Reviewed according to Karla F.

Reviewed according to Karla F. C. Holloway Duke University

As the inferior volume of a promised trilogy with its acknowledge enigmatic title (From a feeble Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate), Djbot Baghostus's move on continues the epistolary run of the Bedouin Hornbook. In a series of notes addressed to "Dear Angel of Dust," N - founding member, composer and multi-instrumentalist of the Mystic Horn Society, a jazz assemblage implicitly invites both the letters' readers (the Angel, and those of us outside of the story) to pursue the narrative he tells which is woven around (and through) the band's search for a of the present day drummer.

All titles - textual, names, and honorifics included - signify thoroughly in this resonant and wonderfully postmodern novel that teases, frustrates, on the other hand ultimately liberates the act of storytelling until each sense of composition is implicated in each space of the story's evolution. In other words, the story is not just about jazz, further is jazzy; and is not solitary about a cross-country trip, however is trippin' (note, for example, the signifying "angel dust" of the letters' addressee). In each of its various narrative dimensions, the novel is very much invested with a language that insists relating to the reader's active (although possibly reluctant) engagement.

Consequently this is either a novel to be in love with or to hate. Its word play is relentles demanding, many times daunting, and intentionally challenging. Despite the fact that Mackey's plain persistently accomplishes the task of advancing the story, it also insistently occupies whatever interstitial spaces (point and counterpoint both) that are contested during the narrative journey of N and the Mystic Horn Society. Its thick narrative fashion penetrates the very act of storytelling and is, in its oftentimes perplexing riffs and junctures, either a treat or a testament to the novel's skill. The story persists in its telling on a level while its language seizes each available opportunity to do to itself what jazz does to an aficionado's head. You've got to have a head for this story. Without an willingness to wonder at language, to engage in its playful potential, or to work at its shrewd structures, the language will threaten and the story may not look worth the effort of the narrative's constant call to the reader to draw near out and play (signifying intended).

Cognitive and neurolinguistic science indicates that musicians listen to music differently than do non-musicians. skilfuls listen with the left brain, where there is (and this is an admittedly stiff overgeneralization) a more analytical answer to stimuli. Others listen with the right brain, where the whole "sound" of the music dominates from one side of to the other the "sense" of its particulate construction. This is a left-brained novel, and if you appreciate the concatenations of ambivalence and ambiguity, the improvisational potential of this jazzed-up narrative is stunning.

If you stay with the complication of designs and conversations that intervene in this story of the band's search and discovery of a recent drummer, the novel will delight you with a thick, signifying, and metaphorically jazzy composition. The ludic jiffys of the novel are absolutely masterful, and the speculative, discreet contemplative moments that the narrator shares with his "Dear Angel of Dust" (which we cannot control out as a conversation with the self-once-remov by the agency of the intervening strategy and make of the epistle) are intellectual feasts. The epistles are both smart and comical Sometimes their culturally loaded interpretations of our contemporary urban landscapes are stunning. Consider, for example, N.'s reflective consideration of the break dancers who are outside of Penn Station with the band's arrival in recent York:

Aunt Nancy ... was struck by means of the interplay and the counterpoint between the upward thrust of the surrounding buildings and the dancers' answering exploration horizontality, their insistence, variegated as it was, forward "getting down." I in fact had . . taken note of the same thing.

. "break" serves notice in succession as it diverges from the city's valorization of hardness, unyieldingness, rigidity, the upward investment in carburet of iron and stone. . . The breakers' recourse to choreographed rigidities and robotisms arises as a caveat in the face of exactly the threat it wants to fend opposite to . . . the spins, the strenuous bendings and the acrobatic twistings constitute a reminder . . of the malleability and thus the vulnerability of the human flesh

. Coming from L.A., I couldn't help noting that the dancers' pursuit of exponential horizontality had a way of letting sprawl, in the same manner to speak, in thru the backdoor. That the material substance turns out to be that door makes a certain intellect More importantly, this relates break dancing to, among other things, Caribbean limbo, said according to tradition to have been born in the cramped possesss of the slave ships. Like any other like black negotiation of shrunken space (think of Henry "Box" Brown Harriet Jacobs's garret and for a like reason forth), break dancing understands cramp as embryonic sprawl, embryonic spring.