AY, CUBA!
by Andrei Codrescu, photos by David Graham
(St. Martins) $25
It’s a pretty idea for a feature article, but a wretched excuse for a book: Send NPR’s ex-Romanian commentator to Cuba with a photographer, so that the former communist subject might expound upon Cuba, Castro, and the Cuban revolution. Unfortunately, Andrei Codrescu’s favorite subject is himself. What came out of this romp through U.S. embargo-enforced poverty should have been titled How I Spent 12 Days Showing My Ass.
Codrescu explores the titillations available to well-heeled middle-aged men — or to anyone with a few American dollars. Some of his anecdotes are perceptive and nicely told, but this project mostly focuses on the impressions of the author, whose memories of Romania in the 1950s have practically nothing to do with Cuba today.
Qué lástima. While capitalists lick their chops to devour the island with free trade, and communists pound their chests to tout how Cuba is much better off than your typical banana republic, Codrescu could have written a valuable account rather than an inferior guidebook fleshed out with soft porn. With a little more work, the founder of the fine (and defunct) magazine Exquisite Corpse might have come up with something that people other than his abject fans would want to read.
Instead, we get a vacation memoir, decorated by bad imitation French Surrealist poetry and filled with some good photographs, half a dozen of which exhibit the author. Codrescu reads at Bumbershoot, Sat 9/4, 4:15 pm, Starbucks Literary Stage. DOUG NUFER
BORROWED HEARTS: NEW & SELECTED STORIES
by Rick DeMarinis
(Seven Stories) $24
Death be not strange — but it ain’t very welcome, neither. In Rick DeMarinis’ collection of new and selected stories, Borrowed Hearts, there’s always this heavy-breathing proximity of death — with its plethora of omens, intimations, signals, and signs — like a familiar stranger who won’t fucking quit the party. Confronted with this ubiquitous mortal bummer, the lonely narrators self-paint portraits of a nostalgic paradise that wasn’t so innocent to begin with, a fey dream with no basis in the squalid reality of a squandered past.
All the better for DeMarinis, as a bespoiled romantic-cum-cynic, to deliver lines such as this: “There was something just out of reach in this stopped moment between us.” Ouch. He’s very often just that good, but without that certain Flannery O’Connor something that makes the prose-tragedies of humanity wallop you right in the sternum — where you spiritually live — as opposed to merely puckering your cerebellum with satire. He works hard, and consistently hits the dart board of good literature, but the stinging bull’s-eyes are rare (but maybe that much more profound). DeMarinis, at his very best, is an effective caricaturist of that most peculiar American breed: the loose cannons of a loquaciously alienated masculinity, those sex-and-death obsessed Hamlets of rotting suburbia. RICK LEVIN
CHRON!IC!RIOTS!PA!SM!
by fly
(Autonomedia)
P.O. Box 568, Williamsburgh Stn.
Brooklyn, NY. 11211-0568
Writing from anger is usually really boring to read. The New York artist fly seems to have ingested an entire Manhattan trash heap of societal disease, but the art and writing she spews forth ends up reaching a height and purity of pain that’s both cathartic and transporting. Much of CHRON!IC!RIOTS!PA!SM! proceeds in dreamlike narrative punctuated by ellipses… so that every angry story, every inhuman offense, is lent a meditative quality. Fly’s illustrations range from loopy doodles that a goth adolescent might pen on her Peechee to fine, moody, haunting dream puzzles. She asks hard questions with a pensive feminine smartness: “I woke up in flames one day. How is it? That I have become so combustible?” Part personal zine, part political tract, part poetry, CHRON!IC!RIOTS!PA!SM! could be inspiration for the Apocalypse. TRACI VOGEL
LOST AND FOUND
FROM INDIA TO THE PLANET MARS: A STUDY OF A CASE OF SOMNAMBULISM, WITH GLOSSOLALIA
by Theodore Flournoy
(Harper, 1901) Out of Print
Beginning in 1896, Helene Smith was possessed by the spirits of, variously, a “Hindoo princess,” Marie Antoinette, and several Martians. The psychologist Flournoy viewed her trances as symptoms of an illness that has long since vanished: “Somnambulism,” as Flournoy used the term, was not sleepwalking but a state of “auto-hypnoid suggestibility,” accompanied by such phenomena as “typtological dictation,” “consecutive amnesia,” and “retrocognition.” Flournoy set out to demonstrate that Smith’s trances were the work of her unconscious. In doing so, he documented his own contributions to the course of Smith’s somnambulism.
Like a philologist, Flournoy pores over Smith’s scraps of “Martian” and “Hindoo,” treating first the “Martian romance” and then the “Hindoo cycle.” Flournoy remarks that these scraps are like fragments of a novel, but one without “plot or intrigue.” The Hindu cycle lacks compelling historical detail, and the Martian romance is no Gulliver’s Travels (the Martians suffer a failing common to fictional aliens: they are merely humans with funny ears). Smith’s unconscious may be structured like a novel, but not a good one.
What makes this lost book nonetheless worth looking for is its documentation of, on the one hand, the reality of Smith’s somnambulism, and on the other, Flournoy’s influence over it. If Smith didn’t speak “Hindoo,” she nonetheless possessed (according to a certain “de Saussure” whom Flournoy consulted) an inexplicable facility with Sanskrit. Martian was “very much like French,” but this invented language was internally consistent. And Flournoy even credits Smith (or her unconscious) with genuine powers of clairvoyance and telekinesis. In turn, Flournoy influenced the very illness he was documenting. His presence at the seances, and the suggestions he made to Smith during them, caused a “transformation and tremendous expansion” of her somnambulism. Both the book and the illness were in a sense co-authored by Smith and Flournoy. As Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen has argued, an “out-of-print” illness encourages us to ask not, “Is somnambulism real?” but “How do words spread these infections?” DIANA GEORGE