Schmitz (1859)

The pandemic has now raged on for three years—and there is no clarity as to when it will end. When US president Biden announced on national television that "the pandemic is over," the next morning he was reminded that he does not have the authority to make such a decision. Just because many act as if the pandemic is over, the fact remains that people in the US are still becoming sick and dying from COVID-19.

As of mid-September 2022—and the time of Biden's announcement—four hundred to five hundred Americans were dying from a pandemic that to date had claimed the lives of over one million in the US—and over 6.5 million worldwide. While the seven-day death average of 491 reported on September 20, 2022, was a far cry from the 3,280 reported on January 28, 2021, the issue remains as to what is the minimum number of daily deaths to remove the designation pandemic.

Aside from the fact that there is no set criterion to designate an outbreak a pandemic, there is also none to undesignate an outbreak a pandemic. Apparently, because the World Health Organization (WHO), an arm of the United Nations, dubbed the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic back in 2020, it is up to them to undub it. In other words, the pandemic is only over when the WHO sings. But is it? [End Page 1]

Just as the negative affects of the wars fought by Americans continue long after these wars have been designated as over by authorities, so too will the negative affects of the pandemic continue after the WHO, Biden, and other authorizers dub the pandemic over. An inventory of the negative affects of the pandemic that will persist long after people stop dying directly from COVID-19 is comparable in scope to inventories amassed by all of the major wars fought by Americans from 1775 to the present.

This list includes the American Revolutionary War (1775–83), the War of 1812 (1812–15), the Mexican-American War (1846–48), the American Civil War (1861–65), the Spanish American War (1898), World War I (1914–18), World War II (

• What Is a Future for Classics?
• Erika Zimmermann Damer (bio)

I contemplate this question as a mid-career professor at a small liberal arts university in the mid-Atlantic, and I ask it mindful of the panel in our field that brought national attention to the future of Classics in 2019, and in conversation with critical dialogues that preceded and emerged from that panel, including those in this issue. From where I sit, Classics is both remarkably changed from my own experience as an undergraduate and graduate student, and quite recognizable. I am not certain that we are in crisis so much as in a moment with welcome changes happening across many parts of our lives as teachers, scholars, and as a learned community. The elements that bring students into a small liberal arts college program in Classics are much the same where I live as where I studied, but the ways we teach, the content we incorporate, and our methods of scholarly engagement have changed. Classics is by nature a conservative field, where our shared goal is to continue to introduce new generations of students and the public to the languages, cultures, and material remains of the ancient Mediterranean, especially that of Greek- and Latin-speaking spaces, and to maintain the ongoing textual and material transmission of a small slice of antiquity to our twenty-first-century communities. Thinking about this question brings me first to a gentle critique of classics pedagogy, and second toward looking at some of the new developments that can broaden the field.

First, I'd like to introduce a compassionate critique of our field. As a faculty member who also led the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program on my campus, and who co-teaches and writes with colleagues in other humanities disciplines, I have found that Classics still harbors some troubling values, including a propensity to value objective data over the human, embodied, sensory, emotional world. We overvalue formal written perfection over creative forms of inquiry, and we often reject knowledges from other fields in ways that isolate us from our peers in literary, performance, and cultural studies. In practice, this can mean that we teach a narrow canon of texts with both difficult and exclusionary pedagogy unrecognizable to our peers in modern languages. Our focus on prescriptive linguistic precision in understanding [End Page 47] Greek and Latin and our emphasis on errors in student's writing, in particular, align uncomfortably closely with elements of what Tema Okun (in 1999, revised in 2021) identified as white supremacy culture, or the systems of belief that normalize white middle- and upper-class values as universal, ideal, and dominant. These beliefs include perfectionism, that there is a single correct path, and avoidance or fear o

Reviewed by:

• The Suffering of Lesser Mammals by Greg Sanders
• Edward M. Bury (bio)

Everything driven by the creative process—be it music, dance, the visual arts, or another expression of skill, perspective, belief, or beauty—can benefit by those who sometimes flex the boundaries and challenge convention in order to establish themselves as a ground-breaker. A proverbial crack to the foundation of a creative genre helps to keep all types of art advancing and open to new interpretations, and potentially new audiences.

The thirteen short stories that comprise The Suffering of Lesser Mammals clearly demonstrate that author Greg Sanders purposefully intended to deviate from the normal by sauntering down the avenue of the quizzical, the absurd, the unbelievable, and at times, the truly bizarre. Sanders employs recognized elements of short fiction—conflict, plot, character development—but deftly infuses creative elements that reveal his clear and purposeful mandate to transcend the expected or the normal. In fact, the front cover of the book displays an astronaut adrift in a life raft, the paddle having floated to the back cover; the image, which portends the story "A Blintz on Ross 128b," is unquestionably apt.

In some stories, Sanders introduces the unconventional element early in the work; for example, two paragraphs into the first story, "A History of Cars," we learn that a significant number of people who read a 1978 graphic nonfiction work "came to believe that the first fully functional automobile chugged along during the rule of King James I, and that workable prototypes had been [End Page 82] built as early as the reign of Canute the Great." (For those unfamiliar with this British ruler, the prototype would have been developed around 1016.)

While in "The Fate of Mathematicians," a tale about Max Tischler, a university professor who reconnects romantically with a woman colleague from his graduate school years, a macabre scene takes place near the end of the story. Our protagonist faces the prospect of a grisly death after being tossed into the hopper of a refuse truck by burly, laughing garbage men after complaining about the noise emanating during their rounds; while this unfolds, neighbors and passersby ignore Tischler's cries for help. After his eventual escape from the hopper, Tischler stumbles to the door of his apartment building while the garbage men observe, "their eyes ablaze with pure joy, a happiness unburdened and full of delight. He was their catharsis for the week."

This practice of varying

• Philology No More?Latin and Greek on the Sidelines
• Nigel Nicholson (bio)

No one would raise an eyebrow if an undergraduate philosophy major at an American university studied Hegel, Kant, or de Beauvoir without knowing German or French. Nor would anyone raise an eyebrow if an undergraduate history major studied the Russian Revolution without Russian, or New Spain without Spanish—let alone Nahuatl or indeed Latin—even if this work constituted a senior capstone project. This is not a question of resources; it is true at the wealthiest schools. The simple fact is that, at the undergraduate level, mastery of the relevant languages has long ceased to be considered integral to history or philosophy.

In coming years I suspect Classics will go the same way: the discipline will increasingly define studying its materials without command of Latin or Greek as the norm, and while some teaching of the languages will be provided by better-resourced institutions, language study will not just be peripheral in undergraduate education, but be accepted as peripheral, and its absence will not be understood as a failure or a loss.

Classics has long been centered around language. Until 2013 the North American professional association of classicists, which was founded in 1869, was known as the American Philological Association. Philology has a range of meanings, but all stress the study of words, whether texts or—especially in Britain—languages themselves. At Reed College, where I teach, until recently we required a year of advanced work in one language and a year of at least introductory work in the other. My undergraduate degree, at Oxford, was centered around large swaths of Greek and Latin, although it was impressed upon us that our reading lists had been considerably reduced from what confronted previous generations. In American universities Classics departments are usually grouped with modern language departments, and in many institutions, historians of ancient Greece and Rome find their home in these Classics departments, not in history departments, and often teach Latin or Greek language classes. I know nowhere where this is true for the modern languages. Historians of France and Spain hold appointments in history departments, and do not teach the languages. [End Page 51]

Control of language—language in general, rather than just Latin or Greek—has long been a central part of the mythology of Classics. Certainly, the study of Latin will teach you grammar and syntax, and enlarge your English vocabulary, but in my youth there was also a clear sense that such control was a key to power and influence. One of the most popular sitcoms in 1980s Britain, the BBC's Yes, Minister, revolved around the interactions of Jim Hacker, the Minister for Admi

• ScenesTwisted Spoon Press: An Interview with the Publisher

Could you briefly describe your press's history?

We were founded in 1992, in Prague, which at the time was still in Czechoslovakia. It came out of a chance encounter the previous year with Lukáš Tomin on a crazy chartered train to a Warhol exhibition in Medzilaborce, in eastern Slovakia, that had been organized by some newly founded post-revolution cultural association. I mentioned to Lukáš that some of us expats were thinking about putting together a magazine of writing, maybe a one-off, maybe a few issues (we really had no concrete conception). He said, "Why don't you do books," and I was naive enough to say, "Sure, why not." So the first two titles we published (in 1992) were his novel The Doll (a new edition is forthcoming) and Kevin Blahut's new translation of Franz Kafka's Contemplation (first time in English as a discrete volume), with some wild illustrations from my roommate at the time, Kip Bauersfeld. We had no distribution, anywhere, so went around ourselves to bookstores in Prague asking them to carry the books, which thankfully they did, albeit skeptically at first. And to our surprise, enough copies sold just in Prague that we could start [End Page 166] thinking about putting out another book or two. From there we eventually developed a program to publish English-language translations of writing from the neighborhood at large, that is, Central Europe. And along the way we've had to learn how to make books. There was a steep learning curve for sure, and sometimes we still don't get things quite right, that is, the end result doesn't exactly match up with what we had imagined. It's easy to make a nice book by throwing money at it. Some publishers can do that, we can't. So it requires some inventiveness to produce quality books while operating with rather limited resources, but figuring this stuff out is what makes it fun . . . mostly. And we've had a lot of help with this "figuring out" from Czechs in the publishing profession—without a doubt the most resourceful folks I have ever met.

How would you characterize the work you publish?

Innovative. Humorous. Exuberant. Sometimes goofy, but goofy with a purpose. Manic. And, most of all, imaginative.

Who is your audience, and in what ways are you trying to reach them?

Our audience? C'est nous. We publish the books we would like to read and hopefully designed in a way that if one of us were to walk into a bookstore and see a Twisted Spoon book we would be interested in picking it up. In other words, while our tastes are not mainstream, they are not sui generis either, and I believe there are plenty of others who have similar tastes, certainly eno

• Babel and the Beginning of Translation
• Brian O'Keeffe (bio)

Once upon a time, the Bible tells us, "the whole earth was of one language" (Genesis 11). Contemplate the halcyon days of the earth's people: harmonized by linguistic uniformity, peacefully complacent in the expectation that communications were transparent, there was no need for translators. On the Shinar plain, the people built a city and then a tower spiraling skywards. That tower, and the city from whose midst it arose, represented the compact unity of society. Those constructions formed bulwarks against the threat of the people being "scattered over the face of the whole earth." Yet the people wished that sky-reaching pillar to reach God's heaven, and that was a blasphemous presumption: speaking to His unnamed auxiliaries, God said, "Let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech." The architects lost the ability to comprehendingly work together, dissension replaced cooperation, and the tower of Babel—for that's what it was now called—fell into ruin. Babel became a name for the ruined dream of a global community achieved by the sharing of one language.

With the calamity of Babel, our fall out of Eden, where Adam could still wield God's Word, was completed. Henceforth, faced with the confusion of tongues, we depended on translators to alleviate that situation. George Steiner's magisterial work on translation is titled After Babel, and the front cover image is Bruegel's depiction of the Babel tower—fat around its base, tiers and balconies arranged in whorls winding above the cloud-base. The tower's jagged incompletion makes visible a rabbit-warren interior of rooms deserted by the people that tower was intended to house. The tower now desolate, we scattered into a multilingualism that entrenched differences—differences only translators could now bridge. It was in translators that we placed our hopes of building coalitions between peoples speaking foreign tongues.

But why did God visit linguistic confusion upon us? The Greek-speaking Jewish philosopher Philo Judaeus, writing amid the teeming Babel of ancient [End Page 94] Alexandria, asked this question in On the Confusion of Tongues. Did our desire to build a world-city that could loft itself into proximity with heaven's firmament threaten God's sovereignty over Creation? Did having one language enhance the prospect of cooperative wickedness? Philo admits that linguistic confusion hardly prevented men and nations from collaborating in deeds of war and sinful iniquity. And God actually wanted us to build a city. He only ruined that city when it failed to follow His architectural blueprint, when it became a Babylon rather the City of God. As Philo observes, moreover, the