Category Archives: food

A Cultural History of the Chinese Language, by Sharron Gu

Posted on May 6, 2012 by | 2 Comments

One can encounter the Chinese language in a variety of unlikely places.  Captain Malcolm Reynolds upbraiding a crewmember in Joss Whedon’s space western TV series Firefly; Chinese characters strewn about Ezra Pound’s controversial epic masterpiece, The Cantos; and in numerous products one sees in finer Asian markets nationwide.  For many Western readers, this reviewer included, Chinese represents a completely alien language.  The challenge comes from a reader trying to find a point of reference with a foreign language, at least from a technical linguistic standpoint.  For speakers of European languages, this becomes increasingly difficult.  A Cultural History of the Chinese Language by Sharron Gu attempts to provide a means for non-specialists to approach Chinese, not from the technical and scientific discipline of linguistics, but from the discipline of literary history.

Gu couples this literary history with the premise that, because Chinese is so much older than other living languages, it is more refined and advanced.  Gu asserts that,

Chinese evolved into a language as abstract as and analytic as German, as fluid as Arabic, and as suggestive and flexible as English and Spanish.  Most important of all, Chinese has become a language of all these capacities at the same time.

Unfortunately, Gu’s book does not deliver on the premise.

A Cultural History tackles a diverse array of disciplines, including archaeology, anthropology, sociology, political science, and a history of philosophy, science, painting, drama, poetry, and literature.  A comprehensive history of Chinese musical instruments is followed by an equally detailed history of poetry.  Her explanation of the linguistic differences between different words is fascinating.  The problem is not with individual sections so much as the overarching organization.  The accumulation of details and minutiae overwhelms the reader.  While touting itself as a book for non-specialists, it reads suspiciously like a dissertation-turned-into-publication.  The book also sets itself up for confusion by its assertion in a single Chinese language, creating a linear progressive history of language evolution.  While not a book on linguistics, the relative scant attention paid to major Chinese dialects (Mandarin, Cantonese, etc.) and languages related to Chinese (Mongolian, Vietnamese, etc.) is jarring and confusing.

The confusion reinforces Gu’s assertion, exposing its political agenda.  Despite this being “a cultural history,” she writes about “the Chinese language.”  The shaky cultural arguments reflect Gu’s nationalist bias.  Gu really needed to explain the political history of China, since there are references made to dynasties and the Warring States.  One needs to understand from the outset that the China we recognize today does not have the same geographic borders as these older historical entities.  The editors should have insisted on a readily accessible apparatus for the non-specialist reader, including lists for: Chinese dynasties, literary terms, philosophical concepts, and words associated with painting, music, and drama.

A Cultural History of the Chinese Language is less a cultural history than a hyper-detailed edifice vainly supporting a thinly-veiled nationalistic mythology.

Here’s some of the Chinese from Firefly.  Shiny!

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What I Hate: from A to Z, by Roz Chast

Posted on December 11, 2011 by | Leave a comment

The world is a scary place.  Roz Chast latest book, What I Hate: from A to Z, is her alphabetic exploration of her panaphobic panoply of paranoia-inducing pictures.  Her fears run the gamut of the familiar (heights, getting lost, and nightmares) to the unusual (spontaneous human combustion, balloons, and Jello 1-2-3).  Each entry has a short introduction opposite the illustrated page.  There are single panels and other pages cluttered with details.  In one introduction, she explains her fear of rabies originating in children’s literature.  She writes, “On an ideal planet, children’s books wouldn’t be censored for references to sex, but for illness.”  The opposite page shows a psychotic dog staring at the reader.  A man in the background offers tepid advice, “His bark is worse than his bite.”  A woman says, “He loves people.”

For those who enjoy a bit of schadenfreude, What I Hate is a quick fun read.  While Chast espouses an especially grim outlook, one needn’t possess her omnipresent anxieties to take pleasure in the witty cartoons.  One should handle the book carefully, since one might get a nasty paper cut or have one of its sharp edges poke an eye out.  That is, if one survives the trip to the local bookstore without getting hit by a bus, abducted by aliens, or trampled by zebras.

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Notes from Irrelevance, by Anselm Berrigan

Posted on September 20, 2011 by | Leave a comment

 

Genealogy

Anselm Berrigan comes from an esteemed family.  The son of poet Ted Berrigan and poet Alice Notley, his brother is the poet and songwriter Edmund Berrigan.  Anselm’s wife Karen Weiser also works as a poet.  Notes from Irrelevance shows that Anselm didn’t get his book deal by trading on his father’s name.  (America, despite its populist and egalitarian posturing, has a yen for dynasties and nepotism.  See: the Presidency, Ford Motor Company, etc.)

Content

Notes from Irrelevance could easily bear the subtitle, “One man’s search for meaning in the second decade of the 21st century.”  Throughout the short volume, Anselm contends with the Big Issues: existence, meaning, faith, family, and literature.  Written as a single book-length stanza, the concept brings to mind the single-paragraph-as-book tirades by Thomas Bernhard or Molly Bloom’s ecstatic run-on sentence that concludes Ulysses.

By turns demotic, snarky, and self-referential, Notes from Irrelevance both charms and challenges the reader.

“             The computer,
not the quesadilla,
told me about a moment,
wherein my father,
talking to an old friend,
waxed nostalgic for a
moment they cohabited,
an extended moment,
and a fellow who heard
the rap from above got
mad and thirty-two years
later related his anger
in a comment box as way
of saying he couldn’t
deal with the sadness
he perceived in Ted’s
poetry.”

In the end, after the attempts to stave off his own irrelevance, Anselm dissects his own writing with cynical precision and acidic wit:

“Cosmic intercon-
nection of all beings?  Check.
futility of pain management as source
of humor in outlook?  Check.  Controllable
vices for purposes
of secondary level
of interior life, an echo
of conscience trailing
out?  Check.”

The question and answer format calls to attention that poetry is a language-making process.  The book demands the reader to contend with the language.  Long run-on sentences, sometimes tied into knots of clauses and sub-clauses, suddenly vanish in a spat of.  Small.  One or two word.  Sentence fragments.  Beautifully polished phrases collide with unexpected bursts of vulgarity.  An occasional pop culture reference pops up (Internet comment boards, the movie Apollo 13, etc.) making the reader realize the poet lives in the real world and is a real person.  The real-life aspect of the poet is a challenge for the reader, since the poet is the son of a famous poet.  Leaving the shadow of one’s father (especially a famous one) forces one to contend with the harsh sunlight of reality.  The Shadow of Fame drove Hamlet crazy and has been the reason countless kids of celebrities went from crèche to rehab.

Reading the book took little over an hour, but re-evaluating the images and the language will require me to revisit the text many more times.

Production

Wave Books is a small press specializing in poetry and operates from Seattle, Washington.  The book itself possesses a sturdy yet delicate feel.  A slim 64 pages give Notes from Irrelevance a chapbook appearance, an aura of the homemade.  On many pages, there are small imperfections, tiny flaws in the paper itself.  The text is printed on sturdy paper, just shy of good cardstock, while the front cover is devoid of any decoration except the poet’s name, each letter sliced and the title itself hunkered down on the lower right, almost an afterthought.

Wave Books puts out a great product, superior materials with stunning content.  Granted that sounds a bit dry and anemic, with all the personality of a State Department press release, but Notes from Irrelevance effects one on an intellectual and emotional level while the book itself feels good in the hands.  (Best accompanied in the morning with a cup of coffee.)

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Fasting for Ramadan: Notes from a Spiritual Practice, by Kazim Ali

Posted on September 19, 2011 by | 1 Comment

Food is one of the essential requirements for existence.  One cannot go about one’s daily business without caloric intake.  However, beyond the needs food fulfils, one takes pleasure in eating.  That is why people read restaurant reviews or watch No Reservations.  Food also represents a mirror of a specific place, culture, and personality.  Why a book entitled Fasting for Ramadan has recipes in the back also requires explanation.

Fasting for Ramadan: Notes from a Spiritual Practice by Kazim Ali is a stunning literary jewel.  An extended meditation on the Muslim practice of fasting during the month of Ramadan has appeal for the practicing faithful, those curious about the Muslim religion, and to those with or without faith.  Faith is not a requirement for the enjoyment of this book.  In fact, one of Kazim Ali’s frequent refrains is, “I’m not sure what I believe.”  This is less an example of alleged agnostic fence sitting (a caricature lobbed by zealous theists and atheists alike), but a cri de coeur against the tyranny of dogmatism and certainty.  But before we place Ali within the spectrum of Muslim theology, it is important to elucidate what Ramadan is and isn’t.

Ramadan is one of the Five Pillars of Islam.  These pillars (Arkan) are as follows:

1. Shahada (The profession of faith): There is only one God and Muhammad is his messenger.

2. Salat (prayer): Traditionally, the five prayers recited at specific times during the day.

3. Sawm (fasting): The obligatory time of fasting during the month of Ramadan.

4. Zakat (alms-giving): The act of giving to those in need by those who are financially capable.

5. Hajj (Pilgrimage): A Muslim must visit Mecca and perform a specific battery of rituals.

Ramadan is not a hunger strike or torturous asceticism.  Ramadan involves the withholding of food from dawn until sunset.  Since the Muslim calendar is lunar (like the Jewish calendar), Ramadan is measured in terms of the moon’s waxing and waning.  In his journal, Ali tells how his first Ramadan fast with his mother was during the month of July.  July’s long days made for an arduous experience.  But the fasting isn’t without celebration, since Ali discusses his fast-breaking meals with fellow students.  Even with the fasting, there is still food and joy.

Kazim Ali is unique in relation to other devout Muslims in that he practices the Ramadan fast, but not the daily prayers.  In the book, he also explains how he practices yoga and is a vegetarian.  (While Muslims are forbidden from eating pork, they can eat other meats.)  For Ali, the vegetarianism and yoga make sense, since he was born in India, a nation with a massive Muslim population.  Ali is also a self-described Shi’a Muslim, the minority sect that has sizable populations in Iraq and Iran.  Ali works as a creative writing teacher at Oberlin University.  Ali is also gay.

Fasting for Ramadan is comprised of two main sections.  The first “New Moon in the Western Sky: Ramadan Essays” are free-associative essays first written for an Oberlin University blog.  Ali discusses his thoughts on Ramadan, dinner gatherings, and matters literary and personal.  The former blog entries give the essays a semi-public feel, not necessarily confessional, but definitely for public consumption.  (The essays pique this reviewer’s interest in seeing what the comments board revealed, since blog posts can act as one half of a public dialogue.)  The second section is called “Absence of Stars: A Fasting Notebook.”  Written years earlier, this is Ali’s personal journal during the Ramadan month.  The tone is more confessional, the feelings more naked, and the impressions more immediate.  In both sections, Ali’s calling as a poet are revealed.

Islam, like Christianity and Judaism, is a religion of the word.  Ramadan celebrates the Prophet Muhammad’s injunction from God (Allah, al-Ilah, literally “The God”) to write the Quran.  Ali writes:

It’s a sacred month, regardless of fasting, because it is said to be the month in which the revelation of the Quran began.

When Gabriel came to the prophet in cave and said, “Read.  Read in the name of the One who created you, made you from a clot of blood.”

And what night of the month was that?  Complicated question.

Supposedly: An odd-numbered night in the third week of the month.  Cryptic.

(NB: Spacing and paragraph spacing in original text.)

Ali’s writing wavers from the ruminative to the epigrammatic, the text a dancer making split-second turns and unexpected reversals.  The hunger for food becomes the engine of his writing, propelling him forward and inward.  The inwardness yields to questions about his faith, his world, and his writing.  The inwardness remains even as the prolonged nature of the fast allows his gnawing hunger to fade away like so much fog on his morning runs.

Amidst the meditations, epigrams fly out and beckon second looks: “Fasting is first to abstain and then to embrace emptiness.  Then to give emptiness back.”  (How can one not think of Beckett?)  “But since I am not sure what the nature of god is (or God if you prefer, or G-D, or whatever) I don’t know how to speak.”  (Shades of the Daoist; serenity in uncertainty.)  “Eden is over, if ever Eden was real.”

The reviewer hopes to gain further pleasure from the text with the recipes in the back.  The emptiness of Kazim Ali’s experience gives back again, this time with the sensations of the tongue and the nose, the eye having been sated on the words.  This is literature to be savored by a writer that bucks the usual stereotype our culture has given the faithful Muslim.  On a rudimentary level, Fasting for Ramadan gives the reader an understanding of the physical and spiritual efforts involved in this month-long practice.  On another level, the book gives a double portrait (one public, another private) of an individual’s attempt to understand himself and his world.

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The Double Life of Alfred Buber by David Schmahmann

Posted on July 29, 2011 by | 1 Comment

KUMAR(to Goldstein)Well, if you have the yellow fever tonight, there’s a rocking Asian party over at Princeton tonight.

GOLDSTEIN Man, I have the yellow plague. There’s nothing sexier than a hot Asian chick…or dude for that matter…

Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle (Danny Leiner, 2004), script by Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg

A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing.  But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.

Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (1867) by Karl Marx

A Woman of Property

David Schmahmann is another lawyer-author who joins the ranks of the Permanent Press.  His second novel, The Double Life of Alfred Buber, can be seen as a Judeo-Anglo-Rhodesian-Thai riff on Vladimir Nabokov’s iconic novel Lolita (1955).  Schmahmann, like Buber, is a product of international personality.  The author is a native South African who practices law in Brookline, Massachusetts.  Alfred Buber is the son of Jewish Communists living in Rhodesia, pariah people living in a pariah state as it were.  (Rhodesia withdrew from the British Commonwealth in 1965 to establish a white-ruled sovereign state.  Unrecognized and justifiably shunned by the world community, it lasted until 1979, when it became Zimbabwe in 1980.)

Alfred Buber grew up in Rhodesia but eventually settled in the United States to work at a prestigious law firm of Henshaw & Potter in Boston.  After many years hard labor at the firm, Buber moves from a small boardinghouse to a white mansion, a veritable marble sarcophagus.  Dissatisfied with wealth and in a rut at work, he decides to take a trip to Thailand.  In a bar called The Star of Love, Buber meets Nok.  With this fateful meeting, this overweight nearly hairless Westerner finds pleasure, relief, and the seeds of his own destruction.

Already one can see the contours of Lolita in the narrative.  Schmahmann elevates the novel from a mere facsimile of Nabokov’s best-known work and makes it his own.  In the same manner, Stevie Ray Vaughn covered the uncoverable “Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)” by Jimi Hendrix.  The unexpected delight arises from Schmahmann’s deft handling of Buber.  He begins as an overdetermined caricature and gradually transforms into a fully formed human being.  Buber’s “yellow plague” becomes less a desire for the flesh than a desperate need for companionship with another person.  His finely calibrated professional persona, the fortress-like mansion, and the complex dissembling finally begin to crack.

Tongue Thai’ed

Western fascination with Asian cultures is nothing new.  As the quote from the pan-ethnic stoner comedy Harold and Kumar explicitly states, human desires know no ethnic boundaries.  Unfortunately, Alfred Buber comes from an older generation and raised in the racially rigid society of Rhodesia, and sees his desires for an Asian woman as something hateful that must be concealed at all costs.  The worst part is not that Nok is Asian as much as she works as a prostitute.

Buber’s descriptions of Thailand are impressionistic and possess the vagueness of fable.  But this should be expected, since he is not a native and everything seems new and odd.  One can compare Buber’s impressions with the razor-sharp descriptions of Sonchai Jitpleecheep, the hero of John Burdett’s crime novel Bangkok 8 (2003).  Buber is a foreigner, a farang.  Bangkok 8 plays like a great companion piece to Alfred Buber, since both are told in first person and Burdett’s crime novel goes into amazing depth about the Bangkok prostitution industry, as multilayered and economically vital as any other sector.

Alfred Buber’s love for Nok develops to the point where he wants her to be his bride.  The economics of prostitution and marriage collide and commingle in a series of scenes with Buber interacting with the Nok’s family and villagers.  Buber, ever the public traditionalist, negotiates with Nok’s father for her bride-price.  (It is ironic how “traditional marriage” advocates fail to mention how the earliest traditional marriages were both arranged and saw woman as property.  Then again, who can rationally discuss anything with someone possessed by Gay Panic?)  In both cases, prostitution and marriage, women are commodified.  Buber, the son of Communists, teases out the “metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties” of the situation.

Nabokov Blues

From the plot to the quality of the writing, comparing Schmahmann to Nabokov is inevitable.  In this case, it is entirely justified.  Anthony Burgess wrote about Nabokov in his book-length review of literature, The Novel Now (1967).  (Burgess also shares with Nabokov, at least with American readers, the notoriety of being known for only one book, despite being prolific.)  Burgess writes that Nabokov is both “pedantic and cosmopolitan” who writes in “the involved, dense, witty, learned, allusive English that disappointed the smut-hound readers of Lolita.”

Buber shares the trait many Nabokovian characters share, finding “the only alternative to perversity, with its magical and terrible privileges, is banality.”  One can see this in Alfred Buber, his near-reverential desires for Nok contrasted with the artifice of propriety and decency.  (Side question: Why do we yearn for our financial betters to be so utterly boring?  And why do we feign outrage when they aren’t?  The hypocrisy cuts both ways.)

An example of Buber at his most tender is in order.  Here Buber describes Nok with a tenderness and joy one usually doesn’t associate with clients of prostitutes:

Buber holds her narrow brown foot in the air as she lies on the bed under a single sheet, traces the curve of her calf with his finger.  What is it, what, I obsess, about this slender curve, this smooth brown muscle, that holds me so entranced?  It cannot be lust alone.  I have had her, recently, cannot penetrate her again and grab any pleasure further pleasure in it, and yet this curve, this calf, holds me still, dominates me, entrances me beyond description.  Or the hardness of the back of her thigh, the very fine, almost impenetrable follicles that give texture to her skin.  I run a finger there and I want it too, endlessly, for myself.  I have her, for a pittance, for today, for tomorrow, for a week or a month if I choose, and yet that is not enough. (Italics in original)

It goes on like this, alternating between an almost detached and clinical sexuality and a lush, overheated sensuality of a Baudelairean prose poem.  The passage convinced this reviewer that the novel was no simple copy of Lolita, but a worthy book in its own right.

While Nabokov is most famous for his book about the pedophile and Burgess is most famous for his book about gangs that speak strange, both writers produced a large multifaceted oeuvre.  Only reading those two books by these titans of literature does a disservice to the reader.  The same goes for David Schmahmann.  While he only has two novels to his name right now, one can only hope he, like Burgess and Nabokov, is capable of so much more.  Nabokov wrote a novel-length poem with academic commentary (Pale Fire), satires of totalitarianism (Invitation to a Beheading), and alternate history erotica (Ada, or Ardor), among many, many other volumes.  And that’s just his fiction.  This reviewer hopes David Schmahmann can be as prolific and imaginative as Nabokov, but hopefully get beyond the great author’s shadow.  It is still early in his career and this reviewer anticipates much from this gifted South African born lawyer.

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An Interview with Lisa Flowers, Founder of Vulgar Marsala Press

Posted on July 23, 2011 by | 1 Comment

Can you explain why you named your press Vulgar Marsala?

We’re named for an image in DH Lawrence’s “Medlars and Sorb Apples”, from his seminal/groundbreaking collection “Birds, Beasts, and Flowers”.  I toyed with an assortment of names that encompassed a lot of literary and mythological and film references, etc, but ultimately this one stuck…more intuitively/impulsively than intellectually.  It’s an eye-catching name…maybe an amusingly misleading one, until you know what its axe is (some have even assumed it’s some kind of sex publication /site, what with the word “vulgar”).

What attracted you to the work of Chad Faries?

I’ve described his work as a trip through Disney through the eyes of Woody Guthrie through the eyes of Ezra Pound, like an ever-overlapping pair of bifocals … that pretty much sums it up!  The Book of Knowledge is an utterly brilliant concept.  Chad’s a distinctly American poet, in the Paterson sense, and a great chronicler of adolescence, of love, of heartbreak, of the landscape and how it shapes nostalgia.  His work’s witty, playful, profound, ingenious, and unexpected.

What is the creative mission of Vulgar Marsala?

Championing the work of unknown or little known artists is our highest priority … and will remain that way, whatever success we may or may not achieve … but aside from that, it’s pretty simple: we’re out to publish the most original and groundbreaking work we can.  I don’t mean simply “solid” “or good work, I mean stunningly visual and cinematically arresting work.  We have tendencies we like to encourage because you don’t much see them being encouraged: epic poetry of the Miltonesque form is like that … most journals, excepting the American Poetry Review and a handful of others, are not big on longer work … it’s often treated as a deal breaker.  Crucially, too, film for me is a passion almost equal to poetry, so I want the work we publish to be in glorious black and white and Technicolor … just as the site says.  We want work you can see, that you can splash around in, that you can reach through the screen and put your hands on … and maybe draw them back into realtime covered with exotic pollen or green slime … whatever.  It’s been said by so many artists over the years that in art that achieves its purpose, there needn’t be any distinction between mediums … cinema, visual art, music, poetry: all one, like a synesthesian Nabokov thing.  There’s this quote by the filmmaker Andrezj Zulawski … I can’t remember specifics, but it has to do with the definition of art … actual art … being no art.  It sounds pretentious and empty at first, but it’s actually trickily exact.  A true thing achieves itself both through and independent of form.  It has to be able to stand on its own no matter what.  We would seek to adhere to that philosophy … as we do to the adage about the first rule of anything being never to bore your readers/audience, etc.  To sum it up in a crude nutshell, I guess we simply want to publish stuff that doesn’t bore us.  We approach things from the POV of a child’s attention span … rather.

Why did you become a publisher?

See above.  Too, as a poet, I wanted an outlet for my own work.  And I want other writers I believe in to have an outlet for theirs.

Where do you see Vulgar Marsala five years from now?

Infinitely more evolved than it is now, certainly.  A relocation to NYC/Brooklyn is going to help immensely.  If we can get rolling along with some funding, and establish ourselves in a community honored through the ages for being one of the world’s most coveted homes for artists … in a city I love deeply and that has been incredibly responsive … I’m confident we can blossom into a humble if hopefully well regarded little outfit.

In what ways are you making Vulgar Marsala a financially viable entity?

Haha … well, uh, here’s where it gets tricky.  We’re essentially seeking to make it a viable financial entity by way of grants and the like.  Support is certainly not going to come from book sales.  All our expenses are out of pocket right now.  That’s why we’re “slow as the world” to quote Plath … though not also very patient, to paraphrase her.  But help is out there; you’ve just got to deliver something that’s worthy of it in the eyes of [grant] committees (etc) and individuals who might hopefully share your tastes.

Name some of your favorite authors and why you read them.

This could go on forever.  Roethke, certainly.  The great religious poets: Milton, Donne.  Epic poets like Hart Crane.  The godhead that’s Emily Dickinson … all of them present unique takes on interpretations of immortality.  Roethke, in particular, is one of the great poets of reincarnation, especially in Praise to the End! and the like.  Whitman has an exhaustible love for life and can show us how to live without fear; when I read him, I’m not afraid to die, which is something I can’t say for any other poet.  I like life-affirming work, even … and often especially … when it’s simultaneously nightmarish, and ingenuity and metaphorical wizardry win over the nightmare; poetry of ecstasy and joy, especially when it’s subverted into the bizarre.  Ditto for eroticism obscured in the ornate.  Obviously Lawrence in the aforementioned Birds/Beasts era, and Ted Hughes … who owes a great deal of his nature poetry to Lawrence.  Plath, of course.  Poets like James Wright can show us everything we could ever hope to know about beauty and sadness and loss.  At the same time, I don’t think doom ever need be unmitigated, and almost anything can be presented with humor, if the author is skillful enough.  I’m leaving a lot of people out, and I’ll kick myself for it, but that’s the jist.  Robert Graves, Anna Akhmatova, Rilke…etc.  John Ashbery is a huge influence on me personally; his labyrinths are endless, and he’s not afraid to go anywhere.  Figures like Henry Darger and his Vivian Girls chronicles can show us how to take a hazardous and technically unexplainable journey into the outer stratosphere.  Speaking of that, epics like Baum’s Oz series, etc … the most formative books of my life have been works of children’s literature … and adult literature masquerading as children’s literature, like the unabridged Grimms. Quantum physics: books like Brian Greene’s The Fabric of the Cosmos and The Elegant Universe have been as influential on my writing as any poet or novelist’s.

Speaking of novelists: Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood, which presents a dazzling picture of a rouged, pendant curled drag queen sitting up in bed amongst hidden chamber pots and discoursing on Rome burning through the night.  Alexander Theroux’s masterpiece Darconville’s Cat (one of Nightwood‘s lovers, along with Tristram Shandy) which presents a pitch-perfect satire and a brilliant range of poetry, children’s fiction, philosophy, and homicidal wrath.  Nabokov, as ever…Ada, which I mentioned, Speak, Memory, Pale Fire…

What kind of editorial relationship do you have with authors?

A very open and unassuming one.  I trust them to edit their own work, though of course I proof everything obsessively.  Editing is a joint effort with a press this small, and I wouldn’t want it any other way, because I like to have complete control over my work and so do the authors/most writers.  But the more eyes the better.  You can never have too many proofreaders, no matter how good you are.

What challenges do you face as a small press?  What advantages do you have versus a larger mainstream press?

The main challenge is having zero initial resources.  With big … or even respectably established presses … you get your books designed and printed for you; you get your readings arranged by your publisher, you automatically make valuable connections … and friends … in the publishing world by way of association; you automatically get reviews…good or bad, etc.  We’ve gotta do all that ourselves.  This is a project of 24/7 hustling, and it’s from the ground up.  We have no agents, and we have no clout.  Of course, the same is basically true of every press (to a greater or lesser extent) that has gone on to become something: everyone needs to start somewhere.  It’s a learning experience.

How do you make your small press stand out in the crowded field of publishing?

By the originality of the work, ideally, in tandem with getting it out there. Scheduling readings, soliciting reviews.  But it’s got to be about giving someone something different and unexpected to look at, in terms of (again) the ingenuity of the work as a whole.  Anything else is false, just a publicity stunt.  And I love publicity stunts, theoretically … rock out with your cock out.  That’s how things get noticed/done.  But the intention and dedication have to be pure and virtuous and steadfast.  It’s just a matter of a lot of hard work.  And I can’t emphasize enough the importance of one’s fellows in promotion, etc.  Artists have to help each other, whether it’s “sharing” on Facebook or writing a review or making introductions …. nothing, no matter how run-of-the-mill, is inconsequential.  We can’t…and more importantly, shouldn’t … do it without each other.  I don’t believe in competition.  Actually, I find the whole notion of it to be offensive … you can be ambitious and driven without being competitive.  This is a community effort that should entail equal give and take.

Visit Vulgar Marsala Press at www.vulgarmarsalapress.com

and Lisa A Flowers’ blog at http://lisaaflowers.blogspot.com/

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Oldest Chicago by David Anthony Witter

Posted on February 28, 2011 by | 1 Comment

David Anthony Witter puts a new spin in the crowded field of travel guides.  Oldest Chicago offers the reader a guide to the oldest places in Chicago and its suburbs.  The guidebook encompasses everything from the commonplace (oldest school building: St. Ignatius College Prep, 1869) to the esoteric (oldest tamale shop: La Guadalupana, 1945).  From the oldest church to the oldest magic shop to the oldest slaughterhouse, they are all in here and much, much more.

Witter seamlessly blends the historical, the informative, and the personal into a unique take on the travel guide.  Throughout the guide, the dark undercurrents of change clash with the forces struggling to preserve old buildings.  Sometimes that devastation is a disaster like the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 to the man-made devastation of the ironically named “urban renewal” of the Fifties, Sixties, and Seventies.  Marvel at the buildings either decades or hundreds of years old, most in their original use.  He tells the story of the original Maxwell Street in the entry on Jim’s Original Maxwell Street (1939), the Oldest Hot Dog Stand.  The transformation of Maxwell Street from a primarily Jewish neighborhood to a predominantly African-American neighborhood mirrors the travails of nineteenth and twentieth century American life.

Witter gives a more personal history on The Medinah Athletic Club (now the Hotel Inter-Continental), the oldest indoor, Olympic-sized swimming pool.  Built in 1929, the Athletic Club played host to the famous, including Tennessee Williams.  The young Witter worked as a pool attendant.  He struck up a friendship with Williams in his waning later years.

For the non-native traveler.

The guidebook will please any Chicago native.  Unfortunately, for those unfamiliar with the city, Witter references things only Chicago natives would pick up.  He talks about the “council wars” of the 1980s, but doesn’t explain what they are.  These are all small quibbles to a wonderful read.  For those unfamiliar with the Windy City, it is advisable to have a more traditional guidebook at your side.  I would recommend Access Chicago by Richard Saul Wurman.  It is comprehensive, exhaustive, and filled with maps.  Read Oldest Chicago and mark down the sites in Access Chicago for your next trip.  Plan ahead and don’t panic.

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Fall Asleep Forgetting by Georgeann Packard

Posted on September 27, 2010 by | Leave a comment

The appreciation of a novel can occasionally come down to something as random as timing.  When one reads a book too early or too late, one can miss important elements within the story.  This reviewer read Lord of the Rings too late and found its cod-archaic prose akin to downing a sedative.  Similarly, when reading Paradise Lost in middle school, the only thing gained was “bragging rights” since the poetry remained impenetrable.  All this represents a roundabout preface for my appreciation of Georgeann Packard’s novel Fall Asleep Forgetting.

In the months leading up to September 11, 2001, the inhabitants of Cherry Grove experience life-changing events.  These events disrupt things spiritual and temporal, albeit in a non-linear fashion that forces the reader to figure out things for themselves.  The novel opens with events in 1959 that will have consequences in 2001.  Packard populates Cherry Grove, a Long Island trailer park located two hours from Manhattan, with its share of eccentrics, curmudgeons, and recluses.  These include Cherry, the transvestite who renamed the trailer park, previously owned by her parents, both devout Roman Catholics.  Claude is a park employee and amateur photographer, whose dated journal entries provide a commentary on the events at hand.  Sonny and his wife Rae appear as a happily married couple, living in a trailer with their precocious daughter Six.  Paul, a black poet, and owner of the Spiritoso, a nearby restaurant, comes to grips with his terminal illness.  He and his sullen wife Sloan end up dealing with the disease in a manner that disrupts the isolation and sexual identity of Claude.

The accumulated quirks may lead to the charge that the novel is precious or twee.  Literary novels, like independent films, can be guilty of such a charge, at least when poor writing or lazy plotting reduce the terms “literary” and “independent” into meaningless buzzwords meant only to move units on a bookshelf.  Book reviewing is a subjective art and subjectivity, like taste, is not the same for everyone.  The same is true for Fall Asleep Forgetting.  The novel represents the highest form of literary art, a deft melding of religion, sex, love, illness, and death into a compelling story.  The only comparable work that comes to mind in this regard is Evelyn Waugh’s masterful Brideshead Revisited, a novel of genius despite its flaws, snobbishness, and mean-spirited attacks on the lower classes.  Fall Asleep Forgetting balances emotional sentiment and the hard events of everyday life with a sumptuous sensuality.  The balance parallels the best made Cosmopolitan, a cocktail dependent on the exact proportions of Vodka, Triple Sec, and cranberry juice.

The novel begins with a drowning in 1959 and quotidian events in Cherry Grove in 2001.  In the beginning, events unfold in an almost haphazard manner, interspersed with Claude’s journal entries.  Not until later on do the seemingly random events and the journal entries gel into a whole.  When events finally interlock, fraying relationships collide, sexuality becomes confused, and strongly held religious beliefs create friction and fears.  The story hurdles forward with a feverish velocity, swept together in a mélange of memory, dream, and revelation.

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Critic’s Notebook: Unpopular Causes, Part I

Posted on June 15, 2010 by | 1 Comment

“In place of a hermeneutrics we need an erotics of art.” – “Against Interpretation” [1964], Susan Sontag

Challenges and Non-Responses

The job of the critic is, by turns, tastemaker, evangelist, and champion.  The best critics harness the powers of intellection and enthusiasm to inform his or her readership on a work’s merits.  If a work receives more merits than demerits, than, in a roughly mathematical fashion, the creator obtains a “good review.”  This reviewer finds works with “mixed reviews” or polarizing reactions (see Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones) most attractive, since “mixed reviews” are not sure things.  A tiny element of surprise exists when encountering the work.  It could be awful, but it could also be great.

Hollywood’s economic base was not built on good movies.

The critic faces challenges when encountering works that are not contemporary or from a creator with a prestigious reputation.  A book that has just been published offers a critic a tabula rasa.  He or she can imprint first impressions and create a reaction that will be integrated into the cultural understanding of the work.  There is critical reception, consumer (read: “popular”) reception, and overall sales.  Hollywood has made millions on good remakes (Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven) and terrible remakes (Harald Zwart’s The Karate Kid).  The balance between these three axes (critics, consumers, and sales receipts) will be the focus of this essay.  Included are two works which I personally like, although both have been critically maligned, albeit not without good cause.

The challenges are myriad for any critic desiring to exhibit his or her worth to the critical community and the readership at large.  If the critic has no taste, why bother reading the reviews?  The subjectivities of taste can be intimidating, especially to two particularly annoying sub-species of readership.

The first sub-species are the Fanboys (and Fangirls).  Critical taste evaporates and a hardcore evangelism permeates every reaction.  Whether it involves CGI, the works of Ayn Rand, or Angelina Jolie raiding tombs, the works are transfigured from mere pop culture artifacts to quasi-religious relics.  This is glaringly evident in champions of J.R.R. Tolkien.  Only a philistine would dismiss Tolkien’s place as founding father of modern high fantasy.  On the other hand, just because he was one of the first to write high fantasy, it does not mean Lord of the Rings is any good.  I found the work an overlong tedious bore written in stilted language.  Tolkien wrote in a style to emulate the cadence found in the King James Bible.  One also sees manifestations of this fanaticism of reader reviews of Atlas Shrugged.  The positive reviews are gushing.  Many say it is the best novel ever written.  To which any sensible critic would ask, “The best novel compared to what?”  Rabid fanatical fandom is hard to deal with.  Instead of Al-Qaeda strapping dynamite to their torsos, fanboys bomb discussion threads with bombastic rhetoric that veils an utter lack of critical sensibility.

Turnoffs: Judging people, things, etc.

The other sub-species are Egalitarians.  Unafraid to offend anyone’s tastes, the Egalitarians short-circuit discussions with non-responses.  These include, but are not limited to the following:

  • “You believe what you want to believe.  It’s your opinion.”
  • “To each his own.”
  • “Twilight may be badly written, but at least it encourages kids to read.”

It is enough to make people gnash their teeth and pull out their hair.  Literary criticism is not about the First Amendment.  That is a given.  The right to an opinion involves having one in the first place! Otherwise, the person renders the entire enterprise pointless.  While these two positions are not necessarily politically analogous, the Egalitarian position crops up in many subscribing to the pieties of the Left.  (Full disclosure: This author finds pieties of the Right and the Left absolutely insufferable.  Political pieties are a waste of time.  What matters are concrete results.)

Concepts like multiculturalism and tolerance have invaded the confines of aesthetic criticism making everyone suffer in the process.  People have become afraid of criticizing a work on its merits and then being accused of racism, sexism, and other epithets.  Works should be included in the Canon based on merit, not on tradition (defenders of Dead White Males) or on representation (defenders of everyone excluded in the Traditional Western Canon™).

In the determination of a work’s merit, exclusions will have to be made, but a work should also be judged on its own merits.  Troma films have their own bent brilliance, despite their tiny budgets, broad acting, and lunatic plots.  One can champion just about any cultural product (film, book, TV show, album, etc.) with sound arguments and sincere affection.

Up next, Hipsters!

“I liked __________ before they were cool.”

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The Art of Reviewing: Anthony Bourdain

Posted on May 7, 2010 by | 1 Comment

Every blog needs a large-scale project. The Art of Reviewing will explore reviewing as an art form and as a valuable element to understanding society.  During this project, I will profile specific reviewers of merit.  Several specific cases also explore other facets of reviewing.

“I write, I eat, and I’m hungry for more.” – Tag line of Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations (2005 – Present)

The Foodie Revolution will be televised … again.  Anthony Bourdain represents another wave of popularizers.  With Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations, he has made it cool to think about food in all its various guises.  But Tony is not the first to give the American TV audience a swift metaphysical kick to the forehead.  He continues the tradition begun by former-OSS op Julia Child to familiarize and popularize French cuisine and to make us think differently about our foodways and folkways.  Both Bourdain and Child entered the mass media in a roundabout manner.  Both authored books before becoming TV personalities.

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Badass

Anthony Bourdain entered the pop culture consciousness with Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly. It read like a cross between Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle.  Insane adventures combining drugs, sex, and food blitzed across the pages, the cod-Hunter S. Thompson prose reflecting the barely controlled chaos of a modern restaurant kitchen.  Portrait of the Artist as a Young Badass.  The book traces his ascent from grunt work as a line chef to running his own Manhattan restaurant, Les Halles.  One realizes that the lives of chefs are hard.  Really hard.  Long, long hours and not the best pay.  In order to score the really fresh, really good ingredients, one has to wake up early and snatch the best stuff.  The haute cuisine restaurant world is as ferocious and insular as high finance and politics.  Old rivals join together; partnerships shatter; and restaurants rise and fall with the vicious regularity of faddish tech stocks and whatever Goldman Sachs can dream up to bilk investors.  If you read the book, either it inspired you to pursue a cooking career or it scared the crap out of you.  The bombastic style combined with the insider knowledge of the restaurant world created a winning recipe for success.

Besides detailing the inner workings of a modern restaurant, Kitchen Confidential allowed Bourdain to vent his spleen on various topics.  One of these is vegetarianism and veganism:

Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans, are a persistent irritant to any chef worth a damn. To me, life without veal stock, pork fat, sausage, organ meat, demi-glace, or even stinky cheese is a life not worth living. Vegetarians are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit, and an affront to all I stand for, the pure enjoyment of food. The body, these waterheads imagine, is a temple that should not be polluted by animal protein. It’s healthier, they insist, though every vegetarian waiter I’ve worked with is brought down by any rumor of a cold. Oh, I’ll accommodate them, I’ll rummage around for something to feed them, for a ‘vegetarian plate’, if called on to do so. Fourteen dollars for a few slices of grilled eggplant and zucchini suits my food cost fine.

It should be noted that Kitchen Confidential was not his first published work.  Bourdain wrote the Bobby Gold series, hard-boiled foodie noir novels.

More books followed and Bourdain eventually entered the world of TV.  His first show, A Cook’s Tour, aired on the Food Network in 2001 and 2002.  Published in 2001, A Cook’s Tour included extended background about the TV show’s segments and his dealing with the TV production process.  Bourdain had a falling out with the Food Network.  While A Cook’s Tour introduced America to Anthony Bourdain, the short running time made watching the program a masochistic exercise.  When he explored something as vast as the tapas scene in Spain or the syncretic cuisine of Singapore, by the time he scratched the surface the show ended.  It was not the best fit.

No Reservations and the Second Foodie Revolution

Bourdain’s second TV series, Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations has aired on the Travel Channel since 2005.  Throughout the series, Bourdain has transformed from culinary badass to world traveler.  Hunter S. Thompson gave way to Sir Richard Francis Burton.  Like Burton, Bourdain has traveled the world, exploring little known folkways and sending his dispatches to a hungry TV audience.  The verbal bombast remains, but tempered by time, maturity, and comfort with the medium.

The series has explored his favorite locales including Vietnam and delved into areas one normally does not associate with foodie culture.  He has explored the Rust Belt, the elephant graveyard of late capitalism, Montana, Namibia, and Scotland.  In each episode, an hour rather than a half hour, Bourdain gives an overview of the region, styles ranging from the journalistic to the psychedelic.  He also gives equal due to street food and haute cuisine.

Bourdain has debunked the common mythology that food need to be expensive or rare to be good.  The cheap street food or little bodega has food as good as anything concocted by Thomas Keller or Mario Batali.  Haute cuisine just puts a nice frame around the same ingredients.  But both venues receive accolades when the owners bring creativity, fresh ingredients, and presentation to their food.  He has also advocated the best eating experiences occur when one is barefoot.  This reviewer concurs.

Bourdain, like Homer Simpson, also worships at the altar of all things pig.  No Reservations has become a treatise on how the global population uses that “magical animal.”  The pig, a generally humble animal that has provided income for farmers have, through the magic of the cook, turned the various cuts into more divine meals that one could comprehend.  His legendary gut-busting meal at the Restaurant au Pied de Cochon involved a decadent exploration of pork products and foie gras.  He out-Trimalchio’ed Trimalchio.

In The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones, an essay collection fitting that description, a bawdy Rabelaisian mélange of fiction, non-fiction, reportage, and screed, Bourdain turns political.  He discusses the touchy subject of Latin American immigration and the very obvious contribution they have to our dining experience.

The idea of America is a mutt-culture, isn’t it?  Who the hell is American if not everybody else?  We are – and should be – a big, messy, anarchic polyglot of dialects and accents and different skin tones.  Like our kitchens.  We need more Latinos to come here.  And they should, whenever possible, impregnate our women.

The recent temper tantrums of the Right yowl for an anachronistic vision of America that is racist, unconstitutional, and hateful.  Above all and this is the most important factor, that Ideal America, this Nativist wet dream, is unbelievably boring.  Everyone white straight and Protestant?  Ugh, change the channel.  What’s on Telemundo?  There’s a reason no one reads Henry James any more.  (Although they should because beneath the vapid WASPy exterior, the characters, heiresses and nouveau riche robber barons from the Reconstruction Era, play like Paris Hilton celebutantes chasing men.  There’s usually less cocaine use in Henry James novels.)

The horror!  The horror!

The books, shows, and magazine articles have enlightened Americans to rethink about what they eat.  The naked lunch at the end of their fork, to use William S. Burroughs’s phrase.  Food is sensual, elemental, reflects where we are and the ingredients were proud.  Food encapsulates history, capital, politics, and biology into tasty little packages for our consuming pleasure.  If Julia Child was the First Wave, Anthony Bourdain is the Second Wave.

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