Digest - The Morning News

Reading • The Wasted Vigil

Afghanistan, frequently referred to as the burial ground of empires or somesuch, may well turn out to be Barack Obama’s pivot point to a second term—and the United States’s long downward spiral into oblivion. Based on his campaign assertions, he would seem be continuing the naïve view that has characterized our ongoing failures in that hard, heartless place. Bob Herbert reminds us of this folly, and Dexter Filkins adds some on-the-ground reality to this disaster-in-progress. Of course, if you and I and others were paying attention to the above citations we might already have preemptive demonstrations in the streets instead of all this short-sighted post-election self-congratulation. There have been recent literary pathways to insights into the Afghan, uh, problem: Afghan-British journalist Saira Shah’s The Storyteller’s Daughter; In Between Places, Rory Peterson’s account of his walk across Afghanistan; Tom Bissell’s story “Death Defier.”

Now comes The Wasted Vigil (Knopf), Pakistani novelist Nadeem Aslam’s (Maps for Lost Lovers) new opus set in the present-day pressure cooker of Afghanistan with a cast that includes an American ex-spy doing some form of penance, a Russian woman looking for closure on her soldier brother’s story, and an expatriated British doctor whose Afghan wife was hideously murdered by the Taliban. Without off-putting didacticism, The Wasted Vigil is rife with the cruel facts that should viewed as billboard warnings against further foreign involvement in what I see as the Asian Balkans; no doubt these warnings will not be heeded. Which thankfully is not Aslam’s responsibility—all he did was create a hypnotic narrative with a palette of prose that illuminates people in trouble against the chiaroscuro of another benighted nation’s history.

Related to the above-mentioned work by Saira Shah, here is a clip from her illuminating television documentary Beneath the Veil. —Robert Birnbaum, Jan. 9, 2009

SHARE THIS • EMAIL THIS • FILE UNDER: Afghanistan, Barack Obama, Bob Herbert, Dexter Filkins, Nadeem Aslam, Rory Peterson, Saira Shah, Tom Bissell

Listening • We Will Fall

It would be remiss not to mention the recent passing of Ron Asheton, guitarist for Ann Arbor’s most acerbic contribution to the late 60s garage rock scene, The Stooges. As reported first in the Ann Arbor News on Tuesday, Asheton’s body was found by police in his apartment that morning. Later reports suspect the cause of death was a heart attack days prior. While frontman James “Iggy Pop” Osterberg tended to steal the spotlight (both onstage with wildly histrionic performances and offstage with his volatile drug and alcohol dependencies), Asheton’s guitar work (driven by his brother Scott Asheton’s drumming) is every bit as crucial to the sound developed by the Stooges, which would influence nearly every rock band thereafter.

The development of this sound is described by Asheton in the book Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk, which is really worth checking out if you’re at all interested in the subject. In his own words:

We’d never been into a recording studio before and we set up Marshall stacks, and set them on ten. So we started to play and John Cale [of the Velvet Underground, producer of The Stooges’ self-titled debut] just says, “Oh no, this is not the way …” We were like, “There is no way. We play loud, and this is how we play.” So Cale kept trying to tell us what to do and being the stubborn youth that we were, we had a sit-down strike … So our compromise was, “Okay, we’ll put in on nine.” Finally he just said, “Fuck it,” and he just went with it.

Which is precisely the attitude that led to the band being the bellwether of the entire genre which became known as punk rock.

Strangely, one of the reformed band’s final non-tour performances last year was at the ceremony inducting Madonna into the laugably formal Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, purportedly at her request for the Hall’s repeated snubs of The Stooges. Their performance of “Ray of Light” can certainly be read as a grandiose “fuck you” to the mainstream music industry which counted them out so long ago, even as it continues to do so (although they are up for consideration for induction this year, but whatever).

The song linked below, “No Fun,” not only features Ron Asheton’s trademark, unheedingly overdriven guitar work, but was one of the songs famously covered by the Sex Pistols and helped introduce a generation of British youth (who, it turns out, also loved punk rock) to the Stooges. What’s more, I think it’s only fitting. —Erik Bryan, Jan. 8, 2009

» Listen to "No Fun" at Here Comes the Flood

SHARE THIS • EMAIL THIS • FILE UNDER: Ann Arbor News, Iggy Pop, John Cale, Madonna, Please Kill Me, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Ron Asheton, Scott Asheton, Sex Pistols, The Stooges, Velvet Underground

Reading • Winter Reading List

The holiday (publishing) hiatus did not much change my reading habits other than two glorious days spent in total horizontal bibliophilic repose. I was able to read Louisianan writer Tim Gautreaux’s new opus, The Missing (Knopf), which doesn’t quite rise to the level of his gripping The Clearing, but close. Set in the late 1920s, a New Orleans department-store floorwalker with heavy personal baggage is fired when a young girl is kidnapped from the store on his watch. The store’s owner suggests he might have his job back if he can find the toddler, setting in motion a rich internal and external journey.

Amy Koppleman (A Mouthful of Air) can write, and if you like stories about smart, disaffected, and disconnected middle-class women struggling with family issues and such, I Smile Back (Two Dollar Radio) is for you.

Having been impressed with Richard Powers’s The Echo Maker (which was a 2007 Pulitzer finalist) and owning all of his books, I dipped into his 2000 novel Plowing the Dark (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux), which features an odd commingling of plotlines—a pack of computer experts employed by a seemingly hip (cool, whatever) software company work at constructing a virtual environment that contains all the images ever imagined or created. A Chicagoan fleeing a desperate romance takes a job teaching English in Beirut during one of the civil wars. You can guess what happens to him. I found the software creation interludes tedious.

If you read anything or watch anything (where people opine), Roberto Bolaño is the new literary it-boy of 2008 (and promises to be of 2009, as more of his work becomes posthumously published in English). 2666 (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux) seems to be his magnum opus, and put simply it’s an amazing work of literature and an amazing read. My only reservation arises from the fourth chapter/section, “The Part About the Crimes.” Bolaño recounts a long list of unsolved murders of hundreds of women in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico (near the Texas border in the Sonoran Desert); 250 pages of incidents of human depravity and Bolaño managed to keep me interested. For a very fine account of Bolaño (without the complication of a review of 2666) read Francisco Goldman’s insights.

Matt Wieland suggested Benjamin Markovits’s subtle and finely wrought A Quiet Adjustment (Norton) continues the author’s use of Lord Byron’s biography as a platform for his fictive urges—in this case, teenager Annabelle turns aside countless suitors and fixes her sights on the newly famous Byron (just on the heels of the publication of his celebrated Childe Harold).

At the time of his 1942 suicide Stefan Zweig was one of the most well-regarded writers in the world; John Fowles fulminates: “Even ‘famous writer’ understates the prodigious reputation he enjoyed in the last decade or so of his life, when he was arguably the most widely read and translated serious author in the world.” The short story The Royal Game (Harmony), the last he wrote—about a very unusual chess game and its players—is a short lesson in why, as is Letter From an Unknown Woman.

Rodes Fishburne debuts with Going to See the Elephant (Delacorte Press), a novel about Slater Brown, a young man who arrives in San Francisco to become a world-famous writer, in pursuit of which he takes a job with a lackluster weekly and proceeds, with echoes of Voltaire’s Candide, to achieve fame. Fishburne is clearly fond of San Francisco and if I could have summoned up some interest in Slater I might have enjoyed this effort more. (The phrase in the title, by the way, once implied the search for fame and fortune.)

Melville House has a series entitled The Art of the Novella (What’s a novella you ask? A short novel or a long story—Jim Harrison writes novellas—is the best I can do.) The series includes some classics (Melville, Tolstoi), some moderns (Steve Stern, Imre Kertez, Gilbert Adair), and now Alejandro Zambra, who elliptically lays out a story of young love that has echoes of the above cited Roberto Bolaño. Published in Chile in 2006, Bonsai won Chile’s major literary prize. —Robert Birnbaum, Jan. 7, 2009

SHARE THIS • EMAIL THIS • FILE UNDER: Alejandro Zambra, Amy Koppleman, Benjamin Markovits, Francisco Goldman, John Fowles, Matt Wieland, Melville House, Richard Powers, Roberto Bolano, Rodes Fishburne, Stefan Zweig, Tim Gautreaux

Listening • Animal Collective

Animal Collective have a new album and we have a new year. It’ll take a while to get to grips with both, so I’m jumping in, spread-eagle, and soaking it up; hesitation and caution are bad resolutions. “My Girls” is all purple lightening, Koyaaniqatsi scenery and soundtrack, magic carpets. It wipes memory of 2008 not with a blinding light, but a haze of glittery samples and drummed thunder. Bubbles of synth burst at the speed of two handclaps as the flesh drips and the metal body is revealed: pulsating, chanting, living. Just don’t call Merriweather Post Pavilion your album of 2009. Bide your time. Pounce in late spring. (Not in January when comparisons to Tropicalia seem alien and wrong.) —Mike Smith, Jan. 6, 2009

» Listen to "My Girls" at the band's MySpace

SHARE THIS • EMAIL THIS • FILE UNDER: Animal Collective, Koyaanisqatsi, Tropicalia

Reading • Annie Leibovitz at Work

Annie Leibovitz is arguably the best-known photographer in the U.S.A. (Who else? Richard Avedon? Herb Ritts? Ron Gallela?) Based on years of service at hippie-qua-boomer journal Rolling Stone, where she shot 142 covers, and her ongoing work at effete boomer glossy Vanity Fair, as well as other such magazines and a plethora of ad campaigns have made Leibovitz’s celebrity images a ubiquitous staple of mainstream culture. All of which may obscure her fundamental achievement—which is to have created a body of work that succeeds, as Susan Sontag wisely observed, in accomplishing what “all photographs aspire to the condition of being memorable—that is, unforgettable.”

One of my favorites is her shot of Keith Haring nude and painted white with his signature illustrations and hieroglyphics adorning his body and the background. Or Bette Midler nude lying in a bed of roses. Of course I could go on. Leibovitz latest opus, Annie Leibovitz at Work (Random House), inter-splices her images with observations about some of her more well-known efforts (the Nixon resignation) and mild revelations from her splendid career:

The first thing I did with my very first camera was climb Mt. Fuji. Climbing Mt. Fuji is a lesson in determination and moderation. It would be fair to ask if I took the moderation part to heart. But it certainly was a lesson in respecting your camera. If I was going to live with this thing, I was going to have to think about what that meant. There were not going to be any pictures without it.

If you need to read a review of At Work, Thomas Mallon’s is spot on, delivering this punch line:

“At Work” includes a picture of the photographer’s mother, Marilyn Leibovitz, shot in 1997. These days it “means more and more” to the daughter who took it, because of its honesty: “My mother is looking at me as if the camera were not there.” This is not a condition easily replicated when the photographer isn’t the subject’s flesh and blood, and it doesn’t obtain almost anywhere else in the book, which is fine, since Leibovitz’s work, apart from a 1990s foray into Sarajevo, has never really been about honesty. As “At Work” makes clear, it has been about performance and arrangement—of the highest and shiniest order.

—Robert Birnbaum, Jan. 5, 2009

SHARE THIS • EMAIL THIS • FILE UNDER: Annie Leibovitz, Keith Haring, Marilyn Leibovitz, Rolling Stone, Susan Sontag, Thomas Mallon, Vanity Fair

Reading • The Mountain Meadows Massacre

One might wonder why three Mormon historians—Ronald W. Walker, Richard E. Turley, and Glen M. Leonard—chose to investigate an unarguably black mark on the Mormon religion and published those results, some 150 years after the fact. Whatever the reason, Massacre at Mountain Meadows (Oxford University Press) is an apparently rigorous unpacking of the heretofore unacknowledged Mountain Meadows massacre in 1857, in which a Mormon militia and their Native American accomplices lured members of an overland emigrant party traveling through the Utah Territory from their fortified camp and murdered 120 men, women, and children—only 17 of the youngest children survived. Not surprisingly, this horrific incident was complicated by many crosscurrents of rumor, hysteria, suspicion, and vendetta—and Brigham Young’s teachings and rhetoric. Which results in a compelling and dramatic piece of historiography. What is news is the significant underwriting by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that made this scholarship possible.

Coincidentally, award-winning Canadian novelist Alissa York (Mercy) shines her narrative talents on the massacre, as it serves as the backdrop for Effigy (Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press), a complex story set on a 19th-century Utah ranch with a variegated cast of characters that includes hunter and horse breeder Erastus Hammer, his four wives, a circus contortionist turned ranch hand, an Indian guide, and a crow who makes its home on the massacre site and tells that terrible story. The potent admixture of characters and past history makes this a riveting, vivid tale. Frank Moher of Canada’s Weekend Post aptly observes:

If the novel featured just these four women, it would still be a welcome addition to the literature about the American frontier: Larry McMurtry on estrogen. York cuts across its potential for gothic excess… The total effect is exhilarating and genuinely fresh, a panoramic view of a pivotal time in Plains history, foregrounding characters who would normally be consigned to the edges of the canvas.

—Robert Birnbaum, Dec. 22, 2008

» Read an excerpt from Massacre at Mountain Meadows

SHARE THIS • EMAIL THIS • FILE UNDER: Alissa York, Brigham Young, Frank Moher, Glen M. Leonard, Mormons, Richard E. Turley, Ronald W. Walker, Weekend Post

Listening • Reading • Watching

Contact:

Browse:

Search:

» Advertise on TMN via the Deck

Friday, January 9, 2009