Sound Off

I’m not sure I buy the claim on the back cover of Stephen Bett’s latest collection of poetry: “This is a book of poems celebrating music, but essentially the poems are for readers — no jazz experience required.” Certainly, there are aspects of the poems collected in Sound Off that will appeal to aficionados and non-aficionados of jazz alike — naming a dog after a favorite performer (as in a poem titled “Avishai Cohen (bassist, composer not trumpeter)”), for example, or imagining the soundtrack to one’s own funeral (as in “Keith Jarrett”). Yet my own appreciation for the majority of the poems collected in this volume increased significantly when I knew the performer Bett was writing about. I got the poems about Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, and Wayne Shorter, but not the poems about more obscure (at least to me) figures like Omer Klein, Jan Garbarek, and Lenny Breau. Even so, the poet’s love for jazz shines through in all of the poems in Sound Off, and fans of the genre who are better informed than I am will find much to appreciate (and likely debate) in this collection.

SUBMIT TO PLEASURE

Look under “ABOUT” on the official Pleasure Editions website and you’ll find that “PLEASURE EDITIONS is a press founded in 2011 dedicated to fostering the furtherance of the international artistic underground via the publication of new and rediscovered art, literature, poetry and translation.” At first this claim comes off as ambitious, maybe lofty, maybe pretentious. Take a look at the content and you’ll find that, on the contrary, they’re being modest.

Any attempt to describe Pleasure’s mission otherwise than they describe it themselves would either fall short or sound stupid. It takes a statement as bold and broad as the one above to succinctly introduce a reader to the constellation of radically interrogative text and imagery that is their catalogue. This is a press that publishes new translations of Gherasim Luca (the forgotten Romanian surrealist poet once championed by Gilles Deleuze) one day and a madcap parody of a Jungian personality survey the next. This is a press that publishes serial installments of “Ill Tomb Era,” a mysterious meganovel that updates maximalist black humor for the age of annihilating post-punk cynicism, as well as new poems dubiously attributed to celebrity chef Eric Ripert. A Pleasure anthology of new writings collected under the theme “Music” promises essays that find seemingly unlikely points of contact between, for just one example, William Gaddis and Pussy Galore.

Beyond that, there’s form-defying prose and poetry, art that redefines the oldest and newest media, design that will leave the staff of any marketing startup baffled and salivating, and curation that suggests, indirectly and maybe even directly, that spirits beyond the grave (Yeats’, for one) might be lending a hand.

What will you make of however little or much of their published material you choose to explore? The better question is: what will it make of you? Pleasure doesn’t seek to contribute to, or even recognize, a consumer-oriented system of transaction and gratification. Instead, they create an immersive cultural exchange in which you will get hopelessly lost. But the rewards of this exchange are of a kind you won’t find anywhere else. If you dare, as the phrase once purposed by the press as a call for submissions demands, “Submit to Pleasure!”

Saving the Hooker

In his very funny sophomore novel, Saving the Hooker, Michael Adelberg takes swipes at academia, politics, publishing, and the media, all while telling the story of a young scholar caught in a downward spiral of lies and deceit. When the novel’s narrator and protagonist, Matthew Hristahalios, wins a grant to study the attitudes of prostitutes toward the Cinderella myth, he thinks he has it made. Describing himself as “more huckster than scholar,” however, Matthew soon finds himself in way over his head in his dealings with fellow scholars and their skepticism toward his work. Add to that a politically and socially conservative father who can’t, for the life of him, figure out what his son is up to, and Matthew’s life is one hot mess that can only get hotter and messier when he falls in love with one of the prostitutes he’s set out study.

That the woman’s name is Julia Roberts only adds to Matthew’s confusion over his feelings toward her, as repeated viewings of Pretty Woman (starring, needless to say, the actress of the same name) are largely responsible for inspiring his life’s work. Soon, Julia has Matthew spending money he doesn’t have, fighting for her affections, and experimenting with drugs. Meanwhile his personal life is falling apart — so much so that he has no choice, or so he believes, but to fabricate the results of his study. The result is a media circus in which reality and fantasy collide with devastating effects for the protagonist.

Throughout the novel, Adelberg demonstrates great skill as a social satirist yet never loses track of what makes his characters tick. Yes, the academics do ridiculous things like calculating popularity algorithms to give their children beneficial names, but they’re also genuinely concerned with their subjects of study. Likewise, Matthew’s father shoots off ridiculous weekly petitions to further his conservative agenda, yet he’s haunted by the death of Matthew’s mother. In short, Adelberg never places himself above his characters. Rather, he treats them humanely and allows all of their strengths to shine as brightly as their flaws. The result is a very funny novel composed of equal parts biting wit and bleeding heart.