By Kevin Labianco / CC

A couple of years ago, I was asked by the Los Angeles Times to review Anthony Holden’s second poker book, Bigger Deal. At the time, my dealings—ahem—with poker were minimal. I had a weekly game with a rotating cast of high school friends; I lost most of the time, and on rare occasions, when I got really lucky, I left with enough money to pay my cab fare home. (The rest of the time, I walked.) Still, I found myself unexpectedly engrossed by Holden’s account.

Like Big Deal, this sequel was set at the big stakes tables in Vegas and Europe. Its cast was comprised of the bigger-than-life urban cowboys and suave playboys that regularly bet—and just as regularly lose—millions of dollars in a single hand. More interesting still for this particular lit geek were the names that made up Holden’s inner circle: Amis, Hitchens, Al Alvarez. As it turned out, not only did some of my favorite writers play poker, but they were pretty damn good at it, too.

I was reminded of that connection this week, when I flipped open the New Yorker to find a long-ish story by journo Alec Wilkinson on Chris Ferguson, the champion poker player. Ferguson is a certified math genius (so says his professor at UCLA, where Ferguson studied for about a decade) and one of the richest and most skilled men in poker; his fans, for this reason and others, call him “Jesus.” Wilkinson’s story is primarily concerned with something called “optimal strategy”—equal parts cloaking device and mathematical calculation. (If this all seems impossibly vague, dip into the article, which is available online, if you’re a subscriber.)

But it’s also written in the same reverent tone that defined Bigger Deal, Alverez’s The Biggest Game in Town, and my favorite poker book, Positively Fifth Street, by Harper’s contributor and novelist James McManus. These three books are at least twice as exciting as any other sports-related nonfiction you’re ever likely to read. What is it about poker that draws world-class writers to the baize? How can a game—so simple on its face—be the subject of so much fantastic, engrossing, downright smart literature?

I’ve written an email to Mr. McManus, who teaches a class on poker and literature at a college in Chicago, to ask for his professional opinion. In the meantime, I’ve got a couple of my own theories. One is that a great writer needs a great subject, and there are fewer subjects richer than the men and women of professional poker. The stakes are enormous; money, reputation, pride and power are on the line. It’s like Washington politics, but more expensive.

The other theory is rooted in a simple fact: most writers aren’t very mathematically savvy. And poker is, at heart, a game of math. You can play for a while on intuition, but as Ferguson tells Wilkinson, in the small circle of top-notch talent, intuition ain’t enough. You’ve got to know the percentages by heart; you’ve got to be able to ascertain who has what, and when they got it. So for a literature person—who may or may not have passed his 10th grade algebra class—the mechanics of a high-stakes poker game might as well be alchemy. It’s a right brain/left brain kind of thing. We’re like little kids at a magic show, waiting for the rabbit to pop out of the felt-lined hat.

I’ve written here before about book covers and their importance for marketing and aesthetics. A beautiful cover and imaginative design, when paired with an enchanting text, create a sense of completeness, of a perfect whole. No longer is a great story hemmed in by clichéd cover art or all too predictable blurbs; instead, an elegant design lifts the book out of the ghetto of a thing produced into the rarified realm of something crafted.

This completeness is evident in Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project. Besides being a very good novel, the text benefits from the careful interspersion of photographs taken from the Chicago Historical Society and Velibor Bozovic, a friend of the author. These black-and-white photographs, blurred at the edges, filled with shadows, and positioned in the center of forbidding, inky black pages, provide a sort of bridge between the intersecting narratives of this historical novel. They both break up and interweave the varying story arcs: of the modern-day protagonist, Vladimir Brik, a writer investigating the story of Lazarus Averbuch, a young Jewish immigrant murdered by the Chicago chief of police in 1908; of Rora, a photographer and fellow ex-Sarajevan who joins Brik in his retracing of Averbuch’s journey across Eastern Europe and regales Brik with jokes and stories, possibly invented, of war-time adventures in Bosnia; of Averbuch himself and his sister, Olga, who attempts to figure out what exactly happened to her brother while she deals with constant harassment from the Chicago police and a muckraking journalist.

These brief summations only hint at the startling depth of this book and its ability to produce a synthesis out of its initially scattershot parts. The characters’ peregrinations and their searches for truth come to overlap in the text, but this convergence is also aided by the book’s design, by the frequently oblique photographs that, besides being beautiful, evoke a vague curiosity and wonderment, made clearer when the reader matches the visual to some action taking place later in the text. It is in this act that a strange mirroring takes place: just as the fictional writer, Vladimir Brik, dips back in time to narrate and investigate the story of Lazarus Averbuch, so too does the reader dip back in his experience, perhaps only a few minutes, to try to match a verbal image with a previously encountered visual one.

The reading experience is enriched by the effort taken to curate these photographs. They manage to enhance the story without self-consciousness or preening vanity. And surrounding all of this is a solid hardcover book stamped with an eerie, quasi-holographic image of an eye that manages to integrate an ashen Chicago skyline, the book’s title and author, and the haunting visage of the murdered Averbuch, an image that recurs both in the text and in the photographs. Holding this book in my hands, feeling its weight, flipping through its pages, looking at the eyes on the front and back covers, one containing the sleepy-dead gaze of Lazarus, the other the fearful intensity of Olga, there is the sense that this is a story that transcends the pages that carry it, that communes with and honors the historical event that inspired it. It is too bad, then, that the paperback edition, to be released in May, does away with this fine artwork. Future readers will have to content themselves with an excellent story, intriguingly told, lazily packaged.

Last week’s installment of Studio 360 included a segment on VQR contributor John Casteen IV, in which Charlottesvillian Jesse Dukes went deer hunting with him and, along the way, talked about poetry. Here’s the segment:

The show also provides a recording of John reading “Night Hunting,” from Free Union, his new book in the VQR Poetry Series:

Thomas Friedman has a lot of friends. But does his penchant for quoting them in his column run counter to The New York Times’ anonymous sources policy? A review of Friedman’s recent columns reveals a pattern of quoting his friends and identifying them only by their nationality or race. Take, for instance, the following instances:

I ran into an Indian businessman friend last week and he said something to me that really struck a chord: “This is the first time I’ve ever visited the United States when I feel like you’re acting like an immature democracy.” (“Are We Home Alone?,” March 21)

“We’re all going to have to learn to live with a lower level of trust in our lives,” an African banker friend said to me here. But the mind recoils at that, which may explain why so many people I talked to here are hoping that President Obama will turn out to be the guy. (“Elvis Has Left the Mountain,” January 31)

So, I was speaking to an Iranian friend about what a mind-bending thing it must be for people in the Middle East to see Americans, seven years after 9/11, electing someone named Barack Hussein Obama as president. (“Show Me the Money,” November 9)

This may not seem like a big deal, but Friedman’s fellow-columnist, David Brooks, came under fire recently for skirting the paper’s anonymous sources policy. The policy states that anonymous sources should be used only as “a last resort when the story is of compelling public interest and the information is not available any other way.” In his column last week, Public Editor Clark Hoyt said he understands Brooks’ argument that columnists should not be held to the same standard as reporters, but that he would have asked Brooks’ source (President Obama, in the instance in question) to go on the record regardless.

All this raises some questions: Are Thomas Freidman’s friends an exception to the policy? Is the information they provide not available in any other way? And why does he only identify the ethnicity or race of his non-white friends?

Jim Harrison was born and raised in Michigan and is the author of thirty books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. His work has been published in twenty-seven languages. Our Spring issue features his poem “The Golden Window,” from his new collection, In Search of Small Gods, due in April from Copper Canyon Press.

1. How does your new collection In Search of Small Gods fit within your entire body of work?

I’m unsure how the book fits into the entire body except that once we disturb the surface we tend to go deeper into the questions that continue to haunt us. In this respect poets tend to resemble the terrier breed of dog.

2. Can you describe how you decided to structure In Search of Small Gods? (The three sections unfold beautifully, moving from meditative narratives to prose poems to gorgeous lyrics, always compelling the reader to consider each line.)

The best structure never seems to be chronological because our brains aren’t linear like a clock or calendar. My editor at Copper Canyon Press, Joseph Bednarik, visited me in Montana and we spread out the whole manuscript on a large table and thought about it for a couple of days.

3. “The Golden Window,” your longer poem at the end of the first section of the book (and in VQR’s Spring issue), seems full of small gods: memories, vision, dreams, nature, stories—is this a poem written in praise of slowness, curiosity, and consciousness?

I had been immersed in a near depression for a long time and “Golden Window” is a record of deliverance which is never far away but often quite invisible. It is a process of revelation.

4. Before Saving Daylight (your poetry collection published in 2006), it had been a while since your last book of poems. Does your recent publication schedule (Saving Daylight, the novel The English Major, In Search of Small Gods) mirror your writing process?

As the T’ang Dynasty poet Wang Wei asked, “Who knows what causes the opening and closing of the door?” With me it is either feast or famine. All that is asked of us, as Char says, is to be there when the bread comes fresh from the oven.

5. What’s your idea of a “nice thing”? (For example, twenty-six years ago in your interview in the Paris Review, you mentioned turning your pasture into a jungle of wildflowers and bushes.)

Well, I’m already doing my “nice things.” I trout fish sixty to seventy days a year but it’s more the rivers than the act of fishing. I’m obsessive to a not very healthy degree in the processes of the natural world. I walk the dogs everyday in fairly wild country. I’m pleased to split my year between an area of the Border where there are a few jaguars and hundreds of species of birds and Montana where there are more than a few grizzlies and many rivers.

6. Who are some of your favorite poets?

I can’t answer this. As a poet I’ve been reading poetry everyday for some fifty-five years. It is my food and water. I have hundreds of favorite poets. In recent time it has been Antonio Machado but I’ve run quite a gamut of favorites from Sappho to Vergil to Gaspara Stampa to Whitman to Yvan Goll to Clare and Smart, to Rilke, Yeats, Pound, Lorca, Paz, Neruda, etc. It’s hopeless to remember them all, and of course King Shakespeare.

7. Whose Chinese translations (any poet or book) do you admire the most?

Burton Watson, Red Pine (Bill Porter), Jonathan Chaves, and more.

8. Are there any young poets whose work has recently impressed you?

Recently I’ve been very impressed by the work of Joseph Stroud. I have no idea how old he is. Also an unknown poet Chris Dombrowski, Wayne State will publish his book. Also Bill Holm, Taya Kitaysky, and Emily Walters.

9. What is the single most important thing you would tell a young writer?

Read a great deal and widely, ignoring the silliness of national boundaries. In my travels I have found young writers to be under-read compared to the past. Stop fiddling with your computer and read the best in the entirety of world literature.

The past week has been pretty good for VQR contributor Sana Krasikov. First came the news that her story “Asal,” from our Summer 2008 issue, was nominated for a National Magazine Award. And this morning it was announced that her debut short story colleciton One More Year (published last fall by Spiegel & Grau) was awarded the 2009 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, which includes a $100,000 cash prize!

1. Sony has one-upped Amazon by making half a million out-of-copyright books available for their Reader, in a partnership with Google. The internet giant has raised the hackles of authors in their quest to make all human knowledge searchable online, though the recently-applied $125M greenback poultice has quieted authors. Now that Google is encoding books in the EPUB format, it’s easy to make them accessible to e-book readers. Let’s see if Amazon follows suit; their business model would seem to make that unlikely. If you’re wondering about the merits of each device, see News.com’s head-to-head comparison, or Wired’s.

2. Shorter Clay Shirky: “Trust me: media outlets should just close up shop and then magic fairies will report the news.” I’m partial to Adrian Monck’s response to Shirky.

3. Artist Robert Irwin was named the 2009 Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medalist in Architecture by the University of Virginia, of which VQR is a part. The prestigious award has been given out annually since 1966. Irwin was the subject of a long feature by Lawrence Weschler in our Spring 2008 issue.

4. Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan has tagged a National Magazine Awards story with “Death to the Virginia Quarterly Review.” We’ve decided to take it as a compliment.

With the tragic death of Natasha Richardson earlier in the week, the world has lost a tremendously talented artist, an actress whose versatility allowed her to charm audiences, wow critics, and entertain viewers whether performing for the silver screen or on the stage. Although her career stretched for a remarkable 41 years, her death at a mere 45 was far too soon, by any measure.

Yet despite the loss to the theater and film industry, even more significant than this professional tragedy is the personal loss suffered by a family: the husband, sons, sister, mother and other loved ones who are left to mourn the healthy, vivacious woman there was no reason to think would soon leave them. And yes, in this case the husband happens to be Liam Neeson, an actor whose craggy profile and distinctive voice are unmistakable, while the mother is Vanessa Redgrave, an actress whose fame likely surpassed her daughter’s. But today, the famous members of this family are not, primarily, famous; they are simply grieving along with the thousands of other families who have lost loved ones to traumatic brain injury, or TBI.

(more…)

The torpedoing last week of veteran diplomat Charles Freeman’s appointment to head the National Intelligence Council was widely seen as a victory for hardline supporters of Israel, who contended that Freeman’s criticisms of Israeli policy were (in the words of Senator Charles Schumer) “way over the top and severely out of step with the administration.” While hardline supporters of Israel may have won the battle, the discourse surrounding L’Affaire Freeman shows evidence of a larger shift in public discussions about Israel, a tilting of the balance to include more voices critical of Israeli policies and actions. From Jimmy Carter to Jon Stewart and Naomi Klein, a number of prominent politicians, media personalities, and intellectuals have come out recently with harsh critiques of Israeli policy and/or support of boycott and divestment. As Andrew Sullivan puts it on his blog “having the kind of debate in America that they have in Israel, let alone Europe, on the way ahead in the Middle East is simply forbidden.” Still, there are signs that the scope of the discussion about Israel and the United States’ role in the Middle East is slowly changing.

As Glenn Greenwald observes on his Salon.com blog “anyone who doubts that there has been a substantial—and very positive—change in the rules for discussing American policy towards Israel should consider two recent episodes.” The first of the episodes he cites is the discussion surrounding Freeman’s appointment. And this was before a bevy of somewhat sympathetic articles in the Washington Post, Freeman’s appearance on Fareed Zakaria’s CNN show “GPS,” and a regretful post-mortem in the New York Times. The second episode Greenwald points to is a series of columns Roger Cohen wrote for the Times, extolling the relative freedoms Jews enjoy in Iran and later critcizing Israel’s new right wing government. It’s worth reading both Cohen’s columns and Greenwald’s analysis of them.

But these two instances are only the tip of the iceberg. In the midst of the Gaza war, former President Jimmy Carter came out with a new book about the Middle East, entitled We Can Have Peace in the Holy Land. (Perhaps a less contentious title than his previous book Palestine: Peace or Apartheid?) And a number of prominent academics have recently engaged seriously with the idea of boycotting Israeli products and academic institutions. In the midst of the Gaza war, Naomi Klien wrote a column for the Guardian entitled “Enough. It’s Time for a Boycott.” And Stanley Fish engaged provacatively with the boycott debate in a New York Times column with the unfortunate title “To Boycott or Not to Boycott, That is the Question.” Hampshire College, the first school to support divestment from South Africa, recently voted to approve divestment from Israel. And while he may be a comedian, Jon Stewart’s piece on the Gaza war, “Strip Maul,” is one of the most trenchant takes on the Gaza war.

This small shift in public discourse in the United States has not escaped the Israeli government. As the Times reported on Thursday, the Israeli Foreign Affairs Ministry has begun a public relations campaign to recoup some of the standing they have lost since the Gaza war. But with a hardline right wing government in power and a leading canditate for foreign minister who wants Arab citizens of Israel to take a loyalty oath, it won’t be an easy job.

The finalists for the 2009 National Magazine Awards, the Pulitzers of the magazine world, were announced earlier today in New York, and for the fifth consecutive year VQR picked up multiple nominations. For the fifth straight year, we’re a finalist for the General Excellence award (for circulation under 100,000) along with American Scholar, Aperture, Bidoun, and Print.

We’ve also received our fifth nomination in Fiction in five years for two stories in our Summer 2008 issue:

• “Asal” by Sana Krasikov and
• “Tale of the Teahouse” by Kanishk Tharoor.

Also named as finalists in the Fiction category are American Scholar, the New Yorker (two nominations), and Paris Review.

This makes fifteen nominations in five years with three wins: General Excellence and Fiction categories in 2006 and Single-Topic Issue in 2008. Congratulations to all the writers and artists who we were fortunate to publish last year and to the VQR staff! A complete list of the finalists is available here.