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Book Reviews

 

 

 

November 2006

What I am Reading

Raymond L Bianchi

 

 

God’s War: Christopher Tyerman

Belknap Press-Harvard University

ISBN: 13:978-0-674-02387-0 (or 1)

 

FT Marinetti: Critical Writings: Edited Guenther Berghaus, Translated Doug Thompson

Farrar Strauss & Giroux

ISBN: 13:978-0-374-26083-5

 

Dario Fo: My First Seven Years (Plus a Few More)

Thomas Dunne Books/St Martin Press

ISBN: 13-978-0-312-35917-1

 

The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley

1975-2005

U California Press

ISBN:10-0-520-24158-4

 

I am an eclectic reader- often reading five or six books at a time on many subjects, and I have chosen to pass this Autumn with some old friends and nostalgic tomes. I love the collage in my brain of lots of good books that are juxtaposed as I drive to work in the morning.

 

We live in a world that seems not to want to forget the 7th century CE.  We are constantly being reminded about wars and hatreds that were formed in years past by people whose lives are only distantly related to our own.  I was recently in Italy for a wedding and the sheer oddness of seeing women in Chadors in the little alpine town where my mother comes from is only salved by knowing that I am sure when my people got off the boat in New York wearing Italian dress they were just as odd, and just as jarring.

 

It is only time that has made me white in America because when they hanged Sacco and Vanzetti my people were not white-nor were the Jews we were odd strangers but no one today wants to remember the great call from the Jesus they profess to believe in that I was a stranger and you welcomed me-strangers are to be ignored or hated or demonized.

By the Way a book I just started that talks about this in a fun way is Mark Binelli’s Sacco and Vanzetti are Dead which I will review next month. 

 

The area of Muslim/Christian dialogue has a sorry and sad history. The fact is that for most of our time together the two great daughter religions of Judaism have been at each other’s throats.  Neither Christian or Muslim has any moral superiority in the area of injustice if you list the nastiness over time-I will trade you one Spanish Reconquista for one Battle of Manzikert.  I will trade you the siege of Jerusalem for the siege of Constantinople and on and on we go into a world of blood and hatred because we are so alike.   

 

The only fiction writer who has done justice to these subjects is the Pakistani writer Tariq Ali whose Islamic Cycle, Saladin, The Pomegranate Tree, The Sultan of Palermo and The Stone Woman have done more for understanding between the two great Abrahamic daughters than any talk between the Pope and an Imam and this is why God’s War by Christopher Tyerman is so important.

 

God’s War A New History of the Crusades is a huge tome; over 1000 hardcover pages and it is a tour de force of writing about a topic fraught with problems. Professor Tyerman does something that other writers notably Runciman choose to ignore that the Crusades was bigger than the war in the Levant and that it needs to be placed into that context. Levantine Crusades, Albigensian Crusades, Baltic Crusades, Spanish Crusades are all here in full bloody glory. 

 

It is into this context that God’s War begins.  A power Roman Catholic Church and Pope call for a Crusade to free the Christian East (Remember in 1095 the majority of believers in Asia Minor, Syria and Palestine were Eastern Christians) which was recently conquered by Seljuk Turkish Muslims after their win at the Battle of Manzikert. 

 

The Byzantine Basileus Alexius wants a few mercenaries instead he gets tens of thousands of Christian Knights and the Islamic World for the first time in 600 years is attacked not for being enemies but for being Islamic alone.  It is the great counter attack the response to the battle of Yarmuk River and it will end with blood, cannibalism and hatred. 

 

God’s War brings us the entire story in great detail and it helps to elucidate the realities of a world where Europeans are the developing world and Islam is the center of world culture.  The way God’s War is developed this book brings to light something that most Americans have no knowledge of- that Islam was the high civilization and Christendom was in many ways backward.

 

 It was through the violence of the Crusades that much of what became the West was created. There would be no Dante, St Francis, Chartre,  El Greco or Columbus without the Crusades.  Before the Crusades Catholic Christendom was a backwater after the Crusades Giotto was painting, Spain was being reconquered and the world we know was coming into shape.

 

God’s  War chronicles this change with clear prose and great scholarship someone should send this book to George Bush but there are many big words that he would not understand.  This is a book worth wading through.  If you want to find an analogy of the Crusades today you will need to go to Shanghai to find the Florence or Venice of our future.

 

 

 

 

The Crusades was a great change and nexus period in history and another was the first part of the last century and one of the most interesting movements was Italian Futurism. FT Marinetti: Critical Writings: Edited Guenther Berghaus, Translated Doug Thompson Farrar Strauss & Giroux is a major work. I usually read Italian books in Italian but when I found this beautiful volume in Seminary Co-op www.semcoop.org which by the way is the official bookstore of www.chicagopostmodernpoetry.com, I could not resist.  What is interesting about this book is that it does not run from what Futurism was an avant garde movement of the Right. 

 

FT Marinetti was a character that could only have been formed in the Post-Risorgimento Italian culture. He was born in Egypt to Milanese, Torinese and Pavinese Parents. He grew up in both Italo-Gallic and French culture with a sense of the superiority of the great Italian machine that is Piedmont, Lombardy and the north. 

 

It was during a time of great machine building and industrialization that Marinetti became a man.  He was educated at the University of Pavia and by Jesuits in Egypt which would explain his hatred for the Catholic Church. He loved machines and speed and hated the kind of Englishified  oldness of Italy he wanted the Italy that today is all too common the Italy of fast cars and industry. 

 

Marinetti’s work and his circle are one of the only Italian Avant Garde movements to matter in the last century. ‘While Italy has produced some great poets and writers none of them did with language what the Futurists did’ (J. Scappettone).  This book is chock full of writings to make your blood run cold,  “War, the Sole Cleanser of the World” the great Marinetti quote that would be put to the test in 1915 in Italy and around Europe for the next 50 years this was of course before Auschwitz made this quote a horrible reality.

 

Marinetti and his circle included Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, Bruno Carra Luigi Russolo, Gino Severini and many others.  His work is many faceted and had a profound influence on both Fascism, Russian Communism and many other movements and in this volume you get a really good taste of this work.   The Futurists were concerned with poetry, cooking, painting and more.  Gunter Berghaus has done yeoman’s service editing this work and Doug Thompson’s translations do something many others have not they get us the sheer energy of the text something so many others do not. 

 

Italian Futurism has been ‘banalized” by so many thinkers today who want to use parts of it and ignore its hard side- and frankly its evil naiveté.   Here in Chicago we have a theatre company called the Neo-Futurists and when you ask them what part of FT Marinetti’s program they follow or want to renew they look perplexed.  Futurism is perplexing and it is important to understand and this book does much to bring the work to an  English speaking audience.

 

Dario Fo: My First Seven Years (Plus a Few More) Thomas Dunne Books/St Martin Press is a great read about a really delicious man.  Dario Fo is a little bit younger than my Grandparents who grew up in the same area of Italy so this work has special meaning for me as a poet and person.  The beginning of this work talks about Trains during the Fascist period and is very moving.  Fo’s father was a train station manager and he shares this love with his son which fills him with wonder.  The commentary about the incredible Fascist train station in Milan is wonderful and should be read out loud in Italian in that great fascist barn filled with Roman Centurions and Glass Windows.

 

Dario Fo also talks about the real harshness of the Italy of that period. About hiding and helping British soldiers to escape from Mussolini’s  Social Republic across the frontier with Switzerland and also his escape from the Reppublica Sociale army.  Fo’s work here is poetic and it fills out a picture of the Playwright as man and person.  This is a great Saturday read, get a coffee or better yet a glass of Prosecco and read this book slowly and enjoy and be repulsed and enraptured by another Italy the one that gave us La Strada,  Riso Amaro and the Fiat 500. 

 

Finally,  The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley 1975-2005 U California Press. One of the great tragedies of America’s bellicose warmongering after 9/11 is that American poets and writers are marginalized. Robert Creeley before he died in 2005 was the greatest living American poet and someone who should have won the Nobel Prize.  I am however quite biased, Mr. Creeley was generous to me as a person and I owe him much poetically but sitting with Creeley’s two volumes of Collected poems I am struck by the sheer humanity of a person who bridges the gap between Pound, Williams, Olson and Stein and Gizzi, Jarnot, Scalapino and Bernstein.  Creeley’s work is well known and speaks for itself but these volumes from the U California press are beautiful tributes to Creeley. From the touching introduction by Penelope Creeley- to the blurbs on the back by Gizzi, Bernstein, Codrescu, Auster and Howe this is a well made book.  The inside is filled with black pages separating sections with small quotes these black pages are a fitting memorial of a great poet and his work.  Creeley did one of his last interviews for me in January 2005 as always he was above and beyond as a poet and a person.