Tom Andes (aka A.J. Asbury)

Pale Sun, Crescent Moon – Cowboy Junkies
The great thing about reviewing a Cowboy Junkies record, is that you don’t necessarily have to listen to a Cowboy Junkies record to do it. Really, just listen to that one you’ve already got, the one you bought after Trinity Sessions, having been won over like the rest of the nation by the haunting cover-version of Lou Reed’s “Sweet Jane” they contributed to the Natural Born Killers soundtrack. You’ll find the same strummy three- and four-chord guitar parts here, the same bare-bones three-piece ensemble rock band instrumentation, with every now and then a harmonica or a fiddle thrown in, just for the sake of “authenticity.” Margo Timmins’s voice still soars above the mix, the sort of voice that makes stoners who dream of becoming rock critics cream their jeans, except she’s still singing the same insipid lyrics about looking down into your coffee cup on a Sunday morning and experiencing some kind of minor metaphysical revelation involving the sunlight and the dish detergent and maybe a ring on the windowsill, all while holding hubby’s hand across the kitchen table, etcetera, the sort of toothless, insipid lyrics that make you think of your newlywed friends with the alliterative names in Boston, since if either of them were inspired to write songs, this is undoubtedly the kind of crap they’d write. Still, one or two tracks almost win you over, one or two tracks that almost seem worth the price of admission, the $18.99 you shelled out because she was right about you, wasn’t she, you don’t read enough fiction or listen to enough music by women, and having all but worn out your copy of that Liz Phair CD, never having been able to stand Tori Amos’s histrionics, didn’t Cowboy Junkies seem a safe bet? Well, safe they are, and safe’s the whole problem. Still, you might enjoy the atmosphere, just as long as you don’t look too closely at the lyric sheet.

The Voice Imitator – Thomas Bernhard
As outlandish a claim as it seems, this might just be the best book ever, certainly one of the best to appear within the last century. Do you call them stories? Do you call them sketches? Do you call them prose-poems or anecdotes? Bernhard might just have invented a new literary form, an anecdotal tale that never runs longer than a page, that passes so quickly you’ll miss it if you blink, and yet one that upon rereading seems to illuminate all of mankind’s absurdity, folly, stupidity, and perversion, all within the space of only a few tortuous sentences – and he’s collected 104 of them together here, under the subheading, “eighteen suicides, six painful deaths, twenty-six murders, thirteen instances of lunacy, twenty surprises, four disappearances, two instances of libel, three character attacks, five early deaths, one memory lapse, four cover-ups.” Certainly the almost documentary distance he keeps from his material is part of his effect, as is his use of an unqualified first-person narrator, who appears now in the plural, now in the singular, adding to the cumulative effect of the book. Misanthropic to the extreme, the narrator of these stories hates his homeland and his countrymen both, and by extension all of mankind, and yet who can argue with the following story, “Mail,” reproduced here in its entirety, a story that achieves redundancy in the space of two short sentences and yet in which that redundancy becomes part of the effect of the story? “For years after our mother’s death, the post office continued to deliver letters that were addressed to her. The post office had taken no notice of her death.” And yet Bernhard seems to reserve particular venom for his homeland and for the city of Vienna, “where lack of consideration and impudence towards thinkers and artists has always been greater than anywhere else, and which can assuredly be called the graveyard of imagination and ideas.” Now, I’ve never been to Austria, have never, in fact, traveled east of the Rio Grande, not since leaving my homeland of Vermont at the tender age of 16 and hitchhiking across the country with nothing more than the duffel bag strapped to my back, and yet I can’t help but find in Bernhard an appropriate antidote to the excessive positivism of my adopted homeland of California, where every beautiful woman carries a yoga mat under her arm and nourishes her svelte physique on tofu and bean sprouts, and where every scruffy beatnik begging for change in the park fancies himself a “free spirit” – and an antidote as well to the self-congratulatory Yankee positivism of my actual hometown of Killington, a town in which there is currently a movement underway to secede from Vermont and join neighboring New Hampshire, just as there is a movement underway in the state of Vermont to secede from the United States – and the punchline is that Killington is not even a border town, it actually lies twenty-five miles from the New Hampshire state line, a petty irony that Bernhard would no doubt appreciate. Well, but far better to let the author speak for himself, in the following story, “Hotel Waldhaus,” excerpted here in its entirety: “We had no luck with the weather, and the guests at our table were repellent in every respect. The even spoiled Nietzsche for us. Even after they had had a fatal car accident and had been laid out in the church in Sils, we still hated them.”

The Collected Stories – Isaac Babel (trans. Peter Constantine)
Who is this guy, Peter Constantine? Thinking of him, I can’t help but think of John Constantine, erstwhile hero of the Hellblazer series of comic books, published by DC’s Vertigo imprint, and lately the subject of yet another godawful Keanu Reeves movie, Constantine, about which nothing more need be said. In my early years, growing up the only child of an elderly pig farmer and his younger schoolteacher wife, in a little chalet beneath the scenic ski slopes of Killington, Vermont, I used to imagine that I was John Constantine. I bought myself an overcoat and spiked my blonde hair, and I started smoking cigarettes to cultivate the look – I even went so far as to pierce my ears – for if I couldn’t be tough like Wolverine from The Uncanny X-Men, if I couldn’t sprout adamantine claws, and if I couldn’t blow things up at will like Havoc, I could at least fancy myself a reluctant hero, one who had no real powers and who hesitated even to use his shady underworld connections for the good. But who the hell is Peter Constantine, and more to the point, how did he con Cynthia Ozick – she of otherwise good repute and refined taste – into blurbing this latest and admittedly long overdue translation of Babel, much less into giving it the glowing review it received in the New York Times? Meet the book that nearly ruined Babel for me, even before I’d discovered him. Meet the book in which the translator, so in love with the florid excesses of the standard Russian translations of yesteryear, no doubt, that he couldn’t help himself, chokes off all the momentum and the humor in these otherwise brilliant tales, drowning them in the own verbiage, so that these once swift and violent stories work even better than Foucault as a non-narcotic substitute for Ambien. If not for the kindly ministrations of an elderly professor of English at our local state-run institution, who introduced me to Walter Morrison’s vastly superior translation from the 1950s, I’d probably have dismissed Babel even before I made it through the first section of this book. As it stands, Babel’s one of the great story-writers of his time – of any time – though you’d hardly know it by reading this translation. Indeed, I’ve read and reread his early stories time and again, so struck have I been by our analogous experience, his fighting with the “Reds” in the Russian Revolution, mine surviving my own adolescence. “The orange sun rolled across the sky like a lopped-off head.” That’s from the Morrison translation. What other author can get away with a line like that? And yet all the swift and terrible beauty of his stories is sunken here in a mire, like the swamp from which John Constantine first emerged as a peripheral character in The Swamp Thing, and one can only wish that Peter Constantine and Cynthia Ozick had both used their powers for the good – or not at all.

The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
Well, call me Dimmesdale. I found out only yesterday, while browsing the relevant Wikipedia articles, that Hawthorne and Melville struck up a “brief but intense” friendship sometime during the 1840s, and that Melville dedicated his magnum opus, Moby Dick, to his dear friend Nathaniel. Poe, apparently, did not count himself quite such a fan, though he wrote a few rave reviews, mostly of Hawthorne’s stories. Admittedly, I first picked up The Scarlet Letter in vain hope that I might glean something of my own history, my ancestors, the Asburys, having been among the first settlers in the dark and gloomy New England wilderness and later the Vermont Republic, which lasted just fourteen years before joining these United States in 1791. According to the editor’s introduction in my tattered paperback copy of the novel, Hawthorne penned The Scarlet Letter in a mad flush of inspiration in 1849, publishing it to wide acclaim the following year. One hundred and fifty years later, I learned how to write the expository essay largely by analyzing this book, though I seem to have retained next to nothing of the novel itself, its author’s heavy-handed symbolism aside. Indeed, one cannot help but wonder if the “Hawthorne” who pens the purportedly autobiographical introductory sketch, “The Custom House,” and who speaks almost jocularly to the reader in the body of the novel proper, isn’t himself a literary construction, if Hawthorne – the real Hawthorne – isn’t being postmodern about a hundred years before postmodernism’s time. To hear him tell it, when Hester and Arthur finally meet in the forest, by conspiring to escape, they have sealed their fate for good and for all, and Dimmesdale has committed his gravest sin yet, placing himself in a moral wilderness from which he will find no egress but death. And yet is it not the rigor and the egoism of his all too literal belief that kills Dimmesdale in the end, despite whatever the narrator says? So Graham Greene might have had it – and so palpable is the good Reverend Mr. Arthur Dimmesdale’s moral anguish, that we might long for a Papist’s gentler touch. Still, there’s such a tangible sense of relief in finally seeing our hero and our heroine alone together in the forest, where Hester can unpin the titular scarlet letter from her breast and cast it away, quite literally letting down her hair, and where the good Reverend Mr. Arthur Dimmesdale might finally lean his head against her bosoms, that we cannot help but root for them, even as pint-sized Pearl and the narrator himself seem to align themselves against these star-crossed lovers.
I’ll admit to being skeptical about this book. My father, a poor, illiterate pig farmer who toiled all his life on a tiny plot of land beneath the picturesque ski slopes of Killington, Vermont, used to love when my mother, the village schoolmistress, herself of French Catholic extraction – a much younger woman, on whom all my friends had at one time or another developed their first crushes, usually during the third grade – would read Hawthorne aloud to him. Well do I remember my mother sitting beside his bed, in the austere ladder-backed wooden chair in their room, her posture impeccable, in a dress of white muslin, pronouncing the word tremulous in a breathy, sonorous voice. It would have been enough to put me off any author for life. Still, on a whim, I read The Marble Faun a few years back. Insufferable. Only a story, “Wakefield,” introduced me by a kindly professor of English at our local state-run institution here in California, convinced me to give Hawthorne another chance. And yet if The Scarlet Letter deserves its place as a classic of American literature – and most assuredly, it does – it’s less on account of its narrator’s incessant moralizing and more on account of how its characters – and especially Hester Prynne – engage our sympathies, even when the narrator seems to have it out for them. Now, I confess that I have always most readily fallen in love with the type of woman whose loose sexual morals might have found her branded – or worse – in Hawthorne’s day. Still, Hester seems possessed of more moral force than the rest of the characters in the novel combined, and it’s thanks to Hester and to Hester alone that The Scarlet Letter deserves a place on our bookshelves and in our hearts. I’m deducting half a star for Hawthorne’s not infrequent abuse of the semi-colon; otherwise, it’s a ravishing read.

Tropic of Cancer – Henry Miller
There are enough rosy female orifices, just in the first paragraph of this book, to populate all the brothels in Nevada. I’ll admit, I never made it past the first page. Perhaps my timing was bad. A younger man, I’d gladly have listened to Miller wax poetic about his experiences slumming it with Paris prostitutes in the decadent Left Bank of the 1920s. As it stands, I’ve got my own fish to fry. Still, there’s some unspoken sympathy between these fallen women and this fallen man, isn’t there, as though the mediating intelligence behind this novel most readily identifies the artist with the prostitutes who populate its pages. My initial question, though, is more fundamental: Does our young narrator enjoy the services of these lovely ladies of the Paris night gratis, or must he compensate them, like any other customer? I imagine him lying on a rickety iron-framed bed in some Paris flophouse, surrounded by a half-blind syphilitic harem who feed him grapes, rubbing calamine lotion on their open sores while he pecks away at his typewriter…Out here in California, the other Left Bank, an artist has to scrimp and save if he’s going to enjoy the favors of a lady of the evening, and yet have we come so far from Henry’s day? All of American literature still seems irreducible only to itself, to that mysterious pronoun I, which favors the fiction of so-called “authentic” experience, and in which all but a few of our great books seem to be written. Indeed, Miller begat Bukowski, who begat a legion of second-rate imitators, and though some of them are palatable in doses, read through a collection, and you encounter the same problem you do with Lucinda Williams now that she’s stopped taking a decade between records or for that matter with Hemingway – namely, that once it starts to accumulate, their you-know-what starts to stink. Now, I myself have no moral objection to prostitution – I rather think we ought to give it free license – and in this regard, sad to say, I find the state of Nevada considerably more progressive than either my adopted homeland of California or my actual homeland, the People’s Republic of Vermont. My father carried a pitchfork and toiled all the afternoon, slopping our hundred-head of hogs. My mother taught the village children in a tiny one-room schoolhouse perched next to the cemetery on top of a hill. People thought she was stuck up because she was always reading, even when she walked. What I’m saying, in short, is that Miller’s world never touched ours. In point of fact, the closest thing to a house of ill-repute in Killington, Vermont, was the mobile home where little Sally Eldridge lived with her father, a former millworker who spent his afternoons drinking his disability checks in Great Barrington or some such place, and who, if rumor could be believed, had sampled his daughter’s favors himself. And oh, poor Sally, the world still bleeds for you, my dear, and I can only hope you’ve found happiness after serving so many years as a rite of passage for all those boys who emerged from your father’s trailer sniffing their fingers, never again to darken the doorstep of your doublewide. Still and all, we ought to be thankful for any book that keeps the juicy bits intact, as this one most assuredly does, and so it’s Miller’s shamelessness, his willingness to wallow neck-deep in sleaze, that finally distinguishes this novel, or the first page of it, at least, which only, frankly, promises more to come.

Sweet Old World – Lucinda Williams
Before he died, my father and I had a running argument, one that usually ended with one or the other of us shouting into the telephone, hollering back and forth between California and Vermont, usually on his dime, about which phase of Lucinda Williams’s career we preferred. My father championed her early years, the cleanly produced country and straight blues of her first records, back when she took as long as a dozen years between releases and was championed by peers like the world’s greatest backup singer, another of my father’s faves, Emmylou Harris, whereas I’d first fallen in love with Lucinda when everybody else did, namely, upon hearing her landmark release, Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, in 1997. Car Wheels…, of course, was the record that had the dubious distinction of sweeping the Grammy Awards, introducing Lucinda Williams to a larger audience, and she’s worked relentlessly – perhaps too relentlessly – to keep herself in the spotlight since then. It’s also the record on which she introduced the time-honored techniques that have since become hallmarks of her vocal style, the throaty bends and dips that make even so seemingly uninspired a line as, “oh, my baby,” lacerate. “Trashy,” my father described her vocal inflections, though quite honestly, I thought the trashiness was part of the appeal. Well, be that as it may, now that my father has left this world and shuffled on up to the great pig farm in the sky, it seems time to reevaluate this representative album from the early phase of Lucinda’s career, and much as it pains me to say it, I’ve come to see the old man’s point. “Born and raised in Pineola, his mama believed in the Pentecost, she got the preacher to say some words, so his soul wouldn’t be lost,” Lucinda sings on “Pineola,” and it’s one of the album’s brightest spots, so pumped full of feel-good gospel and heavy blues that you nearly forget the song’s about a suicide. Typically, one track here, “Little Angel, Little Brother,” highlights Lucinda’s fascination with troubled men, and the one duff track, “He Never Got Enough Love,” falters for all the reasons you’d think it would. For my money, though, the best track here is one of the poppiest, “Lines Around Your Eyes,” which incorporates elements of Cajun and Zydeco into a classic rock and roll shuffle with the kind of sing-along refrain my father must have been talking about back when he described Lucinda Williams as “spunky”: “Sometimes I don’t know what we’re fighting about, but that don’t mean we can’t work it out, because I love you, darlin’, and the lines around your eyes.” It’s all there, her reinvention of a popular form to say something we don’t quite expect, the subtle blending of genres. And yet as with any great storyteller, the devil is in the details. “Well, I can’t stay around, ‘cause I’m going back south, but all I regret now, is I never kissed your mouth,” Lucinda sings on “Something About What Happens When We Talk,” the best of the album’s several ballads, and as hyped as she’s become as a songwriter, back then, suffice to say, she understood that besides fulfilling her rhyme scheme, the difference between lips and mouth, makes all the difference in the world. Yes, she’s traditional, but if the poor, illiterate pig farmer I was proud to call my father taught me anything, it’s that the self-styled avant-garde all too often prefers style over substance, incomprehensibility over any meaningful engagement with form or content, while if it’s substance you want – and style, too – this album is proof that Lucinda Williams has always had plenty of both, even back when nobody but Emmylou Harris and my father knew her name.