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Jared Joseph’s Drowsy. Drowsy Baby is a book and the translation of a book. It is a scroll named Jenny, after Noah’s unnamed wife, both pictured and absent. Like Edmond Jabès, Yoel Hoffman, and Susan Howe, Jared Joseph viscerally merges questions of linguistic, textual, and memorial representation with the persistent violence of religious narrative, historical trauma, and familial haunting. What emerges is a poetic experiment or examination of God and fragment, a book of poetry insistent on challenging the emotional and formal impacts of a page and a life. Drowsy. Drowsy Baby is a book and the translation of a book. It is a song named Joseph, after an unnamed player piano, both pictured and absent.
While reading Jared Joseph’s book, I wrote to him, The honorable thing to do would be to put quotation marks around the entire text, or like pointing someone in the direction of the nearest cathedral, basilica. I was thinking, at the time, of the spectacular, effervescent, and eternally unfinished Sagrada Familia (in Barcelona; shifting landscapes, for a minute). Neither cathedral nor basilica, it is a temple. Expiatory. Where people go to atone. That to describe Jared Joseph’s book would be like putting quotation marks around la Sagrada Familia. No longer impossible, easy: a signpost, an arrow, a finger, a gesture. To not only bind the reader to the space Jared Joseph has created, but Jared Joseph to, among other expressions, his great great grandfather, in the fashion of an even more expiatory, and ultimately effervescent, experience. – BRANDON SHIMODA
Jared Joseph’s profoundly ambitious Drowsy. Drowsy Baby is simultaneously a mystical text, an autofiction driven by Nabokovian madness, the result of a termite artist eating his way through history, a no-holds-barred conceptual hoax, a personal genealogy. It is a book of fear and a book of defenses: from the violent and treasonous acts depicted in the pages, to the writing techniques of montage and erasure, the book is involved in a constant tugging between violence and protection, attack and defense.– JOHANNES GÖRANSSON
Drowsy. Drowsy Baby is a timely, hybrid work of powerful recollection—By way of the poet’s “difficult lyric,” a “combination of the story of Joseph and the story of [my name],” Jared Joseph courts autobiography to unveil vexed family histories as poetic translation suspended in free fall…a great great grandfather figure pushed from a cliff into the abyss—one of many deep sites of this poet’s reclamation. Joseph’s writing emerges, fusing beautiful prose, linguistic glitches, proper names into surprising forms: “Claude…Cloud” is where Nation and Person meet up in Joseph’s at once
idiosyncratic and capacious landscape. Hence, Drowsy. Drowsy Baby is as much rendered pastiche as it is slumbering flight—“If I can retrieve something…I think it says something.” For Joseph, homonyms often reign: tear/tear reveals the contact zone between liturgical genealogy and local bar love, an urgent politics of now, where playful punctuation beats, as if it is the breath itself—fields of commas induce coma, interrogations beget interrogative fields, suspended question marks mark the unconscious, where language is both erasure and concrete, a brilliant display of heart and the human mind.– RONALDO V. WILSON
1) Why poetry?
Poetry is the only place I feel like myself, and when I feel untethered to the pressures of being myself. Poetry is a hallway of talking, a difficult room. “Everything is a receptive sensor” writes Jon Woodward in a poem, he ends that poem with that line, which is a way of making the poem endless, it senses you or reads you. Someone told me once he wrote an apology that made several people cry. That is why I am a writer he said. I remember being disturbed by this. To write out of a need for forgiveness is one thing, I think, an interesting thing. To believe forgiveness exists at all is another. To believe rest exists. Writing a poem is like sleeping. Once a woman caught a white moth in her hand (this means in the night) that I hadn’t seen, I saw instead her fist, and then she opened her fist and the moth crumpled to the ground and twitched she stomped on it, and then she stomped on it, and to make sure its pain was done she stomped on it and twisted her boot to twist the moth out its own axis. That night I dreamt someone I had loved and I had not forgiven wearing a white moth gossamer dress in a smoking bar, and when she glided toward the exit she passed me and her each eyelash was that white moth, her eyes were closed. I woke up and my bed was sweaty and I was sitting. I’ve written this poem so many times I do not know anymore if I had that nightmare ever even at all. It is important to me to be a moth underneath a boot.
2) Do you feel like poetry is more or less important & relevant today?
I don’t know. A poem is built, formed, conceived, felt, seen, experienced, revised, slashed, rejected, beloved, shared, received, saved, stored, treasured. A poem isn’t fracked or leaked. A poem is banned sometimes, maybe this correlates to the fact that a poem isn’t translated easily. A poem isn’t translated. To translate is to take the foreign, and to re-code it as domestic. To translate is to appropriate something by way of rendering it appropriate, relevant. You ban or censor or deport a person word or thing that does not translate appropriately. I like that about a poem.
3) Tell us about one poet who has greatly influenced you as a writer and a thinker.
I think about Jalal Toufic a lot and his poems and his prose and his prose poems, or other things whatever they are, he has a book I have a hard time categorizing called Distractions so maybe those categories are all distractions or maybe he just writes distractions. In the Qur’an it is recounted that God creates Adam from clay, and then commands the angels to bow to Adam, and all the angels bow to Adam, but the angel Iblis doesn’t, he protests that he is made of fire and that Adam is made of clay, so Iblis is better than Adam. And this sin of pride or arrogance gets Iblis cast into hell, “I will fill Hell with you” God says. “I will fill Hell with you.” So Iblis becomes the devil, the ruler of Hell, and Iblis tells God he will make it his mission to mislead all humans forever. And so the pride and arrogance Iblis displayed before God had him cast him out of heaven and into Hell, and this is where evil comes from; Iblis’ revenge against Adam is making all mankind sin and stray from God. This distancing from God – this distraction – is what Toufic picks up on in Undying Love, Or, Love Dies, which is the most beautiful title in the world. Toufic says of Iblis that this is how it went, mostly. However, the real reason Iblis didn’t bow was not arrogance, not that he thought himself better as fire than Adam as clay, but because he loved God too much to bow before anyone that wasn’t God. The fire thing is just a pretense; Iblis was the most loyal of the angels; it was not self-love, but love for God that made him refuse to prostrate himself before Adam. And then Hell is filled with Iblis: “Iblis was dazzled by these debased states: how could all this come from him, an angel? Idolatry, love of sacrilege, anger, lechery, lying, laziness, sloth, betrayal, a treacherous tongue, and the other vices and sins Rimbaud catalogues in A Season in Hell are not what one finds in hell, but a manner of forgetting it.” So all evil and sin comes from Iblis’ melancholic need to forget his love and to distract himself from his undying, or dead, love. The evil that Iblis scatters upon mankind is not active revenge against Adam, but a sort of almost autonomic mist Iblis releases to obscure his acutely painful love for God. So I try to remember everything and be as melancholic as possible, which can be annoying, even arrogant.
4) Tell us about one lesser-known contemporary poet who you’d like more people to know about.
Cecilia Corrigan. I think everything she writes is brilliant, I think her performances are brilliant, I remember seeing her doing a reading for the first time and I couldn’t believe anyone could be so intelligent. Titanic is one of my favorite books in the world, Corrigan published it in 2014, her interview with Felix Bernstein about it is very great, she says among other things “One of the questions that Titanic is asking is whether typing ‘I want to be with you’ over iMessage is semantically different than saying ‘I want to be with you’ at a payphone booth, or in person.”
5) Share with us one of your recent poems and tell us a little bit about its context.
Newest Ninja Turtles
Robotic man talking or malfunctioning about trust says hejust needs to know everything his girlfriend is
his girlfriend is doing, he don’t mind his girlfriend
hangs out with her girlfriends, he is adam
-ant about this he just wants to know her eve
-ning plans nightsly and to know to be on gard
-en duty or not all night sprinkling grass. He wants to
be the first, at the bar telling me these stories that individual
-ize him but all the time I think you are insane normal,
normal grass, normal bullet, normal water bucket and sand castle
he says he is friends with Meester, what the fuck this means, like
God? He said
you missed my heart. She shot me in the arm the
leg the elbow the temple somehow I survived the temple
my tribe somehow survived its several
-times destroyed temples
but she missed my heart, temporary cemetery,
“pain graveyard.” I went swimming in the San Lorenzo
River with Shawnee, Joseph went swimming in
the San Lorenzo River with Winona, if my love
did not survive your love will not survive
my middle name Joseph, Joseph. As the morning sun rose
it has not. It is gray and Marissa says it
is depressing. Perils from the sea, fog from the
prison cemetery. Feeling all the leaves came over my sore.
Ginger Ale. Andy said you put that so clearly, that is
the clearest smartest way of stating that and hugged
me, I have no idea now what I said then. What the fuck this means, like
the ocean? Let’s walk through your next pay period. Every planet wants to grow
a strawberry. Every buried mound wants to grow
a baby boy. Every baby boy wants to row
the whole ocean is an oar. Every oar wants
either oar. She made a real effort but you can’t row a boat
without arms. Where have I lived, what cities. Who cares
Derwood Rockville Potomac Madison Tianjin New York
City Cartaya Granada Madrid Iowa
City Oakland Santa Cruz. Good job
Jared you have vertigo. I don’t want clarity, I don’t want
alacrity. DO I cross the cities off now is that what
I did I can’t take it any longer give me
vertigo don’t go with me come take my hand my hand
I dreamt my hand I dreamt I’d just woken up and
had no time even to, get to work the which I was late for.
Underneath the wood print
I could hear the sirens.
I thought of mowing down the celebrators but I cannot stand the smell
of grass screaming. I don’t want transparent ground I know
already the foundation’s strength and make of fear and liability
to tear apart itself whenever it will deem itself
boring. The most poetic dream came flowing like
a childhood scene: you think you’re funny but you’ve never been
funny. You think you are my son but I look at you and see
cities I wish I’d never been in and made mad decisions in
July clothes. I don’t like that line break what that line
I don’t love. I don’t not love. I forget
the necessary words, the right ones, so I transcribe them
all. The keys, the Styrofoam cup. The drufyls looking
at Amber. The foal I saw a farmer name mber.
Ammiel Alcalay, other names that start with A. I am
tired, my memory is tired. A sunnyside cop. I rode
fast down Laurel, as if hoping my July clothes would burn up
off me, the clothes in my room that are hers would burn up
off me, I hang up my heart / is settled. The beveled walls,
the deviled egg specials. I look down and my hands are
normal. I was too asleep. I was also the hardest part of waking up
is Folgers out of your cup and I wast’ waking up and knowing this was a couch and I
had somehow made it to Nadia’s, my house’mate’s, couch
fell asleep there, full asleep there, with bathroom towels for
blankets. In July the feeling of snow may march backwards on
through April O’Neill
Contexts:
I found this poem in a notebook a couple weeks ago and made it into another poem, this one. The narrative sort-of recounted happened in June, that’s why June is the one month not mentioned. The bar was the Asti in Santa Cruz, California, which everyone calls the Nasty Asti, because it is fucking disgusting. You can smoke in it, or at the time you could, and the bartenders who work there are really nice and capable and smart people and a lot of my friends go there, but also sometimes you get stuck next to an asshole who is telling you intimate details about how much of an asshole he is, without actually knowing that he is such an asshole. It reminded me of the ways I am an asshole, and would like to not be, so my way of empathizing with him is to write as him, while we are both actually malfunctioning drunks, hi-malfunctioning drunks. I don’t remember his name. Meester is a dj in Santa Cruz. “normal grass” is a line Sara Peck or I came up with, I don’t know now. “You Missed My Heart” is a song by Mark Kozelek and Jimmy LaValle. It is bizarre that I put “pain graveyard” in quotes and not “temporary cemetery,” because “temporary cemetery” is a quote from Marissa from the poem (who also lives), and “pain graveyard” is just me, but I think I wanted to distance myself from it because I thought it was so stupid, but apparently I needed it in the poem, and then I decided there has got to be a My Chemical Romance or Slipknot song called Pain Graveyard, so I took my chances and put it in quotes. My neighbor is named Joseph. Shawnee is named Shawnee. Winona is named Winona. I expected the sun to rise but I went outside and it was not convincing. I have no idea what I told Andy, probably it was in the Asti, and I probably threw up under a booth all memory of that night. Puns are stupid, but iamb what iamb. DO was a typo, but I like it. “don’t go with me come take my hand” is a mishearing of the chorus of Exuma’s “You don’t know what’s going on,” that actually goes “Come go with me / Come take my hand,” which is more beautiful. Grass terrifies me, apparently. A kid at summer camp once told me “you think you’re funny but you’re not funny” and I sometimes hope that he’s in jail. I have not seen the newest ninja turtles movie. https://entropymag.org/national-poetry-month-featured-poet-jared-joseph/
Jared Joseph, A Book About Myself Called
Hell, Kerpunkt Press.2022.
A modern retelling of Dante’s Inferno from the twinned vantage points of the Covid-19 pandemic and the crisis of global capital, as well as a vintage review of pop culture and modernity-at-large through the literary lens of medieval hell. In a tragicomic collage of the fictive and the historical, the ancient and the contemporary, the book ultimately poses the questions:
Why are we in hell?
Why is it so funny?
And why can’t I laugh?
The essence of Jared Joseph's A Book About Myself Called Hell, an experimental comic rehashing of Dante's Inferno, comes in the form of three questions asked at the very end, the cap of the book's pop quiz review: "Why are we in hell? And why is it so funny? And why can't I laugh?"
Joseph takes us deep into his own chuckle-inducing interpretation of Dante's journey through hell alongside the great poet Virgil, canto by canto, replete with clever wordplay, comic asides that would make Douglas Adams blush, and generous helpings of modern pop culture references. These references are fairly democratic: highbrow and lowbrow, popular and obscure. While giving a basic overview of Dante's epic poem on the book's first page, Alejandro Jodorowsky's avant-garde cult film Holy Mountain gets a mention, as do Star Wars, the Goodyear blimp, and glamping. If on the first page you already think this jarring juxtaposition of images might not be the most effective way to interpret Dante, buckle up: there are thirty-four cantos to go.
Why of all the classics does Dante's Inferno merit Joseph's scrutiny? A reader could infer that the author thinks, in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, that hell is a subject worth revisiting. For sure, there's fun to be had revisiting hell with Dante, Virgil, and the cast of horrific characters they meet along the way:
Dante wakes up and sees new suffering all around. He also sees Cerberus whose three (i think; unspecified) heads are hungry for the forever feasted upon gluttons as well as, apparently, mud; Virgil, an accomplished dart player—hell is the deepest dive bar—flings a clump of mud into each mouth, simultaneously it seems or at least in quick precise succession, and Cerberus, despite having a dog's stomach, is sated and slumps down and turns over and expects a Good boy! Good boyyyyyy! belly rub for the puppy.
But the text is more than just a manically subversive book report on a world classic; it's also a cry for help. Chipping away at the facade of these hedonistic passages are a few personal interludes that sneak into random canto passages without warning, as in the opening of Canto XIX: "My friend died today and i wonder what Dante would say about it: heaven or hell. It must be a comfort to reduce a life to a quantum of categorized act. Take faith, she's heaven-sent. Steel yourself, she's hell-bent. Either way, she is before a gate."
The state of his mother's health also hovers over his words; she is greatly weakened and forever changed by the virus. With the addition of these brief, but heart-dropping moments, a new lens is applied to Joseph's flippant descriptions of the cantos. He spins novelty into levity by inserting his own grief into the picture, so wracked with confusion and hurt that he can't even be concerned with proper rules of capitalization. Suddenly, Dante's Inferno isn't just a classic work of literature to tackle during lockdown; it's a place of solace where one can look for answers.
And does he find any answers? It depends on the questions. Grief makes inquisitors of us all, but the healing from grief isn't in the answers so much as it's in the asking. In Canto V, Dante and Virgil roam the circle of hell reserved for sinners of lust, reminding Joseph at the onset of the pandemic to reach out to his old lovers and make sure they're okay: "I'm texting all of my exes asking if they are alive, got virus'd, and they are, and they haven't, in that order, and apparently we all still care, and we do not dare hell. We only dare Hello each other. Grief is compassionate, and Dante is aggrieved, all is so lamentable he faints again. i sense a pattern, an order. It bores me, through me."
Later, in Canto XVII, Joseph lays his sense of purpose out more plainly while including a passage describing writing in a pandemic diary—what he calls a "Corona Chronicle:" ". . . but i only do as much as when i feel so emotional i must entirely blunt my emotional affect in language. It works. . . . There is no answer to anything. There is no answer to life; you must die, or change. i choose cake. i say simply i must write sometimes, and sometimes i do not feel i must write, that i can simply live, and that all is adequate."
If, however, you read this book to bask in the author's existentialist conundrums, you'd be missing the point. Joseph employs a keen sense of humor to stay sane during a time of particular hardship, and the reader should follow his lead. Just about every page has at least one gold nugget of pure wit. His hot takes on Dante's characters are vivid and memorable.
On Virgil: "Virgil seemed the perfect choice for a dad: he was dead, for one, so he couldn't refuse."
On the Simoniacs: ". . . the most boring bearers of the -iac suffix. . ."
On Satan: ". . . a three-headed animatronic giant installed by Chuck E. Cheese eating Judas, Brutus, and Cassius like they're pizza. He eats Judas crust first."
These passages are the true fabric that quilts together A Book About Myself Called Hell: an outpouring of grief; a stylized CliffsNotes infused with the breath of life; a mini-opus trying to make sense of the pandemic times; a critique on god, suffering, and death. We may not find out why we're in hell, or why it's so funny, but it's nice to know that we might be able to laugh after all. - Zachary Bernstein
https://www.therupturemag.com/rupture/a-book-about-myself-called-hell
Jared Joseph’s A Book About Myself Called Hell is a book about Dante’s Inferno, the first cantica of the 14th-century epic poem Divine Comedy. While Joseph’s hell is often hilarious in its unfaithful dilation of Dante’s infamous tour of the underworld, Joseph’s humor is no joke. A Book About Myself Called Hell is also a book about late-stage capitalism called It Came from Hell!, and a book about the covid-19 pandemic called Hell, the Reckoning, and a book about writing called Return to Hell. Suffering is no laughing matter except when it is, when the only agency we have is to shape the narrative of our own debasement. True to its medieval roots, this comedy is “a genre where everything begins uncomfortably and ends commodiously” (12).
A Book About Myself is also a book about myself, or yourself, or a collective enunciation of modular subjectivities abject in their terminal desire to know and be truly known, to love and be truly loved, to deliver and be truly delivered across the gap of Self and Other. Like Dante, Joseph is and is not his own protagonist: “i write only my whole life, even if i lie about my whole life” (60). Like Joseph, his reader is a product of language damned to experience significant others and significant otherness (Achilles and Paris, Mighty Max and Bea, a blind man and the eye of his memory) forever mediated by modes of signification. “Semiosis” sounds like a virus and operates by contagion in Joseph’s text to the perverse pleasure of his reader.
As reader, I’m asked to consider that in Arabic, the word for hair and poem is the same (“beauty, let down your long poem, etc.”), but I do not know this Arabic word, or its length, or anything about makeshift escapes or trapdoors through meaning, and I end up thinking about a mashup of Johnny Cash and Frodo (45). I’m asked to consider Hercules clubbing a centaur and end up thinking about a Marxist critique of the commodity object embodied by Holden Caulfield (the object, not the critique) (85). I’m asked to consider Dante weeping out his own asshole but end up thinking about Dirty Dancing (71). When Dante accidentally curbstomps a frozen head and the head takes offense on behalf of its mother’s resemblance, I’m given a blank page. Then I’m asked to consider the narrator’s mother with a t-cell count of 0 (102-5).
I cannot not consign myself to such associative systems of signs like they’re my Virgil, snaking through discomfort, surprise, grief, beauty (even in the pit of hell itself). In Kant’s regime of autonomy, freedom has a price: when I do what I want, I domesticate myself within my deepest pathologies. True autonomy is doing what I simply can’t not do. In theory, then, the pandemic was the freest I have ever been. I could not not binge-watch SVU, eat Kraft mac and cheese, drunk-call estranged friends, hook up with my ex. I could not not desire my own repression. What? I Kant even. But A Book About Myself tries, and is the record of its trying, its trials, even and especially as it experiences a slow-motion existential crisis.
Joseph’s reading of a reading of a visual metonymy called hell, that is really just bare life, constitutes a double contingency that either jettisons us out of the symbolic order and into the Real, or reinscribes us hopelessly within it. And it is here, in the shadow of dialectical materialism, that there be monsters. “Desire is hell–heaven simply means a universe without desire,” Žižek writes. “‘Hell’ is not another reality full of horrors, ‘hell’ is […] the reality of our lives structured by the inconsistency of our desires, the reality in which we desire what we don’t want and do not even know what we desire.” I don’t want to watch Žižek eating hotdogs from each hand while walking down a city street, his crewneck T-shirt and humped neck, but I desire to youtube it at least monthly. I just did. It’s called “Zizek Devours Into Hotdogs.” And this seems apropos, some living critique of capitalist ideology in which we become what we consume, or what consumes us, and love it. I do not know what I desire. All I know is that I love processed meat, and Žižek, and I find both repulsive. I feel like Dante feels about the bloody stumps of souls flung by Minos into the forested second circle to be scavenged by Harpies. All I know is that when I’m going through hell, books like Joseph’s guide me on and deliver me out.
In “A Letter from a Region in My Mind,” James Baldwin writes of his coming-of-age into the violence of race relations that “I became, during my fourteenth year, for the first time in my life, afraid—afraid of the evil within me and afraid of the evil without.” The pop cultural wheelhouse of Joseph’s book situates him, like myself, in adolescence from Air Bud to earbuds, fourteen and waiting for the ball to drop on the year 2000. The reiterative trauma of the millennium impulse is to anticipate progressive malapropisms like “virtuous cops,” “accessible healthcare,” and “flying cars,” but accept in their stead deepest night, weeping, and gnashing of teeth. Patience, turns out, is not a virtue; you can’t ask agitprop to prom with a boombox. Agitprop does not want to promenade, it wants to set shit ablaze. There are over 101 direct references (I stopped counting) to fire in Joseph’s book, and I appreciate this bounty because hell yes, I am angry. And afraid. But, like Dante, I’m not dead; I’m alive to the best of my ability and as near to the setting of the Jetsons as to the social uprisings of the 1960s. Joseph’s document is a monument to rage against unpardonable stasis, another machine.
I write this in the gloaming of midwinter, punishing myself for the exigency of time with blue light and Flamin’ Hot Cheetos and rubberneck videos on the one year anniversary of the storming of the U.S. Capitol Building by rightwing vigilantes responding to former President Trump’s fabricated claims of election fraud. “We fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” a Trump the size of a celluloid Kewpie doll alleges from the corner of my screen. As his “Save America” supporters march on Congress and overspill the Great Rotunda, what circle of hell is this? Who will be saved in abolitionist search histories, and who will be doomed to repetition?
Concluding Joseph’s Cantos is a CliffNotes-esque multiple choice section as if this study/guide has led you to a sublime precipice unbalanced by all the awesome terror of unknowing–of a brooding sea or pop quiz. The correct answer to “What is Lethe?” is “D. I forget” (126). Fitting, given that Lethe is a river in Hades that, when drunk (or drunk from), makes wretched souls forget their (probably wretched) mortal lives. “[N]o deja vu in hell really, all of it is Lethe,” Joseph writes, “but you cannot not step in the same river twice, because you never remember having stepped inside it even once” (52). This mutation of idioms strikes me keenly as a portrayal of pandemic time, concentric and inescapable, not least because of the passage’s proximity to Canto XVII, which begins with a description of me, or who could be me, and Joseph, or who could be Dante, drinking on the abandoned lifeguard tower, pissing in the sand (59). “I forget.” The explication of the correct answer, printed upside down in small font at the bottom of the page (you are falling now), is a quote from Patrik Ourednik’s Europeana: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century, itself a reference to the thesis that would become Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man:
And in 1989, an American political scientist invented a theory about the end of history, according to which history had actually come to an end, because modern science and new means of communication allowed people to live in prosperity, and universal prosperity was the guarantee of democracy and not the contrary […]. But lots of people did not know the theory and continued to make history as if nothing had happened. (126)
A Book About Myself is an impossible book about the impossible task of narrating site-un-specific loss after the end of history when citizen and consumer, liberation and finance, have become synonymous, and when even synonyms disappeared in a global tragedy without likeness. Yet Joseph’s book exists, and far from an Adornean barbarity that seeks to represent, A Book About Myself seeks to unknow with such incendiary vulnerability that any last residue, a me or a Joseph or a Dante, can forget themself and be recast by what hell really is: that which “makes the world yearn, which means burn, too” (122).
The cover of Srikanth Reddy’s Voyager, another book I love, depicts burning maps, perhaps maps of Italy. “The Inferno not only constructs Hell,” Joseph reminds us, “it constructs a launching pad that thrusts Italy out of the medieval era and into the nation-based paradigm that characterizes our own western modernity, or hell” (14). Reddy’s Voyager manages to rewrite, through erasure and with mention of Dante, the autobiography of Kurt Waldheim—a former lieutenant officer in Hitler’s Wehrmacht, the President of Austria, and UN Secretary General, as well as a current greeting on the Voyager Golden Records—into a meditation on what we need most: not another atrocity of power, not power in any form, but the suffering intimacy that persists in its ashes. No, persists against power as its dialectical Other? “The road to hell is paved with transubstantiation. May the muse inspire me to substantiate this claim” (111).
Q: What stays in the past?
A: LOL
I feel indeed like Bernadette Mayer in Midwinter Day, yet another book I love: “I thought I was going to write/A story of my theories tonight/Not this desirous essay on art and home,/This alarming dictionary of reformist love.” Despite tactical and prosaic affinities between Reddy, Mayer, and Joseph, what I think I’m trying to say is that these works share a mouthfeel, and it feels like burning and it feels like yearning, too. If heaven is only as good as hell sans desire, I don’t wanna go. If this is torture, chain me to the wall. - Kendall Grady
https://www.bridgeeight.com/review-a-book-about-myself-called-hell-by-jared-joseph/
A personal growth narrative applies twofold to Jared Joseph’s A Book About Myself Called Hell (KERNPUNKT Press, 2022). In the book, which reads almost like a travel diary, Joseph documents his reading process of Dante’s Inferno, an epic poem in which Dante journeys through Hell as a living being. The parallel narratives for Dante and Joseph reveal the nested nature of the book’s themes, mirroring and re-forming like the concentric circles of Hell.
A Book About Myself Called Hell is a truly impressive work of critiquing and weaving, of joking and wondering, and it is funny. Joseph does it all intentionally, with nary a misplaced comma, and by the end I felt devastatingly seen and understood. The book is precisely human. I recognized my soul’s questions mirrored in the confusion and absurdity of both Joseph’s and Dante’s wanderings. The sentiment is captured perfectly in Job 9:12, which is featured in the book as an epigraph: “Who can say to Him, what are you doing?”. Who is running this life of ours? How can we ask what on earth is going on?
Joseph’s book unfolds in three sections. First, there is a brief introduction to Inferno and why Joseph is reading. The middle is made up of critical commentaries for each canto. Finally, Joseph puts together a multiple-choice section with upside-down answers, reading like a Choose Your Own Adventure novel. This last part enhances the book’s conversational nature; Joseph is telling the readers a story and interjecting with context and anecdotes, to which we respond, but all we say in the end is why is Hell so funny and why can’t we laugh?
The book is adventurous and searching, perhaps because it is somehow a compilation of asked, unanswered, and re-asked questions, occasionally specific but often metaphysical in nature. This essence is what made me feel understood and impressed at the same time: somehow, through a lot of swearing and crude analogies, Joseph pares away the bullshit and gets at some philosophical truth. The absurd humor of the book hinges on a tension between the ancient and the modern, and Joseph bridges the gap through continuous questions and eventual answers. He accurately dissects the structure of Inferno, referencing Dante’s life and numerological affiliations (Beatrice, basically), and analyzing the terza rima rhyme structure that reinforces the structure of the narrative. As well as this technical efficiency, Joseph demonstrates an intimate understanding of the soul struggle which pierces Inferno and carries into his own book: how can we make sense of this strange, contradictory existence that is human? Many little inversions reinforce the idea of heaven being hell, hell being life, and the journey out of hell being downwards to get back up, such as “they [finally] get to wet ground” (Joseph 25). Hell becomes a home for all the comically absurd, and the comically absurd include a lot of questions.
Some of the genius of the work is that, in almost every canto’s commentary, a reference offered earlier is revisited in some sensible, conclusive way, such that everything feels very satisfying. Joseph brings us into his thoughts as he reads Inferno, reminding us that he is laughing with us at all the absurdity, and tying things back together when the questions start to get too big. I invite readers who have not read Inferno, either recently or at all, into Joseph’s narrative for the eccentric father-son relationship of Dante and Virgil, and for the hilarity.
For those with an interest in Dante, Classics, humor, or the existential, this will prove an absolutely worthwhile read. Joseph demonstrates understanding of historical context, accurately touching on Florentine political conflicts and the tension between antiquity and Christian orthodoxy in the Italian Renaissance era. The whole project is kind of lovely because today’s angst at Covid-19, climate change, and the death of God is comparable somehow with that of the dreamy intellectual of the Middle Ages, stuck between pagan antiquity’s distant paradise and the reality of Christendom and plague. Either this was already apparent to Joseph, or he picked a really good quarantine read. In either case, A Book About Myself Called Hell makes sense. It is roaringly funny and intimately beautiful. - Isabelle Whittall
https://sundressblog.com/2024/02/19/sundress-reads-review-of-ema-book-about-myself-called-hellem/
Last March of the Before Times, my partner and I packed a U-Haul and ventured toward a new life in Kansas City. It didn’t offer paradise but had better jobs, fresh faces, and adventure. This seemed like enough at the time. But on the trip, Major League Baseball officially canceled their season. A day after we arrived, the city and most of the country shut down. Our promised jobs no longer existed.
The adventure lengthened into a protracted period of emptiness, unfamiliar streets, and sheltering-in-place. We joked that we must have died on the drive. Our memories of the crash had been wiped out and our spirits continued the narrative into this eerie afterlife.
I’m pretty sure we all have a story of pandemic misery. The dragging existential crisis of boring apocalypse punctuated by moments of panic, near-misses, and death. People grew sourdough starters, learned quilting, fell into QAnon, and became radicalized to one side or the other. They grasped for anything to mitigate the meaningless hours, explain the irrational, or provide a second of reprieve.
The poet Jared Joseph turned to The Inferno, whose main character Dante gets a guided tour of hell — a once unrelatable story. From this comes A Book About Myself Called Hell — part retelling, part critique, and part authorial breakdown.
The Inferno isn’t required reading to enjoy the book but might be best for the reader who’s read Dante but has no intention of rereading him. Joseph spends a few pages summarizing the happenings of each canto while critiquing Dante as a character and author. But as COVID permeates and disintegrates everyone’s focus, it also breaks into Joseph’s, often in stream-of-consciousness musings of our hellscape in opposition to Dante’s.
These intrusive thoughts resonate with the universal experience of the shutdown. And they create the moments in the book that remained with me after I put it down. In one instance, while a verklempt Dante listens to one of the dead recalling her lover torn from her in her former life, Joseph interrupts to write, “i’m texting all my exes asking if they are alive, got virus’d.” Here is a sentiment easily read as an aside, but the conceit is artfully crafted to impress the image of Joseph putting the book down and picking up his phone.
Later, Joseph admits of one canto, “This one took two weeks to get through, i think i was depressed from sheltering in place, a big empty room or stanzone, the parks and beaches having been closed, bills and no money to pay them, my friend drinking herself halfway to death.” The effect of this lament recalls the desperation and failure to produce anything meaningful amidst the weight of a world paused in terror. Joseph conjures the dull grind of us rendered ineffectual, holed up with no escape, tortured by the toppling thoughts of personal and professional responsibility. It’s nice to know it wasn’t just me.
I lingered with empathy on the author’s troubles, but it was when Joseph critiques the moment Dante meets his mentor Brunetto that I fully realized Joseph identifies and wants us to identify with the residents of hell over Dante. In the retelling, Joseph praises Dante for crediting Brunetto as the man who taught him how to write. This is in accord with other scholars who say Dante lauds this man more than any other in hell. But Joseph digs into the fact that Dante the writer has not only written his mentor into hell but has done so for his homosexuality, a preference so reviled Dante cannot even name it. When Dante says he will make Brunetto immortal, Joseph cannot stomach anymore, writing: “And this here further bespeaks the strange cruelty of Dante, i don’t know if it’s intentio, if he’s an evil monster or a stupid beast, either way the result remains, that Dante the character claims to intend to do one thing — I will canonize you as a saint, I will retouch your tarnished memory burnished in gold — while Dante the author sends him to hell for loving men.” Sure, Dante’s era wasn’t open to a rainbow of sexuality, but even if that’s your argument, Dante trashing his mentor while painting himself as a hero is not a great look.
Throughout the book, Joseph ridicules Dante as aloof, judgmental, and deceitful to the dead, but he also reinterprets Dante’s graphic, brutal tortures of hell as not savage or painful but on infinite repeat. So those confined to hell seem more condemned to going through the motions than twisted with anguish. As Dante hoped to make each punishment representative for the sin, I found myself thinking of Ling Ma’s novel Severance, in which the infected zombie cycles through their everyday routines in a hellish pantomime of normalcy. But Ma’s infected are unaware of their sickness or the unraveled world, whereas Joseph sees Dante’s dead as much more pitiful because they retain their identities and awareness. Meanwhile, Dante prances through the small place in wonder at how this half lives. The tension between the characterizations of the dead and Dante works as the current that keeps Joseph’s recurring invectives about Dante afloat. That disparity enriches Joseph’s excoriation of Dante by revealing the base inequality of the poem. The damned are forever stuck in punishing routines, while Dante can leave once he reaches the exit. So Joseph, bitter and alone like the rest of us, paints Dante as a tourist vacationing amidst eternal suffering. The book might have been titled A Book About Hell Called Myself because in his vision, we are in the hellscape and Dante is anyone who has an out.
These themes are very serious, but the book is also funny. It’s filled with the grim, witty humor of a black-pilled Oscar Wilde with a Netflix addiction. Joseph continues the tradition of jampacking a text with allusions. Rather than being lofty, his references echo our own cultural touchstones of TV and pop. I read into the text a little implied derision of Dante’s. While I actually think The Wire is no more or less important than the Western Canon, it’s still funny to imagine how a Dante scholar might respond to that sentiment.
The book’s best moments are when the allusions are tongue in cheek and effectively illuminating. Often, they point to how Dante views himself or others, as when Joseph refers to Dante as Keanu Reeves playing Neo. This is comic in one sense because Dante believes himself to be “the one” writer who could tell this story, while in another because Dante the writer is essentially writing Dante the hero. These moments finger-gun toward Joseph’s larger point that we should remember the gleaming hero of The Inferno shares a name with the author.
But my favorite might be Joseph’s revelation that Dante is Michael Scott: “i realize the main character of ‘The Office’ is the main character of The Inferno, and Virgil is Dwight, they all simply worsen hell, and the revulsion the viewer or the reader feels towards the acts of Michael-Dante converts into a sort of divine comedy that, the more one reads Michael’s Inferno or Dante’s ‘Office,’ the more one realizes there is no change here, the way out of hell would be the way out of the show, so there must be more show, there must be more hell, and we are complicitly sub-authorizing hell’s existence and continuation . . .” Again, this is Dante as the picture of bumbling mediocrity proclaiming itself as valor, where Virgil is the pedant who sucks up to Dante while insulting him. This casts The Inferno as a situational comedy: just as in The Office the characters remain unchanged season after season, so Dante and Virgil exit each episode for the next without much thought or reflection.
Throughout the book, Joseph examines and blurs the lines between the writer and the character, most often lambasting Dante. Through this method, he reads himself and us. We hunger for more show or story, so more show and story are made even if the characters don’t. Our acts of reading or writing about the thing ensure its survival.
I hope this work will be an emotional time capsule holding all the fear and ennui specific to the past two years, but this period appears to be the start of an era rather than the end of anything. For now, it is the best kind of commiseration — funny, poignant, and honest enough to hurt. - Justin Burnell
One of the first things I did after the initial wave of COVID-19 sent me and my 10,000 some-odd coworkers at the gargantuan state university where I work scurrying home for almost five months of quarantine, was pull The Brothers Karamazov down off my bookshelf—one of those dauntingly hefty classics that I’d always meant to make time for, and now, all of the sudden, found I had that time in abundance. As I was still keeping up with my department via the much despised Microsoft Teams and seeing their faces once a week on clumsy, fledgling Zoom calls, I invited anyone who might want to join me in my literary endeavor (we are librarians, after all), in hopes of fostering some community or camaraderie during those newly uncertain times. But no one took me up on it. I made the journey alone.
I’m starting off my review of Jared Joseph’s wickedly funny new novel A Book About Myself Called Hell with this anecdote because it’s still the first thing I think about when I stop to consider all the ways that the pandemic has changed us, and continues to change us, as an already aggressively self-stratifying society. Not because no one would read Dostoyevsky with me—that was hardly surprising—so much as the ease with which we all immediately began hermeticizing, and the surprise at just how inessential so much of our location-based work and our real life interactions with one another actually were. While I was thrilled to spend more time reading, others lost themselves in politics and online activism. Many dove into house repairs and yard projects. Countless more dedicated themselves to home fitness. Most of us watched Tiger King. We all found ways to fill that new abundance of time. And despite all the waves upon waves of “we’re all in this together” messaging from our political leaders and our corporate overlords and our social media and targeted ads, quarantine was ultimately a profoundly isolating and agonizing reminder that we were actually, quite literally, all in this alone. The sudden ability to sit around the house in our pj’s all day, coupled with the sudden inability to do things as intrinsically basic as go to dinner with friends, or as obviously vital as be with our family members on their deathbeds—the upending of the very idea of human contact—settled in quickly as a kind of tangible extension of the technological path toward personal identity and techno-solipsism that we’ve been blithely tripping down for the past 20 years. We all know the famous line from Jean-Paul Sartre—“Hell is other people”—but after a few months cooped up with nothing but our own news feeds and neuroses for company, it became clear in pretty short order that Hell could just as easily be ourselves.
Now I will readily admit that the comparative value in my Karamazov story largely ends there. I finished the book in a couple of weeks and moved on, whereas Joseph has clearly spent months, if not years, dissecting Dante’s Inferno, of which A Book About Myself Called Hell is a manic, comic retelling. Recalling the zany, nonstop non-sequitur pace of the Animaniacs—or maybe just the rudderless, run-on sentence pontificating of your best friend 8 drinks into a bad breakup—Joseph uses Dante’s guided tour of the underworld as a framework through which to lead us on his own tour of Coronavirus lockdown Hell, and attempt to reckon in real time with all the terrifying truths those first few months heaped upon our collective understanding of the civilization we’ve built, and the safeguards we’ve put in place to protect it. From high castle capitalism, to neuroleptic nostalgia, to, of course, our closest-held convictions on life, death, and the afterlife, this book proclaims loudly, and hilariously, that nothing we once believed in is any longer sacred; that nothing is any longer safe.
What are we to make, Joseph wonders, of the now firsthand knowledge which we cannot unknow, that our existing forms of government, science, and religion are largely unequipped to save us from global catastrophe? That a huge part of the response to that catastrophe will be to reply “but what of our system of colored paper rectangles that decides which of us is most important?” and to subsequently prioritize that system over the preservation of human life? (not to mention that the collapse of that system would, itself, be a catastrophe every bit as devastating as the pandemic, if not more so, and that our government/science/religion’s inability to explain that in a way that makes sense is largely a failure of marketing) (or how this has all brought into bracingly sharp relief the way in which absolutely every piece of information we receive from everyone everywhere in the world has begun to feel like some form or another of marketing). What too are we to make of the now firsthand knowledge which we cannot unknow, that our planet’s resources are truly finite? That this fact will sooner or later come for us all (depending on where exactly we fall in the colored paper rectangle hierarchy), and that absolutely everything we experience via our ever-present and inescapable network of informational screens is a variant of manipulative theatre, meant to politicize every issue up to and including the manner and order in which we go extinct? To divide, rather than unite us? To keep the rich rich, and the poor at each other’s throats to the bitter end?
If I sound crazy right now, it’s because this book will make you a little crazy. In between 90s pop culture references, Drunk History-style reinterpretations of the nine circles, and some of the most so-bad-they’re-good puns you’ll ever read outside of an episode of Bob’s Burgers, A Book About Myself Called Hell carries the existential weight of one man nakedly grappling with both his better angels and some personal devils—throwing himself headlong at questions largely outside the purview of humankind, and valiantly attempting to get himself straight on the answers. He makes reference to a friend’s death (possibly by suicide) and his own mother’s failing health—the former exacerbated by COVID restrictions’ effect on their mental health, the latter by COVID itself—and questions both his own failure to affect these tragic situations, and the larger implications (or lack thereof) of his own helplessness to affect much of anything. At one point, he takes a hard look at the idea of traitors and their status as the most harshly punished in Hell (Judas chief among them for betraying Christ), daring to question what, if anything, Judas did to deserve such eternal torture, when it was his treacherous kiss that set into motion Christ’s salvation of all mankind—a plan which any believer in the triune God would thusly have to believe was set into motion by the Father from the moment of the Son’s immaculate conception. Can something be known by an omnipotent being, while still not being preordained? Does the simultaneous existence of God and free will make any kind of reconcilable sense? You know, those old chestnuts. And in applying such logical reasoning to matters of faith and the divine, Joseph creates a kind of parallel shorthand for the certainties we’ve seen unravel beneath the relentless progress of the Coronavirus pandemic; an incessant questioning of our unmade world.
Throughout the book, Joseph also regularly returns to some indirect exploration of the Schrodinger’s Cat paradox—the suggestion that by virtue of living with the knowledge of our own imminent deaths, we are in many ways already and always dead, and likewise that in attempting to mitigate that knowledge through unwavering, illogical belief in an afterlife, we are also still and eternally alive. In our most extreme state of hunkered down disconnection, during a time when the very air we breathe outside our homes is freighted with the fear of infection and death, A Book About Myself Called Hell begs the question: do our shelter-in-place isolation, oceans of universally streaming content, and shared beholdenness to a more immediate sense of our own impending doom make us more alive as a species, more dead, or both? For his part, the author’s fondness for esoteric literary explication and short-lived, failed, and/or forgotten IP that has (thus far) escaped the reboot vortex acts as something of a counter to this new economy of collective media memory. Where so much of our nostalgia feels rooted in a desire for shared history and confirmation of our own lived reality, Joseph seems more concerned with remembering something, anything, that still feels like it’s his alone (I, however, remember both Street Sharks AND Mighty Max. I see you buddy. You are seen).
All of which leads us somewhat back around to the decision to retell Dante’s Inferno in the first place. I probably should have mentioned this earlier, but I haven’t read The Divine Comedy in, like, 15 years? Give or take. But I think that’s part of the point of Joseph’s exercise here too. As everyone knows, and the author himself states pretty blatantly, no one reads the whole Divine Comedy anymore. Purgatorio is every bit as dull as the place it’s describing, and as far as I recall, Paradiso is just a shit ton of trumpets popping out of clouds to herald stuff a la Terry Gilliam’s Monty Python animations. Inferno is the only part anyone cares about, because it’s the only part anyone can remember. Dante’s depiction of Hell—which remains our most immediate and enduring to this day—is in many ways just a mirror of Earth absent the possible escape of death. It’s the OG Matrix; the IP that built the franchise. And what’s more, once it gets you thinking about the impossibility of death—or, put another way, the concept of eternity spent anywhere—there then extrapolates from it the potential for any conceivable version of the afterlife to be a kind of Hell (to make a Hell of Heaven). It effectively buries the lede (upside-down in ice and shit) and makes us question what it is we actually want out of existence in the first place.
With this in mind, I’d like to close with another personal anecdote. I grew up in a pretty religious household, and developed a vivid conception of Hell from a pretty early age, complete with the fire and torture and gnashing of teeth that we all know and love so well. But as I got older, and had more serious conversations with my parents and church leaders about what the Bible actually says, and what they actually believed, Hell began to take on a colder, more despondent, and far less dramatic tenor. What they said was that Hell is nothing more than “the absence of God,” and, ya know, to do with that what you will. For me that just meant kind of a black void—at first anyway. But the longer I rolled that definition around in my head, the more Hell came to resemble something like life on Earth, just after the holier-than-thou believers had all been whisked off to Purgatory, or Paradise, or wherever else they might go; it was simply what we’d be left with after we’d given up on anyone coming to save us from ourselves. And so, as one of the first true post-pandemic (or, at least, intra-pandemic) novels I’ve read, A Book About Myself Called Hell’s message feels very much like one of warning. As we finally (hopefully) (fingers crossed) (knock on wood) appear to be making our way out of this pandemic, we’re already seeing our new bubbles dissipate. Online activism has returned to the streets. Peloton stock is down. Tiger King has caught its own tail. Nothing lasts forever. I’m not a religious person anymore, but I do still feel some semblance of God in the agnostic goodness of the world—in community, and compassion, and humanity’s innate (if often tenuous) grasp of common sense right and wrong—and if we carry on down this path of holing up and letting one another go—if we succumb to mental despair or physiological decimation, feudalism or tribalism, eternal life and/or eternal death spent eternally alone—then it won’t matter if we have all the time in the world to kick back and read the classics in our soft clothes. We truly will make a Hell of Heaven (and Earth), because “the absence of God” will ultimately come to mean the absence of one another. Do with that what you will. - Dave Fitzgerald
https://heavyfeatherreview.org/2022/03/18/a-book-about-myself-called-hell/
https://heavyfeatherreview.org/tag/jared-joseph/
JARED JOSEPH is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop MFA program in poetry, and is currently pursuing his PhD in Literature at the University of California – Santa Cruz. Recent poems have been published in Fence, Noo Journal, and Spork while his and Sara Peck’s collaborative book here you are is available from Horse Less Press.
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