Book talkin'

Oops. I've been reading, but negligent about reviewing. Here are some books I read in December:

Luis Alberto Urrea's Wandering time: western notebooks (University of Arizona Press, 1999) chronicles five seasons of roaming in the West. This slender book sparkles with metaphors: elk-antlered beetles, marmot detectives, a city of gems on black velvet. Its lessons are drawn from trail and tavern, from nature's tricksters as well as the Arapaho joker who pointed out to Urrea evidence of teepee circles on the moon. Crafted with a poets careful observation, the book is a quiet reminder about appreciating small moments, and seeing the large--the universal--in the tiniest leaf or incident. It's also a fine source of reading recommendations, as Urrea cites and quotes favorite authors from Linda Hogan to Tom McGuane.

Lynda Barry's new book, The Freddy stories (Sasquatch Books, 1999), compiles poignant serial comics about the inner life of Maybonne and Marlys's little brother Freddy, drawn with Barry's faux outsider art style. Barry is one rare adult who remembers clearly what it's like to be a kid, even though her imagination can lead to scary places, in this case the mind of an abused child who copes by conjuring up "the Rocka-Shaggy-Baba" man. With an anti-homophobia sub-text, this book is about being different, transcending difficult circumstances, and the redemptive power of sibling solidarity. Go, girl.

Fresh, hopeful, ambitious, and full of energy, William Upski Wimsatt's No more prisons (Soft Skull Press, 1999) compiles essays and manifestos, many of which first appeared in the alternative press: Adbusters, Who Cares, In These Times, and others. The author of Bomb the suburbs (Subway and Elevated Press, 1994) here writes about alternatives to stultifying public education (e.g. homeschooling), offers suggestions for countering xenophobia and racism, and discusses philanthropy in an attempt to spur a "cool rich kids movement." In a society where fear of freedom is rampant, Wimsatt's words have liberatory potential.

The protagonists of Jennifer Camper's subGURLZ (Cleis Press, 1999) are not your ordinary comic book superheroines, nuh-uh. Raised in subways tunnels on their own, these three have grown up powerfully twisted. A hospital orderly, Liver keeps an even keel by swilling drain cleanser cocktails and morphine. Bald-headed Byte, a janitor by day, hacks computers and redistributes wealth. Swizzle tends bar in a lesbian strip joint, uproots parking meters, and hefts parked cars for kicks. Loving and protecting one another three to a bed, living by their own subterranean code, they arouse the wrath of the "street" world after "kidnapping" a girl who's fallen in front of a train. How will they fare against Gotham's woman police chief? Will Swiz learn to be more careful when she hugs? Just what is it that lesbians do in bed? First serialized in comic strip form over several years, SubGURLZ works more coherently as a graphic novel. Kudos to Jen Camper for gleeful trust in her own imagination, an unbridled id, and delight in examining what most other artists avoid.

Robin Behn's poems in The red hour (Harper, 1993) are ambitious and sometimes audacious, filled with musical repetition ("just a fake blue/stolen from the sky-blue sky./And the sky's just a blue mote/in Your enormous eye..."), rambling at times. Music is a recurrent theme here, with individual pieces for oboe, bassoon, French horn, and sousaphone. Several poems ask to be read over and over: they are whole and complex and wonderful. More are simply interesting, with a nice line here and a Nancy Kanga-ish construction there ("the going-ness/of the year"... "We lit up Iowa with overkill headlights" ... "sidewalk slabs jut at a number of skies/like knocked-up bottom teeth"). Disclaimer: In the Sixties I knew Robin Behn and her sister and her parents who were occasional word-game playing visitors to 643 Chestnut Street in Dubuque.

November 5, 1999

Barbara Kingsolver's High tide in Tucson: essays from now or never (Harper, 1995) nicely combines personal anecdote and metaphor. Ostensibly about such topics as a desert-dwelling hermit crab, the importance of libraries, and the trials of parenting a willful child ("Civil disobedience at breakfast"), each fits into a larger scheme that bespeaks the author's values. Kingsolver's writing entails a reverence for life, filled with both questioning and intuition, whether covering sex roles in nature, travels outside North America, or visiting a decommissioned missile silo. Likewise in publicly examining her own psyche (in an essay, for example, about being on the road away from her daughter), Kingsolver displays uncommon honesty. Giving evidence of both scientist and poet, these writings are full of humor, gusto, and admirable courage throughout.

Paul Theroux's Sir Vidia's shadow: a friendship across five continents (Houghton Mifflin, 1998) is a compelling account of Theroux's thirty-year acquaintance with author V.S. Naipaul, from first meeting in East Africa, to the streets of London and country estates in Dorset. "How can one be friends with a person like that?" my partner wondered, picking up the book and reading snippets, and to whom I read passages aloud. Here is ample evidence of friendship's complexity: forgiving, compassionate, and as blinding as passionate love. Utterly self-centered, misogynistic, venal, and snobbish, Naipaul is treated gently throughout, according to his own simple advice: "Tell the truth." Like the best monster movies--horrifying, delicious, sad, and instructive--the book carries one along in waves. It is ultimately as much autobiography as it is a portrait of another: a case study in authorship, protege-mentor relations, admiration and delusion, loss and the admission of weakness, assertion and liberation.

"'We've just driven from Uganda,' Vidia said....'We are inquiring about your hotel...We'd like to have lunch and look around.'

'Give me a moment to get sorted out,' the major said. 'Have a shufti at the garden. I'll give you a shout when we're ready to seat you. What was the name?'

'Naipaul.'

'Are you the writer?'

It was an inspired response. The heavens opened. A trumpet sounded, flocks of doves soared, and all the malaikas, the choirs of black angels, in the skies of western Kenya burst into song. 'Yes,' Vida said, stammering with satisfaction. 'Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.'"

Recently read: Neil Haugerud's Jailhouse stories: memories of a smalltown sheriff (University of Minnesota Press, 1999), set in Fillmore County, southeastern Minnesota (review to appear in next MSRRT Newsletter).

October 3, 1999

I'd looked forward to Louis-Ferdinand Celine's Journey to the end of the night (Voyage au Bout de la Nuit) since reading his bleakly humorous Death on the Installment Plan (Mort Credit) twisted my psyche at age 19 or 20. Critics said Death was good but Journey was great. (Ah, but what do critics know? Perhaps these were the same people who ranked Brothers Karamazov above Crime and Punishment.) Celine's first novel, Journey, published in France in 1932, was available in English translation by John H. P. Marks (New Directions, 1960), but this edition seemed badly bowdlerized to me. I couldn't get more than a couple pages into it. Then--hallelujah--New Directions published a new translation by Ralph Manheim in 1983. Trouble was, by that time I no longer had the inclination to read it, having long since devoured Celine's World War II trilogy (North; Castle to Castle; Rigadoon) and moving on.

Now I've read Journey, at a less impressionable age, and I must say that a few words cannot do it justice. At its worst it is tedious, sexist, and racist. If we give Celine credit, it's his autobiographical protagonist Ferdinand Bardamu--like the author a physician and World War I veteran--to whom these traits should be attributed. Plot? Well, there isn't much. A cowardly Ferdinand survives the war, spends time working in equatorial Africa, visits the United States, establishes a medical practice back in France, and then bumbles around trying to avoid being dragged down by his regularly reappearing acquaintance Robinson. Celine's patented style--elliptical, exaggerated, frenetic, and bawdy--begins to appear here, with otherwise complete sentences and traditional narrative. Chunks of it are wonderful, demanding to be read aloud: from accounts of wartime cowardice and banal violence, to lyrical descriptions of a young woman nurse's musculature.

At its best, Journey is not so much depressingly cynical as it is prophetic, forecasting, for example, the continued "dumbing down" of culture: "Is there any need for us to weigh ourselves down with the least bit of logic? ... Of course not! ... Logic can only be an encumbrance to the infinitely subtle..." Not yet 40 when this first came out, Celine captures middle age exactly in his portrait of a sanitarium owner who chucks everything and heads for England. "One fine day you decide to talk less and less about the things you care most about, and when you have to say something, it costs you an effort ... You're good and sick of hearing yourself talk ... you abridge ... You give up ... For thirty years you've been talking ... You don't care about being right any more. You even lose your desire to keep hold of the small place you'd reserved among the pleasures of life ... You're fed up ... From that time on you're content to eat a little something, cadge a little warmth, and sleep as much as possible on the road to nowhere..." Cynicism? Yes, that too: "There's nothing left but a foul slumgullion of organic debris, a marmalade of madness... sticky, grotesque, contemptuous, fetid. Everything is going to collapse, Ferdinand, everything is collapsing."

Recommended for those interested in delving into humanity's darker side, not for titillation, but to try to understand the complex mind behind these words: fascinating, flawed, provocative, horrible, and--in which places?--entirely true.

From time to time during my reading I referred back to the Marks translation for comparison. Two not untypical examples:

Marks: "On the walls scrawled insults to the police only half rubbed out."

Manheim: "On the wall the inscription 'Fuck the Fuzz' was only partially erased."

Marks: "Don't you get the same kick out of making love as everyone else, you great brute? You get excited then, don't you? Dare to say--in front of every one--that you don't get sexually excited?"

Manheim: "'Don't you get a hard-on like everybody else, you big pig, when you make love? Oh, so you don't get a hard-on, is that it? ... Out with it! ... In front of these people ... Tell us you don't get a hard-on!'"

John Ross's Rebellion from the roots: Indian uprising in Chiapas is an interesting account of the New Year's Day 1994 Zapatista (EZLN) revolt in Mexico's southernmost state. It covers the event's historical underpinnings as well as its subsequent effects--including military repression and EZLN-government peace talks--over the course of what was a national presidential election year. Ross also provides compelling evidence that Mexico's rulers knew about the EZLN in advance, but chose not to acknowledge this for fear of endangering the not-yet-signed North American Free Trade Agreement.

In many ways Chiapas is a microcosm. Comparisons to the U.S. came to mind occasionally while reading this book. In Chiapas drastic inequality between rich and poor means two separate worlds for ladino landholders and Indian campesinos whose ancestors inhabited the Lacandn forest. (The pan-Indian EZLN represents four language groups: Tzeltal, Tzotzil, Tojolabel, and Chol.) Ross shows specifically how poor people in Mexico, "precisely because they are the weakest and most disprotected constituency ... are those most susceptible to the pressures and manipulations of the PRI government." Electoral politics have been useless in effecting change. In Mexico the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), in power since 1929, has been known to turn out more than 100% of registered voters in selected municipalities and register election sweeps by such votes as 12,070 to zero. In several chapters here Ross documents rampant government corruption, political violence (e.g., assassination), such "naked bamboozlements" as payment for votes, and a baffling array of election fraud.

Readers will come away well versed in Mexican political acronyms, likely interested in reading further Mexican history--as well as more inclined to keep up with the current situation in Chiapas, and impressed by Subcomandante Marcos whose words--like those of Panamanian Ruben Blades--blend humor, politics, and poetry. Ross notes that "the evil with which one is familiar [is] more inviting than the good one doesn't yet know." In Chiapas indigenous people are struggling to break out of this construct. Having gained attention of not just the national government but the world, they seek justice not simply for themselves, but for poor people throughout Mexico.

Paul Theroux's The Old Patagonian Express details a trip, mostly by train, over a couple of months, from Boston to southern Argentina. I picked up a used paperback copy for a dime at a smalltown public library recently, and have been moving along through it desultorily, but with great enjoyment (to the point of occasionally needing to read aloud from it). Among its highlights: a rock 'n roll church service in Mexico from which parishioners flee at any sign of prayer, a raucous soccer game between the national teams of Mexico and El Salvador (at which fans pummel each other and float oblong white balloons), altitude sickness on rickety trains in the Andes, a gory wound which wouldn't stop bleeding ("I am sorry for making a mess"), and a week spent talking about books with (and reading to) Jorge Luis Borges (and accounts of what Theroux read along the way--thumbs up to Poe's The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym), not to mention encounters with obnoxious (and noisy) tourists.

"It is hard to think straight in the company of other people. Not only do I feel self-conscious, but the perceptions that are necessary to writing are difficult to manage when someone is thinking out loud. I am diverted, but it is discovery, not diversion, that I seek. What is required is the lucidity of loneliness to capture that vision which, however banal, seems in my private mood to be special and worthy of interest. There is something in feeling abject that quickens my mind and makes it intensely receptive to fugitive impressions. Later, these impressions might be refuted or deleted, but they might also be verified and refined; and in any case I had the satisfaction of finishing the business alone. Travel is not a vacation, and it is often the opposite of a rest..."

I've recently read Jane Kenyon's A hundred white daffodils: essays, interviews, Akhmatova translations, newspaper columns, and one poem (Graywolf, 1999) and Noel Peattie's In the dome of the Saint Laurence Meteor (Regent Press, 1999). Reviews of these appear in the Fall 1999 MSRRT Newsletter.

Now am concurrently reading Ralph Manheim's translation of Louis-Ferdinand Celine's Voyage a Bout de la Nuit (Journey to the End of the Night) and Paul Theroux's The old Patagonian express. Reviews of these forthcoming here. Soon.

Susan Hazen-Hammond's The great saguaro book (Ten Speed Press, 1997) documents in color photos and text the oft-anthropomorphized giant cactus of the Sonoran Desert. In its pages prickly towers of flesh embrace, sprout unlikely appendages, house birds, expand and contract depending upon rainfall, survive human unkindness, provide fruit used by Tohono O'odham people (its taste "like a combination of watermelons and figs"), and, yes, inspire kitsch. A good introduction to the saguaro, this book contains information about its survival rate, growth, and lifespan, as well as awesome pictures.

I have been reading selectively from The complete poems of Anna Akhmatova (Zephyr Press, 1997); translations from Russian into English by Judith Hemschemeyer. A treasure.

...I just can't comprehend
Whether it is the end of the day, the end of the world,
Or the mystery of mysteries in me again.

(from untitled poem, 1964)

Charles Bukowski: locked in the arms of a crazy life (Grove Press, 1998), a new biography of the boozy self-made poet, was put together byHoward Sounes, a British author whose previous book, tellingly, describes "the lives and crimes of mass murderers Fred and Rosemary West." Recommended only for serious Bukowski fans and scholars, its poetic assessments are risible (see page 199, top). Seeming not to have been edited, it is rife with tautology (e.g., "the tranquilizer drug Valium"), uses the verb "lay" for "lie" throughout, and is marked by occasional typos (e.g., "Kinglsey Amis" and "immitation"). That said, the book does offer another (nastier) angle on the mean, misogynistic, alcohol-abusing low life Bukowski has already described in his autobiographical prose (e.g., Ham on rye). Neeli Chernovski's Hank: the life of Charles Bukowski is better, though.

Virginia Hamilton Adair's Beliefs and blasphemies: a collection of poems (Random House, 1998) and Charles Bukowski's Bone palace ballet: new poems (Black Sparrow Press, 1997) couldn't be more dissimilar. The first is a small book of spare religious poems, not as finely crafted or interesting to me as the author's Ants on a Melon (see below). I suppose it's fine if you like this sort of thing, and I can imagine Garrison Keillor performing some of them. Bukowski's latest posthumous regurgitation, on the other hand, is a fat book covering the mundane--horse races, drinking, writing, relationships with women, waiting to die--albeit with lines which are largely tired, trite, prosaic, and uninspired. Bukowski writes self-referentially about composing poems using a computer--complete with spell checker--but this collection contains a piece referring to Beethoven and "Hayden" (and once misuses "where" for "were"). Neat and sloppy, I liked neither of these books but recommend earlier collections by both authors.

I've finally gotten back to--and finished--The letters of Sacco and Vanzetti, begun three months ago after reading Paul Avrich's book. First published in 1928, the year after the execution of the two Italian-American anarchists, the book is interesting on a number of levels. For one thing, its scope is entirely letters composed in English, the duo's second language and one in which they were not proficient. Bartolomeo Vanzetti (who we're told here spent his first two years in the U.S. as a dishwasher in New York), was the more articulate of the pair. His correspondence outnumbers Sacco's three to one, and is a richer source of insight:

"I hate to deceive myself with foolish hopes: I prefer to face the truth, nude, crude, horrible as it may be; to look the eye into the eye, the reality. Not to shrink from, not to fear the reality, is my chosen rule. To think, but not to be crushed by my thoughts..."

"I am disappointed, but not crushed. I have not become a rat or a renegade. And I can carry my burden to the last, and only that counts."

"I believe that a little more of voluntarism, and a little less of fatalism, in all what concerns the human powers and possibilities, would be more salutary for all...."

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