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Inside Martin Amis's Story

2/19/2021

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A WRITER'S WIT
I did not lose myself all at once. I rubbed out my face over the years washing away my pain, the same way carvings on stone are worn down by water.
​Amy Tan
Author of The Joy Luck Club
Born February 19, 1952
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A. Tan

My Book World

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​Amis, Martin. Inside Story—How to Write: A Novel. New York: Knopf, 2020.

I believe this novel falls under the category of metafiction (Google: fiction in which the author self-consciously alludes to the artificiality or literariness of a work by parodying or departing from novelistic conventions). Martin or Mart becomes a character in his own work (à la Christopher Isherwood and others). His self-consciousness revolves around the writing of his own fiction, that of Saul Bellow, and others. As the customary disclaimer in the front matter states, “Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance . . . is entirely coincidental.” But how coincidental is it when “Martin” or “Mart” spends much of the book citing characters with real names, people like his father, author Kingsley Amis, people like longtime friend Christopher Hitchens, as well as other famous (Iris Murdoch) and not-so figures?
 
Amis begins and ends (“Preludial” and “Postludial”) the novel by addressing his readers directly, that he is about to give us tips concerning writing techniques. And he does: such advice is scattered throughout the (did I say?) novel, as if indeed, it is a how-to book and not a work of fiction. I like it. It’s odd, but I like it. You can’t help but believe he is digging down deep to reveal what has worked for him and speaks so authoritatively about writing (and with more than twenty-five books under his belt why shouldn’t he?).
 
However, Amis spends the final 150 pages or so memorializing the life and death of essayist and intimate, Christopher Hitchens. They’re both about the same age. Both straight, both with families. Yet they are Platonic lovers. Martin greets Christopher and sometimes leaves him with a kiss. As his fans will know, veteran smoker Hitchens develops throat cancer, and much of this section takes place at Houston’s MD Anderson Cancer Center. Amis takes readers through every painful step he witnesses in Hitch’s treatment. All to no avail. The man who has always seemed to battle against life and death in equal measures finally succumbs. That is in 2011. Perhaps writing in a fictional mode about this death allows Amis to conceptualize the work differently than if it were in a nonfiction mode. It allows him to eulogize his friend without getting too sentimental about it.
 
And yet—true to the title’s promise—Amis, I believe, does offer the writer, especially the writer of novels, some sage advice. Oh, and before I list a few nuggets along these lines, I’d like to say I detest the excessive footnotes, particularly in a work of fiction. Is it a kind of laziness by which the author cannot manage to incorporate these ideas into the main text? Or is it a way of padding an already lengthy book and forcing readers to peruse longs passages in teensy weensy little print? Or is it a way of showing off, of augmenting an already verbose passage even more? At any rate, here are some passages about writing:

“So avoid or minimise any reference to the mechanics of making love—unless it advances our understanding of character or affective situation. All we usually need to know is how it went and what it meant. ‘Caress the detail,’ said Nabokov from the lectern. And it is excellent advice. But don’t do it when you’re writing about sex” (27).
 
Knopf typo: “obviouly” (221).
 
“Never use any phrase that bears the taint of the second-hand. All credit to whoever coined no-brainer and (I suppose) to whoever coined go ballistic and Marxism lite and you rock and eye-popping and jaw-dropping and double whammy and all the rest of them. Never do it—not even in conversation” (391).
 
The end of a sentence is a weighty occasion. The end of a paragraph is even weightier (as a general guide, aim to put its best sentence last). The end of chapter is seismic but also more pliant (either put its best paragraph last, or follow your inclination to adjourn with a light touch of the gavel). The end of a novel, you’ll be relieved to learn, is usually straightforward, because by then everything has been decided. And with any luck your closing words will feel preordained (394).
In his Inside Story Amis writes about so much more: Philip Larkin’s death, 9-1-1, crises in the Middle East, his life between the early 1980s through 45’s stint as president. Since the work is fiction can we believe “Mart” when he says this will be his last book? I hope not.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Annie Proulx's Barkskins
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President Obama: Promises Fulfilled

1/15/2021

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A WRITER'S WIT
The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character—that is the goal of true education. 
​Martin Luther King, Jr.
Author of Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?
​Born January 15, 1929
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MLK

My Book World

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​Obama, Barack. A Promised Land. New York: Crown, 2020.
 
Having read President Obama’s 1995 memoir Dreams from My Father a number of years ago, I pre-ordered this book and anxiously awaited its arrival from Amazon on November 17, 2020. Dreams had revealed to me a skilled and sensitive writer. The scene in which Mr. Obama kneels at his father’s grave in Kenya is deeply moving and serves as the striking climax. It remains fresh in my memory.
 
A Promised Land is a title that resonates in a global way. However, Mr. Obama transforms it a bit to reveal how the United States of America has functioned as a promised land for him, for his life. The book seems to possess a unique structure. The former president limns in this the first volume of his long-awaited memoir his political life. Yet he does not hesitate to return readers by way of carefully selected flashbacks to his humble beginnings: we learn things about his family that we perhaps did not know before, the boldly liberal nature of his Kansas-born grandparents who flee to Hawaii to live a freer life; their daughter who marries a Kenyan man and gives birth to Barack Hussein Obama. 
 
At the same time, this memoir develops a strand of history focused as readers would expect to see through the eyes of the person to whom it happened, the one who witnessed first-hand his several political campaigns, his earthy language in dealing with staff who have displeased him or fallen short of their expected performance. In spite of the subjectivity of such a view, one senses that Mr. Obama is being fair, that not many can argue with his point of view, his memory, his own fact-checking. 
 
But finally, this book is silver-lined with personal and moving vignettes the president experiences throughout his first term: campaign events, public and private; White House anecdotes (he gives an inviting description of the contemporary White House); the relationships he develops with everyday WH employees, the large majority of whom are African-American, one essentially declaring, “You’re one of us.” At the same time, though he avoids making too much of the issue, Mr. Obama sets the record straight on the political evils he must endure: Donald Trump’s birtherism campaign; the media’s daily tearing at his flesh even though he is far more transparent and open than the previous administration’s leader; obstructionist Republicans who wish to thwart the President’s agenda, not because they so much disagree with him ideologically (which they do) but because they object so blatantly to him. Mr. Obama very elegantly portrays their vitriol without saying what I have no problem stating: Republicans regularly respond with a latent but powerful sense of White person’s entitlement, racism, and bigotry that have laced our American life since before its formation. That the man continues to rule with great dignity is a tribute to his stature as an adult who wishes to build on our democracy, not destroy it.
 
Mr. Obama relates the night at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, in which he takes stand-up potshots at a seated and furious Donald Trump. I think Mr. Obama must later realize how much this roasting inspires DT to run for president. Finally, skillfully building toward the narrative arc’s fine climax, Mr. Obama relates the fulsome scenario by which Osama bin Laden is assassinated and buried at sea. Though at times the reading is a slog, because the former prez wishes to be thorough and exact (a quality I appreciate), the book is well worth the time. And that infamous date, May 2, 2011, is where the first half of this memoir ends.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Steven Millhauser's The Knife Thrower and Other Stories
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All of Us Eat (Jim) Crow

11/6/2020

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A WRITER'S WIT
You see, as I go along, I've come to consider bravery as just about the most pernicious of virtues. Bravery is a horrible thing. The human race has it left over from the animal world and we can't get rid of it.
​James Jones
Author of From Here to Eternity
Born on November 6, 1921
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J. Jones

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Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness with a new preface by the author. New York: New Press, 2020 (2010).

This book should appear at some point on the syllabus of a required course in every college or university in America. Portions of it could be taught in our high schools. Adult reading groups of all stripes should read it. The book is that important. It is that good. “In 1972, fewer than 350,000 people were being held in prisons and jails nationwide, compared with more than 2 million people today” (10), states Alexander.
 
The New Jim Crow, however, is not only about numbers. It is about an entire philosophy in which White people can no longer discriminate outwardly (at the end of the old Jim Crow era) so in an era of colorblindness (“I don’t mind if she’s Black.”), they resort to setting up a new form of discrimination through mass incarceration. How does it work? It begins with the War on Drugs, in 1980, with the Reagan administration. It gains momentum with Bush Senior and gains real traction with Bill Clinton and Bush Junior. Alexander claims that even some of Obama’s policies contribute harm (though he does speak out against mass incarceration). With this new policy young Black and Brown men are given long sentences for minor drug infractions. Then when they finally return to their homes (uneducated and no longer young), they are marked as felons, so for the rest of their lives they cannot vote, cannot get jobs, and wind up in a constant loop of being prisoner or permanent criminal—all for a minor drug offense. And how do White men who commit the same offenses fare? Much better, because, one learns, all these cases are adjudicated by the police, who ignore White drug crime but not Black or Brown.
 
An excellent writer, Michelle Alexander makes her case in not only a lawyerly manner (perfect syllogisms) with logic and facts but also with heavy but artful doses of thinking from the greatest African-American scholars: Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. DuBois, and Martin Luther King, Junior. She is rough on every one of us but in the best Tough Love tradition. There is enough blame for us all but also enough room to turn this around. It won’t be easy, she declares, but by looking at the concept of Race squarely in the eye, we can do it. And I believe her.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Garth Greenwell's What Belongs to You

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Electoral College: Bane of Our Existence

10/30/2020

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A WRITER'S WIT
Nothing seems so tragic to one who is old as the death of one who is young and this alone proves that life is a good thing.
​Zoë Akins
Author of The Greeks Had a Word for Them
Born October 30, 1886
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Z. Akins

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Edwards, George C. with a foreword by Neal R. Peirce. Why the Electoral College Is Bad for America. New Haven, Yale UP, 2004. 
 
For years the electoral college mystified me, but it seemed like a concept that worked because more or less the right candidate always won both the popular vote and the electoral college vote. Then came the 2000 election, a bizarre turn of events by which five people on the Supreme Court would, through their action/inaction allow the candidate with fewer popular votes to win. And one of those justices would tell the rest of us to get over it—instead of taking the time, like a reasoned person, to explain to us why we should get over it, why their decision was such a wise one. Another justice, years later, before her death, would confess that she regretted her vote. Nice. I hope it made her feel better. The electoral college is a roulette wheel that is loaded. Rigged. Like any roulette wheel, we don’t really know until the last second which way the falseness is going to lie.
 
Author Edwards logically and factually proves his thesis as to why the electoral college ought to be drummed out of existence. Interestingly, instead of beginning with the historical context of its origins, he begins with how the electoral college works, how it among other things, cheats the voters in a particular state who vote for the “losing” candidate who may actually have more popular votes. Most important in his discussions may be the idea of political equality or more important the political inequity that the electoral college tends to foster. The biggest takeaway from Edwards’s chapter on history is the recorded fact that the electoral college was not a well-thought-out concept that received rigorous attention from its founders. No, Philadelphia was hot that summer, and men [and I mean only men] formed the electoral college in a hurry, so that they could find cooler places in which to spend the rest of their summer vacations. At every turn, Edwards has an answer for those who would retain the electoral college, especially by noting when the proponents begin with false premises. The e.c. does not protect the smaller states, as some claim. It does not maintain cohesion and harmony among citizens. Candidates are not more attentive to small states with a low number of electors nor to large states that are entrenched in one party or another.
 
In the book’s foreword, scholar Neal R. Peirce sums up what is most flawed about the electoral college: “The electoral college process, Edwards reminds us, doesn’t simply aggregate or reflect popular votes; it consistently distorts and often directly misrepresents the votes citizens have cast. Indeed, the unit vote actually takes votes of the minority in individual states and awards those votes, in the national count, to the candidate they opposed” (x).
 
Don’t worry that Edwards’s tome was published in 2004; nothing much has changed concerning the institution. Author Edwards’s study is prescient in that he states emphatically that what happened in 2000 with Bush v. Gore will happen again. Voilà, 2016! The United States must abolish the electoral college when it comes to voting for the office of the president. The time to do so has past.
 
[This book published by Yale University Press has, by my count, five typographical errors derived mainly from a lack of close reading by copy editors—rather egregious for an Ivy League press, eh?]

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Oscar Lewis's Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty

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The Fight to Vote Is an Old One

10/16/2020

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A WRITER'S WIT
When you're fifty you start thinking about things you haven't thought about before. I used to think getting old was about vanity—but actually it's about losing people you love. Getting wrinkles is trivial. 
​Eugene O’Neill
Author of Long Day's Journey into Night
Born October 16, 1888
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E. O'Neill

My Book World

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Waldman, Michael. The Fight to Vote. New York: Simon, 2016. 

​I wish I had read this book when it came out during the run-up to the 2016 election—when I bought it. Even though the last chapters seem dated now, considering what the country has been through, the early chapters give an excellent historical account of how this country has ALWAYS been divided into two camps: those who would like to allow everyone to vote and those who would only have so-called elites vote. White (heterosexual, one assumes) male landowners comprised that group in colonial times:

“And there were men who worked as hard to restrict the vote as others did to expand it, such as John Randolph of Roanoke, who fought to deny the franchise to men without property, declaring, ‘I am an aristocrat. I love liberty. I hate equality;’” (xi)
Slowly, and only through arduous struggles, did other groups gain traction over great spans of time: African-American males, white women, African-American women and other minority groups (including the young). Still, the fight to vote has wavered back and forth, according to the whims of the SCOTUS and voter suppression activities. One group rises up and gains three feet, and another group grabs power and sends progress back two feet. And tragically . . . the struggle still continues. If readers have time, they should consider devouring this informative and at times humorous book. If you’re undecided about voting in 2020, perhaps its contents may sway you to get registered and do so now!

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Fiona Hill's Mr. Putin
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A Minister's Journey

10/2/2020

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A WRITER'S WIT
Remember that all through history, there have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they seem invincible. But in the end, they always fall. Always.
​Mahatma Gandhi
Author of Mohandas K. Gandhi, Autobigraphy: The Story of My Experiments with Truth

Born October 2, 1869
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M. Gandhi

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Robinson, Marilynne. Gilead. New York: Farrar, 2004.
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Robinson writes this novel in a very different but masterful fashion from most contemporary novels. She undertakes to have a third-generation (at least) Protestant minister tell his family’s story to his very young son by way of a letter, reviving a long epistolary tradition in storytelling. It is the kind of novel that wends itself back and forth over the same geographical (from Iowa to Kansas, literally on foot) and temporal (several generations) territories. One must retain part of the information, at least, to make sense of it all; yet Robinson skillfully reminds readers of pertinent facts, and they can uncover more as they continue their journey through the book. 
 
The elderly Rev. John Ames, who has married late in life, is fatally ill and thus wishes to share his life with his young son. Early on, he shares that in his life as a pastor he has written and filed away a large number of sermons:

“Your mother . . . was the one who actually called my attention to the number of boxes I have filled with my sermons and my prayers. Say, fifty sermons a year for forty-five years, not counting funerals and so on, of which there have been a great many. Two thousand two hundred and fifty. If they average thirty pages, that’s sixty-seven thousand five hundred pages . . . two hundred twenty-five books which puts me up there with Augustine and Calvin for quantity” (19).
One doesn’t know if the son is impressed because he hasn’t yet read this long epistle, but to the reader it seem be a daunting figure. Even most novelists do not produce that much material in a lifetime. So what occupies the thoughts of a trained minister? Family issues, certainly, and we learn of his older brother Edward who studies in Europe and returns an atheist. One problem with a liberal education is that one is taught to think for oneself and what Edward thinks does not please their father; in fact, he is quite hurt that Edward refuses to deliver the prayer at a meal but even more disappointed that his son will not be following in his footsteps. 
 
Another major thread of the narrative has to do with a fellow pastor and friend, a man named Robert Boughton. (One is not sure if the first syllable is pronounced bough as in a tree’s bough, bow as in bow tie, or even buffton or booton.) Robert’s son, Jack, is a bit of a problem in a number of ways I shall not reveal, and because of them John Ames does not trust Jack. But as a matter of putting his faith in action, he finally steps up to help the troubled young man to grow and move on—his own father, Robert, not ever knowing of Jack’s troubled past. I, too, like Edward, am a former Christian, but I find the book explores the topic of spirituality in a manner that is respectful to all parties who may read the book, and that is a feat difficult to achieve.


​NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Blake Bailey's Literary Biography of Author Richard Yates: A Tragic Honesty
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Forster: His Fiction Comes to Fruition

9/25/2020

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A WRITER'S WIT
A great piece of music is beautiful regardless of how it is performed. Any prelude or fugue of Bach can be played at any tempo, with or without rhythmic nuances, and it will still be great music. That’s how music should be written, so that no-one, no matter how philistine, can ruin it.
​Dmitri Shostakovich
"Leningrad" Symphony, No. 7
Born September 25, 1906
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D. Shostakovich

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Forster, E. M. The Life to Come: And Other Stories. New York: Norton, 1987 (1972).
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Oliver Stallybrass offers in his introduction a bit of background concerning these stories. “On his death in June 1970, E. M. Forster left behind, at King’s College, Cambridge, England, a considerable corpus of unpublished literary work, complete and incomplete, and in a wide range of genres: novels (Maurice, published in 1971, and two substantial fragments), stories, plays, poems, essays, talks—to say nothing of letters, diaries and notebooks” (vii). A number of these stories—because Forster creates gay characters and situations that cannot be published at the time he writes them—are instructive for gay writers alive today. One, he is courageous, given his prodigious talent, to write them anyway, not to edit his mind, his heart, his soul. Even if he stashes them away or editors reject them, he senses perhaps that subsequent generations might read and appreciate them. The language and imagery are tame, of course, compared with any so-called gay fiction written since the early 1970s. But the fact that he is willing to portray two men together sexually, employing words like “member” for “penis,” is quite remarkable. Second, he provides a foundation for writers to come, people such as Paul Monette, who, in his book of essays, Last Watch of the Night, pays quick homage to Forster as a mentor. Forster is a formidable and lyrical writer whose work transcends all and deserves to be read by anyone, even fifty years following his death.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Marilynne Robinson's Novel Gilead

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Not a Boring Star

9/18/2020

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We now live in a nation where doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, governments destroy freedom, the press destroys information, religion destroys morals, and our banks destroy the economy.
​Chris Hedges
Author of America: The Farewell Tour
Born September 18, 1956
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C. Hedges

My Book World

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Lane, Byron. A Star Is Bored: A Novel. NY: Holt, 2020.
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Twenty-eight-year-old Charlie leaves his night job writing news copy for a Los Angeles TV station to become “personal assistant” to actor and movie star, Kathi Kannon. When one learns that author Lane once served as Carrie Fisher’s PA, one wants to turn Kathi’s voice into Carrie’s, Gracie Gold’s (Kathy’s mother) into Debbie Reynolds. As with any competent fiction, however, Lane creates two great characters that only reflect that he once knew them both, not that he’s out to recreate them.
 
And this book is full of so many unforgettable voices. Begin with Kathi’s: off the bat she renames Charlie “Cockring.” From there, it’s only a short step to all the other outrageous things she says while he shops with her, travels with her, sees her in and out of hospitals for . . . well, read for yourself to find out what. Cockring’s head is full of voices: his father bellowing at him through the years by way of sentences in all caps: “WE ALL HAVE TO DO THINGS IN LIFE WE DON’T WANT TO DO!” (66); his own fears as he speaks to his inner Siri: “Hey, Siri, I want to impress. I want to be the best assistant. I want to rescue my failing grade” (77); the voice of Cockring’s Therapista; the voices of all the other PAs to Hollywood stars, all with their own nicknames, who collectively write what is known as The Assistant’s Bible, chock full of information every great PA should memorize.

Cockring realizes early: “I have to be: to accept life as it happens, to be still and rest in knowing the universe is friendly, that good things will come, that good things are already here, that ‘good things’ include tidying her house, getting her car serviced, sorting her pills, surrendering my needs to hers” (91).
At a certain point, however, Cockring will learn this lesson a bit too well, and, like all good young protagonists, will have a crisis of identity. How that turns out will have to be the reader’s adventure. I’m not spoiling it for anybody. For laughs and tears, for good feelings and bad, you must read this book.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | E. M. Forster's A Life to Come
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Monette: Still the Last Watch

9/11/2020

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Love and business and family and religion and art and patriotism are nothing but shadows of words when a man's [sic] starving!
​O. Henry
Author of Gift of the Magi
Born September 11, 1862
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O. Henry

My Book World

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Monette, Paul. Last Watch of the Night: Essays Too Personal and Otherwise. New York: Harcourt, 1994.

Dear Paul, 
I’m pretending that you gaze over my shoulder and peruse this piece about you and Last Watch of the Night. On pages 267-8, you discuss your hoarding of books, and I’m so glad to learn that I’m not the only one who does this. In recataloging my library of 1,300 books, a year ago, I realize that 300 of them remain unread, and, until now [during COVID, I am endeavoring to catch up, now having read fifty-six], yours has been one of them. I feel disgusted that I didn’t read it when it came out, but that was the first year of teaching AP English in high school, and my reading tasks were to stay at least one chapter ahead of my five classes of bright bulbs. So now to why I love this book and why it will never be dated.
 
Your essays, at times, seem long and meandering, but readers, make no mistake, they are ordered; they have organization. I believe it is a nonlinear order in which, for example, in an essay about travel, you mention sojourning with all three of your long-term relationships: Roger, Stevie, and Winston. What I like about this sort of organization is it allows the essayist to discuss bigger pictures, larger topics. In the first essay entitled, “Puck,” ostensibly about yours and Roger’s Rhodesian ridgeback-Lab mix, the piece spans out, in which this “noble beast” (28) is the glue holding you two lovers together until Roger succumbs to AIDS. 
 
In another essay, “Gert,” you bring to light your first relationship with a lesbian, in this case, Gertrude Macy, a “maiden great-aunt” of one of your pupils. After she reads your novel manuscript, Gert asks, “Does it have to be so gay?” You answer:

​“Oh, indeed it did. The gayer the better. I launched into my half-baked credo, invoking the name of [E. M.] Forster, the writer to whom I was most in thrall, and the one who had failed me the most as well. When Forster decided he dare not publish Maurice, for fear of the scandal and what his mother would think; when he locked that manuscript in a drawer for fifty years until he died, he silenced much more than himself. He put up a wall that prevented us, his gay and lesbian heirs, from having a place to begin” (43). I tend to agree, but one must think about the consequences for Forster if he had released Maurice. Lost revenue? Loss of a career? His life? Prison time?
​A fallen Catholic yourself, in fact a defiant ex-Catholic, you discuss your relationship with several different “priests.” You cover gravesites and “The Politics of Silence.” “A One-Way Fare,” your paean to travel, becomes a metaphor for the one-way trip we all make through life. I love how you move from Mont-Saint-Michel to Noel Coward’s Private Lives, to a ten-line excerpt from that play, and on to Greece, all within a page—yet all connected.
            
Young gays need to read you, just as we read Forster and Isherwood, our forebears, so that they may know from whence they come. They must realize that the fight for freedom and equality is never over. It just shifts from one opponent to another. You fought to bring AIDS into a national focus, and perhaps the young will see that the COVID-19 battle is much the same: unless we change our national leadership COVID will be with us forever, just like AIDS is still with us. One must thank you for your fight, which ended all too soon. You would just now be enjoying a long-deserved homage at the ripe age of seventy-five.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Byron Lane's Novel A Star Is Bored
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She Explains Too Little

9/4/2020

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A WRITER'S WIT
No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell. 
​Antonin Artaud
​Author of The Theatre and Its Double
Born September 4, 1896
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A. Artaud

My Book World

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Lardner, Kate. Shut Up He Explained: The Memoir of a Blacklisted Kid. New York: Ballantine, 2004.
​
About halfway through this book, I realized I had read it before—not because I recognized the material but because I found little thumbnail indentions indicating where I’d stopped a reading session. My first “review,” sketched in 2004, was rather short and not very positive: Poor writing and poor editing. What could have been enlightening and touching was scattered and uninteresting. Lardner keeps an emotional distance throughout that is not very pleasant.
 
In a way, I still feel the same. The writing is fine enough; it just lacks a certain depth. Perhaps that is the point where a better editor might have helped the author. Much of the book is really about Kate Lardner’s father, Ring Lardner, Jr., a distinguished screenwriter who is blacklisted in the 1950s because he refuses to answer the question at a hearing whether he is or ever has been a communist. He spends twelve months in prison simply for attempting to practice his First (or Fifth) Amendment right to speak (or not). And, of course, such an event does have harmful effects on a burgeoning family: A wife, herself a working actor, who ceases to be offered film roles because she is related to Ring; a daughter and two sons who need him to balance out an impatient mother who, though loving, is also bound and determined to have her own career.

What is most troubling, I think, is the pacing. Of ten chapters, “The Penal Interlude,” is the longest at 120 pages. Conclusions that the author could draw about the effects on her as a “blacklisted kid” are missing or shortchanged. At the end of the book, Lardner gives a hurried account of her college years, her stumbling around to find out what she wishes to do with her life, thumbnail sketches of her two marriages, and boom, we’re done. Either the book should focus more on her father, or she should have a book longer than 272 pages, in order to discuss how being a blacklisted kid has affected her entire life (she’s about sixty at the time she writes the book). This time around I don’t notice the “emotional distance” as much as I do in 2004, but there exists rather a flippant tone that seems to reduce the import of what she is saying about one of the most destructive periods in US political history and its ramifications for her family. Perhaps it’s her way of dealing.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Paul Monette's Last Watch of the Night: Essays Too Personal and Otherwise.

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Kon-Tiki: A Wondrous Naiveté

8/14/2020

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A WRITER'S WIT
Teens affect history. They affect lives; they affect our cultural growth and change, and yet, and at the same time, they are often the most vulnerable among us. 
Mary E. Pearson
​Author of Dance of Thieves
Born August 14, 1955
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M. E. Pearson

My Book World

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​Heyerdahl, Thor. Kon-Tiki: Across the Pacific by Raft. New York: Rand, 1950.

This book may have been written for adults, but I have to believe its adventurous tale appeals to the child inside each one of us. A Norwegian scholar develops a theory that at one time people of Peru crossed the South Pacific; Heyerdahl acquires this idea because huge statues on Easter Island so closely resemble ones found in Peru. Very quickly it seems he scrabbles together a crew of five other men and from drawings of a raft that would have been used in earlier times, the men build the Kon-Tiki essentially from nine huge balsa logs. That feat itself is a large undertaking as the men somehow receive permission from Peruvian officials to go into the forest and harvest such logs from balsa trees—even though commercial logging of balsa has been disallowed for some time.

Then there is the 4,000 mile adventure in which, at first, the raft with a sail is seized by the Humboldt Current. However, as they escape its grasp, the six men embark on a most idyllic, though challenging, cruise across the South Pacific. They worry little about food (though they’ve brought certain stores with them) as they are besieged in the morning with flying fish that they either cook for breakfast or use as bait to catch bigger fish. Creatures large and small are curiously drawn to their vessel, and, though the men are wary at first, they become friends with the aquatic beasts. The primitive raft has its shortcomings so when they finally come upon an island, because of the raft’s steering limitations, they must pass it by. Sometime later, however, they spot another island group, and this time their voyage comes to an abrupt end as the raft breaks up on a reef.

What follows may be the most delightful part of Heyerdahl’s perfectly arced narrative. Curious natives from a nearby island of 127 inhabitants see smoke from the men’s cooking fire and carefully approach them. The six men become heroes to the village and are treated royally for weeks on end before they are able to use their ham (amateur) radio and contact Tahiti and then Norwegian officials. A 4,000 ton ship is dispatched to pick them up, and then the six men and all villagers part with tears in their eyes. The book may be tinged with a childlike naiveté, but it is also filled with a certain curiosity and courage, qualities that are necessary for cultures to cross boundaries and for its inhabitants to realize they have more in common than they don’t.

FRIDAY, SEPT. 4: My Book World | Kate Lardner's  Shut Up He Explained: The Memoir of a Blacklisted Kid

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Past Is Still Present: AIDS

8/7/2020

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A WRITER'S WIT
Modern life has gotten so strange, we all get 150 emails and text messages a day, and it's hard when things are moving that quickly to keep that sense of wonder about being alive.
​Brit Marling
Co-Writer for film Sound of My Voice
Born August 7, 1983
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B. Marling
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Guibert, Hervé. To the friend who did not save my life. South Pasadena: Semiotexte, 2020 (1990).
​
It’s difficult to know what I think of this book, thirty years after it is first published. On the one hand, it is a fair representation of what the times are like in 1991 Paris. When the author dies at thirty-six from AIDS, I am forty-three—very much a part of the same demographic. I’ve taken an HTLV test which claims I am negative. Whew.

Yet there is no real relief for anyone: neither the men and women who test positive and will soon die nor for their friends who have partaken of the same risky behaviors and remain free. Guibert portrays for gay Frenchmen, as do many American gay writers at the time, the devastation that overtakes our community from coast to coast. On the other hand, after thirty years, most of the scientific information Guibert possesses is redundant or has been proven wrong. It’s painful to read about either party.


Even if this work functions as a sort of roman à clef by not naming names, it certainly portrays the dastardly acts of treacherous friends. A character named Muzil is supposedly the noted philosopher Michel Foucault; Marine is based on the life of actor, Isabelle Adjani; and yet “Bill,” Guibert’s friend of the title remains a mystery, a traitor who brags about, as a Miami pharmaceutical executive, getting Guibert in on the ground floor of a vaccine, but cruelly fails to do so. This book, a combination of linear and nonlinear elements, takes us back to the past, but it strangely plops us into the present of yet another untamable virus and directs us toward a future of even more death and destruction. Not a gay book in the original literary sense, but so gay in a tragic way.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Thor Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki

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Fabulous Indeed

7/31/2020

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A WRITER'S WIT
Addiction isn't about substance—you aren't addicted to the substance, you are addicted to the alteration of mood that the substance brings.
​Susan Cheever
​Author of Drinking in America
Born July 31, 1943
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S. Cheever

My Book World

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Epstein, Joseph. Fabulous Small Jews. Boston: Houghton, 2003.
​
There is so much to like about these eighteen stories mostly featuring characters over the age of sixty. As the title suggests, each protagonist is short, yet Epstein never makes a to-do about it, and indeed it is a point of irony because many of them, though short in stature, are not small people. In fact, Epstein pulls readers into every narrative about poor Jews, poor Jews who become comfortable or well-off, or Jews who have always had money. Most everyone in these Chicago-based stories attends good schools, earns good money. But money alone cannot in any way make up for the heartache they suffer: marriages ending in divorce; fathers who die in war; widows looking (or not) for a man to fill their lives.

Fabulous small Jews have their own stores, their own banks, their own restaurants and delis, their own you-name-its. Epstein very quietly limns the lives of Jews almost anywhere in the world: because of prejudices held against them for thousands of years they must band together to protect, coddle, nurture, and love one another. And yet, readers can’t help but love these characters, too: an old man belatedly gets to know his grandson (I cried); a man secretly writes poems about a woman and the executor of his will, to preserve the woman’s reputation, instead of burning the manuscript, spreads it to the four winds from his car window on the freeway; a man quietly helps another man to end his life. Is the act one of suicide, euthanasia, or murder? Epstein does not answer that question but leaves it to each reader to decide, and I admire his courage in taking such a stance.
 
A must-read for Gentiles (like me) and Jews alike.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Hervé Guibert's To the friend who did not save my life

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Harrison's Novellas Are Perfect

7/10/2020

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A WRITER'S WIT
Writers get embarrassed sometimes in talking about how much fun writing can be, but drafting is often really enjoyable. Often, you're tumbling in the dark, and you don't know where the story is going to lead.
​Karen Russell,
​Author of Swamplandia!
Born July 10, 1981 
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K. Russell

My Book World

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Harrison, Jim. The Summer He Didn’t Die. New York: Atlantic Monthly, 2005. 

These three novellas, each one striking for its individuality, are immensely satisfying. The longer-than-a-story-but-shorter-than-a-novel format seems to be perfect for each narrative. My favorite character in The Summer He Didn’t Die, the title novella, is Berry, a child who is born with alcohol fetal syndrome. She is mute but indicates by her actions, quick and sprite-like, how she shall act upon the world and its many rules. Most of the action is of her family (excepting her wayward mother) evading Michigan’s children’s protective agency and depositing their lives over the border in Canada so that Berry can live out her life in peace. Republican Wives, hilarious for its verisimilitude (uncannily written for a male writer), takes readers inside the minds of three different women, friends since childhood, who have been hoodwinked for the last time by a man (also a college acquaintance) with whom they have all had affairs (mostly at different times). Tracking tells the story of an author who outlines his literary career and personal life, from feckless yet ardent college boy to a grandpa, finally finished with world travel and content to be near his grown children and grandchildren. The collection is a great testament to the novella form in which it is just the right length to tell each one of these stories.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Hans Fallada's Every Man Dies Alone

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Rule Follower or Skilled Manager?

6/26/2020

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A WRITER'S WIT
We always look at the “Fortune 500,” and we say, men in power, but we don't look at the glass cellar as opposed to the glass ceiling and say, men also are the homeless, men are also the ones that are the garbage collectors. Men are also the ones dying in construction sites that aren't properly supervised for safety hazards.
​Warren Farrell,
​
Author of The Boy Crisis
​Born June 26, 1943
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W. Farrell

My Book World

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Murata, Sayaka. Convenience Store Woman. Translated from the Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori. New York: Grove, 2018.

​A compact book at 163 small pages, this novel is a more substantive read than one would think at first. The simple language that the narrator Keiko uses may lull the reader into thinking this will be a simple story. In a way, it is. This young Japanese woman who works in a convenient store shifts to a flashback about her childhood. There she reveals her odd personality, a certain problem with affect, in which she would like to cook and eat a beautiful little blue bird that has died, much to the horror of her mother. Then in primary school, when no teacher appears to break up a fight at recess, Keiko takes it upon herself to hit one of the boys on the skull with a spade. At that point, after getting into trouble, Keiko decides to become a little rule follower, making her, upon high school graduation, a perfect candidate for convenience store worker.

Keiko is unusually attuned to the store’s needs, both at the macro and micro levels—responding to the store’s needs the way a mother might respond to her children. Remaining single, without much apparent interest in sex, Keiko works part-time and sustains a secularly ascetic existence until she’s thirty-six. Then she meets a man, creating the novel’s conflict, and I won’t reveal the ending because it’s pretty odd and yet satisfying. I do have a question for the author. Keiko is often more skilled in managing the store than her male, mostly younger managers (eight of them in eighteen years). Why does her demonstrated competency (all her colleagues acknowledge her abilities) ever put her in a position to become a manager herself? Is this author Murata’s point, a comment on Japanese culture? Or is she more concerned with portraying people who happen not to fit the mold of ordinary citizens and how society treats such people? 

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Tobias Wolff's Novel Old School

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'Mules and Men' a Treasure Trove

5/29/2020

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A WRITER'S WIT
I loathe heterosexual weddings. The wedding cake, the party, the champagne, the inevitable divorce two years later. It's just a waste of time in the heterosexual world, and in the homosexual world I find it personally beyond tragic that we want to ape this institution that is so clearly a disaster.
​Rupert Everett
Born May 29, 1959
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R. Everett

My Book World

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Hurston, Zora Neale. Mules and Men with a preface by Franz Boas, a foreword by Arnold Rampersad, illustrations by Miguel Covarrubias, and afterword by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: HarperCollins, 1990.

Part I consists of African-American folk tales that Hurston collects in the late 1920s and early 1930s in Florida. She begins in her hometown of Eatonville, primarily African-American. Amazing it is the number of times the word “mule” does appear in these tales, as if the beast is a metaphor for the “beasts” that white people take black men and women to be: though compliant, also stubborn, and intelligent. On the face of it, the tales might reflect a certain ignorance, but I think they simply reflect that slaves had to develop their own language because the whites refused to educate them in their own (if they themselves were versed well enough in English to do so).
 
Part II is about hoodoo (or voodoo), and Hurston heads for what she calls its capital, New Orleans, Louisiana. These passages are fascinating, as well. All throughout Hurston includes herself as a character. In order to retrieve the information she wants, she must become one of hoodoo’s adherents and spends much time and effort seeking to know its ways. She recreates for readers exact formulae for getting rid of one’s husband, for getting him back if she changes her mind, for many ways of dealing with one’s neighbors. Hurston never judges but fully participates, absorbing its, at times, headiness, as when she dizzies herself from dancing for forty straight minutes as part of a ceremony. 
 
In his afterword Henry Louis Gates (PBS’s Finding Your Roots) identifies Hurston’s proper historical place in American literature. After having achieved a higher education and published seven important books, she is virtually ignored or denounced by leading black male literary figures during the time she should be receiving accolades (among them Richard Wright). This happens, in part, because she identifies herself in a more "conservative," Clarence Thomas-like stance, in which she refuses to be defined by white people. It takes Alice Walker’s landmark 1975 article in Ms. to resurrect Hurston and bring her to the fore of American literary studies. As happens to many whose ideas are published ahead of their time, Hurston’s work languishes for decades amid a poverty of thought. If only she had not been shunned, she might not have died amid a more corporeal sort of poverty at age sixty-nine.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | The Letters of Cole Porter

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'Cleanness' a Superb Novel

5/22/2020

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A WRITER'S WIT
Let the bullets that rip through my brain smash through every closet door in the nation.
​Harvey Milk
Born May 22,1930
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H. Milk

My Book World

APOLOGIES  to my readers: At the last minute I substituted my profile of Garth Greenwell's  book for Alison Smith's. I shall post one of Smith's Name All the Animals in the near future.
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Greenwell, Garth. Cleanness. New York: Farrar, 2020.
​
I didn’t make one annotation on first reading of this novel (and I shall read it again), in part because it held me spellbound and in part because I wanted to experience vicariously the joyride the unnamed narrator (except for Gospodar, the Bulgarian word for Mister) is taking through his young life.
 
Gospodar (Gospodine to his pupils) teaches accelerated English at a high school in Sofia, Bulgaria, sometime in the last decade, and unravels his story of love and loss. At the same time, our Gospodar employs the powers of travelogue to acquaint readers with a post-Soviet culture still burdened with its corrupt architecture (crumbling worse than the geopolitical realm itself). The novel is part language lesson: Gospodar translates (upon first mention) each Bulgarian word or phrase and in such a way that one is acquainted with the word’s fullness. At one point, a male sex partner Gospodar has met online calls him Bulgarian for bitch. But the narrator doesn’t leave it there, massaging the meaning within the context of the indigenous culture. The novel is part love story, in which the narrator meets a man he only calls R (every character is reduced to a single initial, in some way protecting the identities of his co-characters, almost creating the feel that one is absorbing a roman à clef). I’ve never read such sensual yet meaningful sex scenes (for want of a better term). At one point, the narrator makes love to his lover, R, taking perhaps twenty minutes to kiss every part of the man’s body. When he is finished, his partner is attempting to hide his tears, the fact that perhaps no one has ever loved him so completely. These scenes, though graphic, serve a larger purpose, never feeling pornographic (if there is such a thing) or gratuitous.
 
Ultimately, the narrator and R end their relationship, because R hails from Lisbon, and cannot see finding a way to earn a living in Bulgaria. In the last major scene of the novel, the narrator parties with a few young men who have graduated from his school the year before. The three of them get very drunk, and the teacher, Gospodar, makes a play for one of the young men. He is horrified by his own behavior yet is willing to give into it at the same time, if enticed or encouraged by the student. He withdraws from the party just before making a fool of himself or endangering his reputation as a responsible adult. Gospodar does this throughout the book, brings himself to some sort of brink, only to pull back after exploring the full impact that the act is about to make (sometimes within a few seconds), thus making the character more like all of us, ready to jump yet waiting to defer to a better angel. 

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Zora Neale Hurston's Mules and Men

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Hyacinth Blue Is TimeLess

5/15/2020

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A WRITER'S WIT
The mind and heart sometimes get another chance, but if anything happens to the poor old human frame, why, it’s just out of luck, that’s all.
​Katherine Anne Porter
Born May 15, 1890
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K. A. Porter

My Book World

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Vreeland, Susan. Girl in Hyacinth Blue. New York: Penguin, 1999.
​
In contemporary times, a Philadelphia professor calls a colleague (who is an art scholar) into his locked study to reveal what he claims is an original work of the Dutch artist, Vermeer. The colleague argues against such a claim, but the man insists. He is in a bind because his father has confessed that he himself stole it from a Jewish home while he was working for the Nazis in WWII, but he cannot reveal such indicting provenance. Each succeeding chapter takes the reader farther back in history (à la the film The Red Violin) to reveal previous owners, right up to, the reader must assume, Vermeer himself. All owners are fascinated by the painting and yet must depend on its sale to save themselves or their family from financial disaster. The author explores the value of art. Is it entirely intrinsic, or is it monetary, or is it a bit of both? Vreeland manages to explore this unique idea in a poetic manner which is both compressed, yet expansive, a valuable topic for discussion. The novel is a timeless read, and I’m glad a friend recommended it to me long ago and that I finally took the time to read it.

​NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Alison Smith's  Name All the Animals

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Mississippi In Depth

5/8/2020

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A WRITER'S WIT
Beneath words and logic are emotional connections that largely direct how we use our words and logic.
​Jane Roberts
Born May 8, 1929
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J. Roberts

My Book World

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Walton, Anthony. Mississippi: An American Journey. New York: Viking, 1996.
​
This combination of “travel writing, history, and memoir,” as blurbed on the back cover is a profound work. Walton, noted poet and author, takes the reader on a multilayer journey. One of those journeys may be the physical. He tells of the move his Mississippian parents make from their home state to Chicago as young adults to establish a better life for their children. One is always aware of the physical: the hot Mississippi summer days, the fields of blindingly white cotton, the cool of air conditioning and iced drinks. Walton takes pains to give us a full history of the state, beginning with the Native Americans who occupy the land for centuries before others arrive and kill or move them off. He doesn’t stop there but gives us a history of the slave, the African-American: lynchings, beatings, the cold war that Whites take up against Blacks after the Civil War. But Walton’s journey of Mississippi, which begins mostly after he is an adult, includes memories of visiting family there, interviewing a broad range of white and black citizens. He describes the “polite” way that citizens treat each other, as long as one observes one’s role. He also describes the fight for the vote, which continues to this day. Included in his personal comments are original poems of note that help to illuminate his narrative. History. Travel. Poetry. He appeals to the broad spectrum of human perception and sensibility. I regret that it took me this long to read a book I bought in 2006, ten years after it was published. Yet Walton’s message is still a vibrant one of truth.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Garth Greenwell's novel, Cleanness
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This Book of Daniel Is Not in the Bible

5/1/2020

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 A WRITER'S WIT
One reason to fashion a story is to lift a grudge.
Bobbie Ann Mason
Born May 1, 1940
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B. Mason

My Book World

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​Smith, Aaron. The Book of Daniel: Poems. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh, 2019.

This poet's persona clearly has a crush on actor Daniel Craig and cleverly weaves together nearly fifty poems with pop culture in mind. A couple deal directly with our eponymous persona, Daniel, but many cover other icons. In “I Need My O’Hara Frank” he idolizes other poets:

I Need Sharons:
 
Tate and Olds,
but mostly Olds,
 
and never, ever
the Rose of.
​In “Celebrity,” he, stream-of-conscious style, connects the deaths of various celebs with himself:
Anne Sexton died in 1974, the year I was born.
Thomas James died in 1974 and was born
in Joliet, Illinois, where I was born. He wrote
Letters to a Stranger before he killed himself.
I’ve written three books few people read
and wanted to kill myself. He was 27 like
Joplin   Hendrix    Morrison   Cobain.
In the title poem, the persona levels with readers about Daniel Craig:
                                  I made a Daniel Craig scrapbook
called The Book of Daniel. For years I bought
every magazine with him on the cover. In Interview
he’s stripped to the waist, hopping around on the beach.
Jamie Dornan was in Interview, too: arms behind his
head in a bathtub. I fell in love with Daniel Craig
when he was stalked by a man in Enduring Love--
before he was Bond-hot and too famous.
​I rarely read a book of poetry in one sitting. To me, that’s like eating an entire box of chocolates in thirty minutes or less (which I’ve never done but know better than to try). Yet I found myself turning page after page, getting Smith's poetry when often I do not get what a poet wants me to. And when I was finished, it may also be the only book of poetry I turned around and read all the way through again. There.
NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Anthony Walton's Mississippi: An American Journey
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Gay Farm Boys

4/24/2020

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A WRITER'S WIT
I believe no matter how much you research a person's life. No matter how long you spend, the person always remains a mystery. I go by this quote that Mark Twain said about the definition of a biography: a biography is the clothes and buttons of a man or a woman but the real story is in the person's head and that you can never know. I don't think it's possible to get the whole picture, ever.
​Patricia Bosworth
​Born April 24, 1933
Died April 2, 2020 of COVID-19

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P. Bosworth

My Book World

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Fellows, Will. Farm Boys: Lives of Gay Men from the Rural Midwest. Madison: U of Wisconsin Press, 1998.
​
This book has been on my shelf for over twenty years. If I had read it when it was new, it might have seemed fresher. As it is, the men featured here, born between 1907 and 1967, seem stuck in their contemporary argot. I wonder if gay farm boys are still experiencing the same universals, some of which dovetail well with so-called urban gays. Young farm boys seem to have more interest in growing beautiful things like gardens instead of livestock; they enjoy cooking more than being outside. Insofar as it is possible, given small rural school districts, they become involved in the arts and often excel in them. Over and over again, you see gay farm boys say they don’t care for picking up tricks or one-night stands, that they would prefer long-term relationships but that rural life makes that kind openness impossible. The reader cannot imagine the number of these men who have sex with male siblings and other relatives before they begin to engage with and marry women. Perhaps the most prevalent commonality is the harm religion, particularly Catholicism, causes young boys and men as they search for a way to express their sexuality and find a partner with whom they can share a life. Like the urban gay youth, they more often than not experience a sympathetic mother and a distant or hostile father because the gay son doesn’t fall into line. By the end, I almost felt as if I were reading the same four or five profiles over and over again. And yet I know I wasn’t. Every gay man’s story has something in common with others and every story has its differences, its unique qualities, which set that man apart.
 
What would be interesting now would be for Fellows (or some other courageous writer/scholar with boundless energy) to interview gay farm boys born between 1970 and 1995. Have their experiences been different than the generations before them? How does arranging for sex online compare to picking someone up at a bar or at some Interstate rest room? Are fathers still as intractable about masculinity and what that means? Has the world at large made any dent at all into the sequestered lives of rural Americans? This fascinating book seems to invite an ongoing discussion in which these and other questions are explored.

NEXT FRIDAY:  My Book World | Aaron Smith's The Book of Daniel: Poems

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I Celebrate National Library Week

4/23/2020

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A WRITER'S WIT
Cutting libraries during a recession is like cutting hospitals during a plague.
Eleanor Crumblehulme
Library Assistant, University of British Columbia
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E. Crumblehulme

How the Library of Congress Helped Me Organize My Personal Library

In 2010, during a visit to Washington DC, Ken and I visited the Library of Congress. I wasn’t expecting much, just another bureaucratic governmental building of a nondescript nature. But I was surprised and delighted to discover its Beaux-Arts classical façade and elaborate interior. At that time, I began to wonder if I might organize my own library by way of the LC system. After all, by 2020, I owned over 1,300 volumes. Through the years, I had given away books I knew I would never read or read again. I finally gave away some of the assigned texts I had read at Southwestern College (making sure that the TTU Library had a copy in case I ever wanted to revisit those books).

​In the summer of 2019, I took a short break from writing, about five hours a day over five weeks in order to catalog my collection. I touched every hardback, examining its dust jacket or blurbs on the back of each paperback to see if I wanted to keep it. I touched each book again as I wrote the determined call number in pencil following the copyright page, touched it again as I labeled the spine, and touched it once more as I made a Word document accession list of my holdings. That would be so that in the future I could find what I wanted when I wanted it, something I had not always been able to do with my previous rather free-form mode of organization. (I also found duplicates of books I’d bought, not recalling that I already possessed a copy.)
The undertaking was an awesome (despite the weakening of that word) task to follow that procedure for every book, then reshelve the entire collection in the correct order. But since then, the job has proven valuable because I can quickly locate or reshelve a book and it has a “permanent” place, as do certain bytes in my laptop, as do certain memories in my brain. My collection is an integrated whole yet one that welcomes a new book by reserving a unique place for it.
 
How did I locate or generate all those LC call numbers? one might ask. I checked the copyright page of each book, especially if it was published sometime after the late 1980s. Very often the publisher had already acquired an LC number and all I had to do was copy it out. If the book did not have a call number, I consulted the TTU Library online catalog. I would say that I retrieved at least fifty percent of my numbers from there. Last, I discovered that the Library of Congress (duh) also sported its very own online catalog of vast holdings. That source gave me nearly the rest (or often I could “generate” a number similar to a different book by the same author). What about new books? They are often a bigger problem than old ones. Many publishers now seem to rush a book to publication without waiting to receive a call number from LC, and so it must sit on a separate shelf of mine until one day the LC catalog will list its call number. A librarian’s job is never done. Yay. It means one is always acquiring and reading new books.
 
I’ve enjoyed writing about my lifetime of library experiences this week. I might briefly say that the Lubbock City/County Libraries support one main building and three branches. I’ve used the main Mahon Library from time to time, particularly when reading fiction; my writing group has met in a small room there. If you have a comment or a library experience you would like to share with my readers, please leave it in the Comment section. If you enjoyed any of these posts, please copy the URL and send a link to your friends. Thank you.

TOMORROW: My Book World | Will Fellows's Farm Boys: Lives of Gay Men from the Rural Midwest
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Continuing to Celebrate National Library Week

4/22/2020

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A WRITER'S WIT
Libraries always remind me that there are good things in this world.
Lauren Ward
Personal Finance Writer
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L. Ward

Texas Tech University Library:
​1.7 Million Volumes Strong

PictureTexas Tech University Library | Photo by TTU
​In 1973-74, I earned my state certification in elementary teaching at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas. The University Library building of contemporary architecture had opened in the fall of 1962, and I was impressed with its sheer size, that the multiple floors of stacks would take a long time to fill, such a liberal amount had been accounted for. At that time, because of my having worked in the Southwestern College Library, one organized by the Library of Congress system, I easily procured a student job at the TTU Library (there is also a Law Library, an Architecture Library, and the Southwest Collection/Special Collections building). I worked exclusively for cataloging, which, at the time occupied the sprawling south wing. Again, I reshelved books and “read” the shelves, but I also worked for the cataloging librarian whenever she had projects for me. Perhaps because I was a bit older than most student workers, she trusted me to hunt down information in large Union Catalogs so that she could develop a call number for certain volumes. Once more, I found the library to be sort of a temple to learning, the heart of the university. Among other duties, however, I also ironed on call number labels to new or recataloged books. I strolled out to the large stand of card catalog cabinets and interfiled cards for those new books. Because of my class schedule, I worked an eight-hour day on Tuesdays and Thursdays. One of the younger librarians in the department wasn’t much older than me, and she would invite me to break with her in the faculty lounge over in the student union building. She advanced my LC training by giving me faster ways to recognize the correct order of books. I worked in the library that summer, and even after I had taught one year, I was given a job during the next summer when the extra money came in handy. 

Beginning in 1983, I began working on an MA in English, and the TTU Library once again became a necessary haunt of mine. The books I checked out largely came from the “PQ,” “PR,” or “PS,” sections. Since I retired in 2002, I visit the library infrequently, largely because of access. Oh, I do have circulation privileges as an alumni member. However, if I want to visit the library during the day, I must park off campus (at most a three-block walk) if I can’t garner one of the coveted Visitor spots. If I want to come after hours I can park in the library parking lot free but only after eight p.m. I’ve found the best time for a nonstudent to go is on weekends or during student holidays when the library maintains business hours only. And I learned NOT to go late on a Sunday afternoon because that’s when a lot of students begin thinking about the research paper that’s due Monday. Still, within those parameters, I’ve been able to conduct research projects related to my reading and writing. For example, a few years ago I tackled all works—twenty-four—of author Christopher Isherwood. I was able to check out about half of them from the TTU Library, thus saving me a bit of money. When I study the TTU Web site now, I am astounded at the changes that have taken place over nearly fifty years, for one, the digital experiences students can tap into. It has held onto and continued to add to its traditional core but also added a number of valuable digital sources. In short, the TTU Library is fabulous source for information.

TOMORROW: How the Library of Congress Helped Me Organize My Library
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Continuing to Celebrate National Library Week

4/21/2020

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 A WRITER'S WIT
I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of a library.
Jorge Luis Borges
Born 1899. Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator.

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J. Borges

SOUTHWESTERN COLLEGE LIBRARY --
SMALLER DOES NOT MEAN INFERIOR

PictureReading Room, Southwestern College Library, c1966 | Photo from 1967 Moundbuilder Yearbook
For three years in the late 1960s I worked in the library of my undergraduate school, Southwestern College in Winfield, Kansas. In part, I was trained by a young woman whose husband had just been hired as an instructor. She possessed a quiet, “library” voice, but if you displeased her, she would certainly let you know. She trained me to work circulation, checking in and out books at the front desk, but mostly my work was done in the stacks. The woman taught me that the SC library was catalogued according to the Library of Congress system, and once I learned it, I spent much of my time reshelving books. After a while, I was assigned to “read” the shelves. It was a tedious job in which I checked to make sure that books within an assigned section were arranged in the correct shelf list order. There were signs that asked people NOT to reshelve books, but often I would find books out of place and felt a certain satisfaction in returning them to their proper home. Sometimes the book would be off by a spot or two, a shelf or two, and sometimes it would belong to a shelf on the next floor! Among other things, I may have labeled the spines of new books with call letters. I would inevitably become curious about one and spend a bit of the college’s dime studying its contents. I was often one of the first to check out a book, and I would feel very privileged. Though I was a music major, I sometimes entertained the idea of going to library school or becoming a music librarian after graduation. That's how much I enjoyed my work.

The Deets Library, Southwestern College, Today — Stephen Woodburn, Photos
I was fascinated with the LC system, how it had a category for every subject in the world. As a pupil, off duty, I would roam the stacks, and once I learned what was what, I would browse, searching for what I needed. Just as often as not, this proved as good a method for research than merely studying the card catalog. If, say, I knew where a certain author’s books or a certain subject’s books were housed, I could go there immediately and find what I needed, searching through the books’ indexes or tables of contents. Even though the library contained only 250,000 volumes (I believe), I never seemed to have any problem locating what I needed to write my papers. The stacks also housed carrels where one could study in silence. Most weekday evenings, to avoid dormitory noise, I would head for one of those spots and spend three or four hours before the building closed at ten p.m. The library wasn’t just a place where I worked and studied. It felt like the heartbeat or perhaps the brain center of my education. I worked there until after graduation early into the summer. I soon missed it and the people I had gotten to know there.

TOMORROW: I Celebrate National Library Week | Texas Tech University Library
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Continuing to Celebrate National Library Week

4/20/2020

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A WRITERS' WIT
Google can bring you back 100,000 answers, a librarian can bring you back the right one.
Neil Gaiman
Born 1960. English author of short fiction, novels, comic books, graphic novels, audio theatre, and films.
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N. Gaiman

The Many Wichita Public Libraries

The city of Wichita, Kansas, where I grew up, has always seemed to put libraries at the top of its list of civic responsibilities. One of the first libraries was completed in 1908 where it was housed on the fourth floor of the City Building. It and the next two iterations of the central library are all located on the same block of Main Street (there are now six branch buildings located throughout the city).
 
I began visiting libraries early. At Wichita’s Longfellow Elementary, where over six hundred students filled a building constructed for fewer pupils than that, there wasn’t much room for a library, but toward the end of my time there, in 1960, I believe two classrooms were combined to form the library.
 
Still, especially in the summer, it was not enough library for me. My mother would load my siblings and me in the car and take us downtown to the Wichita Carnegie Library (opened 1915), about twenty blocks from our home. Later, I would board a public bus and make the trip by myself. I relished the smell of old books, paper thinned by all those fingers turning pages down the path of the next exciting plot. And in those days I mostly read for plot. I mean, I did fall in love with the characters I read about. I loved the settings the authors created. But mostly, I wanted to know where those characters were going, what they were doing or what they were going to do to solve their myriad problems. I adored climbing the stairs to search for books in the stacks, attempting to read all the books of a favored author before moving on to another.
PictureStudents Transfer Books to Wichita Library c1966 | Wichita Photo Archive
In 1965, with one year left before I went away to college, a new library opened across the street on Main. Note the photograph where public high school students create a chain by which they move books from one building to the next. I didn’t get to use that building much, but I appreciated that it was air conditioned and admired the open architecture, which today still maintains a decidedly twentieth-century if not “contemporary” look. In 2003, even though I had not lived in Wichita for decades I emailed a research librarian to help me find information about the old Miller Theater, as I was in the process of writing a fictional piece around the long defunct building. For a modest fee, I received help from an efficient young woman when she mailed me photocopies of material about the Miller. The story was later published in an online journal, Eclectica, as “Tales of the Millerettes.” And just recently, the 1965 library building was replaced by yet another edifice called the Advanced Learning Library, a building I’ve yet to visit.
 
No matter how small, libraries maintain important places in our lives. They can fill certain voids from which our individual lives may suffer. Today, in honor of National Public Library Week, think about your first library, and what it contributed to your life. Make a donation!

TOMORROW: I Celebrate National Library Week: Southwestern College Library

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