Our Recommended Books & Mags
NOIR: A HISTORY OF MY BOOK REVIEWS: All around me, screaming silently à la E. Münch, the towers of unread books turned and turned toward me, a tiny man of flesh with no time on his hands or anywhere else on his body.
(read the rest of this story at bottom of reviews)
NEW REVIEWS:
(to read older reviews, click here)Andrei Oisteanu, Inventing the Jew, Antisemitic Stereotypes in Romanian and Other Central-East European Cultures by Andrei Oisteanu
Foreword by Moshe Idel, Translated by Mirela Adascalitei
University of Nebraska Press, 2009,
http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/product/Inventing-the-Jew,674083.aspx
Exquisite Corpse is proud to see this major work by one of our most cherished contributors, translated into English. We have published Andrei Oisteanu’s groundbreaking essays on hallucinogens and the Romanian avantgarde. Every book by Oisteanu is an event, but the English translation of this book, containing decades of research, is worthy of serious and attentive focus by every one of our readers. “Inventing the Jew” is a phenomenon. Andrei Oisteanu is a researcher at the Institute for the History of Religions in Bucharest, and associate professor at the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Bucharest. He is the author of several books, including The Image of the Jew in Romanian Culture, Order and Chaos: Myth and Magic in Romanian Traditional Culture, and Religion, Politics, and Myth: Texts about Mircea Eliade and Ioan Petru Culianu.
Inventing the Jew follows the evolution of stereotypes of Jews from the level of traditional Romanian and other Central-East European cultures (their legends, fairy tales, ballads, carols, anecdotes, superstitions, and iconographic representations) to that of “high” cultures (including literature, essays, journalism, and sociopolitical writings), showing how motifs specific to “folkloric antisemitism” migrated to “intellectual antisemitism.” This comparative perspective also highlights how the images of Jews have differed from that of other “strangers” such as Hungarians, Germans, Roma, Turks, Armenians, and Greeks. The gap between the conception of the “imaginary Jew” and the “real Jew” is a cultural distance that differs over time and place, here seen through the lens of cultural anthropology.
Stereotypes of the “generic Jew” were not exclusively negative, and are described in five chapters depicting physical, occupational, moral and intellectual, mythical and magical, and religious portraits of “the Jew.”
Some Praise:
“This scrupulously researched study is a profound revelation of ‘the other’ in western culture. The ‘imaginary Jew,’ in its specifically Romanian and central-east-European incarnation, reverberates through all of Europe’s hellish myth-making, beginning in the first Christian century. The layering of stories and images has the effect of a masterful horror-film. Andrei Oisteanu’s book is an unflinching look at Europe’s darkest secret. It is therefore an indispensible text.”—Andrei Codrescu, MacCurdy Distinguished Professor at Louisiana State University
“This book is erudite, richly documented and intelligently written. Though both a comprehensive and explicit analysis of so many themes concerning the images of the Jews, it is at the same time an implicit critique of an important component of Romanian culture. However, Andrei Oisteanu's book is above all a very courageous one.”—Moshe Idel, Max Cooper Professor of Jewish Thought at Hebrew University in Jerusalem
“A profound and illuminating anthropological study, with many cultural, historical, social-political, and religious layers about an old-new topic. The image of the stranger says a lot about the stranger’s own history and psychology but perhaps even more so about his neighbor-observer. Between the fictionalized Jew and the real one rests an entire history of thousands of years. The author of this fascinating book offers a thorough, subtle, and lucid description and analysis of a certain location, but its meaning goes well beyond it.”--Norman Manea, Professor of European Literature and writer-in-residence at Bard College.
Andrei Codrescu & Ruxandra Cesereanu, The Forgiven Submarine, in Andrei Codrescu's translation has just been published by Black Widow Press (2009, www.blackwidowpress.com ) we humbly announce, while I (Codrescu) am here to tell you that translating Ruxandra's intricate imagery was almost possible, while translating myself from Romanian into English was an odd kind of mind-knotting fandango that took the breath out of me. Now I'm breathing. An essay remains to be written on our American tour of the Forgiven Submarine in New York (Romanian Cultural Center, St. Marks' Church), New Orleans (The Gold Mine Saloon), and Baton Rouge (LSU). Our Romanian tour reached for the limits of my glottal and sublingual resources, the American for my cool. I recommend bilingvism now as Theory, Hardship, Praxis, and Therapy. Through all of it Ruxandra was most gracious and charmed the bejeezus out of everyone. The Forgiven Submarine was written originally in Romanian by e-mail; it is an epic collaborative poem written by Ruxandra Cesereanu and myself over a long, feverish month. This is how I noted it when it was published in Romania:
Submarinul Iertat, Bucharest: Editura Brumar, www.brumar.ro. Another bibliophilic coup! A collaboration with “delirionist” Ruxandra Cesereanu, who made me delirious with poetry. This particular de-luxe edition comes signed inside a blood-maroon silk pillow, and was presented to me during the trip to Romania in 2007. Ruxandra and I read at a Poetry Marathon in my birth town of Sibiu, a breathless event that left me feeling a little like a statue, except that I was wide-awake and exhausted simultaneously. No statue I. We also read the collaboration in its entirety at the University of Cluj where Ruxandra teaches, and were interviewed by all the major media in the wake of our most amusing performance. (In Romania, poets are Brangelinas!) We took Submarinul Iertat to the Frankfurt Book Fair where it was displayed among millions of other books, so I slowly regained my sense of perspective. I shrank from statue to a mildly pleasant pidgeon. We read from it in Romanian to a a fair-sized audience, and listened to ourselves in German translation by Ina Pfitzner. Ruxandra got chased by a mad duck on the bank of the Mein. I believe that the mad duck was the reincarnation of a furious 19th century German Romantic poet who died unpublished. Then we had a lot of German beer and I transacted restaurant business in primitive Deutsch all by myself.
A
Uncensored Songs: A Sam Abrams Tribute, festschrift gathered by John Roche in honor of great rad friend/poet Sam Abrams. Contributors include Amiri Baraka, Tony Weinberger, and many others. We bow before Sam with delight & love.Click to Return to Review List
Adriane Albertowicz, Salty and Haiku, Hawaii: from the author, somehow. One thing the Corpse is very good at, as the techne mega-gorilla keeps marching on, is paying attention to the handwritten, the smudged, the eccentrically set text. Around the mid-90s, manuscripts and books arriving in our offices, started looking mind-numbingly perfect. A nicotine-stained handwritten letter with a prison return-address got our attention a lot quicker than your pristinely spaced mss. produced by computer. The payoff was great: not only were the nonconformist mailings more reasuring (there are still humans in the world!), but the contents were better, too. It's as if the perfect machines also produced perfectly boring texts, and, by extension, turned writers into the perfectly boring people they were always meant to be (by their parents and schools). This process was rapid and we are now in an age when anyone can make a good-looking book and publish it, or, even better, just send herm URL around the world. All this is by way of introduction to two peachy fresh books of poetry written by a poet in her twenties who typed her poems, bound them in cheap cardboard, sewed them by hand, and sent them to me stll smelling of salty ocean from Hawaii. Adriane Albertowicz has an impeccable poetry pedigree, beginning in a chance encounter with the poetry of Jeffrey Miller, and being the daughter of a poet, but she has incorporated her lyric roots and is her own woman. Salty has a crudely drawn seagull on the cover and Haiku has an acrylic hand-splashed crow on it, but beyond the lovely retro-look, her garage band performs like a master. From Haiku: "Everyday": When I walk home/ I count the crushed/ Green frogs/ Along the way. And from Salty: I dreamed//love meant/catching what goes free/The thought broke,//it frightened me awake. You can say that the verse is as raw as the production, but then you'd have to say the same about the ancient Chinese poets and many great observant Americans. There are love poems here that throb with the sentiments of nature, and one can smell the big waves.
Click to Return to Review List
Elisa Albo, Passage to America, march street press, greensboro, 2006, marchstreetpress.com. Cuban-born, American-raised, big heart beating (or fluttering?) over the water between Florida and the Island, this poet makes vivid her bivalval yearnings with precision and delicacy. "if I can't/ go home again to what I have never known/ with my flesh, how can I return to a place that/ lives in the liquid center of my imagination?" (Cuba: a Geobiography).
Click to Return to Review List
William Allegrezza, Otoliths. 8 Kennedy St, Rockhampton, QLD 4700, Australia. http://the-otolith.blogspot.com . Even if this poet didn’t use one of my lines to kick off his “otoliths,” I’d find his work as interesting as a jagged mountain range. These “otoliths” are forms with gaps, like sonnets with holes made in them by “the trickle of voices from across a field.” The word-expedition Allegrezza leads into this landscape of silences and questions is marine as well as alpine (“when tides cease/ when hands ask for life”), which is how one goes about the job these days when iffrits with bags full of commas stalk the poet through “a tracing of maps on a steel drum.” It’s good to see the page used well and to public utility.
Click to Return to Review List
Kostas Anagnopoulos, Various Sex Acts, printed in Brooklyn 2008, in an edition of 500 by the author, twenty-six copies lettered A-Z and signed (we don’t have one of those). Representative of micro-press product, this is a cogent discourse by a poet who’d like to speak Greek, or maybe does or maybe “changing languages mid-sentence/ Without translation or remedy. “ (he does not)
Click to Return to Review List
Radu Andriescu, The Catalan Within, translated from Romanian by Adam J. Sorkin and Radu Andriescu. Fayetteville: Longleaf Press. Andriescu is a poet and carpenter: “I think about happiness/ as if it were a piece of lumber.” We used to think of it as a warm gun, but those days are gone.
Click to Return to Review List
j. reuben appelman, make loneliness, Otis Books/ seismicity editions, The Graduate Writing Program, Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, 2008 (
Click to Return to Review List
B
Gabeba Baderoon, The Dream in the Next Body, and A Hundred Silences, Cape Town, South Africa: Kwela Books. www.gabeba.com. This South African poet’s books are winners of the Daimler-Chrysler Award for South African Poetry, which reminds the editor that he too is the winner of the GE Younger Poets Award, and leads us all to wonder something-something. Rolex also puts out a lot of dough for poets. Good. Gabeba is a sensual poet who uses blackbirds, salt, and sea waves.Click to Return to Review List
Tetra Balestri, Cheap Imitations, New York: Green Zone, 66 George Street, Brooklyn, NY 11206. These are cheap imitations of many poets, including Jim Brodey, Anselm Hollo, and Anne Porter.
Click to Return to Review List
Gordon Ball, Scenes from East Hill Farm, Seasons with Allen Ginsberg, Coventry, England: Nr. 13 in The Beat Scene, www.beatscene.com. Gordon Ball, a good friend of Allen and eminent photographer of Allen’s circle, spent time in the poet’s putative paradise at East Hill Farm, and writes about it with warmth and humor. “”by midsummer we were surrounded by a burgeoning animal population – African geese, Muscovy ducks, Polish hens and other chickens, a jersey cow, a fast horse, milk goats, two dogs, morning doves, cats.” He was also there when Allen received the tragic call telling him that Jack Kerouac had died. Dark Music, Cityful Press, Longmont, 2006. These prose-poem like flashbacks and meditations are Gordon Ball’s language photographs. They are quick, gripping, true, earnest.
Click to Return to Review List
Eric Basso, Decompositions, Essays on Art & Literature, 1973-1989, and Revagations: A Book of Dreams, Volume I, 1966-1974, Raleigh: Asylum Arts, PO Box 90473, Raleigh, NC 27675. The prolific author we have happily published in past Exquisite Corpses, is what the French call an homme-de-lettres, a man of letters, a speciae of rara avis these days when writers specialise strenuously (and tediously). Among Eric Basso's meditations in "Decompositions," a title reminiscent of E.M. Cioran's "Un precis de decomposition," are considerations of Alfred Jarry, Flaubert, and Kafka. "Revagations" is a book of surreal-real dreams collected over time like water in barrels in the Sonora desert.
Click to Return to Review List
Ruth Behar, An Island Called Home, Returning to Jewish Cuba, photographs by Humberto Mayol. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. This is a lovely memoir of a search for lost roots in a country that seems at first to have erased that part of its history. Not so. Ruth Behar finds people and places that have stubbornly refused to fade away.
Click to Return to Review List
Bill Berkson, Fugue State, poems, Cambridge, Massachussetts: Zoland Books. Our Friends Will Pass Among You Silently, poems, Woodacre, California: Owl Press, www.theowlpress.com. Sudden Address, Selected Lectures 1981-2006, SPD, Cuneiform Press, www.cuneiformpress.com. What's Your Idea of a Good Time? (with Bernadette Meyer), SPD, Tuumba Press, www.spdbooks.org . This cornucopia of Bill Berkson books came to us thanks to an appearance by the poet himself in New Orleans, thanks to Dave Brinks. Berkson gave a spectacular reading at the Gold Mine Saloon, that demonstrated a number of things: 1. the Gold Mine has created a sophisticated audience that can hear with the best of them at St. Marks' Poetry Project or at Intersection, 2. so well can this audience hear, the usually reticent poet bounced forth for an encore, like other astonished greats this year, Ron Padgett, for example, 3. there is a new way to read Berkson after hearing him. I have been a long-time reader and appreciator of the intelligence, music, care, and humor of Bill Berkson's poetry, but this reading gave me new access to his verse. There was always something of a mythical aura about Berkson, the collaborator of Frank O'Hara and one of the chiefs of the New York School whose friends included painters as well as poets. The cover of Fugue State is by Yvonne Jacquette, that of Sudden Address by Philip Guston. Sudden Address, a selection of essays on poetry and painting is a manual for hearing and seeing the works of Philip Guston, Alex Katz, Yvonne Jacquette, Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, and Kenneth Koch, among many others. Berkson's constellation of friendships led to profound and useful reflections on their work and constitute, in this book and elsewhere in his work, a solid bridge between the two arts and an enlightening guide to the New York School and, in effect, to the modern proposals of these arts in the last half of the 20th century. The delightful What's Your Idea of a Good Time? is a spacious and joyful collaboration with Bernadette Meyer on the title question. In his dedication to me, Bill asks, "Dear André, What's the worst thing you've ever done? (see p 51) Love, Bill." On p. 51, we find a number of the worst things Bill Berkson has ever done, including: "I was incredibly mean to Frank O'Hara one time: I shouted at him for liking the sound of his own voice too much." Now, anyone who's ever been told that by a dear one, has permission to smile, and that smile will get wider as the implications begin to dawn: Frank O'Hara, the poet who was all about voice is being told by his friend to pipe down. How alive is that? And how much more alive does that make Frank O'Hara, dead now four plus decades? It's not the worst thing Bill has ever done (this bit is No.2 of the worst things), but it's one with cosmic reverb. Berkson's own poetry is subtle and demons