A WRITER'S WIT
No civilized person ever goes to bed the same day he gets up.
Richard Harding Davis
Born April 18, 1864
Something Stolen
Design by Radio.
NEXT TIME: MY BOOK WORLD
A WRITER'S WIT Something Stolen April 28, 2014, Thomas McGuane, “Hubcaps”: Owen, a child of two heavy drinkers, develops a quiet life that includes hiding a couple of small turtles at the bottom of his lunchbox and stealing hubcaps for his collection. ¶ As always, McGuane’s story is rich with details about the setting, the characters. Owen’s inner life, like that of many lonely children, is both desolate and rich. He may collect other people’s hubcaps as a way of feeding his bereft inner life. But this life is also rich with kindness and an awareness that others do not have. He, for example, is able to enumerate both the gifts and the deficits of all the Kershaw brothers’ abilities as baseball players—without judgment. He is able to befriend the mentally challenged youngest Kershaw brother without gathering much attention. The subtle climax seems to occur when something precious of Owen's is taken from him. As his parents separate, he continues to steal hubcaps at football games. “As time went on, it wasn’t only the games: any public event would do.” McGuane’s Driving on the Rim was published in 2010. Design by Radio. NEXT TIME: MY BOOK WORLD A WRITER'S WIT Seafaring Landlubber April 7, 2014, Jonathan Lethem, “Pending Vegan”: Paul Espeseth is coming off an antidepressant and visits San Diego’s Sea World with his wife and twin four-year-old daughters. ¶ Lethem seems to capture that netherworld between an on-drug/not-on-drug life. His nameless wife is but an aloof caregiver, as if he is another one of her children. And in any number of ways he is. Paul renames himself Pending Vegan, fully aware of the questionable methods by which meat-eating is achieved, yet loving the saltiness of pork. With the thought of having to postpone his hunger-busting behavior, Paul buys a turkey leg to gnaw on. His wife is annoyed, and he becomes a victim of his love for meat. ¶ I enjoy Lethem’s writing very much. His literary references, his cultural and spiritual references, are all in service of the narrative, in this case, about a man caught between two worlds. Paul Espeseth, too, like F. Scott Fitzgerald, whom he cites, has the “capacity to keep two opposed ideas in mind at the same time.” Read to find out how! Lethem’s most recent novel is Dissident Gardens. Patrik Svensson, Illustrator TUESDAY: MY BOOK WORLD A WRITER'S WIT Hadley Wins Again March 24, 2014, Tessa Hadley, “Under the Sign of the Moon”: Greta, in her sixties, travels by train from London to Liverpool to visit her daughter and experiences a chance encounter with a much younger man. ¶ Hadley’s greatest gift may be developing character. She so thoroughly creates interesting individuals that the plot seems to unfold as a result of their willful actions—as if they are actual people. We are drawn along with Greta from her past—two husbands, her life as a wife and mother—to the present, as a woman recovering from cancer. The young man’s attentions seem odd; she speculates he must have a mother fixation to be so attentive to her needs. At the same time she feels rejuvenated. . . . the way you might describe a limb getting over an attack of pins and needles—that she was coming back to life. When Greta has a second stranger-on-a-train encounter with the young man, he awkwardly spills his drink in her lap, and while he moves to clean her dress, he places his head on her knee. She insists that he leave the establishment immediately. He has left her a gift, a worn copy of a historical novel, in which he has written what turns out to be her name (though he'd said her name was the same as his mother's): Greta was confused, and for one long moment she really believed that it was fated, that this stranger had known her before he ever met her, and that he had written her name inside his book before she even told him what it was. Hadley is comfortable with Greta’s ambiguous feelings, and it feels natural because often it is the way we feel about our own lives.
The New Yorker published three of Hadley’s stories in 2013, and with this one, she gives this year a great start. Hadley’s novel Clever Girl is out now. Benoit Paillé, Photographer TUESDAY: MY BOOK WORLD A WRITER'S WIT Cunningham's Charms Cunningham, Michael. By Nightfall. New York: Farrar, 2010. I’ve now read everything Michael Cunningham has ever written, including several readings of The Hours, and I believe he may be a genius. A rare author it is who can create a world so airtight and yet breath-like, flexible, that it, itself, seems like a living thing. Rare it is that a contemporary author can compel me to sacrifice an entire morning to finishing a novel as if it were a conversation of the utmost importance. In By Nightfall, a couple in their forties are forging a life for themselves in SoHo. Peter owns his own gallery, and is on the precipice of either making it big or falling into an acceptably mediocre state forever: Get Groff (and really, would he blame Groff for going with a bigger gallery?) and he settles, quite possibly for good (he hasn’t been up and coming for almost a decade now), into a career of determined semidefeat, a champion of the overlooked and the almost-but-not-quite (228). His wife Rebecca is an editor. When Rebecca’s brother Ethan (called Mizzy, because he, arriving quite late in the family’s life, is a mistake) comes for a visit, both are rather knocked for a loop. He is one of those charming, good-looking young men who can get almost anything or anybody he wants because he’s always been told that he is special. In reality, Mizzy is a charming and functional drug addict. But the reader senses that it’s only a matter of time before he must go into rehab again, and who’s up for it this time? Certainly not Mizzy.
To give more of the plot would be to ruin the joys of this book. Cunningham is a master of structure, characterization, and storytelling. The chapters, themselves titled, become short stories, yet each chapter leads in a linked manner from one to the other. Cunningham has a way of realizing character by way of reflection. Although he’s a master of dialogue, as well, we often learn more through what seem like the meanderings of the characters’ minds. Their inner and outer expressions combine to form characters that are as real as our friends, our family members. Cunningham creates an overarching structure, in which the characters are one way in the beginning, we watch them metamorphose, and then at the end, we see them broken, like shards of pottery that have been dashed against the floor. With the last sentence of the book, however, we realize Peter and Rebecca going to put their lives back together. At least they’re going to try. In an interview Cunningham once said that with each book he tries to challenge himself to something larger than the last time. At first, this seems like a smaller, quieter, novel, compared to his previous tomes, but I'm not so sure. With this one he manages to equal, at least, what he has written in the past. Only time will tell if it is better. WEDNESDAY: PHOTOS OF YELLOW HOUSE CANYON A WRITER'S WIT Read a passage from my latest published story, "A Certain Kind of Mischief," a narrative of two boys with way too much time on their hands. I watch as he gingerly undoes the thin cambric material concealing his box springs and pulls out a miniature copy of the Adventures of Tom Sawyer. “Found it on my teacher’s desk in fifth grade,” he whispers. “I’ve read it like twenty times.” He replaces it by wedging it between a spring and the mattress. Untying some strings, he produces a jar filled with grasshopper legs. You can find out what happens to this latter-day Tom and Huck, in the latest issue of the Beloit Fiction Journal. Buy it for $10 by clicking here. My Book World: On Neruda's Case Ampuero, Roberto. The Neruda Case. Translated by Carolina De Robertis. New York: Riverhead, 2012. Ampuero’s novel, The Neruda Case, is divided into five parts, each one named after a woman whom Pablo Neruda is involved with over his lifetime, either as mistress or spouse. This novel is one of those in which a historic figure, in this case, a distinguished South American poet, is employed as a fictional character (names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously). A kind of realization of Neruda’s life, the novel takes place against the backdrop of a pre-Pinochet Chile. In the early 1970s, Cuban Cayetano Brulé meets Neruda at a party, and the poet hires Brulé to help him locate a daughter he never really knew, the only child he believes he ever sired. Even though Brulé has never worked before as a detective, he agrees to help Dan Pablo. In the part titled “Josie,” Brulé realizes Neruda has cancer, and the poet first engages him to locate a certain oncologist in Mexico. Brulé’s “training” as a sleuth takes place by way of reading certain detective novels that Neruda recommends. Throughout the novel, Brulé compares and contrasts his methods, his capabilities, with the fictional detectives of this one author. In order to make Brulé look like a detective, Neruda dresses him, presenting him with a lilac-colored tie dotted with small green guanacos (llamas): “It had a coarse texture, though a nice feel. On the lilac background, the guanacos leapt joyfully, grazed placidly, or contemplated the horizon” (55). Don Pablo declares the tie is over forty years old. He wore it when he met “some of the greatest European intellectuals” (55). He also wore it when he “went underground” in the 1950s. Essentially, Neruda means for the tie to be a talisman, to bring Brulé luck as he heads out on his mission to find Neruda’s daughter. This visual cue appears many times throughout the novel. Is it also a motif representing Don Pablo when he is not present? A reminder of Brulé’s mission, his amateur status? One is not quite sure, but it is one of those delightful images that makes the reader feel that he’s returned to familiar ground. Throughout, author Ampuero recaps certain points in order to keep the reader apprised (and interested): “My women never gave me children. Not Josie Bliss, who was a tornado of jealousy, not the Cyclops María Antonieta, who gave birth to a deformed being; nor did Delia del Carril, whose womb was dried up when I met her; nor Matilde, who had several miscarriages. I’ve had everything in life, Cayetano: friends, lovers, fame, money, prestige, they’ve even given me the Nobel Prize—but I never had a child. Beatriz is my last hope. It’s a hope I buried long ago. I’d give all my poetry in exchange for that daughter” (132-3). Oh, come on! one has to say. Really? Such a statement makes for good character motivation, but would a renowned poet have said such a thing? Brulé’s trip continues throughout the world, including East Germany’s Berlin. One comes to believe that each of the five women in Don Pablo Neruda’s life has inspired him to be the poet he becomes; each is an integral part of the work that expresses the human being he is. Without each, or by remaining with only one woman, he would never produce the work that he does. With three chapters to go, Neruda dies, and Brulé is never able to inform the poet the truth about his daughter. As part of the novel’s denouement, one sees the lilac tie with green guanacos three more times: “He wiped his tears with his guanaco tie, and studied the corpse’s face again through the shadows” (361). This seems to be Brulé’s way of connecting with the poet one last time. The way is not easy, in the time of great political upheaval, but Brulé is able to attend Neruda’s funeral. “He wore his best suit, a white shirt, and the violet tie covered in small green guanacos” (363). “He bit his lips, still unable to place Ruggiero, who now pressed his index finger against Cayetano’s green-and-purple guanaco tie, and smiled. ¶ ‘A friend of mine pushed you into that truck,’ he said. ‘They took you to Puchuncaví” (371). This scene brings Brulé full circle to the point where he was at the beginning of the novel. The Neruda Case is a very finely constructed and enjoyable novel—not only as a sophisticated whodunit, but as a literary novel, as well. And even though I usually dislike reading translations (something is always lost), this one is superb. Read it! WEDNESDAY: PHOTOGRAPH AND SHORT ESSAY A WRITER'S WIT A Small But Beautiful World Ackerley, J. R. We Think the World of You. New York: New York Review Books, 1960. Several years ago (I’m always behind in my reading and follow-up) in the New Yorker, I became acquainted with writer J. R. Ackerley for the first time. From the same generation as my grandparents, as F. Scott Fitzgerald, he was a British man who published only four books in his life. Seems that it took him a long time in between to develop each one. The novel is about Frank, a young man in London, in love with a man named Johnny, Johnny’s wife, Megan, and Evie, Johnny’s German Shepherd pup. We Think the World of You is built somewhat around the motif of the cliché embodied in the title. No less that seventeen times does Ackerley employ a form of it to demonstrate the offhand way the characters have of treating one another and Evie. And though the reader notices the repetition, it becomes an acceptable motif. While we were talking about [Johnny, who is in prison], the scullery door was pushed open and a dog came in. Evie continues to insinuate her way into Frank’s life, at least, while everyone else seems to shove her away. She’s destructive, probably because she is not exercised properly. How she loved running, using her muscles, her strong young limbs! If Tom or the rebuffed boy took her out every day on the lead round these mean streets what use would that be to her? She ought to be bounding a daily ten miles over grass. She ought to be in the country (59). There is some wrangling between Frank and Johnny’s wife and sister over the care of Evie, though they “think the world of her.” After Johnny is released from prison, Johnny spends some time with Frank and brings Evie with him. He is stunned how much she prefers Frank's company to his. There is an extremely tender love scene that, oddly enough, transpires with the three of them. It was now, as the rest of our garments followed, that Evie began to exhibit an increasing perturbation as though whatever was happening before her eyes was having, upon the confidence she had hitherto shown in the distinctness of our identities, a confusing effect. Uttering little quavering cries of doubt and concern, she sat first upon our mingled clothes, gazing at us with wild surmise, then upon our mingled bodies, excitedly licking our faces as though she would solve her perplexing problem either by cementing them together with her saliva or by forcing them apart. She lay with us throughout the afternoon, her fur against our flesh, and we talked of her most of the time (177). Throughout this trim novel, Frank is put in charge of Evie for short periods of time. Once, he even keeps her past a deadline, thinking that he will just keep her, to save her from the ineptitude of the others in her life. Finally, he promises Johnny he will pay him forty pounds for the dog. “Did you mean what you said about the forty quid?’ In some way it seems a painful price; in other ways not. Forty pounds means little to Frank, who has some means. At the same time, it demonstrates how little Johnny thinks of Evie, to let her go for any price, and rather easily at that. After that Evie and Frank live peaceably for many years, yet for such peace, Frank pays a price. Advancing age has only intensified her jealousy. I have lost all my old friends, they fear her and look at me with pity or contempt. We live entirely alone. Unless with her I can never go away. I can scarcely call my soul my own. Not that I am complaining, oh no; yet sometimes as we sit and my mind wanders back to the past, to my youthful ambitions and the freedom and independence I used to enjoy, I wonder what in the world has happened to me and how it all came about . . . . But that leads me into deep waters, too deep for fathoming; it leads me into the darkness of my own mind (209). Anyone looking for a superficial and positive sort of dog story will be disappointed. We Think the World of You is so much more.
WEDNESDAY: TRIP TO A CASINO A WRITER'S WIT Terms We Should Remember: Masscult and Midcult Macdonald, Dwight. John Summers, editor. Louis Menand, introduction. Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain. New York Review Books. New York, 2011. I became interested in this book when I saw it reviewed in The New Yorker. Then after I received my copy, I found that this blurb from the back cover gives the reader a great introduction to Macdonald, who published most of these essays prior to 1972: “An uncompromising contrarian, a passionate polemicist, a man of quick wit and wide learning, an anarchist, a pacifist, and a virtuoso of the slashing phrase, Dwight Macdonald was an indefatigable and indomitable critic of America’s susceptibility to well-meaning cultural fakery: all those estimable, eminent, prizewinning works of art that are said to be good and good for you and are not. He dubbed this phenomenon ‘Midcult’ and he attacked it not only an aesthetic but political grounds. Midcult rendered people complacent and compliant, secure in their common stupidity but neither happy nor free.” Wow! Some Nuggets from a Book Filled with Them On the Mags: “This is a magazine-reading country. When one comes back from abroad, the two displays of American abundance that dazzle one are the supermarkets and the newsstands. There are no British equivalents of our Midcult magazines like The Atlantic and the Saturday Review, or of our mass magazines like Life and The Saturday Evening Post and Look, or of our betwixt-&-between magazines like Esquire and The New Yorker (which also encroach on the Little Magazine area). There are, however, several big-circulation women’s magazines, I suppose because the women’s magazine is such an ancient and essential form of journalism that even the English dig it” (59). 1960 On Speculative Thinking: “Books that are speculative rather than informative, that present their authors’ own thinking and sensibility without any apparatus of scientific or journalistic research, sell badly in this country. There is a good market of the latest ‘Inside Russia’ reportage, but when Knopf published Czeslaw Milosz’ The Captive Mind, an original and brilliant analysis of the Communist mentality, it sold less than 3,000 copies. We want to know how what who, when, where, everything but why” (208). 1957 Middlebrow: “The objection to middlebrow, or petty-bourgeois, culture is that it vitiates serious art and thought by reducing it to a democratic-philistine pabulum, dull and tasteless because it is manufactured for a hypothetical ‘common man’ who is assumed (I think wrongly) to be even dumber than the entrepreneurs who condescendingly ‘give the public what it wants.’ Compromise is the essence of midcult, and compromise is fatal to excellence in such matters” (269). 1972 I was fascinated with this man’s informed opinions because essentially little has changed since he made these assertions (when I was but a child or youth). If anything, such conditions have worsened. What can be more Masscult than People Magazine? And has even The New Yorker slipped a bit? Are we getting stupider as a culture, or was Macdonald too smart for his own good?
WEDNESDAY: SHORT ESSAY AND PHOTOGRAPH A WRITER'S WIT What a Childhood, What a Writer! Dillard, Annie. An American Childhood. New York: Harper & Row, 1987. In this memoir, author Annie Dillard recalls the freedom she was given as a child. Is this childhood lived in 1940s and 50s, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the sort of childhood that helps create artists? From her book I developed the following tenet: Parents who allow their children to be their own person have no equal: “I had essentially been handed my own life. In subsequent years my parents would praise my drawings and poems, supply me with books, art supplies, and sports equipment, and listen to my troubles and enthusiasms, and supervise my hours, and discuss and inform, but they would not get involved with my detective work, nor hear about my reading, nor inquire about my homework or term papers or exams, nor visit the salamanders I caught, nor listen to me play the piano, nor attend my field hockey games, nor fuss over my insect collection with me, or my poetry collection or stamp collection or rock collection. My days and nights were my own to plan and fill” (149). When she is not even twelve, Dillard and her friends, the Fahey brothers, form what they call iceballs and throw them at cars for sport. At one point she lobs one that hits a man’s windshield inches from his head. He throws open the door of his Buick and leaves it agape as he chases them block after block until, breathlessly, he catches them: “‘You stupid kids,’ he began perfunctorily. I witnessed a similar event one year, when a man who lived next door to my elementary school in Wichita stacked dead branches in the area of land between the sidewalk and the street. When a kid picked one of the large branches and began to drag it down the street, the man raced out and dragged the boy toward the school to report him to the principal. Just watching that act of violence froze me to the sidewalk. I could never have thrown a snowball at a Buick traveling haplessly down the street. Perhaps Dillard’s childhood equipped her with a certain courage many of us do not have. Parents who leave their children alone can produce results that go a variety of ways. For Dillard it seems to have helped to produce one of the most creative writers in America. I'm sure I’ll read this work again.
WEDNESDAY: A PHOTO AND A SHORT ESSAY A WRITER'S WIT Does Story Come Together? February 17 & 24, 2014, Karl Ove Knausgaard, “Come Together”: Boy meets girl. Boy is enticed by girl to go “out.” They kiss for fifteen minutes, breaking a record of the boy’s friend. Girl calls it off, breaking boy’s heart. ¶ Coming-of-age stories are tricky to write. If they’re too generic, they can be horribly uninteresting, except perhaps to other twelve-year-olds. The perfect modulation is needed, and such an element seems to be missing from this story. It seems a bit disingenuous for an adult writer to pretend that he is twelve again. A bit of the retrospective point of view is needed, I think, to put the story in its proper place. ¶ Also, I keep expecting something new or different to happen: Karl’s older brother is setting him up for a fall or his parents are going to catch the two mid-kiss or something! ¶ And I issue the same disclaimer I often make with regard to translations. Something seems to get lost, indeed! Perhaps I’ve missed some finer nuance of the story, but I don’t think so. It seems like a very elemental narrative by someone who must be a very fine writer in his own language. Knausgaard strikes a number of chords—music albums, song titles, rock groups from the period—but they fail to make a sound that I can hear. This story is part of the author’s forthcoming title, part of his My Struggle series of novels. Javier Jaén, Photographer. A WRITER'S WIT Playing St. Barbara Not Easy Szczepanski, Marian. Playing St. Barbara. (City): High Hill Press, 2013. In October author Marian Szczepanski wrote a guest post in this blog about how she came to pen her book. Before beginning my profile, you may wish to click on her name for a link to that post. Publishing a book today is as dependent on word of mouth as it has ever been, more so if you consider that most publishers either don’t have the budget for reading tours and other expensive forms of publicity or else save their millions for their top-earners. What follows is my word-of-mouth entreaty to read a fine book. A COMPELLING STORY Playing St. Barbara begins in 1929 with an eighth-grader’s winning essay describing the seventh-century legend of St. Barbara, patron saint of miners. The salient features of Barbara’s life—a cruel and unyielding father, her unbending conversion from paganism to Christianity, her apparent disappearance into the earth—play out in various ways throughout Szczepanski’s novel, and it is important for the reader to internalize the saint’s story before moving on. The narrative reveals the lives of three daughters, one of whom writes the winning essay, and the wife of a coal miner, primarily during the decade of the 1930s in southwestern Pennsylvania. As an aside, in 1957, my family’s car broke down in a coal mining town in this region, and we spent three days there in a “hotel” waiting for our car to be repaired (my parents wound up buying a new Pontiac before we returned to our home in Kansas). Coal dust was so prevalent that my mother felt compelled to wipe every chair before we sat down, even the toilet seat. She must have prayed before each meal we ate, that we would not breathe in any more of the powder than necessary. Such fine dust is spread throughout this story like a black veil. The father, Finbar Sweeney, is an abusive brute. Not a day goes by that he doesn’t verbally abuse his wife, Clare, or physically harm her by way of a brutal slap or unwanted sexual advances. Not a day goes by that he doesn’t abuse one of his three daughters. All three seem like shards of the same person, and they are, in a sense, all reflections of their mother, Clare. It may be because of their suffering that Clare in some way consumes what seem like magic seeds to free her body of a number of pregnancies. One bright thread in the lives of the coal miners and their families is the annual St. Barbara pageant (the other is baseball), offered up to the martyred life of the patron saint of miners. Each of the Sweeney daughters, very close in age, is called upon to play the life of the saint over several years—and each in her own way fails. The event emphasizes the class differences in that the play is directed by a woman the youths call The Queen, a wife of an “upperhiller,” a woman whose husband is in management. However, The Queen must depend on the miners’ children to play the parts and is not always pleased with their performances. Each of Clare's daughters, in her own way, manages to escape from the town: the eldest by marrying well, another by becoming a nun, though she sacrifices her own love of a man to do so, and the third by her very wits, bidding good-bye to the town and venturing off to nearby Pittsburgh to start a new life. Clare, too, long-suffering wife must make a decision with regard to Finbar. After the mine experiences a huge explosion and collapse and Fin must spend time in the hospital, she goes to see him every day, and each day, unless sedated, he lashes out at her. Temporarily free of his ill treatment at home, she, of course, drinks in her freedom. Her friends and daughters urge her to leave Fin, an act of desperation at a time and place where the strictures of the Roman Catholic Church are clear, where most women wouldn’t leave their husbands for any reason. But the women in Clare’s life are clear: Finbar, alcoholic brute, is never going to change. BUY THE BOOK Playing St. Barbara is a rich amalgam of many things: historical novel, romance (capital R), crusade for the rights of nonunion workers (Pennsylvania Mine War of 1933), exposé of the Klu Klux Klan’s work in the 1930s, the plight of women since time immemorial. But most of all, it is a window into a small fragment of life that must have begun somewhere in Germany, where coal-mining was developed long ago, and continues through today in the States. Though the conditions and rights of miners have improved, the delicate and flammable nature of their work will probably never change. And sadly, though the lives of women everywhere have improved, as well, there are still souls today who are being subjected to men like Fin, trapped in lives that are as dark and dirty as the mines themselves. Szczepanski’s book will not allow us to forget. Today’s writers depend heavily on the “platform” they themselves build: websites, blogs, readings in indie bookstores (that they themselves must arrange), Facebook pages, Twits (you know what I mean), Google+. But most of all, steady sales depend on the hardy word-of-mouth transfer from one reader to the next. Marian Szczepanski has written a highly literate and transformational book. It is a book for women. It is a book for men. It is a book for the old and the young. Anyone who loves a great story, a significant one. To get your copy, click on any of the links below. I highly recommend that you do! Amazon High Hill Press Powell’s Books As an added note, click here to follow a link to Marian's website for a PDF of the cast of characters and a number of other aids for readers, as well. WEDNESDAY: PHOTOGRAPHY A WRITER'S WIT Fabulous? January 27, 2014, Robert Coover, “The Frog Prince”: A princess kisses a frog, and he becomes a handsome prince (sort of), while retaining many of his amphibian qualities. ¶ This story looks like one of those exercises in which a (famous) writer takes a (well-known) fairy tale and retells it from a fresh, new perspective—perhaps on a day when he can’t think of anything else to write. (Actually, according to Coover, this is true; he’s planning an entire book around reimagined fairy tales.) Only in this instance, Coover seems to leave out the fresh and new parts. Oh, yes, the prince does retain a certain number of his froggy characteristics, but to what end? Humor alone (ha ha)? To show that he would still rather be a frog than a prince (uh, yeah)? Maybe that’s Coover’s fresh and new take on this brief fairy tale. In all other renditions (including the way I heard it as a child) the reader is led to believe that frog would rather be a prince and project his muddy-tasting goop into a beautiful human princess. Is Coover telling us that this assumption just may not be true? Ribbit. (That’s frog talk for “Amazing!”) Coover is the author of The Adventures of Lucky Pierre: Director’s Cut. Melinda Beck, Illustrator TUESDAY: MY BOOK WORLD A WRITER'S WIT Bisbee Rediscovered . . . Twice Shelton, Richard. Going Back to Bisbee. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1992. In this long-heralded memoir, Shelton accomplishes many things. For one, he takes the reader on an extended journey, not only over his life on this earth, but, citing sources, he also brings an awareness to us of the fascinating town that is Bisbee, Arizona. He achieves a certain paradox by seemingly moving forward through time and backward at the same time. Shelton seems to know so much. He knows botany. "The popular, as opposed to scientific, names for plants and animals are often based on figurative language, the language of impression and comparison, the language of poetry. These names are descriptive, concrete, highly compressed, and usually require some kind of imaginative leap. I am not a linguist, but it seems to me that the more 'primitive' a language is by our standards, the more it relies on such names" (16). He knows archeology. He knows history. "Gradually, a terrible tension developed between life as it was actually lived in Bisbee and the deeply felt moral, spiritual, and religious impulses of the day. Starting just before the last decade of the nineteenth century and lasting until well after World War I, most of the non-Hispanic residents of Bisbee were trapped between the hardships of life in a small Western mining community, including the horrors of mining itself, and the pressures of an uncompromising Calvinist God. It is no wonder that those two pressures, one from below and one from above, created a society that was basically fatalistic and often hypocritical. The wonder is that the society survived at all" (265). That's Bisbee! Richard Shelton knows, of course, literature, a great big chunk of it from the Greeks, to prose, to poetry. My favorite chapter may be Chapter Ten, in which he relates what his first year of teaching in Bisbee's Lowell School—seventh and eighth graders—is like for a young man who has already served time in the army. He's not wet behind the ears, and yet he is honest enough to admit how astounded he is by the experience, how profoundly it affects him. He develops enough courage to tell off a rather officious faculty member who seems to have been after him since his first day (every school has a Molly Bendixon): "Whatever it was, it caused me to be late getting the roll taken, and I had just turned to that task when the door opened and Molly Bendixon walked in abruptly. I love this guy! Not only for his courage, but he goes on to say that when Ms. Bendixon is ill and in the hospital, he makes a point of visiting her. They do not speak of the incident, but instead, share a kind of camaraderie, just the two of them against all the other stupid sons of bitches in their school, the world at large. Yes, courage on the one hand, but also compassion on the other. Makes for great teaching.
Having made a visit to Bisbee myself, about ten years ago, I consider Shelton's book my trip back to Bisbee, too. I can visualize so very much that he puts before the reader, and I can see the town in a different light. If, like me, you've never read Shelton's book, check it out. Still available in fine bookstores everywhere! Click on title above. I wish to thank my friend Peter for turning me on to this book, in fact, for getting me my copy! WEDNESDAY: PHOTOS OF LAS VEGAS ARCHITECTURE A WRITER'S WIT My Book World Unless I stop writing, I'll probably always have more books to read than I have time. Even then . . . I don't know. I still can't help buying more books.
Recently, I received another shipment I've been wanting to read. By next Monday I hope to have completed something I can review. For now I'll merely list. Friend and guest blogger, Marian Szczepanski, has written what looks like a fascinating novel, Playing St. Barbara. It's next and I can't wait to get to it. A man who went to the same college I did in Kansas has written, along with his former wife, a memoir entitled Our Family Outing. In their book, Joe Cobb and Leigh Anne Taylor share how they deal with the fact that Joe realizes thirteen years into his marriage that he is gay. A translation, The Neruda Case, by Roberto Ampuero, gives the famous poet Pablo Neruda a featured role as a character in this novel set in pre-Pinochet Chile. Yum. My aunt recommended Stoner by John Williams, and it's now on my Kindle . . . awaiting my attention. And I'm looking forward to reading Annie Proulx's memoir, Bird Cloud, the name she gives to the house she builds in Wyoming. I'm almost finished with a rather interesting award-winning book, Going Back to Bisbee, by Richard Shelton, given to me by a friend of mine, also an Arizonan. It's a delightful memoir, and I plan to profile it next week. I don't necessarily write about new books. I'd rather share what I've learned or observed in titles from all periods and a variety of genres. Happy Reading, all! WEDNESDAY: LAS VEGAS PHOTOS: LANDSCAPE AND PATTERN A WRITER'S WIT My Book World Bowden, Charles and Alice Leora Briggs. Dreamland: the Way Out of Juárez. Austin: University of Texas, 2010. I read this book, illustrated by my friend Alice Briggs, in 2010, when it came out, but for some reason, I did not make a note of it in either my blog or my reading journals. Perhaps it is too disturbing. Perhaps I could not fully grasp what Bowden & Briggs have accomplished. Both Bowden and Briggs spent months, if not years, researching their book, exposing themselves to the same dangers that the residents of Juárez do every day. To get the story of the informant who murders a man while U.S. agents listen in and do nothing, to understand the dynamics of this and a thousand other stories, they both make themselves vulnerable to the ragged life on the border, where, because of a few political decisions made in the past, life is a constant battle between those who are selling drugs and those who would steal the contraband and/or the money it generates. It is a bloody war, one that the United States quietly participates in with its insatiable thirst for more and more illicit drugs. It is a war the U.S. ignores as well, for it is a war so deeply entrenched in the two countries’ economies, whose balance will be tipped if an “Immigration Policy” is ever brought to light. Bowden provides the illuminating prose, and Briggs the exquisite drawings that expand that which he cannot say with words. The gist of Bowden’s entire narrative might be captured in the following passage: “One of the early priests after the conquest of Mexico, Fray Durán, knew the old tongue and listened to the old men and wrote down their tales of what their world had been and what it had meant to them. They had been very rich and feared by other nations. They told the priest of the tribute once brought to their emperor: mantles of various designs and colors, gold, feathers, jewelry, cacao, every eighty days a million Indians trudged in bearing tribute and the list was so complete that even lice and fleas were brought and offered. The tribute collectors told the emperor, ‘O powerful lord, let not our arrival disturb your powerful heart and peaceful spirit, nor shall we be the cause of some sudden alarm that might provoke an illness for you. You well know that we are you vassals and in your presence we are nothing but rubbish and dirt.’ ¶ That was half a millennium ago and yet the rich still get tribute and the people who give them tribute feel as dirt and rubbish. ¶ For years and decades, for almost a century, people have looked at this system and sensed change or noticed hopes of change. And yet they all wait for change” (67). Bowden is well aware that this journey the Mexican people make is one that started long ago and continues, for all we know, far into the future: The combination of Bowden’s stunning and lyrical prose combined with Briggs’s dramatic but subtle sgraffito illustrations make a powerful statement of our problems on the border. No wonder some want to fortify the barriers that already exist there. It is an ugly world, and we certainly don’t want it spilling over into ours. “In the Florentine Codex, a record of the Indians’ ways that Cortés crushed with his new empire, it is noted that men who die in war go to the house of the sun and then they become birds or butterflies and dance from flower to flower sucking honey. In the old tongue, flower is xochitl, death is miquiztli” (80). Sáenz, Benjamin Alire. Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club. El Paso: Cinco Puntos, 2012. The Kentucky Club is a bar on Avenida Juárez in Juárez, the twin city to El Paso, Texas. Most of these seven stories reference a number of things in each one: The Kentucky Club itself, bourbon (or some other strong liquor), stout coffee, fathers who fail their sons in a variety of big ways, and mostly men who fail each other in love. Sáenz’s style is deceptively simple, strong on declarative sentences and plenty of pages with a lot of white space because his dialog is, if not terse, then spare, lean. Most of the characters, gay men of various ages, live in Sunset Heights, a neighborhood in El Paso, but plenty of them cross the bridge between the two cities, the two countries as easily as most of them switch from Spanish to English—as if they are two forms of the same language. That’s life on the border: with its own lingo, its own culture, like many of the men in these stories, crossing easily from one life to another, but not without a price. And one must not construe that this is a "narrow" book of gay men’s fiction, many of which made their way onto the shelves in the late eighties because gay men were hungry to read about themselves. It is not one of those books. Some of the protagonists are straight, some gay, some are bisexual. Each one is his own person, whether he is yet whole or not. In the final story, “The Hunting Game,” the main character, a high school counselor, speaks of one of his students, who has been abused all his life by his father. Sáenz’s metaphors, like his prose, are deceptively simple: “We grabbed a bite to eat. He ate as if he’d never tasted a burger before. God, that boy had a hunger in him. It almost hurt to watch. ‘I’ll be eighteen in three months. And I’m going away. And he’ll never be able to find me’” (209). The image is so simple, yet so profound, the hamburger that symbolizes a future that might just satisfy the boy’s hunger to be loved. It has little to do with food; it has to do with hunger, the hunger of the human spirit to find meaning. On the same page, Sáenz demonstrates through “dream” how the paths of these two males (one older, one very young) will cross one another by virtue of the pain both have suffered at the hands of their fathers: “I wanted to tell him that his father would always own a piece of him, that he would have dreams of his father chasing him, dreams of a father catching him and shoving him in a car and driving him back home, dreams where he could see every angry wrinkle on his father’s face as he held up the belt like a whip. He would find out on his own. He would have to learn how to save himself from everything he’d been through. Salvation existed in his own broken heart and he’d have to find a way to get at it. It all sucked, it sucked like hell. I didn’t know what to tell him so I lied to him again. ‘He’ll just be a bad memory one day.’ He nodded I don’t think he really believed me, but he wasn’t about to call me a liar” (209). This PEN/Faulkner award winner has written seven striking stories I believe I should read again and again because I sense there is much I may have missed the first time around. This book is one that my friend Alice Leora Briggs gave me. For me, it is a bookend to the one she illustrated, Dreamland, profiled above. This one gives the reader yet another view of life along the border between Mexico and Texas.
Men in power can easily change borders on maps with the quick exchange of currency, but borders that exist in people’s hearts are much more difficult to traverse. WEDNESDAY: LAS VEGAS PHOTO ESSAY A WRITER’S WIT History This is the third consecutive year that I’ve read every story in The New Yorker and then written a short analysis of it. I can’t exactly defend why I undertake this project, except that, as with most of my writing, I feel compelled to do so—for my own satisfaction—which may not meet the approval of others, but I don’t care. On a less defensive note, the process has taught me to love (or at least appreciate) a broad spectrum of short fiction being written currently by a broad spectrum of people working in English throughout the world. The reader can access previous analyses by going to the side bar and clicking on “January 2011” or “2012.” The Stats for 2013
*This discrepancy in The New Yorker’s otherwise liberal acceptance policy (in terms of subject matter) is rather disconcerting. In a city that is home to one of the largest gay populations in the world, here exists a major, longstanding magazine that can’t locate at least one story featuring a central character who is LGBT! That is unbelievable and unforgiveable (in an abstract sense, of course). Its straight readers, I dare say, must have dozens if not scores of LGBT friends. Why this apparent squeamishness with regard to featuring a story about, say, a newly married gay couple, who are on the very brink of divorce, with a surrogate mother in the wings awaiting the birth of their first love child? You can’t tell me that there isn’t something appealing in the story. Perhaps I should write it. Yeah, hey, I’ll write the damn thing. I’ll be the sole gay writer featured in next year’s stories, a celebrity! Interpreting Theme For 2013, I challenged myself to distill the theme of each story to one word or phrase if I could. I made up my mind quickly—believing that, like selecting a character’s name or looking at Rorschach inkblots—first thoughts are the most honest psychologically: AGING-2% ALIENATION-26% BETRAYAL-2% CAN’T GO HOME AGAIN-2% COMING-OF-AGE-4% EVIL-2% FAITH-2% FAMILY-6% FEAR-2% FIDELITY/INFIDELITY-14% FORGIVENESS-2% FREEDOM-2% INJUSTICE-4% LONELINESS-2% LOSS-2% LOVE-6% MORTALITY-2% POVERTY-2% PRIDE/HUBRIS-2% REGENERATION/REBIRTH-6% RETRIBUTION-2% SURVIVAL-2% SUSTENANCE-2% WAR’S ABSURDITIES-2% Even more so than the last two years, I determined that The New Yorker story must be accessible. There is apparently a very narrow range of what a New Yorker story can do or say or be. It can’t be about abortion, incest, not directly, not, God forbid, like its nonfiction pieces. While many of the magazine’s nonfiction articles are “challenging,” particularly if you’re reading in a field that is not yours, the short stories are not necessarily as complex as those found in top literary magazines. And perhaps that is the point. The editors want their readers to enjoy the fiction, to be entertained by it—as if it were another one of their cartoons. Ultimately, a New Yorker story must strike the proper balance between urbanity and childish wonder. Some Nuts and Bolts The Gods at Circulation must have heard me cursing last year. Many more of my hard copies have arrived before the cover date than those that have not (two failed to make it to my door at all, either purloined by our postal carrier or the people with the same house number one block over, to whom it was misdelivered by our postal carrier). My digital copy arrives each week without fail on a Sunday night while reading in bed! Thanks to the Digital Gods. Seriously. In 2014 I plan to read the fiction selection as it arrives and post a comment before the cover date. Then at the end of the year I shall conclude with series of posts a similar to this week’s series. In the next three days I shall post a short comment on all fifty-one stories and rank them in three categories (including links to further writing by a particular author and his or her biography): Wednesday, Crème de la Crème (the top 1-17) Thursday, The Big Middle (18-44) Friday, The Stories I Least Liked and Why (45-51). I urge you to read at least some of the stories by clicking on the story's title that will take you to The New Yorker website. There they offer full access to some of the stories but only a passage from others. Don't know why! A WRITER'S WIT My Book World Abbott, Alysia. Fairyland. New York: Norton, 2013. On November 13, 2013 I attended a reading at Texas Tech University. There Alysia Abbott, author of Fairyland, read from her memoir about growing up in the seventies under the parenting of her father, who was gay. During her presentation, Abbott gave more history and background about the time period than she spent reading from the actual text, which was a bit disappointing. Perhaps she felt, since she was addressing history as well as English students, that she must give more information to such a youthful audience. At any rate, Abbott’s book is what a good memoir should be: a point of view that is composed from the inside-out, a story few others could tell. When she is a tot, her mother is killed in a car accident in Atlanta, Georgia. Her father Steve Abbott, bisexual up until that time, bundles up his daughter and moves to San Francisco. There he finds solace in a Bohemian community of poets, from whom he gains great sustenance. He could have left his daughter with her maternal grandparents in small-town Illinois, but he chooses to raise her in this milieu of social and political freedom. Even though he has opted to live in the freest gay community in the country, Alysia assimilates a rather closeted attitude by virtue of the fact that she must keep her dad’s gay life a secret from the rest of their family when she visits them. And because of this attitude, she too, feels as if she’s closeted. In fact, she often keeps her dad's sexuality a secret from her friends at school, for as long as she can. Even when she attends school in NYC and later in Paris, she does not easily reveal her secret—afraid it will make her different. When her father becomes ill with AIDS in the early nineties, she must put her academic and personal lives on hold and return to SF to care for him. When she hesitates, he asks her to recall that when her mother died, he didn’t have to take care of her, but he chose to. Dagger! She winds up caring for her father thirty or forty years earlier than most people care for their elderly parents, and it does cramp her robust life. When he enters hospice care, she is relieved. Still, she must make daily pilgrimages to see him, must remember to take him certain items he asks for or things she knows he wants. Each day becomes more difficult. Abbott has slowly built the narrative arc leading toward a powerful and inevitable climax: her motherless state and search to find surrogates, the San Francisco earthquake of 1989, which becomes a metaphor for the fissure in the relationship with her father, her cross-country pursuit of education, when she could have stayed in California, and her return from Paris so that she can finish her degree hurriedly and rush home to witness her father’s death. “I was studying his fingers when the mechanized rhythm of the breathing, which had been steady—and calming in its steadiness—suddenly paused. Everyone in the room stirred, the tension building as we waited for the next heaving inhalation. One of the finer aspects of Abbott's memoir may be the contemplative passages, the moments she takes to stop and reflect on her actions, her feelings: “It didn’t occur to me until after Dad died that the lack of a long-term boyfriend in his life was due, at least in part, to my overarching presence in our apartment as a teenager. I scowled. I was rude. I neglected to deliver phone messages and objected when my father kicked me out of his bedroom/our living room. Except for my close attachment to Dad’s first two boyfriends, the men that passed through our life were mostly useless to me. They could never replace my mom. All they could do was take my father from me, divide his precious love in two” (308). In this one statement, Abbott confesses her shortcomings, but she also explicates the complexity of her childhood. She talks about survival in a world that she (as well as her father) may only partly understand. Fairyland is a fine book that should gain a wide readership—doing much to close the gap between young/old, gay/straight.
As usual, I've set up a link to Powell's Books, and, if the price isn't right, of course, you can find anything at the other place. Ken Dixon at the Museum of South Texas For several decades Ken Dixon, visual artist, has provided exhibitions for the Art Museum of South Texas in Corpus Christi, Texas. On Saturday, November 9, the museum honored all the artists who have contributed work to its permanent collection, an exhibition entitled "Forty Works for Forty Years." For more details click on the museum link. Look below to view a slideshow of snapshots from the evening (all iPhone pics). Nighthawks Reading For over five years I've been part of a writing group that meets at the local Unitarian church. For a modest annual fee, we meet monthly to critique and celebrate each others' writing. Our approach is positive, even when the piece under consideration may have some difficulties. As a result of this nurturing approach, we've all grown, and so has our confidence. New works are constantly finding their way into print because of our sensitive efforts to help one another grow. On Thursday, November 14, we staged a reading of our recent works-in-progress. Barbara Brannon read a series of sonnets that trace the life of her adult daughter. Michelle Kraft shared a prose piece about how her childhood home in North Texas later became home to an Army Corps of Engineers lake. Marilyn Westfall, poet and leader of our group, read a number of linked poems, among others, about a recent trip to the Isle of Wight off the coast of England. Actor and playwright Juanice Myers organized a troupe of players to present her monologues limning characters—from an old woman regretting how her looks have faded to one that looks back at the fun times the alcoholics in her family provided. I read excerpts from the first chapter of my memoir concerning my twenty-seven years of public school teaching. Thanks to everyone who came, and to the Unitarian leadership for providing us with a place to present our work to the public. Below find photos documenting our efforts. Ken Dixon, photographer. Many thanks to Dick for inviting me to introduce myself and Playing St. Barbara, my debut novel, to you, his faithful readers. Inhabiting Time That's Not Mine If I’d known it would take eight years to write my debut novel, I probably wouldn’t have attempted it. Inspired by my family background—I’m the granddaughter of immigrant coal miners—I set the story in southwestern Pennsylvania coal country. Playing St. Barbara takes place from 1929 to 1941, a time marked by rampant xenophobia and violent strikes. Since mining literature typically focuses on miners, I chose a different approach. My story chronicles the secrets and struggles of a miner’s wife and three daughters. I’d never attempted a historically based narrative, but the prospect didn’t daunt me. I’d started out as a journalist, so I was used to asking questions, tracking down facts. Every novel requires some degree of research. How hard could it possibly be? What I failed to consider was the fact staring me in the face: I wasn’t alive from 1929-1941. Consequently, everything had to be researched. I was sure that if I cut corners, it would show in the writing. Even readers who knew nothing about mining would sense I hadn’t done my homework. I needed to learn everything I could about Depression-era mining technology, labor history, immigration trends, as well as fashion, diet, car models, entertainment, slang—in short, I needed to write with the authority of someone who had been alive from 1929-1941. I amassed a small library and worked my way through it. I visited historical and labor archives. I studied vintage photographs. I explored Pittsburgh’s old German neighborhood. I watched a host of old movies—a repository of clothing styles, period interiors, and popular figures of speech. Replete with knowledge, I began writing, only to stop time and again to look up a salient detail online. What did a 1930s wedding gown look like? How much did ground beef cost in 1929? What was happening in Europe during the spring of 1941? I resolved every last detail in the story would be authentic, from the cover image on the May 1941 issue of Screen Guide magazine, to the real-life county sheriff whose insubordination led to county-wide martial law, to the Lincoln quote on the H. C. Frick Coke Co. pay envelope. However, I must confess I cut it close in Chapter 15. “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” (from Disney’s 1933 film The Three Little Pigs) was released just the day before a deputy whistles it. I met Marian while we were both residents at Arkansas's Writers' Colony at Dairy Hollow several years ago. I'm inspired by both her persistence and her debut novel, Playing St. Barbara, now out from High Hill Press and available from a number of sources. I urge you to check it out at www.marianszczepanski.com. Even after this post drifts to the bottom of the screen, readers will be able find a link to Marian's novel on my blog sidebar. Best of luck, Marian! RJ My Book World Updike, John. Rabbit, Run. New York: Knopf, 1960. I’d never read any Updike before but thought that I would like to peruse at least the first book in his “Rabbit” series. I was surprised at the freshness of his language, over fifty years later. Surprised at the sensual/sexual nature of a young man’s relationships with two different women. Updike may be among the first American writers to see that sex is like a sixth sense. To be honest, the writer must portray it honestly. I’m not sure I could have tolerated reading this novel when I was Rabbit’s age, twenty-six, would have seen too much of my own fecklessness in the narrative, too much of my own wavering. This wife, that wife. This life, that life. Only after a lifetime can I read of such things and not be turned away, can wallow in them, because yes, I’ve been there, to some degree, and arrived somewhat unscathed. The death of Rabbit and Janice’s baby girl was completely out of the blue, as most of life’s terrible events are, but at the same time, Updike had prepared the reader for such an event. The baby girl, Rebecca, has been crying for a long time, is hungry, but Janice, the mother, is dry, has no milk for the moment. Both parents are exhausted, the little older brother Nelson is worn out, too. “The noise makes Nelson fretful and whiny. As if, being closest to the dark gate from which the baby has recently emerged, he is most sensitive to the threat the infant is trying to warn them of. Some shadow invisible to their better-formed senses seems to grab Rebecca as soon as she is left alone. Rabbit puts her down, tiptoes into the living-room; they hold their breath. Then, with a bitter scratch, the membrane of silence breaks, and the wobbly moan begins again, Nnh, a-nnnnnih!” Yes, the “warning” is somewhat abstract, but this dark shadow is cautioning the young couple to be careful. They are not. Rabbit encourages his alcoholic wife to have a drink to calm her nerves. She takes down several. Rabbit leaves the apartment. In bathing the child, the slippery little baby, in a tub that is filled with too much water, for even an adult, Janice lets go, the baby falls away from her and drowns. Updike has warned us, and yet we are shocked. Shocked that something like this, even in a novel, could happen. That the carelessness of a young couple could result in the death of their child. And yet the death is so much more. It seems to be the symbol for their failed marriage. By not caring for one another enough, they kill off what little love is left, and the tangible sign of this death is the baby’s death, isn’t it? I shall be reading Rabbit Redux, the next novel in Updike’s series. I'm not sure why I read these two men in tandem, both of them coming to prominence in the 1960s, but I'm going to roll with it, and see where my reading takes me. Le Carré, John. Call for the Dead. Boston: Hill, 1961. I’ve always been interested in the character George Smiley, and when I saw this title in a used bookstore, the first in Le Carré’s series about the spy, I grabbed it. This kind of narrative involves so much cold information, facts and figures about murders, disappearances, betrayals, that I find it more difficult to concentrate on than a narrative that flows of normal interactions between normal people. And that may be the point. Spies are not normal people. But I shall read the author's next one, A Murder of Quality. My Book World In the past I’ve enjoyed reading the letters of writers and artists I’d like to know more about. I’ve read Flannery O’Connor’s letters: The Habit of Being (Noonday Press), actually a great treatise on creative writing. A few years ago I read The Letters of Noël Coward (Knopf)—more than sixty years of scrumptious gossip about some of the most important figures in theatre and letters. I took the thick tome with me on a trip to the mountains and was so engrossed I scarcely left the balcony of our hotel room as I read in the crisp mountain air. Collected letters give one a singular view of artists, particularly those who formalize their writings by way of plays, fiction, or the musical lyric. I’m now reading The Selected Letters of Willa Cather, newly released by Knopf. Cather can’t seem to spell worth a flip. She often uses “don’t” with a single subject. But both practices make her more human, separate her from the elegant prose of her fiction.
I began thinking of our writers and artists who started, like most of us, exchanging e-mails in the 1990s. Have they stored copies of their letters in folders? If we are fortunate enough to have the collected letters of Richard Ford or John Irving or Jane Smiley or Alice Munro or any writer with a career established prior to 1995, will the collections suddenly end with that year? For a long while, I thought e-mails were worth saving. I from time to time printed out copies of e-mails exchanged with my aunt, my mother’s sister, who is now eighty-two. She often includes important narratives about her childhood or about her adult children and grandchildren—information I might like to use in future writing. I’m glad I did record them because when I changed internet providers at one point, I lost all my electronic files. But I have to admit that I’ve failed to keep up with the practice. I just assume her letters will be in their little cyber folders forever. When as a culture we used to exchange letters via standard mail, we were careful to some extent. One might store them in boxes and tie them up with string. We’ve all seen that scene in some movie. My mother used to keep a rough draft before sending a letter out. Smart. She had a record of what she’d said, plus she could produce a final copy that was clean. Moreover, if she’d been attempting to keep track of a narrative thread, she would have been able to do so. Receiving a two to six page letter from someone was quite an event, especially if it was from a love interest. And when an epistle from a relative such as a cousin could keep you riveted to your seat (or not) for five to ten minutes while you read and re-read it, you absorbed it, began thinking of how you would answer. The heft of it, an ounce or more, felt sensuous as you held the sheaves in your hand, looked inviting as you lay them aside, still creased from their folded journey to your front porch. Even after all these years, I still open my mailbox each day with a miniscule hope that I’ll receive a nice plump letter from someone. Now . . . we as a culture communicate by way of a number of faster and more efficient methods: IMs or texts for example. Among the young, e-mails are quaint, laughable, even a nuisance. To me, texting seems more like passing notes back and forth under your desk at school, but quickly and without much regard for language; you can even include a very cheap-to-produce photo. In fact, I believe the phone companies, when they saw how the young so easily took to the practice, made IMs the most expensive item on one’s phone bill. How can it be? Writing with our thumbs as if we were little monkeys. Yikes. With regard to the future, will we have instead the collected twits . . . tweets . . . of, say, today’s most beloved of writers? Yes, the Collected Tweets of E. L. James? Or better known as Fifty Shades of Fey? Chelsea Handler’s Fifteen Hundred Greatest Tweets? Or will it be Chelsea’s Collected E-mails in the form of an e-book (a separate volume for those e-mails she sent from her employees’ computers, a fine practical joke)? Whatever happens, the question is still an interesting one. Will our communiqués become lost to the ages, so much nonsense gobbled up by the ether of cyberspace? Only time will tell. I urge you. If you think you have some vital e-mails, tuck them away now. If you’re going to change providers, somehow make copies, electronic or hard. Otherwise, we may forget what it was like to live in these times. And we must remember. We simply must. I can't tell you how much it means to me to see readers responding to the blog. Thanks to everyone who left a comment or a message concerning my Sandhill crane post. It seemed to raise interest from a broad range of people, and I find that exciting. My Book World Dangerous Ambition, Rebecca West and Dorothy Thompson: New Women in Search of Love and Power by Susan Hertog Both of these writers were born in the early 1890s, same as my late grandmothers, but neither one of my grandmothers experienced even a tenth of the excitement that these women did. But then my grandmothers wound up with something these two women didn’t: men who loved them enough to stay with them for life. Rebecca West, British, and Dorothy Thompson, American, were both writers and became fast friends. Early on West was married to H.G. Wells, but the marriage did not last. Though West did remain with another man for over thirty years, in the end it was not a satisfying relationship. Dorothy was married to Sinclair Lewis, and though she was thrilled by his career and lived in support of it, she didn’t exactly receive the same enthusiasm in return for her award-winning work. Both women gave birth to a son each, both of whom would be troubled largely, they proclaimed, because their mothers pushed them away in favor of their careers (yet each had an equally self-absorbed father). West’s son would go so far as to portray a likeness of his mother in a novel that she did not sanction. They never spoke after its publication. Biographer Hertog does a fine job of comparing and contrasting the women’s lives by way of alternating chapters. Even better is her assessment of the place these women hold in literary history, plowing the way for women of succeeding generations. Some Nuggets: Dorothy Thompson Friends Their Work Hertog’s selected bibliography includes all of West’s and Thompson’s major works, should one choose to read them. I read West’s The Fountain Overflows because Jane Smiley included it in her Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Novel. I’m afraid my 2007 assessment wasn’t very substantive, but I’d be willing to tackle it again knowing now what I do about West. Errata This Kindle edition had at least a couple of typos: “gossping” and “lattter.” I wonder if the same typos exist in the print edition. My Beloved World by Sonia Sotomayor I became enamored with this book before I ever opened it by way of hearing Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor’s televised reading on C-Span’s Book TV. With great verve, wit, and charm, she enthralled a large crowd with the circumstances that led her to write a memoir in the first place. Sotomayor jumps right in by telling of her lifelong battle with diabetes that began at age eight, a condition that frightened her a bit at first. “But the disease also inspired in me a kind of precocious self-reliance that is not uncommon in children who feel the adults around them to be unreliable” (11). She describes with great detail her upbringing, living with an alcoholic father who dies at a relatively young age, a mother who toils as nurse to provide income, and a brother with whom she is close and who will eventually become a doctor. She introduces the reader to all her Puerto Rican family, both in the South Bronx and those back on the island. “Since those years, I have come to believe that in order to thrive, a child must have at least one adult in her life who shows her unconditional love, respect, and confidence. For me it was Abuelita” (16), Sotomayor’s grandmother, who lives close enough for Sonia to make overnight visits that help shape her character. In speaking of her upbringing amid the multicultural arena of the Bronx, Justice Sotomayor says, “The differences were plain enough, and yet I saw that they were as nothing compared with what we had in common” (103). This understanding, early on, may lead Sotomayor to do something with her life that brings humanity together rather than tearing it apart. Justice Sotomayor then tells of her education at Cardinal Spellman High School, Princeton University, and Yale Law School. Far from boasting, she always relates honestly her struggle with the language, the struggle against class and racial prejudice. “I honestly felt no envy or resentment, only astonishment at how much of a world there was out there and how much of it others already knew. The agenda for self-cultivation that had been set for my classmates by their teachers and parents was something I’d have to develop for myself. And meanwhile, there could come at any moment the chagrin of discovering something else I was supposed to know. Once, I was trying to explain to my friend and later roommate Mary Cadette how out of place I sometimes felt at Princeton” (135). The friend said, understandingly, that Sonia must have felt like Alice in Wonderland.
Sotomayor continues by describing her career develops, how each step leads toward her eventual nomination for the Supreme Court. Of her work in the district attorney’s office, “It was in effect to see that mastery of the law’s cold abstractions, which had taken such effort, was actually incomplete without an understanding of how they affected individual lives. Laws in this country, after all, are not handed down from on high but created by society for its own good” (212). As I neared the end of the book, I found myself wanting the pages to stretch out; I wished for a delayed resolution to the narrative. Sotomayor, from the work she does while at Princeton on behalf of others less fortunate than herself, to her work in the DA’s office, to her work in a private firm where she earns a better salary and is befriended by important and wealthy people such as the Fendis of the fashion arena, is storing up years of valuable experience. In braving so many different worlds and mastering the language and rules of each, she smartly positions herself to become a judge, one who actually brings the law into focus for the rest of us. How many of the other justices, I wonder, have the breadth and depth of experience that she brings to the bench? If they know only the law and have had little touch with humanity, one wonders if their judgments aren’t sometimes a bit tainted by a certain provincialism. I finished the last page having developed a great admiration for Sonia Sotomayor. She tells frankly of her life, neither diminishing nor embellishing any aspect of her background or character. When one writes with such candor, the reader can't help but feel drawn into the story. One has to think: Maybe, I, too, can be as honest as I tell my children and grandchildren about my life. I can’t wait to read her next book. As this one ends with her first judiciary assignment, I am positive there will be another. P.S. I think West and Thompson would be delighted that Sotomayor is the third of four women to be appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States of America. I hope so. The battles they fought and won in the first half of the twentieth century, though not in the arena of law, should account for something. Some Fine Seasons There is something cathartic in viewing all these old photos, and I'm not sure why. Is it because we lived through all of those holidays? As a childless adult, do I miss all that falderal? I guess I'll never know. For some reason the commercial nature of the holiday hasn’t gotten to me yet. I keep waiting for that one fragrance ad on TV that will send me screaming from the room, that one in which a Lexus is wrapped with a red bow as if it were a mere box of chocolates, that ad with a nonexistent family gathered round a huge nonexistent table eating food that’s probably not edible because it’s been treated to keep it colorful and fresh looking. Arrrggghhh. Ken and I will be in Vegas again, third Xmas in a row. Can’t wait. Vegas keeps the holiday real: people from all over the world who do not celebrate Christmas hit the city this time of year. There are people of all ages who will, and some by choice, be all alone on the holiday so revered for bringing families together. Merry Xmas one and all. Double arrrggghhh. Foxes2For the third time in little over a year, Ken and I witnessed a fox in our neighborhood. You can see previous photos by clicking on January 2012 under Archives above. I don’t believe it’s the same one, but it could be from the same family, eh? Our neighbor thinks this one could be denning under his shed, but the creatures are so cunning about their whereabouts that we probably will never know. Better that way, Sweet Face. My Book World Happy Birthday: Adjusting to Life’s Changes as Birthdays Keep on Coming by Alice French Alice French is a friend who once lived in Lubbock, Texas. For years she worked as an on-air personality for KCBD-11, the NBC affiliate in town, including a talk show for women. She later developed the student-run cable TV station for the Lubbock Independent School District, as well as ran her own media firm. Her late husband, Rich Weaver, was head of the theater department at Texas Tech University for many years. For the first three years of their retirement, they toured the U.S. in an RV, and Alice has many interesting tales to tell about their experiences. She now lives in Holiday Island, Arkansas—and has a beautiful view of the famed hills from her living room window. Alice wrote her book, Happy Birthday, primarily for women over sixty. She did so as an outgrowth of several related activities. First, she solicited women in her study to answer various questions she posed by way of her blog. Second, she put together a number of groups from these women and asked them to meet her in her home for further discussion. Utilizing these two rich sources of information, as well as drawing from her own life history, Alice offers alternatives to women over sixty, who may feel that their lives are at a dead end. Faced with the reality that she and her friends could live another twenty or thirty years, Alice wishes to touch a broader community of women: women who may have had children who now are busy with their own lives and not have much time for Grandma; women like Alice who had full and satisfying careers but now find themselves widowed and living alone; women who are still healthy and strong and itching to learn new things, itching to be a part of a vibrant world that doesn't always warm to older people. She hates it when a young salesperson asks if she knows how to "work the Internet." Please, I once ran a cable station! I have an iPad! Alice and members of her group offer much valuable information, and the positive tone she maintains throughout is always tempered with a healthy dose of no-nonsense reality. I’ve purchased a number of copies for my female friends over sixty, and here I’ve set up a link to Amazon.com where you can purchase copies if you wish. I hope you will. Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power by Seth Rosenfeld I shouldn’t watch C-SPAN’s Book-TV quite as much as I do. There are so many great books presented by the authors themselves. What is more inviting (in most cases) than that? Sometimes I get enough information just by watching the reading. Other times, as with this book, I can’t resist buying my own copy. Rosenfeld researched this book for over thirty years, not because he wanted to, but because he was forced to sue the FBI repeatedly to induce the agency to release documents under the Freedom of Information Act. As the author states in his preface, “Many pages were disclosed for the first time, including those concerning the surveillance of law-abiding citizens and efforts to disrupt political organizations. Many others were reprocessed to release additional information, such as the names of people Ronald Reagan informed on” (loc 64). Almost fifty percent of the book consists of appendices, FBI files, notes, selected bibliography, documents, interviews, other sources, acknowledgments, and a subject index. While Rosenfeld was speaking on C-SPAN, I became reacquainted with this era of unrest, the early and middle 1960s, and after I finished the book I became more and more satisfied with the fact that I’d never mustered much respect for the gipper (or is it gypper?). Rosenfeld produces evidence that Reagan began buying favors from J. Edgar Hoover by turning in certain Hollywood celebs who were suspected of being communists. In exchange, he would later ask Hoover to tail his eighteen-year-old daughter, Maureen, in the Washington, D.C. area to see if she was truly living with a man much older than she. Why would a leader who hated excessive government exploit said government for private reasons instead of hiring his own private investigator? Was he just cheap? Why would Reagan use his power as California governor to remove a liberal chancellor at UC Berkeley by seating himself as one of the regents? All throughout his life as a politician of “less government,” he used more government to further his own political standing. Our upstanding Reagan, according to Rosenfeld’s information, was quite promiscuous by way of starlets as much as fifteen years his junior during the period following his divorce from Jane Wyman and before he met Nancy Davis. He neither cared much for nor spent much time with his “Wyman" children, and, well, we know through Patty Davis how great a father he was to the “Davis" kids. What an all-around wonderful human being he seems to have been—having justified all his actions on behalf of his brilliant career. If you can stand getting angry all over again, as I did, you might enjoy reading how Rosenfeld documents everything that seemed to be true about Reagan and his horrible misuse of power but which one couldn’t prove. By the end of the book, you realize that Rosenfeld’s title, Subversives, is true not only (according to the media and popular culture) of the UC students who rioted for reform but also of Reagan, who used his power to subvert democracy, the very ideal he purported to be protecting. Next month: My second annual New Yorker Project in which I read and comment on all New Yorker short stories published in 2012 . See a sample here.
By Book WorldI’m not sure why, but I spent most of October—when I wasn’t glued to MSNBC—reading about politicians: one a famous Texan, no longer among us. Yes, I read Jan Reid’s recent biography of the former governor, the late Ann Richards—chock full of gossip (the good kind) and stories I’d not heard before. The other title, President Obama’s first book, I read while visiting our friend in Northampton—it was just sitting there on her shelf, and I couldn’t resist. Regardless of your political affiliation, you may be able to see why the man has such a large world view and such great regard for those less fortunate. I waited to blog about it until the election was over. I offer my thoughts as a literary review, not a political cudgel. Let the People in: the Life and Times of Ann Richards by Jan Reid I pre-ordered this book from the University of Texas Press, so it literally came to me hot off the . . . following its release not long ago. I thought I knew pretty much everything there was to know about late governor of Texas, Ann Richards. Not true. I didn’t realize she had four grown children, not just Cecile Richards, the current president of Planned Parenthood. I didn’t know that she had become quite bored and discouraged as a mother and homemaker and entered politics in order to challenge her mind. I didn’t realize Ann had lived her last years in Manhattan. I didn’t know, following her divorce from David Richards, that she had had a long-term relationship with a male writer (not Reid). The biography by Jan Reid, a writer-at-large for Texas Monthly with many other journalistic credits, as well as several books, is in many ways a memoir. Reid and his wife, “Darthy,” (Ann’s pronunciation of Dorothy) were close to Ann, and many parts of the book shift to first person after having established a certain objectivity in the third person. It’s little jarring at times, but it also offers a more personal view of Ann than a straight bio would have. As one can imagine, I found a number nuggets I found irresistible and share them here: “[Ann] had a green rubber stamp that read ‘Bullshit.’ She used it often in her correspondence with Zabel. One day, she banged the stamp on a copy of a letter from a small-town district attorney who had written to a representative in support of a House bill that increased the fines in Texas for prostitution convictions: ‘The fine is still a maximum of two hundred dollars. It’s a simple matter of arithmetic to see that a prostitute only has to have eight customers in order to pay a two hundred dollar fine. She can generally do this or more in one night.’ Beside her ‘Bullshit’ stamp Ann wrote: ‘The insidious effects of inflation are felt in all segments of society. Eight tricks a night is damned hard work’” (79). Richards’s son, Clark, said of his mother after she stopped drinking: “She was a champion and everybody looked up to her. I saw her that way, too. But part of me wanted to say I was upset about the way things went when I was a kid. That part of me didn’t have a chance to express itself. Any time I went to a group, I couldn’t say, ‘Godamighty, when I was young and Mom was drunk, she was mean.’ ‘Nobody wanted to hear that story. Part of me had a need to say to somebody, ‘You know, that hurt.’ So this guy [therapist in Japan] provided me with an opportunity eight thousand miles away, and I could say when I was young, Mom would sometimes have these rage attacks, and boy, they scared the hell out of me.’” (119). Paul Burka, a Texas Monthly political writer, said of Ann after her gubernatorial win: “‘She has turned an office from one that’s supposed to be weak—the Texas governor has no direct control over state agencies and doesn’t even get to appoint a majority to their boards for at least two years—into one with muscle . . . . Ann Richard is a politician, in the true sense of the word—someone skilled in using the political process. She is the first governor since the fifties to push her agenda by testifying at legislative hearings’” (285). “Engraved on the other side of Ann’s tombstone is a graceful line that I couldn’t hear when hear when the helicopter was circling the Capitol that day of her inauguration, all those years ago: ‘Today we have a vision of a Texas where opportunity knows no race, no gender, no color—a glimpse of what can happen in government if we simply open the doors and let people in” (426). Ann Richards’s remarkable story is heightened by the way Reid portrays the context in which it happened. You’d think now, not the nineties, would be when Ann might have attempted to open the doors of the Lone Star State’s government (if still alive), but because of the Republicans’ choke hold on the legislature and the state’s gerrymandered congressional districts that send representation to Washington, Ann Richards couldn’t get elected today any easier than the day she lost in 1994. Whether you were fond of her or not, you might like to learn more about one of the most colorful figures in Texas political history. Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama I didn’t know what to expect. A Harvard graduate, the editor of its esteemed Harvard Law Review, Mr. Obama should be a fine writer. He certainly has a great control of rhetorical devices in his orations. But then I was completely bowled over by this book first published in the nineties, and anyone who’s had the privilege of reading it may understand why I’m so enthusiastic. Mr. Obama’s control of the language is exceedingly good: his understated prose, his ability to sustain a narrative and delay its resolution (novel-like), his exquisite use of figurative language, the emotional tones he strikes when he needs them. More important—always at the service of language—is the message he brings to the reader. Unlike many of us in our youth, he searches for answers to why he has reached the point he has: always asking questions of his mother, his maternal grandparents; later, while visiting the Obama family in Kenya, asking his numerous relatives the questions that have confounded him his entire life (this is the summer before he is to attend Harvard Law School).
But the memoir is so much more. Considering that he writes the book before seeking elected office, one can trace a rather subtle line between his work as a community organizer (so sneered at by his opponents in 2008) and his desk in the oval office. If people should question his motives after four years of fighting for the common person, they should read this book. As a community organizer in the projects of Chicago, Mr. Obama becomes aware of the political machine that controls and diminishes the lives of poor people—those who are so consumed with life’s ordinary difficulties that they have no idea how to fight the invisible but insidious powers that keep them oppressed. Mr. Obama gives people in the projects power over the machine by enabling them to stand up to city hall when they discover there is asbestos in their apartment building. He works with churches and public schools to help people help themselves. In a way, it is how he ran both of his presidential campaigns: engaging individuals (paid and volunteer) whom he enabled to work on his behalf. He found the best and trusted them to come through for him. Politicians often do this, but Mr. Obama seems to be a natural. Again, the memoir is so much more. The two years he lives in Indonesia under the tutelage of a stepfather from whom he learns much. The correspondence courses his mother believes he should take, rising at four-thirty in the morning so that he can catch up with the content he’s lost in the lesser schools of Indonesia. His life in Hawaii in which he could so easily become another dropout. His first two years at Occidental College. His last two years, a diploma earned from Columbia University. His grandfather Obama, a very bright man—though without formal education. His father, also intelligent, receiving a degree from Harvard. So many places along the way of his youth, Mr. Obama could have been led astray, just another unfortunate lost to the ghetto—but because of loving relatives on both sides of his family, this man discovers what he needs to know so that he can carry on with his life, fulfill what is expected of him. From his father he learns never to turn anyone away, the elder Obama doling out money to his relatives (many who do not wish to work) until he is broke. If Mr. Obama understands the plight of the masses of our country, of the world, it is because he has learned such lessons—from his father. But the memoir is also a history of inventing a life separate from his history, his father's history. During his trip to Kenya, after his father has been killed in an automobile accident, Mr. Obama visits with many of the elders in his family. After he listens to all their stories, near the end of the book—the emotional climax—he elects to be alone in the cemetery where is father is buried in a raised grave that is sealed with ceramic tiles. “I dropped to the ground and swept my hand across the smooth yellow tile. Oh, Father, I cried. There was no shame in your confusion. Just as there was no shame in your father’s before you. No shame in the fear, or in the fear of his father before him. There was only shame in the silence fear had produced. It was the silence that betrayed us. If it weren’t for that silence, your grandfather might have told your father that he could never escape himself, or re-create himself alone. Your father might have taught those same lessons to you. And you, the son, might have taught your father that this new world that was beckoning all of you involved more than just railroads and indoor toilets and irrigation ditches and gramophones, lifeless instruments that could be absorbed into the old ways. You might have told him that these instruments carried with them a dangerous power, that they demanded a different way of seeing the world. That this power could be absorbed only alongside a faith born out of hardship, a faith that wasn’t new, that wasn’t black or white or Christian or Muslim but that pulsed in the heart of the first African village and the first Kansas homestead—a faith in other people” (429). Mr. Obama’s opponents underestimated his powers of persuasion in 2008, his powers to govern the last four years, the powers to wage a heroic campaign again this year. After all that this man has accomplished, and there still exists doubt about what he is capable of! Last year Mr. Obama closed a 60 Minutes interview with the words, spoken with no great effort, “I’m a pretty persistent son-of-a-gun.” His rivals have no idea, but once again, they’d better get prepared to deal with him straight up. Any other way will ensure their defeat. Happy One Year to MeA year ago this week I made my first post here at richardjespers.com. Originally I intended to do one a month, but in the last twelve months I've written fourteen. I realize that most bloggers post daily or weekly, but I look at my post as more of a newsletter. Each month I write about what has piqued my interest since we last met here in cyberspace: books, trips, writing conferences, a marathon essay on all the New Yorker stories for 2011. As time has passed, I’ve become more conversant in how to post photographs, videos, and how to set up links. I encourage you to subscribe by locating the box in the sidebar to your right. If you like my posts, I hope you will forward them to your friends. Thanks, dear readers, and have a great day as we close down summer. My Book World Not long ago I finished reading *A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. I was encouraged to tackle it by a woman I’d studied with this past summer (see my August post). She recommended it when I asked her about contemporary novels that are written with a nonlinear structure. *I've pledged to link all recommended books to powells.com because they carry titles from small and indie presses (the big places don't consistently do that). If you can make a few book purchases that are not from The Big Ones, you'll be helping out many a writer. I love how Egan structures this book. It’s almost like a story collection in which one character is both a major and a minor character but in different chapters. The narrative is not in chronological order—much the way our minds work—and it’s up to the reader to put the events together. She’s a master at giving the reader subtle clues about where you are and what the time frame is. It’s not an easy read, but it’s fun. She has one chapter—Chapter Twelve, Great Rock and Roll Pauses—that’s written in the form of flow charts. The novel, about the punk rock world of the eighties, seems genuine—particularly to those of us who know little about it—and draws us in as a fine novel should. Kudos to Egan for earning all the awards of the year: National Book Critics Circle Award, Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a PEN/Faulkner finalist, one of the Best Books of Year. I also enjoyed another title, The Tools: Transform Your Problems into Courage, Confidence, and Creativity by Phil Stutz and Barry Michels. I found this book helpful, as it dovetails well with my latest therapy experience. And after I memorized the procedures (tools), I believe they do "work." One I find somewhat helpful is the Reversal of Desire. If there is something you don't wish to do or an event you dread attending, you repeat the following mantra. “Bring it on! I love pain. Pain sets me free.” (There are also some mental pictures you must employ, like imagining that a “cloud” is spitting you out when you think, Pain sets me free, but I find that they help to legitimize the experience.) I've simplified the process entirely too much, but see if you can get a copy. And the authors are correct. You can’t stop using the tools, or you lose them. I’ve continued to re-read portions of the book each day. I needed to make a very difficult phone call the other day, and after preparing myself with the tool mentioned above, I was surprised at how well I was able to communicate with the caller. Viva Las Vegas AgainIn a little over a year and a half, Ken and I have made three trips to Las Vegas, Nevada. The first two times were during Christmas week. For people who’ve never liked Christmas (a childhood thing or phobia perhaps), Vegas is a great place to be. Along the strip, Xmas is rather a footnote. Oh, each hotel, each shoppe has its sparkly little decorations, but you don’t see many creches. The only Xmas carols you might hear are at the Bellagio Fountain shows that occur every hour or so, in which the loudspeakers might ring out with something sung by a great choir, almost, almost making you wish you were at home by the fire. Our hotel, Circus Circus, and the streets are filled with foreign visitors who don’t necessarily celebrate the birth of Christ or even know who he is. It’s enlightening to see that an entirely different world exists right under our very noses. In early September we made our third visit, and it was hot, hot, hot. Not only that but the city was suffering through a rare period of humidity (it would rain hard and flash flood a few hours after we left to fly back to Texas, whew). The great indoors, the uber air-conditioned Circus Circus, was so cold, in fact, that some of us kept our arms and legs covered most of the time. Unlike the winter months, in which you can stroll up the strip in sixty-degree weather, we had to forego any walks, except for one. Yes, one mild morning, we took a cab to a large park known as Springs Preserve. There you can view much in the way of native flora or plants that seem to grow easily in the desert—all with the city in view (see photos below). I would have labeled the plants except that many of the little signs had been plucked by management to correct previous mistakes. There are also carefully placed pieces of outdoor sculpture. After you’ve made a vigorous walk along the paved paths, you can grab a great but inexpensive meal at the Springs Café run by the Culinary Academy of Las Vegas. Among other items, you can order a vegan burger for $7, a chicken panini sandwich for $9, a vegetable & goat cheese panini for $8.25, crispy fish tacos for $10, or a chicken waldorf wrap for $9. And if it’s pleasant enough to eat on the terrace, you can also view the strip from one end to the other. Gambling is a bizarre activity. You really can’t care about it, whether you win or lose (because you’ll do a lot of that). If you, for example, line up four fours in video poker and win a hundred dollars, you feel it’s quite a triumph. And if you’re smart, you’ll quit that machine and head for another one. If you’re really smart, you’ll cash out, leave the casino, and come back later (or never). You don’t want to jinx your luck by staying too long and giving all your winnings back to the casino. No, I have a set amount I spend each day on the machines, and when it’s gone, it’s really gone. I took a number of photos of Circus Circus because I found the sights interesting. Yes, the place is over forty years old, but the MGM Grand owns it and has refurbished one tower and is working on another. The rooms are clean and up to date, and the Steak House has some of the best cuisine on the strip. Ruidoso, New MexicoIn August, Ken and I traveled with our friend Betty to Inn of the Mountain Gods in Ruidoso, where we stayed as her guests once again, always an enjoyable experience. FYI, a new trail has opened up adjacent to the Inn. You cross the highway to find the beginning, and from there you find many miles of a new asphalt trail. We heard that it was a walking trail. But others must have heard that it was for cycling for you'd hear, "On your left," as someone approached from behind. Others must have surely thought it was for runners only as they whizzed past you, refusing to acknowledge your existence. Believe me, there is plenty of room for everyone if we all follow the rules of any road. Stay to the right . . . or is it left, if you're a pedestrian? Yes, walkers and runners stay to the left, so that cyclists who are heading toward you on their right have the best shot at you. Ah, well, the point is that the new trail is beautiful. If you like the great outdoors and don't care for golf, this new trail in Ruidoso is just for you. Check it out!
Trash GaloreIn many of my posts I've spoken of items that do not recycle. An artist friend, Aidan Grey, of Denver, told me he would take any of those items when I was through writing about them. So I later packaged them up and sent them off. Recently, his show, Trash, opened at Denver's Edge Gallery. To your left you see my photo of the blue rubber rings that Target Pharmacy uses to identify its prescription bottles. Note below how Aidan transforms this gasket trash, as well as other pieces, into art. My Book WorldDrift by Rachel Maddow I made a number of notes (as well as using Kindle’s handy yellow highlighter), but I fear they would interest only me, so I introduce Rachel Maddow's book by way of the following passage. “‘Not since the peace-time years between World War I and World War II,’ according to a 2011 Pew Research Center study, ‘has a smaller share of Americans served in the armed forces.’ Half of the American public says it has not been even marginally affected by ten years of constant war” (202). And yet I wonder . . . haven’t more than half of Americans been . . . affected? Haven’t more than half of us known at least one family affected by the war, at least known of a soldier (even a friend of a friend) killed or disabled by the war? Haven’t more than half of us known at least one person whose business has folded during this decade in which the war-induced deficit (along with other controllable factors) has crushed the economy? In addition to demonstrating how the country has drifted to a new kind of warfare—distant, affecting civilian life hardly at all, almost unreal because it’s kept out of the public eye—Maddow brings to our attention how little U.S. citizens have at stake, apparently. Because our last two wars have been fought without a draft, without civilian sacrifice (except for, needless to say, the friends and relatives of over 4,500 men and women), without the approval of the civilian population who is paying and will continue to pay for these wars—we are a population that has drifted into war and will be less and less likely to drift out of it. My grandfather, my father, my uncles, my cousin all fought in various wars with mixed results. What will be the ultimate result of our decade of war? Maddow, despite the progressive stance she takes on her show, manages to approach her subject objectively--siting support from military experts at both ends of the political spectrum. My only criticism concerns Maddow’s prose. Her writing is both elegant and pedestrian, at turns. It is elegant when she is making a point, employing “drift” as a fine extended metaphor throughout the book, articulating herself with a vocabulary that reflects her education. On the other hand, her prose sometimes reads as if she has dictated one of her evening presentations complete with single-word fragments, not to mention using the word “busted.” Okay, it’s fine to opt for busted in informal usage or a context pertaining to police work (The detective busted him on the spot.), but in a book in which Maddow has gone to great lengths to be accurate and eloquent, might she please avoid the word “busted?” A “busted fuel line” (230) could easily be transformed to a “broken fuel line,” a “damaged fuel line.” In another instance, “broke-down busted, overgrown, spongy stairs,” (243) seems a bit like overkill—particularly in the context of describing the home Maddow and her partner are buying. Surely any editor over the age of forty—an editor who has mastered grammar and composition—could catch these instances and elide them. 25th Anniversary of Prick Up Your eArsIn 1987 two books concerning the life of British playwright Joe Orton were published. In June of that year I read The Orton Diaries edited by New Yorker critic John Lahr (son of Wizard of Oz actor Burt Lahr). Orton’s journal is comprised of brutally frank entries about his openly gay life in 1960s London. He offers his opinions on literature and the world of the theatre that he so desperately seeks to be a part of. Below is a sample of his candor. “When I left, I took the Piccadilly line to Holloway Road and popped into a little pissoir [rest room at the Tube Station]—just four pissers. It was dark because somebody had taken the bulb away. There were three figures pissing. I had a piss and, as my eyes became used to the gloom I saw that only one of the figures was worth having—a labouring type, big, with cropped hair and, as far as I could see, wearing jeans and a dark short coat. Another man entered and the man next to the labourer moved away, not out of the place altogether, but back against the wall. The new man had a pee and left the place and, before the man against the wall could return to his place, I nipped in there sharpish and stood next to the labourer. I put my hand down and felt his cock, he immediately started to play with mine. The youngish man with fair hair, standing back against the wall, went into the vacant place. I unbuttoned the top of my jeans and unloosened my belt in order to allow the labourer free reign with my balls. The man next to me began to feel my bum. At this point a fifth man entered. Nobody moved. It was dark. Just a little light spilled into the place from the street, not enough to see immediately. The man next to me moved back to allow the fifth man to piss. But the fifth man very quickly flashed his cock and the man next to me returned to my side lifting up my coat and shoving his hand down the back of my trousers. The fifth man kept puffing on a cigarette and, by the glowing end, watching. A sixth man came into the pissoir” (105). On and on Orton continues describing a situation where as many as eight men engage in illicit, illegal sex. As far as I know, he never used this material per se in any of his dramatic or fictional works, but here he arranges the material as if he is creating a scene in a novel—and it is quite instructional. Orton is brutally frank concerning more substantive matters, as well. “I got to Brian Epstein’s office at 4:45. I looked through The New Yorker. How dead and professional it all is. Calculated. Not an unexpected line. Unfunny and dead. The epitaph of America” (73). Whether he’s right or wrong, he seems to state his opinion with authority. In 1987 John Lahr published a biography of Orton called Prick Up Your Ears (a motion picture starring Gary Oldman as Orton and Alfred Molina as Halliwell was soon followed). Lahr borrows his title, Prick Up Your Ears, from one of Orton’s that he himself deemed “too good to waste on a film [Up Against It]” (88). “Ears” is Orton's anagram for his favorite part of the male anatomy. From a large number of sources, Lahr details Orton’s life from early childhood, to his first few successes on the London stage, to his relationship with lover, Kenneth Halliwell, who, in 1967 bludgeoned thirty-four year-old Orton to death with a hammer and then killed himself. Fifteen years earlier, Halliwell, well-educated but lonely, had taken a poor teen-aged Orton under his wing, to educate him and provide him a safe haven in which he might develop his craft. Halliwell considered himself the writer in their duo, and when Orton began to experience success that included a bigger bank account, Halliwell’s jealousy got the best of him. One can extrapolate from Orton’s journal entries that he was fed up with Halliwell and nearly ready to leave him. Recently, I re-read both of the Orton books, twenty-five years after first devouring them. I've also seen the film version of his hit play, Entertaining Mr. Sloane. I still find his works astonishing. In them I find the courage to be the writer I would like to be: saying that which I believe is true, rather than that which will be acceptable to the public. Of course, I still succumb the latter. I would like to be read by a broad audience. Still . . . I look to his journals for the right tone, the point of view that tells the rest of the world to go f@#k themselves while creating the works I wish to create. A Workshop For Editing the NovelIn July I attended a workshop in Alpine, Texas sponsored by the Writers League of Texas. Alpine is part of an interesting trio of towns in far West Texas, Marfa and Ft. Davis being the other two. Alpine is home of Sul Ross State University. More like a small college nestled into a shining hill, it served as a great setting for our workshop. As we only had an hour to eat lunch each day, we often ate a great meal in the union. Several deluges pelted us during the week, but no one complained. Just a year before the area had suffered great loss from fires due to the long drought (see rainbow photo by Tanner Quigg.) Author Carol Dawson, with at least four books to her credit, conducted the week-long course on how to revise and edit a novel. I’ve attended writing workshops before, mostly those concerning the writing of short stories. In this one, every exercise had to do with the novel manuscript I had brought to the group. At our first meeting, Ms. Dawson told an amusing tale of overhearing one of her students saying, “If you take Carol’s class, you’d better wear your big-girl panties.” Even though our group was evenly divided between men and women, no one disagreed with the idea that we were in for a tough ride. Actually, the workshop—painful as it was at times (seems that my novel didn’t have a hook, that opening line that makes someone want to forget his or her chores and read on into the night)—was also quite helpful. Editing requires one to leave his or her creative shoes at the door. It requires one to look at his or her text as if it belongs to someone else. One must cut, cut, cut. One must chop "ly" adverbs away from speech attributions (he said hesitantly). One must cut most adjectives. One must cut material that doesn’t move the narrative along. I returned home with much to think about, and much to do. I highly recommend Dawson’s course, particularly if it’s held in Alpine. On Thursday night, two of the WLT’s instructors gave readings at Front Street Books in Alpine. Poet Scott Wiggerman read from his recent volume of poetry entitled Presence. In addition to his writing pursuits, he is chief editor of http://dosgatospress.org/ in Austin. I loved hearing Scott read his poem, “Letter to My Father-in-Law,” in which the persona skewers his partner's father for not accepting him. It begins with “I rode your son real hard last night/broke him like a wild stallion/head puled back, nostrils wide as moons . . . .” The piece--the tone of which is bold, angry--ends with the lines, “I’m reconciled to the fact that you’ll be dead/before I ever set foot on your farm/I should like to see the house your son grew up in/the acres he worked, the home he escaped/But the biggest draw will be standing on the land/that I’d been banned from, knowing that you/will be in your grave, writhing without a shotgun/ when your son and I get down in your dirt.” Whooee, what a ride. Joe Nick Patoski, read passages from two of his books: Dallas Cowboys: The Outrageous History of the Biggest, Loudest, Most Hated, Best Loved Football Team in America and his 2008 biography of Willie Nelson. Dallas Cowboys is more of an expose of the city of Dallas than it is about the cowboys. His prose is as wild as the rides he takes you on. |
AUTHOR
Richard Jespers is a writer living in Lubbock, Texas, USA. See my profile at Author Central:
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