It Is What It Is

Coming out of Bowery rain into downtown New York’s New Museum last Friday, I didn’t expect more than to spend an an hour or so with some installations and some video art, — I’d just come off a long bus ride and was hoping the video rooms might have pillows on the floor. I didn’t expect a change in the way I think about the world and I didn’t expect to be be emotionally moved, but if you can make it to the Bowery show in the next three weeks, or to any of the dozen spots across America where It Is What It Is travels this year, you can safely expect to leave feeling fascinated, bent out of shape, and grateful.The physical space of It Is What It Is doesn’t carry the viewer away. Two maps take up one corner of the wall — one of the maps is an outline of Iraq with the names of American cities inside it, the other vice-versa. Across the room sits the husk of an exploded car, which a little card explains was destroyed in an explosion on Al-Mutanabbi, a street of bookshops. There are some before and after pictures of the street there too.But these things are mostly on hand to begin conversations with the attendant Iraqi citizens, academics, and soldiers, name-tagged participants who have had real experience of the country and who will appear throughout the next few weeks on the gallery’s couches in shifts. They are the installation, and they are not only fascinating but welcoming and solicitous. Although I haven’t asked, I suspect that the artist and organizer, Jeremy Deller, coached some of the participants on how to begin conversations with potentially unadventurous gallery goers. I talked with artist and Lieutenant Colonel Peter Buotte about my life and my family’s military history and it turned out that we had a surprising amount in common. I asked him what he’d done in Iraq (infrastructure repair) and what Iraq’s most pressing problems were (massive corruption, among others, and no one knows what’s up with the electricity).

Shortly, a woman, also wearing a name tag, arrived and sat down next to us. Her name was Zainab Saleh and she and Peter were as anxious to talk to each other as I was to talk to both of them. He and I both listened to stories about her life growing up in Iraq (her family had been murdered there and she escaped shortly afterward by “knowing the right people to bribe”). She told us that sectarian violence has increased enormously in her lifetime, that much of the unemployment and despondency now chronic there began as a result of the embargo in the 90′s, that normal people had turned to radical religion when they felt hemmed in. She said she never wanted to go back.I can report these facts and more, but we have all read plenty of articles about Iraq and most of this has been observed by others and is somewhere in print. But the genius of the exhibition is its humanity, how normal and strange it is at once. The effect isn’t at all that of going to a lecture, since you’re just sitting around talking. But it isn’t exactly like a dinner party conversation either: there was no pressure to be amusing or to entertain. Even though I paid ten dollars to have the conversation (gallery admission, student rate), I felt privileged to be a part of it. As new people walked into the gallery — one or two every few minutes — we waved them in.Later that day, I told a number of friends how much It Is What It Is had moved me, and a few were more than suspicious: What corporation had funded it? Were antiwar activists represented? In what ways had they tried to change my mind? I was against the war from the start and I still am, and no one tried to change my mind. (I asked a soldier how he felt about the decision to go and recent decision to leave, but he responded in the way soldiers have to: “we were ordered in and so we went, now we’re being ordered out, so we’ll go”). No, you probably won’t have your mind changed about whether or not the invasion was a good idea, but you may find yourself feeling differently about other aspects of the last six years; you may even find yourself finally knowing why something you’ve always suspected to be true really is true. But the one thing I can promise you is that both the war and the history of Iraq and the Americans who are over there now or who have been there in recent years will feel more real to you.You owe it to yourself to go, and to ask questions, no matter how foolish they may seem (and plenty of mine were plenty foolish). Talk with everyone who’s there and shake their hands. A better world would have more art like this.___John Cotter‘s novel Under the Small Lights was published by Miami University Press in 2010 and his short fiction is forthcoming from Redivider and New Genre. He’s a founding editor at Open Letters Monthly and lives in Denver, Colorado.

Dharma Bums: 50th Anniversary Edition

Dharma Bums: 50th Anniversary Editionby Jack KerouacViking, 2008Louis Menand wrote an excellent piece in the New Yorker last year about On the Road, reminding us of the huge loneliness and nostalgia in and around the book and the Beat movement. There’s sadness to spare, but when I opened Viking’s new 50th anniversary edition of Dharma Bums, I was surprised by all the joy in the prose, and how good life can feel in Kerouac’s descriptions:

I waded in the water and dunked a little and stood looking up at the splendorous night sky, Avalokitesvara’s ten-wondered universe of dark and diamonds. “Well, Ray,” sez I, glad, “only a few miles to go. You’ve done it again.” Happy. Just in my swim shorts, barefooted, wild-haired, in the red fire dark, singing, swigging wine, spitting, jumping, running—that’s the way to live. All alone and free in the soft sands of the beach by the sigh of the sea out there … And if your cans are redhot and you can’t hold them in your hands, just use good old railroad gloves, that’s all. I let the food cool a little to enjoy more wine and my thoughts. I sat crosslegged in the sand and contemplated my life. Well, there, and what difference did it make? “What’s going to happen to me up ahead?”Then the wine got to work on my taste buds and before long I had to pitch into those hotdogs, biting them right off the end of the stick spit, and chomp chomp, and dig down into the two tasty cans with the old pack spoon, spooning up rich bites of hot beans and pork, or of macaroni with sizzling hot sauce, and maybe a little sand thrown in. “And how many grains of sand are there on this beach?” I think. “Why, as many grains of sand as there are stars in that sky!” (chomp chomp) and if so “How many human beings have there been, in fact how many living creatures have there been, since before the less part of beginningless time?

First he’s hopping a train, then he’s cheering at an obscene poetry reading, “Fuck being a dirty word that comes out clean,” slugging a jug of wine, then on the way up a mountain, laughing Haiku, then shy at an orgy, then writing alone. A lot of us read this stuff as teenagers, and those of us who went looking for the life it described found just as much magic and dissipation as Jack said we would. The book reads true.Kerouac’s style of spontaneous prose didn’t work for him most of the time, and wouldn’t work for most writers, but when he’s inspired (and armed with lots of notes and early drafts, as he often was), his exuberance becomes sweet-hearted eloquence, no less appealing for its clumsiness:

Then also as we went on climbing we began getting more casual and making funnier sillier talk and pretty soon we got to a bend in the trail where it was suddenly gladey and dark with shade and a tremendous cataracting stream was bashing and frothing over scummy rocks and tumbling on down, and over the stream was a perfect bridge formed by a fallen snag, we got on it and lay belly-down and dunked our heads down, hair wet, and drank deep as the water splashed in our faces, like sticking your head by the jet of a dam. I lay there a good long minute enjoying the sudden coolness.“This is like an advertisement for Rainier Ale!” yelled Japhy.“Let’s sit awhile and enjoy it.”“Boy you don’t know how far we got to go yet!”

Dharma Bums is one the books where his style clicks best. Obviously, you should buy an old paperback and not an overpriced “anniversary” edition. Both of the British editions are sturdy, good-looking, and cheap through Abe Books.___John Cotter‘s novel Under the Small Lights was published by Miami University Press in 2010 and his short fiction is forthcoming from Redivider and New Genre. He’s a founding editor at Open Letters Monthly and lives in Denver, Colorado.

Analfabeto / An Alphabet

Analfabeto / An AlphabetEllen BaxtShearsman, 2007Dictionary 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:

Both handssnappingmeans very.Come bythe housemeans we’llsee eachother again,but is notan invitationto come bythe 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‘s novel Under the Small Lights was published by Miami University Press in 2010 and his short fiction is forthcoming from Redivider and New Genre. He’s a founding editor at Open Letters Monthly and lives in Denver, Colorado.

The World from Beginnings to 4000 BCE

The New Oxford World History: The World from Beginnings to 4000 BCEIan TattersallOxford, 2008Focusing on early humans to the exclusion of non-human biology or world geology, this lean book may have been more accurately titled The History of Humans on Earth to the End of the Stone Age, Minus Continental Drift, Half a Billion Years of Crowded Life, and Everything Prior to Us. But this is an objection to the title only; what this new book covers, it covers well.The New Oxford World Histories are an ambitious and timely project. If The World from Beginnings to 4000 BCE is a representative sample, the series will be sharp, engaging, and concise. Probably useless to specialists, this is an excellent book for the general intelligent reader: a tight, fast-moving work of equal parts science, history, and the history of science.Following brief primers on the work of archeologists, evolutionary biologists, and paleo-anthropologists, Ian Tattersall expertly walks the reader through what differentiates early humans (all twelve or so species) from their close ancestors. We get loads of comparative skeletal analysis (clearly a love of Tattersall’s) and a convincing explanation of how we hominids spread into the world and what made our rapid migration possible (not our special brains, it turns out, but our special hip joints).Without resorting to conjecture, Tattersall describes the lives of Neanderthals, Eargasters, and their kin, sorting through their complex and incomplete ancestral trees. And if he doesn’t practice the kind of storytelling that would have made these dry bones come alive, readers at least get plenty of interesting nuggets to show off with, like “the pattern of fractured and healed bones in Neanderthal skeletons resembles that among rodeo riders today” due to their “frequent close encounters with unfriendly animals.” These same Neanderthals, he tells us, tamed fire and built shelters. They protected the weaker members of their group; they buried their dead.Then we arrived.Although Tattersall mourns the loss of the art-making hunter-gatherer culture and the ecological damage wrought by crop cultivation, he acknowledges that Homo Sapiens were doing plenty of damage before we set down to farming: killing off not only most of the big animals but the rest of the early humans. For a time, he gingerly steps around the subject of what exactly happened to all of these hominid cousins of ours, before admitting:

Although (or perhaps because) it is the Cro-Magnons’ creativity that we find most impressive about them, these people, like us, certainly also had a dark side. And it may well have been expressed in the Neanderthals’ disappearance.

Why Tattersall should be so delicate about the subject, I have no idea. But the rest of the story proceeds with confidence.This promises to be an exciting new series from Oxford. Let the great work begin.___John Cotter‘s novel Under the Small Lights was published by Miami University Press in 2010 and his short fiction is forthcoming from Redivider and New Genre. He’s a founding editor at Open Letters Monthly and lives in Denver, Colorado.

The Waitress Was New

The Waitress Was NewBy Dominique Fabre, translated by Jordan StumpArchipelago Books, 2008Pierre, a bartender, is a gentle man—tactful, considerate. He may not always have been so, but life has worn him smooth. Even in the privacy of his own mind, he maintains a respectful distance from the world. He’s canny enough to know what comes of engagement. Of a new waitress at work, he writes, “I don’t look too closely at her shoes, the way I usually do to size someone up, because I had a feeling she’d seen some rough times and there was no point in overdoing it.”This, the narrative voice of Dominique Fabre’s new novel, creates an atmosphere which is comfortable but not quite intimate. And the reader, in turn, is left wondering whether intimacy with Pierre is even possible. The extent to which he’s addressing himself alone or a random patron at his bar is somewhat in question, but we’re can’t tell weather his tone would change either way. Small details are noted in the same resigned voice of mild interest, as are life-changing events.In The Waitress Was New, we watch Pierre’s professional life disintegrate over the course of one long weekend in Asniéres-sur-Seine. The novel is an exercise in perspective, where modest quiet moments of reflection can become huge and moving simply because of how infrequently they occur, as below, when Pierre looks up:

The sky was brighter here, because of the height of the building. Sometimes the sky must even have been a little too bright. It made me think of before, long before, when I wasn’t a barman but a fireman, an explorer, a soldier, and a soccer player, a long way from Le Cercle, the bright sky I had inside me, and above me, before the apartment blocks where I grew up.

And then we’re back to the shifting pattern of the street crowd, the variations in the weather.Dominique Fabre has written ten novels in French and thanks to Jordan Stump, we finally have the chance to read one of his poised, quietly dark stories translated into English. The Waitress Was New is a fine short novel and entirely deserving of the American audience that Archipelago Books has delivered it to.___John Cotter‘s novel Under the Small Lights was published by Miami University Press in 2010 and his short fiction is forthcoming from Redivider and New Genre. He’s a founding editor at Open Letters Monthly and lives in Denver, Colorado.