By Iva Bittová
ECM Records (March 2013)

A review by Ian Patterson

The catch-all term avant-garde is often used to describe singer/violinist Iva Bittová’s music, but in truth her musical language—kaleidoscopic in color and unique in presentation—is essentially unclassifiable. A well known actress, Bittová expanded her horizons to music in the early eighties, since when she’s bounced from Bartok to experimental rock, and from folk-influenced jazz to her collaboration with innovative New York ensemble Bang on a Can. Bittová’s eclecticism is evident on her debut as leader for ECM, an intimate solo performance where her voice blends with violin and kalimba in an intoxicating brew that is both ethereal and invigoratingly rootsy.

The dozen tunes—simply titled Fragments I-XII—cover broad impressionistic ground, and whether accompanied by kalimba or violin, or singing solo, Bittová’s emotive language stems from the depths of the human soul. Violin colors the majority of the tracks, but more than an accompanying instrument, it’s an extension of Bittová’s voice and of her Moravian heritage, both classical and gypsy. This symbiosis is strongly felt on “Fragment III”—a strangely operatic poem—and on “Fragment V,” a haunting lament where violin and voice sound as one. Plucked, reverberating strings provide minimalist but highly atmospheric support to Bittova’s hypnotic, folksy vocals on “Fragment IX.”

Bittová collaborated with Czech string quartet Škampa in interpretations of Moravian composer/folklorist Leoš Janáček’s music—a source of inspiration too for Czech pianist Emil Viklicky and bassist George Mraz, with whom Bittova recorded Moravian Gems (Cube-Métier 2007), and the idiom is clearly close to her heart. Moravian folk may provide the common thread that unites these dozen pieces but Bittová’s language is all her own, crafting a scarcely discernible line between incantation and lament, and between abstract and viscerally engaging moods. It’s impossible to remain indifferent to Bittová’s naked emotion.

The vocal-only numbers provide album highlights. “Fragment IV,” “Fragment VI” and “Fragment X” seduce with their sacred quality. In Bittová’s voice reside hints of Gregorian chant, early music and inescapable Eastern European flavors. There’s universality in her gentle ululations, in her siren call as seductive as the call to prayer, and in her soothing balm for tired souls, as caressing as the morning sunlight. Equally striking is the violin solo number, “Fragment VIII,” a short yet captivating hybrid between contemporary classical and timeless folk music.

Bittová trades violin for kalimba on “Fragment I” and “Fragment XII.” Her voice skirts between lullaby and prayer over repeating kalimba motifs, on pieces that mirror each other closely. Greater dramatic narrative shapes the episodic “Fragment VII”—which passes between angular, half-spoken, half-sung poetry and urgent violin riff—and “Fragment XI,” where swirling violin underpins Bittová’s heady vocals. Violin and voice soar gracefully as one, like a bird darting and gliding on warm currents, an effect heightened by the bird effects courtesy of both voice and strings. Bittová’s vocal improvisation here is strikingly original.

The allure of Bittová’s music lies in her disregard for convention and in her all-encompassing musical vision. There’s wicked beauty in the spells she casts.

Ian Patterson has covered jazz concerts and festivals the world over.

By Matthew Guerrieri
Knopf (November 2012)

A review by Cecil Lytle

Almost any discussion about Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) assumes an encounter with the meaning of canon as well as the meaning of Scripture. Both invariably rely on a certain level of faith and agreement. Matthew Guerrieri’s The First Four Notes takes on the task of unraveling the meaning and mystery of that reverberative quartet of notes that have made Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony (Opus 67) an iconic symbol of all sorts of terrifying machinations, including “fate knocking at the door.” To do so, Guerrieri has considered the overall work in its historical and philosophical contexts enlisting the help of a potpourri of thinkers and sensualists along the way from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Immanual Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx—traditional intellectual fodder for understanding the rise of the West—to Stanley Kubrick, the Bee Gees, Bonita “D’Mite” Armah, Ralph Ellison, Henry Thoreau, Nadine Gordimer, and, of course, Ludwig van Beethoven’s greatest inquisitor, Chuck Berry. Quite a sweep!

Beethoven’s Fifth has become a warhorse if there ever was one and, as such, suffers from over-familiarity. But no serious listener should attend a future concert of this iconic symphony (or any Beethoven symphony for that matter) without having first read Matthew Guerrieri’s The First Four Notes. This ambitious effort suggests that the author is part of a cadre of post-9/11 public intellectuals who see literary and musical canon as an ever-evolving mélange of voices and actors creating, codifying, and interpreting times past and present and re-evaluating the symbolic nature of (S)cripture not as script, but as an almanac—a lot of real-time guesswork predicated on “tradition” as well as matters of the moment. Therein lies the challenge Guerrieri has set out for himself.

The main premise of the book is the underlying notion that certain works in the musical and plastic arts (not necessarily literature) by relatively few artists endure not because of their intrinsic common emotional appeal, but because they engender in the view/listener a more indelible moral or political value easily usable from time to time, cause to cause. (Indeed, this is true in the most glaring twentieth-century example of Wagner in the hands Nazi propagandists.) Measuring the intrinsic appeal of a piece of music for its political applicability would include labor and civil right protest songs, some Gangsta Rap, any Perry Como ballad, and more. But then again, when is music ever completely apolitical? Music is always about “something,” even Guerrieri’s first four notes. The concern here is the suggestion that an accumulation of distinguished witnesses (Hegel, Berry, et al) is in itself a determination of the value and importance of those four notes.

Guerrieri observes that the first step in garnering witnesses is the need for a degree of popularity and pervasiveness. Beethoven was one of the few European musician/composers of the early 1800s to achieve celebrity during his own lifetime and an inner circle of fellow artists. His renown, unlike the quintessential court musician, Franz Josef Haydn, was chiefly attained outside the service of aristocracy who hired musicians and paid staff composers stipends for new works (usually celebrating an occasion important to them alone). It is significant, therefore, that Beethoven earned his keep in later years from royalties from publications and as an independent musician. By the time of the first performance of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in 1808, his reputation rested largely on the immensely popular and very playable first movement of the “Moonlight” Sonata (Opus 27, #2) published in 1801.

Although this lunar appellation did not come into vogue until half a dozen years after Beethoven’s death, he did signal his intentions by subtitling the work and its immediate predecessor (Opus 27, #1), Sonata quasi una Fantasia. In order to invoke the ineffable, he instructs the performer in the conventional Italian: “Si deve suonare tutto questo pezzo delicatissimamente e senza sordino” (“One must play this whole piece—meaning ‘movement’— very delicately and without dampers”). While these instructions present acoustic challenges for the modern player seated at a large sonorous grand piano, Beethoven couldn’t be clearer: mood and atmosphere are the essential features of the first movement. Despite the revolutionary aspects of the “Moonlight” Sonata, however, this celebrated first movement devotedly follows the structural procedures of pure sonata-form.

There’s no mistaking the fact that Beethoven was drawing attention to the element of surprise—the sense of departure from script—not found in the scores of sonata-form works he had composed during this brief period in Vienna. Similarly, Symphony no. 1 in C Major (Opus 21), published in 1801, opens deceptively (Molto Adagio) with a harmonic device that immediately steers the work away from its yet-to-be established home key (C Major) toward F Major, then G Major before moving forward twelve measures later to the more familiar brisk Haydn-esque sonata-form Allegro con brio in the key of C Major. With only one rehearsal before its premiere in the Imperial Court Theatre, the 2^nd flautist, 2^nd oboist and 1^st clarinetist must have wondered why, with a symphony in C major, their first utterance is a Bb, a flatted seventh—a note alien to simple C Major in tertian harmony. Unlike Mozart and Haydn before him, Beethoven is distinguished by his penchant for deception and misdirection without severing his devotion to the principle post-Enlightenment architectural attribute that made classical music classic—sonata form.

It is precisely this tension between adherence to form at the macro level and the blurring of events at the micro level that Matthew Guerrieri considers in the opening chapters of The First Four Notes. His discussion investigates the subversive implications of Beethoven’s use of fermatas, rests, and unisons, positing the view that each of these compositional devices contribute to the element of surprise and awe.

Fermatas over the fourth and eighth notes of the symphony [are] dramatic pauses punctuating the two statements of the four-note motive.

Throwing up such rhythmic roadblocks, holding the notes out for as long as the conductor sees fit, might seem like an avant-garde touch—a Beckettesque frustration, stopping the clock just as it gets started.

Piano Sonata no. 1, opus 2

The evolving use of fermatas as a dramatic element is an essential turn in Beethoven’s middle sturm und drang period. The interruption of even metrical pulse surprises the ear and misleads any unsuspecting follower. By contrast, Beethoven’s deployment of the fermata in earlier works was essentially pedagogical in nature, serving to separate and delineate the structural features of sonata-form. The best example of this technique occurs in the opening measures of his Piano Sonata no. 1 in F Minor, Opus 2, no. 1. The ascending first theme lasts a quixotic duration of 8 bars and contains just about all of the musical materials for the remaining six minutes of the movement. The material immediately following the fermata is the start of a development section built upon a contrapuntal spinning of the tiniest ingredient found in the first theme—the turn at the top. This section passes on to a literal reiteration of the opening measures of the exposition after an extended passage on the dominant which acts as a surrogate fermata suspending time and events before the full recapitulation.

By contrast, Guerrieri notes the first movement fermatas in the Fifth Symphony are not entirely structural, they are emotional, suspenseful, breathtaking. As with the above example from the First Piano Sonata (as well as the celebrated Sonata Pathétique, published in 1798), the first movement of the Fifth Symphony is an organic work that exploits the raw motivic elements found in its opening measures. Indeed, as the first movement of the Fifth Symphony progresses, Beethoven has the first four notes serve as the accompaniment to the second theme. Guerrieri, consequently, makes an interesting case for appreciating Beethoven’s intellectual development as a composer: What had, heretofore, in earlier compositions been an editorial punctuation (the fermata) is transformed into a compositional device or motive to be exploited and woven into his developmental technique.

That exploitation even allows room for Beethoven to employ fermatas, once again, as room dividers at the start of the Development section and even more dramatically in the Coda where he writes a reflective fermata within a fermata (Adagio, measure 268) featuring solo violin. If the ubiquity of the subject de-de-de dum was not clear enough, the author goes on to point out that after an opening series of fermatas opening the symphony’s third movement, it then moves forward to recast the same mnemonic rhythm of the symbol “V” in Morse Code, ● ● ● ▬, this time in triple meter. It would not be long before the twentieth century connected the two-fingered “V” victory sign with Beethoven’s little enigmatic musical motive and war.

Chapter Three (“Infinities”) offers yet another well-trod discussion of the connection between Beethoven and Romanticism. The difficulty here, as with most such examinations, is that the bevy of citations in the chapter is from figures living contemporaneous or immediately contiguous to the period in question. It’s a bit like asking the soldier in the fox-hole, “What do you think of the enemy?” Perspective is compromised by close proximity. A great deal of Western European intellectual thought is framed today by Kant’s wrestling to understand rascally questions about the nature of man in the Post-Enlightenment era. Is it possible to apply the machinations of social contract theory, Newtonian physics, mixed with the class-conscious aspirations conveyed by the American and French Revolutions to understand the meaning of de-de-de-dum as a symbol for “Fate knocking on the door?” Moreover, Beethoven’s most “romantic” musical extravagances with form and content took place long after Kant passed from the scene. Perhaps Matthew Guerrieri’s inclusion of lines from the usually unreliable source, Richard Wagner, gets it about right:

Here is shown once more the idiosyncrasy of German nature, that profoundly inward gift which stamps its mark on every form by molding it afresh from within, and thus is saved from the necessity of outward overthrow. Thus is the German no revolutionary, but a reformer…

Despite the myopic declaration of Teutonic superiority, Wagner’s description of Ludwig van Beethoven as reformer, not revolutionary, is apt. Those Beethoven extravagances such as changing and rapid tempi, and sudden key shifts were, for the most part, contained within the confines of traditional sonata-form. The point is made in the book that de-de-de-dum, while cryptic and haunting, projects toward more extremes yet to come in the œuvre of Beethoven and others. The stark FFF opening of strings and solo clarinet all reciting the same de-de-de-dum notes in octave unison, for instance, is prescient of the same raw emotional clarity found in the opening of the third movement of Arnold Schoenberg’s Fourth String Quartet (Opus 37) following the 12-tone cacophony of prior movements.

The genius of Beethoven may be attributable to his native abilities as much as it is an indirect result of fate of birth. Like Johann Sebastian Bach, Beethoven was born late into an era. He grew to maturity at the end of the period that saw the codification of sonata-form in the hands of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Franz Josef Haydn. He could measure and extend his ideas against nearly a century’s worth of sonata and symphonic exploration. De-de-de-dum and what happens to it in the Fifth Symphony is really about us—how we regard what we preserve and how we might continue to be amazed by the very familiar. Matthew Guerrieri’s First Four Notes: Beethoven’s Fifth and the Human Imagination just might help us do that.

Cecil Lytle is Professor-Emeritus/Provost-Emeritus at the University of California San Diego in La Jolla. He was the First Prize winner of the Franz Liszt International Piano Competition and his recording career includes the Complete Works for Piano by George Ivanovich Gurdjieff/Thomas DeHartmann, the late works of Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Schubert sonatas and waltzes, the piano sonatas of Alexander Scriabin, rages by Scott Joplin, Thomas “Fats” Waller improvisations, and Franz Liszt. This year he completed a 90-minute documentary film, Liszt in the World.

By Cees Nooteboom & Max Neumann
Translated by David Colmer
Seagull Books (February 2012)

A review by K. Thomas Kahn

Je est un autre.

—Arthur Rimbaud

Rimbaud’s 15 May 1871 letter to fellow poet Paul Demeny stands not only as a touchstone for modernist literature, but also as a presage of poststructuralist thought on alterity, most notably the work of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. For Rimbaud, “I is an other” is a concept that serves a cultural function for the artist, the writer as visionary (“I say it [the I] must be a seer, make oneself a seer”), dissociated from the self to forge an aesthetics whose focal points are meditations on the fractured nature of the “I” and the similarly unstable state of the world in which this being lives, creates, and desires.

This dual meditation on self and other is omnipresent in the Kafkaesque images for which Berlin-based artist Max Neumann is so well known. His images are absurd, surreal, and unsettling, many displaying Munchian faces with little or no distinguishing features, such as an untitled 2007 painting whose eerie chiaroscuro pits a darkly-clad figure against a pitch background to spotlight a white face literally coming apart at the seams from its center.

“Untitled,” May 2007/August 2009, 210 cm x 200 cm, Acrylic and oil on cotton

Whereas Munch’s Screamer actually does scream, a howl that is carried along in a circuitous wave of blue into the orange-tinted sunset above his head, Neumann’s images appear to be screaming silently: his palette suggests the alienation and dissociation individuals feel in the world at large and also in their own skin. As Cees Nooteboom puts it in one of the companion text pieces in Self-Portrait of an Other, his collaboration with Neumman: “Unable to advance or fall back, he turns circles in the space left him, screaming his discomfort in the scorched air.”

These themes of Neumann’s work were united recently in a collaboration with Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai; that collection, Animalinside, drew from each of their haunting concerns about self and other, the individual versus the state, and how the artist can act as a mediating figure for dominant culture to present the schismatic nature of things using an aesthetic approach indebted to Rimbaud’s visionary “I” as well as poststructuralism’s questioning of the dichotomies surrounding the nature of identity. It seems only fitting that Dutch author Nooteboom would want to collaborate with an artist like Neumann given that Nooteboom’s poetic prose fuses reality and dreams in uncanny ways that often mirror prosaically what Neumann does visually. As Nooteboom writes of first encountering Neumann’s images:

I could not reconcile their restlessness with the calm their maker radiated. I felt as if I knew the world I encountered in his work very well without being able to say why. Later I saw his work again in Barcelona and Paris and there too, far from his German base, I again felt the enchantment of those strange, unprecedented creatures, dream figures that resist description.

Self-Portrait of an Other roots itself titularly in the Rimbauldian, poststructuralist tradition by calling attention to the divisive nature of existence which Nooteboom and Neumann make the crux of their project: “Instead of trying to describe [Neumann’s] work, I would draw on its atmosphere and my own arsenal of memories, dreams, fantasies, landscapes, stories and nightmares to write a series of textual images as an echo but unlinked, a mirror.” (I will return to this idea of the mirror and its relation to otherness shortly.) The title “cuts both ways” according to Neumann in focusing its concerns on the same phenomenological events with which Lacanian psychoanalysis is concerned: “memories, dreams, fantasies,” and so on. In addition, the epigraph to Self-Portrait of an Other underscores the collaboration’s intent to examine various dichotomies—self/other, reality/dreams, landscapes/cityscapes—from a liminal standpoint as a Rimbaudian seer: “Transmigration of the soul does not happen after but during a lifetime.” This curious statement problematizes the teleological aim in most discursive practices, noting that what is to come after at the level of discourse is an event that actually takes place during one’s lifetime, thus becoming a phenomenon to which we can choose to bear witness.

Neumann’s palette for the background of the images in this collaboration consists entirely of variants of blood orange and a deep, sharp red, one reminiscent of Austrian artist Hermann Nitsch’s canvases and installations made with blood. Here, Neumann’s reds serve as artery-like settings against which his figures can emerge as though from scenes of carnage. One image is of a seemingly human form either wrestling with or morphing into a birdlike other whose beak is open in what appears to be an anguished cry. Another image places a hybrid figure in a series of obstructions—harsh black lines near the sides of the body present an obvious restriction, but Neumann carries this further by fashioning his painting into an oppressive force upon this being with a self-reflexive rectangle that calls our attention to the painting being a painting, a move uniting this collaboration’s poststructuralist tenets with aesthetic experimentations paired with linguistic inquiry such as René Magritte’s, most notably his La Reproduction Interdit (1937).

Like the figures that feature in Neumann’s startling images and which emerge from a blood-soaked background, Nooteboom’s prose poems emerge from and speak to Neumann’s own. A series of dreamscapes and ruminations, of splintered moments in time and fetishized compulsions, Nooteboom’s words weave in and out of different states as seamlessly as do Neumann’s paintings; as such, the repetitive themes of the project are stressed, becoming an obsessive rhythm to which the images add an additional level of anxiety, melancholy, and despair.

In one text, the text facing Neumann’s image of the figure obstructed which I noted above, Nooteboom situates his prose in the Rimbaudian tradition where intellectual and artistic discovery is the cause of existence: “He knew his continued existence was due solely to his addiction to thought, the chains of words he draped over things that remained unnameable despite their names.” Naming the unnameable is at the core of any artistic endeavor; here, the binary relation between what is named and what cannot be named stands as but one of the tenuous dichotomous relations examined throughout Self-Portrait of an Other, the examination of which can never be exhausted except through a Derridean “slippage”: a transgression of binaries by positioning oneself in the middle, by embracing an otherness that is paradoxically part and parcel of one’s self.

The artist is also visited by gods, but Nooteboom, rather than embracing a divine presence to serve as a poetic muse, rejects such intervention: “He kept still and hoped the god would not notice him.” Solitude remains the province for the poetic and artistic examination of existence, then, but this is complicated by the fact that the self is a series of masks, a collection of identities often so disparate that they can only remain in the realm of the unnameable: “When he is alone, crowds become mysterious. Among others, he no longer knows himself. Who are they? Does he recognize his own mask?” Apart from being masked from one’s own self, the “I” is under constant panoptic surveillance, with “perfectly circular eye[s] watching him”; as such, despite the solitary task of fathoming one’s own identity, this endeavor is also a performance of sorts, one that takes place under the eyes of society at large and therefore reduces the self to an actor in the drama that ensues when an individual attempts to challenge hegemonic meanings and norms.

Otherness is related to this idea of the gaze: “As the day proceeded, he saw the faces change, growing less and less recognizable. He wondered if he was like that too, but he didn’t dare touch it and avoided his glance in the windows… This time there were two of him.” According to Lacan, the mirror stage is one of the most pivotal development stages in our growing understanding of who we are and what makes us an “I”; however, in the mirror it is not recognition but misrecognition (méconnaissance) that causes us to begin to fathom our identity. As Nooteboom writes: “He didn’t know if his body has recognized him.” Like Neumann’s images, Nooteboom wonders if “there were holes where the eyes had been,” causing a project concerned with an analysis of the self to buckle as the self is an entity that is ultimately a stranger. Tellingly, then, it is the Other—our reflected image which we fetishize as an “ideal-I”—that defines our self, and it is for this Other that we are continually striving, barred from this idealized version of ourselves by desire and the linguistic trappings of the symbolic order. If “I is an other” then the “I” is also always in pursuit of the Other.

In Nooteboom’s prose poems, the mirror comes to stand as the place where this terrifying performance of recognition and otherness is enacted, and therefore there is both an attraction to this scene as well as a repulsion: “How easy, he thought, to disappear, becoming someone who has left his clothes on the rocks and entered the mirror forever, the impossibly thin, living mirror that seals the silence.” This image again emphasizes this collaboration’s aim to dismantle binary oppositions, and yet risk being “seal[ed] in silence” in the process. While images can help us to remember past experiences, they can also be traumatizing in that these reminders can further alienate us from our sense of self, recalling events in an ostensibly objective way when it is subjectivity that governs our relation to things: “There must still be photos with him in them, photos in which he didn’t want to see himself. The number of lives in an old body is unbearable.”

Recognition and rupture: these extremes are at the heart of many philosophical and aesthetic projects and Self-Portrait of an Other is a relentless meditation on the relation between self and other, between text and image, between the individual and the world, and, most importantly, what the artist’s role is in trying to elucidate these questions—for these are phenomenological questions to which there are no answers—in ways that do not repeat old discourses. Neumann’s images and Nooteboom’s texts work together to postulate a world in which the self can be free from all fetters, a world that can exist only in the dreamscapes and nightmare worlds the two men create together for there can be no self without the divisions, fissures, and schisms that we conceptualize as the Other.

K. Thomas Kahn is a writer based in New York City whose criticism has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Quarterly Conversation, Book Slut, 3:AM Magazine, The Millions, and other venues. He is the curator of @proustitute.

By Mikhail Shishkin
Translated by Marian Schwartz
Open Letter Books (October 2012)

A review by Christiane Craig

In Tromsø, Norway, in 2010, at an exhibition commemorating Russian prisoners of war interned in Norway, Mikhail Shishkin remembered Kandalaksha. Kandalaksha is the name for a city in the northwesternmost region of continental Russia where Shishkin’s father’s brother Boris went missing in 1941, the same year the Soviet Union completed a railway from that city to the Norwegian border, seized by the German army shortly thereafter.

With this knowledge, Shishkin was moved to inquire about a Boris Shishkin at the Norwegian Archives, to discover that Boris had indeed been transported to Norway as a Russian prisoner. Presumed Jewish, he had been executed by German officers a year after his disappearance, at the age of twenty.

When Shishkin first held the prisoner’s card kept for Boris, he was already thirty years his uncle’s senior and this report, along with an imprint of his thumb taken at the time of his capture, were the last remaining documentation of his lost uncle’s life and death—the only physical evidence of his having been at all.

In Shishkin’s Maidenhair, or Венерин волос, the first of his novels to be translated into English, the young soldier Alyosha writes to Bella Dmitrievna, the girl he loves, shortly before his own death:

Apocalypse is from fear of personal death. Universal death is a reassuring justice. It’s frightening to die because no one wants to be left behind. The others will go on and see what will remain forever concealed to you beyond the next turn. The worst thing about the Apocalypse, then, is that there won’t be one.

This fear of personal death is at the center of Shishkin’s project. Bella, to whom Alyosha had addressed his last letters, writes in her diary: “I need a notebook to record the sensations that no one but me has ever experienced before or ever will!”

For long years after his uncle’s disappearance, Shishkin’s grandmother held out hope that he hadn’t died, that he was still living on somewhere. And, in a way, it was so: upon reading the prison report, on which the flesh of his uncle’s thumb appeared in ink, Shishkin recalls how “the boy came suddenly back to life.”

Maidenhair’s epigraph—from the Revelation of Baruch ben Neriah—ends: “For by the word was the world created, and by the word shall we be resurrected.” Indeed, for Shishkin, the word can serve but one magisterial purpose: to resurrect the disappeared and all else that once lived and has since been lost.

And, according to Shishkin, only what was once real could be resurrected, pieced together from written fragments, what he calls “deposits of words”: diaries, memoirs, and letters.

This is how Shishkin defends his choice to copy passages nearly verbatim (only minor changes are made: a dog becomes a cat, a girl is called by another name) from the writer Vera Panova’s autobiography. Her recollections—of school, family, fascination—appear in the fragments of singer Bella Dmitrievna’s love letters and diary.

Shishkin has described reality as an “exterminating machine” of which written words are only the waste material. The refuse of human experience, they must be “brushed clean and put together with glue, as a broken vase is.” He explains his own writing as a kind of textual collage, countering the contemporary fashion of placing emphasis upon personal style. He is rather more interested in questions of form.

Maidenhair, then, is assembled from letters, myths, diary entries, and the transcripts of spoken interviews. The novel’s early pages describe a series of interviews, facilitated by “the interpreter,” between Russians seeking political asylum—entry into “paradise” (Switzerland)—and an unsympathetic Swiss officer called Peter:

Question: Have you ever sought asylum in other countries?
Answer: No.
Question: Do you have legal representation in Switzerland?
Answer: No.
Question: Do you consent to expert analysis to determine your age from your bone tissue?
Answer: What?

The interviews, at first brief and routine, ramify into endless histories, explanations, and parenthetical digression. Gradually, applicants forget what it was they are meant to prove. Very little of what they explain is “pertinent” to their application: they are only desperate not to disappear.

One man, having arrived in Switzerland without proper identification, launches into a preposterous story, according to which he worked as the body guard for a journalist who claimed that the secret contents of his briefcase would dismantle human evil. The journalist had resolved to carry out the very delicate operation of destroying evil on national television but is killed in a car-bombing just before his scheduled appearance.

His bodyguard absconds with his briefcase to protect it from whatever agents of “evil” would seek to suppress it. Finally, in a moment of fevered distraction, he forgets the crucial briefcase, along with his identification, on a train. But not before he discovers the tortured, half-burnt corpses of his mother and sister at their country home.

Many of the interviewees describe brutalities of a similarly extreme nature: rape, disembowelment, death by fire. Indeed, a great many people in Maidenhair burn, a most extreme attempt to forever abolish their presences from the earth. At one point, a list is given of the names and ages of the Gaugauzes burned alive in a barn during resettlement, and Shishkin advises his readers, “Here are the names, but you don’t have to read them. Just turn the page.”

These stories are interlocked with the interpreter’s letters to his “future, former” son Nebuchadnezzasaurus and fragments of Bella Dmietrievna’s diary, written over many decades and then passed along to the interpreter, who has been commissioned to write her biography.

Maidenhair’s language seems a “tessellated vault” under which its voices refract and converge, engaging one another. The endless work of writing, reading, and re-reading, of transcribing, copying, and translating, gives rise to these many textual echoes. Even in Rome, the “Eternal City,” every sculpture and every icon is only a copy of some lost original, like the girl who sleeps as though swimming a crawl: one arm forward, under the pillow, the other back, palm up.

Beneath the surface chaos of its many narratives, Shishkin’s book would appear fractal in its logic.

The prayer of a young soldier, Vasilenko, is recorded in Alyosha’s love letter to Bella: “God the father is in front, the Mother of God is in the middle, and I am in the rear. What happens to God, happens to me.” Bella tapes Alyosha’s letter in her diary and many years later, it will be read again by the interpreter.

Across time and space, Vasilenko will be “resurrected” by the Word.

Shishkin writes: “We are the branch, but for next year. And the soul of your father the submariner is not in some gull. It’s in you.”

Shishkin’s father had indeed been a submariner, as had his uncle Boris. But Shishkin’s “we” describes not self-identified bodies, but the stories created out of them. One branch—or story—emerges from the tissue of another and is at once particular and continuous.

The eighth-century Catholic theologian Henri de Lubac describes a Cosmic Tree: embrassant l’atmosphère entière de ses mains incommensurables.

It is a recurring image in Maidenhair that can be traced back—from Shishkin, as well as de Lubac—to The Book of Daniel, in which the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar dreams of just such a tree, standing at the center of Heaven and Earth.

Like de Lubac’s tree, Maidenhair’s narrative grows in all directions with “incommensurable hands,” except that, in Nebuchadnezzar’s vision, the Cosmic Tree is cut down and stripped bare, its stump bound with iron and bronze, made to “remain in the ground, in the grass of the field.” The king calls upon the prophet Daniel to interpret the dream, only to learn that he is himself the tree, and will likewise be cut down.

From its first pages, Maidenhair is explicitly premised upon the stories of the disappeared and the disappearing: marginal persons. Time and space are “decrepit, worn, shakey” and the slenderest of branches—your blackberry branch—are likely to snap off, to be lost in an eternal “Winter”: “stout, hundred-mawed, howling.”

Indeed, Svetlana Lashova refers to Shishkin’s interest in “the lateral branches of history.”
Not without bitterness, he invites his readers to turn the page on the names of the dead, to consent to their disappearance.

In keeping with this sentiment, the delicate Maidenhair fern that grows out from the Roman ruins is “God of life”: “The greenest of grasses. It grew here before your Eternal City and will grow here ever after.” The plant is also distinguished in The Complete Burke’s Backyard as having a “Lazarus quality,” which means, as Burke elaborates, “with the right care, it can come back to life from what looks like certain death.” It has elsewhere been called a “master” of resurrection.

If Shishkin is also a master of sorts, what he has mastered is precisely this “right care.”

Many of the fragments of Bella’s diary are written during time of war, and despite the general destruction that surrounds her, her first instinct is toward love and self-delight. Her dearest wish is to sing in a theatre, to be singly worshipped and adored. So when Pavel, her third love, tells how he rode with gunners over a field strewn with Red Army corpses, how drivers split heads under their wheels like melons, chuckling as they went, Bella closes her ears. She objects to atrocity and to human suffering as such: “It’s not my fault that my youth came in time of war! I won’t get another youth!”

Rostov, the city of her childhood, is twice destroyed by war, but always swept clean, rebuilt, painted over. Snow falls and the world is new again. Only in her diary, by virtue of her words, will the war and the ruined city, her youth and its every sensation, its every mood, rise up to “remain forever.”

And as for the ink that stains Lyalya’s lips and tongue—Lyalya, who first taught Bella how to kiss—nothing will ever wipe it from her mouth, neither time nor death.

Christiane Craig is a writer, translator, and Master’s candidate at Paris IV. She lives in Paris.

By George Szirtes
Sheep Meadow Press (February 2013)

A review by Bethany W. Pope

Bad Machine, the latest by poet George Szirtes, is a deeply associative collection centered around an idea of borders. How do we distinguish, Szirtes asks, between the physical form, which passes away, and the spark—or, according to one poem, smoke—that sets us apart from other animals? The poet raises such pivotal questions throughout this magnificent book—and answers as bravely as he can, as anyone could, the urgency of the questions matched by the extreme high quality of his writing in both form and image.

Every poem in this collection is more than worth the time it takes to read it, which, in turn, is longer than the time it takes the eyes to pass over the words and the synapses to file them. The book is full of unanticipated repercussions that assemble as a sort of echo-chamber inside your head. There is a vast amount of material to consider here, so I will focus on three poems that reverberated plaintively within me for several days, and it is fair to say these three encompass the author’s themes.

The first is taken from Szirtes’ experimental “Postcard” series, a sequence of poems specializing in the blurring of borders. At first glance, their layout, which presents the reader with two distinct sections—an image and its reverse—would seem to enforce distinction. The reader might even believe that the two sections could be separated, could stand alone, but soon it becomes clear that these are more than two loosely joined halves: the forward and the reverse bleed into each other.

The first section of a poem entitled “Postcard: Untitled, Monument” is built in jagged six-line stanzas, each line beginning and ending at a separate point, the shape mimicking the dissolution found within the verses:

Look, they have collapsed. The monuments

have fallen one after the other. Mud

Covers them; guts and grit and blood,

so they’re no longer granite but tents

Here is a poem about endings—of entire cultures, of relationships, though not all of them at once. The speaker appears to be of our time and culture, looking backwards at one that came before, yet the past and present overlap in a very physical way: the remnants of the monuments are something that the speaker can see and touch.

The second section of this poem (“Reverse Side”) delivers a solid block of text filling out twenty-four lines. It is a nearly perfect square of text dedicated to exploring the relationship of a couple in a park, the place where the remains of the past have ruptured and now push through the surface of the world that they know. They discuss the implacable nature of time and the inevitability of dissolution from the seeming safety of their place in time:

‘We are returning to nature.’ said one. ‘If these weeds
are anything to go by’. ‘And nature regenerates’, another responded.

These lines locate the speakers—and the seemingly fixed society they inhabit—at a place in the grand cycle, though only at the end of the poem is there a hint toward a coming phase. The text, which has hitherto been laid out as a near-perfect square begins to fracture ever so slightly. The spacing of the words change, the last line stutters, then abruptly halts:

never stopped growing. ‘We must hurry’, said one. ‘We cannot let the
grass grow under our feet’. A small wind sprang up. ‘Now we’ll be all
right’, they said. ‘Now at last we can breathe’.

The stanzas that once seemed to be composed of two poems blur into one, a cycle complete.

“Postcard: Joke Shop” covers a single page. Beneath the title are two subtitles—“1 Joke Shop” and “2 Reverse Side”—each above a block of text that is approximately the same size as a novelty postcard you might pluck from a wire rack in your local convenience store.

In “Joke Shop,” a nostalgic voice speaks first, asking the reader if she remembers various goods traditionally sold in novelty stores. This voice then asks several additional questions, such as, “Do you remember Jumping Beans?” Another voice, made visibly separate through the use of italics, replies with another question, though of a very different kind: “Do you remember the cockach?”

The first voice responds with nine more questions about much lighter memories, as though the speaker is trying to gloss over the other: “Do you remember Love Potion? Mystic Smoke and The Bloody Arm?” The second voice, gaining courage, fires six questions back, “Do you remember the ambiguities as well as the explosions? Do you remember the smells? Do you still have your eyes?” The brutality of the past cannot be buried by jokes.

The first section of the poem ends with a link to a fake web address:

http://www.onlinejokeshop.co.uk/practicaljokes/Others/

There are three voices in the second half of “2 Reverse Side.” The voices interact in a way that looks, on the page, very similar to the pattern in the first section. A speaker displaying the slight morbidity found in highly romantic lovers, writes, “My darling when I finger your tiny bones and consider our fragility I cannot help wondering about our future.”

His message is interrupted by another voice which shows kinship with the fearful italicized voice in the first half of the poem. This voice writes two sentences, ‘hi sir, i want to learn about some little bombs for only to make a man scared sound and little explosion and also have a timer.” This voice could easily be mistaken, at first glance, for a practical joker.

The first voice seizes the page again, for one sentence, “And I watch your eyes flicker, as mine too flicker” before romance is buried by more talk of bombs.

A third voice, also italicized, now replies to the first with nine questions, laid bare, stripped of all prankishness: “Do you want to put a hole in a concrete wall? Cutting through steel wall? Anti-personnel? Bring down an airplane in flight?” The romantic voice writes last, it cannot be buried, though its meaning can be altered by context: “Darling, I gently lick the stamp. I am delicate in my writing. My heart goes boom boom boom.”

Like the imagined front of the postcard, the reverse also carries a web address (this one very real), which is the final word:

http://www.boomershoot.org/general/BombHelp.htm#Littlebombs

There are no such things as jokes in the land of association, though true to the established form of the author, there are plenty of puns.

The second poem comes from another sequence of three poems collectively titled “Canzone.” This is the first, “Canzone: The Small of the Back.” It begins with a reference to the Judeo-Christian God (“He who has numbered the hairs on your head…”) before leading into a stanza that describes a form of intimacy both infinite in detail and universal. This God knows you down to your cellular structure, but he also knows every flower in the field. This creates a strangely impersonal sort of intimacy.

The second stanza introduces a hypothetical doctor (“I see his ginger hair, his black bag”) who owns a very different, limited field of intimacy: the physical body.

His field

is comprehensible, part of a bigger field.

He copes and prescribes for a body of small

disasters.

The doctor has stepped into the shadow of God, an echo, a lesser reflection.

In many ways the speaker of the poem (the “I”) is even smaller, admitting “My field/ of operation is narrow.” But the quality of intimacy the speaker shows makes this “I,” in its own way, closer to that of God: “I move to touch the small of your back/ where it narrows before widening.”

The speaker uncovers associations, memories that place the body it describes in a romantic, loving context:

So my hand knows your back.
It is marble and milk and summer and smooth grass.
We were stretched together, lying on the grass.
It was summer in London.

But while this is all human and beautiful in its way, the speaker nonetheless indicates a longing for a version of the God described, albeit a more manageable one:

That god knows the small
of your back better than I do. He comprehends the small.
We want him to number us, want someone who knows
what number is and means, someone who knows
the time.

The last stanzas pick up the root that blossoms in the third poem, the implacable nature of death, which is the reason that the immense God of the first stanza knows all of the flowers (“We know all flesh is grass./ We are handfuls of dust, breathing in dust”).

The third poem in the Canzone series is by far the most powerful, though without the others its effect is a diminished. “Canzone: Animal” presents us with the last moments of the life of the speaker’s father.

It begins with an image of departing (“I watch him blow/ out air that fills the room”). This air later becomes both dust and smoke, the flesh which congeals around and finally departs from bone.

The man is losing his humanity in increments, beginning significantly with the hands, “they are animal/ claws, old bones.” This is an image that leads, naturally enough, to the image of a thing consumed, “a plate of chicken bones,/ his fingers now very like chicken bones.”

Fire consumes, reducing the eaten to smoke and dust-ash. So death consumes, as well, leaving the gnawed clean skeleton.

The speaker questions the reality of what we are, if we are indeed anything. He states, “flesh and tissue and blood, pure animal/ whole animal, the spirit that we mean by animal,” the thing which, while it lives, cannot be dissected or reduced. If it is reduced, the layers peeled back, the life reveals something unquantifiable:

Then blow away the smoke
and see what remains, that nothing after smoke,
that nothing hardly worth the reckoning,
that all the same we must be reckoning.

This is the spark, the spirit that cannot be understood by deconstruction. Prod too hard, and the cloud dissipates.

Death and fear are things that must be lived with:

listen out for bones
whispering in the flesh, their song like smoke,
their words those befitting the fleet animal
glimpsed in the distance, leaping into reckoning.

This book is full of such glimpses. I highly recommend it. Go out and pick a copy up, you will still be holding it long after you have laid the paper down.

Bethany W. Pope is an award-winning author of the LBA, and a finalist for the Faulkner-Wisdom Awards. Her first poetry collection, A Radiance was published by Cultured Llama Press in June.

http://thereviewreview.net/interviews/one-vision-relentlessly-pursued

The mission of Music & Literature is somewhat evangelistic; briefly, its purpose is to bring attention to under-appreciated artists. Would it be fair to say you strive more to initiate conversation on these artists rather than define readers’ perception and interpretation of them?

I suppose so. The point certainly is to spur conversation, to present an artist’s work in many different lights so we might see it wholly, unapologetically bare and complete. A reader of Music & Literature will come away from an issue with many new voices to consider, all radically different from one another, and all compelling. Our appreciation for art, and the pleasure we take from it, deepens when we are challenged to think about it differently. This occurs most effectively through conversation among many inquisitive minds, which is what an issue of Music & Literature offers.

What was your publishing experience prior to Music & Literature?

Five years ago I began working for a couple of literary magazines, doing as much as they’d let me do, in all aspects of production, trying to learn everything there was to learn about how a literary magazine comes together and goes out into the world. After two years of magazine work, I did a four-month marketing internship at Graywolf Press and soon thereafter began working for Dalkey Archive Press.

How was Music & Literature started?

I began conceiving of Music & Literature immediately after leaving Dalkey. I knew I wanted to start an arts magazine, broadly defined. One of the reasons I sought work with Dalkey—why anybody seeks them out, as a reader or otherwise—is because of a mounting frustration I felt regarding the level of discourse in this country around the arts. I strongly believe that whatever apparatus we have today that informs the public about new beginnings in art has grown increasingly conservative over the past few decades, both in terms of what kind of art critical outlets (newspapers, arts and cultural publications, blogs, etc.) decide is worth presenting to the public as well as how this art is presented or reviewed. At the same time, we find fewer and fewer non-American artists in the pages of English-language newspapers and magazines, even online venues. This can lead to a false sense that there isn’t a lot of art being produced today that’s truly original, innovative, challenging…and therefore a false sense that we live in a much more homogeneous world than we really do! What was needed, I thought, was a new venue for high-quality, in-depth coverage of inventive artists who have no hope of receiving attention from newspapers or online editors. It took many months before the kernel of Music & Literature formed, and everything since has evolved naturally out of this central idea.

Are there other magazines on the market that have a similar mission to yours?

Only a couple others come immediately to mind: the Review of Contemporary Fiction used to do something similar, with each issue covering one or two modern writers whose work was seen by most review editors to be too esoteric or “strange” to interest their readership (a completely absurd idea!). I believe Parkett does roughly what Music & Literature does, with each issue covering 3-4 artists, though they deal exclusively in the visual arts.

Our mission is admittedly narrow, intensely focused, but to my mind the most interesting publishing ventures ongoing today began with one person’s vision, relentlessly pursued. I think most arts magazines lack a strong editorial vision or aesthetic, and for that reason read very much like many other magazines (which is not a criticism) and each seems to find its own audience, but I do think it limits them in terms of their cultural importance. That Music & Literature is a venue for critical inquiry alone sets it apart from almost every other arts magazine available. That we are interested mainly in artists who are, well, not American places us in league with just a handful of other publications. Add to this that we work directly with our featured artists to publish 70-100 pages of the best original material on their work…I’m not aware of any other magazine with such a mission.

Who is the ideal reader of Music & Literature?

A friend recently joked that the audience for Music & Literature will be a group of NYU dropouts 50 years from now. I try not to be quite so cynical, though his point was well taken. Those who have so far discovered Music & Literature seem to be intrepid, young readers. One reader who had just received our first issue (featuring new work on and by Hubert Selby, Jr., Micheline Aharonian Marcom, and Arvo Pärt) wrote to me quite excitedly to ask if I realized that it had been 16 years since someone had published new non-academic work on Selby. He was very pleased to have found, in Music & Literature, a community of like-minded readers, engaged in an intimate discussion on one of his favorite writers.

I believe the magazine will appeal to any art enthusiast who has not become complacent in their expectations of journalism on the arts, who is, maybe, like me, frustrated by the narrow aesthetic of major critical outlets, or who simply wants to learn something about artists they’ve never heard of before. Because the magazine is rather idiosyncratic, I am under no illusions that its circulation will ever grow to that of, say, New York Review of Books. But our readership is already—and I’m sure will continue to be—passionate, informed, and ever curious: an important class of reader indeed.

Do you believe the low public awareness of “difficult, experimental, modernist” work is a result of such work being more troublesome to market, or the lack of willingness among critics, editors and publishers to address “difficult” work? Might the two be connected?

Good question. It’s really a systemic problem. No one aspect of the market can be blamed, yet no one is guiltless. As I’ve said elsewhere, public awareness of any sort of art that is not easily digestible is at a low ebb. Unfortunately, this cuts us off from most of the best work being created in rest of the world, as well as from the most innovative art that’s being produced here in America. So, yes, the public radar is very narrow and, in a way, I see Music & Literature as has having a wider aesthetic than most other critical venues, even though we focus on only a few artists in each issue. In any case, since editors at the major review outlets are quite conservative and worried about satisfying a widely varied readership, there exists a wide aesthetic range that they do not cover, and what does get reviewed at a major newspaper/outlet seems then to get similar coverage or treatment in 25 other outlets, similar to the way in which so many articles in the New York Times get blogged and re-blogged across the internet. This leads to a very narrow public understanding of what books—and what kinds of books—are out there.

Book critics today are, by and large, unread in much outside of American literature of the past 30 years. The editors of review outlets do not assign “difficult” or “modernist” books to their reviewers because they (wrongly) believe that their readers don’t care about such books, or that their readers will be turned off by the foreign name on the cover. I don’t believe most readers care at all about which language a book was written in (do we often think of Anna Karenina or The Odyssey as being “works in translation?”) nor do people care about a book’s supposed “difficulty” (if you have read Moby Dick or Don Quixote, you can take on anything.) But if a reviewer claims that a book is “difficult” or “not for everybody,” and that’s the bottom line of the review, readers are less likely to go out and pursue it.

At the same time, publishers have shied away from releasing anything that does not easily fit this all-too-narrow market. Aside from a very few nonprofit small presses, publishers operate as any for-profit business operates in a free market: they supply what they perceive as the largest demand, flooding the market with books that have little or no artistic merit but that are easily digestible. If this is the majority of what gets published, and there are few intrepid critics out there to assuredly cut the wheat from the chaff, then you arrive in our current situation in which it is very difficult to isolate and enjoy those works that carry artistic value.

What kinds of submissions are you looking for?

Since we work directly with our artists to seek out the best articles written on their work in other languages, the majority of the material we publish is solicited either by me or by others closely associated with the magazine. We do, however, accept unsolicited submissions on artists whose work will be featured in forthcoming issues (this list, which evolves weekly, can be found on our website), and I encourage anybody who has an interest in writing for us to contact me directly. We are always looking for intelligent, informed criticism that engages in a meaningful way with the text or piece of art in question. In short, because our mission has largely to do with bringing these artists to public attention, we’re looking for appreciative articles that effectively and inventively highlight the best qualities of that artist’s work, articles that grapple directly with the question of why this artist’s work is so important. The articles we publish are smart, playful, and accessible to all audiences, even those who have not yet experienced the featured artists’ work.

Please elaborate on what you look for in criticism which can be accessible to the uninitiated while taking bold positions.

I think that the great majority of today’s art criticism, particularly book reviews, is inexplicably neutral, too uninformed and uninformative to be of much use to readers and art enthusiasts. Fewer and fewer reviewers take a strong stand and then support it with an informed critical argument. Perhaps this is one reason why readerships of book review sections have dropped precipitously over the past twenty years: they haven’t been doing their job! How are we supposed to know what to read if every review sounds like every other review and few strong arguments are being made in favor of one book or recording against another?

Music & Literature is—and must be, in order to thrive—both accessible to the general public and strong in will and opinion. If an article is written clearly and flows from the essayist’s deep knowledge of the artist in question, that article will most likely be as accessible to the uninitiated reader as it will to the reader who has an intimate relationship with that artist’s work, so the article at once functions for the uninitiated reader as an introduction, and for the initiated as something that deepens their appreciation of the artist.

As I said earlier, I’m in the business of highlighting the work I think and feel is most important, particularly if I sense it is in jeopardy of going overlooked. And then I’m looking for creative articles that approach that work from many different perspectives, and that, taken together, cover that artist’s entire career. A good critical article is as stylistically adventurous and as precisely organized as the piece of art it’s discussing. I’m not looking for instigation or confrontation: just quality articles that engage with the artist in an interesting way, that cast the artist’s work in a way I’ve never see it cast before, that makes the work new.

You freely admit your own personal taste being a factor in the selection of artists to feature. Are you open to queries or proposals from writers with their own neglected favorites? If so, how should a critic seeking publication in your journal go about making their case for a writer or composer who is not listed on your upcoming issue page?

Yes, the artists we will be featuring are simply artists whose work I greatly admire and wish to expose to as wide an audience as possible. That said, I am absolutely open to any recommendations, and welcome suggestions from readers of the magazine. As I said earlier, one of the main reasons for Music & Literature to exist is to spur conversation—and not just around the specific artists in any given issue, but out in the broader artistic and cultural realm. I recently had a reader who was aware of my admiration of Vladimír Godár’s music recommend the work of Alfred Schnittke (lo and behold, a late modernist Russian composer!) which I’d never heard before. On his advice I sought out everything I could and almost immediately became an obsessive Schnittke lover. I’m now set on dedicating an issue to his music and influence, and am truly very grateful for the recommendation.

J. Y. Hopkins lives in Virginia and writes a little bit of everything. His work has appeared.

Audun Lindholm: With the recent launch of Los Angeles Review of Books and the upscaling of BookForum, there seems – from the outside – to be a revival of ambitious review-based literary journalism in the US, after the demise of the Sunday book sections. But in your declaration of intent, you say that Music & Literature Magazine sees itself in “the tradition of ambitious critical publishing that in recent years has fallen out of fashion.” What separates your magazine from the review-based journals, and what is your view on the current critical situation in the US?

Taylor Davis-Van Atta: There has been, over the past 40 years, a shift in art as well as musical and literary criticism in the US toward conservatism, a shift that has mirrored our political tendencies. Broadly speaking, art today is marginalized in US culture nearly to a point of irrelevance, in that it is nearly impossible for a work of art, regardless of its medium, to enter into public discourse. The US has moved from a culture with rather harsh art censorship laws (in the 1950s and 60s) to one that engages in a form of self-censorship that might do art an even greater disservice. We live in a time of absolute saturation in terms of the amount of literature and art being produced (David Foster Wallace referred to this as “total noise”), and there exists no organized critical apparatus that readers and art enthusiasts can use to isolate and discuss the great works. As a result, US public awareness of so-called “difficult,ˮ “experimental,ˮ “modernistˮ music and literature is exceptionally low. I believe the audience for this type of work is shrinking and has been shrinking since the 1970s, and that this trend is due in part to the disappearance of critical outlets and the increasingly conservative nature of what critical literature is published.

On top of this, Americans seem to have contracted a case of cultural amnesia. Books, in particular, are generally treated much as any other commercial good: as objects with no history, objects that are expected to arrive and disappear as do any other bit of disposable culture. It seems to be a bygone notion that great art can stay with us, can remain as relevant to our lives and our time in very essential ways, sometimes even more so than when it first appeared.

Music & Literature is an effort to oppose both of these trends at once, to make great living artists relevant and accessible to large audiences, while also “reintroducingˮ artists whose work appeared and was somehow lost, like the novels of Hubert Selby, Jr. The other critical outlets you mention, along with a handful of others, including The Quarterly Conversation and the Review of Contemporary Fiction, are indeed doing very good work and are, collectively, trying to come up with new ways of approaching this landslide of new literature and art in such a way that we might be able to inject the best artistic endeavours back into public discourse, or at least identify and highlight the best of what is being produced. Perhaps in this way there is something of a revival going on in terms of critical literature and I certainly hope Music & Literature will be part of that.

Regardless, Music & Literature is a very personal project and the fact remains that very few places give considered attention to artists I like: Micheline Aharonian Marcom, Stig Sæterbakken, László Krasznahorkai, Arvo Pärt, Vladimir Godár, Avet Terterian, and so forth. Rather than covering new books and music as they are released, M&L will, over the years, offer its own canon, its own peculiar taste in art. It is an attempt to make as strong a case as we can for the recognition and appreciation of certain artists, over a period of years. Unlike most critical outlets, we are not dedicated only to the newest books or music, nor do we publish articles on current affairs or politics; in fact, often our featured artists have long fallen from public memory (their books are out-of-print, their music no longer performed, etc.) and we see it as our obligation to help reintroduce their work to the public.

AL: To my mind, American critical essays surprisingly often follow a certain formula. Formally, much of what’s published is very similiar to the factually oriented, quite neutral writing found in The New York Review of Books – often eloquent and always well-informed, but seldomly stylistically flamboyant or digressive, as essayistic writing tends to be in Europe, or at least in Norway. Exceptions to this rule seem to be Charles Bernstein, Carla Harryman, and a few others. Am I right in my supposition – probably a prejudice – that there isn’t, despite your Emersonian heritage, a strong experimental essayistic vein in current US essay writing?

TDVA: I can’t speak to the American personal essayistic tradition, but in terms of the critical essays and reviews of art that are produced in the US, I think there’s a lot of truth in your observation. Often our critical literature lacks any critical element. Literary reviews are, as you suggest, largely neutral, merely a passive summation of a book, which of course makes it all the more difficult, as a reader and consumer of art, to know what one should go out and read or experience. Reviewers seem to bend over backwards to appear objective in their writing, and there is little or no passion or enthusiasm for the work they’re reviewing. Sometimes one can’t even tell if the reviewer enjoyed the book or hated it, much less why! So, yes, I think there is a pervasive timidness within the whole US book culture. There are certainly many exceptions, but reviewers are often too afraid to take a stand, to support an opinion or form one of their own. The result is that their language itself is timid, conservative, sterile, which eliminates the possibility of taking stylistic chances.

AL: Quite contrary to Horace Engdahl’s widely publicized and much criticized statement about US literature being isolated and not in dialogue with the rest of the world, you’ve made a very international selection of writers for M&L’s first issue. Have you done this as a self-conscious pro-cosmopolitan gesture, or is this just the way you see literary influence and critical discussion taking place in general?

TDVA: Music & Literature is a natural extention of my own views on this subject and my own habits as a consumer of art. Personally, I don’t care where, geographically, a book or opera or film comes from; I care about its artistry and the artistic lineage out of which it is borne. It’s true that there is some chatter in US literary circles about “translated literature,ˮ almost as if it were a different form of art altogether, segregated from all other types of writing. This is, of course, ridiculous. I don’t think there’s any doubt that literature is an international art form and that the discussion of literature and art ought to be an international activity. One only has to read something like Watt by Beckett and wonder what Beckett was reading at the time to be introduced to the whole of great comic world literature. And reading this literature will inform and heighten one’s appreciation of Beckett’s novel.

But I can’t say that, at this point, the Magazine’s focus on international art is at all political. My taste in music and literature—and therefore the aesthetic of M&L—is international only because the great majority of the art I love is created overseas. As Dalkey Archive founder John O’Brien once said to me, “With music or painting, one doesn’t say, ‘Oh, Bach is German, how can I possibly listen to him since I’m an American?’ˮ And yet there does exist this persistent and inexplicable stigma or distrust in the US around “foreignˮ art, and particularly around contemporary “foreignˮ literature.

AL: You worked for Dalkey Archive for some time. Any thoughts you’d like to share about what you learned during your time at the press?

TDVA: Only that everything I know about publishing I learned from my time at Dalkey, and there’s no way I could start something like Music & Literature without having had that experience. I’m quite grateful for it. Dalkey Archive is one of a handful of small literary presses in the US whose mission it is to publish the masterworks of contemporary world literature, and their taste is exquisite.

AL: Why do you think N+1 gained such momentum? How did their magazine succeed in becoming so widely discussed and referenced? A few years ago, I spoke to a small press publisher in NYC who was not very impressed by their work nor pleased with the image propagated by the mainstream media of N+1 as “the alternative voiceˮ of their literary generation…

TDVA: It does seem true that N+1 has successfully generated or tapped into its audience with surprising efficiency and quickness. I have to admit that I was so turned off by the work they were publishing early on (in their first year) that I have not read them recently. They certainly put forth opinions, which I appreciate, but I remember the publication having a divisive tone, rather than one that is inviting and nourishing. I know that they are a rather broad cultural magazine, which heightens their appeal, and they picked up some powerful endorsements. In any case, I certainly don’t think of N+1 as speaking for me or my generation. American culture is so vast and diffuse that I think it would be impossible for one publication to «speak» for even a small portion of it.

AL: Your way of thinking about each individual issue of M & L seems in some respects to be similar to an academic anthology, which tries to cover a lot of aspects of a writer, from different angles. But you’ve also chosen to include interviews with each of the featured artists. These more subjective texts wouldn’t normally be part of an academic publication. How do you see the journal’s role in relation to academic criticism?

TDVA: I don’t see a relationship between Music & Literature and academic publications, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t similarities. The Magazine is, first and foremost, a forum for artists and critics, rather than academics. I am very open to publishing critical literature of any style, so long as it conveys something insightful and interesting and new about the work of the artist in question. Actually, our first issue finds contributions from two Arvo Pärt academics and their essays are clear, accessible, and interesting, though their approaches to Pärt’s music differ radically.

Much depends on knowing who your audience is. Academic journals tend to publish academics who are writing for other academics in their own encoded language, which, generally speaking, doesn’t appeal to the average arts lover. These journals do, at times, feature very good artists, but the literature produced on those artists can be quite inaccessible, impenetrable to most of us. This relates to another difference, which is that Music & Literature is marketed toward the “averageˮ or “generalˮ art lover. My intent is that a reader of M&L does not necessarily need to have read or even heard of an artist featured in one of our issues in order to enjoy the work we publish, and that they leave one of our issues with the desire to go out and experience these artists firsthand.

AL: Why was Arvo Pärt chosen as the featured composer for the debut issue? In your next issue you’ve picked Górecki as the composer to be focused on – am I right to infer a certain preference for the more “humanisticˮ or “emotionalˮ European modernist composers in these choices?

TDVA: You’re right that European modernism does seem to be the artistic vein we’re mining, at least with these first few issues. I’ve been listening to Pärt’s music for many years, and the choice to focus on him came mainly out of my passion for his work, but there were other factors as well. Several years ago Pärt was commissioned to write a symphony for the Los Angeles Philharmonic. I was very excited about this. I thought this event would finally launch his reputation in the US and push his music closer to “mainstream” acceptability. This work, his fourth symphony (entitled “Los Angeles”), debuted in January 2009. But it was met with a dispiriting level of coverage, both in terms of quantity and quality, and Pärt remains a world-famous composer who is ignored by my country. His work is not often performed and, outside of musical academia, very little has been written on his music. On a more practical level, I was also able to collaborate with the International Arvo Pärt Centre, which granted me access to Pärt’s personal archives and connected me with many of the best European scholars and artists who ended up contributing work to the issue. This was also a factor in deciding on Pärt as our debut composer.

It is true that we will feature Górecki at some point, but forthcoming issues will actually feature Avet Terterian and Tigran Mansurian (issue two), and Vladímír Godár and Ivá Bittová (issue three). These composers all fall within the vein of European modernists. Their music is at once intensely emotional as well as formally and stylistically innovative. Like Pärt, they have each managed to invent their own methods of composition that only they can master and employ. Their methods intrigue me as much as their work does, and the same can be said of the authors we cover.

AL: Your excellent reading of the Serbian novelist Svetislav Basara at Numéro Cinq suggests that you, as an essayist and reviewer, have an intimate relationship with the European existentialist tradition – Ionesco, Beckett, Kafka, Bernhard, Krasznahorhai – to the extent that you are mildly critical towards Chinese Letter‘s use of “now-tired tropes of the existentialist novel.ˮ But you also say that with CL, Basara “has tapped into the most powerful fictional engine: a self-observing observer who is riddled by doubt.ˮ On a personal note, it struck me while reading this sentence that, to see these words in this exact order, as a poetological micro-statement, was almost like hearing Stig Sæterbakken speak… Did you and Stig find each other in this existentialist view on the novel?

TDVA: I don’t believe Stig and I ever spoke explicitly about Basara or existentialism, but we certainly shared an affinity for self-conscious literature. I recently read Krasznahorkai’s Satantango, which was finally published in English earlier this year (to my mind one of the major events in US publishing over the past 5 years). In a way, Krasznahorkai reminds me of Stig’s work, in its darkness, its intensity and nearly intolerable realism. In fact, it is Krasznahorkai’s own observation on his ideal literature—that it should be “reality examined to the point of madness”—that I instantly relate to Stig’s fiction.

In the end, I am simply interested in language. One of America’s best literary reviewers, Steven Moore, recently wrote that “literature is a rhetorical performance,” which immediately resonated with me. The artistry of fiction, how a story is conveyed, interests me much more than the story itself, and more than any particular vein or tradition of literature. I’ll admit that I am a bit wary of “existentialist” art at this point, only because it has already been executed so well by others that most of what I’ve read since is a pale imitation of the greats, with too little variation to reinvent or make new the form. I am not putting Basara in this league, I think he is a powerful and very interesting writer, but only giving my general observation of existentialist writing today.

AL: How did you get in touch with Stig? Why did you choose to translate his essay about his habit of listening to sad music in your debut issue?

TDVA: Oddly I was not in touch with Stig until after I left Dalkey, which as you know is his American publisher. A huge admirer of Siamese (which is his only work to be brought into English so far), I wrote to Stig about a year ago, last spring, after I came across an article he’d written more than a decade ago entitled “Alt jeg behoever aa vite: 4 notater under innflytelse av Arvo Pärt’s musikk” (“All I need to know: 4 notes under the influence of Arvo Pärt’s music”). I approached him about translating this essay into English, as it seemed a natural selection for our debut issue on Pärt. He wrote back to say that this particular essay was “a sin of youth” that he was not interested in having translated. But he did have another essay, “Why I always listen to such sad music,” that he thought might fit, given that the musical reference in it is to Pärt’s De Profundis. I accepted “Why I Always Listen to Such Sad Music” and we began talking about the Slovakian composer Vladímír Godár, Susanna and the Magical Orchestra, Béla Tarr…. In every artistic realm, it seemed, we shared similar tastes and appreciations. He was very supportive of M&L from early in its conception, which was when I really needed such moral support, and I’m forever grateful to him for his kindness and generosity. We have dedicated the first issue to his memory.