Give My Poor Heart Ease: Voices of the Mississippi Blues. William Ferris. The University of North Carolina Press, November 2009. $35.00.

Review by Katya Cummins

Give My Poor Heart Ease: Voices of the Mississippi Blues is a book that will transport its readers, though it’s meant to be experienced at a walking pace. The book is comprised of black-and-white photographs and edited interviews that William Ferris compiled in the 1960s and ‘70s, and it comes with a CD and a DVD that don’t merely just make possible, but actually require, appreciative interaction with the people of a “fading generation” along the landscape of Mississippi's Highway 61.

The directness of what Ferris calls “the uninterrupted narrative voice…a folkloric version of the dramatic monologue” allows for a shift away from the technical aspects of blues and facilitates a relationship between readers and members of Mississippi's black community, through the songs that influenced them.

In his introduction, Ferris makes it clear that growing up white in Mississippi during the Civil Rights era made him a foreigner to the world of blues. To cultivate an understanding of the music that surrounded him, he first had to be invited into the community that created it. Ferris describes the warmth with which he was received:

When I knocked at the speakers’ doors, they welcomed me and encouraged me to learn from elders whose voices are the heart of this book. As Reverend Isaac Thomas said to me, "The door here swings on the hinge of good welcome at all times."

This good welcome is extended to the reader, even as Ferris’s voice acts as mediator between the reader and several communities. The book is divided into four sections: “Blues Roots,” “Blues Towns and Cities,” “Looking Back,” and “Sacred and Secular Worlds.” In each section, Ferris introduces a town and its significance to blues, then the people who formed that history in those communities tell their own stories.

The largest section, “Blues Towns and Cities,” is dedicated to Ferris’s close relationship with James “Son Ford” Thomas, whose song “Highway 61” gives the book its title:

I walked Highway 61 till I give down in my knees.
I walked Highway 61 till I give down in my knees.
You know,
I ain’t found nobody to
give my poor heart ease.

As a result the book has a sort of zoom effect, from wide-angle to close-up—here’s the history, here’s the town, here’s its people—with Ferris’s voice tying the three together by providing the context of his visits. Though he uses an autobiographical frame, Ferris emphasizes that “the real story lay in ‘freeing’ the voices, and letting them tell their own story.”

Ferris (Joel R. Williamson Eminent Professor of History and senior associate director of the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) wants the book to be about blues and its people, about Mississippi, about two past generations. But the book is, in places, deeply personal and autobiographical, giving it the feeling of something like creative nonfiction. I think this is Ferris’s way of paying homage to people he’s known well, but it creates a tension. He doesn’t want his voice or personal story interfering with the voices and history of blues, yet there he occasionally is, especially in the act of discovery:

Blues and sacred music are joined at the hip…one blues musician told me that if a singer wants to cross over from sacred music to the blues, he simply replaces ‘my God’ with ‘my baby’ and continues singing the same song.

Turning the page, we transition from Ferris’s voice to that of Mary Gordon, his once-housekeeper, who speaks about the importance of Rose Hill Church, 15 miles southeast of Vicksburg, where she grew up singing gospels:

When people go away from here and they die, they want their bodies to come back here where their mother, father, and all their relatives are. That’s why they brings them back. Some of them make a request that they want to go back home, you know, when you die. So their families will bring them back and bury them up on Rose Hill.

But sacred music and blues were intrinsically linked there, and Mary Gordon agreed to sing “You Shall be Free,” a parody of the preachers, only after Ferris promised not to let Reverend Isaac Thomas, the last of the Rose Hill preachers, hear it. The reader is invited to slip in the CD and listen to the song before flipping the page and hearing Reverend Thomas’s story.

Rose Hill was one of several communities between Centerville and Memphis, the beginning and end of Highway 61. In another town, Lorman, the reader will pause to listen to a story told by Louis Dolton, who introduced William Ferris to the one-strand guitar, sometimes called the diddley bow, and Ferris points out how its influence marks the evolution of music through generations:

[The one-strand guitar is] related to African...instruments and is an important reminder of how African musical roots survive in the American South…. The instrument influenced the bottleneck guitar style popularized by blues performers Elmore James and "Mississippi" Fred McDowell. Today, bottleneck style is used by musicians like Eric Clapton, Bonnie Raitt, and Keith Richards.

This is one example of how this book teaches musicology subtly and engagingly, mapping the genealogy of African music to blues, blues to jazz, jazz to folk, and folk to rock n’ roll. In this, it's about how music and stories tie one generation to the next. Its multimedia journey moves us from Louis Dalton’s town of Lorman, to Johnny Lee “Have Mercy” Thomas’s Parchman Penitentiary. We’re invited to listen to the prison-chant “Lazarus,” to linger briefly in Tutwiler for a fiddle tune, and to hear Willie Dixon and B.B King reminisce about how the blues influenced their lives.

Give My Poor Heart Ease is a multi-faceted portrayal of blues history that makes accessible a community and a genre of music with incalculable influence, and it should be a holiday favorite this year.

If you’re reading this Monday morning, the strike at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign has begun, and I’m out taking a look at how the picketing is going outside the buildings where I usually teach.

After weeks of buildup and planning, the Graduate Employees’ Organization (GEO) at UIUC announced last Monday, November 9, that 92% of participating GEO members had voted to authorize a strike. The GEO, American Federation of Teachers/Illinois Federation of Teachers Local 6300, AFL-CIO, represents teaching assistants and graduate assistants on the UIUC campus. With 2,600 members, it claims to be “one of the largest higher education union locals in the United States.”

On Thursday they bussed members to a rally in Springfield outside the Board of Trustees’ meeting and held another on campus, marching from the quad to the Swanlund Administration Building for speeches then marching back.

(Pictures in this post are from that rally. At left, Gwen Rudy, GEO member; middle, below, GEO marchers outside the Swanlund Building; at bottom, GEO member John Warner holds a sign as several hundred others listen to speeches from the front steps.)

The GEO’s literature stated the initial issues like this:

GEO bargaining unit members teach 23.1% of all undergraduate course hours at UIUC, and perform comparably to faculty in official student evaluations of instructor performance as measured by the University of Illinois’ Center for Teaching Excellence. Yet our salaries draw only 6.5% of state funding, including salaries for GAs and Research Assistants, who don’t teach. By contrast, faculty salaries draw over 55% of the University budget. Should graduate employee salaries be set to a living wage, the University would still have a large pool of inexpensive and high quality instructional and administrative labor….

The GEO has been negotiating with UIUC administrators for over six months. The GEO seeks a contract that will set the minimum salary for a 50% nine month appointment at the University’s estimate of a living wage for a graduate student in Urbana-Champaign and protect tuition waivers for TAs and GAs. While the GEO presented the administration with a full contract proposal on the first day of negotiations, the UIUC administration declined to offer a counterproposal until August 11th, just four days before the GEO’s previous contract expired. The UIUC administration’s initial contract proposal sought to freeze GEO wages for three years, reserve the right to furlough and layoff graduate employees in good standing, and to count “in-kind” compensation such as housing or meal vouchers toward the minimum salary mandated in the contract.

The Provost’s office has said:

It is not news that the State of Illinois, and consequently the University of Illinois, face severe budget problems and an uncertain financial future. As Presidents White and Ikenberry shared recently, immediate challenges include the State's lack of capacity to provide the funding for this fiscal year that we are to have received but have not received. More serious yet is the negative effect that State budget shortfalls will have on funding appropriated for the duration of this academic year. Still more serious are the projected effects on the University budget for fiscal year 2011 of the disappearance of federal recovery dollars from our State budget and the further erosion of the State's tax base. Financial planning is now focused on meeting and coping with financial stresses exceeding any the University has encountered for many, many years. Although we have seen welcome increases in research funding, and there have been successes in the advancement campaign, it must be understood that funds from those sources cannot be used for TA salaries….

We value the contributions graduate students make to the University, and we know we are competing nationally and internationally to attract and retain the best and brightest students. The total compensation package offered by the University, which encompasses wages, waiver of most fees, the tuition waiver, and a University of Illinois education, reflects our recognition of the value brought to the University by our excellent graduate students.

All this occurs at a time when money is not only hard to come by across the land but also went in regrettable directions. The GEO says:

The former Chancellor diverted $450,000 of discretionary funds to provide jobs and scholarships for politically well-connected but undeserving applicants. Another $400,000 went to the attorneys who represented the University before the Governor’s investigative committee, and another $550,000 to new faculty appointments for the former President and Chancellor [who resigned after the scandal broke]. In this context, the GEO finds it hard to trust the UIUC administration when it argues that there is not enough money to provide a living wage. From the GEO’s perspective, it appears that budget priorities are simply out of place. When campus revenues rose by 7% in FY 2009, only 0.8% ($2.7 million) went to undergraduate instruction. Meanwhile, the Chief Information Officer’s budget rose by 10.9 percent ($1.6 million), and the Division of Intercollegiate Athletics budget increased 6.2 percent ($4.1 million).

The Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, housed in the English Department, has on its site an earlier statement from the GEO and the transcript of an address by Michael Verderame, Ph.D. candidate and graduate employee at UIUC, who addressed the Board of Trustees on Thursday at their meeting. Tenure-stream faculty in English sent a statement of support last week to the Chicago Tribune and local media, which read:

We, the faculty of the Department of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in continuity with resolutions we have passed in previous years, call upon the university administration to bargain in good faith with the Graduate Employees Organization and agree to a contract along the lines that the Graduate Employees Organization has proposed, including the provision for a living wage. We believe that agreeing to such a contract is essential to maintaining and improving undergraduate and graduate education, that it can improve conditions for graduate students, undergraduate students, and faculty, and that it can help the university attract and retain outstanding graduate students. Because graduate workers are indispensable to the core missions of the university, we express our support for the Graduate Employees Organization, including our support for the right of graduate employees to participate in a lawful work action without retaliation.

No doubt this could put departmental administration in a tough spot with the provost’s office if it comes down to having to enforce penalties for work stoppage. While GEO members have the lawful right to strike, they face not being paid for any time they’re not in the classroom. Tenured faculty, of course won’t face reprisals.

But for adjuncts and other employees, such as office staff, the situation is actually much worse, something that the GEO has not been good about confronting—at least for adjuncts—in the buildup to the strike. The Provost’s office writes:

I remind you again that we have an obligation to our students and their families to provide the education which they have sacrificed to attain. Only GEO members have a legal right to strike; all other employees have an obligation to meet the responsibilities of their positions.

Employees who choose not to cross a picket line must request and receive approval (in advance) for vacation time. As always, vacation approval is based on operational need; a unit is not required to approve a vacation request if there are operational needs that would be unmet if the request is approved. Sick leave cannot be utilized to cover strike-related absences. If staff not covered by the GEO contract have unapproved absences during the strike, normal discipline procedures will apply.

Asking adjuncts to fully support the strike—or not to teach TAs' classes if asked at swordpoint by administration to do so—is asking quite a lot. Several years ago when the UIUC GEO was still organizing and had not yet attained union recognition, they asked for and received tremendous support from adjuncts on campus, who thought there might be a possibility of their being included in the proposed bargaining unit. After some time, one of their chief organizers—I believe he was with the AFL—told us we’d have to do our collective bargaining with the campus’s tenure-stream faculty instead, and many believe that ain’t gonna happen. The GEO went on to receive union status, while the Great Adjunct Purges began—the year after our department head told us of a planned, multi-year buildup of our salaries and a professionalization program for us that were in the works, neither of which happened.

I don’t think that what happened back then was political cynicism, just expediency and the nature of labor struggle, and I hold no grudges. Besides, I believe in what the GEO is trying to do, and hypocrisy, as our philosopher friends say, is the only sin. As a result I’m finding ways not to cross picket lines by using alternate meeting places and assignments for my students, so instruction won’t be interrupted. My acquaintance Rory, who’s deeply committed, or should be, is meeting the few students he teaches in the Presidential Room of a sorority house instead of his classroom, and others have similar plans.

There was an eleventh-hour bargaining session held yesterday (Saturday) in a hangar at Willard Airport, several miles outside town. The odd location seems to have been chosen by administration, no doubt in part because it’s Dads’ Weekend here and the location was slightly less accessible to union members. Going by Twitter updates throughout the afternoon and evening, things were going well for compromise, but in the end the two sides failed to reach agreement on one major point.

An e-mail this morning to GEO members read:

The sole reason that the strike committee has called a strike is tuition waiver security. When we voted as GEO members to authorize a strike, one of the most important concerns was tuition waiver security. Since the strike authorization vote, GEO members have indicated that including security for tuition waivers is a top contract priority that should be in any tentative agreement reached by the bargaining team. After the six hour bargaining session Saturday, the bargaining team was able to use a compromise on our wage proposal to get furloughs and scope of the agreement off of the table, but the administration refused to include language that would protect tuition waivers as a benefit of employment for TAs and GAs. Early this morning, the strike committee responded by calling a strike.

Their press release added:

The administration’s refusal to guarantee the continuation of its current tuition waiver practice not only means that the majority of graduate employees could be forced to pay thousands of dollars in additional tuition charges, but also indicates its plans to implement such a change. By making graduate education untenable for all but the most affluent students, the administration is abandoning its responsibility to ensure access to the highest level of public education for all. This is contrary to the University of Illinois’ mission as a public land grant institution. By calling a strike, the Graduate Employees’ Organization is holding the University of Illinois administration accountable to its stated commitment to excellent and accessible higher education.

The latest rumor is that the University of Michigan GEO is coming down to lend support. The next opportunity for negotiation will be on Tuesday of this week, but a GEO representative told me that the strike committee is prepared to be out for four weeks before re-evaluating the situation.

It’s good to collect Ph.D.s—people who have them, not the degrees themselves—to make yourself look smarter at cocktail parties.

“Oh yes,” I’m able to say, “my recent acquaintance, the good Dr. Elrick, was just telling me how sulfur content is largely dependent on both thickness and composition of overlaying layers of gray or black alluvial shale.”

Or: “The right honorable Dr. Trinkle said to me most amusingly just yesterday over corned beef, ‘Churm, my colleagues and I have discovered that island shape controls magic-size effect for heteroepitaxial diffusion....’”

Listeners are often so stunned with admiration by my knowledge-by-proxy that they must excuse themselves to get more punch.

But Dr. Benjamin R. Cohen will always be ol’ Ben to me, since we first met at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, where he’s written innumerable things including, most recently, dispatches from his Smithsonian Fellowship at the National Museum of American History. Ben also writes for The Morning News and The Believer, where he’s interviewed Rebecca Solnit and Michael Pollan. He’s the co-author, with David Ng, of the popular Seed Media science blog The World’s Fair.

He’s even written for The Education of Oronte Churm.

His new book, Notes from the Ground: Science, Soil, and Society in the American Countryside—a study of the cultural conditions that led to science and agriculture first coming together in the U.S.—is available from Yale University Press and is on my nightstand for the semester break.

Obviously ol' Ben has many interests and a talent for crossing the academic-popular bridge. As an Assistant Professor at the University of Virginia, he's passing those along to a new generation, and four of his students have a very interesting project going at the moment, having set out to determine if it’s possible to eat sustainably at UVa.

Duck into their blog to take a look!

I met today's guest, Sandra Beasley, back at the start of the year, after a session at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference in Chicago. Sandra is the author of two poetry collections: I Was the Jukebox, winner of the 2009 Barnard Women Poets Prize (selected by Joy Harjo, forthcoming from W. W. Norton), and Theories of Falling, which won the 2007 New Issues Poetry Prize. Chance meetings like this make attending the conference worthwhile all by themselves.

In June of this year, Sandra left her job at The American Scholar to focus on writing Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life, forthcoming from Crown in 2011. Recently I asked if she'd post something here about the big step, which so many writers dream of taking, of leaving one life and starting another. She graciously agreed.

Sandra lives in Washington, D.C., where she periodically contributes to the Washington Post Magazine and serves on the Board of the Writer's Center. After reading her piece below, come on back and read three of her poems online at Agni: "My God," "I Don't Fear Death," and "Love Poem for Wednesday."

***

Let It Rain

By Sandra Beasley

I just snarled at my boyfriend over a piece of fruit. More specifically, my last banana, which he tried to claim for his lunch. “I’ll buy you another one,” he promised, and he would. He’s good that way.

The problem is that I’d wanted to eat that banana within the hour, and he tends to pick under-ripe produce. So I’d end up running to Safeway myself, which means getting dressed and stepping outside. At which point, I’d remember oh! the envelope I need to mail and oh! the birthday card I need to buy for my mother and oh! I need to make photocopies of an essay and oh! I’ve got a 3 p.m. coffee date—might as well head over early with this copy of Real Simple and read until she gets there.…

“Don’t mooch,” I snapped at him, with the ferocity of someone defending no mere piece of fruit, but hours worth of work. That’s right: the act of putting on pants can derail an entire day’s productivity. Welcome to the life of a full-time writer.

You know the drill. When someone asks what you do, you trot out whatever workhorse pays the rent—in my case it was “scholarship coordinator,” then “personal assistant,” then “magazine editor”—before arriving at your true destination. “I’m really a writer.”

This elicits a respectful head nod or, if talking to a fellow writer, a bittersweet shrug. We know the odds. And you swear to yourself Someday, the answer will be, I’m a writer. No hyphenating. No qualifying.

I quit my job. I quit so that for the next year I can live off the combination of an advance on a nonfiction book, periodic freelance gigs, and honoraria attached to two poetry collections. I am a full-time writer with the bathrobe and sparse cupboards to prove it.

Yet the “what do you do?” exchange is no easier than before. The respectful head nod has been replaced by a quizzical tilt. The bittersweet shrug has been replaced by a narrowing of eyes or, worse, a nauseated smile.

“Really?”
“So you, um, you don’t work anywhere?”
“How are you covering health insurance?”
“That’s pretty brave.”

Yes. No. COBRA. Hmm.

It’s not as if I had been deveining shrimp for a living. I worked as an editor at a national magazine of arts and commentary, the kind of venerated place one settles in for a lifetime (literally: two supervising editors had, combined, over 50 years experience on staff). People all around me—including my best friend, including my boyfriend—have been laid off in their professions. Meanwhile, I walked out on a steady income with full benefits and three weeks annual vacation.

Is “brave” codeword for “idiotic”?

But the thing about life’s big decisions is that by the time you make them, you’ve already made them. The day I decided to leave my job was not the day I gave notice to my editor. The day had come months earlier, when I set into motion the events that necessitated my departure. And the roof fell in.

That’s not a metaphor. Passing through the doorway that morning, I had noticed the smell first. I thought I knew all the office odors: the accountant’s gardenia perfume, fake-cherry bathroom spray, fish-and-broccoli lunches. This smell was unfamiliar. Damp.

“Oh, Sandra,” my boss said. “I’m so sorry. We did what we could.”

Wet white chunks of tile covered my workstation. A broken dishwasher line on the floor above had released a torrent that dissolved our pressboard ceiling. Luckily, my computer seemed to be working despite the surrounding wreckage. I swiped the worst of the dust off my chair and did what we all do in moments of crisis—I checked my email.

The life of a modern-day magazine editor is that every morning you have thirty-six unread messages waiting, and not one will be useful. Submissions that began “I know you’re not considering unsolicited poetry, but….” Pitches for books we’d never review. Another query from the Save-the-Manatees people, hoping we’d print their public service announcement in the unsold advertising space of our next issue.

But when I switched to my personal email, there it was: an agreement that would authorize a New York literary agency to sell my proposal for a non-fiction book.

Sign and return, the email requested, as if that was the simplest thing in the world. So why was I shaking? Maybe because I’d said I could complete the book in a year. I’d lied. Or, rather, I’d made a promise while trying to please (pick me! pick me!) without fully processing the consequences. There was no way I could write a book in a year and keep working in this office. Something would have to give.

To distract myself from the looming dotted line, I turned to the water damage. On the table I’d used as my extended desk, towers of paper had melted into one gummy mass. This had been the worst of my job—the repetitive record keeping that haunts any assistant—and now, I’d spend hours regenerating what I had put off filing. But the table held the best of my work as well. Forty books, comp copies I’d collected on everything from political poetry to the Medici Giraffe.

“What better job for a writer, than to be surrounded by books all day?” I could remember telling people over and over throughout the years. Now those books were waterlogged. And as I looked over each handful I dropped into a trashcan, I realized: sure, I’d been surrounded by them. I’d talked about them. I’d assigned some for review. But I’d never had time to actually read them. What I had surrounded myself with was not words and ideas, so much as unkept promises in bright-colored covers.

What better job for a writer? How about the job of…writing?

The contract was waiting for me. Hands and heart moving faster than my head, I printed; I signed; I faxed.

“I’m stepping out,” I said to my officemates. The saxophonist who always hangs out on the corner of Connecticut and Q was playing “Walking On Sunshine.” There were only two-dollar bills in my wallet, but I gave one to him. I bought a Coke with the other and walked the same square block three times, sipping it slowly.

When I returned to my desk, the overly conditioned air raised gooseflesh on my arms. When I am writing at home all day, I thought, I will keep my thermostat at 76 degrees. Then I heard it. A gentle rushing. Maybe the air-conditioner? I pushed back from my desk. “Anybody else hear that?”

Drip. Drip. Drip. I dashed up to the kitchen, where the building manager was twisting valves under the sink. Someone had restarted the broken dishwasher.

“I’ve got a call in,” he said. “But I can’t stop it.”

Downstairs, the staff gathered around my desk. They laid trash bags over my computer and lined up wastebaskets, trying to catch the spray. The spray became a flow, then a flood. The surviving tile swelled and drooped.

An impatient coworker grabbed the nearest prod—my long-handled umbrella—and began jabbing at the tile, trying to coax it down, smearing the pink-and-yellow flowered nylon with white sludge.

“Back off!” I wanted to shout. “Leave it alone!”

But there was no point. Soon this would no longer be my office. Soon this would no longer be my life. In the days ahead, I would come to understand that the free pens and ever-ready coffee had been an impossibly precious gift. I would come to count bananas like a madwoman. And I would be writing. Writing. Writing.

I can’t tell you if I made the right decision, or where I’ll be in a year. Here is what I do know: there’s no such thing as a wise risk. There are only the chances you must take on yourself. No matter the timing. No matter the economy.

Sometimes that means you stand back, and let the ceiling fall where it may.

***

Read more by and about Sandra at her website, SandraBeasley.com, and check out her blog there, called Chicks Dig Poetry.

Upon receiving word Sunday that a brief essay of mine had been listed as notable in the new Best American Nonrequired Reading, 2009, I was so rattled that I let the broom out and swept the floor with my cat.

“Three Graces” first appeared in Brevity, one of my favorite journals. Brevity has published “extremely brief” essays for a decade now, with the indefatigable Dinty W. Moore at the helm. Now it also traffics in craft essays, book reviews, and a saucy blog. It’s one of those publications that anthology and textbook editors seem to trawl consistently, and I’m thankful to Dinty and his crew for the opportunity.

Season of Ash. Jorge Volpi (Translated by Alfred MacAdam.) Open Letter, University of Rochester, October 2009. Paperback, $12.75.

Toward a Coherent Vision of the 20th Century—Or, Why Jorge Volpi Is My New Favorite Novelist

Review by Okla Elliott

Jorge Volpi’s Season of Ash is the kind of novel that reminds me why I read novels in the first place, but it’s also the kind that makes me wonder why I bother to write. Before the end of this review, I am going to try to convince you that Volpi is a genius, that you have to buy this book, and that he’ll end up with the Nobel Prize in Literature if there is any justice in the world (which there might not be…)—but before I attempt all that, you should know who Jorge Volpi is, as he is not yet well-known to North American readers.

Jorge Volpi, born in the internationally tumultuous year of 1968 in Mexico City, has written nine novels, including one other, In Search of Klingsor, that has been translated into English and which has won prizes in Spain and France, as well as Volpi’s native Mexico. He is one of the founders (along with Ignacio Padilla, Pedro Ángel Palou, et al) of the “Crack Movement” in Mexican literature, a movement attempting to free itself from what its members perceive as the chains of magical realism, hoping to return to the joys found in the work of, for example, Julio Cortázar and Jorge Luis Borges. Volpi studied law at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and holds his PhD in Spanish philology from Universidad de Salamanca in Spain. He has worked as a lawyer, a political aide, and as a scholar. The evidence of this political/legal praxis and this scholarly knowledge certainly show up in his work, though never pedantically or gratuitously. In the world of Spanish-language literature, he is known for his wide-ranging intelligence, the ambition of his work, his intricate plots, and a subtly dark humor.

Season of Ash opens with the infamous 1986 meltdown at Chernobyl. (So, okay, here I have an admission: I rather disliked the first few paragraphs of the novel—so much so, in fact, I was disappointed I’d agreed to review the book, since I was worried the rest of it would be equally unpleasant. I mention this for two reasons—to let you know I’m not such a fan of Volpi’s novel that I can’t admit its failings, and to make sure if you pick up a copy of the book, that you force past the first two pages, because after that, it’s pretty much perfect.) Here is Volpi, several pages in, at his lyric finest, personifying the radiation from the reactor’s meltdown as a monster the hopeless Soviet soldiers die trying to fight:

Wind and rain were carrying its humors toward Europe and the Pacific, its dregs were piling up in lakes, and its semen was filtering its way through the geological strata. The monster was in no hurry. It was patiently planning its revenge: Every baby born without legs, without a pancreas, every sterile sheep, dying cow, every rusty lung, every malignant tumor, every eaten-away brain would celebrate its revenge.

That wide narrative view—which takes in so much geography, time, and human suffering—is paradoxically one of the joys throughout the novel. The various plotlines, however, occasionally focus very closely on certain characters, the POV embedding so deeply into the consciousness of a particular character in the ensemble cast that we forget the novel spans four continents, eight decades, and over a dozen important characters (not to mention such historical figures as Joseph Stalin, Ronald Reagan, and Boris Yeltsin). Though, now looking over the above excerpt, I see just how intricately Volpi weaves his narrative lines, how flawlessly he modulates his narrative registers; I say this because while I enjoy the excerpt by itself, it loses much (most?) of its power out of context, where we see Soviet soldiers sent to their deaths, ordered to bury the site of the incident with sand, ordered to axe to death all the animals in the region and incinerate them, all the while dying slowly or quickly of radiation poisoning. We also are worried about the political well-being of the scientists involved as we read all this. And on, and on.

Volpi’s scholarship and knowledge of international law and politics complements his novelistic powers wonderfully. With only a few well-placed and concisely explained historico-political facts, Volpi creates unimpeachable narrative authority on such wide-ranging topics as Hungarian student movements, the Zairian French dialect, the corruption surrounding IMF funds in Africa, computer technology, mathematics, genetics, war strategy, hippie communes in the US during the '60s, abortion procedures, depression, and more. There seems to be nothing he doesn’t know and nothing he can’t find human tragedy and human comedy in.

This wide of a scope and this many movable parts would likely become a mess in a lesser novelist’s hands. Volpi has, however, chosen a structure that organizes his materials without constricting them. The novel is divided into a prelude and three acts, each act containing seven chapters.

The Prelude covers the Chernobyl incident and is set entirely in 1986. Act I, which covers the years 1929-1985, is not chronologically ordered but rather swims around in time and plotlines, which seems unorganized but is not on closer inspection. We learn the DNA, so to speak, of the novel in Act I, and the non-linear narrative lends itself to such a huge vision very well. But had Volpi kept that non-linearity for the entire novel, readers would simply get lost in the wash of time and information. And so Act II, which covers the years 1985-1991, is ordered exactly chronologically, with each of its seven chapters covering a single year. Act III covers 1991-2000 and returns to the non-linear structure, but by this point, we are oriented enough in the world of the novel for this not to be a problem. And, as you can see, the overall structure of the novel takes us, in its roundabout way, from 1929 to 2000, thus giving the novel an overall sense of progression.

The two novels I was most reminded of while reading Season of Ash were Europe Central, by William T. Vollmann, and 2666, by Roberto Bolaño. Most novels would be reduced to, forgive the pun, ash by such a comparison, but Volpi’s novel not only stands up to these two masterpieces, I daresay it surpasses them. It shows all the erudition, all the aesthetic sophistication, all the vision of a Europe Central or a 2666, yet it is considerably more readable. In effect, it accomplishes all they do intellectually and emotionally while also being entertaining. During the time I carried the book around with me, I was always digging it out of my bag on a bus or train, just to get a few pages in; it kept me up past when I should have been asleep; it caused me to ignore invitations to parties (even ones I actually wanted to go to).

The publisher’s synopsis on the back of the book reads:

Jorge Volpi's Season of Ash puts a human face on earth-shaking events of the late twentieth century: the Chernobyl disaster, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of Soviet communism and the rise of the Russian oligarchs, the cascading collapsing of developing economies, and the near-miraculous scientific advances of the Human Genome Project. A scientific investigation, a journalistic exposé, a detective novel, and a dark love story, Season of Ash is a thrilling exploration of greed and disillusionment, and a clear-eyed examination of the passions that rule our lives and make history.

So, there you have it.

I can’t go into a complete analysis of the translation here, but suffice to say that Alfred MacAdam, who has translated many of Latin America’s literary giants (Fuentes, Vargas Llosa, and Cortázar), has made a virtuoso performance here. (I do wonder how the Spanish title, No Será la Tierra, became Season of Ash—but oddities of title changes happen all the time in translation, so we’ll just have to overlook this). Translating genius requires itself a certain genius. MacAdam is already well-lauded for his work as a translator, but someone needs to give this man a medal for his current effort.

I hope Volpi’s international reputation, coupled with MacAdam’s translation and credentials, make this book the last necessary element for Volpi to contend for the Nobel, which would end the Eurocentrism many (Americans) complain about the prize having had in recent years. More importantly, it would celebrate a massive and original talent.

***

Okla Elliott's non-fiction, poetry, short fiction, and translations have appeared in A Public Space, Indiana Review, International Poetry Review, The Literary Review, The Los Angeles Review, and New Letters, among others. He is the author of two poetry chapbooks and is co-editor, with Kyle Minor, of The Other Chekhov.

Gaze into the box:

I had some fun yesterday doing a nearly hour-long interview on my novel with the local NPR affiliate. I don’t exactly have my NPR voice perfected, but brew up a cup of chamomile and sip it while you listen, and you’ll get the idea.

Sometimes, even in writing, it’s necessary to lead by negative example. Granted, I’m in one of my moods after several hard days in the teaching mill, but I think this is spot-on, mate (via Philip Graham).

Speaking of Philip Graham, author of The Moon, Come to Earth: Dispatches from Lisbon and the subject of a recent interview here, he’s taking his book on the road (again). Check here for dates and venues if you live near Iowa City, Champaign, or Chattanooga.

Brian Turner, a poet to watch and another interviewee here, has been blogging for the New York Times as part of the "Home Fires: American Veterans on the Post-War Life" series. He’s currently spending a year traveling around the world, and his posts are getting a lot of attention.

State workers here are required to take and pass an annual, online, ethics refresher course (it takes 30-60 minutes), and state university employees are no exception. The format has varied over time, but the requirement inevitably draws complaints. Since money is always tight, and the state employs many people, the course's design has been one-size-fits-all. Liberal arts faculty were often irritated that they had to read about and be quizzed on the ethics of signing contracts with vendors, with whom they had no contact, and facilities workers were no doubt puzzled about warnings not to take gifts from students’ parents in exchange for grade influence.

ach year's refresher covers oddly selective rules governing everything from taking home leftover departmental-party balloons to sexual harassment. None of the information is particularly weighted, so all infractions sound like equal offenses. A formal test, also taken online, used to follow the instruction. The system knew exactly how long you were taking to read each page, so if you sped through or left it sitting there too long you could be disciplined for not taking the process seriously. The system also reports those who fail to take it at all.

When you do finish, it generates a certificate that must be printed and kept on hand in case an administrator demands to see it. Dire warnings are sent around about failure to comply. All this has come down from on high in a state where the governor himself had a few ethics problems, which really stuck in some people’s craws too.

I’ve just finished this year’s refresher. The website was much slicker, and there was no separate test, just 74 pages(!) of scenarios and multiple-choice questions, with feedback on both right and wrong answers. The material still tried to cover, in a general fashion, oddly specific rules. If you’re invited to a cocktail-dinner party for a company that does business with the university, it turns out, you can eat and drink $75 worth, but at $75.01 you’ve committed an ethics breach. Some other situation sets the cap at $100. Sometimes you have to give perceived gifts or compensation back, or donate an equivalent amount to charity, other times not.

The winning scenario was one in which Administrator Pablo did something that was a minor ethics problem, best I can remember; Sub-Administrator Jill didn’t report it, so her violation was worse; her coworkers tried to give her a hard time about it and were in bigger trouble; and when State Investigator Fred came to ask for documents regarding the case, he overstepped his authority by doing so. The expected answer to the final corresponding test question was that we should immediately contact our “EO”—campus ethics officer—to report the state ethics investigator.

There was a passage in the introduction to this year’s test that read:

The University is committed to building and fostering an ethical workplace culture. Ethics training provides an opportunity to reflect on and reaffirm our obligations as members of the academic community. Though not all elements of the training may be specific to your line of work here at the University, the program in its entirety is important. Ethics training will not, by itself, ensure ethical behavior. Personal responsibility, a culture of high mutual expectations, and the tone set by leaders all play a role in encouraging ethically responsible behavior.

It was signed by all the university presidents in the system, including the one we most recently lost to ethics violations, and I took my test on the day that our chancellor resigned for related reasons.

On a recent collecting trip through the thickets of creative nonfiction, I took note of a form that must have its roots in something ancient that I’m not remembering:

I can remember the bare wooden stairway in my uncle’s house, and the turn to the left above the landing, and the rafters and the slanting roof over my bed, and the squares of moonlight on the floor, and the white cold world of snow outside, seen through the curtainless window. I can remember the howling of the wind and the quaking of the house on stormy nights, and how snug and cozy one felt, under the blankets, listening…. I remember the raging of the rain on that roof, summer nights, and how pleasant it was to lie and listen to it, and enjoy the white splendor of the lightning and the majestic booming and crashing of the thunder.

It’s a litany of things remembered (or known or seen in other texts), hung on a string of conjunctions; it’s sung in a first-person voice unsubmerged in the narrative; it’s in the present tense, where elsewhere the remembering is situated in the past; and it almost boastfully advertises its store of memories. Could the general form be from Shakespeare, epic poetry, the Bible? There is a faint echo in Ecclesiastes (“I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and, behold…”) and in Job (“And I alone am escaped to tell thee…”).

There’s something similar in Ernest Hemingway’s “one true sentence” exercise, which I wrote about a couple of years ago. His sentences also want to be noticed in their observing:

I have seen Peggy Joyce at 2 A.M. in a dancing in the Rue Caumartin quarreling with the shallaced [sic] haired young Chilean who had long pointed finger nails, danced like Rudolph Valentino and shot himself at 3:30 that same morning.

The present-perfect construction “I have seen” intensifies the feeling that something that happened at an indefinite time in the past continues to inhabit the present, and the word “have” is a homonym for possession. (Hemingway’s exercises could have been influenced by the “Epiphanies” recorded by James Joyce in his early notebooks, which include short “memorable phases” of the artist’s mind “as he observes, reminisces, or dreams,” but there appears to be nothing in the Joyce epiphanies this obviously “I”-centric. Joyce liked to leave the artist behind the curtain, paring his fingernails. See Robert Scholes and Richard M. Kain, The Workshop of Daedalus: James Joyce and the Raw Materials for A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Northwestern UP, 1965).

The little form I started with is longer than Hemingway’s Imagistic exercises and more lyrical (“That art is lyrical whereby the artist sets forth the image in immediate relation to himself,” Joyce writes), and in fact brings narrative to a grinding halt, relying on its sharpness and mood for interest instead. The thing that stands out for me is the claim of ownership or capability:

I can call back the solemn twilight and mystery of the deep woods, the earthy smells, the faint odors of the wild flowers, the sheen of rain-washed foliage, the rattling clatter of drops when the wind shook the trees, the far-off hammering of woodpeckers and the muffled drumming of wood pheasants in the remoteness of the forest, the snapshot glimpses of disturbed wild creatures scurrying through the grass….

Oddly enough, both examples I’ve provided are Mark Twain, from his Autobiography, a mash-up of unpublished writing, the occasional published piece, and a whole lot of raw dictation that was never finished or published as a book in Twain’s lifetime. The passage, which continues for five pages, doesn’t sound much like Twain to me, and in fact there’s nothing else like it in the book or in the rest of Twain, best I can remember. (I elided telltale words in this example, such as “forgotten sins came flocking out…and wanted a hearing,” which would be like finding his fingerprints on the page). It reminded me of Hemingway in his memoirs, Moveable Feast:

I remember the smell of the pines and the sleeping on the mattresses of beech leaves in the woodcutters’ huts and the skiing through the forest following the tracks of hares and of foxes. In the high mountains above the tree line I remember following the track of a fox until I came in sight of him and watching him stand with his right forefoot raised and then go carefully to stop and then pounce, and the whiteness and the clutter of a ptarmigan bursting out of the snow and flying away and over the ridge.

In addition to staking claims on Romantic experience—transcendent self in nature—both passages use present-tense verbs and participles in an implied past progressive tense (“I remember [that I was] following…”) to show the past, in the process arguing the power of the minds involved to defy time, in which the writerly ego takes particular pride. The resultant intrusion of the overt first-person could as easily have been submerged in standard exposition or description, as in Hemingway’s memory of F. Scott Fitzgerald, in which there’s no announcement of remembering:

He was lightly built and did not look in awfully good shape, his face being faintly puffy. His Brooks Brothers clothes fitted him well and he wore a white shirt with a buttoned-down collar and a Guard’s tie.

But the self in relation to its past is the basis for much nonfiction writing, and elements of what I’m talking about often rise to the surface without breaking, as with Russell Baker in his autobiography Growing Up, on the wake held after the sudden death of his father:

So late in November, the dusk came early. The men seemed unusually quiet. I did not know many of them. They stood in little groups talking quietly, almost in whispers, probably not saying anything very interesting, just feeling self-conscious in their Sunday suits with nothing to do but stand. The men standing and waiting and talking quietly with nothing to do in their good dark suits [my emphasis on the ongoing present] was part of the ritual too.

Or Mencken in Mencken’s America (Ohio UP, 2004): “And she wore, I remember [intrusive “I”], something of very soft dark green, and the spun sable silk that mere prose writers would have called her hair caught in orange chiffon.”

In that most beautifully literary of memoirs, Speak, Memory, Vladimir Nabokov reveals his ongoing construction of memory with various elements of this form—reversion to present tense, use of participles, prideful possession of images, the intrusive “I”—every few pages:

I can visualize her, by proxy, as she stands in the middle of the station platform, where she has just alighted, and vainly my ghostly envoy offers her an arm that she cannot see.

Presently, lessons are over and Mademoiselle is reading to us on the veranda where the mats and plaited chairs develop a spicy, biscuity smell in the heat.

I can easily refeel the exhilarating change from the thickly padded, knee-length polushubock, with the hot beaver collar, to the short navy-blue coat with its anchor-patterned brass buttons….

And now a delightful thing happens. The process of recreating that penholder and the microcosm in its eyelet stimulates my memory to a last effort….

I suddenly see myself in the uniform of an officers’ training school: we are strolling again villageward….

I remember the dreamy flow of punts and canoes on the Cam, the Hawaiian whine of phonographs slowly passing through sunshine and shade and a girl’s hand gently twirling this way and that the handle of her peacock-bright parasol as she reclined on the cushions….

Nabokov of course is writing on memory as much as on his memories:

[T]o try to express one’s position in regard to the universe embraced by consciousness, is an immemorial urge. The arms of consciousness reach out and grope, and the longer they are the better. [T]he poet feels everything that happens in one point of time. Lost in thought, he taps his knees with his wand-like pencil, and at the same instant a car (New York license plate) passes along the road, a child bangs the screen door of a neighboring porch, an old man yawns in a Turkestan orchard, a granule of cinder-gray sand is rolled by the wind on Venus, a Docteur Jacques Hirsch in Grenoble puts on his reading glasses, and trillions of other trifles occur—all forming an instantaneous and transparent organism of events, of which the poet (sitting in a lawn chair, at Ithaca, N.Y.) is the nucleus.

That ongoing present of consciousness, with the writer inside like a grain of sand, and the pearl in the oyster, and the oyster in the sloshing sea, and the planet spinning with the inertia of its watery weight, is the basis for this odd little form I’ve noticed, which we might call the litany of self.

While trying to write his failed autobiography Twain searched for a form that would best convey the experience of a life lived.

What a wee little part of a person’s life are his acts and his words! His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself. All day long, and every day, the mill of his brain is grinding, and his thoughts, not those other things, are his history. His acts and his words are merely the visible, thin crust of his world, with its scattered snow summits and it vacant wastes of water—and they are so trifling a part of his bulk! a mere skin enveloping it. The mass of him is hidden—it and its volcanic fires that toss and boil, and never rest, night nor day. These are his life, and they are not written, and cannot be written. Every day would make a whole book of eighty thousand words—three hundred and sixty-five books a year. Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man—the biography of the man himself cannot be written.

(Note that Joyce, soon after, writes a “whole book”—Ulysses—that purports to be one day below the thin crust of a man’s life.) Twain’s litany of self, a few intense memories arranged by craft in a much longer text, is but one mode of that search for form.

Pleased with my discovery and wanting to share the beauty of the un-Twainish Twain passage, I went to see my acquaintance Rory, a nonfiction editor, administrator, sometime-teacher, and progenitor of a girl-tribe so large it will one day people the earth. All these stressors sometimes make him Churmish, and the flood of predictable writing about self that he constantly reads—“Look at me, looking at the world”—has jaded him.

“My crew and I would shoot that thing full of holes,” he said, sneering at the Twain. He said anything written in the “I have seen, I can remember” style was notable only for its sentimentality. I pointed out that in writing terms it’s not sentimental—unearned emotion—though it undoubtedly has feeling.

Rory said it must be nostalgic then, longing for an irrecoverable pastorality, like Raymond Williams’ idea of an Edenic past that never existed except in the mind of the writer. Rory pushed me out the door with an essay he’d written about lost Beat-writer sons who yearn for this Eden, which he’d published in the Review of Contemporary Fiction so long ago it was printed on the bark of the tree of knowledge.

Of course there are lost worlds in my examples, since, almost by definition, writing on the past points to difference. Hemingway talks about skiing in Austria between the wars, before ski lifts were common, and how hiking up the mountains made one’s legs capable of the long run down to the valley, so injuries from falls were less common then. Changes do occur in processes and technologies, and to recall old ways is not necessarily nostalgic. (Hemingway is instead making a moral judgment.) Besides, many things this form takes pleasure in—experiences in both nature and human culture—can still be found if you wish to find them for yourself.

Rory would probably better appreciate the litany of Roy Batty, the killer replicant in the film Blade Runner, who wants in his dying hour for his pursuer to understand the fragility of even spectacular memories. “I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I've watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate,” he soliloquizes in an elegy of self that fails to mention his gouging out the eyes of his Frankenstein-like creator. “All those moments will be lost, in time, like tears in rain.” Now there’s a lost-son narrative.

Here’s the set-up; you have until Friday at 4:00 to answer:

You’re teaching an introductory survey for non-majors to a lecture hall of 200 students. Since the class is only 50 minutes long, three times a week, you handed out a prompt last Monday for a short take-home essay due Friday by 4:00 p.m. The prompt stipulated that no late essays would be accepted. On Wednesday last week you gave an in-class test of matching, fill-in-the blank, and short answers. You drove your TAs (and yourself) to finish grading and recording all the scores by the end of the weekend.

This Monday you go in and discuss the test in class. As you’re leaving a young man asks if he can speak to you. He’s shy, impeccably polite, and mildly embarrassed: He’s “forgotten” to write and turn in a take-home essay, worth 20% of the midterm total.

“Is there any way I can still do it?” he asks. Tears (his) are a real possibility.

He, like 70 of his classmates, is a first-time freshman at a very large state school. He’s Hispanic, and going by what he says, he's probably the first in his family to attend college. His score for the in-class portion of the test was a mere 50 out of a possible 80. (With the 20 additional points of the take-home essay, the test is worth 100.) Only one other student "forgot" to turn in an essay, but at least she remembered to e-mail with extenuating circumstances a few hours after it was due.

What would you do about the young man? Take his essay? For full or reduced points? How reduced? On what basis, given your policy? Or would you refuse the essay as another sort of pedagogy?