New Directions, May 2007, 192 pp, $16.59An Elemental Thing, by Eliot Weinberger, is very much a poetic reverie. Through a series of 34 essays, Weinberger invents a creation myth by borrowing from varied cultural traditions—some Chinese, Indian, African, and Muslim, others plucked from the jungles of South America. Sometimes nostalgic and sorrowful, and other times playful, Weinberger creates a strange new mythology of the world, accessible only through the eyes of anthropologists, scholars, and sages.

An unexpected continuity of ideas and themes is created through titles, recurring words, characters, and phrasing. The wind series, which explores the different desert winds around the world, and the four seasons series, which traces the movement of the Chinese imperial court in the different seasons, are such examples. A strong Chinese and Eastern religious influence guides the essays as well; many discuss Chinese philosophers and royalty. One particular essay discusses the many notable people named Chang throughout Chinese history. There must be an element of humor to such an obsessively alliterative discourse.

One needs to prepare to read these essays. They require concentration, a quiet mood, a hunger for poetry. At times the text becomes excessively academic or experimental. In short, it is not light reading. Yet, for every esoteric piece, there are delightful, nearly nonsensical pieces like “Rhinoceros,” where the origins and characteristics of the animal are described in Hawaiian. “Ua hanaia ke Laehaokela, I mea aha?” the essay poses the question, “Why, then, was the Rhinoceros created?” Nonetheless, even this "light" piece evokes a sense of loss as it ponders the animal's near extinction. Others still are reminiscent of Arabian Nights, such as "The Tree of Life," the tale of a beautiful woman who turns into a tree that blooms unearthly flowers. She marries a prince who lovingly transforms her into a tree each night, before making love to her on the petals that become their soft bed.

Weinberger’s poetic style works better in his shorter essays, where it powerfully captures the reader, for the end is in sight and his meandering doesn’t seem so intellectually pandering. The essays are often dotted with ironic wisdom: “Elixirs of Immortality made of arsenic, lead, and mercury, hastening madness and mortality…” Often, the essays have endings so apt that you smile in pithy comprehension. One enchanting story, "Where the Kaluli Live," invites the reader to relish the way onomatopoeia feels in one’s mouth. It begins:

                                                                ubogubo gubogubo
                                                                a Black Sicklebird

and continues with an explanation: “When a person dies, the reflection also disappears, and turns into a bird in the visible world. Birds see each other as people, and their calls are people talking to one another. The passage of life is from infant to bird. So, the Black-throated Warbler says seeyo-gogo-bayo seeyo-gogo-bayo, ‘I’m staying right here.’”

Such imaginary words are a delight to sound out–and are irresistible on one’s tongue.

In An Elemental Thing, Weinberger transports the reader into the realm of possibilities, into the time of legend and myth. Reading these powerfully evocative essays made me wonder who Eliot Weinberger is–poet, thinker, or writer? In this volume, perhaps all three.

Eliot Weinberger is an American writer, translator, and editor. He is the main translator of Octavio Paz into English, work for which he received the Mexican Order of the Aztec Eagle, the highest award the Mexican government bestows on foreign nationals. Weinberger's other honors include the National Book Critics Circle prize for Criticism in 1999 for his edition of Jorge Luis Borges' Selected Non-Fictions, and PEN's first Gregory Kolovakos Award in 1992 for promoting Hispanic literature in the United States. He is also the translator of Bei Dao's Unlock (with Iona Man-Cheong). His books of prose include Muhammad, What Happened Here: Bush Chronicles, and Karmic Traces: 1993-1999.

Elizabeth Cho received her BA in business and MA in art & archaeology from Brown University. An ad executive by day, art consultant by night, she brings together her starving artist friends with her yuppie friends in a modern day salon way. She assists young artists in the beginning of their careers while helping young collectors develop individual tastes in art. Her other great love in life is writing. Her short stories have been published on 5_trope and other literary magazines. Please visit her website Au Currant where she discusses what is au courant in art, culture, and literature. To contact Elizabeth e-mail:echo@kgbbar.com.

  Riverhead, September 2007
352pages, $24.95

Fukú is not a spelling-check-be-damned “fuck you,” but a curse—a mucho mala dose of rotten ju ju, and the lurking theme of Junot Díaz’s scintillating new novel, The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.  While superstition, belief in evil spirits, or fear of bad karma is certainly not culture-specific (my Irish grandmother kept banshees away by rubbing her fingers raw on Rosary Beads), Díaz uses it as a foundation to explain the remarkably tough tidings that befall the good people of the Dominican Republic and one of its misplaced sons, Oscar Wao.

The porcine Wao is the tip (or the base, if you want to be metaphorically cruel) of the fukú iceberg.  Growing up in the ruined wilds of industrialized North Jersey, he is a Ghetto Nerd, whose obese homeliness, sci-fi devotion, and virginity (not his choice) makes him an urban wallflower, or, as Diaz writes, the neighborhood pariguayo (party watcher).  Oscar is nothing like his male Dominican counterparts: suave and sexually active players who eat more puto than plaitanos.  Díaz paints Wao’s grotesque physicality and pariah’s penchant for role-playing games with a brush that makes one sorry for the youngster’s predicament, but also angry that he doesn’t do something about it.  You feel Oscar’s plight more than you can rationalize it, and in this regard Díaz has created a conflicted but memorable character that floats somewhere in the literary ether between Dostoevsky’s Raskonikov and John Kennedy Toole’s Ignatius Reilly.  

Like all talented writers, Díaz has the capacity to teach without seeming to.  The novel is akin to a Ken Burns PBS documentary, so thorough is it in sizing up the history of the DR and it’s villainous despot, Trujillo (the alleged source of all the fukú).  But Díaz’s lesson plan is denser, more stunning, and more painful to experience than anything taught in a classroom.  He has the rare literary chops to integrate the past into the present while creating an inevitable future.  One way he accomplishes this time-meld is with the use of footnotes that are scattered expertly throughout the text, illuminating, for the most part, the dank atrocities of the Trujillo years.  Yet these asides are seamless extensions (not required pit stops) of the narrative, written in the same conversational (a mix of English, Spanish, and professorial-level ebonics) that Díaz has expertly crafted as a literary voice.

Díaz’s novel reads in some way like a My Space page—with words as links and ideas as portholes to communities and forums heard and unheard.  Like James Ellroy’s American Tabloid, a novel that blends facts and fiction to create a new and more believable motive behind the JFK assassination, Díaz recounts history (the DR saga and the diaspora of its peoples) in a way that seems more credible and complete than any journalist’s take could ever do.

So I strongly suggest reading The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.  And not just for the usual reasons for reading a book of high caliber, but because it might provide one with an injection of Zafa—the antidote for fukú.  However, if you feel immune to the dark forces of the ghost world, feel free to ignore my recommendation.  Just don’t come crying to me when the shit hits the fan, because, amigo, you know it will.

Junot Díaz’s fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The Best American Short Stories. His debut story collection, Drown, published eleven years prior to Oscar Wao, was met with unprecedented acclaim; it became a national bestseller, won numerous awards, and has since grown into a landmark of contemporary literature. Born in the Dominican Republic and raised in New Jersey, Díaz lives in New York City and is a professor of creative writing at MIT.

More of John McCaffrey’s writings can be accessed at www.jamccaffrey.com. 

  Impetus, January 2008
202 pages, $16.95

Almost all of the stories in Dave Housley’s collection Ryan Seacrest is Famous share a protagonist who lives in a world that hardly extends beyond the confines of his body.  He is obsessed with his body hair, indulges in drugs and alcohol, and arranges his t-shirts in chronological order.  His self-awareness is based on who he is not: a celebrity.

In the story from which the book takes its title, the protagonist Burns is devastated by the fact that his former high school classmate Ryan Seacrest is famous and he is not, especially because Seacrest was once the geek, the wanna-be John Hughes movie character.  The key to happiness in this world is both having the camera pointed at you and watching those in the camera’s eye.

The brilliance of Housley’s writing resides in its melancholy humor.  Take the book’s first sentence: “I shaved my balls a day after Claire left.”  Housley lures the reader into believing that he is the protagonist by casting him as a writer.  The protagonist’s apathetic nature carries over to his writing: “Maybe I needed somebody to tell me what to do, to get onto the second sentence, to outline the novel of my life.”  

Not surprisingly, the novel of his life cannot exist without pop culture.  On Valentine’s Day, his girlfriend texts him a sappy message and he replies with morose Pink Floyd trivia.  He also comments that “I was no more dark and mysterious than the Spin Doctor’s tie-dye I’d use as a pillow.”    

Amongst the tabloid aura of the stories, Housely manages to squeeze in a story about 9/11.  How can a story about 9/11 exist along with a story about a drunken clown?  Easy.  The protagonist, McGuire, is pessimistic.  There is no room for sentimentalism.  He goes and jams out to AC/DC.  Well, maybe a little Highway to Hell is McGuire’s way of mourning.

“First, my feet start tapping.  Next, I feel the sensation move up my spine, as if my limbs are getting lighter, filling with helium, moving up toward my head until, literally, my frown is turned upside down,” says the clown in one of the stories.  Readers are prone to laughter.  The book is about entertainment.  It is entertainment.  It is as fleeting as the stars that Housley mentions, one day it will be a relic like an old tabloid, found and guarded for its kitsch value.

Dave Housley's work has appeared in Gargoyle, Nerve, Sycamore Review, Yankee Pot Roast, and other places. He is one of the editors of Barrelhouse. Ryan Seacrest is Famous is his first book.

Olena Jennings has translated Ukrainian poetry for publication on the web site poetryinternational.org, publication in Chelsea, and the book-length collection A Chapel for Angels by Oleksiy Koshel, published in Ukraine. She is an MFA student in writing fiction at Columbia University and is working on a novel. To contact Olena e-mail: kgbbarlit@kgbbar.com.

Dalkey Archive Press, July 2007
79 pages, $9.50

Unlike most short stories, creations of solitary gods, each short story that comprises As You Were Saying is a collaborative effort of writers from different expressions, cultures, and countries. It goes like this:  a French author writes a few pages of prose and an American author, purportedly of "equal talent" (an issue that urges some speculation) takes up where the French writer left off, with freedom to do just about whatever he or she wants: continue, juxtapose, contradict, or close the given piece.

14 writers contributed to As You Were Saying; Marie Darrieussecq and Rick Moody; Camille Lauren and Robert Butler; Jacques Roubaud and Raymond Federman; Lydie Salvayre and Rikki Ducornet; Grégoire Bouiller and Percival Everett; Phillipe Claudel and Aleksandar Hemon; Luc Lang and John Edgar Wineman.   

On many occasions I wondered what would have happened if the French initiator had finished his or her piece rather than leave it ajar for the American to peek through.  Were the initiating and responding authors, in being less selfish with their work, less in love with it?  Is this book just a "literary game", as the French Ambassador to the U.S, Jean-David Lévitte and the writer of the preface puts it, or is there strong authorial investment?  What if Marie Darrieussecq had written a whole short story out of her four-page beginner?  One could argue that the segment she wrote is an entirety in its own right, but I wanted more, and while Rick Moody's response is fun, there is a real gruesome potential in what Darrieussecq started and I nearly wish she hadn't passed on the torch. 

In some cases the pairing creates a startling gem.  Everett for example, while not directly continuing Bouillier's narrative, resumes the tone and punctures a lifeline in Bouillier's prose.  Bouiller writes, "The truth of that inescapable love still escapes you and that bafflement never gives you any respite—for example, you now change your shoes everyday, you can't help yourself, you can't wear the same pair of shoes for two days in a row…”.  In his counter-prose, Everett digs at this idiosyncrasy, zeroing in on like a pulse.  He writes, “You looked down at your feet, at the boots that had worn ever slightly over the meters of sidewalk, leaving part of them and bringing along part of the city.  The boots must be changed, you thought…” The two fictions are joined by this prominent detail and seem to go hand in hand with one another. 

As You Were Saying is flash fiction done right: it leaves the reader with an inlet to countless wonders, vibrations, and fleeting ecstasies.  It is however, also a work that retains a sense of whim and nascence.  Though a completed work, As You Were Saying is still a kind of experiment as opposed to a final proof. Each story is like a tasty appetizer, followed by another appetizer—sometimes clashing, sometimes complementing.  As a whole, the book is not unlike a string of previews, a pithy glimpse here and there into realms of imaginations set to the unusual task of cooperation.

Nicole Audrey Spector is a fiction writer; as her photo suggests she is prone to bummers, and spends much of her free time in bed and in the bathtub, where she gets a lot of her reading and writing done.  She is editorial assistant at a weird trade magazine in Manhattan, and co-organizes a monthly fiction reading series: Guerrilla Lit Reading.  She lives in Brooklyn with her cat.

Alexander Kluge is a German author, filmmaker, and the founder of Ulm Institut für Filmgestaltung, the institute that birthed New German Cinema.  As the recipient of Germany’s highest literary award, The Büchner Prize, and four Gold Lions from the Venice Film Festival, “accomplished” doesn’t begin to cut it.  Sure, he’s well respected, but he’s earned more than respect from his friends, who represent the acme of European intellectual life: Theodor Adorno, who first encouraged Kluge to explore film, and Fritz Lang both counted him among their inner circle.  Steadfast, multifaceted, prophetic— Kluge deftly cross-sections culture in service of exposing its inner realities, or, to quote the slogan of the French progenitors of film, the Lumiere Brothers, “apporter le monde au monde.” Through artifice, be it filmic or literary, he holds a mirror to the world where it seems more like itself.  At 75, he shows no sign of slowing down.  This fall, a MoMA retrospective and the Venice Film Festival will both celebrate his life and works.  Concurrently, his book Cinema Stories is coming out from New Directions.

Cinema Stories is a bold, galvanizing hybrid of fiction, interview, film theory, German history, scientific inquiry, and his cosmology of cinema. It’s also a tabloid that exposes the secret hopes of those ignored by the spotlight. Stars in their respective fields such as Rem Koolhaas, the architect, Olive Thomas, the first casualty of the silver screen to be exploited by the media, and Leon Trotsky, each contribute to his cobbled ground of discourse.

The book itself stems from one man tapped into multiple mindsets.  Likewise, Kluge understands the core of film to be comprised of side-by-side ‘texts.’  Let me try to condense this theory: every other 48th second of a film is completely dark. The text we see transmits light, image, and meaning.  The dark text conveys a nonconcious thrust toward the next instance of light, image, meaning. The human brain incorporates this polyphonic stream of dark and light through a complex sequence of “misunderstandings” that, according to Nobel Prize winning neurologist Professor Eric Kandel, “fit together […] so that the brain (even if it does it with a fallacious text) reproduces the outside world […] against its will.”  The dark phase draws the mind into a dream-like or drug-induced state of completely self-created signs and signifiers.  Cinema Stories transports the reader into a similar state, though the matrixes of signs are prescribed meaning by an expert guide—Kluge.

Kluge portrays cinema reeling from a skein that reaches into outer space and inner cognizance.  The resultant dream-reality is produced by the mind’s uncanny ability to suture apparently irreconcilable opposites.  Kluge’s acrobatic text likewise mines contradiction for truth, beauty and coherence.

In the “Notes” section of the book, Jean-Luc Godard is quoted as saying, “Children, when they are born, / and old people, when they die, / don’t talk, they see something.” To which Kluge rejoins, “If you were to cut yourself open would a child come out?” Likewise, Kluge implies that if the human mind were cut open the cosmos would come out.  And if the cosmos could be reproduced, it would be an endless reel of moving images.  Cinema Stories boasts enough intelligence, insight, and flexibility to project that reel onto the reader’s psychic screen just long enough to believe that cinema is so beloved precisely because it mimics eternity. 

In closing, I’d like to quote from the namesake of the Büchner Prize, George Buchner—from his novella, Lenz: “Only one thing remains, an infinite beauty passing from form to form, eternally unfolding.”  With a kind of erratic, casual brilliance, Kluge arrests and presents for the reader this unfolding beauty he finds manifest in film.

Alexander Kluge, born in Germany in 1932, is a world-famous author and filmmaker (his 23 films include Yesterday Girl, The Female Patriot, The Candidate), a lawyer, and a media magnate. He has won Germany's highest literary award, the Georg Buechner Prize.

Kendra Sullivan lives in Brooklyn . She studied painting at NYU, where she received the Thomas Wolfe Prize for Poetry. She's worked at Poets House, Apex Art, Archipelago Books, Pequod, and The Center for Book Arts. Last summer she taught arts and crafts in Central America. She'd like to go back. Kendra is also a monthly columnist for KGB BAR LIT. To contact Kendra e-mail: kendra@kgbbar.com.