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Where Are We Now? Sam Truitt The Form of a City Changes Faster, Alas, Than the Human Heart Jacques Roubaud Translated by Keith and Rosemarie Waldrop Dalkey Archive Press http://www.dalkeyarchive.com 247 pages; paper, $13.95 Andromache, I think ofyou!—That little stream, That mirror, poor and sad, which glimmered long ago With the enormity ofyour widow's grief, Thatfalse Simois swollen by your tears, Suddenly made opulent my teeming memory, As I walked across the new Carrousel. —Old Paris is no more (theform ofa city Changesfaster, alas! than the human heart); I see only in memory that clutch ofstalls, Those heaps ofshafts, ofrough-cut cornices, the grass, The huge stone blocks stained green in puddles ofwater, And in the windows gleam thejumbled brica -brac. —Baudelaire, "The Swan " A book is a map, potentially. Books and maps both possess plot, as in the Old English word for ground—or, rather, for a ground, as "plot" involves a marked distinction and use—ground to be planted or a grave plot, say. As an overlaying scheme, the word "plot" is associated in literature with mythos, literally "mouth" and its product "speech," as that word is applied to translate Aristotle's notion in Poetics of an "arrangement of incidents." (The word "plot" in this sense was perhaps conveyed into English by an accidental similarity to the Old French complot, "combined plan," a back-formation from compeloter, "to roll into a ball.") A book of poems has a plot, and the truer that proves the closer it's aligned with plot's first meaning, because words are things—touch ground. The closer we can get to their roots—hue, as above, to "the huge stone blocks stained green in puddles of water"—the more we can "say," if not understand, where we come from. Sentences themselves, along which the stone blocks rise, are plotted streets and trails—there is a view to left and right and a horizon—and so we veer, soar, and plunge on. Reading, we pass through a book as over ground, making decisions. While we may read more or less its every word, we do not necessarily visit each—stand as we may on a sentence as on a bridge over a river—the Carrousel, say, over the Seine—to study its banks, depth and flow—and what floats there, even our selves (all of them). Principally books and maps locate us, though differently: We find ourselves in a book but on a map. Why? Maps, like poetry, retain more the original Old English sense of plot: it's grounded to the lines and features of earthly or human works, including words. To find ourselves in a map, then, would mean we were buried (the usual prerequisite for which is to be dead), though it might also mean having become indistinguishable from it. To read a map, we may wander or even see it all at once spatially: Its plot- (as scheme) is in its making—its rules and legend lending arrangement and so guidance—while plot as ground remains exterior to it, mirrored. In a book, there is nothing beyond it—as is true in any moment attended. It is possible to comprehend a book and wander out of time in its detached particulars (perhaps another book), but this occasions remove. Reading requires devolution to one-thing-after-thenext , which comes only in time and so in mortality , which is the reality or anticipation of loss, like Andromache's exile. Jacques Roubaud's The Form ofa City Changes Faster, Alas, Than the Human Heart comes close to being a map: It is responsible, as Roubaud appears to be aware of the words' power to create time, which is loss—to be taken by words and so lose our own plot—which, for lack of a better word, is our selves. But perhaps more than "power," it is words' magic to which Roubaud is responsible. From that standpoint, this reminds one of Federico Fellini's Intervista (1987), the director's last film, the conceit of which is an interview during which he visits his studio and some of his cinematic haunts. At one point, Fellini, his crew, and...

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