Book talkin'

Emma Goldman's Living my life, volume 1 (Dover, 1970) is a chatty account of love and fervid dedication to an ideal: anarchism. An insider's account of the generally repressive tenor of the early twentieth century United States, it contains interesting details about anarchist and immigrant history, prison life (Alexander Berkman's imprisonment and Goldman's own), the assassination of William McKinley (Goldman was blamed for inciting Leon Czolgosz), and much more. Stubborn, witty, smart, conflicted: Emma Goldman was all of these. One refreshing aspect to this first volume of her memoirs is its straightforward and non-sensational sexual autobiography.

Living My Life hypertext edition

Russ Kick's Psychotropedia: a guide to publications on the fringe (Headpress, 1998) is staggering. In his Outposts (Carroll & Graf, 1995), Kick reviewed hundreds of books, videos, zines, and comics approaching and going beyond the pale. Focusing on printed material this time, the nearly 600-page Psychotropedia contains over a thousand full-fledged reviews of taboo, titillating, disturbing, radical, intriguing, weird, disgusting, and dangerous books and magazines. How one person could read, digest, and coherently review so much is amazing in itself. Here descriptions of tomes on cult religions and sexual fetish magazines bump up against collections of transgressive art, psychoactive drug use manuals, Holocaust revisionism, and guides to dirty tricks. Arranged roughly by topic, Kick's reviews examine "the unusual, the unorthodox, the overlooked, and the controversial," meaning everything from body modification and sabotage to luddism, conspiracy theories, civil rights, and forgotten history. Since most of these publications are from small or specialty publishers, Kick usefully includes an appendix listing complete contact data for all. Indexed by title (subject would have been ideal), this book ought to be used widely by selection librarians, as well as added to library collections to let users know what they've been missing. (U.S. distribution: Creative Forces, Inc., 370 S. Lowe Ave., #A-311, Cookeville, TN 38501; $27, paper, 1-900486-03-2).

Lois Lowry's Looking back: a book of memories (Houghton Mifflin, 1998) is a testament to familial love and--to a degree--the joy of reading. Using quotations from her books (e.g., Anastasia Krupnik) and generations of Lowry family photos, the author evocatively relates pivotal "moments, fragments, falsehoods, and fantasies...which caused other things to happen, so that eventually stories emerged."

In 1941 when the author was four, she had a friend named Modest Storewrecker. "That didn't seem unusual to me at the time because when you are four, nothing seems unusual. But later, when I was grown up, more literate, and living in a different place, I thought occasionally about Modest Storewrecker. I wondered if she was still at it. I pictured her blushing shyly (an immodest storewrecker would have been boastful and obnoxious), and explaining, 'Ah, shucks, it was nothing. I just took my baseball bat and went into Woolworth's and bashed everything.'" While looking though old photo albums with her mother, Lowry eventually pried loose the truth. Her girlhood friend's name was Mardis Storacker.

Books and reading were a powerful part of Lowry's life from an early age. After her mother read The yearling to Lois and her older sister Helen, Lois sometimes would sit on the floor beside her bed, reliving an illustration in the book which showed a boy beside his father's bed. (His pa had been bitten by a rattler and looked "almost dead.") "The caption under the picture was 'The Vigil.' I didn't know what a vigil was. But a few pages earlier in the book, it said, of Jody: 'The vigil was in his hands.' In the picture, Jody's right hand was clearly empty. So the vigil had to be in his left which was sort of in shadows. A vigil had to be something fairly small, to fit into one left hand. I put a crayon in my left hand and sat on the floor beside my bed. I leaned my head and closed my eyes and looked mournful. 'The vigil was in her hand,' I said to myself, even though secretly I knew it was only a crayon... My sister walked into the room, looked in, and groaned. 'Mom,' she called loudly down to the kitchen, 'Lois is doing that weird thing by her bed again.'"

Rob Kirby's Curbside (Hobnob Press, 1998) is a compilation of the best of his strips from 1991-1996, first serialized in the gay press. Fun for insiders (look for the references to comic artist peers Jen Camper, Alison Bechdel, Diane DiMasa, and Howard Cruse), it's also amusing look at gay relationships and Rob's move from Minneapolis to the Big Apple.

For order info, and Curbside samples: Open Prairie Syndicate.

Paul LaFargue's The right to be lazy and other studies (C.H. Kerr, 1907; translated by Charles H. Kerr) argues for a three-hour work day. Yes! It contains some insight which holds true today, along with hilarious overstatement which apporaches parody (though I think was not meant as such). In this day of overtime, overwork, and manic consumption, it's useful to read historical references to topics such as Sunday labor. LaFargue: "'The more my people work, the less vices they will have,' wrote Napoleon on May 5th, 1807, from Osterod. 'I am the authority�.and I should be disposed to order that on Sunday after the hour of service be past, the shops be opened and the laborers returned to their work.'"

Since this essay was written in 1883 it was also a jolt to find references to planned obsolence and corporations expanding markets to the southern hemisphere. "In our woolen districts," LaFargue writes, "dirty and half rotten rags are raveled out to use in making certain cloths sold under the name of renaissance, which have about the same durability as the promises made to voters�.All our products are adulterated to aid in their sale and shorten their life. Our epoch will be called the 'Age of Adulteration'�." He notes, "The great problem of capitalist production is no longer to find producers and to multiply their powers but to discover consumers, to excite their appetites and create in them fictitious needs�.Virgin countries are needed."

"Cannot the laborers understand that by over-working themselves they exhaust their own strength and that of their progeny, that they are used up and long before their time come to be incapable of any work at all, that absorbed and brutalized by this single vice they�kill within themselves all beautiful faculties, to leave nothing alive and flourishing except the furious madness for work."

"Jehovah the bearded and angry god, gave his worshipers the supreme example of ideal laziness; after six days of work, he rests for all eternity."

Pat Gray's The Cat (Ecco Press, 1997), a short novel hyped by the publisher as "the Animal Farm of the...1990s," is more like a thin urban Wind in the Willows. After ten years of leisure, The Cat is left to fend for himself and begins to consider the ethics of eating birds and field voles. What does he do? Learns to talk, orders furniture, and has a car accident. While it contains several good lines, it doesn't live up to its promise of examinining more than cursorily such themes as love, friendship, loyalty, betrayal, ambition, and domination.

Ken Appollo's Humble work & mad wanderings: street life in the machine age (Carl Mautz Publishing,1997) combines antique photos of street workers with brief personal essays on homelessness, begging, child labor, police abuse, and related issues. Historically, some privileged people have romanticized poorer classes, but others have criminalized them. "Pushcart use was increasingly restricted," Appolo writes. "New laws made beggars of wandering musicians. Permits and licenses were used to regulate and discourage street workers. Some traditional occupations were banned outright." International in scope, this book's images of vendors, sweeps, ragpickers, water carriers, and handbill pasters, date from the 1850s through the1930s. They speak of "human ingenuity and tenacity and the varieties of human employment."

"When I panhandled, I gave up asking for food because that sort of truth makes strangers uncomfortable. I discovered that it was less traumatic and more profitable to ask for money to see a movie."

"The mouse isn't supposed to beat the cat. The mouse wins by surviving."

Edward Abbey's The fool's progress (Holt, 1988) is a big picaresque novel about the cross-country journey of one Henry Lightcap. A middle-aged seasonal park service employee who lusts after teenage girls and young women, the protagonist is clearly based on Abbey himself. Just how autobiographical is this book? Lightcap says, "Girls are like busses; miss one and another will come along in five minutes," then chastises and corrects himself. Pure Abbey, fictional sonuvabitch, or someone else entirely? Lightcap usually treats his mangy dog with more respect and empathy than he does his women companions. How to reconcile this with his obvious love for family? By turns bawdy, philosophical, and self-pitying, this Lightcap/Abbey character maintains a balance between skepticism and hopefulness. Love him or hate him, but do not ignore him.

The selected works of Voltairine de Cleyre (Mother Earth, 1914), acquired via interlibrary loan, has engendered a good deal of thinking (and discussion), especially about relationships, values, and freedom. I've skipped the florid poetry and gone straight for the no-nonsense essays and speeches. (Even turned one of them, "Sex Slavery," into a pamphlet.)

"'Cynegils was the son of Ceol, and he of Cutha, and Cutha of Cymric.' It reads considerably like a stock-raiser's pedigree book."

"If anyone fancies that this disposition has quite vanished ... pick up any ordinary history and see how many pages are devoted to the doings of persons intent on slaying, and those intent on peaceful occupation; and how many times we are told that certain politicians lost their jobs, and how we are not told anything about the ordinary people losing their jobs." ["Literature the Mirror of Man"]

I highly recommend you check out more Voltairine quotations.

Rosemary Mahoney's Whoredom in Kimmage: Irish women coming of age (Houghton Mifflin, 1993) is based on six months the Irish-American author spent in Dublin in 1991 and her four months in a West Clare village. Much of it is so good it demands to be read aloud: an hilarious account about a group of "rough" girls attending religious classes (see below), a conversation with an eccentric woman farmer and her "son" (a Jack Russell terrier), and portraits of pub life drunkenness, family dynamics, and repressed (and not-so-repressed) men. Between the laughter and the beer, Mahoney interviews Irish lesbians, poet Eavan Boland, and even President Mary Robinson about the status of women in the republic. Describing a people from various viewpoints, Mahoney depicts a society in which not only the women but also the men "are not truly free."

"Sister Keating prepared the girls for prayer by asking, 'Why do we say the Hail Mary, girls?'

With insurrection in her voice a pie-faced girl shrieked, 'Dunno, S'ta Keatin'!' and the others tittered wickedly. Sister Keating was unfazed. 'Why do we say the Hail Mary, Jane?'

Jane couldn't have been more than nine....She had a sardonic sense of humor and the deep smoky voice of a barmaid. Watching me, but speaking to Sister Keating, she said unctuously, 'We say the Hail Mary, S'ta Keatin', to honor Mary, Mother of God!'

The girls began reciting a slovenly rendition of the Hail Mary. They made it sound taunting and lewd, like a jeering chant from an angry crowd at a football game. Blast art'ou 'mongst wam 'n' blast's da fruit... Their faces were twisted into postures of sarcasm and mirth, and I could see I wasn't the person for this job; I wouldn't be able to keep from taking their side....Just as I was thinking how much I wanted a piece of their bubble gum, Sister Keating shouted at them to spit the chewing gum into the bin. Jane, the ringleader, cried with brilliant mimicry, 'Girls! Put da choongum out in da bin!' and the girls ran over to the tin wastebasket and shot the gum out of their mouths with such expert force it pinged like bullets against the metal."

Paul Avrich's An American anarchist: the life of Voltairine de Cleyre (Princeton University Press, 1978) has inspired me to seek out Voltairine de Cleyre's essays and prose writings, among them "Anarchism and the American tradition" (on what schoolchildren are not taught about Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine), "They who marry do ill", "Direct action", and "Sex slavery". Avrich's book does a good job of balancing historical context (with details about friends, acquaintances, lovers, and the events of 1887-1912, from the executions of the Haymarket anarchists to the Mexican revolution), with excerpts from letters which illuminate Voltai's personality. Craving solitude, she wrote from Chicago where she shared an apartment the last 19 months of her life with Anna and Jacob Livshis, "I feel, more than ever in my life, the horrors of communism. These comrades are natural communists. Their house is everybody's house. Everybody is welcome in every corner of it, and there is never one moment where one can comfortably be alone."

I'd read her rather florid poetry unenthusiastically, but have now discovered a whole new-to-me straight-talking Voltairine de Cleyre.

"I do not disparage Thomas Paine's efforts nor works, but if we must have hero worship, let us have a little she-ro worship to even things up a wee bit!"

I am curious (yellow), "the complete scenario of the film by Vilgot Sjoman with over 250 illustrations" (Grove Press, 1968), translated from the Swedish by Martin Minow and Jenny Bohman, includes 66 pages of transcript excerpts from its 1968 obscenity trial in New York. Along with its matter of fact treatment of sexuality, perhaps its radical politics were also at issue. Reference is made in the film to Lars Gyllensten's "ten commandments for this age," (e.g., "Thou shalt reflect that comfort agrees with other people as well as it does with you"). The trial was a farce, it seems. After four days of testimony by film critics, sociology professors, novelist Norman Mailer, and the film's director Vilgot Sjoman, all of whom found the film morally significant, a jury of twelve "deliberated" for two hours before finding it obscene.

After psychiatrist Edward Hornick had cited Kinsey reports that "well over 60 percent of their sample of Americans have mouth-genital contact," a cross-examining prosecutor asked, "Is it your testimony, Doctor, that a majority of Americans have sex in trees?"

Hornick: "I don't have any data on that."
Judge: "Does Kinsey?"
Hornick: "Kinsey didn't study that variable."
Judge: "The answer is no, Kinsey has no data on that?"
Hornick:"Yes."
Prosecutor: "Would your answer be the same for the balustrade of a public building with a sentry watching?"
Hornick: "I didn't study the Kinsey data with that point in mind, but to the best of my memory from reading both volumes there is no data on balustrade sex."
Prosecutor: "In the absence of your recollection of any mention of this subject in the Kinsey report, is it your testimony, Doctor, that you are unable to tell us whether 60 percent of Americans have had intercourse in trees, or whether 60 percent of Americans have had intercourse on the balustrade of public buildings?"

Never having seen the film, this book was the next best way to experience it, a profoundly un-American work for all the usual reasons. A film review by James Kendrick says "I Am Curious (Yellow)" often "borders on trite silliness when it isn't being overbearingly pretentious," but notes that "the film's politics stick with you, even more than the sexual imagery [for example, a] scene showing a man trying to explain why a doctor should make more money than a dishwasher." Kedrick writes, "I have no doubt that the MPAA would slap it with an NC-17 rating if it were ever re-released into U.S. theater (there's far too much male frontal nudity), but despite its intrinsically biting nature, it still feels droll and creaky when seen today."

I've been percolating in zines. Especially recommended:

Bitch ("Feminist response to pop culture"), now up to a whopping 64 pages with the "Wint-o-Green 1998" edition (v.3. #3); subscribe: $12/4 issues to 3128 16th St., Box 143, San Francisco, CA 94103.

Stay Free, fresher than Adbusters in its examination, prodding, and lampooning of the ad/marketing/PR industry; $3 for the latest issue (#15) to: P.O. Box 306, Prince St. Station, New York, NY 10012.

Also: Davida Gypsy Breier's Slow Leek features her journals and zine reviews while Glovebox Chronicles includes other contributors writing about experiences with cars. Send $1/issue or trade for the former, $2 for the latter, to: P.O. Box 963, Havre de Grace, MD 21078.

Screams from Inside #7 ("The punk girl issue") contains artwork by the irrepressible Fly and interviews with Christine Boarts (Slug & Lettuce), Jen Angel (Fucktooth), Cindy (Doris), and Amanda Wakefield (Not for rent). Contact editor Carissa at 4434 Ludlow St., Philadelphia, PA 19104, [email protected]

Cometbus #42 (a.k.a. Double Duce: a novel) describes life amid a dysfunctional household of crusty punks ($2.50 postpaid from BBT, P.O. Box 4279, Berkeley, CA 94704). Cover by Fly.

Reviews are forthcoming in the next MSRRT Newsletter covering Robert Allen's Simple annals: 200 years of an American family, Antonio Turok's Chiapas: the end of silence, and other titles.

Also: Alison Bechdel's Split-level dykes to watch out for is great fun (and contains a considerable amount of new material created just for the book).

Charles Bowden and Jack Dykinga's The Sonoran Desert (Abrams, 1992) comes on the heels of reading about "Cactus Ed" Abbey. Thanks to it I've learned the difference between saguaro and organ pipe cactus, and about ocotillo and boojum (the latter an inspiration for Dr. Seuss?). Its full page color photos--of flowers blooming in the sand and dying saguaros like mammoth denuded celery stalks--are paired with Bowden's essays about Cabeza de Vaca, a Papago shaman, and Abbey.

Oddly, Cabeza deVaca's name has been popping up everywhere recently: a new book coming out from the University of Nebraska Press, excerpts from a couple anthologies of Latin American literature, and even in a book about the history of African Americans in the West. The fascinating story of this 16th century explorer who was stranded, enslaved, then "went native," is available in various editions. One is The account: Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca's Relacion, an annotated translation by Martin A. Favata and Jose B. Fernandez (Arte Publico Press). Those seeing the film "Cabeza de Vaca" without previous historical background might find its magic realism preposterous. As The Sonoran Desert and Cabeza de Vaca's written account attest, truth is sometimes stranger than fiction.

James Bishop's Epitaph for a desert anarchist: the life and legacy of Edward Abbey (Atheneum, 1994) isn't a full-fledged biography. What it may do best is report what other people thought about the man. While there is a chapter on the author's formative years (incorrectly stating his birthplace as Home, Pennsylvania) and another titled "The anarchist emerges," the second half is taken up with critics' and friends' reactions to Abbey's writings, as well as eulogies. At times, Bishop seems clueless, apparently failing to notice, for example, the irony dripping from these lines:

"I want to hear once more the crackle of clamshells on the floor of the bar in the Clam Broth House in Hoboken. I long for a view of the jolly, rosy faces on 42nd street and the cheerful throngs on the sidewalks on Atlantic Avenue. Enough of Land's End, Dead Horse Point, Tukuhnivats and other high resolves; I want to see somebody jump out of a window...

"I grow weary of nobody's company but my own; let me hear the wit and wisdom of the subway crowds again, the cabdrivers' shrewd aphorisms, the genial chuckle of a Jersey City cop..."

For a better view of Abbey's early years (with some corrections to Bishop's errors), check out James Cahalan's "My people: Edward Abbey's Appalachian Roots in Indiana County, Pennsylvania. The article is just one of many links on Abbey's Web.

Confessions of a barbarian: selections from the journals of Edward Abbey, 1951-1989 (Little, Brown, 1994). Yow! For me, this book was like opening a door.

I think Abbey's a patron saint of the curvy-edge movement. After all, the guy was fired as editor of his college literary magazine for printing on its cover the Voltaire quote "Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest," and attributing it to Louisa May Alcott. And he once wrote a letter to Ms. Magazine addressed "Dear Sirs." Occasionally puckish, usually goading, Abbey's doggedly immoderate writings have something to offend nearly everyone. That said, no one wrote as fearlessly (and lovingly) in defense of the voiceless.

Known as a "nature writer" and picaresque novelist (e.g., The monkey wrench gang), Abbey's journals describe much more than desert walks and raft trips down the Colorado. Namely they elucidate his complex inner life, a brew of self-criticism, doubts, longing, depression, lust (and concomitant self-analysis), wanderlust, familial love, friendship, and determined independence. Full of wise-ass opinion on everything from authors and composers to Park Service politics, above all it is imbued with a personal philosophy which idealizes freedom and justice. A sampling:

"Without courage, all other virtues are useless."

"The highest form of literary sublety, in a corrupt social order, is to tell the plain truth."

"Too many of our poets novelists essayists seem to be taking the side of the State in that ancient and inevitable conflict between the State and the independent individual. This is wrong; that is not the natural place for a writer. If it weren't for all these fools and fanatics running around trying to make things better, then most certainly things would get worse. We need this constant pressure against the barriers to change in order simply to prevent a collapse into total evil. The tension against wrong. To keep things from getting worse."

"Writing for National Geographic is like trying to jerk off while wearing ski mitts."

Candace Falk's Love, anarchy, and Emma Goldman (2nd ed., Rutgers University Press, 1990) is a fascinating bio drawing heavily from Goldman's correspondence with Ben Reitman, Alexander Berkman, and others. Neither hagiographic nor hypercritical, it shows how EG's personal and political lives merged and diverged. Her letters show a more human Emma than does her autobiography: sexual infatuations, jealousy, evidence of desire to control. (Ironically, having gone through Berkman's papers after he died, she wrote to a mutual friend, "I have come across...some things that hurt like hell and showed me how very naive and blind Sasha was in many respects. But with all that...my love for him is deeper than ever.")

That noted, Goldman always maintained the courage of her convictions, going to prison for daring to speak about birth control, alienating herself from political allies for criticizing Russia after the revolution.

Falk is director of the Emma Goldman Papers Project.

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