New Finds - Our Man in Boston

New Finds • The Ghost in The Squirrel Machine

OK, first, my initial impression of cartoonist Hans Rickheit’s new book The Squirrel Machine (Fantagraphics) was one of amazement (a word I don’t bandy about indulgently) and bafflement. I am clear I am not grasping something—not an unpleasant feeling in this circumstance. But Rickheit doesn’t do much better when asked (see the short film, Hans Rickheit At Home), referring to Kafka and Bruno Schulz.

Then there is the publisher’s description:

Legendary obscurantist cartoonist Hans Rickheit’s most ambitious graphic novel to date. Exquisitely rendered, strange, and hauntingly beautiful, this evocative and enigmatic book will ensure the inquisitive reader a spleenful of cerebral serenity that will require vast quantities of mediocrity to banish from memory.

The book’s preface is a poem by Longfellow—I still don’t know why (something to do with storytelling?). And then it launches into “Suggestions for the Teacher.” Huh? Maybe this explains (maybe not):

At first glance, this work might appear to be descended from the traditions of Greek tragedy or the bitterly profane satire of 16th century social critic Pietro Aretino. But the negative implies a positive; satire and tragedy ultimately acknowledge humanity. You’ll find none of that here. Before you is the meticulous documentation of an inhuman process involving a series of changes. Plotting and character development are incidental elements put into play only as necessary to insure the proper placement & circumstance within that process.

The drawings are crisp and clean: five or six to a page, and as the story advances there are less and less text balloons. As usual for Fanatagraphics, this book is well-designed and well-printed. Let me know if you figure out what it’s about, though not knowing made it no less fun for me. —Robert Birnbaum, Dec. 21, 2009

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New Finds • Four Million Years

Japanese designer Yohji Yamamoto first called my attention to the distinction between residence and citizenship, pointing out that in France, living in Paris makes you Parisian, not French. I am almost tempted to say the same about residents of New York: New Yorkers first, United States citizens second.

Such is the evolution of urbanization in the post-national world, and as modernity couples with globalization, metropoli are in danger of losing their distinguishing character. Now comes another paean to Mexico City (after First Stop in the New World by David Lida, a decidedly different view). Unrepentant warrior for social justice, poet, peripatetic journalist John Ross (Murdered By Capitalism—150 Years of Life and Death on the American Left), a resident of the marvel that is Mexico City for nearly 30 years and an off and on visitor for 50 years, expresses such concerns in his new tome, El Monstruo Dread and Redemption in Mexico City (Nation Books). El Monstruo refers to proud Mexico’s capitol city, home to 23,000,000 people, or as Ross characterizes, “There are 23,000,000 stories in Mexico City, 22,999,997 busted dreams, and two or three tales of overweening ambition and craven success.”

And Ross’s book (ignore the cover, which is a graphic mongoloid) is a memoir of his life in the city arriving there just one week after the devastating earthquake of 1985, which killed 30,000 people. It’s a people’s history from prehistoric times through the Aztec-Mexicas era when the city was viewed as the umbilicus of the universe, to the 1968 massacre at Tlatelolco, to the roiling and precarious present. Finally, it is also an homage to the mega-city that Ross and untold others love.

John Ross’s prose is wonderfully lucid and laden with history and story—it seems as almost every sentence contains a fact or a germ of a story—you do begin to see this geography as a pulsating, living thing. Even if you have not had the pleasure of visiting Mexico City, John Ross’s El Monstruo is an extraordinary conveyance and a powerfully riveting experience. —Robert Birnbaum, Dec. 15, 2009

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New Finds • Bach in the Day

Back when I was an impressionable undergraduate (as opposed to being an impressionable graybeard), I was heavily into German author Herman Hesse (Siddhartha), devouring his oeuvre and other big chunks of world culture (I should add certain drugs were experimented with, in addition to those that I inhaled). In Hesse’s magnum opus, Magister Ludi or The Glass Bead Game—the nature of the game is not clear nor are the rules—but mastery comes from years of study, synthesizing all manner of seemingly unrelated information. It was then I discovered the Bach (6) Suites for Unaccompanied Cello and which I saw as a possible interpretive schema of the, uh, universe (silly me), somewhat akin to the bead game. Anyway, despite their appearance in various commercials, I am still deeply moved by this music—so much that I have at various times acquired performances by Janos Starker, Pablo Casals, Mstislav Rostoprovich, and Yo Yo Ma.

(Sadly, as far as I know, the brilliant cellist Jacqueline du Pré never recorded them.)

Former Montreal Gazette pop music critic Eric Siblin has recently fallen under that music’s powerful sway and has written a monograph entitled The Cello Suites: J. S. Bach, Pablo Casals, and the Search for a Baroque Masterpiece (Grove Press). There is a wonderful story here of which I was not aware. Apparently, Bach’s original score—for what was then considered a second-rate instrument, the cello—was lost until the teen-aged cello student, Pablo Casals, discovered the music in Barcelona. Reportedly Casals played the Suites every day for 12 years before he performed them in public.

I am much encouraged by the publication of this sort of book; it probably has a limited audience, though it need not, as it reads well as a piece of cultural history and historical mystery. And, if you don’t know this music, you owe it to yourself to take a listen. —Robert Birnbaum, Dec. 10, 2009

» Excerpt from The Cello Suites: J. S. Bach, Pablo Casals, and the Search for a Baroque Masterpiece

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New Finds • Texas Noir

There is already a Tabernacle-size choir singing the praises of Attica Locke’s first novel. Among others, the inestimable James Ellroy and my old pal (I mean that in a Facebook kind of way) George Pelecanos extol Black Water Rising (Harper Collins) as a stylish, involving literary thriller with a strong emphasis on human politics and character.

I know I am a slightly tardy to the party, but then again what is the timeline (other than the contrived and artificial window that commerce allots) for new books and music and such?

Here’s a novel that fires on all cylinders: good plot, complex protagonist, brisk and nimble prose, and thoughtful insights well-expressed, with some Civil Rights historical detail thrown in for good measure. Set in Houston in 1981, when that city was still riding an oil boom (which is, inescapably, a big factor in the story and from which the title comes), Jay Porter, black ex-radical and movement leader turned lawyer, is struggling to keep himself and his pregnant wife afloat. On the night he celebrates his wife’s birthday with a bayou cruise, he saves a woman from drowning—an act which involves him in a murder investigation that threatens to, at the very least, ruin him.

Porter runs a gauntlet of interesting fellow characters: from Cynthia Maddox, his white ex-girlfriend who is now Mayor of Houston, to an Indian private investigator named Rolo; all provide color and seasoning to a hearty literary recipe. This is most definitely an auspicious beginning for Ms. Locke and leaves me looking forward to her next work (and the movie version of this one). —Robert Birnbaum, Dec. 3, 2009

» A personal note by Attica Locke about Black Water Rising.

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New Finds • A Good Best

There must be some explanation for the fact that it wasn’t until 2008 that someone had the clarity of thought to anthologize their well-considered selection of the best writing on the internet. Possibly it is that whatever cabal decides these things was finally overwhelmed by the torrent of quality prose pouring out of the virtual realm. Or maybe someone unfettered by any proprietary bonds to old media. Which brings me to Dandy Dan Wickett (who was once derided by a small-minded L.A. Times critic for having a day job) of the Emerging Writers Network and his Dzanc Books cadre—who may not have removed the scales from the eyes of the mainstream media (now known to all as MSM) that was done by the circulation and ratings plunge that evidenced a looming irrelevancy—but has exhibited both the multifaceted legitimacy of new media and its vastness as a wellspring of creativity by publishing Best of the Web (Dzanc Books) in 2008 and 2009.

The latest iteration of Best of the Web is guest edited by Lee K. Abbott and aheres to the series mandate to “compile the best fiction, poetry, and nonfiction that online literary journals have to offer in an eclectic collection in the manner of other broad-ranging anthologies.” Additionally, there is a comprehensive appendix containing valuable information about 300 or so online literary venues. That’s worth the price of admission alone.

Of the contributors I recognized, few are household names—Blake Butler, Matthew Derby, Roy Kesey, Terese Svoboda, Todd Hasak-Lowy, Stephen Dixon—the rest are discoveries waiting to be made, which is what commends this wide-eyed effort. —Robert Birnbaum, Nov. 30, 2009

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New Finds • Pants on Fire

Growing up in Chicago in the ’50s and ’60s, I was not aware of this sprawling prairie city’s commitment to racial segregation until Martin Luther King came to the city and led marches for fair (desegregated) housing in Caucasian neighborhoods. For such temerity, the good doctor was stoned by white homeowners and others. This was the ’60s, and the so-called civil rights movement had gathered enough momentum—with sufficient velocity—to send protesters to the recalcitrant South (Freedom Riders, lunch counter sit-ins, the Selma marches, the K.K.K. killing of Viola Liuzzo, and on and on).

In the intervening years, the notion that racial antipathy has dissipated in this country—thus somehow culminating in the election of a black man to the presidency—is a reminder of the almost laughable disconnect in thinking about race in America. (Don’t even get me started on antisemitism.) Oscar Bennett’s (The Colored Garden) second novel, The Lie (Algonquin), is a good example of a decent and worthwhile book being overlooked mostly because it is just that: not flashy or extraordinary or big or bold. And perhaps that it’s a story that has to do with the tragedy that befalls a black family has something to do with its indifferent reception.

Set in Evansville, Ind., in the mid-’70s, Terrell Matheus is the only witness to his brother’s fatal shooting on the front porch of their house. He lies about the circumstances of that death, blaming it on a group of white boys. Havoc, of course, follows as what appears to be a racial murder roils an already short-fused black community. As facts turn out not to be as they have been reported, the story reverts to an interior study of the surviving brother and his frayed relations with his family and his community—which Bennett writes convincingly and sensitively.

I am not sure how I came to this fine piece of storytelling. I am quite glad I did. —Robert Birnbaum, Oct. 19, 2009

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New Finds • Nightime, the Right Time?

Ginnah Howard (Rope & Bone) manages to make the harrowing and bitter world of a shattered family (suicide of the father and one brother and the perennial cycle of substance abuse and various rehabilitations of the remaining brother) convincingly interesting. Set in upstate New York, the story alternates between Mark—the remaining brother, a heroin junkie and bearer of a number of psychiatric pathologies—and his mother Del, who wavers but never gives up hope in the recovery of her son.

Though ably standing alone, Night Navigation is the second volume in Howard’s projected trilogy—continuing the stories in Rope & Bone 10 of which you can read here)—described as a “novel-in-progress,” composed of 34 chapters, and covering a 40-year timespan (1955 to 1993). Howard is completing this family saga with Common Descent, which centers on the Morlettis: Carla and her daughter and son, who figure in Del and Mark’s tale of misery and calamities.

Why read such a bruising story? I also asked myself that about the middle section of Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, 250 pages of murder and mayhem recounting in excruciating detail the unsolved assaults and disappearances of hundreds of women in a town much like true-life Ciudad Juarez Simple methinks, fine writing and a voice that also compels you to want to stay with the novel. —Robert Birnbaum, Oct. 15, 2009

» Read an excerpt from Night Navigation.

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About Our Man in Boston

When Robert Birnbaum was an adolescent, his mother took him to the Chicago Public Library every week, and he would leave with armloads of books. Ever since he has been an avid reader—except in the cultural sinkhole era of the ’70s (think Saturday Night Fever).

Illustration by Witold Ridel

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Tuesday, March 16, 2010