quality alert

Charles W. Pratt's new book, From the Box Marked 'Some Are Missing,'is now available. It brings together most of his strongest poems from several decades. It puts me in mind of Richard Wilbur, of Frost, of Seamus Heaney. If you think that's hyperbolic, look at the book. Start, perhaps, with "Winter Squash," "For Sarah," and "The Merger"--though I could as easily name a dozen, two dozen, more, others. www.hobblebush.com

Kenji Yoshino's A Thousand Times More Fair: What Shakespeare's Plays Teach Us About Justice will be released in April (ECCO). It has wonderful, original, convincing readings of Othello, Lear, The Merchant of Venice, Henry V, Hamlet, others. Along the way Yoshino reviews and clarifies a few analogical contemporary events, esp. the Simpson trial and Bill Clinton's (actionable) spinning of the truth in his sworn testimony in the Paula Jones case. But the book is mostly and even more memorably about Shakespeare.

writing

Some years ago Chang-Rae Lee visited one of my classes and remarked, "I'm a writer; I like sentences." I'm a reader and editor, and I like sentences too. I thought of Chang's remark as I finished Willa Cather's My Antonia today, which ends with this:
"Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past."

brief view of Caryl Phillips, The Nature of Blood

Enter not, ye who read for fun. The strands of this transhistorical story include the Holocaust; the ignorant and savage European persecution of Jews that predates Hittler by four hundred years; and racism as well as anti-Semitism. As a cover blurb says, "He finds humanity everywhere," but the humanity is not always or even mostly redemptive. 'What can be done on the earth to cleanse it after this?' Hell of a question. It's a tremendously ambitious book and yet also one that is informed by humility: it's not about him.
The final scenes are set in fledgling Israel. They too are unsentimental and unromantic, but they do honor the new country for its commitment to survival. Yet the sense I got was of Act VI of a tragedy, one more like the comprehensive desolation of The Trojan Women than like Othello (a version of which is part of the novel), where some semblance of justice has been re-established.(Though I suppose one could say that just as Iago is exposed and captured, so Hitler has been defeated.) In the novel life does endure, but Phillips doesn't make great claims for where it is headed. He only shows us what his somber vision sees.

short journal entry on The Things They Carried

Tim O'Brien's claim in "On the Rainy River" (the fourth chapter of The Things They Carried)that going to the war was an act of cowardice is paradoxical, but it's also his claim to make. Physical courage is not the only species of courage; moral courage is often less concrete but may be as fundamental, as essential, to the survival of the self as physical courage is. How many memoirists 'go there'? Of course The Things They Carried isn't a memoir. But then why is Tim O'Brien such a major character in it, both as platoon member and, much more, as self-conscious narrator? Suppose one took "Tim O'Brien" out of the book. Then it could no longer be the story of his keeping Timmy alive; and it would miss the particular kind of authenticity (as well as the particular kind of story-telling) that it now "performs," as some of my younger college-schooled friends say. Every time I read this book, I want to write about it, much more than this post implies.

public images

According to William Rhoden ( NYT Feb. 21), it is folly to believe in "manufactured images" based on sports marketing. Who could disagree? But not every public image is inauthentic. We sometimes believe, as millions did with Tiger, in a public figure as being genuine in his or her respect for a profession, even for politics, or for a sport. In this sense I still believe, for instance, in Rafa Nadal, in Kim Clijsters, in Paul Farmer, in Meryl Streep. I believe in golfers like Graeme McDowell (NYT March 6) who call penalties on themselves when they could almost certainly get away with a technical infraction. I believe in Derek Jeter even though I'm not much of a baseball fan. Tiger himself may well have lived up to that standard on the golf course.
We can also believe in such figures as adhering to normal if not elevated standards of good faith in private behavior as well as in their professional sphere. We can even hope that their private standards are higher than that: Roberto Clemente, Arthur Ashe. In this sense too I believe in Nadal, Clijsters, Farmer, Streep. "Though all things foul would wear the brows of grace,/Yet grace must still look so."
Rhoden seems to say that since everyone is fallible, it is naive or hypocritical or both to believe in anyone in this sense. I may be as unwilling as Rhoden to believe again in Tiger (or in John Edwards and many others) in this sense. But to make that deep recoil a universal principle is a form of refusing to care because one may be hurt. That way lies the desert. It's not the only available habitat for people in general, nor for sports fans.

While I'm Falling

I have found Laura Moriarty's writing convincing and moving since I first encountered it in a personal essay she read aloud at Exeter in the fall of 2001, a piece that I continue to cherish and that I think of together with Scott Sanders' "The Inheritance of Tools" and Chang-Rae Lee's "Coming Home Again." Since then I've read her first novel, The Center of Everything, which I loved and will read again, and now While I'm Falling, whose characters I half expect to meet sometime.
While I'm Falling is in one way very narrow in scope: it is the story mainly of a college student, Veronica, whose parents have just divorced, and secondarily of the student's mother, Natalie. The setting, in Kansas, has a radius of perhaps fifteen miles. But in another way the story conveys intimations of universality. Grace Paley said she wanted her characters to have "the open destiny of life," and Moriarty's characters share this with them. Life in her stories is uncertain and fluid; but its vicissitudes allow for recoveries as well as disasters. The outcomes of every kind all seem equally probable. As I read I sense no agenda besides truth. I swear I would recognize Veronica and Natalie if I met them on the street, and I would be glad to see them.

King Corn

Last night I got to see the whole of King Corn and to hear Ian Cheney respond to questions about it. Previously I had seen an abridged version and heard Curt Ellis do Q&A. Nothing but pleasure in both events.
It's wonderful as a piece of film-making and makes me want to see their other work. (Go to www.wickedelicate.com.)And it also pushes back against our contemporary political culture, so full of misrepresentations and acrimony. In King Corn there are two major interviews with people whose views are antithetical to Ian and Curt's--but the interviewees are treated respectfully, even empathically. Not only does this
aspect of the film make it deeper and more humane; it also makes it more persuasive. I'm tempted to show it to my students in relation to their choice of rhetorical strategies. Another achievement of King Corn is that even though it is topical and explores public issues that are hugely consequential, it is never shrill and always immensely entertaining. It's playful, for God's sake.