Sierra Nevada Review

by Laurie Macfee

The Georgia Review
Summer 2013
$15.00
Published quarterly by University of Georgia
143 pp. plus front and back matter
ISBN 0016-8386
http://garev.uga.edu/

 

The Georgia Review has been publishing a cross-section of poetry, fiction, essays, art, and reviews since 1947. Based at University of Georgia, the journal is internationally distributed and published quarterly. It is widely considered one of the finer literary publications in America. At 143 pgs, the Summer 2013 issue packs in eight poems, two fiction pieces, one essay, a painting folio, six book reviews, a note to readers, and most importantly, a special non-fiction feature, Judith Kitchen’s remarkable “Circus Train.”

In editor Stephen Corey’s front piece, To Our Readers, he notes, “During my 30 years with The Georgia Review, the journal has published just a few works that approximate the length of Judith Kitchen’s ‘The Circus Train.’” He queries whether perhaps we need to devise a new category for pieces such as this inventive and moving, “segmented but forcefully interwoven study of memory and mortality,” which is 55 pgs long. The last piece of this length was featured in 1985. For comparison, the environmental essay “Near and Distant Bears,” a treatise on climate change by Scott Russell Sanders, is a mere 12 pgs.  The two short fiction pieces, also environmental in nature, come in at 9 pages for David Griffith’s “Blight,” and 10 pgs for Jerry McGahan’s “The Deer Walking Upside Down.”

Why go on about the length of this work? Because what The Georgia Review has allowed with Kitchen’s breath taking, genre-bending reflection on her upcoming death from cancer, is the room to recreate a life. The back and forth segments mimic the waiting for letters (“wings of thought”) to arrive in the mail.  “Everything on hold while time crossed the country in its three-hour increments.” The generosity of space allows her to ruminate and build a case for her memories that lap like waves at the edges of our shore:

 

“…because the only snow is that of memory, and you will miss it acutely with a soft smile as you picture it spreading over the lawns, settling on fences until they carry their burden oh so lightly along their length, the celebration of cardinal or jay as they add their brief glint of color. Soft smile as you step out in boots to scoop up the past, letting it trickle over your face where you lick at its fake confection. Soft smile in perpetual summer twisting your heart where yes you miss snow you miss snow you miss snow.”

 

This lyric essay alone is reason to purchase the issue, as it will undoubtedly be anthologized for years to come, poetic language building the narrative in sections that fall in and out of focus. It is haunting, and unforgettable. In the end, Kitchen leaves us with this thought: “To conjure the circus train… it must have meant something as it moved across my horizon and vanished into the haze. It must have meant something, because it keeps trailing its scarf of smoke.”

There are only a spare eight poems in this issue.  In comparison, The Iowa Review featured 38 poems. I went to several back issues of The Georgia Review, to see if the length of Kitchen’s piece limited the poetry selection but the fall/spring/winter issues only feature 13/14/9 poems each. Seemingly, a breadth of poetry is not the focus (as a poet, it is something I look for). However, this issue begins with a piece by Al Maginnes, which is a mark in the win column. In “Music from Small Towns,” he writes about blue collar boys who, “play their version of a place/that didn’t have a name before it became a song.” Since he opens the journal, Maginnes sets the tone for the entire spread, a melancholy, somewhat wistful narrative on memory.  Since I had the great luck to hear him read at SNC last month, I could hear his voice in my ear as I read. Maginnes has such talent in capturing this world.

Other poems that stood out included Jack Ridl’s “Practicing Chinese Ink Drawing,” a lovely moment of re-awakening of an artist to the scene presented in front of him, “my brushstrokes/carry the feel/of listless/luck – languid/and precise….” And even more compelling, was Robert Wrigley’s “16 Down,” about the names for a part of a knife, “choil or ricsasso,” how the speaker fell in love with the words, with the fact that there were multiple ways to talk about the place where the haft disappeared into the handle.

It is refreshing that The Georgia Review includes a section dedicated to art. Paintings by Maine artist John Winship are featured on the covers, and in an 8-pg folio on glossy paper inside.  These 10 pieces represent a body of work, Presentiments, for which the managing editor wrote a 2-pg intro to help ground the reader. Based at least partially on Emily Dickinson’s poem of the same name, the work seems to rise out of the “domestically grassy, shady vision of past moments,” that Dickinson mined. The oil and acrylic pieces are Hopperesque in their narrative, single figures or couples caught in a shadowed landscape.

The book reviews included an interesting critique of two new books on film critic Pauline Kael; a review of three new books out in 2013 about the work of Sylvia Plath; a new book on the selected correspondence of Kenneth Patchen; a book of essays and cartoons by Tim Kreider; in a double cameo, a critique of the newest Al Maginnes book “Inventing Constellations;” and a wonderful review by Sian Griffiths of Eric Sasson’s unflinching portraits of gay men’s lives in “Margins of Tolerance.” 

Because I count, only two of the eight poets, two of the six book reviewers, and none of the regular essays, fiction, or art are by women in this issue.  So, for a body count of the 20 writers/artists listed in the table of contents, only five have a vagina. And of the eight books reviewed, only two were by women. One might imagine that 75% of the writers in the United States are men. But I digress – or do I?  The Georgia Review is a lion in the literary world, which is why these numbers are so problematic.

If I had to choose adjectives for The Georgia Review, they would be upstanding, elegant, and safe. Perhaps attempting to represent the best of literary tradition requires choosing more traditional work, taking care not to offend? Besides Judith Kitchen’s piece, none of the work pushes at the edges – this is not a journal intended to shake the status quo. It is lovely and palatable and known, like a Hopper painting. Which is not to say without quality. It has the imprimatur of arrival, a resume-maker if you are emerging. The writers in this issue seem to be established or at least mid-career. It is just too bad that artwork isn’t chosen that pushes as hard as Scott Russell Sanders does on the environment, or as Emily Dickinson pushed at the traditions of her day. Or that more women are seemingly not up to their standard, or part of the literary tradition they cover. Maybe I just picked up a depressingly testosterone-filled issue. It seems like such an old saw at this point, except that it obviously is not. But I would buy this issue for Judith Kitchen’s piece alone – it is worth the expenditure.

by Laurie Macfee

Heath Course Pak
Author: Tan Lin
ISBN: 978-1933996271
Publisher: Counterpath Press http://counterpathpress.org/
Dec 15, 2011
2^nd ed, revised
$17.95

Were you to pick up Tan Lin’s seminal little book Heath at your local bookstore (and may I suggest that if you find it, you buy it immediately), you might take it at face value. It is a 3/8^th inch thick soft back, with no page numbers. The cover features the title in red caps, HEATH COURSE PAK RFC. Layered behind that, in black text, is Tan Lin’s name followed by: “plagiarism/outsource, Ed. Rev., Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, Untilted Heath Ledger Project, a history of the search engine, disco OS annotated”.

A quick perusal between the covers will net you the following: it is a book, “set” in plain text (or a courier-esque simulation), a mash up of data sources from RSS (Rich Site Summary) feeds to blog posts, Google searches, retrieved photographs, handwritten notes, redacted text, sticky notes, an interview, annotated text, meta text on design of the book, etc. A disjointed amalgamation, it is written in multiple parts, the most obvious of which are Part 1 Samuel Pepys and Plagiarism, and Part 2 Outsource. But even on a cursory glance, the textual layering posits more “parts” to this book than the noted two.

On the surface, this book appears to be a collage about the actor Heath Ledger’s death in 2008 of an accidental overdose. At one point, Tan Lin even appropriates the minute-to-minute news feed and blog reporting Ledger’s death. There is an autographed fan photo of Ledger on the Broke Back film set, but also one of Jackie Chan in an ad selling Green Tea. As Alice said, “Curiouser and curiouser…”

At this point, two things might occur. First, a reader, aka a “user”, might thumb through the book blindly and try to make some sense of it: dip in and out of the text stream, turning the page when bored, jumping, subverting the authorial intent.  Or is that part of the authorial intent? It is at this point that the questions may begin: Does the author intend for the reader to make her own meaning, a personal grammar? In this way, is the book democratic, perhaps even Marxist, as we upset the power and production of authority? Is that part of Tan Lin’s aim with the sub-title “Notes on the Definition of Culture”: our relaxing attention spans, the temporal nature of information and language in the current zeitgeist? And what is the deal with Jackie Chan? Which leads to the second option: as the reader becomes confounded by the surface, she might return to where she started, and try to untangle the web that is merely the title, let alone subtitle, on the cover.

PART 1: TEXT

Grammar is the set of structural rules that governs the composition of clauses, phrases, and words in any given natural language. – New American Dictionary

A cloud of philosophy can be condensed into a drop of grammar. –Ludwig Wittgenstein

One way of looking at Heath is as a game, a form of serious play, with the end user as sleuth. If it was digital book, written in hypertext, we could jump from node to node, accessing information. But when readers hold the paper book in sweating palms and are faced with a proliferation of language/data, the notion of interactivity changes. Luckily, from the moment we pick up the book, Tan Lin has set the conditions or grammar for reading it. He has designed the environment for us, if we choose to “interact”. To this end, the cover offers key ways we might begin to understand the text. Armed with my computer, I decided to parse it, to see where it led, in consideration of the contents.

First, because Tan Lin chose to replicate the language of programming as the primary type on the cover and throughout the book, we are notified that we are entering into a world of the data stream. This font is shorthand for the constructed language of technology, where layers of information produce/hide/create/numb meaning. In addition, the title words fall apart on the page, as words do in plain text, creating a disjunction, a level of abstraction.

The first word of the title, HEATH, is our first hint that this is about Ledger (though without opening the book, it could be about the Scottish highlands). Upon realizing the connection with the actor, we might remember that his death was a cause celebre and, as the book notes, over 25,000 stories were produced. His death becomes a perfect catalyst to talk about the cultural simulacra of imagery and text, the way global obsessions light up RSS feeds. This very real tragedy became consumed, a spectacle of representation, a mediated cultural icon producing layers of meaning.  We could choose to tap into or ignore the proliferation. Included in the book is a photocopied prospectus of a paper written about the first edition of this book, which mentions actor network theory, or ANT.  ANT treats objects as part of social networks – mapping relations between materials and concepts.  Ledger’s death is almost a rebus, a pun, for ANT: an actor, whose death becomes the relational material for an entire network of responses, which become a theoretical poetry.

A COURSE pack is a set of materials arranged by a professor to be used in the classroom, including copied articles or portions of books. The packet is a multi-authored compilation, a low-tech aggregation. It is cleared under the Copyright Act of 1976 as fair use, in the educational context only. Tan Lin changes pack to PAK, another technological reference and play on language of software. PAK is a file extension (similar to doc or pdf), an abbreviation of “package”. By titling this book as a COURSE PAK, Tan Lin is signaling that it is a fair use aggregate of technological language. I sense the humor in this, as well as staking ground.

RFC is tech lingo for a “request for comments.” Is the author prodding us to interact, or merely toying with the Internet specifications and protocols for procedures and events?  If this is indeed a course pack, is Tan Lin telling us the readings are up for discussion?

PART 2: SUBTEXT

Below Tan Lin’s name, we come to the first part of the subtitle, plagiarism/out source Ed. rev. In the text, Tan Lin complicates authorship by plagiarizing himself (lectures, notes, poetry) as well as outside sources, including Google’s Project Gutenberg. In Part 1, he begins with PG’s representation of Samuel Pepys diary.  Is Google’s offering of this primary source plagiarism or access? As an aside, the original diary was written in shorthand, a code, just as this book is written in a form of shorthand, requiring translation.

Tan Lin’s use of the word outsource denotes the contracting to a third party, such as news blogs, RSS feeds, etc. It may also point to the fact that part of the text was generated in an Asian Poetry Writing Workshop he led. It could even point to a political connotation of contracting public services to for-profit corporations. Regardless, this use of a multi-authored texts points to how we gather information, how language is shared contemporarily in digitized form. Because this is titled a course pack, Tan Lin plays with notions of appropriation, copyright, and censorship – major issues in the age of digital language. A portion of the text, as well as a sourced photo, links to the nature of derivative ecstasy. Finally, I find the Ed. rev. portion to be amusing – a tongue in cheek signifier that this compilation has in fact been edited, and revised.

The second part of the subtitle, Notes on the Definition of Culture, brings questions. Is an RSS feed a manifestation of collective intellectual achievement, a form of art?  Or is it more related to the scientific notion of a culture, an artificial medium that promotes or cultivates replication? At base, is culture a noun or a verb? With technology, is culture a metaphor for how we experience language: remixed, random access, temporal, aggregated, unauthored? How does this affect the audience? In the same way that a repeating sound pattern will lull the eye, does this language of inundation bring on a hypnotic state of mind, which we sometimes call boredom, or numbness, or brainwashing? What happens when we are bored by someone’s death? Is technology neutral or a benign instrument in the construction of culture, one that can be used well or badly, like a gun?

When reading Untilted Heath Ledger Project the brain automatically auto-corrects Untilted to Untitled. This might be a humorous reference by Tan Lin to how fast we type, or the fact that we expect the computer to correct us, or our brains to make sense of nonsense, while also defining the HEATH of the title.  However, if tilt means to unsteady, lean, slant, or cause to topple, then untilted means steady, rise, ascent, increase or agreement. Read with authorial intent, the wording walks both lines – humor and information.

Tan Lin gives us another clue with the subtitle, history of the search engine. It is a short history. From its inception in 1990 with Archie, to Google’s birth in 1996, to Bing in 2009, the ability to search word streams on the World Wide Web has been sculpted into an art form.  In the beginning, users had to enter exact wording, so if you wrote “untllted Heath Ledger Project” into a search engine, nothing might come up. By the time Google came on the scene, with autocorrect and its authorial relativity linked to the number of people visiting a site, questions of language ownership began to rise. Search engines have led us, in 23 years, to the advent of data mining, inexhaustible data horizons, real time information retrieval, open directories, rich source sites, indexing and architecture of information, retrieval index design, permanent storage and retrieval of natural language documents, web crawling, news feeds. Search engine’s revolutionary effects on culture cannot be underestimated: a constructed hyper-reality of hypertext, shared meanings, interconnected with no dominant axis of orientation.

The part of the subtitle that might cause the most initial difficulty is disco OS. What does a dance style have to do with an operating system? Using the ubiquitous search engine, I found two things that shed insight. First, disco is an app that allows you drag, drop and burn info onto discs, and then to instantly search thousands of files across discs.  Perhaps Tan Lin used disco to organize the information streams in the book? But then, I found an essay on the website Project Muse, penned by none other than Tan Lin in 2008, called Disco as Operating System. It linked the generic cultural dance phenomenon and its “mimicked forms of mass cultural production” to the digital age of programmed language we are mired in.  It is a brilliant essay that shed light on production of the book. These passages seem to presage the blanketing of Ledger’s death as noise across the blogosphere, and Tan Lin’s reaction.

Suddenly disco was everywhere, a product without clear origins, broadcast indiscriminately like Tennyson’s and Longfellow’s trance-inducing poems in the nineteenth century or home décor in the post-Bauhaus era….

Inverting Claude Shannon’s theory wherein increased information generates greater noise, disco would blur the distinction between signal and noise….The listener experiences disco desiringly, without listening and blindly, as a function of increasing uncertainty in the remix, where the listener is the output—that is, a programmed state of mindlessness…In this sense, disco exposes even as it camouflages desire as a programmable function.

And so the social world of language production and meaningful utterances is rendered obsolete and automated.

Such a programming language was once called literature (we have chosen to call it art history), though disco, of course, is not a literature at all; it merely simulates the effects of literature (as empty brand) with the uncanny precision of our era’s version of a lullaby: the remix. Disco is a programming language…

In our era, unlike in Shakespeare’s, all plagiarism is part of an operating system. …most writing is automated and invisible, an empty form of surface decoration where “writing” is the instantiation of a software code being transferred from one location to another in an act of self-plagiarization.

Disco provides impetus for new modes of being and nonbeing involved in the writing and in particular the nonwriting of poetry and art, where lyricism, subjectivity, and personal expressiveness might be reduced to blips in an ambient sound track, where historical markers (of cultural products) could be erased, and where nonreading, relaxation, and boredom could be the essential components of a text. Poetry—and here one means all forms of cultural production—should aspire not to the condition of the book but to the condition of variable moods…

Review by Chelsea Archer

As anyone who has ever read Neal Shusterman will tell you, his books don’t shy away from difficult topics. He broaches these topics by creating fantastical worlds that blend elements of realism. Speculative fiction relies on realism to draw the reader in and make them believe in the absurd happenings of the story. Shusterman’s novels are moral plays, on par with Stephen King’s Misery, Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, and Frank Herbert’s Dune.

As the author of over 30 novels, Neal Shusterman knows how to create a burning interest within the first few pages. Like most other YA novels, his characters are often under the age of 20, the parents are no longer in the picture (for a variety of reasons) and they undergo a quest of some sort that changes them at a fundamental level, but unlike most other YA novels, he likes to open his tales with immediate shock and hardship. In Shusterman’s Skinjacker trilogy for instance, readers are taken to children’s limbo where newly dead or dying souls must come to grips with the end of their short lives. The opening page introduces the reader to the heroine as she is killed, instantly drawing us in. Life and death make up a large part of his novels, something that many of us struggle to understand and come to terms with. This serves not only to compel YA readers to consider this heavier topic, but also to bridge the gap between YA and an adult audience.

Just as in past novels, Neal Shusterman’s Unwind creates a fantastic world with our own issues hidden just below the surface. In the United States, sometime in the near future, a second civil war takes place over abortion. The resulting compromise calls for unwanted children between the ages of 13 and 18 to be “unwound” – have their body parts harvested for later use. Since all parts of their body will be reused and live on, technically, the government considers them to still be alive.

Here the reader meets Connor, Risa, and Lev, our three heroes leading us through the narrative. All three are set to be unwound and all three feel differently about their impending dissolution. This is what gives the novel such depth. We are provided with each possible viewpoint into the act of unwinding, allowing us to form our own conclusion. We see one child fighting for his life, one welcoming the end, and another following a religious path.

However, it’s not until Shusterman takes us into the mind of a character being unwound that we can truly appreciate this novel’s depth.

“I’m alone. And I’m crying. And no one is coming to the crib. And the nightlight has burned out. And I’m mad. I’m so mad. Left frontal lobe. I…I…I don’t feel so good. Left occipital lobe. I… don’t remember where…Left parietal lobe. I…I…I can’t remember my name,but…but…Right temporal…but I’m still here. Right frontal. I’m still here… Right occipital. I’m still…Right parietal. I’m…Cerebellum. I’m…Thalamus. I…Hypothalamus. I…Hippocampus…Medulla……………..” (Shusterman 226).

In this passage we see this child’s mind deteriorate as sections of her brain is harvested. Shusterman doesn’t just show the body being taken apart, (which is disturbing by itself) he physically places us into the perfect position to watch as the very essence of a human being is destroyed.

Throughout the novel, Shusterman alludes to questions of the human soul – What is the human soul? If our body is separated but still alive in others, is our soul gone? Did it get transferred? Are we dead or alive? He gives us everything we need to form our own conclusion. But whatever conclusion you may reach, the remainder of the novel is given new power, because we now know the fate that awaits our heroes if they fail – complete and utter dissolution of body and mind.

YA fiction is underrated in the adult community, but it should be given a chance, because by having fewer expectations than a literary novel, YA novels are able to take more risks, thus providing the reader with a new experience. Although not as popular as The Hunger Games or Harry Potter, Unwind is the perfect novel for those who wish question their beliefs, better understand a topic of great controversy, and wonder how the human mind adapts to new perspectives. Read this book.