Moby Dick, by Herman Melville (four-volume CD) (review)

Association, with its toll-free hotline to report "heritage violations" whenever they occur. Written with a combination of journaUstic insight, humor and an eye for the bizarre, Confederates in the Attic brings to light a world that for many of us has heretofore remained well camouflaged behind the façade of our contemporary cultural homogeneity . Entertaining and picaresque, at times frightening and disturbing, this book is about more than just damn Yankees and the sanctity of the rebel flag. (BR) Babylon in a Jar by Andrew Hudgins Houghton Mifflin, 1998, 72 pp., $22 The poems in Andrew Hudgins' fifth collection probe "the dead world's constant simmer," which to Hudgins' eye is everywhere apparent —on the nightly news, in his garden, at cocktail parties, in the classroom. His desire to recognize history's cycles of compounding violence and terror necessarily prevents the poet from settling into his daUy comforts. Babylon in a Jar percolates with the dark intrusions of ruined empires, blood sacrifice and pain. In "Poem," Hudgins catalogues the cities of the ages—Babylon and Nineveh, Athens, Berlin and Tenochtitl án—that come and go Uke the daffodUs in the garden: "The murderous, back-/from-death pre-blossoming/ blossoms, promising/the frUled afterthought /of flowers, bright cups/ tipping in the March god's fist." Other poems lament contemporary sodet/s loss of a sense of tragedy. In "Rain," as a serial kiUer terrorizes Cincinnati, leaving female body parts to be found by the poUce, a woman student asks tentatively if the anrient myths the class is studying are no longer true. Hudgins thinks one thing and says another: "No,/it's not true anymore. We aren't all Isis./We won't aU be Osiris." But, his own observations tell him as the poem concludes, "Like a small boy with a radio or frog,/we hack and reassemble our old unmurderable gods/so we won't tear each other into pieces./Eternity's a baU, history is a stick." Though such brutaUty cuts across the centuries and weighs on our daily negotiations, Hudgins says, "Let us/save outrage for our private Uves." Though Hudgins excels at the first-person, understated, anecdotal poem, one wishes at times for a more wrenching or ambitious syntax and diction to confront the mysteries that span the centuries. Hudgins' verse generally hinges on the state of mind of the speaker, asking the reader to buy into his pUght, to believe what he says because he believes it. If Hudgins strives for something beyond the self, the poems should not depend so entirely on the self for access to it. Testing the undergirding of the choices we make, individually and collectively, Hudgins' best poems locate a furious mystery in historical moments that have modern-day moral or poUtical analogues. (PM) Moby Dick, by Herman Melville (four-volume CD) read by Bill Bailey Naxos AudioBooks, 1998, 4 hrs. 43 min., $25.98, ISBN: 9626340266 172 · The Missouri Review The written word has in fad been spoken for most of its history. The Romans both composed and read their books oraUy. Cicero, for example , composed aloud by night, memorized his passages, then dictated them the next day to a scribe. In his fourth-century Confessions, St. Augustine recorded the first known description of someone reading süently and without moving his Ups—the awesome scholar Ambrose. As late as the nineteenth century, when the most popular authors were also lecturers and readers, the oral presentation of texts remained as important as sUent reading. Jane Austen read her compositions aloud to entertain family and friends. Most of the canonical authors of the nineteenth century were performers for private and pubUc entertainment, and many of them read aloud to their friends for editing suggestions. Certain books can best be experienced , or reexperienced, by listening to them. The growing variety of books on tape and CD provides great companions for travel, exercise or busy work. At The Missouri Review, we have dedded to pick some of the best of these audio books for regular review. What sets apart the four-volume CD of Herman MelviUe's 1851 novel Moby Dick (since this item can be somewhat hard to find, we...