Dog Ear, Erica Baum (Ugly Duckling Presse) $25
Erica Baum’s dog-ears are just that—the dog-eared corners of adjacent pages spliced together into complete squares like conjoined twins. The resulting pieces allow for a multiplicity of interpretations, which Kenneth Goldsmith compares to the traditional verse form leonine. His concise and very complimentary introduction facilitates engagement with the text-boxes, and Béatrice Gross’ afterword contextualizes it within the contemporary art tradition, using Mallarmé’s fan poems as a starting point. The book’s simple presentation—including its drab, anti-book design cover—allows the reader to focus fully on the work itself, which encourages meditation on the multiplicity of interpretations suggested by each dog-ear box. Baum’s simple titles (like “Geisha,” at left) incorporate notable words from the work they describe, and the varied textures of the papers, made visible by their blown-up size, pay tribute to the physicality of the much-maligned and much-beloved habit of the dog-ear itself. Dog Ear encourages multiple readings—even the dog-earring of especially interesting pages.
Mourning Diary, Roland Barthes, tr. Richard Howard (Hill and Wang) $25
Following the death of his mother Henriette, who died just three years before his own death in 1980, the great critic and semiotician Roland Barthes began to document his mourning on note cards, which ultimately totaled 330, dated though September 1979. Barthes brief notes chronicle his despairs and triumphs, portraying a very self-conscious mourner, aware equally of mourning’s pointlessness and inevitability. Barthes’ clarity of thought is evident, and his intelligence does not falter in mourning; his notecard annotations often approach aphorism.
November 16
Now, everywhere, in the street, the café, I see each individual under the aspect of ineluctably having-to-die, which is exactly what it means to be mortal.—And no less obviously, I see them as not knowing this to be so.
November 26
What I find utterly terrifying is mourning’s discontinuous character.
December 9
Mourning: indisposition, a situation with no possible blackmail.
The book includes facsimile notecards and a photographical chronology of Barthes’ relationship with his mother, which illuminates his highly unusual relationship with Henriette, with whom the writer lived for most of his adult life.
Richard Ford continues to prove the worthiness of his reputation as our finest contemporary translator from the French. Ford suggests that “Mourning Diary can be correctly read only by a concomitant reading of [Barthes’] ultimate books,” which he wrote “à la fois.” That is probably true, but the immense readability and emotional rawness of the Diary in seclusion make it worthwhile alone, too. His afterword also recounts the firs time he met Barthes’ mother, traveling together by helicopter to meet Howard’s close friend Barthes for Christmas. He argues that Madame Barthes was indeed as perfect a mother as her son suggests—better proof of the translator’s friendship with Barthes than of the subjective fact itself.
As the excerpts above prove, Barthes’ honesty is so complete blackmail would be impossible, discontinuous but continuously haunting, intimate, real.
Forty Lies, John Gallas, w. illustrations by Sarah Kirby (Carcanet Press) £12.95
As liars go, John Gallas is pretty talented. He begins his seventh collection with Umberto Eco’s famous epigraph: “It is the job of the poet to invent beautiful falsehoods,” then proceeds to craft forty mostly beautiful falsehoods, ranging in subject matter from “In 1968, in Mexico City, Mongolia’s first silver medal was won by Munkhbat Jigjidym in the middleweight (up to 87kg) freestyle wrestling” to “23 March 2005: Associate Professor Hulya Tezcan. This lecture provides a fascinating look at some eighty talismanic shirts… which were believed to ward off all sorts of evil spirits and restore the health of the ailing” to “Laika was the first living creature to orbit space…and…the only creature knowingly sent into space to die.” Each cites its source—the titles above are listed as “Entry in ‘World Sports’ magazine,” “From the Turkish University lectures schedule,” and “From the ‘Memorial to Laika’ website,” respectively. Gallas occupies a curious space between American Conceptual Writing and Flarf groups and more mainstream poets—the only book that comes in recent memory to explore similar territory is David Breskin’s Supermodel. The poems themselves are fun, mostly lighthearted, and each is accompanied by illustrations by the printmaker Sarah Kirby, which look like wood- or linocuts. Most illustrations appear to have been produced after their poems, but the more interesting ones interact with the text more directly, like the Laika poem, the text of which is slowly overtaken by Kirby’s five-pointed stars, and “A pensioner has committed suicide in Turkmenistan…,” a noose of text with Kirby’s cut block framing hanging feet. The book’s occasional missteps—Gallas’ concrete poems aren’t as strong as his others, and some of his more outrageous titles rely more on their novelty than lyricism—are easily forgivable in light of the quality of the collection in its entirety.
