Reviewed by Saul Steier, San Francisco State University.

You know a field has “arrived” when its rich content is such that it is no longer possible to represent it adequately with random selected individual works. The publishing sign of that moment of arrival is the “Anthology.”

It makes me very happy to see that African Literature, a field in which I have been teaching for twenty years, has finally been elevated to Anthology status. To be sure, it is not a Norton or a Longman’s with an array of famous scholars, each of which is given editorial responsibility over a single area within the entire field. Rather, the Rienner Anthology Of African Literature is a Herculean labor of dedication and love by a single individual, Professor Anthonia C. Kalu of the University of Northern Colorado.

Professor Kalu has organized her Anthology of African Literature chronologically, from what is assumed to be a pre-contact period of “Oral Tradition” through the periods of chattel slavery and colonialism up to the post-colonial present. For each of these “periods” selections are included from the continent on a geographical basis: North, West, Central, East and Southern. The Anthology’s selections are from countries with different colonial heritages and histories, so many of the works have been translated.

In order to maximize authorial representation, Professor Kalu has chosen to use excerpts from longer works– a decision which will not please all potential users. And, as is inevitable in such an endeavor, there are significant omissions of authors who, had the task of choosing been this reviewer’s, would have had to be included. There is nothing by Sony Labou Tansi, Kodjo Liang, Ben Okri, Mongo Beti and Ahmadou Korouma.

But the Anthology’s range is broad in a variety of genres; all the “classics” are there; and works written originally in the indigenous languages also have their place. There is a useful introduction, short biographical sketches on each of the authors, and a list of suggested readings. Here too I was struck by some of the omissions: Simon Gikandi, Achille Mbembe, Ato Quayson,Tejumola Olaniyan, Olakunle George, Karen Barber, Stephanie Newell. In spite of its problems, however, the incontestable value of this anthology is in its gathering together of, and making available, materials which show the range, richness and variety of the corpus.

Professor Kalu is to be thanked and congratulated for having recognized and responded to the need for such a work and to Lynne Rienner for publishing it. The book is expensive ($125) so I wouldn’t be likely to require it for a course, but every undergraduate library in the country should have a copy of it on its shelves. I am profoundly pleased the field has finally “arrived.”

(Saul Steier chairs the Department of Interdisciplinary Humanities at San Francisco State University.)

Reviewed by Harriet Rafter, San Francisco State University.

What were the religious beliefs of the men we consider this country’s Founding Fathers: Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Paine, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison? Did they intend the country they helped to create to be Christian? Were they observant Christians themselves? Would their religious beliefs and practices pass muster with those self-styled “values voters” whom American politicians now feel and fear they must court? These are the questions that Gary Kowalski asks in this short and informative book. Formerly this topic would have been an academic exercise, of scholarly interest only. Now that we are reminded daily of the enormous role that religion plays in world politics and events, the faith of these men assumes weightier importance.

Kowalski’s witty title actually introduces a story more complex-and to my mind, far more interesting-than the faith of these men, for the revolutions in which they participated were scientific, industrial, philosophical, as well as political. They knew the inventors and scientists who made this new world; they belonged and contributed scholarly papers to the same clubs and societies. Ben Franklin, Thomas Paine, and George Washington (along with Ethan Allen, Alexander Hamilton, John Hancock, John Marshall, and Paul Revere) were even Freemasons, which makes them brothers in the Craft to Mozart and Kipling and, by extension, to their fictional brethren, the wise Sarastro and Tamino, as well as those over-reachers, Peachy Carnahan and Daniel Dravot.

Kowalski guides readers painlessly and sometimes humorously through 18th century history and thought. In the introduction, he shows how many religions were practiced in the American colonies and, Puritans aside, how varied were the reasons for leaving Europe and the ways of thinking and living in the New World. Chapters two and three are particularly helpful. Chapter two investigates the philosophical basis of the Enlightenment and the concept of separation of church and state. And it introduces Deism, the form of religion which most of Kowalski’s subjects (and a good many of their philosophical descendants) espoused:

The cosmos presented a folio of order and regularity signed in the Creator’s own hand, a testament prior to any written scripture (literally old as the hills). . . . America’s founders sensed the sacred in the laws and harmonies of nature, rather than in the miraculous suspension of those laws. [. . .] when they referred to a deity it was most often under the rubric of Chief Architect or Grand Designer-the God revealed in the workings of earth and sky rather than the tradition God of Abraham and Isaac. [. . .] They worshiped in the cathedral of Creation (21).

Chapter three graphically describes how the European worldview was affected by the Enlightenment-and here, I feel, Kowalski’s book takes off, as he illustrates the before-and-after treatment of the mentally ill, or people accused of sorcery. Having set the stage, he then devotes a chapter to each of these six men and the role religion played in his life.

Now, liberal and tolerant Christians or ardent Deists the Founding Fathers may have been; it does not matter to me. Far more interesting is how they actively participated in the Enlightenment: they were soldiers, farmers, architects, astronomers, inventors, scientists, theorists and practitioners of war and government and education, and sometimes even pranksters (that naughty Ben Franklin). They lived during many and simultaneous revolutions when the world which so dazzled them was being conceived anew, and they were fortunate to be personally involved.

In his last chapter, Kowalski describes how their broadminded and intellectual approach to the world changed with the next generations to prejudice–Freemasonry became the object of suspicion and disrepute–and Romanticism: “religion exerted an ongoing literary influence . . . but its epistemology was romanticized from a faith grounded in observation and experiment to one based on feeling and intuition” (191). If we agree to consider these men fathers of the newborn republic cradled along the Atlantic shore, their heirs include such ebullient and, yes, romantic, American spirits as Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Stegner and De Voto, Abbey, and Edison, among many American writers, scientists, inventors. John Muir, for instance, combined the scientific and the ecstatic in writing the Founding Fathers certainly would have understood:

“The radiance in some places is so great as to be fairly dazzling, keen lance rays of every color flashing sparkling in glorious abundance, joining the plants in their fine, brave beauty-work-every crystal, every flower a window opening into heaven, a mirror reflecting the Creator”.(fn.1)

While Kowalski’s contribution to our knowledge of the faith of our Founding Fathers is no doubt valuable, I feel that his greater achievement is to briefly but vividly set the scene of the intellectually thrilling era in which they lived, and show how each responded with awe and a hunger to address the issues of the day. To paraphrase two other thinkers at critical historic moments, it was, not wholly or in full measure but very substantially, a brave new world indeed to have such people in it.(fn.2) If these are our fathers, we had best make some effort to recapture the intellectual and ethical standards they have bequeathed us.

1. 1 My First Summer in the Sierras. 1911. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1997. 153.
2. 2 Despite his admiration for Thomas Jefferson, Kowalski describes Jefferson’s role as a slave owner pretty bluntly. And he points out-lest we rationalize Jefferson’s refusal to free his slaves as a response to his own times-that his neighbor, Edward Coles, freed his, and later was elected governor of Illinois.

Reviewed by George J. Leonard, San Francisco State University.

Since the SFHR is usually appealed to when works of merit can’t find appropriate reviews, we were slightly mystified to be sent the new legal thriller by Gianrico Carofiglio, which comes adorned with blurbs from the New Yorker and the London Times. “Carofiglio writes crisp, ironical novels,” the New Yorker’s reviewer tells us, “that are as much love stories and philosophical treatises as they are legal thrillers.” Reasonable Doubts is his third novel featuring a Guido Guerrieri, a public defender.

Carofiglio knows his subject the way John le Carre knows spies-from the inside. Carofiglio (b. 1961), before retiring to write full-time, was — his publisher informs us — “an anti-Mafia prosecutor in the city of Bari in Southern Italy… responsible for some of the most important indictments in Puglia involving corruption and the traffic in human beings.” But, like the early le Carre, he’s rather a stylist too. He was won the Bancarella Prize and is translated into more than ten languages.

So, I reflected, one would imagine that Reasonable Doubts would be appearing from a major New York publishing house on its way to join Jeffrey Deaver, Michael Connelly, John Grisham, and John Lescroart on the best-seller list. Instead, the volume I unwrapped came from the Bitter Lemon Press in London, which had published two other Carofiglio novels before this. And it had been sent to the SFHR, a scholarly reviewer.

Like a character in a Carofiglio novel, one holds the book in one’s hand and says, “What’s going on? This doesn’t add up.” Trying to find the answer to this mystery turned into an interesting lesson in what keeps a book popular in Europe from popularity in America.

But since reviews are not articles and should tell the reader quickly whether he or she wants to read this book, the answer is yes, the educated readers of the SFHR certainly do. But the reason that they want to is precisely the reason that Carofiglio isn’t a bestseller in the USA, the reason that the average reader would be displeased with Carofiglio. By the middle of this enjoyable book, I was radically updating my idea of Southern Italy.

The first suspect in such a matter — one always suspects the family first — is Carofiglio’s translator, Howard Curtiss. Has Mr. Curtiss, working in London for Bitter Lemon, translated the book into English or into British? That’s often part of the answer. On page 13, the American reader, puzzling over a hero who remembers defiantly “I didn’t take off my anorak, you fucking Fascists, and I remember your faces. One day I’ll get my own back on you,” has to do a second mental translation: “one day I’ll get even.”

Someone has prevented Mr. Curtiss from translating freely; or from providing editorial help. The author’s thought remains stuck back over on the Italian side, unable to cross over to us. On page 12, the hero, Guido Guerrieri, meeting his defendant for the first time, recognizes him as “Fabio Rayban… a Fascist thug.” “We called him that because he always wore sunglasses at night. Rayban had been part of the military squad that had stabbed to death an 18-year-old Communist who suffered from polio.” Given Guerrieri’s age, we’re not talking about Mussolini’s Fascists, as I first assumed. I soon realized that during the nearly forgotten European Culture Wars of the late 60s and early 70s, the right wing was popularly called “fascist.”

Guerrieri himself had had a long-ago run-in with Fabio. He had wandered into an area which the Fascists controlled wearing “a green anorak that I was very proud of.”

–But now the reader may wish to interrupt me, “Anorak?” Actually, I had to look it up. It is not, as I thought, a parka. It is a kind of tight hooded sweatshirt, apparently, usually worn with the hood up (my son might call it a “hoodie”) though a lot warmer than a sweatshirt.

None of which explained why the Fascists “approached me and told me I was a Red bastard, and I should take off that fucking anorak immediately.” When he won’t, they tell him, “Take it off, Comrade,” and beat him up. But in spite of everything, Guerrieri never does. And swears vengeance. What in the world?

It took considerable researching on Wikipedia’s Italian version to discover that during the riot era, the “anorak” became the trademark garb of Leftist youths, somewhat the way the pea coat was for the hippies in 1967 and 1968. If you didn’t know that Guerrieri had been part of that youthful scene, you’d never understand him quite right, or understand why he hated Rayban so much.

Was the publisher was unwilling either to provide a helpful footnote or to free the translator to add a sentence explaining the significance of the anorak to the Fascists. Certainly a practical man of the world like Carofiglio would have permitted it, though James Joyce might not have. If they ever translate my book on Italian American culture into Italian, I have decided, I am going to demand it.

Could Bitter Lemon not at least have run the book past an American translator, who might have read-flagged the rare phrases that were stiff in one culture though not in England?

But neither Britishisms nor incomprehensible pop cultural references were the biggest problem that Reasonable Doubts faced finding a popular audience in America.

As you may have guessed, Guerrieri (who is something like a public defender, but grander) has just recognized that the defendant he has been assigned under Italy’s legal system to defend is Fabio Rayban, now married and in middle age. Rayban doesn’t recognize his old victim. Guerrieri is ready to recuse himself until Rayban’s wife comes in—- but let me set this up.

A few doors down the hall from me here at SF State was Frances Mayes, Professor of Creative Writing. Frances was a good academic poet who almost accidentally made millions of dollars a few years ago writing up her real-life retirement adventure in Tuscany. She bought a farmhouse, and remodeled it: Under the Tuscan Sun. It stayed on the New York Times best-seller list for over a year. The glamorous Diane Lane (35?) played Frances (70) in the movie version. Frances has spun off sequels since, including a popular cookbook. She had captured an American fantasy about Italy.

Carofiglio has not. He’s too Italian to write well about Italy for Americans.

When I saw that this book would take place in Bari, I smiled nostalgically. In the 1960s, I had taken a train out into that area to stay with the relatives of my teacher, Charles Calitri (lionized by another student, Frank McCourt in his memoire, ‘Tis’)

I knew I was getting close to Mr. Calitri’s village when I saw women washing clothes in a stream and beating them on rocks. There were no cars in the village, only burros. Staring out of the rattling train’s open windows, I half-expected to see Sophia Loren walking up the cobblestone streets of Mr. Calitri’s Panni, barefoot and wearing a scowl and a torn dress, like in Two Women. Bari, where the book takes place, is just another few hours ride on that train.

But that was before the Italian Economic Miracle. Bari has changed.

In Carofiglio’s novel, Fabio Rayban’s wife isn’t Sophia Loren in a torn dress, but a beautiful Japanese woman named Natsu Kawabata. Natsu works as a sushi chef. In Bari! “Three evenings a week, she worked at a restaurant. She mentioned the name of a fashionable spot — but she also made sushi, sashimi, and tempura for private parties thrown by people who could afford it.”

A “fashionable sushi spot” in Bari? Private tempura parties? An afternoon’s drive from where Bonaventura Calitri taught me to go to his hen house, and eat a raw egg with a shot of grappa for breakfast? Infamia! And on the next page, when Guerrieri sits down to consider his options, does he pour himself an Orvieto Classico Bigi and listen to an aria? No! The son of a bitch listens to “the latest Leonard Cohen album, Dear Heather, on the CD player.”

I was completely bummed out. This is not tourist Italy, and that after all is what the mass market would be looking for; and me too. Taking an armchair trip to Italy to watch them eating sushi and listening to Leonard Cohen wasn’t what I had in mind when I sat down on the couch with the book. When Guerrieri, mad with love for Natsu, walks through the midnight streets, he says, “I was in a strange place, an unknown area of my consciousness, a black and white film with a dramatic, melancholic soundtrack, in which Boulevard of Broken Dreams by Green Day stood out. I often listen to that song, and it echoed almost obsessively in my head during my nocturnal walks.”

The first rock concert I took my son to was a Green Day concert. I have to go all the way to Italy to listen to Green Day?

But by the middle of this fast-paced book, I was hooked, and couldn’t put it down. I had to find out if Guerrieri would send the bastard Fabio Rayban up the river by blowing his defense, to get the enchanting Natsu. There’s a powerful complication. Guerrieri, a childless man just dumped by his fiancé, doesn’t want Natsu as much as he wants her adorable daughter, who is so young she would forget her birth father, Fabio Rayban, and accept Guerreri. It’s not often you get the chance to take not only your enemy’s wife, but his child. And in this case, it would be a rescue.

No wonder these books have been bestsellers in Europe, where the readers aren’t surprised or disappointed to read about an Italy more modern than 1961 Sophia Loren flicks.

And the SFSU reader will similarly come to enjoy, as I did, learning about an Italy so different from one’s tourist memories.

And yet. Is it really so wrong to want to revisit, in fictional form, those memories, that Italy? Given a choice between this book and Roman Holiday — set in a tourist Italy, but also an Italy before the Italians got globalized into Green Day fans-which would you choose?

Yesterday morning, I went to the Apple store in Palo Alto to buy a Firewire cable. In the parking lot, a man in a late-model black SUV accosted me and asked me, in Italian, if I was an Italian. I realized he was wearing an Armani suit with tailor’s marks on it and the label on the outside. Interesting. I said yes. He then explained to me that he was in a complicated legal situation, which meant he had to get rid of these Armani suits in the van at a greatly reduced price. I declined. He asked me where in Italy I was from, and this time I said here.

He said, irked at having wasted his time, “But you looked Italian!” I told him thank you, but I’m not. Believe me, I’m not. Just a tourist.

Reviewed by George J. Leonard, San Francisco State University

If I had to rest the case for the immortality of John D. Rosenberg’s prose on one paragraph, I could choose the paragraph in “Mr. Darwin Collects Himself”– unknown to me before I read Elegy for an Age– in which Rosenberg caps a series of perfect hammered sentences with the image of Darwin, the enthusiastic entomologist, “at the center of a worldwide network of researchers in a multitude of fields, all touching antennae at local scientific societies or through the penny post . . .” It takes a second for one to register the creepy appropriateness of that image for entomologists, and by then one has pictured them, tete-a-tete, feelers waving. Anyone interested in Darwin who reads that description will never willingly let it be forgotten.

Rosenberg is, of course, author of standard volumes on Carlyle (Carlyle and the Burden of History) and Tennyson (The Fall of Camelot) and of the classic biography of John Ruskin, The Darkening Glass and its companion anthology, The Genius of John Ruskin, both of which have been read continually for fifty years. Just as Rosenberg’s hero, Ruskin, made the point that even Milton’s wildest-seeming metaphors are never casual, so in Rosenberg’s prose too, every word, no matter how witty– or lovely– adds meaning. He was always one of the prose talents of the 20th Century (the sentence above about Darwin is only a hint. See below.)

It was a wonderful idea to assemble these brilliant, long-influential essays in one place. Each has changed the course of study in its field. “Classics of prose criticism,” Elizabeth Helsinger rightly calls them, in a blurb; Rosenberg’s “magnum opus,” Garry Wills adds. I can imagine the overwhelming effect on readers new to Victorian studies. The Swinburne, for instance, “Swinburne and the Ravages of Time,” the Modern Library made into its standard introduction to Swinburne for decades. “At times he is nearly a blind poet, all tongue and ear and touch.” It went completely against the critical grain, revising and reviving Swinburne’s work. “Edmund Wilson condemns Swinburne for his ‘generalizing visageless monosyllables’; I would praise him as the supreme master in English of the bleak beauty of little words.” Always a show-stopper on its own, the essay only gains in impressiveness when it simply seems to be just one of the chapters. The reader has scarcely recovered before being rushed on to another high moment in Rosenberg’s prose.

Yet– and this is extremely unfortunate– the very fame and familiarity of these essays has led most reviewers to mistake the book for an anthology. Not that it isn’t a fine one. Indeed, I’ve assigned it as my undergraduate textbook twice now. As the selections above suggest, Elegy for an Age’s eleven essays cover every major figure and intellectual current– poetically, succinctly, wittily, and always without jargon.

Those Victorianists who have taught Rosenberg’s essays for decades, however, will discover the many changes, revisions, new insights. Most important, the order itself will tip them off. Some of the first works written, appear last. Works one never saw before are pulled into prominent places. Rosenberg has been his own Redactor. And just as the Torah’s Redactor by combining J, E, P, and D created a new work through the resulting cinematic montage, so these works, in this new order, create a new truth. Rosenberg knows the power of montage very well, since he used it so masterfully in The Genius of John Ruskin, creating a new meaning (indeed, creating John Ruskin) from the montage of great pieces. He used to claim that the anthology was as important, for that reason, as his critical work on Ruskin.

Rosenberg has arranged this montage to uncover, in the nineteenth century, a central genre: the elegy. His title, “Elegy for an Age,” refers to his own book, but more importantly to the ceaseless elegy woven like an overall organizing pattern into the endlessly branching figures which cover the ornate carpet of Victorian literature. It isn’t as if he has been coy about what he is doing. The book’s first chapter, “The Age of Elegy,” makes the claim. Criticism has dropped the ball, inexplicably.

This new montage of his works then, aided by strategic changes, is designed to make a new assertion. It is an important one. Seventy years ago Jerome Buckley titled his influential work, The Victorian Temper; and Walter Houghton titled another famous work, The Victorian Frame of Mind. Yes, but the Victorian temper, the frame of mind– what was it? The titles intuited a unity, but what that unity was, has always remained unanswered.

Rosenberg’s career has been as long as Tennyson’s, and after fifty years of work, Rosenberg hazards an answer: consider the elegy as the Age’s “temper,” “frame of mind,” Weltanschauung, if the term “elegy” can be expanded to mean a complex response to their unprecedented experience of Time.

The elegy is the genre most concerned with time, and the Victorians, because of the unprecedented change in human life that was the Industrial Revolution, were the first society to experience time in a new way. The Industrial Revolution, it is often said, was the greatest change in human life since we stopped being hunter-gathers and settled down to grow things.

Rosenberg writes,

Waking daily to newness in all its forms– new sciences and intellectual disciplines, new and vastly more rapid modes of transportation, new political and social institutions, vast new acquisitions to the Empire, new relations between the classes and the sexes, sprawling new cities in which machines were housed with far more care than the ‘hands’ that worked them– the Victorians felt, in Matthew Arnold’s phrases, like wanderers “between two worlds, one dead/ the other powerless to be born.”

Faced by such a dizzying present, connecting with their past became for the Victorians a sort of survival strategy. For the present was both exhilarating and menacing, like the vertiginous landscapes that rushed past them at unprecedented speed outside their railway carriage windows.

Rosenberg’s opening meditation on elegy is too nuanced and subtle to reproduce fully here. Cut any part and it tips out of balance. It contains so many of his distilled sentences that I have to read very slowly, like those moments when my computer struggles to download too large an email file. “Elegy requires a fine equipoise between remembered joy and present regret. If the pleasure implicit in the recollection of loss becomes too predominant, elegy slips into the sentimentality of unresisted regret; if present pain wholly occludes recollected pleasure, elegy aborts itself in tears or breaks down into Lear’s thrice repeated ‘howl’ of pain over Cordelia’s corpse.”

Please re-read that sentence slowly, savoring with me the choices of ‘equipoise’ . . . ‘thrice,’ ‘occludes’ . . . ‘aborts’ . . ..” Not only les mots justes, but each time the perfect sound. One will turn over the thought in one’s mind for years; but already one can savor the sound. “If present pain wholly occludes recollected pleasure, elegy aborts itself in tears . . ..” Yet, tap that sentence anywhere you will with your hammer, and the meaning is rock-solid.

Later Rosenberg writes, “Grief is a ventriloquist who speaks in many voices.” Including John Rosenberg’s.

Rosenberg mentions Moliere’s Monsieur Jourdain (”who awakens one day to the realization that he has been speaking prose all his life,”) to comment that he himself has awakened to the knowledge that he has “written, all my adult life, without realizing it, elegies in the guise of literary criticism.” The statement is a veiled reference to his brother, Martin, an heroic American flier in World War Two, who– when John Rosenberg was just a boy– was shot down over Germany, and died. He was twenty years old. (That explains, after thirty-four years, the dedication to The Fall of Camelot: “To M.J.R 1924-1944 Frater ave Atque Vale”) Rosenberg couples his new awareness with another observation, that his personal affinity with the elegy as a genre, has given him “perhaps, a natural affinity,” with the Victorians.

It is not that Rosenberg projected his life upon the Victorians. Rather, the unexpected, accidental “natural affinity” between himself and them, equipped him to penetrate unusually into those kindred minds. Not just in the way that Martin’s loss obviously helped him penetrate into what Hallam’s sudden shocking absence meant to Tennyson, or how Tennyson translated Hallam into Arthur. (Rosenberg’s essay on In Memoriam, “Stopping for Death,” has a terrifying immediacy.) I noticed in a book some years ago that– of all the people I had studied the Victorians with– in conversation Steven Marcus, Lionel Trilling, Jacques Barzun always said, “The Victorians thought . . ..” While John Rosenberg always said, “The Victorians think . . ..” They were living presences to him, and now I can guess it was because he was emotionally their kin.

Kin not only to the writers. The whole culture, as Time accelerated around it, turned elegiac. “The Gothic Revival embodied this nostalgia in stone.” The Houses of Parliament, burnt in 1832 and rebuilt in English Gothic, were stone elegies. On the book’s cover Rosenberg has placed Turner’s elegy to the Fighting Temeraire, the gorgeous ghost of the heroic past, being dragged by a smoky little steamboat “to her last berth to be broken up,” as Turner inserted in the title, to be sure everybody got the picture.

So, fifty years after he began, rising to personal consciousness of one source of his identification with so many great Victorians, Rosenberg has tried in this new book to bring us to consciousness of the elegy’s centrality to Victorian culture as a whole. This was the Victorian Temper. This was the Victorian Frame of Mind. (Again, his nuanced explanation of “elegy” in the first essay is crucial to the claim, and already compressed so tight I cannot further synopsize it here.)

It will take scholars a long time, of course, to test out so large a claim against our readings of the works, our experiences of the pictures and monuments. Yet after thirty-six years of teaching the Victorians, when I tap the idea with my own hammer, something rings true. As one thinks it over– here comes Moliere again– one realizes that it is elegies one has been reading from the Victorians all one’s life. Even from that most positivistic character, Mill. What is the essay on the great English Utilitarian Bentham but a great English elegy? “He was a boy to the last.” And so, Mill continues under his breath, were we all, to believe that stuff? Is it really Bentham, or is it Margaret Mill mourns for? I never thought of it that way before. As with Rosenberg’s previous books, Victorianists will be scribbling notes in the margins of these dense, suggestive, musical paragraphs for years.

Trying out Rosenberg’s insight in another place, I find that a line that he doesn’t care for, “Tis better to have loved and lost/ Than never to have loved at all,” reveals itself more fully, considered in relation to the elegy. Love and loss were the great Victorian themes, as Time, down the ringing grooves of Change, shoved the Victorians inexorably forward– but always looking backwards, ave atque vale, at all they loved vanishing into mist. “All that is solid melts into air,” two awed observers of Victorian London wrote– Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Graduate students to the contrary, Derrida did not invent the idea that there was no place solid left on which to stand. Tennyson’s great elegy is an ode on the death of human certainty– in memoriam. Tennyson’s great line, staled to dullest commonplace by generations of assent, makes a final judgment about human life even when all certainty is gone: Life is worth it. So, even with the retreating tides sucking every kind of solid ground from beneath his feet, Tennyson stayed sane. Ruskin didn’t. Carlyle drifted into rage; Hopkins and Newman, into the Church. Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites turned and fled back to the Past itself, and when it wouldn’t let them in, they sat at the door and made up dreams about it.

The book’s epigraph (”but now the whole Round Table is dissolved,”)– how apt it is for anyone who knew Columbia in the 1960s; or indeed, for anyone who knew the profession of teaching English then. George Stade asked me 15 years ago if he was just getting old by thinking that the glory had departed. I thought not. By now, it’s obvious, and being spoken of openly. “And I, the last, go forth companionless,” Rosenberg’s epigraph continues.

So it is a pleasure to receive one last book from Camelot. But– if only to point out parallels with Rosenberg’s earlier work, and to make the titles of his books more uniform– shouldn’t they have called this new work, The Genius of John Rosenberg?

Gloryland, by Anne Marie Macari. Alice James Books (September 30, 2005). 75pp. paperback $14.95 ISBN 1882295501

Ruin, by Cynthia Cruz. Alice James Books (September 1, 2006). 80pp. paperback $14.95 ISBN 1882295587

Reviews by George Leonard

From that strange house, Alice James Press, which consistently offers remarkable works that defy poetic fashion, come almost in the same mail, two books which reflect upon each other, and a central problem in poetry– and in the criticism of it: Gloryland by Anne Marie Macari and Ruin, by Cynthia Cruz. If I hadn’t read Macari’s work back to back with Cruz’s, I might have liked the Cruz better. The two titles offer an illuminating contrast: gloryland versus ruin.

Of the pair, Cruz is the power hitter. The dust jacket proudly informs me that she is “the recipient of several residencies to Yaddo and the Mac Dowell Colony. She lives in New York City.” Macari, though her first book, Ivory Cradle, “won the APR/Honickman first book prize in 2000,” is less well known, though she has been in TriQuarterly and The Iowa Review. Cruz, by contrast (BA Mills College, Sarah Lawrence MFA), has appeared in Paris Review, Boston Review, GRAND STREET and so forth, and made it into two anthologies.

I underline that Cruz is no tyro because my comments otherwise might sound harsh. The reader, who is also probably a writer (does any grownup but another poet still read poetry in 2007?) knows the situation. In the writer’s workshop, a woman begins reading a work, which the other members realize with discomfort is a kind of elegy.

The elegy is certainly a central poetic genre. John D. Rosenberg, in his magisterial summing up of the Victorians, “Elegy for an Age,” said that the elegy had even been their central genre, as all that was solid melted into air. Yet what a strange genre it is. Tennyson included stanzas in In Memoriam in which he pictured people criticizing him for parading his grief. His reply simply was, “I only sing because I must,” the way even a bird sings at the death of its mate. “Short swallow flights of song, that dip/ Their wings in tears, and skim away.”

The workshop, listening, wants to extend its human sympathy, but the very act of being presented with the grief as poetry demands a response to it as poetry. The grief must have permutated into poetry, before we can criticize it as such. Not enough time has gone by here, apparently.

“You say there are no words in the English language/ For the dark flocking of your sadness.” (Microscopic Winter II) The dark flocking of what? I want to like the poems. The narrative thread that holds them together is her brother’s suicide. One would think that this is powerful material to work with, but the fact that we’ve been presented with poems forces us to ask, where’s the poetry? “Murderous, bloody-nosed brother, it was you/ Who made me. I don’t blame you.” (January 5, 1973) “His hands were moving like twin engines/ But his lips unzipped my pants” (Traveling Gospel).

These lines alternate with laments about Cruz’s own condition, comments, alas, so familiar they could be taken from an Avril Lavigne song. “As a girl, I was razored/ Into the world. I was never close to anyone./ World of wingless, world of hands, I killed off everything I loved./Do not talk to me about the stars.” (Prelude to 220, or 110). Cruz needs more time to work the grief through. She is still stuck in the very human stage where the whole world is seen through one’s loss. “Someone’s mother’s pick-up’s parked/ With a glue-sniffing family/ Of kids inside. And everyone is dead/ In my America.” (Toby II) In her America, perhaps. But even a professional reviewer feels inhuman, saying of a woman’s grief over her brother, “Your comments are familiar.” As Tennyson admitted, “Never morning wore to evening but some heart did break.” The elegy then, poses the tremendous challenge of making grief new.

–Yeah, well, I still feel like a louse telling Cruz my opinion of these poems, but I won’t insult a well-known poet by praising her work as “sincere,” as if she were a sophomore with black fingernail polish reading to a class. Cruz is a pro. She can take it. In time, the grief may diminish to a point where poetry about her brother is possible for her. As a John Cage partisan, I cannot accept or even condone her attack on life.

By contrast to Cruz’s versifications of familiar arguments, there is the sharp vision in Macari’s poem “Horseshoe Crabs,” “Their bodies float to shore and he dashes/ to collect them, upending them to dry,/ all their feet walking the wind.” I had seen those crabs do that a thousand times, growing up in Long Island, yet the image was entirely fresh to me. Even her word “wind” is precise. Those crabs are animals of the bay, a place where enormous winds always blow.

In Book One, she makes Eve new again: “Light was being, held by her own hands or/ touched like water burning bare skin./ In the beginning meant learning to see: a thousand/ kinds of green, the vine-crawl along rocks,/ the groping mouths of flowers. In the beginning/ all they knew was yes, so when the first no/ settled quietly around the tree/ they though it was birdsong . . .” These are thoughts and emotions I cannot find by turning on Live105 and listening along with my son while I drive him to school.

Macari has a great range, too. I enjoyed “Madame Sherri’s House.” “If it was really a bordello, as the locals say,/ why build in the woods, miles from nowhere?/ And what’s the crime in wearing feathers/ or going naked under a fur coat?” And then the final irony in the poem called “Gloryland,” (”I’ve got a home in Gloryland that outshines the sun”– African-American spiritual). “And what of my brother, dead, who clowning/ held a gun to his head and blew himself/ into the nebula sac while someone cried/ come back . . .” So Macari has been in exactly the same place that Cruz (or her narrator) has been. But she took her time. She is back in the light, and her joy wasn’t earned cheaply; it is the joy of someone who has come out the other side.

Sleepwalking Land, by Mia Couto. Translated by David Brookshaw. Serpent’s Tail (April 2006). 213pp. paperback $14.95 ISBN 185242897X

Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali, by D. T. Niane. Pearson Longman; 2nd edition (August 7, 2006). 120pp. paperback $16.00 ISBN 1405849428

Reviews by George Leonard

I’ve been supposed to find someone to write a review of Sleepwalking Land by Mia Couto. I could write the thing myself, but the whole point of The San Francisco Humanities Review, with its ferocious Rolodex of five hundred nationally known scholars, is getting authors a hearing by an expert in their field, then letting that expert write at length. This is no one-man book blog.

But this one’s unexpectedly tough to place. I can’t even learn enough about him to figure out who would do him justice. Mia Couto isn’t even on Google! My local hardware store and bike shop are, but not an award winning African novelist. There is a “stub” on Wikipedia, the editor’s last resort, but it seems to be quoting the same PR material the publisher enclosed with the book.

The best-read Modern African lit scholar in my College only replied, “Can’t help you much. He’s important. Is along with Henri Lopes one of the two most important Lusophone [Portugese language] African Writers. Heinemann’s did publish some of his stuff before it went out of business. But he’s been slow getting a reputation in the Anglophone world.”

I asked my Africanist, quoting the material the publisher sends with the book, “This book was apparently voted ‘one of the 12 best African books of the 20th century’ by Zimbabwe Intl Book Fair. Is that a major organization?”

“Not in terms of historical precedent but this was a very important poll,” was his reply. “Took and gave great status to the winners.” “He is,” my source added, “along with Ben Okri(Nigeria), Kodjo Liang(Ghana), and Sony Labou Tansi(Zaire), a major example of African Post Modernism.”

Mia Couto, then, shouldn’t be passed over. If the SFHR had such trouble pairing him with a reviewer, the mass-market media certainly won’t bother.

I asked my source about a blurb the publishing firm’s publicist, the energetic Meryl Zegarek, had enclosed. “A white man with an African soul.” I found that kind of praise problematic after my experiences in American ethnic studies. Americans used to praise Stephen Foster that way. But my expert challenged me on it. Apparently my unconscious equation of “African” and “black” was very much out of line.

“Is this a problem for you?” he asked, plainly annoyed. “He’s native-born, raised and educated. Fought with the rebels against the Portuguese. And against the South African/US proxy army.”

So Mia Couto had earned the right to call himself African in every way a human being could — by birth, education and blood. I ended the correspondence before I had to admit I had no idea which wars my source was talking about. One can’t know everything without turning into a jack-of-all-trades, and frankly, I don’t know Mozambique history, or Portugese literature, let alone African literature written in Portugese. I’m just not a member of the “Lusophone” world.

But how many are, in America? Why, without my source, is everything useful I know about Mia Couto coming from a xerox folded into the book by its publicist? The publisher includes a scant two paragraphs printed at the front of the novel, which adds to my store of information that Couto was born in 1955, has been an important journalist — important in Mozambique, at least — and a poet.

Two paragraphs at the front, the way Penguin does for Flaubert, say. That’s fine for Flaubert. But Mia Couto isn’t Flaubert and, frankly, his country isn’t as familiar as France is to the American reader (who would probably bail out on this puzzle of a book before a dutiful book reviewer will). Even the most assigned book in English, George Orwell’s 1984, includes in the cheap Signet edition an “Afterword” by Erich Fromm, positioning Orwell for the reader.

By contrast, consider another African book that has just arrived for review: Pearson Longman’s new edition for the Longman African Writers of Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali by D.T. Niane. It says proudly — and to my mind, significantly — in a golden starburst on the cover, “New Information Added” Before we get to Chapter 1, a helpful table of contents directs us to: “Introduction to the Revised Edition,” “Background Information,” “Who’s who of characters — glossary of places,” “Oral Tradition, Pronounciation, and Spelling,” and finally, “Preface” — fully twenty-four pages of information before we confront what would have been the intimidating first sentence “I am a griot.”

D.T. Niane has already informed us that this book is “primarily the work of an obscure griot from the village of Djeliba Koro,” and given us a two-century history of how griots evolved from “the counselors of kings” into their present African decadence: “Nowadays when we say ‘griot’ we think of those numerous guitarists who people our towns and go to sell their ‘music’ in the recording studios of Dakar or Abidjan. If today the griot is reduced to turning his musical art to account or even to working with his hands in order to live, it was not always so in ancient Africa. Formerly ‘griots’ were the counsellors of kings, they conserved the constitutions of kingdoms by memory work alone; each princely family had its griot appointed to preserve tradition; it was from among the griots that kings used to choose the tutors for young princes.” (xviii)

How exciting, for the middle-aged reader knows the word “griot” from the famous 1970s television series “Roots” and the novel it grew out of. Alex Haley claimed that the essence of it had been communicated to him by a griot before he novelized it. Reading Sundiata gives us something with which to judge the famous African-American work, which has often been accused of inauthenticity.

The translation, by David Brookshore, is graceful. The griot narrator says of his craft, “The art of eloquence has no secrets for us; without us the names of kings would vanish into oblivion, we are the memory of mankind; by the spoken word we bring to life the deeds and exploits of kings for younger generations.” (1) There are homeric catalogs: “Sundiata pronounced all the prohibitions which still obtain in relations between the tribes. To each he assigned its land, he established the rights of each people and ratified their friendships. The Kondés of the land of Do became henceforth the uncles of the imperial family of Keita, for the latter, in memory of the fruitful marriage between Naré Maghan and Sogolon, had to take a wife in Do. The Tounkaras and the Cissés became ‘banter-brothers’ of the Keitas. While the Cissés, Bérétés and Tourés were proclaimed great divines of the empire. No kin group was forgotten at Kouroukan Fougan; each had its share in the division.” (78) The book ends with another eleven pages of helpful footnotes.

Sundiata, its text only eighty-four pages long, is a painless and poetic introduction to the art of the griot and to this body of African literature in general. It not only excites one’s interest, it satisfies one’s interest. This should be the model.

Memo to Mia Couto’s publisher then: in cases like Mia Couto’s, we would like to see the kind of reference help that Pearson Longman has given us for the Sundiata.

For instance, Mia Couto is advertised as a novelist of his country’s war experience, so I’d like to know more about that. He’s billed as a “magical realist” — but how will I know what is “magic” when I don’t even know when he’s being a “realist?” Perhaps Mozambique, during wartime, really was littered with busses filled with charred bodies, like the one in which the protagonists take refuge, in Chapter One. “Look how small they ended up,” the old man remarks to the boy. “It seems fire likes to turn us into children.” (3)

In this Rashomon-like setting (that movie also springing emotionally as well as physically from post-war ruins) they find notebooks on a nearby corpse, so recent “this fellow doesn’t smell.” To say that is to have become a conoisseur of death. The old man and boy entertain themselves by reading their find. The notebooks turn out to be a kind of magical autobiography written by the dead poet they have just pulled into a mass grave, “his teeth ploughing the soil.”

Brookshore’s translation is smooth and terrifying, but I could use more editorial help evaluating it. Is Mozambique African speech so formal that a boy would really say, “It’s just that I’m aching with a sadness.” Or has Couto poeticized the speech to suit the “magical” action? When the dead poet, Kindzu, writes, “War is a snake that bites us with our own teeth,” I sense he is speaking poetry, or was in the original.

In English, however, Kindzu’s prose poetry sounds like the self-consciously poetic novels of Tom Wolfe (Look Homeward, Angel): “O Lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost come back again.” For us, it was a period style. People often talk like that in John Steinbeck, too, even in the Grapes of Wrath, at occasions like Grandpa Joad’s funeral. “Won’t be so lonely, an old man under the ground, having his name there with him.”

In Kindzu’s narrative, funerals are far more magical than that. When his drunkard father’s corpse is tossed into the waves, all the water “disappeared within an instant.” “Where there once was an expanse of blue, there was now a plain covered with palm trees. Each one was brimming with plump, shiny, tasty-looking fruit.” But does a tree “brim” with fruit? You need an object that has a brim to do that, like a cup. And how evocative, or even just euphonious, an adjective is “tasty-looking”? One feels for the translator, remembering the proverb about translating poetry, “The poetry is the part that doesn’t translate.”

Later (67) an equally magical old man passes away, declaring, “My name is in the blood of this tree now.” The “blood” of the tree? Don’t ask questions, it’s poetry. He commits suicide by putting “his finger in his ear, inserting it deeper and deeper until they hear the muffled sound of something bursting.” How deep can a finger go in an ear? It seems almost an unintentionally silly Groucho Marx kind of death. “I can’t hear you, there’s a banana in my ear.” The old man extracts his finger and his ear spurts a fountain of blood. Gradually, he wastes away until he is no more than the size of seed.” [No typos — “size of seed” not “size of a seed.”] I had pictured the shrinking puddle of blood until that metaphor changed it to a completely inappropriate image. “Seed?” Singular. But that’s not a small expanse of liquid… unless he means, and I hope he doesn’t, human seed? But then the blood has to change color, too.

Can this really be the author who, my source told me, “is along with Ben Okri (Nigeria), Kodjo Liang (Ghana), and Sony Labou Tansi (Zaire), a major example of African Post Modernism.” Not from what I’ve read. I am ready to believe that I am missing a lot here.

Let the editors and authors learn from this contrast: the Longman Sundiata should be the model, not this nearly impenetrable edition of Mia Couto. Better to risk looking scholarly but being accessible than to try to brave it through without critical apparatus.

Bewildering Complexities of Integrating Muslims into Europe
Review by Manfred Wolf

A recent book, “While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within,” dwells on the habitual looking away of liberal European elites from the problems posed by Muslim immigrants — a blindness and silence it regards as continuing to this day. The author Bruce Bawer claims that if Europe does not defend against its “Weimar Moment,” it will be destroyed from within. The Weimar Republic, it should be recalled, failed to take a stand against Hitler before he came to power.

But, as Bawer also notes, not only will the European Establishments have to come down hard on extremist behavior and even thought, they will also have to guarantee full equality to their newly minted citizens. For the one thing all European countries have in common is that they never really conceived of the immigrants and their descendants as being truly, really, genuinely Dutch or French or Danish or Swedish. That is a major difference with the US.

Immigrants will have to accept the reigning norms — but European host countries need to offer true acceptance and equality. If, in fact, both sides don’t change, all will indeed be lost.

Some have looked at Bawer as anti-Muslim, but this is not so: he simply makes the point that a viable country must have a dominant culture. In that regard, the US could serve as a model for European countries, and certainly the debate about immigration here, whatever its complications, is relatively straightforward compared to that raging in Europe, where complexities of policy, attitude toward outsiders and the nature of immigrants’ backgrounds dominate all discussions. During the last twenty years, I’ve lived in Europe for years at a time — and I continue to read the Dutch papers daily. I’m fascinated by the complexities of this new Europe.

During a teaching stint at the University of Helsinki in the early Nineties, I was at a dinner party where the inevitable subject of immigration came up. Finland had recently taken in two thousand Somalis and resisted admitting more. It discouraged immigration and has remained homogeneous to this day.

Sweden, on the other hand, was much easier about giving political asylum and had hundreds of thousands of Muslim immigrants already. Now it has more.

The academics around the table wished Finland would be more like Sweden in this regard. My comment that some day Finland might be spared many problems was treated with polite silence — as was a remark from the other extreme by another guest, that he wouldn’t mind a million or two Russians “who’d liven things up in Finland” (at that time, it was widely rumored that hungry Russians would soon swarm across Finnish borders).

Finland vs. Sweden is only one of many contrasts in the way European countries have handled immigration. These days, the usual contrast is between Sweden and Denmark. Denmark has taken a hard line with its Muslims, restricting further immigration in part by clamping down on marriage between resident Muslims and the spouse they might send for in the home country. Sweden, on the other hand, remains almost aggressively lenient.

Sharp differences about integration and assimilation of immigrant and minority populations into Europe continue to exist.

There is the French model of integration — dented somewhat by last year’s immigrant riots in the notorious ghetto-like suburbs — that everybody living in France should be French, period, while the British multicultural model attempts to avoid segregated suburban high-rises and encourages immigrants to retain their own culture. Of course, in practice the two models frequently overlap.

In fact, within France, many variations exist: Paris favors the “be French” model, while Marseilles — a Mediterranean city with vast experience of non-French residents — has gone in for a more multicultural system, less segregation, and greater flexibility in having Muslims play a significant role in the civic life of the city.

The Netherlands has tried both models, especially in housing. At certain times, urban planning produced ghettoization, at other times greater mingling. Despite many pronouncements neither has worked well. The last five years — after the rise and fall of populist politician Pim Fortuyn and the murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh — have ended the silence and quieted politically correct platitudes, and the country has almost swung the other way, towards overt anger, pessimism and despair. Moderate native and Muslim Dutch voices are now often going unheard.

As if these complications weren’t enough, let it be noted that there are major differences between Muslim immigrant groups. Algerians in France, Moroccans in the Netherlands, Turks in Germany, Iraqis in Scandinavia may all be Muslim, but their cultural backgrounds differ. Add to that the hostility between minorities within minorities: recently the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad reported on a group of Syrian Christians in the Dutch town of Enschede who were collectively accused of hooliganism. As it turned out, an unsympathetic Turkish Dutch Muslim city councilman was the main complainant about what most townspeople saw as an exemplary subgroup.

Any number of Muslim immigrants function well as Dutch citizens, but the country’s attention appears focused on criminal Moroccan youth, especially in the big cities, and the potential for terrorism among seemingly assimilated but radicalized youngsters, often of school age.

In a country of sixteen million, over a million Muslims, mainly of Turkish and Moroccan descent, now dominate the debate. How best to integrate them? Do they even want to integrate? Can a large minority refuse to integrate?

In his meteoric career, the populist Pim Fortuyn proposed that no country could be truly multicultural without fragmenting. Pluralist, yes, multiculturalist, not really.

This may well contain the key to the present dilemma. Muslim groups, which see their culture as entirely the equal of the prevailing Dutch culture, may be on a collision course with the host country. Norms of free speech and the equality of women, the Dutch now say, are not negotiable. The dominant culture has to be respected and in some fashion submitted to by all the citizens. The fabled Dutch tolerance cannot yield to those who are intolerant of its major values.

Manfred Wolf is the editor of “Amsterdam: A Traveler’s Literary Companion.” He teaches literature and the history of ideas at the Fromm Institute, University of San Francisco.

A review by George Leonard.

From the time of the Iliad until World War I, war was one of poetry’s central topics, yet now the subject seems taboo; as if all other artists were allowed to address this large and persistent area of human life except the poet. Even to write poetry involving war is suspect. Why? Why must the poet be excluded from the debate?

So I was surprised but pleased to read that Alice James Books was not only publishing Brian Turner’s poems, but that they had presented him with the Beatrice Hawley Award. I think of Alice James Books as a ferocious feminist press. I remember its founding, named for the neurasthenic sister of two famous brothers, soon after an excellent biography had resurrected her. They had published my friend, the Marin poet Laurel Trivelpiece, in the 1980s. I connected them with our poetry workshop, which frequently met in the women’s Marin homes. It was a stretch to picture them publishing war poems until I read the poems. Brian Turner is a “real poet” and Laurel– a holy terror who loved nothing as much as real poetry– would have loved them. (Matter of fact, Alice James was a holy terror too.)

Of course, these poems aren’t “political.” They bring no news that would affect one’s opinion of the Iraq War either way. What they do is use poetry’s power (they’re poems, it isn’t just the content that makes them interesting) to bring deeper knowledge of how any modern war feels, and how it is experienced by the people caught up in it. They bring knowledge that a news story or a film camera cannot bring. But do I really have to defend poetry’s superior powers to the San Francisco Humanities Review’s sophisticated readers?

Last night, I saw the Oliver Stone movie, “World Trade Center,” which used every device of the giant screen, of digital magic and THX sound, to make you feel how it felt to be there when the building collapsed. Yet the movie theater concussions affected me less than these lines in Brian Turner’s poem, “2000 lbs.” The subtitle, “Ashur Square, Mosul,” makes it clear that this actually happened. Mosul was a place where, as in this poem, Shia suicide bombers detonated trucks full of improvised explosives. Turner starts with a close-up of the terrified bomber’s sweating hand, waiting:

It begins simply with a fist, white-knuckled
And tight, glossy with sweat.

–And then Turner cut around the square at the moment of detonation, showing up the Iraqis (Sunni, I take it?) in the last second of life:

Rasheed passes the bridal shop
on a bicycle with Sefa beside him
and just before the air ruckles and breaks
he glimpses the sidewalk reflections
in the storefront glass, men and women,
walking and talking, or not, an instant
of clarity, just before each of them shatters,
under the detonation’s wave,
as if even the idea of them were being
destroyed, stripped of form
(p.43)

As if “even the idea of them were being destroyed!” I see it in my mind’s eye, to echo Coleridge, better than Stone could ever blue-screen FX it. The film director has the power to replace the audience’s imagination with his own; but a real poet, like Brian Turner, has the power to enlist your own imagination; and, as the saying goes, “what the audience can imagine is always stronger than anything you can show them.”

Turner has, even more than Robert Frost, taken the road less traveled by, at least for a poet. After his MFA at the University of Oregon, he served for seven years in the United States Army. It was the Clinton era, and his first job was defending Muslims from Serb atrocities in Boznia-Herzegovina with the 10th Mountain Division (1999-2000). I trust nobody will object to that, whatever their antipathy to the current Iraq war. “He was an infantry team leader for a year in Iraq with the Third Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division,” the book’s publicity also tells me. As the epigraph for one poem in Here, Bullet says, “The wrong is not in the religion; the wrong is in us.” Not “American us” but “any of us, us.”

If Turner’s current assignment somehow disqualifies Turner as a poet all by itself, well, that’s quite an aesthetic. The Left does maintain a stance that it hates the conflict but does not blame the soldiers. I for one am relieved to picture an M.F.A. and a working poet in a position where he can exert influence over his men.

Iraq, then. It is a world which plainly awes Turner, a world where

At dusk, bats fly out by the hundreds
Water snakes glide in the ponding basins,
Behind the rubbled palaces.
(Curfew, page 47)

He has seen terrible things and has a compulsion to make us see them too. After the suicide bomb, he imagines the spirits of the newly dead,

As they wander confused amongst one another,
Learning each other’s names, trying to comfort
The living in their grief….
That it might not be forgotten.

I think that here the poet speaks of himself, as the speaking spirit of these muted dead, talking to us that “it might not be forgotten.” He has the power to re-present them to us, the power to make us see them; and– far more than a film director can– the power to make us feel what we are seeing.

When he jumped from the balcony, Hassan swam
In the air over the Aschur Street market,
Arms and legs suspended in a blur,
Above palm hearts and crates of lemons,
Not realizing how hard life fights
Sometimes, how an American soldier
Would run to his aid there on the sidewalk,
Trying to make sense of Hassan’s broken legs,
His screaming, trying to comfort him with words in an awkward music of stress and care….

I thought of the jihadi, who “swam in the air,” tonight, when the news showed a row of buildings in Baghdad brought down by “improvised” explosive devices. People must have swum in air, leaving them.

The poem isn’t over. The American, making his “awkward music of stress and care” is trying to comfort him when Hassan pulls the soldier’s knife out of its sheath and tries to kill him. The soldier who had been comforting Hassan, wrestles with him, finally kills the weakened jihadi, who says, dying,

Hassan whispered to him,
“Shukran, saddiq, shukran.”
“Thank you, friend, thank you.”

One has a sick feeling that there is no way Brian Turner could have made something like that up. I’ll remember Hassan, and the soldier, in their complex bond. I’ll remember too, that nowhere in the poem does the soldier hate Hassan, or, it seems, Hassan the soldier.

In fact, no place in the whole ambitious poetic cycle of Here, Bullet, does Turner unconsciously display any animosity to the “enemy,” any triumphing, gloating– none of that. It is war as a miserable and ugly duty which one does not shirk, but certainly cannot enjoy. There are people who do enjoy it, I believe; and plenty who hate. But they aren’t in these poems. Even the jihadis are just doing what they believe must be done. Turner’s vision of war is a vision of tragic necessity. I don’t share it.

These poems are arranged, as I said, in an ambitious poetic cycle which, like all poetic cycles, has better moments and worse moments. I don’t like the title poem, “Here, Bullet,” the only poem in the group with even a trace of soldierly bravado to it. (Though who am I to deny him a moment of that? Or to deny him pride in his ability to go through scenes like those above and still be able to write real poetry?)

As craftsman, Brian Turner is better when he describes than when he ventures into the abstract:

Rockets often fall,
In the night sky of the skull,
Down long avenues of the brain myelin sheathing over synapses
And the rough structures of thought
(Katyusha rockets, page 32)

Those are lines which any working poet could have written without having to be there. In fact, they read a bit like lost lyrics to a Doors song. By contrast, read this imagist vision:

Ankle-dash in the white-ocre salt flats
North of Babylon, women harvest salt
With buckets and bare hands,
In stands of water the color
Or rust, or a blue, dark as oil
Come up from the Earth
As if they walk on the water’s surface
Ablaze with sunlight, dressed in black, the color of crows, the color of shadows….

It burns your eyes. We talk a lot, in writing, about Make it New! But we also value, Make it Real! After reading Turner’s poems, how people suffer in a war, all wars, was realer to me. That’s knowledge any of us need to have, whatever our politics.

A review by George Leonard.

When Kathy Acker died, the Creative Writing Department at San Francisco State did something that I’d never seen before: they covered the wall of one corridor with a collage of pictures, notes, testimonials of homage and grief. Such was the passion that this unlikely poetic diva inspired. I only met her once, at a premiere of an Eleanor Antin film– a small, startling combination of piercings, muscles, and wild hair, unexpectedly gentle and affable for a woman working on Janis Joplin’s reputation.

The New York Times spoke of her “scarified sensibility, subversive intellect, and predatory wit… a writer like no other.” The Times Literary Supplement called her “fearless in seeking to destroy the unifying illusions of subjectivity and narrative.” Her publisher adds “post-modernist, feminist, post-punk, and plagiarist….” That’s a lot to live up to.

Someone reviewing George Orwell’s life work said cruelly but accurately, that after he had reached great fame with Animal Farm and 1984, he immediately did something “brilliant– he died.” Kathy Acker’s premature and terrible death by cancer is part of her legend.

These essays– often brilliant, generally “fearless” as the TLS claimed, even when they are not brilliant– offer us contact with a real person, not a legend. That’s their fascination. Some may prefer not to recover the “real” Acker; some may deny, like Peer Gynt unable to find the center of an onion, but only more and more layers, that there is any “real” Acker at all. Certainly Acker was as protean as her own myth. “For me, writing is freedom. Therein lies (my) identity, period… the excitement of writing, for me, is that of a journey into strangeness….”

Yet the non-fiction essays will enrich the fiction for her admirers. For one thing, so much that is known about Acker just isn’t so. No accounts of her as “post-punk diva” like to mention that, when Acker ran away from New York City to California, it was not to live on the streets but to teach Classical Greek as a TA at the University of California San Diego. Nor was it “the streets” of New York she was running away from but Brandeis, with a fine B.A. in lit. She became a grad student at San Diego and was trusted with a TA. Not only does none of that fit the image, it suggests too strongly to youthful admirers that some serious reading and scholarship will have to be done to become the next Kathy Acker. (Classical Greek!)

Her mass media obituaries (you can find them rehashed at her Wikipedia entry now, as if they were gospel) connected her with William Burroughs for the usual reason. His was the most famous name they encountered as an influence.

In these essays, Acker tells a different story.

Yes, Burroughs’s work was a distant example which helped her do in prose something of what the poets and visual artists around her were doing. They, however, not he, were her real influences. “When I was either twenty or twenty-one, and in San Diego,” she writes in the leading essay in this collection. “I apprenticed myself to David Antin. That is, I sat on his doorstep and babysat for his kid.”

David Antin, a potent New York City avant-garde figure, had made the journey from New York to San Diego before her, to establish at UCSD a center for the avant-garde arts. It included many rising stars, like Antin, a young but well-published critic and experimental poet from the 1960s New York City Pop era, whom the University of California was eager to hire away from the East. The most famous was undoubtedly Allan Kaprow, legendary creator of the “Happenings,” John Cage’s best pupil and one of the people who popularized Zen in America, as well as Pop Art. There was Antin’s wife, who would become the equally celebrated feminist artist and pioneer filmmaker, Eleanor Antin– when I mentioned her name to a class a few years back, a student was startled to learn she was alive! Eleanor’s name was already in some kind of song or poem (the “Foremothers”?) that this student had learned in a Women’s Studies course. But at the time, Eleanor Antin, though well-known, was considered a brilliantly perverse, notorious young artist who, like her contemporary Susan Sontag, was all the more intriguing for her dramatic physical presence.

Since the San Francisco Humanities Review exists to review in greater depth than the mass media can, I called the Antins, who are certainly the experts on Kathy Acker’s formative period. David Antin kindly sent this email (and much of the information in this review):

“Another important figure in the art department was our friend, the artist John Baldessari,one of Kathy’s earliest fans. Also, San Diego was the center of an avant-garde music scene with people like Pauline Oliveros and Ken Gaburo and a host of even wilder grad students like Peter Gordon, Ron Robboy and Ned Sublette, who used to attend my semiotics class wearing a thrift shop evening gown. There was a wonderfully wild and untamed scene that drew from experimentation in all the arts.”

Not all were at UCSD, Cal Arts was nearby, but all clung together in an East Coast, largely New York Jewish (like Kathy from Brandeis, the great Jewish university) expat community living on the wild hillsides of San Diego’s almost uninhabited Northern outskirts. It was 1971 or 72. No yuppies, no suburbs. No lights. At night you saw stars, and heard coyotes. The golden hills above the cliff-walled beaches were populated by surfers living in trailers, retired Navy men with flagpoles outside their bungalows, and– fading north toward Camp Pendleton– Marines, ex-Marines, more surfers, and hippies living out in the brush itself, including for a while, Charlie Manson and his clan. The Antins, who in New York were still part of Warhol’s and Cage’s sophisticated groups, lived, he recalls, “in a shambly stucco and tile house hanging on the bluffs over the Pacific surf. It had a terrace on the bluff from which you could watch whales or look a seagull in the eyes.”

This led to closeness. All kinds, including the kinds Kathy became celebrated for. Certain names recur in these essays, but I’d rather not hazard identifications, for prudishness has descended on the universities again, and sometimes the bodies in “Bodies of Work” are actually bodies very much at work: “I reach over Peter so my mouth is on his nipple… Other times I stick my right hand third finger into Eddie’s asshole… He bucks and looks at me with surprise…. Openness makes me open.” (121)

Looking back at the Sexual Revolution as it broke out in Southern California, there is a Heart of Darkness quality to it– only joyful. Heart of Lightness, then? Out there on the golden cliffs with the whales and the coyotes, these young Eastern artists and grad students, freed of their families and communities and all inhibitions, slipped outside civilization and started rampaging out there in the sexual wilds. Picture Kathy going awol in San Diego, like Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now. There were a host of younger people who would become, like Acker, important artworld figures– novelist Mel Freilicher, later her best friend; the grad student universally called “Acker” whom Kathy would marry; conceptual artist in training Martha Rosler; poet and linguistic student Lenny Neufeld, who happened to be Martha’s husband, and with whom Kathy ran away; avant garde composer Peter Gordon, whom she ran to, after running away from Lenny and coming back to San Diego; Allan Kaprow’s disciple and biographer, Jeff Kelley; feminist star Judy Chicago; Heng Liu, new from China, who would become America’s most famous “Asian American” artist.

The Antins showed some openness themselves in accepting her as their “favorite babysitter.”

“Blaise, David’s kid, and I got along great,” Acker tells us. “Our favorite game was Criminals; a sample question, “would you rather hold up a small bank in Kentucky or poison a rich creep who’s already dying?” “MAKE IT NEW.” “I wanted to be a writer; I didn’t want to do anything else, but I couldn’t find my own voice…. I hated my fathers.” (9)

So to find her voice– and, she at least subconsciously suggests, a new father– she had fled Brandeis for San Diego, to join David Antin’s family virtually as an older sibling, re-parenting herself with both Antins, and re-inventing herself in the bizarre new world of near-Mexican sunlight and wild manzanita hillsides.

This reviewer ran away from the New York City Pop world to the same place about then, and I cannot exaggerate the culture shock– and the corresponding closeness it promoted among the isolated Eastern expats Acker lived with, and whom I also knew. It was still a world of blond “Iowans” who talked like Gidget. At Coco’s restaurant in nearby Newport Beach, symbolically, there was only one flavor of ice cream: vanilla. (”But if you want chok-lit, I could pour Hershey’s on it?”) To eat pizza, you had to drive to the Italian restaurant next to Disneyland. If you looked for Jewish food at the supermarket, you found it in the “International” aisle next to taco shells.

But the resulting loneliness abolishes hierarchies. By comparison, my student Michael Ohlsson ran away to China, and a few days ago, taking his sister to visit the Great Wall, ran into Shaquille O’Neal. In America he wouldn’t get within camera range of Shaq, but in China, it was “let’s hang out.”

The New York expats clung together mentally and (as Acker’s selection above indicates) physically. One had “access”– every kind of access. It was still the Sexual Revolution. As Cynthia Carr accurately says, in an afterword to Bodies of Work, whatever the narrator’s name is in a Kathy Acker novel, it is always “one voice raging– obscene, cynical, bewildered, demanding to fuck.” Nobody would ever dare to tell Kathy Acker that she was “objectifying” herself.

But this was a great environment in which to learn from the best, you and them, just expats huddling together. Turn from the “one voice raging” stuff about sticking fingers up assholes to Acker’s essays, and one meets a rational, fully-developed aesthetic:

“I was taught by Conceptualists” whose foundational figures were available to her at UCSD, “that all that matters in art, in the making of art, is intention, intentionality. To use Zen language,” she continues, and I see Allan Kaprow’s spirit hovering in the background, “one should not mistake the finger that points at the moon for the moon. That all that does not concern intention is simply prettiness; that prettiness, is, above all, despicable.”

Brilliant.

Only when one balances that rational, educated voice against the “one voice raging,” do we see Kathy Acker. In terms she would have approved, there is an Apollonian Acker as well as a Dionysiac, and she is only understood as the tension between the two.

The Antins are famous in their own right, and do not correct the William Burroughs stuff. (Nor was Kathy their most famous student.) But, although she wouldn’t admit it, it was Eleanor Antin who was probably Kathy’s hero, as much as David.

Essay 16 in this collection is the title essay, “Bodies of Work,” and it describes Acker’s bodybuilding– an art of her own body. There are references to Elias Canetti, to Wittgenstein, to Heidegger, for godssake. Harold Bloom says the artist would rather invoke a false influence on herself, than the real one. What’s missing from the essay is a much closer influence than Wittgenstein on a young woman making an art of bodybuilding– one of Eleanor Antin’s most famous pieces, “Carving: a traditional sculpture,” in which Antin had herself photographed nude each day of a crash diet, back and left and right profiles, while she dieted, sculpting her body. “At that time Elly was notorious, rather than famous as she is now,” Antin cautions me to remember. How notorious? To put “Carving” in contemporary context, on TV I-Dream-Of-Jeanie’s bellybutton was considered too overtly sexual to be shown, and when Cher’s bellybutton became visible on Sonny and Cher, it caused an uproar, a national pornography debate. Eleanor role-modeled Kathy’s future career as Notorious Woman Artist. Kathy saw first-hand how a smart woman artist could manipulate her physical presence to create a success d’ scandale; and then she helped with the 100 Boots, no less controversial. “Elly’s one woman show at MOMA in 1973 of the whole 100 Boots series was so shocking to MOMA’s photography department that its curator, John Szarkowski, tried to block it and had to be overruled by Bill Rubin, the senior painting curator, on the grounds that the cards were not photography but conceptual art.”

Often Acker’s works seem to transpose to the literary world performance acts that Eleanor Antin and other women artists had been creating a decade earlier. And why shouldn’t Acker transpose them? Acker believed in the work, not the originality of the artist.

Certainly it was Eleanor Antin who gave Kathy Acker her launch. When Kathy returned to San Diego to live with Peter Gordon, from about 1971 to 73, Eleanor Antin was working on her now very famous 100 Boots project, mentioned above, in which 100 empty boots go marching around the world as if they were having adventures– impossible to describe, really, the way a Christo “wrapping,” if you’ve never seen one, is impossible to describe. At least one new image was mailed out to a mailing list of 1000 people in the avant garde world no less often than once a month, and Kathy and Peter helped her with the two of the mailings when Elly was down with the flu. When Kathy decided to undertake her Black Tarantula series, learning from Eleanor, she decided to distribute it as a mail work. Eleanor Antin magnanimously turned over to Kathy the invaluable 100 Boots mailing list of the thousand influential artworld people who had already gone for such a concept from Eleanor Antin. Through that mailing list– and, though they do not say so, through the Antins’s influential patronage– “Kathy became the darling of the art world before she was the darling of the literary world,” Eleanor Antin remembers.

San Diego was too close, too familial. Kathy went to San Francisco, to New York. No more working in sex shows. The Antins, long distance, arranged a job for her teaching Greek at the Walden School to help out. Eventually, she wound up in London– about as far from San Diego in all ways as you can get. These essays were originally collected there.

“Through over a dozen works of fiction and one scandalous play, Acker set out to remake the canon,” Cynthia Carr writes in her Afterword, “hacking her way through great novels and great dramas, ” rewriting famous plots with new versions of familiar characters– a “quasi-Pip” in her “post-Dickensian Great Expectations.”

That takes some explanation, but you won’t find it in the literary world. Think “collage.” The game she had been playing with Blaise Antin was based on the exercise his father had given her in a unique creative writing course. Adapt principles of collage to literature. Use the old, but make it new, make it your own. “I’m not vs. creative writing,” Antin later explained. “I’m vs. self-expression.” Or as Acker says in the introduction to these essays, “I’m hoping communication cannot be reduced to expression.” (viii) Kathy, David Antin laughs, “went on to create an ideology of plagiarism.”

She found an audience for it; became notorious, then famous; went into body-building; was diagnosed with cancer.

She came back to the Antins when she was dying– she died across the border from San Diego in a Tijuana clinic, trying a last ditch quack cure, which, at least, gave her hope to the last. I called the Antins to research this piece. Eleanor Antin grimly remembered the “appalling border traffic” which made their weekly trips down to see the dying Kathy “a psychotic experience.” I asked Eleanor Antin to verify or correct certain things I’d read about Kathy Acker. Eleanor was deeply puzzled by my question about Kathy’s “bisexuality.” I had to explain I’d read some criticism that claimed her as a lesbian. Sure, Kathy tried everything, Eleanor finally ventured, but she was “basically straight.” Pause. “Almost entirely straight!”

The Antins talked about the odd ways in which a woman they’d watched grow up, flourish, and pass away, had been transformed into the icon I’d seen on the impromptu wall shrine made up for her at San Francisco State, an image so different from the real woman (a smart woman, educated, a Classical Greek scholar, “widely read in several languages,” as David added); a woman one can now meet in these valuable essays. David reflected, “When we construct a constellation, the farther you are from the stars, the closer they look to each other.”

A review by George J. Leonard, San Francisco State University

In the summer of 2006, as baseball fans were watching Barry Bonds push his lifetime home-run total into the 720s, patiently chasing Hank Aaron’s record, those of us who follow aesthetics were watching David Carrier write his 11th 12th and 13th book, chasing his teacher Arthur Danto’s home run record. I had recently finished Carrier’s Rosalind Krauss and American Philosophical Art Criticism (2002), Writing about Visual Art (2003), and the catalog of a museum show he put together. (My favorite among his books remains The Aesthetics of Comics.) Today I review Carrier’s latest book, Sean Scully, and the Chinese translation of his Principles of Art History Writing, plus Museum Skepticism: a History of the Display in Public Galleries, Carrier’s book on the museum experience from Duke University Press, begun during a year at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

To turn my light-hearted metaphor serious, Carrier as a writer resembles Bonds in his peculiar versatility. Bonds hits homers both righty and lefty; he has also stolen over 40 bases in years he has hit 40 home runs. What is truly remarkable about Carrier’s thirteen books is that they’re all excellent yet (particularly after writing Principles) they’re in so many different genres. Carrier, so to speak, bats righty and lefty and steals bases. Sean Scully, one of the three new books before us, is a complex biography/memoir of a long and mutually sustaining friendship between artist and critic. Rosalind Krauss and American Philosophical Art Criticism was written by Carrier– but this time wearing another hat, writing as one of the rare art critics who knows more philosophy than Rosalind Krauss does. The Aesthetics of Comics is also by Carrier– but in a third style, an extremely fruitful, sometimes indescribable encounter between aesthetics and pop culture criticism, the “first book by an analytic philosopher to identify and solve the aesthetic problems posed by the comic strip and to explain the relationship of this artistic genre to other forms of visual art.”

The Aesthetics of Comics handled, for instance, the nature of “conventional elements” in representation by explaining, “If you could stand next to Donald Duck in a comic, you would see him, but not the words or thoughts in his speech balloon.” A chapter about not only Baudelaire and Daumier, but also Gary Larson’s strip The Far Side, (”Caricature; or, Representing Causal Connection”) begins with this explanation of David Hume’s conjectures about causation:

“While working in my third floor study, I can sometimes see the postman coming along my quiet, dead-end street. And when then I run downstairs, I view the mail coming through the slot and hear my daughter’s dog, Brigston, rushing barking to defend the house. I understand what is happening at any given moment by relation to what happens earlier or later. Brigston awakens because he hears the postman. I infer, as Hume noted, causal connections between those pairs of events….”

In Aesthetics of Comics Carrier fully turned the stylistic corner that his teacher Arthur Danto had turned in 1981, with The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, In that amazingly influential book, Danto adroitly incorporated fiction and comedy into his analytic philosophy. Every time, for instance, that Danto’s narrator tries to set up a (fictional) art exhibition which will exclude certain “mere real things,” unworthy of being contemplated as art, he is attacked by Kierkegaardian and Borgesian characters, most memorably, “a sullen young artist with egalitarian attitudes, whom I shall call J.”

Carrier more and more has melded art interpretation and autobiography into a kind of kunstlerroman, the history of the education of the artist’s taste. He is a great Proust reader, Carrier, and entire pages in Carrier’s books can be almost indistinguishable from Proust’s accounts of how he responded to a particular artwork, and his meditations on why.

Museum Skepticism, the newest from Carrier reminds me of Aesthetics of Comics in an important way. One’s first reaction to the subtitle, “a History of the Display of Art in Public Galleries” is to say, “You mean, there wasn’t one?” The Aesthetics of Comics was a similarly inspired choice: the first time a world-famous philosopher like Carrier had fully evaluated comic strips (which, amazingly enough, are no older than the 1890s, though one would have thought the form so obvious it was in use forever).

One realizes, reading Museum Skepticism, that one’s main knowledge of the history of museums is still the prefaces which Elizabeth Gilmore Holt and her graduate students assembled for the workmanlike dated A Documentary History of Art back in the 1940s and 50s. The topic apparently was too daunting. Harvard’s Ivan Gaskill justly says in a blurb that Carrier is “one of only a handful of scholars who inhabit with ease the diverse worlds of philosophy, art history, art criticism, and now museology”– the study of museums, a study which will surely demand your abilities in the first three fields that Gaskell mentioned.

But let’s return to the beginning.

Danto’s 1981 leap into writing art criticism for The Nation, after writing Transfiguration, intrigued Carrier. He too became a frequent art critic for magazines like Artforum, collaborated with Mark Roskill, and finally wrote the American version of the Chinese book under review today, Principles of Art History Writing.

The Principles of Art History Writing is, like Artwriting, one of several books he has now written on the writing of art history itself. “What inspired me was two shows,” he remembered for this interviewer many years later (2006) “both at the Met, those devoted to Caravaggio and Manet.” In the introduction he remembers seeing them with the philosopher and art critic Alexander Nehamas, who urged him to write. “I could see the whole body of paintings, more of Manet of course, and so the questions of development came into focus. And looking at the literature, I could see the development of commentary. What most struck me: the move from simple early to later elaborate commentary.” There had been “progress” in artwriting, a rare thing in any kind of philosophic discourse.

In Principles, Carrier reviewed every genre the Western art historical narrative had developed. He has said he was “naïve” when he started. He was a philosopher. He had only taken one art history course!

But he knew how to think– and, as an analytic philosopher, he knew when others were substituting rhetoric for thought. What an enjoyably destructive work Principles is! Carrier, the philosopher, appears in the thick of the art historians like a federal auditor arriving at an Enron Board meeting in 1999. The word “but” must occur a thousand times; “therefore” very rarely. “But how is that possible, when the axis also passes through….” “But there is no record of Vasari ever describing….” “But earlier generations of interpreters saw Manet as a simple man….”

The book has become a staple of art history courses, and I can guess why. The students come into the course expecting me to tell them which Experts knew the “truth” about the paintings, so they can memorize it, and recite it on appropriate occasions to impress people.

By the time Carrier is finished deconstructing art history (for once the word fits) the student is free to be imaginative as she wants to be, secure in the knowledge that she can’t do much worse than the “authorities” have done! That makes for uninhibited classes. Carrier frees genius to create.

During the writing, Carrier also came to a consciousness of himself as a prose artist, as well as a philosopher. More than any other contemporary “artwriter,” to use his meaningful double-entendre of a term, Carrier has treated artwriting as an art, and, as he once said, he has given “art history a history.”

Carrier took his epigraph from Friedrich von Schlegal: “In what is called philosophy of art, there is usually lacking one of the two: either philosophy or art.” Carrier, putting the slighting comment at the front of his book, accepted it as a challenge. Could philosophy of art be not only philosophy but also art? Did artwriting itself include or overlap the literary genres, was there an art to artwriting? That was a central question in Principles of Art History Writing, and several books since. In books like England and its Aesthetes: Biography and Taste, and Charles Baudelaire and the Origins of Modernism Carrier connected with an era in which artwriting had been not only a respected genre, but a central one, practiced by major literary figures like Baudelaire, Pater, Ruskin. In the 20th century the scales tipped toward pure scholarship, but could a balance be found? Could artwriting in the 21st century become art again, as it had in the 19th century?

Coincidentally– for Carrier’s fascination with China is recent, though growing– the mainland Chinese are now asking all of those questions, as they emerge from decades of xenophobia, and are allowed to explore Western concepts that before Deng Xiao Ping’s reforms could have gotten them sent to a labor camp. Or sent back, rather, since most of the country’s intellectual class had languished there between 1966 and 1975, during the Cultural Revolution.

Carrier’s much-assigned book is a perfect match for them. Carrier wanted to look back and take stock of everything that Western artwriting could be, and do; and so do the Chinese. This summer his Chinese publishers invited him to Beijing, where a conference was held, and Carrier was presented with copies of Principles in a luxurious Chinese edition. (One measure of Carrier’s growing influence is that this year alone he will have spoken about his work in Ireland, Italy and India, as well as in Beijing.)

Contemporary American aesthetics is still new to the People’s Republic of China, but they are determined to import it like everything else American. Think of the appetite which Meiji Japan showed for Western methods and you’ll understand PRC now. A wave of Chinese who studied in America have been returning home since 2001, when our economy worsened and China’s improved, (they are humorously called the returning “sea turtles”) bringing every kind of experience of the West with them.

Yet after teaching and living in Beijing on and off since the Eighties, I can say that China will read Carrier carefully, for our aesthetics remains extremely foreign to them. The only Western critic who at all resembles classical East Asian aesthetics is Thomas Carlyle– who to us seems more like an anti-critic– since he, like the high East Asian tradition, examines a painting primarily seeking contact with the artist’s heroic personality and/or his spiritual vision. I speak of the unbroken discourse going back to Hsieh Ho in 500 C.E. Anyone who thinks Western aesthetics merely codifies some “natural” way that humans respond to art objects will be disabused (and perhaps depressed) by reading Chinese aesthetics, which– this is a considered judgment, not a flip remark– relates to our aesthetics not much more than jingju, Chinese opera, relates to Verdi’s opera. Our aesthetics and theirs intersect at right angles. We do different things with objects, though we persist in calling our various activities by the single name, “art.”

The Chinese decision to translate David Carrier is significant, the way almost everything is significant in so centrally-controlled a society. It is part of China’s determination to re-open to the West– the American West, this time, instead of the Marxist West, which (bad timing!) had been represented to them as Modernity itself, when they last opened to us, in Mao’s youth. The edition is even handsomer than the American editions– large, on slick paper, and abundantly illustrated with fine color pictures. Carrier is good at elucidating difficult critics, a skill he shares with another of his teachers, Richard Kuhns (Tragedy, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Art). The Chinese scholars undoubtedly saw that Carrier’s Principles would serve them not only as a work of advanced theory but also as a textbook on Western writers as yet untranslated.

It is interesting and significant that the book has come out from Beijing’s People’s University. Built by the Communists next door to “Bei Da,” Beijing’s Harvard, it was meant to rival it. (Something like an M.I.T. next to Harvard?) People’s University specialized, as the name indicates, in educating for leadership the brightest children of “the people,” that is, people of correct proletarian background. After the Cultural Revolution discredited the “ultra-leftists,” People’s University, like China, turned about-face, and became a school for the most Western-oriented Party elite– my niece Toto goes to their highschool. It’s a sign of the times that the once ultraleft, xenophobic school set up to educate populist leaders is now catching up with the West by bringing in David Carrier and the principles of Western art history writing.

The two works under discussion are linked, because thirteen years before Carrier wrote Sean Scully, he was already training for it, analyzing the way “both seicento and modern accounts of Caravaggio” had tried to construct an artist’s personality from his works. (Scully already appears in Principles‘ acknowledgements.) “Compare two accounts of Caravaggio’s personality: Giovanni Bellori’s brief 1672 text, and Howard Hibbard’s Caravaggio, published in 1983.” So a chapter starts on “The Construction of an Artistic Personality” by an artwriter. Carrier then compares Burckhardt, Fry, Berenson, Bellori, Wincklemann, Arnold Hauser and Wittkower on Caravaggio (”Caravaggio’s site-specific effects analyzed by Steinberg raise similar problems,” “modern art historians’ reliance on humanism is described… by Panofsky….”) When Carrier, thirteen years later, turns to the construction of Sean Scully, he brings to the analysis all this theoretical depth.

But that is what the deeper purpose of Principles, and some of his other works were for Carrier: training sessions. In 1991 Carrier analyzed, for his own writing’s sake, the strengths and weaknesses of the countless ways prose, art and thought interact. The discussions are pragmatic– you’re in a training camp, sitting with a professional athlete running videotapes of other professionals. The second epigraph to Principles, from Vladimir Nabokov, alluded to the way the attentive young man was studying all the magic tricks of his great predecessors, to “transcend” them:

“Those apparatuses– the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions– which the native illusionist, frac-tales flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way…”

“In his own way!” The strong poet only studies others to devour them and gain their strength, like a cannibal eating his (or her!) archenemy. Carrier, Arthur Danto has said with admiration, has more energy and ambition than anyone he knows. (This is a good point at which to make my “full disclosure” that I know and like David Carrier, having met him at a conference on Danto’s work. Sean Scully, however, I do not know. I did not even particularly like his work before reading Carrier’s book.)

All Carrier’s sophisticated techniques are in evidence in Sean Scully, which overcame my old doubts about Scully’s work. Scully needed a volume on this scale (Ten inches by twelve inches, with 190 color illustrations) to bring him out. His work is subtle, and anything but the best color reproductions will fail to catch it, the way a bad taping may not much hurt a Tchaikovsky symphony but will destroy a quiet John Cage tympani piece.

A full discussion of Scully’s life, as skillfully enacted by Carrier, is beyond the scope of this already long review. Suffice to say that Scully is a model of the modern transnational artist and Carrier’s biographical approach deals with that subtle phenomenon. Born in Dublin in 1945, Scully moved to London at the age of 4, and won prizes in London before 30. That year he gambled, gave up his growing presence in English art, and tried to make it in New York. (All his life Leon Golub wished he’d bitten the bullet and done that sooner. He had tried to make a go of “regional” art from as nearby as Chicago, before deciding it was impossible and that he had wasted decades.) Scully had to start all over again in New York, but he had his first one-man show there in 1977, won even more prizes and grants, was soon studying and teaching at Princeton, then Harvard. (Driving up from the art capital, of course.)

Yet– here is the challenge to the biographical work– though he left Ireland at age 4, Scully has always identified with, or “given salience” to, as we say in ethnic American studies, his Irish ethnicity -”romantically,” as he admits. It’s a very contemporary sense of what it means to be “Irish.” (And it is an American sense, not an Irish one!) Ethnicity, it was argued in the 1990s, now may be “salient” over residence, citizenship, all. Earlier Irish-Americans, by contrast, sang how they were “born on the Fourth of July.” Scully claims an indelible Irishness, and that it matters to his art, and to our understanding it. The Irish (unexpectedly) accept Scully’s claim and return Scully’s fondness. They have honored him with shows, with documentary films on their national TV. He’s even had a postage stamp.

Carrier prepared for years to examine how so subtle a sense of identity interacts with fields of muted color. For a second challenge to the biographical approach is that Scully’s severe paintings and sculptural objects primarily use stripes of color, like the bottoms of American flags without the box of stars, but in every possible gentle combination of tones. How can that be “Irish”? They would seem to be antithetical to “content” or “istoria,” the way Robert Ryman’s work is; yet Scully, like Van Gogh and Kandinsky and Rothko before him, believes he can communicate with the colors and shapes.

Carrier largely convinces me. In a painting called “The Moroccan” the bars evoke the beautiful palette of a desert sunset, the colors of sand and hills fading into orange and ochre. “The ghost of figuration” Carrier argues of paintings like these, “is the ultimate source for these narratives.” In “Wall of Light Fall,” Scully magically soaks up the “weathered looking colors” of autumn, the way Pollock once did in “Autumn Rhythm, No. 30, 1950.”

What the dancing splash was for Pollock, the solid rhythm of stripes is for Scully: his basic phoneme of expression. The stripe, not the brushstroke, is the minimal unit in the visual system of Scully’s pictorial language. It is amazing how much Pollock and Scully can say by changing, shaping, repositioning their building blocks. Carrier is right to claim that Scully has successfully brought Abstract Expressionism into the 21st century.

The genre of the book is complex, adding autobiography to biography. Sean Scully records one of those moving artistic and intellectual friendships, almost partnerships between artist and writer. Carrier knows Scully better than Baudelaire knew Daumier, and he and Scully have lasted much longer than Clement Greenberg and Pollock. As I mentioned above, Scully’s name already appears in the credits of Carrier’s 1991 Principles. “Your constant, I might even say relentless, support” Scully once wrote Carrier, “has been at the back of me like a shadow that is made of light.” Carrier in turn mentions a night “when I asked for help at one unique moment of extreme crisis,” and Scully “spent a long time at two o’ clock in the morning telling me that my art writing mattered,” until Carrier’s “dark mood dispelled; I slept soundly and never looked back.”

It is pleasant to picture these two hulking, bearish men together, hanging out, cheering each other up and egging each other on. They have worked and talked and dispelled each other’s dark moods, the text reveals, all around the world. The book relies on many hours of tapes done in Morocco. In 2006 they plan to be together again in Bombay.

Carrier as biographer is lucky, for how Scully can write! Most painters can’t, as anyone who has trudged through the ill-translated volumes of Elizabeth’s Holt’s documentary histories of art can attest. (Monet’s letters all start “sorry I haven’t written” and end “send anything you can spare.”) Scully is certainly Irish in his eloquence. Carrier wisely often steps aside and lets Scully hold forth at length. Scully’s letters to Carrier (which, during the fax era, came written in an expressive calligraphy) are pregnant with large