notanotherbookreview

The back cover of  The Beginning Comes After the End:  Notes on a world of change calls it   a sequel to  Hope In The Dark.  That book relates the historical moment in 1955, w hen Grace Lee Boggs ushered in the Montgomery Bus Boycott. That event, says Solnit, began the era of progressive social change. Now it may seem eclipsed in a distant past.. What we may not realize in our present world's incessant "newness" is the ageless persistence of social values--old ways and wisdoms. In our rising world view,  interconnection is a core value. Solnit shows how underlying transformations are often obscured by a longer arc of history. The scale of what's underlying is seldom recognized. Yet these currents shape destiny.  In Rebecca Solnit’s new book, The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a world of change, there is plenty of evidence for a long view of political change. Though in our current period of backlash, after decades of progressive change, ...

With an economy of space and words, Rebecca Solnit's essays often encompass complex issues not easily defined. Her new book ,  NO STRAIGHT ROAD TAKES YOU THERE :  Essays for Uneven Terrain (Haymarket, 5/13) explores   the organic process of life and change.   The introduction ,  In Praise of the Indirect, the Unpredictable, the Immeasurable, the Slow, and the Subtle , explains the book's intended for "anyone considering history, power, change, and possibility." This is Solnit territory, where you meander through her visions, revisions, and conclusions--which felt "right," though could be a surprise. In "Tortoise at the Mayfly Party, she sums up the approach, "I try to see the long trajectory of events leading to the present moment, because it is this time to see change. To understand change is essential to understanding politics and culture, let alone trying to participate in it. The short view generates incomprehension and ineffectuality. Event...

Days at The Morisaki Bookshop,  Satoshi Yagisawa first introduced Tokyo's Jimbocho district, an improbable world of shops specializing in used books. Art books, playscripts, philosophy texts, maps, literature (classic and contemporary) and books bound in the traditional Japanese way are sold in  ancient wood buildings. Inside stores, books are tightly packed from floor-to-ceiling. Outside, carts  in front of the store contain bargains! Like The Strand in NYC, tourists, as well as young people who may not be readers, look at surprising titles and for a couple dollars, or a hundred yen, may give it a try. Browsing books may be a quicker transaction, bur post pandemic, the tactile appeal, mysterious dedication promise adventures for a pittance, no delivery needed.   In  More Days at The Morisaki Bookshop, .Takako, who first came to her Uncle's shop three years before, is now a reader. She glances at the carts of mostly modern novels, and greets her Uncle Sato...

Other Places, Other Times by Robert Wexelblatt  (Pelekinesis)  is a collection of twenty-six short historical fictions. Thirteen of the stories are about Chen Hsi-wei, an imaginary peasant-poet of the Sui period, circa 600 C.E. As a boy, he  served the emperor and turned down material rewards for an education. He became a poet (though nobility found an educated peasant as implausible as a flying pig), Hsi-wei travelled the empire making verses, along with straw sandals for customers.  He often set up a sign for sandals in marketplaces, before looking for a corner to sleep in an inn or stable.  Often Hsi-wei's curiosity about people and places led him to incongruous events and mysteries. The poem,  The Madness of Nowa   sums up a strange murder he resolved for a skeptical magistrate. At a seasonal festival, a chance meeting inspired rare insight about time, nature and men. U nknown truths, injustices, fateful sorrow inspired poems.  After some year...

      For some perspective on women's rights in the U.S., which were derived from English law--changed in Britain in 1839. Black men in the U.S. had the right to vote in 1870. White women in 1920 and black women not until the voting right act of 1965. Women's rights had little precedent in English law until Caroline Norton set a new precedent in 1839 (during Victoria's reign) with a mother's legal right to have access to her children. Before that time, Caroline, like all women, was a legal nonentity. Husbands and fathers represented them. (Spinsters, who could inherit if no male relatives, had more status then married women) Nonentity means no legal precedent existed for women's rights in England. If a man beat his wife or broke her arm (like Caroline's husband), the matter was not considered a crime. Unless a woman was killed, domestic violence was private. Some men thought it helped woman's behavior to be "knocked around." Wages or inherited mone...

Autonomy becomes urgent necessity in a volume of interlocking stories and a novel, Heroines must shed socio political expectations  and  their conditioning to remake their worlds.  GIRL, WOMAN, OTHER  (Grove Atlantic) by Bernardine Evaristo, won the 2019 Booker Prize and I am glad I just got around to reading it.  In our emergence from Covid, it seems more relevant than it might have in 2019.  These intertwined stories are like a musical ronde, each a different aspect of the subject, Black women finding autonomy, despite daily lives that demand conformity. Their voices, unexpected and enjoyable, come from present day Britain, though they extend to intergenerational immigrant experiences in Guam, the Caribbean, Nigeria.  Mothers, daughters, wives, fled wars and poverty, only to face new struggle and danger in public housing and menial jobs, no matter what education they brought. Their children, second generation, are caught in ambitions "to make it" and...

What is a Chapbook? I always thought of it as poetry, printed on vellum with letterpress and largely undistributed beyond poetry community. According to Wikipedia:   " A chapbook is a small publication of up to about 40 pages, sometimes bound with a saddle stitch. In early modern Europe a chapbook was a type of printed street literature." These prose chapbooks by BAMBOO DART PRESS may be a 2021 version of "street literature".  Attractive to hold in your hand, around 45 pages, they offer a meaningful, even inspiring read. But can these books be long enough to deliver that experience?  In these disconnected days of isolation, I enjoyed the humor and wonder in these books.    Books and Tapes and Art and a series of chapbooks, a collaboration between Pelekinesis and Shrimper Records and Tapes.     John Brantingham  is a poet, novelist, essayist and foremost in this book, a man who remembers being a kid and profound moments, like peeling an orang...

Called "one of the innovators of the short short story" by Publishers Weekly, Peter Cherches'  Whistler's Mother's Son and Other Curiosities (3/23, Pelekinesis) is a marvel of wit an ingenuity. In this collection of short works, over 100 pieces of prose, he veers from minimalism to satire, noir to children's tale, abstraction to surrealism. Cherches' imagination takes a variety of forms; parodies, standarized tests, nursery rhymes, conundrums, rescued cliches, misbegotten mysteries, dark Americana, existential misdemeanors, optimistic nihilism and more. Whistler's Mother's Son features material never before published, published in small magazines, and from his early  Condensed Book .   Here are beloved characters; Hamlet, Gertrude Stein, Amelia Earhart, Fred Flintstone, Mr. Mondrian--hard-boiled dicks, a man with two mustaches and even a confused Peter Cherches. Though I have read  Between a Dream and a Cup of Coffee,  Lift Your Right Arm  ...

THE DOG SEATED NEXT TO ME by Meg Pokrass (Pelekinesis, September 15, 2019.) Pokrass' flash fiction has the magic of loved and lost, humans and creatures. Imagine Flannery O'Connor would enjoy the dark wit of  Meg Pokrass ' THE DOG SEATED NEXT TO ME (Pelekinesis, September 2019) . Here the usual mysteries; love, youth, age, the games people play with themselves and others, the texture of time and our bodies, are given strange life. Pokrass often writes about us as creatures. The wilds we are and inhabit may refer to "familiars." Canine, avian, insect qualities are guides of sorts for the women relating stories. One shelters under her lover's wing. Another disappoints her husband when she falls for a blue tongued squink instead of the idea of a new baby.  Some samples below. The Rescue He told her how his parakeet died, all at once, in the middle of a regular day. A bird holocaust. She could see, behind his words, such gorgeous, frantic color that...

LA COMMEDIA SOTTERRANEA DELLA MACHINA DA SCRIVERE, Swizzle Felt's FIRST FOLIO from the THE TYPEWRITER UNDERGROUND (Pelekinesis) Is this a put-on, precious satire, poetry, an infinite jest? Yes, as well as the first blast of  THE TYPEWRITER UNDERGROUND, a movement both radical and retro, reactionary and progressive, profound and silly--Marc Zegans, poet and spoken word artist, began this movement after publishing a collection of verse,  The Underwater Typewriter. The Typewriter Underground was originally inspired by an abandoned subway, boarded up and forgotten. Zegans imagined galleries, performance in such a space. His movement has attracted a group of like-minded artists making film, music, spoken word events. It's become an alt art movement. In the FIRST FOLIO he teams with Eric Edelman, a retro collage artist, to introduce fictional author, Swizzle Felt and his group of bohemian drop-outs, such as Edamame Phelps (his personal librarian), Clytaemnestra Litotes...

  Let us talk about that most crazy and foolhardy of  free lance journalists, brave ones who cover wars and in our time the "forever wars" of Afghanistan and Iraq. Vietnam a different story, body bags being loaded on planes, front and center on the six o'clock news. People were riveted-overloaded by daily body counts like a dark casino jackpot ever rising. Until it was enough, and Americans--old and young, liberal and conservative, veteran and resistor, surged in the streets to end that war. That old coverage gets little play now but then the numbers were enough. (Today, without the nightly network focus, would it happen?) This post is to celebrate this rare journalist in the present, when our wars merit scarce network attention and coverage is often but a distanced reminder of what is going on far away --the horrific daily reality of war.  But there are news outlets who occasionally run stories by journalists enbedded with soldiers and their allies, working inch ...

A Thinking Woman's Icon, HANNAH ARENDT, celebrated in Ken Krimstein's witty and profound  new graphic novel. THE THREE ESCAPES OF HANNAH ARENDT : A Tyranny of Truth (Bloomsbury September) I read Hannah Arendt's book  Eichmann in Jerusalem : A Report on the Banality of Evil, about the former vacuum cleaner salesman,  German Nazi SS-Obersturmbannführer and one of the major organizers of the Holocaust. He  made sure the trains to the gas chambers ran on time packed with passengers. Arendt's account of his trial was a stunning inquiry into the man and the political system he served. Her coverage was controversial, because she depicted  not a monster, but a man frighteningly average.  Ahrendt was an intellectual, a brilliant philosopher, when she fled from Hitler's  terror--from Germany to Paris, from Paris to America.  Coincidentally, it was The New Yorker who asked her to report on the Eichmann Trial and it's the New Yorker cartoonist, Ken...