Category: Art

Monstruary

by Julian Rios

Knopf, 225 pp., $25

Imagine for a moment that through some strange rift in reality you have been physically transported to the absurd, unnatural, and harrowing world of a Hieronymous Bosch painting, but you’re blindfolded. What you hear is disquieting. What you smell is nauseating. Since you can’t see, providing narration for every terrible and nonsensical sight encountered is your disturbingly alliterative and alarmingly articulate guide Julian Rios, author of Monstruary.

Rios’ most recent book, masterfully translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman, is nigh Joycean in its labyrinthine linguistic complexity, though you most likely can decipher its prose — unlike some of Joyce’s — albeit a bit dense and breathless.

Monstruary is the tale of Emil, our writer/artist/narrator, and his exceptionally gifted cadre of friends and acquaintances, who are all caught up in a world of high-octane art and bad-luck love. The title of the book comes from Emil’s friend Mons’ painting-series-in-progress, a number of works with many different recurring themes but one thing in common: chilling imagery, which Emil is all too happy to relate to his audience in horrific detail.

It seems Mons must first have a drunken nightmarish vision a la Bosch before his brush touches canvas:

The trampling angel with the body of curling clouds who plunges

ahead on petrified pillar legs that shoot fire like muskets and

make the earth tremble to the rhythm of a pile driver.

Ill-assorted multitudes of human figures with the heads of animals, vertebrate and invertebrate, and all kinds of beasts and insects

with the heads of men and women and mutants, semihuman masses

that swarm like ant colonies, surge like cresting waves, spill

like avalanches into chasms of darkness. …

A giant starling straddled by a naked Lilliputian. …

A tightrope walker with the head of a goldfinch.

A carp with the head of a duck.

A beetle with the gaunt, dissipated face of a young man.

Fish with human arms, men and women with fishtails …

Admittedly, this is a very odd book. While we learn the details of the characters’ lives and loves, we’re intermittently taken on descriptive roller-coaster rides regarding paintings and sculptures, the life of the mind of several artists, mysterious journals full of automatic writing penned by unaware mediums of dead wives (each almost indecipherable phrase rife with possible meanings), et cetera. And this roller coaster starts on page one.

Somewhat pretentious is the narrator’s ubiquitous plays on words, obscure puns, and alliterative phrases — that poor exhausted translator! — of which there have to be at least 20 on every single page. (Every character is a latent linguist.) No phrase is left unskewed by double entendre, no pun is left unpunned, and rarely is a sentence left in which every word does not echo another with the same sound or series of letters. Chew on this: “That delirious architecture seemed to spring from the opium visions of De Quincey and Coleridge, semisymmetries in a chaotic kaleidoscope where dromedary domes rose beneath the cupola of night, mad truncated caracole staircases against unsalvageable walls, lofty basalt rising over the abyss, pilasters soaring to the stars and splintered plinths and prostrate rostrate columns, the sharp beaked peaks of their rostrums earthbound, and alligators astride astragals in the black sun of melancholy.”

For many readers this will be too much to deal with. They’ll lose interest immediately, or, if intrigued, will simply be worn out by the sentence strata they have to constantly dig through to get at meaning. But there are plenty of masochist members of the intelligentsia who relish a very challenging book like this, obstinately difficult in its narrative bent. You just have to be a word junkie. You have to enjoy it like others enjoy puzzles. The meaning’s there, but you’ve got to know what to look for to get it.

Don’t get me wrong. I recommend Monstruary, especially if you love art and literature. But don’t eat too many pronto pups and cotton candy before you get on the ride, and for God’s sake keep your hands inside the car at all times.

Too Much Loneliness?

Isolation is all well and good. But as questioned earlier, can a writer live alone? The answer is: most likely, but it is more fun to have a community. Michelle Buckalew agrees. “We must remember that a lot of great things can come out of talking with authors and people who write,” she says. “There are wonderful relationships that can help our community. [Right now,] It’s so fragmented.”

“A few years ago,” Corey Mesler recalls, “for National Poetry Month, which is in April, Otherlands coffee shop had [roughly] 20 poets read for 3-5 minutes each. It was an entire evening of poetry and the wildest spectrum of poets you could imagine. It was great. And nothing has been done since like that. I wish there more things like that.”

“This is a very feudal city and I don’t just mean academically. Memphis operates in cells,” says Randall Kenan. According to Buckalew, so does most of the writing community. “A lot of writers aren’t aware of other writers. There is no network outside of particular institutions. There aren’t a lot of venues to meet, they don’t foster relationships.”

Shara McCallum, local poet, assistant professor in the creative writing program at the University of Memphis, and current head of the River City Writing Series has something of a different viewpoint. While she agrees that there can always be more options for those inclined toward word-smithing, she would like to see a larger audience in Memphis.

“There are a number of writers in this town,” McCallum says. “So that if someone wished to look, there’s something there to take advantage of. I think that writer’s find communities, find each other. I’m interested in a readership of good literature by people who are not necessarily writers. I think that needs to come back to the U.S. There is a support of the visual artists [by patrons] who are not themselves visual artists. I think that writers are already so insular in terms of our community, in particular in academia and how much that has become a centralized place for writers to exist now. I feel what is important is for educated readers to read literary stuff. I think it [Memphis] is still lagging behind where I would love for it to be.”

Mesler expresses some frustration along the same vein. Though Burkes Bookstore hosts multiple book-signing parties for local, nationally, and internationally known authors, sometimes the response from the citizenry is less than extraordinary. “I’m often disappointed in the turn-out,” Mesler says. “If I could figure it out, I would be smarter than I am. I’ve been doing this for 26 years and I haven’t figured it out.”

He doesn’t think that lack of recognition stops with name writers. “I think what you always miss — and this is unfortunate — is that there are writers who are working very seriously and with great commitment to their craft who haven’t had the success. I am sure there are poets and short-story writers who have placed things in magazines and they just haven’t had a breakthrough and they may never. That’s the sad state of publishing today.”

Buckalew adds, “I think it is so important for the writers to know that they are appreciated and to somehow salute them, acknowledge them in some way because this area is not known so much as other areas.”

A Growing Community.

Admist all this negative talk of the lack of a writing community, there are pockets of Athenian cultures among the prevalent Visigoth society. For example, Royal Stewart, Marketing Manager of the Deliberate Literate sees a mentorship growing in the recesses of his coffee shop. “There’s a gal named Melissa Crouch.” he says. “She’s kind of become a student of Craig’s. She’s in the process of writing a movie and getting all kinds of help.” Crouch, a poet, is now producing her first short films with Brewer’s advice.

These sorts of relationships were unheard of as recently as a decade ago, according to Mesler. “I think the Memphis literary scene used to be non-existent,” he says. “It was a bunch of back-biting curs with egos who wouldn’t talk to each other, wouldn’t give anybody credit. If you were associated with Memphis State [now the University of Memphis], you wouldn’t associate with the Rhodes writing group. That was about ten years ago. I think there’s been a lot of positive change. Tina Barr coming to Rhodes, Shara McCallum coming to the University of Memphis. Those two women bring a lot of energy and a lot of creativity. They care.”

Says McCallum, “I’ve seen some progress. I really have seen some good things happen. So I have hope. I’m not at all seeing it as a dismal thing.”

Kenan, however, is not so optimistic. “I don’t see Memphis becoming Santa Fe or Dallas anytime soon,” he says, referring to those cities vibrant literary communities. “The people’s priorities are not such to cause that to happen. It’s [Memphis is] a blue-collar town. People don’t have a lot of time for it. Which isn’t to say that it dictates destiny because there are working classes very interested in the arts. But it’s not in a lot of people’s priorities.”

All that said, there is a consensus that the writing community in Memphis could stand some improvement without exceeding the city’s critical mass of interest. One such improvement can come from the media.

“I think that — as someone who is looking at the overall spectrum of arts — if the media doesn’t do something, we’re sunk in general. I think there will be a small [writing] community always,” says McCallum. “ I don’t think it will ever be huge. But I think that small community can be better reached and better served if the main sources of information — which is what the media is supposed to be — gets behind us.”

Hancock shares McCallum’s frustration with the press. “We deserve some sort of kudos,” he says. “We seem to get press from all sides except from Memphis. The media just ignores us. It pushes us to the side.”

However, writers in Memphis are at least receiving more interest from the arts community at large. Mesler sees the inclusion of a poetry booth in this year’s Arts in the Park festival as a big sign that the literary arts are moving onto the main stage in Memphis’ arts scenes. “I saw that as a really positive thing,” he says. “When you talk about arts in Memphis, you used to be talking about dance, painting, theater, and music. And nobody gave a thought about writers and the writers didn’t feel a part of the arts.”

In all the cases, there are small steps toward a more general recognition in the city. Such a distinction, according to Brewer is something the city deserves to give itself. “I think Memphians are beginning to reward themselves more. I haven’t lived here my whole life [his family moved to California from Memphis and Brewer moved back ten years later], but I think it’s fair to for me to say that Memphians dog themselves and dog the location.” According to Brewer, Memphis’ growing literary scene is an indication of its acceptance of itself as more than that city between St. Louis and New Orleans.

There’s more. There’s always more. There are writers not mentioned and writing programs not here in this article and ideas not shared. Still, it is a start. The literary word is not dead here in Memphis and is even growing a little day by day. The next time you find out about an author signing or a poetry reading, why not check it out? The wind blows and the rain rains and writers write. Now all that needs to happen is for writers — and readers — to talk about it.

The wind blows, the rain rains, and writers write. It is hard to escape such simple truisms. But a more murky question is this: Where do writers write? Certainly not Memphis? The city known for the Blues and barbeque, independent theater and minor-league sports could not possibly have a writing scene. Right?

Let’s see (in no particular order): Shelby Foote, Steve Stern, Arthur Flowers, Marilou Awiakta, Randall Kenan, Ralph Wiley, Tina Barr, Shara McCallum, Craig Brewer, Marshall Boswell, Margaret Skinner, John Fergus Ryan, Tom Graves, Joan Williams, Corey Mesler, Alan Lightman, Jim Gray, Charles Turner, Cary Holladay, John Bensko . . . okay, the list goes on and on. And these are just the Memphians who are established workers at their crafts, with publications and awards galore. This speaks nothing about the various poetry slams around the city coffee-houses, the occasional reading, and all the writers yet to be known for their work.

Oh yeah, and there is John Grisham.

There are also writing venues. Owner Sarah Hull of the The Deliberate Literate on Union hosts multiple series for area readers and writers to get together and convene with programs like poetry readings, the Yarn-Spinners club, a story-telling center, and the Word from the Basement series. There is the River City Writers Series at the University of Memphis as well as a similar writing series at Rhodes College, both featuring Pulitzer winning writers. The University of Memphis houses an MFA program, and Rhodes sponsors a well-known summer writer’s camp for high schoolers. Both programs publish literary journals, the University of Memphis on a national basis and the Rhodes on a smaller scale, but to much acclaim in academe.

Memphis magazine offers a $1,000 prize each year to the winner of its annual fiction contest. According to Marilyn Sadler who oversees the contest, there are few contests that offers that much. The winning story is published in the magazine.

On the air, Michelle Buckalew hosts The Book Gallery on AM 600 WREC’s station on Beale Street every week, interviewing writers from around the world. On the FM dial, 89.3, The Book Show broadcasts weekly with host Douglas Glover. On TV, the Library Channel (cable channel 18), supports three book shows: Talks with Authors, Library NewsLinc, with a library representative discussing new books available in the Memphis library system, and the “Channel 18 Spotlight,” a monthly interview with various area writers, as well as other artists. On the web at http://www.memphislibrary.lib.tn.us/, you can read book reviews for what is in the libraries or write your own.

Memphis also has a surprising and growing live literary presence in the form of the Poetry Slam, an event likened to “the Olympics” by Slam-Master John Hancock who runs the Memphis chapter of the nation-wide group with co-Slam-Master Benjamin “IQ” Sander. Once a month, there is an “official” Poetry Slam (usually at the Map Room) where 10-13 readers have three minutes and ten seconds to read their work. The five judges then judge the performances (half on the poem and half on the performance). According to the Poetry Slam’s website at www.memphispoetry.com/slam, “Any audience member who isn’t related or sleeping with a poet may judge.”

Last year, the Memphis Poetry Slam team went to a National Poetry Slam competition in Providence Rhode Island, and also a regional Slam in Birmingham, Alabama, where they placed third. Hancock and Sanders are also creating a non-profit organization tentatively called Word Play Ink which will support the Poetry Slam group. They also hope to work toward bringing poetry to the community on a wider basis with such events as Youth Poetry Slams.

Finally, there is the The Mid South Writers’ Association, started by Paul Flowers, an author, journalist, and columnist for the defunct Memphis Press-Scimitar. The group has grown from meetings in Flowers’ home to bimonthly gatherings at St. John’s Episcopal Church, located at Central and Greer. The group publishes Writers on the River, a bi-annual journal featuring the nonfiction, fiction, and poetry of Memphis writers.

So there are Memphis writers and locales and discussions. Big deal. Every city has its own writers. Language, as ubiquitous as it is, extends its grippy fingers to every walk of life and few communes escape. However, to say that a city has writers is not the same as saying that there is a writing community. And while common-sense accepts that writers are by their very nature loners, history accepts the best work of writers coming in groups. Think of Modernist salons or surrealist get-togethers. For those esoteric, think about the Dadaists.

But in the same way that literary writers and thinkers see the world as a big fragmented mess, Memphis writers do not get together too often for coffee. However, such a step would require a unique vibe running through the heart and work of the writers present. Do Memphis writers have a genre all their own?

The Memphis Voice

“When I read a Grisham,” says Rhodes writer-in-residence Marshall Boswell, “I look for landmarks. There’s a southern suburbia to Memphis; all those lawyers and judges. All those spots and landmarks like Silky O’Sullivans. It’s more about a region. It’s restaurants and barbeque. It’s Elvis.” Memphis writers also seem concerned with the city. Says U of M assistant professor, North Carolina native, and Rome de Prix winner Randall Kenan, “That’s a truism about Southern writers. We’re obsessed with place.”

“I’d say that Memphis writers are very steeped in the history of the city,” says Corey Mesler, owner of 125-year-old Burkes Bookstore, who just signed a book deal on his first novel. “In a way, they [Memphis writers] are very pro-Memphis.”

Going away from the printed page to the projected screen, Memphis screenwriter and filmmaker Craig Brewer says, “Storytelling is very important in the South in general. I think it was Peter Taylor who said, ÔWell, the South lost. That’s why there are good writers there.’”

Brewer says other Southern influences are in the writing as well. “Family history is very important, at least it is to my family,” he says. “You can’t help but when you’re in this city and in this location to know that people have a need and are connected to a history.”

But a sense of history and place does not add up to a sort of collective unconscious needed for unity. There has been no defining great Memphis novel. “I haven’t seen that captured,” says Boswell. “It’s under-appreciated and it’s not real flashy, so I think it’s going to take some carefully nuanced observation to get at it.”

Says Buckalew, “I would say that most of the local writers are just looking. They’re looking, I think, for a voice.”

“I don’t think that Memphis [writing] has a specific feel. I don’t think the Blues influences it or anything like that,” says Hancock. “What I do feel is that there are a lot of people in Memphis who think outside of the box more than people expect. They think a lot bigger than anyone else in the country would realize. All the artistic history that is here in the city breeds people to be artistic in one way or the other. A lot of that comes out in their writing.”

That voice can lead to untapped reserves of writing potential in the area’s students. Says Kenan about his students, “They have a lot of material. I think the sad thing is that they don’t realize how good it is. I spend a lot of time trying to convince people that their mundane, unexamined circumstance is just their niche. I can’t believe more people haven’t written more.”

“I think Memphis is fertile ground,” says Boswell, a native Memphian. “Tom Wolfe did his Atlanta book and figured the mainstream of the country is being generated from this part of the country. I think the South is the center of designing the culture right now.”

Try preaching that to Hollywood, who is currently at odds with Brewer over the location of his next movie. “That’s kind of the deal breaker right now,” Brewer says. “I go to these meetings at New Line Cinema and Universal and they’re like, ÔDoes it have to take place in Memphis?’ Well, yeah. It’s such a unique place.” Brewer’s recent success seems to prove his point. “You know what’s funny about Poor &Hungry,” Brewer wonders aloud, “I was so expecting that once I got past the Mississippi [River], no one would be interested because it was regional. It was quite the reverse. I think the South is one of the last mythological places in America. Too much has fertilized this soil.”

If the South is such “fertile” ground, not all writer’s feel enough people realize that. Says Hancock, on his experiences at national Poetry Slam tournaments, “On a National level, there’s a Northern stigma against the South in general. It’s difficult to convince people that we’re not just a bunch of illiterate hillbillies. So many people don’t appreciate their Southern literary heritage. They don’t realize how many great writers come from our area. It’s sad to see that when you go out and perform a piece that has nation-wide or world-wide appeal and it confounds an audience that doesn’t know what to expect from a city like Memphis.”

A Writer’s City?

Fine, so there are writers and at least some common vibes about which to write here in Memphis. But does that make Memphis a good city in which a writer can live? What makes it interesting for writers to work here? One major benefit is that Memphis is away from the center of the literary world such as the giant literary agencies and presses and even the smaller, independent scenes.

It is that separation that can be good for a writer’s life. “I’ve lived in literary towns and non-literary towns and this is one of the least literary towns I have been in,” Kenan says. “Which, for a writer, is wonderful because you aren’t sub-conscious about it. People aren’t rhapsodizing about the place from a literary standpoint.”

Barr thinks Memphis is a good place for her and her muse. “It’s been very good for my writing,” she says. “It’s allowed me to focus. It’s different if you are in New York and you are going to miss the Metropolitan Opera. It’s quiet [in Memphis], and that’s good for my work.”

Says Hancock, “I think it’s [Memphis Writing] more ‘salt of the Earth.’ With a lot of the writers in the city, I don’t feel synthetic words from these poets.”

Brewer says that the cacophony of peers can be deafening. “When I went out to L.A.,” he says, “I was there for a week. I realized on about Thursday of that week that my ideas began to get stupider. When you get so close to the industry, in my case the film industry, your thoughts begin to sound like everything else around you.”

However, Brewer, who does a good amount of his writing at the Deliberate Literate, also finds inspiration in Memphis’ peculiarities. “I remember coming back home and it was Dead Elvis Week,” he recalls. “I was glad I was back and I was that I live here.”

Part 2 of this article will appear in tomorrow’s On the Fly.

As it is in Larry Brown’s fiction, so be it in Larry Brown’s nonfiction: straight up. Language: straightforward; method: straight-shooting. He’s made that way his way in short stories and novels, in one work of nonfiction (On Fire), and again in nonfiction, now, in Billy Ray’s Farm (Algonquin), a new selection of previously published magazine articles, plus a closing essay titled super-economically “Shack.”

That “shack,” like the author’s writing, is simply put: a set of walls and roof Brown built with his own hands on his own land in Tula, Mississippi, where, if he wishes, he can watch the rain come down, maybe step outside and fish, maybe strum a guitar. Maybe write? Sometime, perhaps, when the tiny building is finally finished and when, as he describes elsewhere in these pages, he is: not on a book tour, not at the Enid Spillway “fish grab,” not at Proud Larry’s in Oxford, not aiming at coyotes, not rescuing goats, not wrestling with a “calfpuller” and mother heifer and unborn calf, and not remembering the kindnesses shown to him by personal hero Harry Crews and an unsung hero praised nonetheless by Flannery O’Connor, Madison Jones.

Brown met Jones in 1989. The occasion: Brown’s first literary conference. And it’s an occasion in Billy Ray’s Farm for Brown to state explicitly what Jones succeeded in doing and what Brown, implicitly, hopes himself to achieve in fiction: “a relentless forward drive of narrative”; “the ordinary things of life [witnessed] with great clarity, [the] weather and seasons and the land that lies around the characters”; “people … caught up in the events around them and swept forward … to the point where drastic actions can result.” In short, fiction populated by “people breathing and moving and acting on their own, as if this story was simply found somewhere, fully formed.” Better put, shorter still: to make something that “makes you forget that you’re reading.”

Needing, however, more than a cow’s prolapsed uterus in the way of “drastic action”? Conflict both internal and external, on a grand scale? People caught up in events and swept forward, even unto certain death? Something nowhere near the “ordinary” but “things,” the weather, the seasons, the land around people so caught, witnessed with great clarity? Anthony Loyd’s My War Gone By, I Miss It So (in paperback from Penguin) may be a story the author found fully formed when he first set foot in Sarajevo in 1993, but you’ll in no way forget you’re reading. You may in fact feel the urge to stop reading and throw up once inside this eyewitness reporter’s heroin-fed brain and inside his depiction of contemporary warfare, Balkans-style and centuries in the making.

That this author is still alive isn’t a matter of luck, it’s a matter of miracle. When he isn’t shooting up on return trips to London, he’s shooting (as cameraman) any number of atrocities and being shot at (as sitting duck) by any number of sides responsible for those atrocities in war-torn Bosnia.

Loyd’s employer was The Times of London, but Loyd’s outlook isn’t a seasoned newspaperman’s cool detachment. He knowingly, repeatedly, recklessly, suicidally (?) plants himself where the going gets tough and the tough (including innocents) get … what? In the way. Of bullets and bayonets and worse. Those bullets and bayonets, backed by bloodthirsty commanders backed by competing, insane nationalisms, this book does something to explain but in no way explains away. Better, as in the case of a kitten making off with a man’s spilled brains or as in the sight of a disoriented crone wielding a man’s severed leg, you, like Loyd, cast your feelings in the bin marked “horrible” and wait “until the night’s darkness paroles them into your dreams.” That a self-professed fuck-up as major as Anthony Loyd could pull himself together and graduate to writing this good must say something about A) the educational might of England or B) the survivor instinct inbred in Loyd from a host of military forefathers. The result either way: a dispatch from the nightmare also known as front-page news.

An altogether different, private, bloodless nightmare presents itself the second you so much as read a word of Roberto Calasso’s Literature and the Gods (Knopf), the private portion being the realization, despite education and reading, you don’t know squat. The least but immediate of the book’s virtues? It’s short. Meaning: a complete reread isn’t an option, it’s a given. The topic: nothing less than the foundation of Literature itself, with a capital L; man’s perception of the gods as real entities, interceding, wrecking, inspiring earthly affairs and stretching back to archaic Greece and antique Rome; the much earlier source of that interplay, the early Vedic verses and ritual practices of India; and the revolutionary reworking of individual consciousness that took place in 19th-century Germany and France, according to avant-garde theories of artistic creation, the very well-spring of modernism. Course requirements: a working knowledge (preferably in the original but translations, for wimps, provided) of Baudelaire, Heine, Helderlin, Lautreamont, Mallarme, Nabokov, Nietzsche, and Novalis, and never will you feel stupider than you will reading this book. Dig out from college your thinking cap and forget about forgetting you’re reading.

Taps

By Willie Morris

Houghton Mifflin, 338 pp., $26

Willie Morris died in 1999, which makes his novel Taps posthumous but not unfinished. His widow, JoAnne Prichard Morris, who oversaw every aspect of the manuscript’s preparation, who honored every change Morris indicated, has seen to that.

Taps took the author decades to write. Morris began toying with the idea of a fictional work based on his own experiences growing up in Yazoo City, Mississippi, as far back as the late 1960s, the same period (1967-71) he served as editor of Harper’s. When he returned to Mississippi in 1980 he returned in earnest to Taps, a labor of love obviously, a work to join My Dog Skip in popularity possibly.

The story is a year in the life of Swayze Barksdale (age 16), the season opener is early summer 1951 (with the Korean War at its height), the place is Fisk’s Landing (Yazoo City stand-in, pop. 10,184, staple of conversation: hearsay), and life there goes this way: divided — between hill country and flatland; between planters and plain folk; between blacks and whites; between the living and the dead; and between what these citizens, good or bad, show of themselves and what they don’t or can’t, which, in the book’s violent climax, makes for a matter of life and death. Heavy-duty? Sometimes yes, more times no. Heavy-handed? In spots.

“I began to see that everyone in the town seemed troubled,” young Swayze observes after perhaps observing more than most 16-year-olds in a town he goes on to describe as “a warehouse of tormented souls.” His object by the time he reaches college at Sewanee? To “remember with surging clarity how passionately I was trying to give a little sense and design to the things I had felt and learned and experienced.” It’s a tall order, but consider:

1) A fatherless boy on the brink of adulthood who “worries about everything,” who is “miserable in the very tributaries of [his] soul,” which prompts in or on him “a sturdy trace of paranoia — warts and rash and angst … dread of the open grave and the mother … perverse predilection for the Ricks Funeral Home … and along with all this a proclivity for the desolate, the insufferable, the troubling.”

2) A widowed, indomitable mother, a teacher of tap dance but with “aristocratic” forebears, who is “fraught with an inordinate propensity for intrusion,” a woman “obscurely troubled” and driven to search and research her son’s every move.

3) A girlfriend, Georgia: “spoiled, irreverent, unpredictable,” “stubbornly self-reliant and free,” source of Swayze’s joy, then sorrow.

4) The half father, half big brother to Swayze, Luke Cartwright: a man of “truncated queries and unembarrassed silences,” “half redneck and half coat-and-tie,” “iconoclastic,” “ironic,” a man who sensed “the essential malevolence of things and aberrant behavior and other people’s limitations.”

5) Rich boy Durley Godbold, whose limitation is being born the monster son of a “feudal grandee” of a father, his limit crossed when he learns of Cartwright’s affair with Godbold’s wife Amanda, “daughter of a failed yeoman turned small time entrepreneur” yet blessed with “an essence of honor” to go with her iron sense of self.

And 6) Potter Ricks, owner of the local funeral home, “a central figure in those days, the talisman and necromancer and conjurer of the tale, the sad, the gruesome, the funny,” “custodian of our past.” It is Ricks, along with Cartwright, who enlists trumpeters Swayze and his misanthropic friend Arch to play “Taps” for the town’s multiple war dead over the course of these 12 months.

If the prospect from Fisk’s Landing looks gloomy, Morris’ story, for the most part, is not. And yet, early on we learn this from Swayze: “The ornately polite and elaborate society of that old small town rewarded the child for keen observation and encouraged him to listen — a society of extremes with secrets not easily honored” and with some secrets apparently more honored than others.

Swayze’s mother Ella, for one, is a case of barely contained hysterics. Swayze observes her but cannot justify, much less comprehend, her bizarre actions. And Swayze’s father, “a tall man … of gentle countenance” who died when the boy was 10, figures even less prominently in Swayze’s recollections. Unless by the tap of Ella’s feet we’re to hear of a husband and father (the author’s own?) being secretly, repeatedly mourned.

JoAnne Prichard Morris will be reading from and signing copies of Taps at Burke’s Book Store tonight, Thursday, April 19th, from 5 to 7 p.m. For more info, call Burke’s at 278-7484.

This is Not a Novel

By David Markson

Counterpoint, 190 pp., $15 (paper)

In the library of the world, the reader who suppresses the prejudice of taste (to go beyond a favorite genre and explore those countless books of every kind that sit still unread on the shelves) is the reader who inherits the greatest riches. With a wide-open mind, she stuffs her head with works from the entire spectrum of the written word. When her field of reference has become a fruited plain stretching to the horizons of her mind, she will enjoy the satisfaction of knowing that she did her best to wring a greater understanding out of the collective consciousness of humanity.

Now, if you’re not of my ilk and you don’t consider it your duty to gorge your head on the offal of 10,000 other minds, don’t listen to me. Read whatever the hell you want to read. But if you are of my ilk, then I suggest you pick up David Markson’s latest book, This is Not a Novel, which is one of the most edifying works I’ve ever encountered.

Markson’s is a mind stuffed, a mind comprising a vast field of reference, a sated, rich mind. The title is apt. The book is more of a meditation than a novel, though it does fall into the category of highly experimental fiction (self-referential metafiction particularly). There is a narrator, called only “Writer,” who tempts you down the winding yet circuitous path of his tale, which is, if anything, a fragmented monologue, the outpouring of a mind not just steeped but drowned in the literature, history, music, and art of the world.

If you asked me to simply state what the book is about, I would say: the arts, fame and “immortality,” and the cold hard fact of impending death, all delivered in anecdotal form. But the novel is not dark at all. On the contrary, it shines brilliantly, “plotless and characterless yet seducing the reader” (to quote “Writer”) with details from the lives (and deaths) of artists of every kind: musicians, painters, sculptors, writers, et cetera.

Every page is filled with brief paragraphs throwing out ideas for contemplation. Each piece of the “story” sometimes implies much more than it says, rendering these tidbits expansive upon consideration. As you go along the ideas and information begin to accumulate and allude to other works and other points set down in the narrative before. You will find yourself learning delicious details about names you know all to well and jotting down names to pursue further, myriad creators lost to all but the most encyclopedic minds. To give you a better notion of the form used throughout, here are some excerpts:

This morning I walked to the place where the streetcleaners dump the rubbish. My God, it was beautiful.

Says a Van Gogh letter.

~

When I was their age I could draw like Raphael. But it took me a lifetime to learn to draw like they do.

Said Picasso at an exhibition of children’s art.

~

My mind and fingers have worked like the damned. Homer, the Bible, Plato, Locke, Lamartine, Chateaubriand, Beethoven, Bach, Hummel, Mozart, Weber are all around me. I study them, I devour them with fury.

Wrote Liszt at twenty.

~

Greater than any of us, Yeats called Rabindranath Tagore.

~

The greatest lyric poet Germany ever knew, Gottfried Benn called Else Lasker-Schuler.

Who at sixty-four was beaten with an iron pipe by young Nazis on a street in Berlin.

~

Fray Luis de Leon, returning to his Salamanca classroom after five years of imprisonment by the Inquisition:

As I was saying…

~

Donatello, at work on his Zuccone, heard muttering at the stone:

Speak, damn you, talk to me.

Peppering these anecdotes throughout is the narrator’s forthright, even self-deprecating, thoughts on the writing itself. He is weary of making up stories. He wants to relate those he’s already heard. He’s sick of characters, plot, theme, setting, all the trappings of the novel, yet he’s his own character, pared down to only a voice. He can speak of nothing but the creative life and the inevitability of tragedy, but nothing ever gets too heavy. It’s all leavened by the capricious glee of the narrator’s tone, his wit poking through just when needed to break any tearful tension.

Is This is Not a Novel a compendium of quotations and hearsay or is it a book that would only interest a writer? It’s a fine and compelling read is what it is.

With each passing year, the architecture of a city changes. Buildings come and go. Think about it. How has the built environment in the area surrounding your own neighborhood or workplace changed in the past few years? This month, as Memphis magazine continues to reflect on its 25-year history, we thought it appropriate to consider how the architecture of our city has changed during that period. What are the outstanding design achievements, whether new construction or a renovation, that have made an impact on the city? And who better to comment on this changing cityscape than some Memphis architects? We asked each of them to name some design achievements from the last quarter century. There wasn’t enough space to list all of their choices, but we’ve highlighted a few. Is your favorite among them?

J. Carson Looney, FAIA

Looney Ricks Kiss

“The renovation of The Peabody (1981, McFarland & Associates) marked the turning point for downtown, which, by the late ’70s, was headed to the pits.” says Looney. “Such a major commitment as The Peabody established a precedent in people’s minds. This turning point signaled that it was okay to give a shot at the rebirth of downtown. Smaller projects that might never have taken off did so, all because of The Peabody, the Belz family, and then-director of the Center City Commission, John Dudas. The Belzes brought The Peabody back with such energy and commitment that it could not help but spill over into other areas of downtown.

“The Peabody is of its time, the late 1920s. It was the benchmark for hospitality, not just in Memphis but throughout the Mid-South. The Belz family did an excellent job. They did not go into the project with the intention of making the space “modern.” Instead, their renovation plan drew from the beauty of the original structure-and more importantly, the beauty that was in the public’s mind, and the emotional attachment that people had toward the building.Ê

“A great piece of architecture and great interiors do not always make for a great place, a place people love. It’s how the hotel is operated-and The Peabody is a first-class hotel. But it’s not just a hotel – it has become what it was historically-a destination.”

Lee Askew, FAIA

Askew Nixon Ferguson Architects Inc.

Lee Askew had a theory about buildings. “Buildings that start out as aliens often become icons,” he says. He cites as an example I.M. Pei’s glass pyramid in front of the Louvre in Paris that at first outraged some Parisians but now has quickly become a revered part of the landscape. Askew describes The Pyramid (1991, Rosser Fabrap) as one of the more not-able structures in Memphis that he feels is destined to become another icon. “The Pyramid is significant because of its function and shape, and its siting on the north bluffs,” he says.Ê

Jack Tucker, FAIA

Jack R. Tucker Jr. & Associates Architects

Jack Tucker, a veteran of downtown renovations and restorations, nevertheless looked to East Memphis when naming one of his favorite architectural projects. The Crescent Center at Poplar and Ridgeway (1986, Nathan Evans Pounders Taylor), he says, is appealing because of its subtle curve, its materials, and the fact that the design “looks at itself.” He notes that while the interior architecture of many office buildings can be predictable – in that the use dictates the design of the interiors – The Crescent Center’s exterior exceeds expectations on a major scale.

James Williamson, AIA

Williamson Pounders Architects, PC

The impact of AutoZone Park (2000, Looney Ricks Kiss) on the growth of downtown cannot be overemphasized, says architect James Williamson. “The park has been a real shot in the arm to downtown from a social and cultural point of view,” he says. “Now people are coming down here for recreational purposes.” Williamson also praised the design of the ballpark that opens to the street so passersby “can get a real sense of what’s going on inside.” He describes the plaza in front as “a generous civic gesture.”Ê

Williamson also singled out the Auto-Zone headquarters building (1995, Looney Ricks Kiss), that faces Front Street on the east and the river on the west. “The scale of the east side complements the adjacent Cotton Row warehouses, while the curving glass wall on the west side speaks to the curving nature of the Mississippi.”

The Memphis Brooks Museum of Art’s addition (1989, Skidmore, Owings and Merrill; Askew, Nixon Ferguson and Wolfe), says Williamson, is “extremely successful in that the architects were able to create a new main entrance without covering up or insulting the original, which dates from 1916. The museum’s new rotunda has become, in effect, its new entrance.”

Greg Hnedak, FAIA

Hnedak Bobo Group

Greg Hnedak views the Harbor Town (1989, Looney Ricks Kiss) development as a remarkable achievement whose appeal extends beyond the architecture. “It provides a different lifestyle downtown than just high-rise living, and I hope it helps to bring people back to the city,” he says. The architect adds that the choice of neotraditional architecture for Harbor Town was a logical one, appealing to people who want such designs as porches and houses set close to the street – features that increase the sense of neighborhood.

The architect, who himself has lived in Harbor Town for several years, says he also enjoys the neighborhood feeling that is created by Harbor Town’s commercial district. “Having a store like Miss Cordelia’s where you can buy staples like milk, being able to walk to a cash machine, a dry cleaner, a coffee shop where you can read a newspaper or a book – that’s part of the appeal. There’s even a day spa where you can get a massage.”

“Also, part of the draw is the diversity of people who live in Harbor Town,” says Hnedak, “which is racial to some degree but also economic.” He points out that Harbor Town housing types range from apartment rentals to high-end residences. “This is one of Harbor Town’s strengths that makes it such an appealing place to live,” he says.

“If you had told me 25 years ago, that I would be able to walk from my home to nearby stores, that I would be living in a house downtown that rivals any house in East Memphis, I would think you were dreaming,” Hnedak says. “Now I can look out my living room window and have a view of a pond. If I had to leave, I don’t know where I would go to find anything to compare to Harbor Town.”

[This story originally appeared in Memphis magazine.]

Michael Byron’s 1960 Ernst.

This week I am compelled to review the work of three very different painters, Michael Byron, Barbara Zaring, and Tom Chaffee, but to do so, some prologue is in order.

For most of art history, the medium of painting has ruled supreme. With the exception of figurative sculpture, the history of art itself is virtually undifferentiated from the history of painting. Some of the earliest instances of representation are found among the depictions of humans and animals in the cave paintings at Lascaux, dating from the Paleolithic era. Over the centuries, among various cultures, technical and aesthetic innovations evolved that were rooted in the idea of creating an illusionary reconstruction of three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface. During the 19th century, however, the depiction of an external realism gave way to an acknowledgment of the painting as a flat plane upon which pigment is suspended, giving the world Impressionism, Cubism, Abstraction, and ultimately, Minimalism.

This reduction of painting to its logical terminus has inspired the declaration from time to time that the practice of painting is dead. Since the ’60s, painting has played a secondary role in the art world as other forms of media have gained ascendancy.

Standing before the paintings of Michael Byron at Rhodes College’s Clough-Hanson Gallery, I cannot help but consider them stillborn. Don’t get me wrong, the artist is a consummate craftsman. His command of the medium of oil paint is evident in the sensitive depictions of images of modernist and ethnographic sculptures copied from black-and-white postcards. What leaves me cold is the self-consciousness of the whole enterprise. Byron is first and foremost a conceptual artist and painting for him becomes nothing more than a parlor trick at the service of his premeditated program.

For instance, each painting accentuates the flatness of the plane by way of trompe l’oeil water droplets. In an essay for the exhibit, Rhodes art history professor David McCarthy writes that “instead of the pristine picture plane needed to confirm the illusion of transparency, the stained surface calls attention to its opacity. This emphasis on surface returns us to the modernist insistence that a painting is, before anything else, an arrangement of pigment on a canvas.” God bless Byron for his attempt to make the viewer reconsider the contributions of modernism, but the patented approach makes for aclinical experience.

On a different note altogether, as a practitioner of oil painting, one might say that Barbara Zaring is a true believer. Like Byron, Zaring is in complete command of her medium, painting in a style that seemingly borrows from Impressionism, early Kandinsky, and Bay Area figurative simultaneously. The artist, who is exhibiting work at the Cooper-Young Gallery, is well-known in the Southwest for her depictions of the local landscape, and I especially am enamored of images of rock faces, as in Earth’s Crowning and Red Canyon in Spring.

What I found troublesome was the formulaic nature of Zaring’s palette. What one recognizes immediately is that the artist’s pungently chromatic colors seem to repeat themselves in practically every painting. I initially assumed that this was a reflection of the artist’s stylized representation of the much-touted light of the Southwest landscape until I came across the tiny Notre Dame. This work, while neutralized somewhat, contains the same juxtapositions of complementaries found among the images of the Southwest. This recurring palette risks relegating Zaring’s work to the simply decorative.

Tom Chaffee, professor of painting at Arkansas State University, is exhibiting several new works at the Jay Etkin Gallery. One would never accuse Chaffee of making pretty pictures. Rather his paintings juxtapose images of innocence with those of a mean world, as in Back Home in Indiana, in which a little girl in a pink dress stands side by side with the corpse of Mussolini, hanging by his ankles. Elsewhere, images of black buzzards, crumbling facades, haunted cathedrals, and angry dogs coexist among indecipherable texts and baby Jesus, and it seems that Chaffee’s favorite color happens to be a murky asphalt gray. Chaffee’s enigmatic layering of symbols and texts brings to mind the paintings of Basquiat.

Chaffee’s paintings are, as always, engaging, yet I am somewhat disappointed that they don’t seem to be a far cry from what he has been doing for quite some time now. Somehow, pairing innocence with degradation doesn’t seem as shocking as it once did, and the experience of this show left me feeling like I had seen it all before.

If these shows are any sign of the potency of painting, then no, painting may not be dead, but it is certainly hurting.

“Michael Byron: The Grisaille Series 1997-2000” at Rhodes College Clough-Hanson Gallery through March 22nd; “13 Paintings” by Barbara Zaring through March 3rd at Cooper-Young Gallery; “Paintings for the South Wall” by Thomas Chaffee through March 16th at Jay Etkin Gallery.