Friday May 16th 2008, 12:28 pm
New Lives for Old
by Roger Kershaw and Janet Sacks
The National Archives, 2008
| Pity the poor in any empire. In every era, as the amassed money of a state allows it to increase its modernization (and, lately, its industrialization), it will do so at the expense of those who cannot make accommodation with the new forces in their midst: the poor, the sick and mad, immigrants. A growing network of roads, aqueducts, mass-production farms … a growing network of anything will require land, room, and right of way, and this inevitably boils the poor like grease out of bacon. |
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The Victorian empire was no different, and its growth was railroads, which dispossessed thousands of farmers and tenants, crowding them into tenements and slums where there was little food, less sanitation, and no hope. And the most wretched in these wretched places were the children, denied the happiness that should be every child’s birthright.
Small wonder then that charitable organizations in the 1830s and 1840s in London began plucking some of these poor children from their squalid lives and shipping them off to the far corners of the empire, in the hopes that they might find the better life that was certainly not waiting for them in an East End tenement. It’s a fascinating story, and Kershaw and Sacks tell it well in this compact, groundbreaking book, citing rosy progress reports like this:
Louisa J. (14). Rescued from a wretched home. Mother has been one of the vilest characters on the streets of East London … this girl and her younger sister had already had their young lives scorched, and were veritably ‘saved so as by fire.’ Is now doing well in the family of a Methodist Minister, and writes now and again bright little letters to her unhappy mother.
The children’s fates were not always so happy – often they traded one wretched existence for another, put to work in factories and on farms from Canada to Australia in conditions sometimes little better than slavery. Kershaw and Sacks’ book is another amazing product from the National Archives, lush with rare photos and accounts in the children’s own words. No student of empire should miss it.
–Steve Donoghue
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Wednesday May 14th 2008, 7:29 am
… we’ve been partial to:
some ruminations from Bud Parr about a subject always of interest to Open Letters, what are the hallmarks of good and bad reviews;
and on the same wavelength, some ruminations about the highs and lows of contemporary literary scholarship at The Reading Experience;
a recommendation re: Anthony Burgess at Salon eds refusés: “Read him, read him again”;
Garth Risk Hallberg rhapsodizes (in chorus with PEN World readers) about Robert Walser;
another packed issue from Vibrant Gray;
some eerie flags (but true) at Brazilian Artists dot net;
our Poetry Editor has published some woodsy fiction at Ghoti;
Smith is parlaying its now-trademarked Six Word Memoir success into a handful of new books—and they want your contributions!
a link to get us banned in fundamentalists circles;
all of John Berger’s landmark Ways of Seeing has arrived online;
And an all new, long-awaited Teen Girl Squad from Homestarrunner.com.
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Monday May 12th 2008, 3:25 pm
The Mammoth Book of Best Horror Comics
ed. Peter Normanton
Running Press, $17.95
| First, jealousy: oh to be the editor of such a tome, to be sent into whatever vaults (of horror) that contain the thousands of acid-eaten comic books from which these “best” stories were drawn. Then, after just the fifth unsatisfying Poe or Lovecraft rip-off, pity. I pity Mr. Normanton.For all the glory that’s been bestowed upon the golden age of horror comics, before the notorious code that all but sealed the crypts, tombs, chambers, and dens of terror (that is, the Comics Code Authority, a self-censoring measure instituted in 1954 in response to social pressure and to prevent possible government interference), most of those stories don’t age well, and by that I mean once you’re fourteen, the lack of depth and predictability begin to wear thin. Fortunately, the anthology covers post-code decades, and it’s among these decades that downright good stories are occasionally found, stories that use the form adeptly, and that don’t rely on shock tactics or twist endings, but rather leave the reader with the implication of something more—and wrong. |
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Most disappointing is the last chapter, “A New Millennium for the Macabre.” There are excellent horror comics being written today, but none are represented here (if you’re interested, read The Walking Dead or any of Mike Mignola’s output, for starters).
What is absent from this anthology is notable. The editor was not able to include any E.C. comics, nor the Warren horror titles of the 60s and 70s, nor Marvel, or D.C. An interesting restriction, that leads to the inclusion of some wonderful minor titles—Twisted Tales, from P.C., for example. However, no explanation is given for other exclusions, such as Gore Shriek, a strong horror comic from the 1980s. I suspect there are many such exclusions.
Steve Niles, who gets top billing on the front cover of the book, and who is lauded by many as the best scripter of horror comics working today (he wrote 30 Days of Night), but who is, in fact, very mediocre, if not downright bad, is revealed here by the poor black and white treatment the whole anthology gets. Ben Templesmith’s striking, painted panels can’t make up for Niles’ lack here. Black and White should be fine for most of the stories included, but too often it’s faded where it should be sharp.
Normanton could have made up for the failings of the comics themselves by writing more about them. His introduction to the book and his notes throughout are thin, either pointing out what can plainly be seen or tending toward nostalgia. Perhaps this is pandering to a perceived audience; if so, for shame. All together a missed opportunity, a footnote for fans of little other value.
— Adam Golaski
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Saturday May 10th 2008, 11:49 pm
Blind Fall
by Christopher Rice
Scribner, 2008
| We’ve encountered the specter of nepotism before on the Open Letters blog, and it hasn’t necessarily been such a bad thing. The accomplished third-tier writers of the past have to do something with their patrimonies, after all, and talent sometimes actually does roll downhill.
Christopher Rice is of course the son of bestselling novelist Anne Rice, whose vampire novels (impressively gothic in Interview with the Vampire and even more impressively post-gothic in The Vampire Lestat, plus all the others) have set sales records world-wide. All Rice fils would have needed to do to guarantee himself royalty checks for the rest of a very, very long life would have been to even imply the presence of a vampire in even one of his novels, so the guy deserves some credit: he hasn’t done that or anything like it.: |
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Instead, his novels have been about the decidedly human variety of monsters that populate the mortal world: users, posers, manipulators, and the purely psychic vampires. And where his famous mother’s dialogue and plotting were unapologetically purple, young Christopher has aims towards more verisimilitude.
Blind Fall concerns the Iraq War and young veteran John Houck, whose investigation into the death of a former brother in arms leads him into a thriller-plot involving all levels of the U.S. military, which Rice has researched as extensively as life and limb would permit. The result is a military-thriller unlike anything Rice’s celebrated mother could have produced – but also, and equally importantly, unlike anything he himself has produced ‘til now. There’s an edge to the dialogue that wants to be raw and adult:
For what felt like an eternity, he rocked back and forth, as if it would help the pain to subside. Then, when he had managed to steady his breathing, he felt the gun barrel brush against the back of his head, and in a clear and controlled voice Alex said, ‘Did you ever stop to ask yourself why I never suspected you, John? Did you ever wonder why I didn’t think you killed him? After all, you were the only one who ever got to be alone with him after he was dead. Maybe chasing me out into the woods the way you did was some big cover.’
‘You know that’s not true.’
‘How did I know that, John?’
‘Because when I caught up with you, I would have killed you.’
Christopher Rice is a good-looking, amiable, and unpretentious young man who, in his writing, wants nothing more than ‘to keep you turning pages,’ as he’s said in many interviews. In Blind Fall he certainly succeeds in that modest aim. We’ll see how long it suits him.
–Steve Donoghue
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Friday May 09th 2008, 3:36 pm
Sarah Hall’s new novel Daughters of the North is bestowed a four-sentence review in this week’s “Briefly Noted” section of The New Yorker, a review that does nothing at all except again raise the question of why New Yorker editors persist with this entirely useless feature. Does it exist simply to justify publishing houses in sending the magazine review copies? As busywork for some thankless intern? Is there any good reason that, instead of four unrevealing 150-word squibs, there shouldn’t be one 600-word review of some substance, credited to an actual person?
The editorial wisdom certainly isn’t related to the best interests of the reader, because these squibs are invariably mechanically impersonal and unenlightening (which is not to say that short reviews can’t be worthwhile—Time Out New York, for instance, packs in wonderful humor and charisma in each of its capsule reviews, and Open Letters’ own “Microreviews” are becoming a standard for the form). Here’s what’s written about Daughters of the North, in its entirety:
In Hall’s unsettling third novel, a series of ecological and geopolitical disasters in Britain has caused all citizens to be herded into urban centers, where women are fitted with contraceptive coils. Hall’s work covers familiar fictive ground in imagining a dystopia in which women’s bodies have become the battleground for competing ideologies; what is new here, however, is the unflinching focus on physical control. This can make for squeamish reading, as bodies are continually being “stretched and scoured” in the most vivid terms, but the result is a powerful argument that, when civil institutions, or the bodies of the state, are compromised, so, too, is the integrity of the body. The book sometimes lacks suspense, owing, in part, to the limitations imposed by its framing device, a transcript of a prisoner’s statement.
And…? we can only ask in response. Luckily, there’s ample elaboration to be found in A.I. White’s gregarious and in-depth review of Daughters of the North from Open Letters’ April issue. Head on over and discover if the novel is more than an “argument,” and has more going on in it than “scouring.”
–Sam Sacks
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Wednesday May 07th 2008, 12:11 pm
Analfabeto / An Alphabet
Ellen Baxt
Shearsman, 2007
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Dictionary lists intersperse the fragmentary text of Analfabeto / An Alphabet, but they are always incomplete. We have the English, but we don’t have all the Portuguese. So, for the letter J, we learn that “judia” means “jewess,” and “judiaria” means “ghetto,” but we do not know how to say “It was a good play,” or “boa constrictor (feminine).” The untranslated English pops up here and there throughout the text (along with some of the Portuguese we’ve learned and can now, partially, apply). Later, when presented with a landscape: “tarp / thatch / bags // jagged bottle halves against the pigeons,” we’ll only know what to call it (“judiaria”) if we’ve been paying close attention. That is, if a ghetto in Brazil is also a ghetto here.
Ellen Baxt’s Analfabeto is one of those books that teach the reader how to read them, and so it correlates with Baxt’s own life in Brazil, where she had to learn to read more than just the language (“the buildings have two addresses, one above the other so you are always at the wrong building”). Eventually, the idea of translation becomes the glass through which we read the text and everything seems related to it: handwriting, culture, religion, gestures:
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Both hands
snapping
means very.
Come by
the house
means we’ll
see each
other again,
but is not
an invitation
to come by
the house.
Along with the dictionary entries, lists, and fragments, Baxt gives us what look like short entries in a journal or traveler’s notebook. In this, a short, sharp book, Baxt creates poetic language out of mistranslation (“Sit next to me, blacklist flatterer. Slow my lion”) and poetic encounters out of the enchanting and frustrating confusion of a foreign place:
She spreads her blanket over my geography, pushes the latch. At dawn she asks if my family knows. In the van she covered our legs and held my hand underneath. Você tem vontade? But I don’t know vontade.
Life, in fact, moves too swiftly for even the best translations, and it is the moments in which Baxt captures that alluring and maddening mix that are the reason to pick up a copy of Analfabeto:
The wind is picking up. A plane lands over the water as the ferry departs. Christine is at her desk in the Palisades plotting Grimano, Italy. The kids stand up and pump their swings. Intermittently, a bell rings. Across the water they’re trying to get read of the winter clothes. The mannequins’ shirts say “Liquidçāo” across their torpedoed breasts.
– John Cotter
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Monday May 05th 2008, 11:51 pm
Human Resources
Rachel Zolf
Coach House Books, 2007
Having read a little about Human Resources, I suspected I might “get” the project pretty quickly and not need or want to finish the whole thing. It combines corporate language (“I took it offline”), machine-generated poems and unsettling numeric codes (based in part on a database of the most frequently used words in English, as explained in an end note) – which gave me the impression that the poems would be soulless and creepy by necessity.
But I surprised myself by reading the entire book in one sitting. I can’t think of a time I’ve digested a 90-page book of poetry so quickly, which is a testament to its sustained liveliness and accessibility. And while it’s not not creepy, it’s funny and true in equal doses.
Zolf rotates through a handful of different “forms,” none longer than a page – prose blocks, PowerPoint-style bulleted lists, short poems of about a sentence per stanza, and poems generated by a Flash poetry program – and this variety keeps things interesting without losing the reader in an overly chaotic system. The voice of the poems, more an un-pin-down-able uber-voice than a single persona, reads like a ticker tape of office-ese:
We’re in a bit of a holding pattern right now providing you with a pulse on ‘inquiring minds’ I’d kill this sentence entirely.
On our side of the family my day got totally blown out of the water push back if you think this is a ‘must have.’
As you progress through the book and learn its codes (“Include a link to the Code,” a list titled “How to write for the Internet” advises), gradually certain words are replaced with the number presumably representing their frequency of use. (If so, the last word in the line “Ambiguities of the human condition are a threat to surfeit of 1267” is “meaning.”) This turns the book into a kind of interactive game – readers can look up the words (the URL to the database is supplied in the back), guess at them or simply enjoy the robotic effect of the alphanumeric lines as they stand.
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This isn’t just a comment on what it’s like to work in an office, but what it’s like to live in a culture flooded with office-generated artifacts. It’s a daring experiment – Zolf risks unreadability but never succumbs to it until the very end, and then provocatively – that raises all kinds of uncomfortable questions: How do machines speak? Are corporations machines? Are humans machines (merely “resources”)? Are they corporations?
– Elisa Gabbert
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Sunday May 04th 2008, 5:23 pm
That infamous bawd, Anne Boleyn’s sister-in-law Lady Rochford, is getting her day in the sun again after nearly five hundred years. She’s the subject of a new biography by Julia Fox, which was reviewed here April by our own Steve Donoghue and is reviewed in this week’s London Review of Books by the wise and witty Hilary Mantel. The LRB gives its reviewers Open Letters-style legroom, and Mantel takes advantage of it to rehash Lady Rochford’s beans in detail, including wonderful observations like this:
Fox is thorough in her exploration of Jane’s financial position at every stage of her life. It is often the only clue as to her more general fortunes. The figures are there on paper; for the rest, it’s like chasing a ghost. Perhaps its Jane’s very centrality that reduces her to a vanishing dot on the page. She’s always where the action is, if never precisely part of it. No one writes to tell her what’s going on, because she already knows. She sees and hears everything, and keeps no diary.
Mantel comes away from Jane Boleyn slightly nonplussed, as did our own reviewer:
The difficulty with Fox’s book is this: who is it for? She knows more about Jane Boleyn than anyone else. Her painstaking research would make a handsome academic paper. Her publisher has dressed it up as popular history, and she has provided the padding to go with it; but her credentials as a judicious and restrained historian make her unwilling to set out to entertain, and her uncertainty about who her reader is and what her reader wants make her unwilling to air conflicting theories in the body of the book.
Her review is full of such fluid prose; read it and enjoy it, then click back to April and read some more about the infamous Lady Rochford, who most certainly doesn’t deserve all this high-caliber attention.
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Friday May 02nd 2008, 12:40 pm
Phyllida and the Brotherhood of Philander
Ann Herendeen
Harpercollins, 2007
It’s safe to say Ann Herendeen has written a Regency novel unlike any that has come before. Oh, all the outward elements are there: the feisty, penniless heroine, a debauched, wealthy scion of the nobility, a host of engaging secondary characters, and all the glittering finery of the ton. Any reader even vaguely familiar with this particular sub-genre of romance will feel confident plotting the thing’s conclusion: feisty heroine wins wastrel scion’s heart and achieves the Holy Grail of all Regency romances – a good match.
This is Herendeen’s first novel, but even so, she clearly has no intention of doing what long-time Regency romance readers expect. She has the feisty, penniless heroine, Phyllida Lewis, as assured and laugh-inducing creation as anything Kathleen Woodiwiss ever dreamt up. And she has the debauched heir to an earldom, Andrew Carrington. She has the host of interesting secondary characters, and she’s done a great deal of research on the Regency period. But there, quite delightfully, it ends.
| Phyllida makes her match, but it’s on Carrington’s terms – and Carrington, a thorough-going member of the eponymous Brotherhood of Philander, has ideas endemic to that society, and they don’t exactly include having sex with women. Phyllida and the Brotherhood of Philander comes bursting through a door in Regency romance that previously Diana Gabaldon’s Lord John books had only knocked upon politely: |
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Richard Carrington was worried, and he didn’t enjoy the feeling. It wasn’t like Andrew to be evasive and polite; it wasn’t like Phyllida, what he knew of her, to hide in her budoir and not receive callers; that weaselly secretary of Andrew’s got on his nerves; and he was tired of living on credit. He dressed with unusual attention to fashion, had his man spend a good half hour on his hair and gave him free rein with the cravat. Having prepared as best he could, he walked slowly to Park Lane and then presented his card to the suspicious heavyweight on the door. The damn brute made him wait.
Impossibly, wonderfully, the book has a happy ending. Read Herendeen to find out how, and then keep an eye on her.
–Steve Donoghue
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Thursday May 01st 2008, 9:03 pm
Open Letters Monthly is live for May, and as usual, we have a bumper-crop of fascinating stuff for your delectation! Our poetry editor John Cotter returns from the wilds of higher academia to grace the site once again, this time with a jaunty, eminently quotable review of the new volume by August Kleinzhaler. Sam Sacks, our fiction editor, turns in a fascinating review of the new work by Peter Matthiessen – coupled, as always, with a thorough retrospective on the course of Matthiessen’s fiction over the years. Megan Doll writes on the new Siri Hustvedt; Thom Daly writes on the Congress of Vienna; Carolyn Grantham writes on those wacky blogs and the people who write about them; Chad Reynolds writes on the latest offerings from Dalkey Archive; Karen Vanuska writes on the new Jeanette Winterson – as wide a variety of literary topics as you’ll find anywhere, online or in the print world. John G. Rodwan, Jr. digs up a little-known incident from the youth of George Orwell in this month’s One Encounter; Amelia Glaser offers an original plea directly to the son of Lolita author Nabokov; and I take you all on a tour of a Roman poet you’ve probably never heard of. Elsewhere on the poetry front we’ve got National Book Award-winning poet Clayton Eshleman joining us again, and the next installment of Adam Golaski’s beautiful and otherworldly Green. And our wicked Quiz returns to bedevil you with pointless trivia!
All this plus a nifty photo from our steadfast (and, apparently, multi-talented) regular contributor Lianne Habinek – how can you go wrong? So pull up a chair, bookmark us, tell two friends, and then jump right in and join the fun – and don’t forget to tell us what you think!
–Steve Donoghue
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