Book talkin'

Dalton Conley�s Honky (University of California Press, 2000) fascinatingly relates the tales of a "white boy" who grew up in the projects of Manhattan's Lower East Side. There his downwardly mobile family lived in what he and his sister called a "ghetto penthouse", a twice-broken-into 21st floor apartment sometimes reachable only via partly-dark stairwell. What's especially compelling is Conley's perspective on racial and class identity and mobility. First attending a public school segregated into African American, Puerto Rican, and Chinese classes, Conley switched to one in Greenwich Village where the teachers spoke quietly and nerdiness wasn't a character flaw. At the end, Conley reflects on some of the privileges that helped get him through childhood alive. (His best friend was shot; young Conley burned down a friend's apartment; another acquaintance is now doing 25 years for a drug crime; but Conley continued to college and now teaches at NYU.)

In the South Bronx of America, photographs by Mel Rosenthal (Curbstone Press, 2000). Humans living in what look to be bombed-out hulks of buildings, amid rubble. A sheet with the words painted on it: PEOPLE STILL LIVE ON THIS GOD FORSAKEN BLOCK. Thanks to a policy of "planned shrinkage" (a euphemism): 75,000 apartments lost in the South Bronx, many of them to arson. These shocking facts and statistics combined with humanizing images, are accompanied by an essay by Martha Rosler on photography of socially marginal groups.

Robert Ellis Gordon�s The funhouse mirror: reflections on prison (Washington State University Press, 2000) presents insightful essays and anecdotes about the author�s experience teaching writing to prisoners, as well as stories by some of his students, most of whom were convicted of violent crimes. The best of these confront the reader with ugly truths, which--if acknowledged--are a necessary first step toward positive social change. In "The Lie," Ellis describes the cheerful Chamber of Commerce map of Monroe, Washington, a document which fails to note any evidence of the town�s four prisons (employing a fifth of the population).

Dear, dear Brenda: the love letters of Henry Miller to Brenda Venus (Morrow, 1986) shows at least these two things: that joie de vivre, sexual appetite and imagination may remain strong even as a person approaches a 90th birthday... and that a beautiful young woman can love a much older man. These randy, ribald, direct letters contain plenty of reading recommendations and film suggestions, detailed accounts of erotic dreams, amorous descriptions of Brenda's body and mind, and confessions of gratitude. Yes, gratitude, because there was a certain functionality to this relationship: Brenda helped Henry feel younger and more alive, kept his imagination fertile and active, while Henry fed Brenda praise, affirmation, and personal contacts, not to mention mini-tutorials in literature and philosophy.

In fact there is something heartening here, vibrant:

"I kiss you in some unknown area."

"Forgive my unspoken desires."

"You've taken me to your heart. Now take me other places!"

"You asked me last night if I thought things came to you when you stopped trying. I can repeat yes, because things are always trying to reach us, but it is we (through our ignorance) who block these efforts on the part of God, destiny, or what you will. Faith is the great thing. Faith even when everything seems to be going wrong."

"This is a difficult letter for me to write to you. I reread your marvelous letter to me and was moved to tears, But, I have a little bone to pick with you. In your letter you say that I never ask anything of you, that you are the one who asks.
Brenda, that disturbed me. Only a letter or two ago I wrote you a special letter, asking if you would grant me a 'little' favor. (Forgive me if I call it a little favor.) Anyway, you ignored the plea. In a way, and you are aware of it, I am sure, ever since I [have known] you I have been silently asking the same question. As you well surmise, it has to do with sex..."

"If only I were forty years younger."

George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia (first published in 1938) describes the author's experiences as a British radical fighting with an international militia in the Spanish Civil War. Written just after he returned to the UK, it is--on one hand--a fascinating battlefront account, describing bleak foxhole life, participation in a badly armed unit, even his own experience of being shot through the neck. (With a understated style, Orwell's story sometimes crosses over into black humor.) That said, the book is also a political analysis of the internecine struggle within the broad anti-Fascist, anti-Franco movement, focusing on how a revolutionary movement (led in part by anarchists) was sabotaged by Communists through a massive propaganda effort. As such, it is an excellent case study in media manipulation, still cogent today.

Franz Wright's The beforelife (Knopf, 2001) is a small compilation of spare poems written over a recent one-year period. Much of it is bleak, bespeaking struggle. Some of it is pretty good:

You were gone love
voice invisible
presence

for lack of which
welling up
how would I live

No lightbulbs
And how would I write
without
light

corner of Nowhere and Everywhere, I swear

on my own grave
I'll never move again

Anne Carson's The beauty of the husband: a fictional essay in 29 tangos (Knopf, 2001) tells a story of marriage, love, and betrayal in blank verse such as this:

"for what is more true

than a snowy night, down it comes
sifting over branches and railings and the secret air itself,
down the steep, down the stops, down the deepenings, down the grooves in the nails�"

"�let's suppose your husband and a certain dark woman
like to meet at a bar in early afternoon.
Love is not conditional.
Living is very conditional.
The wife positions herself in a veranda across the street.
Watches the dark woman
reach out to touch his temple as if filtering something onto it.
Watches him
bend slightly toward the woman then back. They are both serious.
Their seriousness wracks her.
People who can be serious together, it goes deep.
They have a bottle of mineral water on the table between them
and two glasses.
No inebriants necessary!
When did he develop
this puritan new taste?
A cold ship

moves out of harbor somewhere way inside the wife
and slides off toward the flat gray horizon�"

Lyle Neff's Full magpie dodge (Anvil Press, 2000) is a first collection of poetry which shows a talent for playing with words but not much evidence of depth, heart, or soul. Here's the highlight, I think:

Moving

Deathbed Speech, Hopefully

It's been the usual life in all ways--
got mauled some days, had friends, sprawled in a maze,
got real stark love from some, made others sick,
had days of dirt, times of good coin--why does it

Strike me so extraordinarily, to
sit hospitalized, silent, on this tomb
stone bed in the smell of blood, wild and gleeful,
scared, my life's been shaded, lit, wonderful

Joyce Sutphen's Coming back to the body: poems (Holy Cow! Press, 2000) is above average.

Late in the Century

Sometimes my world slips
on its axis and words
lose their letters.
I say one name
and mean
another.

I know I will not always
return to you, nor will
you come back
to me. This is
the modern
world.

Knowing this, I drink
all the bright light
from a cup of
red hibiscus
opened this
morning.

Already there is darkening
in the leaves. Every
minute eats the next
with a ferocious
and delicate
appetite.

Earth apples: the poetry of Edward Abbey (St. Martin�s Press, 2000) ranges from doggerel to rough diamonds. Best are "Black Sun," "American Picnic," and this:

"Benedictio: May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing views. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets� towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottoes of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you--beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.
So long."

Raymond Queneau's Exercises in style (translated by Barbara Wright; J. Calder, 1979) retells the same brief incident in 99 ways, understatedly, metaphorically, vernacularly, in various verse forms, expressed in negative terms, as correspondence, etcetera. At its best, it reads like a comical Monty Python sketch, and yet suggests itself as a device for those who teach writing. My favorites: Double Entry, Onomatopoeia, Abusive, and Gastronomical. (There are wonderful illustrations as lagniappe, using human bodies contorted into letters of the alphabet.)

Wislawa Szymborska's Poems: new and collected, 1957-1997 (Harcourt, 1998) is a nice English language introduction to the work of the 1996 Nobel Prize for Literature winner. Translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh, these poems are characterized by two of the author's own lines from "Our Ancester�s Short Lives":

"�if joy, then with a touch of fear;
if despair, then not without some quiet hope."

Lawrence Sutin�s A postcard memoir (Greywolf Press, 2000) pairs brief personal essays and prose poems with the old postcard images that inspired them. The result is a hodgepodge of poignancy mixed with the mundane. In some of the more satisfying pieces Sutin examines childhood sexuality and interpersonal relationships from his past. The best testify to the power of the imagination: If we are able to skillfully shape our pasts, can we also change our future?

I've been reading the micro-press, some of which is pretty good. Zine highlights include Celia Perez's I Dreamed I was Assertive, the first issue of which contained an interesting interview with Chicano cartoonist Jaime Hernandez, a rant about teaching 6th graders at a hellish sounding school, a letter from Celia's father about his homeland Cuba, a recipe for sugar skulls, y mucho mas. This publication dates from late 1998; subsequently Celia entered library school and I'm looking forward to reading issue #3 (published earlier this year) which includes an excerpt from a paper she wrote about zines in libraries. Celia also published a limited edition booklet (no more available, I think), titled Gringolandia. Send good things to Celia Perez, 214 S. Cedar St., #3, Tampa, FL 330606. Email: [email protected]. Website: not quite ready for prime time.

Thanks to Phlox Icona for sending me a copy of the great looking zine titled Spunk; omigawd it's lovely, issue #6: silkscreen printed on kraft paper, yarn bound, hand-colored, and full of reviews of the best zines, plus a refreshingly candid comment about the magazine where I work, Utne Reader. Lots of letters in it from people I know or sort of know. More about this one later. Meanwhile, send good things to Violet Jones, Box 55336, Hayward, CA 94545.

The ballad of the two-headed boy is a dark, minimalist, nearly wordless graphic book ostensibly "by Abel Brekhus," though copyright info at the back identifies the artist as Anders Nilsen. Published under the rubric "Airplane Press" thanks to a grant from the Xeric Foundation, such a bleak little book, like autumn with its musty smell of decay, provoked in me an odd feeling akin to real happiness. (Cover price: $7.) Nilsen is also responsible for the nice mini-comic Big Questions, featuring wee talking birds and philosophy. Issue #3 has lovely color covers and I think that you should write for one ($2.50 cover price): 2867 N. Milwaukee, Chicago, IL 60618. Email: [email protected]

I've been reading several books at once, in part with a mind to finding one worth recommending to a quarter million readers in the next issue of Utne Reader. Among these: Andre Schiffrin's The business of books: how international conglomerates took over publishing and changed the way we read (Verso, 2000), bell hooks' All about love: new visions (William Morrow, 2000), Matthew Appleton's A free range childhood: self regulation at Summerhill School (Foundation for Educational Renewal, 2000), and Alexander Theroux's The strange case of Edward Gorey (Fantagraphics, 2000).

I�d like to just keep reading Mark Twain. The adventures of Huckleberry Finn carries on where The adventures of Tom Sawyer left off, but is a much more mature, ambitious book, in part a long, scathing black comedy about slavery and hypocrisy. Both are available, along with other Twain works, at Ever The Twain Shall Meet. Cool beans, as my friend Michelle would say.

"Don't it s'prize you de way dem kings carries on, Huck?"
"No," I says, "it don't."
"Why don't it, Huck?"
"Well it don't, because it's in the breed. I reckon they're all alike."
"But, Huck, dese kings o' ourn is reglar rapscalions; dat's jist what dey is; dey's reglar rapscallions."
"Well, that's what I'm a-saying; all kings is mostly rapscallions, as fur as I can make out."
"Is dat so?"
"You read about them once--you'll see. Look at Henry the Eight; this 'n' 's a Sunday-school superintendent to him. And look at Charles Second, and Louis Fourteen, and Louis Fifteen, and James Second, and Edward Second, and Richard Third, and forty more; besides all them Saxon heptarchies that used to rip around so in old times and raise Cain. My, you ought to seen old Henry the Eight when he was in bloom. He was a blossom. He used to marry a new wife every day, and chop off her head next morning. And he would do it just as indifferent as if he was ordering up eggs. 'Fetch up Nell Gwynn,' he says. They fetch her up. Next morning, 'Chop off her head!' And they chop it off. 'Fetch up Jane Shore,' he says; and up she comes. Next morning, 'Chop off her head'--and they chop it off. 'Ring up Fair Rosamun.' Fair Rosamun answers the bell. Next morning, 'Chop off her head.' And he made every one of them tell him a tale every night; and he kept that up until he had hogged a thousand and one tales that way, and then he put them all in a book, and called it Domesday Book--which was a good name and stated the case..."

As an aside, I like how Mark Twain made up words like "googling" ("like a jug that's googling out buttermilk") and "squshed" (all squshed down).

Mark Twain�s The adventures of Tom Sawyer is amusing--and early on made me wonder if Matt Groening consciously based Bart Simpson on Tom. There�s something about homeless Huck, though, that�s especially winning. On being taken in by Widow Douglas, Huck rants:

�I got to wear them blamed clothes that just smothers me, Tom; they don�t seem to any air git through them somehow; and they�re so rotten nice that I can�t set down, nor lay down, nor roll around anywher�s; I hain�t slid on a cellar door for--well, it �pears to be years; I got to go to church and sweat and sweat--I hate them ornery sermons! I can�t ketch a fly in there, I can�t chaw. I got to wear shoes all Sunday. The widder eats by a bell; she goes to bed by a bell; she gits up by a bell--everything�s so awful reg�lar a body can�t stand it.

When Tom interjects that�s the way everybody does it, Huck continues:

�Tom, it don�t make no difference. I ain�t everybody, and I can�t stand it. It�s awful to be tied up so. And grub comes too easy--I don�t take no interest in vittles, that way. I got to ask to go a-fishing; I got to ask to go a-swimming--dern�d if I hain�t got to ask to do everything....The widder wouldn�t let me smoke; she wouldn�t let me yell, she wouldn�t let me gape, nor stretch, nor scratch... And dad fetch it, sahe prayed all the time! I never see such a woman! I had to shove, Tom--I just had to.

Mark Twain's Pudd�nhead Wilson, a short novel first published serially in 1893-94, deliciously pans the idiocy of race and exposes lesser human foibles. It does this partly through chapter epigraphs ostensibly drawn from "Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar" (e.g., "Nothing needs reforming so much as other people�s habits" and "Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example"). The book's plot centers around a switching of male infants, one of whom is 1/32 "black" and a slave; a crisis comes years later after he learns his true identity after having grown up privileged. Twain's refreshing words are a balm for those sick of reading --or beginning to read and then tossing away with disgust--stories which are vapid and soullessly ironic, clever at best, ludicrously solipsistic, or well-intentioned but hopelessly didactic.

I�ve been reading a dozen books or more at once. Some of these are single-author poetry compilations better left unnamed, variably pretentious, vapid, prosaic, unfathomably arcane. A notable few I will cite:

Diane Ackerman�s I praise my destroyer (Random House, 1998) is a largely disappointing (and even regrettable) amalgam of poems, too many of them which ought to have stayed private, written for one person. On the other hand, I love these five lines from the title poem:

�...and it was grace to live
among the fruits of summer, to love by design,
and walk the startling Earth
for what seemed
an endless resurrection of days.�

And these nice lines on apricots:

�Somewhere between a peach and prayer,
they taste of well water
and butterscotch and dried apples
and desert simooms and lust.�

I�ve always been a fan of New Rivers Press and their Minnesota Voices Project. Two new books of poetry from this series, with nearly matching covers: Richard Broderick�s Woman Lake and Susan Steger Welsh�s Rafting on the water table. Despite the aquatic nature of these titles, both seem more earthbound than buoyant, only occasionally moving, the way a scrap of paper might briefly ride the wind. Some of Broderick�s repeat themselves--which some might find interesting for comparison, but which made me wonder: why didn�t he choose the best? In my favorites, Broderick compares his favorite secret childhood places with how he feels in the arms of his lover, and writes about folding sheets with his partner as if it were a sort of dance. Welsh wins points from me simply for mentioning seed art (in �The Patience of Grass�). I also like �In defense of semicolons� and �Audition for a love poem.� The latter includes these lines:

�The sound of my name on your lips--
Those two
particular syllables rising
up through your throat,
over tongue, teeth, lips.
I overhear you talking
to someone else at a party,
feel the vibration of my name
rolling outward.
Say it again.�

Nice.

Bill Holm's Eccentric islands: travels real and imaginary (Milkweed Editions, 2000) is enough to make me want to go to Iceland.

"Icelandic country dances are famous; they begin late and go till the last dancer drops, often at an hour when puritans rise from bed. The invariably skilled bands play every conceivable sort of music: old time waltzes, polkas, fox-trots, sambas, bossa novas, cha-chas, tangos, rock and roll, country western, square dances, funky chickens--and probably if you asked them: pavanes, galliards, minuets, and gavottes. Everyone dance with everyone, children with grandpas, mothers with sons, old with young, choose your sex but choose somebody. They dance hard and they dance steady. They are not shy about moving their feet and often old farmers are astonishingly graceful ballroom dancers. When they have worked themselves into a sweat, they go to the parking lot with flasks and swig grandly on white lightning. Sometimes they get drunk and fight--but it always has the feeling of ritual, not of passion or hatred. Sometimes they get randy and kiss everyone in sight and make outrageous propositions for dalliances. The actors at an Icelandic country dance are not small hearted or timid, and they don't like it very much if you insist on being a purse-lipped disapprover or a constipated puritan. A dance is a serious matter, and you had damned well better enjoy it.

And so we all did. Holm can no more dance than he can speak Icelandic or play hockey, but that night, by God, he danced. He flirted. He made a fool of myself. He kissed several women he had never met. He did not fight but he laughed, and then he danced some more, probably destroyed thirty or forty perfectly respectable Icelandic toes. He may have been the tango king. He doesn't remember. What he does remember is Porhalla's laughter as she loaded them all back into the Land Rover to drive an hour north from the sloshing Atlantic at the bottom of the long fjord, back home, home on the island where he first shouted out to all the interior angels: The hell with continents. Let me die here where I can be thrown into the sea to circle the planet forever as a pink whale, spouting the foam of poetry up into the chilly air."

Cristina Peri-Rossi�s Dostoevsky�s last night (Picador USA, 1995; translated from Spanish by Laura C. Dail) is a short novel written in the voice of a male magazine editor for whom gambling represents a form of erotica. Like Peri-Rossi�s latest, Solitaire of Love (review forthoming in Utne Reader), it entails a blend of desire and analysis that I found full of life.

"We should all change our profession sometime, Lucia. The doctor, who after twenty years of treating heart attacks, comas, cancers, colon obstructions, feels nothing but indifference in the face of pain and dath; the professor who doubts his own knowledge or the possibility of transmitting any kind of it; the secretary who no longer feels revulsion for the company's secrets; the revolutionary who is tired of history; the delegate who is obligated by his party to vote 'yes'; the housewife who's raised four kids and a husband, whose only distraction is the little bit of fun she gets feeding the slot machines on her way back from the store. We should also change cities, parents, children, friends, lovers."

"'Desire is exhausting,' I acknowledge. 'But giving up desire makes you sick,' Lucia states. 'Psychoanalysts' offices are full of such sick people.'"

"Life's best cigarette is the one smoked after making love."

"In an era when intelligence is muffled and lifeless, like a limp prick, because the vast majority (we live under the dictatorship of the Vast Majority) live and die without ever using it. To be born, live, and die one need only learn a few mechanical lessons: put a plug in a socket, press a button, manipulate a computer, drive a car, sign a check, obtain credit, watch TV. 'What exactly is this "magnificent elation" like for you?' Lucia asks. 'A state of grace,' I answer quickly. 'The divine grace of the ancient Christians that produced miracles, or, for the poets, the inspiration that issued from the muses...'"

"When she stops laughing, the world grows dim: darkness, pain, and death return."

"I have never been able to console myself of the absence of one woman by the presence of another woman."

"A psychoanalyst is like a mother with many children; no one is privileged. Each one wants to be the favorite; receive more love, more touches, more protection, more admiration. But she distributes her time and attention equitably; forty-five minutes for each one, same price. But deep down, each one believes he is the chosen one."

"If she was ever naive, it must have been during her first seven days as an embryo."

"Why didn't I say to Claudia: 'I'm sorry. You don't know how sorry I am. You don't know how much I hurt. What a shame. I love you in some strange, detrimental but immensely compassionate way. I still love you.' Then I smiled: what a delirious speech."

"The world is full of men with an inflated sense of self-worth and women with a lack of it."

"'If you call me "sensible," I just may run out of here and go straight to a casino. Like Don Quixote,' I add, 'sensibleness kills me.'"

"True desires are unutterable."

"Let's respect that silence in which the desire is gestating, growing, like a new creature."

Beth Kephart�s Into the tangle of friendship (Houghton Mifflin, 2000) thoughtfully examines and reflects upon the author�s relationships with important people in her life.

"Friendship... a roughing up and a letting down. It was the way I shared what I loved and discovered what was worth sharing; the way I wasted the day, or fractions of the day; the way I knew how big or strong or good or protected or likable I--for that small instant--was."

"A letter sent for no good reason. A joke only two people understand."

"Friendships matter; they rebut death, they tie us to this earth, and, when we�re gone, they keep us here; our friends remember us."

"Unlikely friends allow each other to dream on, to rearrange or appropriate the world in ways those outside their circle can neither grasp nor affect. Differences may stack up tall around them--class, age, religion, race, gender--but something bigger than all that makes them safe and strong in eachother�s company.. Truman Capote�s stories are filled with lovely discrepant friendships between old ladies and young boys, companions with little in common save a neediness and an imagination."

"We live on fragments on an entirely fragile crust; we are exposed to the serendipity of the sky. Houses, music, passions, and also friendships provide a patterning calm despite all the evidence to the contrary, all the rocks moving at our feet, all the gasping metals. But friendship too can become its own puissant chaos, the shattering antithesis of calm.... 'Are you okay?' Lately I�ve learned to ask the question first.... These days, often, I find that another friend is under siege."

Ironically, it took my joining the staff of Utne Reader to begin reading Harper's and The New Yorker on an occasional basis. The July 10 issue of the latter includes an excellent profile of Paul Farmer, physician and author who works in Haiti with AIDS patients ("The good doctor," by Tracy Kidder) and a personal piece about memory by Andre Aciman (author of Out of Egypt).

Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary is noted in Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory. Reporting that his father had inscribed a volume with the words '"The unsurpassed pearl of French literature," Nabokov appends agreement ("a judgment that still holds"). If the 1976 Illinois State Lottery ticket in my paperpack edition is a fair indicator (I believe it is), I picked up this entertaining novel about adultery about 23 years before finally reading it.

"The boldness of his desire protested against the servility of his conduct, and, with a kind of naive hypocrisy, he felt that being forbidden to see her gave him a right to love her."

"He became accustomed to living alone. The new delights of independence soon made his solitude more bearable. He could now change the hours of his meals, come or go without giving any explanations, lie down and spread his arms and legs from one side of the bed to the other when he was tired."

"Emma would have preferred to be married at midnight..."

"He was capable of seeing differences, of discriminating between imagination and fanaticism. In the tragedy of Athalie, for example, he condemned the ideas but admired the style, cursed the conception but praised all the details, was exasperated by the characters but enthusiastic about their speeches. He was carried away when he read the most famous passages, but he was distressed when he reflected that the priests were turning them to their own advantage; these contradictory feelings were so confusing that he would have liked to place a wreath on Racine's brow with his own hands and argue with him at the same time."

L�on was tired of loving without having anything to show for it..."

"She repeated to herself, 'I have a lover! I have a lover!' and the thought gave her a delicious thrill, as though she were beginning a second puberty. At last she was going to possess the joys of love, that fever of happiness she had despaired of ever knowing. She was entering a marvelous realm in which everything would be passion, ecstasy and rapture; she was surrounded by vast expanses of bluish space, summits of intense feeling sparkled before her eyes, and everyday life appeared far below in the shadows between these peaks.

She remembered the heroines of novels she had read, and the lyrical legion of those adulterous women began to sing in her memory with sisterly voices that enchanted her. It was as though she herself were becoming part of that imaginary world, as though she were making the long dream of her youth come true by placing herself in the category of those amorous women she had envied so much. Furthermore, she had a satisfying feeling of vengeance. How she had suffered! But now she was triumphing, and love, so long repressed, was gushing forth abundantly with joyous effervescence."

"[Emma] glared at Charles with blazing eyes that were like two fiery arrows ready to shoot forward. Everything about him exasperated her now: his face, his clothes, what he did not say, his entire person, his very existence. She repented of her past virtue as though it had been a crime... She reveled in all the malicious ironies of triumphant adultery."

"...the eternal monotony of passion..."

"...she would stay up all night reading lurid novels full of orgiastic scenes and bloody deeds. Often, seized with terror, she would utter a cry. Charles would come running in, but she would say to him, 'Oh, go away!'"

Viktor Frankl�s oft-cited Man�s search for meaning: an introduction to logotherapy (4th ed., Beacon Press, 1992) describes firsthand concentration camp experiences during World War II with the intent of showing not only how people were able to go on living despite the direst of circumstances, but also how even a dignified suffering and death are meaningful. In reading it I could not help but be reminded of oppressive workplaces I have known where a prison camp pathology held sway.

Remembering a former prisoner friend of mine who�d read the book, I�d already intuited Frankl�s basic message: that meaning is found in responsible action (one�s creative work and daily behavior), by experiencing something (�such as goodness, truth, and beauty�) and loving, and in the freedom to control one�s own attitude (to think, dissent, laugh at oneself, maintain dignity, be courageous).

There is basic truth in Frankl�s words, some of which echo Lao Tsu (Tao te Ching) on the wisdom of paradox, accepting, embracing, bending, not breaking.

Frankl comments on contemporary culture and the predilection of people to consult psychoanalysts not to treat neuroses but in an attempt to address real problems and philosophical/spiritual questions. He also cautions: �Freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness. I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.�

First published in German in 1946, the book�s minefield of pseudogeneric male pronouns challenged my patience somewhat. I hope they�ll be replaced if a fifth edition is published.

Vladimir Nabokov's autobiography, Speak, Memory articulates memories from a priviliged childhood in Russia, living on a family estate with parents, siblings, and about fifty servants. At first a bit horrifying--and perhaps prevaricative as when Nabokov describes the synaesthetic representation of letters by exact colors--it soon mesmerizes with lush descriptions, many of which retroactively connect childhood meaning with Nabokov's adult development. Both pretentious and wonderful, it carefully attends to sensually illustrating the author's boyhood governesses, tutors, mania for lepidoptery, discovery of poetry, first love, family, and Russian emigre life after the revolution.

I picked up a mass market paperback copy recently among used books being sold at the Bayfield (Wisconsin) Public Library. Thanks are due to my friend Nicole for the tip on its wonderfulness.

During the course of reading it I jotted down a couple of dozen words to look up in my Webster's Third. "Ophryon," for one: the point above the nose and between the eye sockets.

About passports, I heard a pre-echo to Paul Theroux: "the smaller the country the worse fuss they made."

About his father's mother: "In a flowering silk gown and net mitts, a period piece rather than a live person, she spent most of her life on a couch, fanning herself with an ivory fan. A box of boules de gomme, or a glass of almond milk were always within her reach, as well as a hand mirror, for she used to repowder her face, with a large pink puff, every hour or so, the little mole on her cheekbone showing through all that flour, like currant. Notwithstanding the languid aspects of her usual day, she remained an extraordinarily hardy woman and made a point of sleeping near a wide-open window all year round. One morning, after nightlong blizzard, her maid found her lying under a layer of sparkling snow which had swept over her bed and her, without infringing upon the healthy glow of her sleep."

About butterflies: "The mysteries of mimicry had a special attraction for me... Consider the imitation of oozing poison by bubblelike macules on a wing (complete with pseudo-refraction), or by glossy yellow knobs on a chysalis ('Don't eat me--I have already been squashed, sampled, and rejected'). Consider the tricks of an acrobatic caterpillar (of the Lobster Moth) which in infancy looks like bird's dung, but after molting develops scrabbly hymenopteroid appendages and baroque characteristics, allowing the extraordinary fellow to play two parts (like the actor in Oriental shows who becomes a pair of intertwisted wrestlers): that of a writhing larva and that of a big ant seemingly harrowing it. When a certain moth resembles a certain wasp in shape and color, it also walks and moves its antennae in a waspish, unmothlike manner. When a butterfly has to look like a leaf, not only are all the details of a leaf beautifully rendered but markings mimicking grub-bored holes are generously thrown in. 'Natural selection,' in the Darwinian sense, could not explain the miraculous coincidence of imitative behavior, nor could one appeal to the theory of 'the struggle for life' when a protective device was carried to a point of mimetic subtlety, exuberance, and luxury far in excess of a predator's power of appreciation. I discovered in nature the nonutilitarian delights that I sought in art. Both were a form of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and deception."

About poetry, to which the entire eleventh chapter is excellently devoted, Nabokov compares early efforts of his as being "hardly anything more than a sign I made of being alive, or passing or having passed, or hoping to pass, through certain intense human emotions... a phenomenon of orientation rather than of art, thus comparable to stripes of paint on a roadside rock or to a pillared heap of stones marking a mountain trail." He goes on to write that "in a sense, all poetry is positional: to try to express one's position in regard to the universe embraced by consciousness, is an immemorial urge. The arms of consciousness reach out and grope, and the longer they are the better. Tentacles, not wings, are Apollo's natural members. Vivian Bloodmark, a philosophical friend of mine, in later years, used to say that while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time...." The summer when Nabokov was fifteen, "in the course of the languid ramble that accompanied the making of my first poem," he ran into the village schoolmaster and "registered simultaneously and with equal clarity not only his wilting flowers, his flowing tie and the blackheads on the fleshy volutes of his nostrils, but also the dull little voice of a cuckoo coming from afar, and the flash of a Queen of Spain settling on the road, and the remembered impression of the pictures (enlarged agricultural pests and bearded Russian writers) in the well-aerated classroom of the village school which I had once or twice visited; and--to continue a tabulation that hardly does justice to the ethereal simplicity of the whole process--the throb of some utterly irrelevant recollection (a pedometer I had lost) was released from a neighboring brain cell, and the savor of the grass stalk I was chewing mingled with the cuckoo's note and the fritillary's takeoff, and all the while I was richly, serenely aware of my own manifold awareness.

About pathetic "magic lantern" shows at his house: "Now that I come to think of it, how tawdry and tumid they looked, those jellylike pictyures, projected upon the damp linen screen (moisture was supposed to make them blossom more richly), but, on the other hand, what loveliness the glass slides as such revealed when simply held between finger and thumb and raised to the light--translucent miniatures, pocket wonderlands, neat little worlds of hushed luminous hues! In later years, I rediscovered the same precise and silent beauty at the bottom of a microscope's magic shaft. In the glass of the slide, meant for projection, a landscape was reduced, and this fired ones fancy; under the microscope, an insect's organ was magnified for cool study. There is, it would seem, in the dimensional scale of the world a kind of delicate meeting place between imagination and knowledge, a point, arrived at by diminishing large things and enlarging small ones, that is intrinsically artistic."

Sapphire's Push (A. A. Knopf, 1996) is a short compelling novel written in the voice of 18-year-old Harlem resident Precious Jones, mother of two children (at ages 12 and 16) conceived after she was raped by her father.

"After park liberry on 124th. I got libry car. Nex door libry is none house. Nones live ther serve god don fuck. Rhonda say you go in basement where nones live is babee bones. Rita say das a lie. She Kathlic. I say God. Sho me god..."

"I don't know what 'realism' mean but I do know what REALITY is and it's a motherfucker, lemme tell you."

Paul Theroux�s The pillars of Hercules (G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1995), is an incisive and entertaining account of the author�s solo journey around the Mediterranean--mostly via ferry and train--in backwater towns during the off-peak season. Especially interesting for its pictures of life in Albania, Syria, and other places not often touted by the Sunday travel pages, it had me reading aloud at points, a good sign.

Theroux does go upscale for a time and reports about his experiences on a luxury cruise ship. When his waiter on the Seabourn Spirit suggests �the Two Salmon Terrine with caviar and tomato, followed by Essence of Pigeon with Pistachio Dumplings,� Theroux responds:

�As I mentioned the other day, I try not to eat anything with a face... which is why I had the asparagus and truffles last night, and the stir-fried vegetables.�
�Yes, sir.�
�Nor anything with legs.�
�Yes, sir.�
�Nor anything with a mother.�
�No fish, then.�
�Fish is a sort of vegetable, I said.�

Theroux on bullfighting: "Institutionalized sadism."

In The Old Patagonian Express, Theroux wrote of his meeting with Jorge Luis Borges. Here he spends a short time with Naguib Mahfouz and Paul Bowles. About the latter he writes: �He seemed at once preoccupied, knowledgeable, worldly, remote, detached, vain, skeptical, eccentric, self-sufficient, indestructible, egomaniacal, and hospitable to praise. He was like almost every other writer I had known in my life.�

Ken Lamberton's Wilderness and razor wire: a naturalist's observations from prison(Mercury House, 2000) is a fine book I actually read about six weeks ago, then touted in Utne Reader. From the southern Arizona desert, an incarcerated biology teacher writes clearly--yet metaphorically--about obstinate trees, tenacious weeds, and predatory arachnids. This "drive-by desert" wilderness intimately mirrors the author�s own struggles.

Cristina Peri Rossi's Solitaire of love (Duke University Press, 2000). Intense. Review forthcoming in Utne Reader.

Raymond Briggs' Ethel & Ernest: a true story (A. A. Knopf, 1999) is not so much "graphic novel" as graphic biography. By turns humorous and poignant, it describes the courtship and married life of Briggs' working class London parents, from their meeting in 1928 till their deaths in 1971. I like the way this personal story is grounded against 20th century British politics and social conditions. Highly recommended.

Like Franny and Zooey (see below), J.D. Salinger's Raise high the roofbeam, carpenters and Seymour--an introduction (1963), originally came out in the New Yorker during the Fifties. I just read and enjoyed Seymour, reading some of it aloud. About a big brother/little brother mentor/prot�g� relationship, it�s written from the point of view of Buddy who has "four living, lettered, rather incontinently articulate younger brothers and sisters, of part-Jewish, part-Irish, and conceivably part-Minotaur extraction..." Here, however, Buddy writes about their guru, oldest brother Seymour, a poet who plays ping-pong "as if Mother Kali herself [was] on the other side of the net, multi-armed and grinning" and who was curvy-edge to the bone:

"His smile often went backward or forward when all the other facial traffic in the room was either not moving at all or moving in the opposite direction.... He could look grave, not to say funereal, when candles on small children�s birthday cakes were blown out. On the other hand, he could look positively delighted when one of the kids showed him where he or she had scraped a shoulder swimming under the float..."

Once radio show whiz kids who "each carried at least three library cards around with us in our hip pockets, like manhandled old passports," Buddy and Seymour went from being First and Second Fastest Boy Runners in the World to mystical dead poet and his admiring younger brother.

"Oh this happiness is strong stuff. It�s marvelously liberating. I�m free, I feel, to tell you exactly what you must be longing to hear now. That is, if, as I know you do, you love best in this world those little beings of pure spirit with a normal temperature of 125, then it naturally follows that the creature you love next best is the person... who can write a poem that is a poem. Among human beings [this person is] the curlew sandpiper... "

"Used with moderation, a first-class verse is an excellent and usually fast-working form of heat therapy. Once in the Army, when I had what might be termed ambulatory pleurisy for something like over three months, my first real relief came only when I had placed a perfectly innocent-looking Blake lyric in my shirt pocket and worn it like a poultice for a day or so."

The book even ends on a curvy-edge note: "Just go to bed, now. Quickly. Quickly and slowly."

Lorna Crozier's What the living won't let go (McLelland & Stewart, 1999) is a short collection of poignant poems. In one of the best, "Watching My Lover," a woman watches her man tend to his dying mother:

"Later, I curl naked beside him
in our bed, listen to his sleeping,
breath by breath. So worn out
he burns with fever -- the fires
his flesh lights to keep him
from the cold.

Though he has washed
I smell her on his skin
as if she has licked him
from head to toe
with her old woman�s tongue
so everyone who lies with him
will know he�s still
his mother�s son."

"Nothing I do resembles a life
if she�s not in it."

J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey (1961), first published in two parts in the New Yorker, presents portraits in dialogue of two ironical, intellectual, Buddhist-informed, New York-apartment-dwelling, young adult siblings and their ex-vaudevillian mother. While encompassing a lot of wise acreage, it also covers philosophical and religious issues (such as the distinction between knowledge and wisdom) as Franny flirts with a nervous breakdown. At the heart of these stories is this fictional fact: "From 1927 through most of 1943 the network radio program called 'It's a Wise Child' had rarely gone on the air without one (and, more often, two), of the seven Glass children among its panelists."

Anne Carson's Eros: the bittersweet (Princeton University Press, 1986) uses Greek literature (Sappho, Socrates, et al) to interestingly examine desire, romantic love, metaphor, pleasurable paradox, and "triangulation" such as that which occurs between author, reader, and text.

"As Sokrates puts it, your story beings the moment Eros enters you. That incursion is the biggest risk of your life. How you handle it is an index of the quality, wisdom and decorum of the things inside you. As you handle it you come into contact with what is inside you, in a sudden and startling way. You perceive what you are and what you could be..."

"When you are falling in love it is always already too late."

Yasunari Kawabata�s House of the sleeping beauties and other stories (Kodansha, 1969). After twenty-two years or so, I reread the title novella about an old man who visits an institution which allows him to spend the night with comatose, naked, virginal young women. Chiefly dedicated to physical details about their bodies, the old man�s perverse thoughts (�What would she think, awakening the next morning, if there were toothmarks on her little finger and blood oozing from it?�), and metaphors of sleep and death. Unsettling. Lingering like cheap perfume.

Hen desu nee (It�s strange!)

Gaston Bachelard�s The poetics of space (Orion Press, 1964) theorizes about things I�d heretofore thought about alone. Will my street poetry be contaminated as a result? Probably not. In fact, Bachelard�s effect has been encouraging, even if his intellectual investigation of such metaphors as shells and houses can be dense.

"Art...is an increase of life, a sort of competition of surprises that stimulates our consciousness and keeps it from becoming somnolent," Bachelard writes. "Poetry [is] a phenomenon of freedom� and �a commitment of the soul" which awakens us.

"Whatever the affectivity that colors a given space, whether sad or ponderous, once it is poetically expressed, the sadness is diminished, the ponderousness lightened.... When a poet tells me that he 'knows a type of sadness that smells of a pineapple,' I myself feel less sad, I feel gently sad."

"At certain hours poetry gives out waves of calm.... It is like a value that dominates, in spite of minor states of being, in spite of a disturbed world."

Anne Carson�s Plainwater: essays and poetry (Knopf, 1995) is unlike. For example, "Town of My Farewell to You":

Look what a thousand blue thousand white.
Thousand blue thousand white thousand.
Blue thousand white thousand blue thousand.
White thousand blue wind today and two arms.
Blowing down the road.

"Language is what eases the pain of living with other people, language is what makes the wounds come open again."

"Desert syntax is hot and transactional: 700 SUPERLOOSE SLOTS."

Alta's Deluged with dudes ( Shameless Hussy Press , 1989) is as wonderfully earthy, alive, human, and full of eros the second time around as it was the first. "I've never loved a man more than I've loved a white page," Alta claims, yet she's known and cared about many dudes and writes about them here, from "Harry the Biker from Antioch" and lawn mower Lorenzo, to a Marty--a platonic lover less than half her age. Often erotic, sometimes unabashedly comical, Alta's revolutionary polyamory is active, not theoretical: "For twenty years runaway youngsters & homeless kids have been landing on my porch, waiting to see if I'll take them in," she writes. "Some people attract cats."

Still Alta employs an epigraph from Lorraine Hansberry: "There's two kids of loneliness: loneliness with a man, & loneliness without a man." This delicious complexity: a moist, salty whole.

"As I go down on him, he says, 'Oh, baby. I never had a woman treat me this way.'
I look up, 'You serious?'
'Well,' he says, 'not for free.'"

I've been enjoying poetry by Stephen Dunn, thanks to Garrison Keillor whose radio voice woke me recently at dawn, reading "The Woman with Five Hearts" from Dunn's New and selected poems, 1974-1994 (Norton, 1994). Besides dipping into this anthology, I've read all or most of Local time (Quill, 1986), Riffs & reciprocities: prose pairs (Norton, 1998), and Loosestrife (Morrow, 1996) from which comes this:

"In a flat country
friends are mountains."

And this, from "Ars Poetica":

"Restraint. Extravagance. I liked
how one could unshackle the other,
that they might become indivisible."

In Yasunari Kawabata's Beauty and sadness a thirty-year-old male author has an affair with a 15-year-old girl which results in pregnancy. After the infant dies at birth, the couple separate. The writer marries, has a son, and later becomes famous for his novel about this affair. Girl grows up to be a well-known artist. Approaching 40, she still harbors unresolved affection. Then a beautiful young woman seeks her out, becomes her student and lover, gets revenge by seducing the author and his son, and is ultimately responsible for the death of the latter.

Kawabata won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968. Stylistically spare, sensual, this is the first novel of his I�ve reread. I first encountered it a generation ago, along with Snow country, The master of go, and others.

�Her awareness of her body was inseparable from her memory of his embrace.�

I�ve been reading about a dozen book simultaneously, some for review in MSRRT Newsletter and Utne Reader, others for the hell of it. Among them: Wendy McElroy's interesting Queen Silver: the godless girl (more about this soon), James Houston's Zigzag: a life on the move, Anders Corr's No trespassing: squatting, rent strikes and land struggles worldwide (which put me to sleep, though I had high hopes for it), James Loewen's Lies across America: what our historical sites get wrong (in bits and pieces), and a new edition of Vachel Lindsay's The golden book of Springfield with long introduction by Ron Sakolsky.

In Walter Mosley's Walkin� the dog (Little, Brown, 1999) supermarket worker and ex-prisoner Socrates Fortlow continues his quest to make the right decisions amidst difficult circumstances in South Central, Los Angeles. A fine sequel to Always outnumbered, always outgunned.

Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, the one book Amy Tan says she�d take on a desert isle, ends with perhaps the funniest murder scene ever. Though Nabokov says it's the record of his love affair with the English language, I say he employs the word "nacreous" twice too often in it.

"The publicity warmed the porcelain cockles of her heart..."

"She was so kind ... such a good sport, that I daresay she would have given herself to any pathetic creature or fallacy, an old broken tree or a bereaved porcupine, out of sheer chumminess and compassion."

"Are you quite, quite sure that--well, not tomorrow, of course, and not after tomorrow, but--well--some day, any day, you will not come to live with me? I will create a brand new God and thank him with piercing cries, if you give me that microscopic hope."

"I decieved her with one of Lolita�s anklets."

At its best Geoffrey Canada's Reaching up for manhood: transforming the lives of boys in America (Beacon, 1999) provides stories from the author's youth which illuminate African American boys' problematic risk-taking, ignorant drug use, and the hazards of dubious mentorship. At its worst, it champions faith and hard work as if "by-your-own-bootstraps" alone is a formula for success.

Edward Abbey's Black Sun (Capra Press, 1990), a short autobiographical novel first published by Simon & Schuster in 1971, is dedicated to Abbey's third wife, Judy Pepper, who died of leukemia in 1969. Its forest ranger protagonist Gatlin serves as fire lookout and enters a relationship with a young woman barely half his age. In a deceptively simple way, it pulls together Abbey's sometimes conflicted thoughts about eroticism, the West, and family values. The book is also about grief for lost love, which perhaps for Abbey was also a metaphor for the loss of wilderness.

One of the book's voices is that of Gatlin's lascivious, boozy college teacher pal whose periodic letters seem to carry Abbey's own philosophy on love, sex, and marriage:

"I have abandoned my schemes for socialized civic whorehouses, as too . . . well, schematic. Too formal, doctrinaire, cold, commercial. And not necessary. In my present rosy optimism, good old Will, I believe that we in this crazy tragic splendid society are working our way, with much agony and confusion to be sure, toward something entirely new, a kind of world community now barely imaginable, in which men and women will pass freely and happily from one to another, as they choose, bouncing from one jolly romance to another as freely as the birds, choosing new mates each season."

Abbey began his relationship with Judy Pepper in 1965 when she was 21 or 22. ["I remain obsessed by sex," he wrote in his journal, June 2, 1965. And: "I've become a convert to Judyism" (July 24, 1965).] They were married that September and daughter Suzie was born in 1968. [ "I believe in marriage. I love my wife. I love family life. And yet, I can't bear monogamy; there's the rub. For me it's unnatural. Cruel. Painful. Unbearable. I like girls: can't seem to get over it, or outgrow it, or sublimate it--in fact, the more active and creative I am, and the happier I am, the more I crave sexual excitement... Am I truly a satyrmaniac, as Judy thinks?" (journal, June 27, 1969)]

Judy Pepper left Philandering Ed in October 1969. Diagnosed with acute leukemia in 1970, she died on July 4 that year, at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York City. Abbey came east and spent the last 2 weeks with her.

"I wish I could forget Judy's pain and fear, and all the hurt I gave her during our 4-1/2 years of marriage. Perhaps writing it all down will help... What now is the aim of my life? To sit on a rock in the desert and stare at the sun until the sun goes black." (journal, July 11, 1970).

Luis Alberto Urrea's Across the wire: life and hard times on the Mexico border collects a series of articles first published in the weekly San Diego Reader. "If you think the 'illegal alien' problem is bad in San Diego," Urrea writes, "You should see what's it's doing to Tijuana." Documenting the stories of people who live in the trash dumps on that city's outskirts, it is grim going, leavened by a small amount of hope and gallows humor.

The tragic death of the author's father is profiled in the penultimate chapter. Titled "Father's Day," this tale of a car crash, cops, and corruption is a segue to the author's autobiographical Nobody's son (see below).

Luis Alberto Urrea�s Nobody�s son: notes from an American life (University of Arizona Press, 1998) is mostly about growing up in the barrios of Tijuana and San Diego, surviving encounters with his parents...and the "Nun Intelligence Agency." A chapter titled �Sanctuary�--about the foster family who took Urrea under their care--prompted read-aloud sessions. To Urrea, this home was a paradise, from the first chamberpot �Triiing!� of each day, to visits to its frog-filled garden, infatuation with women's underwear and "el lipisticky," and awaiting each evening a �special love gesture� (hint: it has to do with feet).

The last chapter, �Leaving Shelltown,� presages Urrea�s next book (see below): �I�d lay odds I�m the first National Avenue boy to hike Sheep Creek Canyon.�

�Sometimes you can�t escape from home, no matter how far you go.�

Back to Who Is Street Librarian? or home.

Mail me: stlibrarian at yahoo.com