Bookmarks

The first poem in Bright Hill Press’ 2005 Poetry Chapbook winner, “Grace”, begins:

They are here to teach him about power,
a gang of ten-year-olds. Hands tied to his shoes,
he kneels before them. Face smeared
with jelly, ears plugged with bread,
he does not cry out: no one can save him.

It is the most visceral, the most frightening, perhaps the most beautiful one in the book. “Grace” ends as a sort of resistance-poem, as the “he” never screams, the gang eventually tires, and the victim has the last word. Other poems in Autobiography of My Hand might have a similarly discomforting effect on readers as “Grace”, but none have its relentless force.

So much seems so drab here (the physical and emotional ailments of childhood and adolescence, a greasy spoon, a Burger King bathroom) and is presented with such reserved urbanity (a habit for the second person, the dash of surrealism, unbearable and unsurprising run-on catalogs of dream imagery, oxymoronic titles and turns, historical re-imaginings, explorations of hypotheticals), it’s easy to feel inferior to such cool, over-clevered. You can only get by for so long with touring the oddities of the everyday, followed by a lyrically philosophical closing line.

“Off Hours” comes close to the drive of “Grace”, as a daughter watches her aging father take his shoes and socks off, troubled to believe that the broken man is her father.  The film-like movement of imagery is brilliantly done, but the end is lopsided, curt.

Similarly, “Which Is To Say” mini-catalogs what a grandfather loved and didn’t love, and what those tastes meant. It is extraordinary until its finish: “The last time I saw him he was taped to a purple La-Z-Boy / he wouldn’t have bought in a room he wouldn’t have let / and he turned to me and he said, How’d you get on this flight, / which is to say something, just what I cannot tell you.” If only Olsson weren’t married to that last rhetorical hit of “which is to say.” It is at once sincere and smells like pose.

“Drinking with Li Po” is a knockout. An educated but delusional speaker, partying with friends, tries to think something more than “America” but never does, and finally relents, “maybe it’s nothing to do with anything, but when I hurtle out / to the roofless outhouse and sway hard into the steam piss makes, / I glance up and—I swear—see every star ever made.”

Olsson does pull off some surprising upsets: “Heartache Rings Again” personifies heartache, but happily in an adversarial manner. “One Chance” begins with the eye-roller “What if God were a dog?” but ends poignantly, “Your dog is loping toward you, six months old, / paws like fresh snow and you say, Wait. Then, / Please. Knowing you’re too far to ever go back again.”

Attitude-wise, Olsson is pretty squarely post-modern in that his poems tend to skirt narratives and express only the edges of emotion—the work seems distrustful of language’s ability to hold; on the other hand, his delivery is that of a wryly zany slam poet (one speaker is vigilant for “not happiness exactly, but close enough"), comic, amusing at times, but never laugh-out-loud funny.

For the most part, I bristle at this kind of two-fisted writing, but the more I’ve read, the more poems have grown on me. Olsson’s first full-length book What Kills What Kills Us is due out in early 2007 from Silverfish Review Press (www.silverfishreviewpress.com), and it’s hard to imagine 50-plus pages like this holding up, but we’ll see. [Amazon, Amazon UK]

For writer Paul West, the connections between the two world wars of the last century transcend the likes of a train car at Compiegne and a Bavarian private named Adolf Hitler. West’s connections are personal, powerful memories of a one-eyed father, maimed in the Great War, playing war games with his son while Nazi planes regularly bombed a nearby English town. West’s father, forever transformed by “his war,” was an enigma and mystery to West; My Father’s War is his attempt to sort out that mystery.

As West seeks to assemble the puzzle pieces at his disposal, a beautiful and moving portrait of his father emerges: a teenager issuing from the mud and blood of WWI trenches who became a respected veteran never quite comfortable with peacetime. His discomfort with post-war life far surpassed his frequent unemployment due to his war-damaged eye. When other Englishmen were hiding in their homes with their curtains drawn during Nazi air raids, West’s father would go outside to watch the planes, partly because he had come to admire the Germans while gunning them down on European battlefields and partly because, as West relates, he was “going after some sullen undesirable beauty he must first have seen from the trenches.” Beauty in the trenches? Yes. It was there that “he had found men at their noblest.” He never stopped longing for that beauty but it almost completely evaded him during his civilian life. That is, until the outbreak of the Second World War: then, for a few years, he embraced the beauty of his old war with a salute to the new. He began to teach his pre-adolescent son soldering through war games.

Is it possible that the senior West played war with his son in order to prepare him for real warfare? Possibly. No one knew how long World War II would last. But perhaps the more likely reason was that “the only busyness he regarded as genuine toil was soldering. All the rest, which is to say life’s work, he regarded as frippery, trivia.” He was first and last, a soldier.

The book is comprised of a series of essays, some previously published, written in novelist West’s inimitable prose which is so lyrical at times, it occasionally threatens to leave earth (and some readers) behind. In the chapter entitled “An Extraordinary Mildness,” West describes his father’s later years in terms of a certain lightness of existence: “almost all the woes of the human condition [were] floating away from him, although ascending with him toward the nullity that, compared with his post-mortem paradises, was the merest tincture of slightness.” Excellent prose? Well, yes. Slightly incomprehensible? Definitely.

If West’s writing sometimes aviates into clouds of rarified incomprehensibility, it also (and usually) soars into prose of pure gold. Ruminating on Hitler’s reticence to invade England, West opines: “If only Hitler the know-it-all had followed through, brushing aside the popguns and Robin Hood pikes along with the remnants of the British army, we would all have been goners; but by then he was lusting eastward toward Mother Russia and ‘Uncle Joe,’ and my father and I had joined the survivors in the street, crisp with our sense of reprieve.” West exhibits his formidable descriptive skills while spying his father watch American bombers returning from the mainland: “Not a bomber left its place on this return trip as the crews, with the correct bustle and protocol of bombing left behind, tuned in to swing music on the American Forces Network, chewed fresh gum, and over the sea slung out their machine guns and other gubbins to lighten the load.”

Was West able, at last, to completely understand his father? The emotive center of his book focuses not on the mystery solved but the journey through it. Whether writing in convoluted or golden prose, West has succeeded in piecing together a very moving account of his father, an eternal soldier, discovered by his son between two wars. [Amazon, Amazon UK]

According to author Jake Austen, televised rock music is in some ways an impossible combination ... and one that he absolutely adores. Rock music is essentially “wild, raw, and dangerous” but when Bo Didley first performed it on the Ed Sullivan show in 1955, television and rock music began a long partnership which proved, according to Austen, that “one of the best ways to present [rock’s] energy is to impose structure, make it adhere to the laws of entertainment.” His delightful book, TV a-Go-Go explores the myriad manifestations of this partnership.

Austen, who produces his own children’s television dance show called Chic-a-Go-Go, has a feel for what worked and what didn’t and his intelligent opines are a delight to read. His opinion of the Monkees was not only wonderfully affirming for me—a die-hard Monkees fan, married for 18 years to a ‘60s garage band rock purist who has always despised the “pre-fab four”—but it also clearly illustrates his general opinion of televised rock: “as far as I’m concerned, any documented band ... is far more real than a gritty brilliant band that rehearses in a garage but never records or plays a show ... in my opinion every band that has ever appeared on a record or a TV show or a movie is real.”

Besides covering famed televised artists, such as the Monkees, the Beatles, Elvis Presley, and Michael Jackson, Austen’s book spills a large amount of ink on lesser known shows such as kiddie rock cartoons. Having spent my 1960s childhood in a home where a jukebox—kept well stocked by older rock ‘n’ rolling siblings—vied for maximum electrical wattage with a constantly running television, I often watched, not only the prime-timed Monkees, but also an animated, Saturday morning show called The Beatles. I seem to recall that the theme song was “A Hard Day’s Night” and because Ringo kept insisting that “droppin’ a G never hurt anybody,” of course a giant G kept falling on his head.

Until reading TV A-Go-Go, however, I didn’t realize that the animated mop-tops show was a sign of a seismic cultural shift. The Beatles, which was the first of many successive cartoons to market rock to kiddies, was, according to Austen, a sign that “the old guard,”—the adults who thought “that the Rat Pack in tuxedos was running the show”—were no longer a serious cultural influence.” Rock ‘n’ roll was here to stay.

Austen’s self-described “absurdly broad book” has almost negated his introductory claim that “a comprehensive overview of all rock on TV is impossible.” TV A-Go-Go has come profoundly and entertainingly close to attaining that impossibility and is a delightfully informative read for anyone with the slightest interest in televised rock. [Amazon, Amazon UK]

When it comes to tracing the roots of American music, there’s just no place like the South: jazz, rhythm & blues, rock ‘n’ roll, gospel—most music that comes with a “made in America” stamp originated south of the Mason-Dixon line. While the world obviously owes a huge musical debt to African-Americans for their contributions in the aforementioned genres, what we now call “country” music primarily evolved from the souls and throats of white rural southerners. It is these singers—and their songs—that are the focus of Bill C. Malone’s Singing Cowboys and Musical Mountaineers.

Malone’s first concern is to precisely define white rural southern music, especially that which was sung in the 19th century South (just before this music was discovered by the rest of the world). Was it—as early 20th century British musicologist Cecil Sharpe wanted to believe—merely a twangy redefinition of ancient British ballads? Sharpe collected hundreds of Appalachian songs that were clearly traceable to the British Isles, but as Malone points out in Singing Cowboys, Sharpe was in the South specifically looking for this connection. He found it in spades but because the other songs he surely heard echoing through the mountains didn’t concern his thesis, he simply ignored them.

There was a lot to ignore. Country music has many primary sources, and although Malone claims that a detailed history of the genre is nigh impossible, he does a masterful job of describing most of its influences in fascinating detail. British ballads, black spirituals, minstrel show songs (most of their composers ironically Northern), German bands, and hymns all had a major role in shaping the white folk music of 19th century America. Rural southerners were very catholic in their love for music: a good tune was a good tune, whether it originated in ancient Britain or at the desk of a contemporary New York composer.

By far the most fascinating aspect of Malone’s book is hinted at in its title and answers this question: why did country singers such as Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, and Alan Jackson—who all hailed from the southeast—dress as though they had been raised on a Texas ranch? Simple: a national hunger for symbols. Before the cowboy singer took over as country music’s mascot in the 1930s, it was the mountain man of the 1920s, romanticized by novels and the Great War hero, Alvin “Tennessee Mountain Boy” York, that exemplified a rural, unfettered, Anglo-Saxon America for an increasingly urban and immigrant-heavy America. It was primarily the Carter family and Bradley Kincaid whose performances first personified this mountain personality; their success paved the way for many other southern musicians of the era to cash in on the hunger for the quintessential American symbol.

However, when reports of aberrant behavior and oppression from coal companies began to trickle out of the Appalachians, along with the proliferation of vaudeville acts that degenerated the mountain man’s vigorous image into a ridiculous caricature (think The Beverly Hillbillies), the cowboy—whose manly persona and limitless freedom was being popularized in countless films and dime novels—became the preeminent and permanent symbol of country music. The actual canon of authentic cowboy songs is much smaller than the amount of folk songs originally from the eastern south, but an image is an image and the singing cowboy is here to stay.

Singing Cowboys and Musical Mountaineers is a very enlightening read regarding the roots of country music and provides the definitive explanation for the ubiquitous connection between country music and cowboy hats. [Amazon, Amazon UK]

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were prolific German scholars, yet the work they are best known for, the one that will eternally bear their name was not actually authored by them. The genesis of the Grimm’s Children’s and Household Fairy Tales, is the fascinating subject of Valerie Paradiz’s Clever Maids: The Secret History of the Grimm Fairy Tales.

The brothers Grimm could have gleaned the bulk of the tales from the dusty old books they were wont to frequent, but, spurred by German nationalism in an era of Napoleonic domination, they were searching for something simpler, richer, something more quintessentially German. They believed that a “Volk” spirit (i.e., the spirit of the commoner) could more accurately be found in the hearts and souls of young German women, who had heard the tales from their mothers and nannies. Although there were some male contributors, the focus of Paradiz’s skillful narration traces the assemblage of Children’s and Household Fairy Tales to at least 20 core female collaborators who provided the Grimms with over half of their stories, including some of the collection’s most memorable: Sleeping Beauty, Little Red Riding Cap, and The Goose Maid.

The real genius of Paradiz’s book is her ability to interweave the fairy tales with the biography. For instance, The Singing Bone, a grisly tale of fratricide, was communicated to Wilhelm Grimm by his future wife, Dortchen Wild (one of the book’s main collaborators), while she and Wilhelm were embroiled in what appears to have been a lover’s triangle with Ferdinand Grimm. The chapter entitled “The Six Swans”, juxtaposes a tale of sisterly self-sacrifice with Lotte Grimm’s unwillingness to be a domestic slave to her four brothers.

Paradiz is a something of a social historian as well as a German scholar (she includes many quotes directly from original source material), and her feminist slant is well taken. In addition to portraying the domestic woes of Lotte Grimm and the lack of credited authorship for most of the collection’s female collaborators, she also successfully illustrates how the tales themselves portray the social inequity of those that told them. It was as if, in telling these stories to the Grimm brothers, the young women were “giving a voice to their voicelessness.”

Clever Maids is a scholarly but immensely readable work, and will captivate anyone interested in folk history, German scholarship, or women’s studies. [Amazon, Amazon UK]