Focus: Life Studies — May/June 1999

Life Studies

Volume 20 Number 4
May-June 1999

FOCUS: LIFE STUDIES

Writing a New Mappamundi
Christina Milletti reviews Mary Butts: Scenes from a Life by Nathalie Blondel

Painting The Inner
Regina Weinreich reviews You Are Not I: A Portrait of Paul Bowles by Millicent Dillion and The Tangier Diaries, 1962-1979 by John Hopkins

The Rascal as Cultural Provocateur
bart plantenga reviews View from the Exterior: Serge Gainsbourg by Alan Clayson

Seduced Into Carpentry
Bryant Mason reviews Harry Partch: A Biography by Bob Gilmore

When Do We Go?
Charles Marowitz reviews Elegy for Iris by John Bayley

FEATURE: POSTMODERN POSSIBILITIES

Turning History to Our Own Ends
Matt Kopka reviews The Cultural Turn: Selected Writing on the Postmodern by Fredric Jameson

Room to Wander
David Winn reviews Monstrous Possibility: An Invitation to Literary Politics by Curtis White

Debunking the Beats
Sal Salasin reviews Crimes of the Beats edited by Ron Kolm

FEATURE: THE SURREALIST CONNECTION

Dada at Midnight
Jim Feast reviews Half Angel, Half Lunch by Sharon Mesmer and The Amazing “True” Story of a Teenage Single Mom by Katherine Arnoldi

Having Text with Michael Palmer
Fred Muratori reviews The Lion Bridge: Selected Poems 1972-1995 by Michael Palmer

Book Reviews

Mythic Modernist
Steven Moore reviews Ashe of Rings and Other Writings by Mary Butts

Life and Its Person
Roger Mitchell reviews Life and Death by Robert Creeley

Unlocking Elvis
John Rocco reviews Beaver Dam Rocking Chair Marathon: Fragments of a Lost Text by Ron Whitehead

A Fan’s Notes
Doug Nufer reviews Your Vigor for Life Appalls Me: Robert Crumb Letters 1958-1977 edited by Isle Thompson

Transcendental Armenian
David Stephen Calonne reviews The World of William Saroyan by Nona Balakian

Mapping a Life
Wyatt Mason reviews The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald, translated by Michael Hulse

Love Letters to the Dead
Robert Buttel reviews Without: Poems by Donald Hall

Opus Contra Naturum
John Olson reviews From Scratch by Clayton Eshleman

Discipline and Publish
Elizabeth Mazzola reviews Get Thee to a Nunnery: A Pair of Shakespearean Divertimentos by David R. Slavitt

Humpty Dumpty
Rochelle Ratner reviews Paradise, Piece by Piece by Molly Peacock

Bearing All the Reader Can Bear
Joe Maynard reviews Burning in Paradise by Michael Madsen

Why Cambodia?
M.G. Stephens reviews Sacred Vows by U Sam Oeur

Having Her Say
Susan Sindall reviews Clemency by Colette Inez

Extending Possibilities
Lyn Di Iorio reviews Thieves of Paradise by Yusef Komunyakaa

Hearing, Saying , and Seeing the Words
Corinne Robins reviews Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word edited by Charles Bernstein

Everydayness
Margaret Quamme reviews Range of Light by Valerie Miner

The Politics of Comics
Shawn Aron Vandor reviews Commies, Cowboys, and Jungle Queens by William W. Savage, Jr.

From the Backlist

Literary Detritus
Don Bogen reviews Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909-1917 by T.S. Eliot

Departments

Rants and Raves
Letters to the Editor