Djbot Baghostus's Run

From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate #2

by Nathaniel Mackey

Djbot Baghosthus's Run is the second volume of Mackey's ongoing epistolary fiction, From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate. Like the first volume, Bedouin Hornbook, this work is written by the composer/multi-instrumentalist N., a founding member of a jazz group known as the Mystic Horn Society.
Djbot Baghosthus's Run is centered, in part, on the band's search for a new drummer. But this search, which begins with a revolution among the women of the group, and ends in a series of remarkable coincidences and eerie transcendental experiences, is also a search for everything that art (music and writing in this case) is and serves as an emblem for. Each letter spans an extraordinary range of voices and discourses, from philosophical to folkloric to erotic - with music always the connecting thread. Jazz for Mackey clearly is a cosmological and spiritual experience, on which signifies all those possibilities that lie beyond N.'s improvisations of a saxophone riff. At every level, intellectual, spiritual, sexual, and just plain gut, Djbot Baghosthus's Run is a masterwork of contemporary storytelling, a wonder that will haunt the emotions and arouse the intellect.

Genres: Poetry, Fiction

208 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1993

About the author

Poet and novelist Nathaniel Mackey was born in 1947 in Miami, Florida. He received a BA degree from Princeton University and a PhD from Stanford University.

Nathaniel Mackey has received numerous awards including a Whiting Writer’s Award and a 2010 Guggenheim fellowship. He is the Reynolds Price Professor of English at Duke University and served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2001 to 2007. Mackey currently lives in Durham, North Carolina.

Reviews

[Tim]

Second in Nathaniel Mackey's From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate series of epistolary fictions, following the expensively out of print Bedouin Hornbook. I read this a few years ago, before I really realized that fiction doesn't necessarily = story, so I enjoyed it way more this time around. Mackey's protagonist, N., writes to the Angel of Dust about his jazz sextet, the Mystic Horn Society, which in this book is looking for a new drummer, who may or may not be the dreamed-about (literally) Penny or Djeannine. The writing is oddly academic for a fictional voice but also loops and whirls around, fitting with the jazz theme of the series (and jazz is the smartest musical form anyway), but once used to it, it's pretty rewarding. Short capsules of the other books in the series to come.

[Eglash · Rating 4 out of 5]

Weird stream of consciousness heavily influenced by jazz -- in fact it comes with a discography of all the songs that influenced it. My fav part is when the protagonist is stopped at a traffic light, and spaces out watching it change colors over and over because red green and yellow make up the pan-African flag.