Book talkin'

Honoring our ancestors: stories and pictures by fourteen artists (Children's Book Press, 1999) is a handsome follow-up to Just like me, a book of artists' self-portraits. Edited by Harriet Rohmer, it pays homage with words and vividly colored portrait paintings to such ancestors and spiritual kin as a grandmother who made shoes from leftover scraps of brightly colored fabric, a father who inspired his son by drawing pictures of animals (and teaching him color theory), and a great grandmother imagined as a healer on horseback, listening to "the voice of the plants." The book represents true diversity instead of tokenism. The real people it describes have ethnic backgrounds from around the world: Chinese, Mexican, African American, Jewish, Lebanese, Chicano, Puerto Rican, Trinidadian, Australian, Filipino, and Native American. Clearly and personally, Honoring our ancestors conveys the importance of recognizing those who came before us. It is likely to engender children's curiosity about their elders and to help them feel more rooted and grounded. It also communicates strongly a sense of how art is not simply decoration or a class in school, but alive and created. At its best, some of these pages produce goosebumps and its paintings are fun to examine carefully for detail. Speaking of fine points, the Library of Congress subject cataloging for this book is pathetic. The two headings assigned: MINORITY ARTISTS--UNITED STATES--PSYCHOLOGY--JUVENILE LITERATURE and MINORITIES IN ART--JUVENILE LITERATURE.

Charles Bowden's Red line (Norton, 1989) was a disappointingly vacuous, slightly smug, psycho-journalistic account of the author's desultory investigation into the killing of a Mexican gangster from Nogales, Sonora. Must the "new journalism" entail writers covering mundane personal details? Some of these are almost comical here in their clich�: e.g., "she pulls off her panties and we make love as the column of water falls to the earth." Readers who desire bleak, cynical, boozy, haphazard, channel-changing journalism will like this.

Jane Kenyon's Otherwise (Graywolf Press, 1996) is a posthumous collection of twenty new poems, plus selections from her four previous books, From Room to Room, The Boat of Quiet Hours, Let Evening Come (see below), and Constance. Concise, clear, and grounded, some of Kenyon's poems counterpoint a searing psychological stanza amid others describing mundane (if sensuous) external physical details. Occasionally this thematic signature is reversed, but with similar result, a balancing of ideas instead of rhyme. Kenyon's predominant themes of awareness and mortality are present here:

Three Small Oranges

My old flannel nightgown, the elbows out,
one shoulder torn.... Instead of putting it
away with the clean wash, I cut it up
for rags, removing the arms and opening
their seams, scissoring across the breast
and upper back, then tearing the thin
cloth of the body into long rectangles.
Suddenly an immense sadness....

Making supper, I listen to news
from the war, of torture where the air
is black at noon with burning oil,
and of a market in Baghdad, bombed
by accident, where yesterday an old man
carried in his basket a piece of fish
wrapped in paper and tied with string,
and three small hard green oranges.

Virginia Hamilton Adair's Ants on the Melon (Random House, 1996) is a first collection of poems, coming out when the author was 83 (though she has been published widely for years in Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, and other magazines). These skillful and honed poems examine a rock, snowfall, memory, reading in bed, killing a fly, surviving a partner's suicide, and gardening ("She hacked and dragged away/Horrors of deadwood, webbed and sagging foliage,/Self-strangling roots, vines, suckers, arboreal/Deformities in viperish coils. Sweat, anger, pity/poured from her"). The book's one occasional disconcerting intrusion is the use of pseudogeneric masculine pronouns (e.g., "his" instead of "its" or "hers"). Still, many of these poems ask to be read aloud or demand reading over and over to fully savor their complex flavors. (Thanks to Leavenworth Jackson for the tip.)

The April Lovers

Green is happening.
Through the sweet expectant chill
Of a northern spring
We have gone without will,

Without fear, without reason,
Trusting to the power
Of a fickle season,
Of a passionate hour,

To mature, to sustain
Till the plan uncovers
In the sun and rain.
Early lovers

Never question much
What is quietly beating
Through the music and the touch
And the mouths meeting.

After meeting her briefly at the annual American Library Association, I've just read seven of Megan McDonald's picture books. My favorite was Insects Are My Life about a little girl who's a nascent entomologist. I like its solipsism--"Ms. Scorpio read The Very Quiet Cricket, and Amanda made the cricket sound, 'Cree! Cree! Cree!' because the computer chip in the back of the book was broken"-and the way it works factoids into the story relatively seamlessly (e.g., when Amanda's mom tells her to get her feet off the table, she replies, "But butterflies have taste buds on their feet.")

The Bone Keeper is spooky (and prolly would've given me nightmares as a kid).

Why has I, Phoolan Devi: the autobiography of India's Bandit Queen (London: Little, Brown, 1996) never been published in the U.S.? While the theme of injustice and women's revenge was palatable enough in "Thelma and Louise," that film was fictional. Phoolan Devi's story, on the other hand, is both true and inestimably more violent. What were the options for an Indian girl who was given in marriage at age eleven to a 30-year-old man who raped and beat her? When she escaped to her village she became an immediate pariah. When she stood up for basic rights and dignity, she was abused, imprisoned, and tortured. Kidnapped by bandits, she herself became a teenage bandit who survived further indignities and became legendary for robbing the rich and giving money to poor people (even giving rise to at least one impostor). While the film "Bandit Queen" focused on Phoolan Devi as victim of caste oppression and sexual violence, this book in her own words gives much more thorough psychological insight into rebellion.

At a certain point in her life, after she had suffered within an inch of her life and wavered between the twin urges of self-destruction and vengeance, Phoolan Devi decided she would survive. From the moment she realized there was nothing left to lose, Phoolan Devi became fearless and her oppressors terrified--convinced that she was mad or backed by powerful people. "All it took was courage, and the threat of violence," she relates. The people of her village were "afraid of power--any kind of power. That was the only thing they truly worshipped."

As a bandit, Phoolan Devi burned with anger, seeking to avenge her rapes and punish those who stole her father's land. (In two instances here she describes castrating rapists.) She had a custom rubber stamp made in order to mark her name on doors of villages she and her gang looted. Eventually she was convinced to give herself up, on her own terms which included the condition that she be incarcerated with those who remained of her gang. The last dozen pages too quickly cover eleven years of prison, during which Phoolan Devi went from naivet�, rage, and mistrust, to a point where she could say "there was no more vengeance in my heart." Still this nearly 500-page book is a nerve-wracking novelistic tale of injustice, shoot-outs, and an underdog's survival, recalling equal parts a vigilante western film and SCUM Manifesto.

After her prison release, Phoolan Devi moved to a secluded location New Delhi where she lived under police protection, an epilogue reports. Subsequent to the book's publication she was elected to India's parliament.

"The bad things done by the poor were all anyone ever talked about, not the bad things done to them." --Phoolan Devi

Jane Kenyon's Let evening come (Graywolf Press, 1990) collects 57 accessible and clearly articulated poems about seasons, death, and one's place amidst nature with other humans. This writing is not precious, but simple and focused, incisively describing the smell after rain and using such descriptions to mirror difficult emotions. At least two poems here effectively employ sudden rhyme to effect closure. This one sneaks rhyme in at the beginning:

Like primitives we buried the cat
with his bowl. Bare-handed
we scraped sand and gravel
back into the hole.
They fell with a hiss
and thud on his side,
on his long red fur, the white feathers
between his toes, and his
long, not to say aquiline, nose.

We stood and brushed each other off.
There are sorrows keener than this.

Silent the rest of the day, we worked,
ate, stared, and slept. It stormed
all night: now it clears, and a robin
burbles from a dripping bush
like the neighbor who means well
but always says the wrong thing.

Jon Agee's Sit on a potato pan, Otis (Farrar Straus Giroux, 1999) is his third illustrated compilation of palindromes. Most function as cartoons, with graphic and text equally important. For example: two 10-gallon hat wearin' folks are looking at a wanted poster that pictures two ocelots wanted for the kidnappin' of Sheriff Conrad Smith. "Darn ocelots got Conrad," one says to the other. You can imagine this to yourself: "Dog doo? Good god!" Silly and creativity-spurring, this little book has me thinking palindromically. Picture this: "Yo, bottom motto, boy!"

Carlotta R. Anderson's All-American anarchist: Joseph A. Labadie and the labor movement. (Wayne State University Press, 1998). "Gentle anarchist" Joseph Labadie was a Detroit-based labor activist, typesetter, writer, and editor whose influence continues today in great part due to the archives he left behind. Written by his granddaughter, this interesting and thoroughly documented biography traces Labadie's roots from childhood years spent with Pottawatomie people. (One of his great-grandparents was Ojibwe.) A tramp printer, Labadie eventually settled in Michigan, became an enthusiast of socialism, helped organize the Knights of Labor, got involved in the Greenback movement, and eventually moved towards advocacy of a "practical" anarchism. This biography further elucidates connections between the radicals of the late 19th and early 20th century, many of whom corresponded despite philosophical differences. (Labadie was connected with Samuel Gompers, Eugene Debs, Benjamin Tucker, and Emma Goldman, to name a few.) One interesting anecdote describes how Labadie got in trouble with a postal inspector for "adorning his letters with little anarchist stickers" (after which the Detroit press rallied to his cause). It's also fascinating to learn about Labadie setting up his own print shop as an old man and publishing his own poetry in booklets "hand-sewn and tied with leftover pieces of ribbon." Perhaps most interesting is the chapter about Labadie's amazing archives, saved by his wife and later heroically (if idiosyncratically) organized and augmented by Agnes Inglis at the University of Michigan. The book includes an afterword, "The Labadie Collection today," by Edward Weber, co-winner with Julie Herrada of this year's Eubanks Award.

Is "ugly truth" an oxymoron? Phoebe Gloeckner's A child's life and other stories (Frog Press, 1998) suggests so, compiling powerful and disquieting comics about childhood sexual abuse. With admirable forthrightness Gloeckner explicitly addresses the creepiness of abusive stepfathers and boyfriends (cloaked in a veneer of respectability and niceness) as well as the ambivalence of a girl raised irresponsibly. Combining a fairy tale sense of pacing with hyperrealistic drawing (she works as a medical illustrator), the newest pieces here are especially cogent. Arranged developmentally (Childish Stories, Teen Stories, Grown-up Stories), some were first published in Wimmin's Comix, Young Lust, and WEIRDO, and included in the two Twisted sisters anthologies. The book includes two full-color sections, one of which reproduces the covers of Andrea Juno's Angry women and Angry women in rock and other paintings (one depicts fellatio in biomedical cross-section, reminiscent of the psychedelic anatomical art of Alex Grey ).

If there is an element of clinical detachment apparent here, A child's life is more a testament to courage, a message not to avert ones eyes, a reassurance against the fear to know.

I am writing a poem about...: a game of poetry (M. K. McElderry Books, 1997) is a slim volume edited by Myra Cohn Livingston. While teaching poetics at UCLA, the editor known for her collections of poetry for children, assigned her class one word to use in a poem, then three words for another poem, and then six words (actually five, plus a choice of one of two others). While these rules seem rather loose to me, I was interested to see evidence of how these poets' minds work. My own experience is that strict form and meter can oxymoronically be liberating to a writer while a blank page can be overwhelming. Forced choices may enable serendipitous word combinations and cause fresh metaphors to spring up. Douglas Hofstadter writes interestingly about this in his Le ton beau de Marot: in praise of the music of language.

The poems I found most clever here are by children's book author Alice Schertle. Schertle solves the "drum/ring/blanket" assignment thus:

Three Words Set Sail

'Beat the drum! Ring the bell!'
I shouted. 'This is going well!'
The first two words in record time
were floating on a sea of rhyme,
one sitting forward, one word aft;
my poem was a sturdy craft.
Then one more climbed aboard,
and blanket
was the word that finally sank it.

Thanks to Nancy Bonnell-Kangas for the tip on this book.

Malcolm Braly's False starts: a memoir of San Quentin and other prisons (Little, Brown, 1976) is an autobiography which focuses on self- psychology. The product of a messed-up childhood (not that he uses this an excuse), Braly "blundered in and out of prison for over twenty years," a thief who seemed programmed to be caught. A relatively small part of the book deals with Braly's becoming an author while in prison. (Before this memoir came out, he had four novels published. I read one of them--On the yard--in the mid 70s...or perhaps I have just now reread False starts.)

"The human buck was passed from one group of experts who didn't know what they were doing, to another group of experts who also don't know. And where this process became evil--I suggest evil to be a chronic insensitivity to the real feelings of others--is when all these officials were compelled to pretend they did know whet they were doing."

"I heard there were no bars on the prison ward at the Santa Barbara County Hospital. If I could make it there [from the Santa Barbara jail], I might get away.... To get to the hospital I decided to eat soap. I had heard stories of how beans cooked in a poorly rinsed pot had caused regiments of soldiers to become violently ill with symptoms of food poisoning. We were furnished Fels-Naptha, a strong laundry soap, to wash our socks, and I took a bar of this and soaked it in water to make softsoap. I ended up with half a number ten can which I forced myself to drink one afternoon. I sat down to wait, hoping the soap wouldn't kill me or make me so weak I wouldn't have the strength to escape. After half an hour I belched once or twice. That was all. I decided if I was healthy enough to digest a quart of softsoap, I was too healthy not to try to live."

Alexander Berkman's Prison memoirs of an anarchist begins with his account of personal events in 1892. The fervid 22-year-old radical was on his way to shoot Henry Clay Frick, the manager of Carnegie's Steel's Homestead plant. After the "attentat" fails, he's jailed, quickly prosecuted and found guilty, and sent to prison. Berkman's memoirs at first seem on the self-righteous side, even a touch priggish and self-pitying. Eventually, though, this book is a fascinating insider's account of 14 hard years behind bars. A political prisoner, Berkman spent whole years in solitary, sometimes on a diet of nothing bread and water. How did he survive while friends around him died? Though sometimes desperate to the point of considering suicide with a sharpened spoon, Berkman maintained his sanity in part by planning an escape and by staying in contact (if tenuously) with Emma Goldman and other comrades on the outside, but even more so by reading and by befriending fellow prisoners.

Berkman's documentation of the corrupt administration in this specific instance (prison in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania) mirrors that of vicious people in power everywhere: "[Prison guards'] attitude ... is summed up in coercion and suppression. They look upon [us] as will-less objects of iron-handed discipline, exact unquestioning obedience and absolute submissiveness to peremptory whims, and harbor personal animosity toward the less pliant. The more intelligent among [them] scorn inferior duties and crave advancement. The authority and remuneration of a Deputy Wardenship is alluring to them, and every keeper deems himself fittest for the vacancy. But the coveted prize is awarded to the guard most feared by One notable element of the book is Berkman's discussion of homosexuality in prison (he went from ignorance and homophobia to the point where he fell in deeply love with a man). Berkman also writes interestingly about his collaboration with two other anarchist prisoners on a samizdat publication they titled Zuchthausbluethen (Prison Blossoms). This 3" x 5" handwritten "magazinelet" was passed from contributor to contributor, "its contents growing in transit."

Paul Avrich's Sacco and Vanzetti: the anarchist background (Princeton University Press, 1991) provides a fascinating look at the network of militant Italian anarchists active in the United States during the Teens and Twenties. Resolutely devoted to a cause, their number included prototypical "anarchist bombers" who employed dynamite and words in seemingly equal measure. Unsurprisingly, a backlash of anti-immigrant and anti-radical hysteria swelled with each bombing. President Woodrow Wilson in 1915 warned of "hyphenated Americans [who] have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life.... Such creatures of passion...and anarchy must be crushed out." Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer concurred: "Out of the sly and crafty eyes of many of them leap cupidity, cruelty, insanity and crime; from their lopsided faces, sloping brows, and misshapen features may be recognized the unmistakable criminal type."

While the Sacco and Vanzetti trial is only touched upon here briefly, it is evident that parallels can be drawn with the other dubious legal proceedings against radicals in U.S. history, from the Haymarket martyrs' legal lynching to the contemporary case of Mumia Abu-Jamal.

Hal Sears' The sex radicals: free love in high Victorian America (Regents Press of Kansas, 1977) illuminates a hidden history of 19th century freethinkers, sex education advocates, feminists, and free speech devotees. Perhaps foremost among these were Kansas anarchist Moses Harman (editor of Lucifer, the Light Bearer), imprisoned for daring to publish a letter about marital rape (the word "penis" was deemed obscene); Harman's daughter Lillian (jailed for over six months for marrying without sanction of church or state); and Ezra and Angela Heywood, editors of The Word. The latter were hounded in Boston by fulltime censorship activist Anthony Comstock, about whom Sears writes:

"Comstock became confused in his attempts to define 'suggestive' art works. He conceded that some works portraying the nude body were not obscene, provided they fulfilled his notion of painterly art: the artist's technique must effectively divert attention from the nudity, which of itself is objectionable... In short, he felt that a direct link existed between the sight of a naked human body and the degradation of the viewer. The degradation, whether from a vision of nudity or an evil word, became all the more total if experienced by a child. [Comstock] never quite explained how he himself escaped such degradation, even though he probably viewed more 'evil' than most professional lechers were able to see. He allowed himself to sit through whole performances before making arrests, such as 'Busy Fleas,' which was enacted for him in 1878 by unwary prostitutes. On an 1881 occasion, a Philadelphia paper reported, he paid $14.50 for a specially ordered undressing act by three prostitutes; they performed for Comstock for one hour and twenty minutes before he arrested them." (p.73)

Sears also notes that "Comstock hounded Ann Lohman, an abortionist and dispenser of birth control methods and advice, until she committed suicide; hers was the fifteenth suicide that he personally credited to his account, and there were to be more." (p.72).

The so-called Comstock Act (Postal Act of 1873) criminalized the mailing of "obscene," "lewd," "and "lascivious" materials. In response, some radicals backed down (Liberty editor Ben Tucker, for one) while few remained fearless. Besides Moses Harman (about whom Voltairine de Cleyre wrote in her essay "Sex Slavery"), there was Lois Nichols Waisbrooker. Sears writes that during 1891-92, as Harman moved in and out of prison, "the sixty-six-year-old woman served as editor of Lucifer [and] succeeded in getting the journal barred from the mails for pointing up the contradictions in the Horse Penis Affair." (Urging readers to compare the two, Waisbrooker published an explicit excerpt from a Department of Agriculture horse veterinary pamphlet along with the passage from the letter which caused Moses Harman's imprisonment.)

These "sex radicals" of the 19th century had roots in the abolitionist movement and were largely concerned about women's rights and equality. At the scandalous wedding of Lillian Harman and Edwin Walker, the groom asserted: "Lillian is and will continue to be free to repulse any and all advances of mine as she has been heretofore. In joining with me in this love and labor union, she has not alienated a single right. She remains sovereign of herself, as I of myself and we� repudiate all powers legally conferred upon husbands and wives."

Not all of those described by Sears were anarchists or freethinkers. Some were proponents of spiritualism, wacky sex theories, and eugenics. One theory asserted that "contraception could not occur unless the two sexes 'connected in at least two places, thus allowing�electric current to make a complete circuit through the spinal column properly.' This explained why people�and animals sought to connect the top parts of their bodies as well as their reproductive organs in the act of intercourse. The lesson was simple: 'If you do not want children keep your head away from your companion in sexual intercourse.'" Besides covering the lives of courageous individuals far ahead of their time, Sex radicals is a fascinating look at the history of birth control, and attitudes toward oral sex, masturbation, and sexuality in general.

Relatedly, the seventh annual conference of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP) set for July 15-18 in Madison, Wisconsin, will include a July 17 session titled "Free Love and Print Culture in 19th Century America," with a talk on "The Best Woman's Friend Published": Lucifer the Light-Bearer, Anarchism, and the Rights of Women." Here are conference details, including the entire program.

Some related documents:
"Feminism in Liberty," by Sharon Presley
"The Free Love Movement and Radical Individualism in the 19th Century," by Wendy McElroy
"An Age of Consent Symposium," by Lillian Harman

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