Book talkin'

Katherine Arnoldi's The amazing "true" story of a teenage single mom (Hyperion, 1998) is a graphic novel about resilience. A mother at seventeen, the author survived shitty jobs (one on an assemblyline inspecting rubber gloves), abuse and homelessness, before meeting someone who encourages her to enroll in a community college. Arnoldi writes, "I made this book to copy myself and take to GED...programs. My purpose was to help single moms feel worthy to pursue their rights to an equal access to education and to provide them with the information to do so." Portions of the book originally appeared in Welfare Mother's Voice.

The Imp is a new publication focusing on alternative comics, with each issue devoted to a single artist or topic. While number one covered Ghost World creator Dan Clowes interestingly, the phenomenal second issue is an in-depth look at the tracts of Jack T. Chick. In format it parodies the original, though it's four times as large and 64-pages. I was glued to my chair. Send your $5 cash to Chaplain Dan Raeburn, 1454 Summerdale, 2C, Chicago, IL 60640.

Uruguayan Eduardo Galeano's Soccer in Sun and Shadow (Verso, 1998) is the real thing: passion and intelligence, not the pablum that usually passes as sports journalism in the USA. Its historical anecdotes focus on Latin American futbol and the World Cup. If you've read Galeano you realize what a concise, poetic way he has of telling a story. There are tales of superstitions and memories of fantastic plays (soccer equivalents of the time Dr.J. hung in the air, went underneath the basket, etc...). There are accounts of famous firsts (e.g., first corner kick to score on the fly) and deadly politics. When a Kiev team playing Germany during WWII was instructed not to win, they were unable to "resist the temptation of dignity" (result: mass execution). And yet there is humor (a penalty kicker who dropped his shorts and scores), y mucho mas.

Excerpts are posted at the Verso web site (see Spring 1998 catalog).

Oh, yeah... tiny illustrations in the top corners of the book mean it's also a flip book!

Earl Lee's Libraries in the age of mediocrity (McFarland, 1998) is a brief collection of writings about libertarian librarianship, outsourcing, the tendency for mediocre books to flourish, and how the Library of Congress has done a poor job cataloging books on freethought. Full review forthcoming in MSRRT Newsletter.

Jewelle Gomez's Forty-three Septembers (Firebrand, 1993) is two kinds of book. The first half--autobiographical essays focusing on Gomez's family--is personal, engaging, and full of love. Gomez was raised by her great-grandmother ("born on an Indian reservation in Iowa") and spent Saturdays with her father (who "had two wives simultaneously when I was growing up, neither one my mother"). It's about coming out as a lesbian (an hilarious scene in a busy movie theater restroom) and about African-American self-identity. The second half of the book is a kind of personal literary criticism focusing on such writers as Audre Lorde and Lorraine Hansberry, whose writing influenced Gomez. This primarily made me realize how much I haven't read (and got me to retrieve a copy of Zora Neale Hurston's autobiographical Dust tracks on the road).

Jewelle Gomez's Don't explain (Firebrand, 1998) contains eight short stories (one featuring benevolent lesbian vampire Gilda) and a futuristic novella which entails a queer trio of friends (one a tattoo artist). The Library of Congress cataloger assigned the subject heading AFRO-AMERICAN WOMEN--FICTION, but not LESBIANS--FICTION. Heads up, LC!

At her best, Gomez writes magically. Full review forthcoming in MSRRT Newsletter.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's Red dirt: growing up Okie (Verso, 1997) is about being poor, living in a small town, and coming of age in the 50s. The granddaughter of a Wobbly veterinarian (and daughter of a "half-breed"mother who identified with Daniel Boone), Dunbar-Ortiz came to my attention (I think) while cataloging White trash: race and class in America.

An element of tragedy pervades much of the book. Paralleling Rick Bragg's All over but the shouting, it involves an alcoholic parent. Like Bragg, Dunbar-Ortiz offers stories illustrating that social class isn't something one can easily transcend. In her case there are also skin color issues and accounts of anti-Indian racism, the latter all the more ironic since Dunbar-Ortiz's mother disavowed her heritage when she "married up" (slightly). The account of the dissident six-girl, six-boy Cub Scout troup demands to be read aloud.

Rereading books. I just can't bring myself to do it. Yet.

In the meantime, here are some books I've not been rereading.

Readers who pick up Lee Stringer's Grand Central winter (Seven Stories, 1998) expecting an "ain't this awful" attitude are in for a surprise. From the early 80s till the mid-90s, Stringer lived on the streets of New York. Summer nights he crashed in Central Park; winters he sought refuge in the bowels of Grand Central Station. No angel, the author expresses himself unabashedly here, about his former crack habit and about the resourcefulness necessary for a "non-domiciled" person to survive. Full review in MSRRT Newsletter.

I've recently read Ken Smith's Raw deal: horrible and ironic stories of forgotten Americans (Blast Books, 1998). Full review in MSRRT Newsletter. I've also checked out other books by Charles Bowden (see below), a spiritual cousin to Ed Abbey whose area of special interest is the desert southwest. One of these books has a jacket photo of Bowden sporting a "Rednecks for Social Responsibility" cap.

Charles Bowden's Ju�rez: the laboratory of our future (Aperture) is disturbing...and recommended. Through the eyes of photographers, it looks at economic violence in the city of 2,000,000 across the river from El Paso. Full review in MSRRT Newsletter.

Gayl Jones' Corregidora (Beacon, 1986) is a raw novel told from the point of view of a woman jazz singer, descendant of slave owner and slaves, and survivor of abuse. First published in 1975.

"'I don't like those mens messing with you,' he said.
'Don't nobody mess with me.'
'Mess with they eyes.'
That was when I fell."

Dan Woog's Jocks: true stories of America's gay athletes (Alyson Books, 1998) is an important follow-up to Woog's previous School's out: the impact of gay and lesbian issues on America's schools. It focuses on gay male student athletes and gay coaches, but should be read widely by all coaches. I didn't read the whole thing, but was especially interested in stories of runners and wrestlers. Self-promotional note: I'm listed in the acknowledgments of both books. Thanks, Dan!

June 2, 1998

Susan Eisenberg's We'll call you if we need you: experiences of women working construction (Cornell University Press, 1998). On her first day on the job, Melinda Hernandez was mistaken for a girl looking for her father. A bank guard in Boston found it easier to imagine Susan Eisenberg a terrorist bomber than an electrician. This oral history of women plumbers, carpenters, ironworkers, electricians, and painters dates from 1978. In that year legislation was passed which was intended to increase women's participation in the trades to 6.8% in three years. Eisenberg's interviews make it apparent why that figure was never reached. Harassment is but one of the reasons. Longer review in MSRRT Newsletter.

Roger Manley & Roger Sloan's Self-made worlds: visionary folk art environments (Aperture, 1998) documents outsider art installations: "eccentric" rock gardens, grottoes, sculpture gardens, architectural follies, and uncategorizable creations. Heavily illustrated with photos, it devotes 2-4 pages to each artist, including the relatively well known Tressa Prisby ("Bottle Village"), Howard Finster, Nek Chand Saini, Simon Rodia (Watts Towers), and Samuel Dinsmoor, as well as dozens of others, most based in the U.S. Primarily useful to inspire potential creators, the book does have a thoughtful essay by Manley which addresses problems which occur (pillage, for example) when art buyers and others discover "outsider" artists. In fact, the term is in some ways a misnomer. Self-taught artists such as Clyde Jones are an integral part of a community. Nearly everyone in Bynum, North Carolina, has one of Jones' "critters" in their front yard, as do the local library, elementary schools, and post office. The real "outsiders" are the culture vultures who have flocked in (in other cases) to pick artists clean.

An appendix ("A global tour of sites") arranged alphabetically by artist's name might have been better if grouped by location. A two-page bibliography includes some esoteric items (artists' books, for example) which will not be easily located.

Recent reading: Ron Sakolsky and Stephen Dunifer's Seizing the airwaves: a free radio handbook (AK Press), K.j.a. Wishnia's 23 shades of black (Imaginary Press), and Susan Eisenberg's Poems from the construction site (ILR Press). Reviewed in May/June MSRRT Newsletter.

I've gotta 'fess up. I read a lot more books than I've been writing about here. One category from which I've been reading heavily are children's picture books. This is largely due to my participation in a library program which connects prisoners and their children by reading aloud. Lately I've read John Steptoe's Stevie, which came out when he was just 19, Jon Scieszka & Lane Smith's comical The true story of the 3 little pigs (which I once read word-for-word backward to three nephews, several times in a row), and The summer my father was ten, a new book by Pat Brisson, with vibrant and detailed water colors by Andrea Shine. (The latter is about impetuous behavior, fear of apologizing, cross-generational communication, and mucho mas.) Also: Vera Williams' A chair for my motherand subsequent books about a strong working-class daughter/mother/grandmother trio. This is the tip of a large iceberg. Don't get me started.

Jess Mowry's Way past cool is a raw tale straight from the street: about skate boardin' gang boys in the Oakland ghetto, trying to make their way between school, drive-bys, conflicting loyalties, corrupt cops, and a rival gang, not to mention a sleazy (and dangerous) sixteen-year-old Trans-Am-driving drug dealer named Deek.

The players include: 13-year-old Gordon (leader of the Friends), Lyon (mystic and "brains" of the gang), Curtis (dreadlock-wearing, Jamaica-loving, and gay), Ty (Deek's bodyguard), Furball (Ty's little brother and wannabe), and Markita (romantic interest and voice of reason). Here's Curtis:

"'Life ain't nuthin but a goddamn Popsicle course.'
'Obstacle course,' said Lyon.
'Whatever.'"

"Curtis considered a second. 'Well, I think they got some werewoofs in Pennsylvania...but that clear cross the goddamn ocean!'"

Jim Longhi's Woody, Cisco, & me: seamen three in the merchant marine. Review forthcoming in the May/June edition of MSRRT Newsletter. Choice images: Woody Guthrie boarding ship with guitar, mandolin, fiddle, typewriter, and stack of books ("Hey, look at the walking pawnshop!")...and a ship full of powdered milk going down in a sea of white foam.

Mei Ng's Eating Chinese food naked is a novel about Ruby who goes back to live at her parent's house for a while after graduating from college. Home is her father's laundry business of which she's a little ashamed. It's about Ruby's relationship with her mother (she has a dream in which they're having sex), her gruff father, and on-again off-again white boyfriend who embarrasses her by taking all the good pieces of food for himself. Stir in some bisexual longings, shitty temp jobs in Manhattan, a sister and brother-in-law who live upstairs, and a rock-n-roller wannabe older brother, and it was an okay at-home-nursing-a-cold read.

The home cooking throughout ranges from mom's sea bass to her father's cheese sandwiches. One evening the family breaks pattern, though, and walks down the street to Moon Palace for "gringo food": soup and ribs and lo mein and butterfly shrimp, roasted chicken and a bottle of soda. Another time, Ruby and Nick receive their food delivered from Hunan Delight: "The smell of greasy gringo food mixed with the smell of sex. For the first time, the sight of his soft penis didn't seem to fit with the tins of dumplings, noodles, rice..."

Yeah, it's set in New York: "They're right outside the window. One guy says, "Fuck you.' And then the other guy says, 'No, fuck you.' All night long it's 'Fuck you,' 'No, fuck you,' 'Fuck you,' 'No, fuck you.'"

Philip Bryant's Sermon on a perfect spring day: poems (New Rivers Press, 1998). I just cataloged this collection of autobiographical poems about growing up on the South Side of Chicago, Aunt Janey, jazz...and Minnesota.

He held the
record album high
over his head
like Moses
coming down
from Mount Sinai
with the Ten Commandments:
"Perfect, I tell you, perfect."
it was the new Miles Davis
album, Kind of Blue--
with John Coltrane
and Cannonball Adderly,
and he stood there
beside the hi-fi system
in just his white
terry cloth robe,
his dark brown face shining
in the morning sunlight,
striking that beautiful
biblical pose.
Suddenly I believed him
and even now
I still do.

Dorothy Allison's Trash (Firebrand Books, 1988). "The condensed and reinvented experience of a cross-eyed working-class lesbian, addicted to violence, language, and hope," these interconnected short stories reflect on growing up poor in the South, surviving abuse, and being queer, full of "a wild aching hunger in my heart and a deep resentment." Stories about leaving and not leaving. About a friendship with a girl "wholly monstrous, a lurching hunched creature shining with sweat and smug satisfaction." About shoplifting and "borrowing" professors' books. About waitressing, and a profane mama who used phrases like "Jesus shit a brick" every day of her life. About food and sex, lust, and not fitting in. About Great-Grandmother Shirley, "the meanest woman ever left Tennessee." It also refers to Flannery O'Connor (see review of Wise blood below). "This one's just like you, honey. She'd have given you a vision of Jesus with monkey's blood. She'd have had you chop off your own fingers and feed them to the monkeys."

One of my brothers was a two-time small college "All-American" wrestler and my father was a junior high coach, so I read Nolan Zavoral's A season on the mat compulsively. It's about Iowa wrestler and coach Dan Gable (a 1972 Olympic gold medalist), as well as the sport of wrestling itself and the University of Iowa program on the eve of Gable's retirement. For fans only.

An octogenarian acquaintance loaned me a signed personal copy of Philip Brain's Soldier of Bataan. He'd grown up with the author. Compelled to read it, I gained a spot of insight into my father's combat experiences in the Philippines. It transcribes three talks given by Brain (in 1965, 1983, and 1986) and relates (somewhat repetitively) his personal account of surviving the Bataan Death March and subsequent imprisonment under horrendous conditions. The slim volume is illustrated by Bataan survivor Benjamin Charles Steele.

"The nights were restful, and for me, very important. One could lie on the ground...look to the stars and be in a different world....I imagine this is one of the reasons that nights mean so much to me now. "

Bohumil Hrabal's Too loud a solitude.

Spiritual kin to Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, this novella features a narrator who's toiled thirty-five years operating a "press" which destroys books rather than than producing them. This belching trash masher compacts literature, soiled butcher paper, art prints, and waste paper alike, but our hero is a hopeful Sisyphus. He steals glances at extricated gems ("savoring each sentence like a cough drop'), salvages them for friends and himself (sleeping under a book-laden canopy which threatens to fall and crush him), and dreams about the Press of the Apocalypse in which Prague itself is compacted into a fifteen hundred foot cube.

At times Too loud a solitude expresses a bibliophilia so fervid as to parallel blind patriotism. When the narrator agonizes over the trashing of a quarter million copies of a "preteen adventure novel," books are no longer packages with unique contents but rather symbols like flags. Read this allegorically if you wish. Translated into English from the Czech by Michael Henry Heim and published in 1990 by Harcourt, it was originally copyrighted 1976, the middle of particularly repressive era in Czechoslovakia.

Flannery O'Connor's first novel, Wise blood. Southern comedy noir featuring shrunken heads, masochism, assorted fakers and fools. Who is the truest believer?

Hazel Motes: "No truth behind all truths is what I and this church preach! Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place."

Sabbath Lily Hawks: "Take off your hat, king of the beasts."

William Lee Brent's Long time gone (Times Books, 1996). "A Black Panther's true-life story of his hijacking and twenty-five years in Cuba."

While not particularly revelatory or profound, this straightforward autobiography wasn't a waste of time. Most interesting to me: the Cuba years (second half of the book) in which Brent writes about his affair with poet Margaret Randall and how Huey Newton and his partner were "given a live chicken as part of their monthly rations and neither of them had the slightest idea what to do with it." Brent attended school in Havana, learned Spanish, received a B.A., and became a high school English teacher. Describing his medical treatment for alcoholism in 1987 and subsequent drying out, Brent then mentions--with little elaboration--his return to drinking a year and a half later. Hmmm.

William Ayers' A kind and just parent: the children of juvenile court (Beacon, 1997)

"Recently I spent some time with my active ninety-two-year-old father-in-law in a retirement community. One of his daily routines is watching the five o'clock news, and so we watched and commented together, day after day. There was, of course, sports (a gamble), stocks (speculation), and weather (out of control). But mostly what we saw was that the five o'clock news tells a single story over and over on what seems like a continuous feed. The story is this: you have a chance of falling victim to a random act of violence, wreckage or mayhem, or, conversely, (and this is a much smaller story), you might win the lottery. We counted up the stories: one evening a murder, a huge warehouse fire, a bank robbery with hostages; the next evening two murders, a gas explosion and a rape. And on and on. Nothing that we saw on the news was the result of human effort or agency or sustained hard work or commitment or thoughtful analysis or efficacy; everything was accident, fate, fortune.

The message conveyed by all this speaks to something deep in the modern predicament: the sensation of incapacity and alienation, the awful feeling of impotence, the suspicion that a desolate, frightening landscape lies just outside, the impression that nothing you do matters or means anything or could possibly make a palpable difference."

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