The Safe Vacation(to the tune of Memphis Tennessee)

The Safe Vacation
C 2014 by E.M.Kabak(to the tune of Memphis Tennessee)

I’m going to Fallujah on a ten day package tour
Though I think it might be safer livin’ in the sewer
Lying in a hotel bed once shelled in Ramadi
With a side trip to Aleppo’s Museum of the IED

The waiter that brings up room service-yes you’ve rightly guessed
Seems adorned in some once worn suicide type vest
So off it is to Africa- to the airport in Bangui
Where half the city’s population’s sleeping fitfully

So now you’re in a new place- will the bullets fly and kiss you
In your quarters in the crumbling port of Mogadishu…
One night there take a chopper say your prayers and then Amen
Now in Sa’na are you insane inside drone prone Yemen?

Check into the grand hotel -your room’s festooned with flowers
Perhaps because they’re planned you’re next- you flee within the hour
For now it’s on to Asia where your next reverie-
A three mile hike by foot and bike in the Korean DMZ

And the Japanese ship captain on your China Sea bound cruise
Has you wincing and convincing it’s your life to lose
He makes you think it’s safer in Peshawar Pakistan
So you go there and then to Makhachkala Dagestan

Now it’s time you fly home-which airline you don’t care
But why did you now take the view from Chechnya Chartered Air
Phew- the trip is over-- you’re home-don’t hold your breath
In the U.S., polar vertex, lest you freeze to death

So much now is changing. it’s all just shifting sands
Next year there’ll be tailgate parties rockin’ in Teheran…
Who knows the safest place to go soon may be IRAN!

Edgy Lit Top 25 Books -Part I

Welcome back!And Happy New Year to all. Here we present Edgylit's best 25 books of 2013, with a tribute to a couple published a while ago. They are listed in no particular order.Here are the first few:

Javier Marias-The Infatuations(Knopf)-A masterly metaphysical murder mystery touching on life,death. morality and chance.It starts with the protagonist. Maria Dolz,  each day watching in the same Madrid  cafe a middle aged Perfect Couple- Miguel Desvern and his wife Luisa Alday- having their breakfast. It is only some time later that Maria reads in the press that Miguel has been stabbed to death by a beggar in an apparent random murder.Bringing condolences to the widow,Maria meets her husband's friend , Diaz-Varuela, and soon thereafter begins an intermittent affair with him.
As one critic points out, this is a novel where chance may or may not survive a deeper, more
 introspective look.
The translation is by the redoubtable Margaret Jull Costa and is her usual, predictably brilliant work.It has been pointed out that the title in Spanish is Enamoramiento, the act of falling in love briefly but with great passion, whereas the word Infatuations characterizes a state of intense relations often entered into with folly. That's what happens though when works get published in different countries with a different culture and their personnel attend to such issues.
More to the point, there is, in this reader's judgment,no writer who handles long sentences with the same deftness that others display for the short clipped phrase.One feels that he/she is in the presence of a true master, perhaps the finest stylist in Europe, if not the world today.
After you finish The Infatuations you can proceed to one or more of  Marias' oeuvre-recommended is the trilogy, Your Face Tomorrow, which turns the spy novel into a Shakespearean voyage, worthy of Cervantes.

The People in the Trees by Hanya Yamagahira(Doubleday)
An enthralling first novel, twenty years in the works,loosely based on the life of Carleton Gajdusek, Nobel prize -winning scientist who discovered  as a result of field work in New Guinea ,the connection betweeen between eating at mortuary(cannibal) feasts and developing kore, which is now known as brain prion disease. Gajdusek however stumbled badly by adopting many young boys and bringing them back to the US where in Maryland he was charged with molestation, ultimately served a year in jail and retired in disgrace in Europe.
In Yamagahira's talented hands,these episodes are bookends in what is a wondrous picture of a doctor-anthropologist doing field work on the mythical South Pacific island of Ivu' Ivu where he and members of the expedition encounter a Stone Age tribe.The text,which is replete with detailed close observance of the lives of the people ,  reads like an exciting piece of field work, along with fictionalized scholarly footnotes; it is hard to believe that one is reading a novel.
The tale turns on the discovery of a subgroup of the islanders who as a result of certain contact with the flesh of an aquatic creature, live to become 200 years old, but also see their minds atrophy even as their bodies retain what appearsto be something akin to eternal  youth.The novel touches on these themes as well as the rivalry among scientists on being the first to publish and the ultimate contest by the pharmaceutical companies to capitalize on the discovery and take over the island for their own purposes.with the usual play between the values of different civilizations .
With taste and a fine hand, an engaging and provocatively entertaining read.

A Life In Books,The Rise and Fall of Bleu Mobley-by Warren Lehrer(Goff Books)
A unique offering from the multitalented author and innovative book designer Leherer.He has won numerous awards for book design and is the author/creator of numerous books/multimedia projects,including the recent Crossing the Boulevard, prepared with his wife Judith Sloan, as a series of interviews with immigrants to Queens and beautifully designed sections on the neighborhoods of Queens, perhaps the most ethnically varied, diverse community in the country.
A Life in Books is the fictionalized confession of Bleu Mobley, an author invented by Lehrer as a former inner city youth who became a journalist college professor and accidental best selling writer.The memoir,allegedly weitten from a jail cell,contains a list of 101 books published by Mobley and Lehrer has quoted excerpts from and designed and published book covers from many of them; the book is a humorous trip through  publishing with all its conceits and marketing tricks from "Out Sourcing Grandma" to the toilet paper poems (an art series)  and children's books(How Bad People Go Bye Bye) etc etc. A literary multimedia satirical romp through the last half century of publishing. Wonderful.

24/7-Late Capitalism and the End of Sleep by Jonathan Crary(Verso)
A philosophical polemic by a distinguished art history professor at Columbia University and a co founder of Zone magazine( an early post-modern Bible),the book is a pungent cri de coeur against how the marketplace  creates a sense of perpetual consumer and business activity and in doing so has changed the cyclical rhythm of life and effectively  even colonized sleep.Packed with quotable zingers, it treats the marginalization of social life and its replacement by an interface with machines that dwarfs all other relations not only during the daytime but at night as well. We now live in a culture where those in close contact with each other interact more with machines and mimic them than with their fellow citizens One doesn't have to be an anticapitalist to observe  the increasingly rapid hybridization of humans-  A killer book.

Out of the Mountains -The Coming Age of the Urban Guerilla byDavid Kilcullen (Oxford)
Kilcullen is an Australian expert on military intelligence and the book is a brilliant futurist tract on the conflation of four trends- increasing population, urbanization( as more move to the cities away from rural areas, particularly in Asia Africa and the Americas but elsewhere too), littoralization(the clustering of such cities in coastal areas)-and connectivity-particularly the spread of smart phones , social media sites and email among the world's population , including the poor, oppressed and insurgent populations. It makes the cities and the surrounding areas all arenas in a battle for competitive control among governments, insurgent groups, criminal gangs.fundamentalist radicals and other niche groups.
Again, one doesn't have to be a conservative or think tank spook to appreciate the brilliance of this text.
Just  for a few examples- We all remember(don't we now) what happened in Paris after the Revolutions of 1848, the populist rebellion that blew throughout Eueope and affected huge changes in its political and legal landscape. Haussman tore down down many of the side streets and cul de sacs  into which the police did not dare follow the rebelling groups and replaced them with a number of grand boulevards including the famous right bank eponymous avenue that in each case were large enough to allow a whole infantry column to march down, thus increasing the presence of the police in various parts of the city. That did not happen in the 1950's when the Algerian insurgency was able to win a victory over France in part because of the winding alleys and overhanging houses of the casbah in Algiers. And it's no secret that when the antiwar groups protested in NY City in 2004 , the NYPD made them march down or up the wide Avenues but then penned them for their rally in cornered off areas. Funny how some of us learn our civics lessons!

Then there was the attack by terrorists in Mumbai in late November 2008-One of the facilities attacked was the world famous Taj Hotel, where in the day or so before the Indian security forces deployed maximum strenth to rout the 4 terrorists stuck inside the Taj(10 terrorists in all did a huge amount of damage including shooting 150 people dead in the railway station), several folks holed up in a private dining club in the Taj. But they made a  mistake with their connectivity in tweeting and emailing their loved ones and others and when this was broadcast on tv, the handlers of the terrorists operating remotely dialed in  and communicated the location of the hideout to the four remaining terrorists who killed a few more before finally being despatched.
This  is an endlessly fascinating guide to what we hope may not be such a dystopian urban future.
Now real estate agents go out and sell those coops!

Book Expo- Waiting for Marias et al

BEA(Book Expo) is taking place this week at the Javits Center and we are surveying numerous new books and titles; there are a number of incredibly wonderful titles being published this year, many of them lost in the wake of the NY Times book reviews, which seem more and more pitched to those who hold book club discussions and read responsively...
 We have finished the UK edition of Javier Marias' The Infatuations. Marias, a prolific Spanish writer who has been compared to Proust and Henry James is more like a mad Cervantes, mixed with a dollop Of Sterne and then tiopped off with a layer of Proust.

There is no reading experience I have ever encountered that is as rich as the 3 volume Your Face Tomorrow, the existential espionage masterpiece of story telling published over the last fifteen years.
There is no writer whose paragraph if not page long sentences are more compelling. Even Laszlo Krasznahorkai does nor compel this level of excitement.

The plot(such as it is) can be neatly summarized thusly; A Madrileno, separated from his wife and two children who remain in Spain, takes a position with the BBC in London as a translator- At a party given by one of his former Oxford dons, he is recruited by Btitish espionage because he has the unique intuitive ability to read people's faces and predict what they will do "tomorow"or further in the future(the line comes from Henry IV,part 2, and is ascribed to Prince Hal)
In volume 2, most of the action takes place in a London Disco where the protagonist,Jaime Deza and his boss, the enigmatic Tupra, are entertaining a mafioso type, whose wife is being hit on by a Spanish compatriot, the latter who winds up in the handicapped men's room brought there by Deza at the direction of the boss,and who gets the living daylights pounded out of him by Tupra. When Deza later asks why this is ok,Tupra says 'why not" an d the nin volume 3 proceeds to lead him on a tour of past espionage videofootage;as a result, when Deza returns to Spain and finds that his estranged wife has bruises much like those the Spanish compatriot suffered in the men's room,(which she ascribes to being "hit by a garage door:" he takes  appropriate action as well.,before the denouement of the novel.
None of this can explain the incredible poweer of Marias'style of writing with his long loopimg paragraphs to engage with tthe culture the history and identity of numerous subjects from the Spanish Civil war(in which his father was informed on and exiled but not assassinated by Franco)and subjects ranging from the last Judgment to the relationship between botox and the botulin toxin that was used in the assassination of reinhard heydrich, the nazi Commandant of Prague)which provoked the fierce reprisal and slaughter by the Nazis of the inhabitants of a nearby Czech town)to obnscure works of art. A fabulous journey by a truly brilliant writer.

Take this passage for example quoted in extenso, but only part of an even longer soliloquoy:
in which the narrator is explaining why he cannot finish off the abusive boyfriend of his estranged wife:"I don't want anyone to disapear- was my next thought-I don't believe in the Last Judgment or in a great final dance of sorrow and contentment nor in some kind of rowdy get-together at which the murdered will rise up before their murderers and present their accusations to a bored and horrified judge.I don't believe that because I don't belong to the age of steadfast faith and because it's not necessary;...(and quoting what he imagines the about to be murdered victim would  say):".You're taking my life more for reasons of jealousy than justice,I haven't killed anyone not as far as you know,you're putting a bullet in my forehead or beneath my ear lobe not because you think I am beating up the woman who is no l onger your wife,as if I were some vulgar wife-beater,  ...but because you are afraid of me and and are going to fight for what is yours, as do all those who commit crimes and have to convince themselves that their crimes were necessary : for your God, for your king, for your country, your culture or your race;for your flag, your legend, your language, your class,or your space.for your honor, your religion, for your family, for your strongbox, for your purse, for your sox;;or for your wife......"
What more can one say-as brilliant a prose stylist as I have ever encountered..

Book Expo 2012

Here we are- approaching another Book Expo in a year when more and more readers are using the Kindle, Nook or iPad, and fewer and fewer companies are distributing print galleys or the like.
In addition, since we started following publishing as writers, lawyers collectors and students of the industry, the number of publishing stalwarts has shrunk to a half dozen megacorporations where every title has to be separately financially justified(no longer can the big sellers be depended on to support the midlist), and if you read Andre Schiffrin's brilliant works, including The Business of Books, rhe number of bookshops in major metropolitan areas has shrunk by 90%- This happened even before the full flowering of the net,Amazon and e-books. The high rents in places like Manhattan have turned the neighborhood bookshop into a relic of the past in a ghost town virtually devoid of bookstores. Only the Strand and McNally Jackson seem to be thriving.Brooklyn calls of course!



Still, one cannot suppress the excitement of meeting one's former colleagues and seeing them go through the motions of hawking and grinding out the literature and publicity for this fall's new title list.


We, as usual, are particularly interested in seeing Dalkey Archive, the New Press, and those University Presses still able to afford a booth in the somewhat antiquated Javits Center, as well as the mainstream publishers of books like Joseph Anton, Salman Rushdie's memoir of life under the fatwa after the publication of his Satanic Verses in late 1988.(Joseph Anton was a pseudonym he chose while on the run, using the first names of Conrad and Chekhov.)


And, after all, despite the appalling of lack of fiction in translation, America is still a place where a huge number of titles are published each year in a climate of general press freedom, although authors of books that espouse a more fundamental radical view of the society are sometimes ignored by the establishment - but we suppose that's better than being harassed and surveilled, no?






TWO TITLES


Just a short mention of two recently released titles-Death Sentences, by Kawamata Chiaka, and published by The University of Minnesota, which has a seriously intellectual publishing program.Here the sharing of a surrealist poem over time kills its readers, a theme close to William Burrough's concept of language as a virus, and picked by recently in a similar contxt by Ben Marcus in his most recent novel The Flame Alphabet. See also the brilliant riff of a secret language coded for death in Delillo's mesmerizing "The Names"





The other book is by David Talbot, founder of Salon-it's a complulsively entertaining valentine to San Francisco, The Season of the Witch about Enchantment, Terror and Deliverance in the City by the Bay- A wondrous romp from Janis Joplin and the Diggers through the SLA, Patty Hearst, Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple and the tragic intersection of George Mosconi Harvey MIlk and Dan White-, ending with the bonding together in the Super Bowl victories engineered by Bill Walsh for the San Francisco 49ers. Just whipping through the book reminds one of how far ahead of our Eastern metropolitan culture is this city on the Bay.

Best Books of 2011- Nos 6-10

6-Unoriginal Genius by Marjorie Perloff,University of Chicago Press. Famed Professor of Poetics Perloff(Professor Emerita at Stamford U) takes us on a journey through the poetics of copying, citation, and constraint based writing. Landmarks along the way include Walter Benjamin's Arcade Project, Charles Bernstein's opera, Susan Howe's the Midnight, the Oulipo and Kenneth Goldsmith's summary of CBS am traffic reports. The one volume that will get you up to speed on how to read and enjoy the new poetics.



7-El Narco, Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency by Ioan Grillo(Bloomsbury Press)British journalist Grillo's dazzling report from on the scene about how the cartels have been transformed into a major criminal insurgency, with due consequences for the US. Based on interviews and on the scene coverage by this ourstanding journalist now residing in Mexico City. Chilling.

8--Romain Gary- A Tall Story by David Bellos(Harvill Secker UK). Bellos, Professor of French and Comparative Lit,Princeton U.,is already well known form his brilliant biographies, including of Georges Perec, the Oulipo master, as well as translating much of Perec's work, including Life: A User's Manual and a recent text on the nature of translation.Here (in a book shamefully not yet published in the US) he gives us the biography of Romain Gary,whose life moved from Vilna to immigrant status ,to airman in UK with the French resistance, diplomat(French Consul General in Los Angeles),celebrity spouse(Jean Seberg) to best - selling author, the only man to win the French Goncourt Prize twice. This, included the creation of a fake identity- that of Emile Ajar, under which he avoided the requirement that the prize could only be won once by an author.And it eventually earned Gary the scorn of critics.
The many lives of a most unusual man-and the role that deception plays in our own self-constructed lives.Wonderfully written and a fascinating study in the nature of identity in this world.

9-This is Madness by Darian Leader(Hamish Hamilton, Penguin Books,UK). An absolutely riveting book by a psychoanalyst on the nature of psychosis- and how those afflicted use delusions and other seeming badges of lunacy to construct their way through their own conditions to a kind of mental equilibrium. Replete with Lacanian analysis beautifully explained ( for a change) and lots of examples from practice and history.With special chapters om Aimee(Lacan's famous patient who stabbed well-known French actress Huguette Duflos outside a French theatre), The Wolf Man, and Dr Harold Shipman,who put to death in excess of 250 persons by morphine injections. An enriching study on what triggers psychotic outbreaks and what can remedy psychosis.A plea for individual- centered treatment in an age of compulsory drugs and uniformity.

10-Parallel Stories by Peter Nadas- A long,demanding but brilliant masterpiece from the author of A Book of Memories, called the most important novel since WWII by Susan Sontag. Published to mixed reviews by a bunch of Anglo- Saxon reviewers who by and large have neither the time nor the temperament to enjoy a book so heavily based on the politique of the body,nor willing to read a novel whose transcription chapter by chapter does not flow with the ease of reading expected by some, this is yet the one novel where the politics and aesthetics of sex interfaces with the history of Hungary and Central Europe from the years of World War 2 through the Hungarian Revolution to the dismantling of Communism.The beastly self in all its turgid glory,in juxtaposition to the rational and socially acceptable self- a rambling tour through espionage, duplicity, repression and death and the emotionally tangled lives of the many characters who step in and out of its pages.Not to be missed, especially for its epic descriptions of marathon sex and its relation to our emotional lives. Called an example of bad sex writing by a few critics. some may yet find it the ultimate in sticky fingers and slippery epiphanies.

These books should be available from amazon.com, amazon.co.uk or the publishers directly

Best Books of 2011

Here is the long promised best ten list of 2011-not in any particular order of merit-

The first 5-
1- The Origin of Aids by Jacques Pepin( no, not the culinary expert), published by Cambridge University Press. I first learned of this incredible tome in a NY Times piece dated Oct 17, 2011 in the Health Section. Pepin is an infectious disease specialist who teaches epidiemology and the like at the University of Sherbrooke in Quebec.Pepin uses his own medical knowledge, plus years spent in the bush in the Congo running a medical clinic plus years of research in Africa and French libraries. He traces the history of AIDS, from the first time it jumped the ape to human bloodstream circuit, estimated some time, based on testing of preserved samples, around 1920- 1930 and probably occurring in rhe Cameroun, to where it was transmitted into the Congo and languished there until- and this is the key to the medical mystery , a series of disease amplifiers occurred that created the first epidemic in Africa in the Congo, to its ultimate transition,probably through Haiti to the US, where it blossomed and was reexported.
Along the way, there are fascinating sidebars on Tribal anthropology, Belgian colonialism, plasma infection in an operation controlled by the once feared head of the TonTon Macoute( secret police of Papa Doc Duvalier), sex tourism and the like.

But the major amplifiers occurred initially in the Congo where the Belgian colonists, anxious about controlling the spread of diseases like African sleeping sickness and other illnesses from the locals to themselves, engaged in an obsessive weekly program of vaccinating the locals -with needles that were not properly sterilized. After a period in which there was perhaps a very small number afflicted with the AIDS syndrome, which had jumped from ape to man probably through a cut hunter scenario, the disease finally began to multiply. That, plus the growth in population centers following the end of colonialism where particularly some urban areas had male to female ratios of 1.5-1 as a result initially of much greater male migration into urban areas compared to females,encouraged the increased practice of urban prostitution for unaccompanied females trying to make ends meet.Here the author segues fromm medical expert to sociological researcher and builds a convincing case that it was these practices and the excessive but unsafe vaccination that constituted the first two disease amplifiers.
It's a much shorter step from there to the importation of large numbers of French speaking Haitians into Kinshasa(once Leopoldville, named for the brutal and avaricious King of Belgium, who once owned the entire country in his own name and had thousands if not millions of rubber worker workers killed and enslaved under his regime). They(the Haitians) were needed in the newly formed nation, which had come to independence without a trained class of French speaking government bureaucrats.
It's a few more short steps from there to Haiti,infected blood plasma( a little more speculative here, ) and sex tourism to where the disease ( in a different strain) spread to the US.
But the thrust of the book is on and in Africa and it is a peculiar combination of medical research, local experience in the bush as well as detailed sociological and historical research and clear writing that make this text the most fascinating of mysteries explained about as well as one could possibly expect. Perhaps not a final answer but a brilliant exposition. One of the best books I have ever read!


2-Memoirs of a Dervish by Robert Irwin, Profile Books UK.
This is the astounding memoir of Robert Irwin, the dean of scholars on Islamic culture in England, and the author of numerous classic texts and novels, including the classic study of the Arabian Nights:A Companion,and For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and their Enemies, with its criticism of Edward Said's philosophical polemics, as well as a number of novels,including The Arabian Nightmare and the humorous Satan Wants Me, a send up of the cult of Aleister Crowley.
This is an unorthodox memoir about growing up in London, and going to Oxford during the swinging 60's days, and as a pot - smoking anarchist , but not a progressive leftist. Instead, Irwin sought his solace in Sufism, made several journeys to Algeria taking religious instruction in Mostaganem and studied under the esoteric guidance of those in England and North Africa. A wild journey into another counterculture-one of wild communal dancing and the quest to be a holy fool from the dean of Arabists in the West. As anyone who has read and cherished Irwin's writings should know, despite disagreements with his political hammerings of the Franz Fanon's and RD Laing's of the 60's, this is an engaging and wild trip as only Irwin can deliver it.
(available thru amazon.co.uk)

3-The Sufferings of Prince Sternenhoch by Ladislav Klima(Twisted Spoon Press, Prague)- This is one of a number of English language translations of classic Czech literature, in this case from Klima(1878-1928) who was a mentor to the celebrated writer Bohumil Hrabal and the Plastic People of the Universe( a much later group). It is a sophisticated piece of decadence a la Maldoror by Lautreamont, mixed in with a strong Nietzschean will. Ostensibly a tale of how a prissy key adviser to the Kaiser is brought under the will of a lower class mesmerizing wife, who marries him , then relegates him to a position of supreme inferiority, until he engages in savage retribution and ultimate self- detroying perversion- at another level it is the hallucinatory tale of a man obsessed by Will and and a radical subjective need to become God. It is a classic darkly comic and obscenely funny piece of writing, - not for everyone but a wild excursion indeed. True black humor.

4- The Secret Tradition of the Soul, by Patrick Harpur(Evolver editions ,Berkeley, California). From the author of Daimonic Reality and The Philosopher's Secret Fire, a template for those seeking the answer to the role of the soul in our lives and its
place in the great traditions of culture from Greek philosophy and Renaissance alchemy to Romantic poetry and the Jungian aesthetic pyschology practiced by the late Jmaes Hillman. A clear, concise life-altering view of the underappreciated role of the soul, as opposed to the more abstract spirit in our religions and culture. A handbook for more meaningful living through the imagination.Highly recommended.

5- Harry Belafonte- My Song-(Knopf) A great American life, from a Jamaican immigrant family who came to fame in the 1950's to 60's entertainment and civil rights - with detailed involvements with Paul Robeson, Eleanor Roosevelt, John and Robeert Kennedy,Sidney Poitier the civil rights movement, Nelson Mandela , Fidel Castro and Clinton, and from a man who has never hesitated to call it as he sees it- from the progressive left.This is a no bullshit autobiography.

Please note- These books should be available from amazon.com , amazon.co.uk or from the publishers directly. Nos 6-10 coming next.

A Tree Falls

Each tree that fells a power line

Is a sign of rebellion

Against the electro-insectoid grid

Of parallel poisons

The self-organizing superorganisms of technology



The faithful leaves are martyrs moving in one direction

the sussuratingembrace of coiled death

When the music of the wind blows a whistle sharpens its jagged edges

And though the hedged assemblies may cut down the oak and the maple

They only expose the wired lunacy to the mouths of rodents

One set of sharp teeth can interrupt a communications system

And hold back the surge until the crowd awakened takes justice into its

own hands



The field of judgment is infinite.





C 2011 by E.Kabak