pile of reading

the Winter/Spring 2006 issue of Berkeley Review of Latin American Studies (in which I learn that Chile has elected its first woman president. Kent told me this some time ago and I remember thinking, Oh? I ought to find out more about that.)

Spontaneous Combustion, a thinly fictionalized autobiographical novel by David B. Feinberg (the incidents in at least the first third recapitulate incidents in Feinberg's first novel, Eighty-Sixed)

924 Gilman, edited by Brian Edge (a sort of oral history of Berkeley's famed collectively run punk rock club; the book's repetitive and rarely exposes a prose style but I'm enjoying it)

In Cold Blood, a nonfiction novel by Truman Capote (I've been meaning to read this forever and it's a little premature to say I'm reading it since so far I've only read the first sentence about five times; while it was lying on the couch Kent took it up and got to the fourth page)

Parthenon West Review, issue 3, a poetry magazine out of San Francisco

Swann's Way, the endless novel (with endless sentences) by Marcel Proust

The Work of a Common Woman, poems by Judy Grahn (Grahn agreed to read as part of the Poetry & Pizza series this fall -- yay!)

Long Walk to Freedom, the autobiography of Nelson Mandela

Funny in Farsi: a memoir of growing up Iranian in America, by Firoozeh Dumas (the "Berkeley Reads" book this year; I tried to read along with the community book the first year they announced one but stalled out on Ellison's Invisible Man midway through the first chapter)

Snow Crash, a virtual reality novel by Neal Stephenson (as with In Cold Blood it is premature to say I'm reading this, really, but Stephenson keeps getting the hype and, um, I see by looking at page 211 that there's a librarian in it)

Poems for the Millennium, Volume Two, edited by Jerome Rothenberg & Pierre Joris (if this had been a 430 page anthology I would have finished it already)

Snapshots: 20th Century Mother-Daughter Fiction, edited by Joyce Carol Oates & Janet Berliner (I've read two of the stories; maybe now that I'm between New Yorkers I will read a third)

The Collected Poems by Sylvia Plath (I read the bio Bitter Fame but I find I keep pulling Plath biographies down from the bookstore shelf and flipping through them for fresh anecdotes; "It took three days driving north to find a cloud / The polite skies over Boston couldn't possibly accomodate.")

For those of you not up to looking, the books that have hung on since last pile are: Plath's Collected, Snapshots, Parthenon West, 924 Gilman, Poems for the Millennium, Long Walk to Freedom, and Swann's Way.

Other books have fallen into and out of the pile in the meantime but I'm not going to go tote those up.

Eyak

Useless to go back there.
My uncles too have all died out on me.
After my uncles all died out my aunts next fell,
to die.
Yes,
why is it I alone,
just I alone have managed to survive?
I survive.

The above is a translation of a "lament" recorded in 1972. The poem/song was composed in Eyak, an Alaskan native (Indian) language that, as of summer last year had one remaining native speaker. Having no one to talk to in her language the elderly woman typically uses English and Tlingit, a native language that, the author of the article I'm looking at (New Yorker, June 6, 2005) speculates, may in the absence of English have displaced Eeyak. When Europeans arrived Eyak speakers were a remnant population and Tlingit speakers were becoming ever more dominant in the area.

The extinction of languages distresses me. I do remember when I was a kid being delighted by the idea of global language and enough of a chauvinist (& lazy?) to hope that that hegemonic language be English. As I studied other languages (such common ones as Spanish & Portuguese and the relatively exotic American Sign Language) and discovered different ways of organizing thoughts my dream of the triumph of English began to seem distasteful. Gradually the frustration with hearing unintelligible language gave way to an appreciation for their musicks. The change had something to do with my growing appreciation for poetry and exploration in language. Much poetry is difficult, even impenetrable, and, I discovered, there are varieties even of English that I just can't grok. Unfamiliar languages came to seem new technologies, fresh tools, and I like gizmos, too. I like it when science "discovers" some animal (typically well known to the also overlooked locals). Why shouldn't I be fascinated by the novelties of other languages?

The Eeyak version of the first two lines of the above goes (roughly, as I don't know how to reproduce some of the typography -- an "l" with a line through it, an "x" with a subscript period):

K'aadih ulah uuch' q'e' iili'ee.
SitinhGayuudik sixa' iinsdi'ahl.

The New Yorker short story

So I've been reading my subscription to The New Yorker, right?, now that it's been lapsed for a year or more. Just finished the third of the stories in last June's "Debut Fiction" issue.

There's a photo of the three debutantes, "Uwen Akpan, 34; Karen Russell, 23; and Justin Tussing, 34" posed in what looks like the storage room of "the Strand Book Store." Uwen is black, perhaps an African immigrant -- one might guess that from his story, which is set in Nairobi, Kenya. Karen is a bright-eyed mousy blond, her long pale arms bare. Justin has rectangular glasses, a shadow on his jaw.

None gives a story to which I wish to return. Not saying they're bad. They all do that New Yorker short story thing where the story doesn't resolve so much as it stops. I'm getting used to it, sort of. A situation is presented, characters drawn, conflicts grow and begin to make things difficult, then a complication arises. As the characters realize they are facing a new situation, the story stops and the new situation is not quite addressed.

In Uwen's story the oldest boy in a street family is the hope of the family. They're putting aside money so he can go to school. Even his eldest sister who is hooking saves money for his sake. The boy is conflicted, ashamed to be so favored when all the others (especially the elder sister whom he looks up to) are obviously stuck, no school, few prospects. Sister is planning to move out (the family lives in a storage box); when she comes to get her things, the boy runs away. End of story.

In Karen's story two brothers (one of whom narrates) are searching for their little sister's body. She was swept out to sea and the brothers blame themselves. There's a mysterious element in that the older boy finds a pair of water goggles that supposedly reveal ghosts. Will they see their sister's ghost? No. Unless that glow that suffuses the grotto is her ... I guess this story comes closest to resolution. But Karen's young. I'm sure she'll wise up.

Justin's story has a teen boy developing a crush on his pretty young teacher. There's a crazy wise hobo who speaks like an oracle, penetrating yet inexplicable. There's a family that's just a touch quirky. Just when it looks like the (secret) relationship with teacher might develop into something deeper (or she might dump him) she tells him her ex-husband has called and is threatening to come to town. "'I'll protect you from him,'" he says. "That's the type of life I wanted to lead when I was seventeen." Boy and teacher hold hands. End of story.

It's easy to imagine each as a novel excerpt. That they end where they end doesn't seem at all inevitable. The stories don't wrap up. In fact with many NYer short stories I have the feeling more is about to happen than we've so far been allowed to see. Having invested in the characters, having taken the time to get to know the situation they're in, I confess to feeling a little frustration at this abrupt manner of closing up shop. Well ... what happened then? How'd it turn out?

Endings are artificial, I suppose. But then so is a story. In a sense I've come to like that little feeling of frustration. I would prefer resolution. But it's kind of like leaving the table hungry, you know. You want more. You think more, maybe. And, playing that metaphor out, you end up snacking.

books bought

I walked downtown about noon to go to the gym. I was feeling kinda blue but physically felt pretty good. When I have a day without obligations and I’m not sore & worn out I get to the gym. That’s about once a week. I did the FitLinxx routine on the weight machine – I punch in my code and the computer tells me when last I lifted weights then at each station tells me how much weight I lifted that last time and how many reps. It’s nice not to have to remember.

I ate lunch afterward at Panini -- an artichoke hearts sandwich, a cup of coffee, and one of their rich chocolate cookies. I wrote in my diary and read a couple pages of The Ohlone Way, a book about the lifeways of the people who lived in the SF Bay Area before the arrival of Europeans.

I haven’t been to Comic Relief in two or three weeks so I figured I’d poke around there on the way home. First I stopped at Half Price Books. I checked out the clearance shelves and there were a lot of mildly interesting books filling the clearance shelves. A worker was boxing up books that had sat too long and refilling the space with new clearances. I drifted by the children’s section and there was a new Oz thingie, something called, I think, Everything Oz, which quotes from various Oz books and Oz-related sources and features illustrations & doodads from around the world. I slid it back onto the shelf. Since I read Born Free last year and since I own the third book Joy Adamson wrote about Elsa the lioness, Forever Free, I’ve had my eye out for Living Free, in which Elsa gives birth to and raises a litter of cubs. A handsome hardcover was waiting for me today. I flipped through it. I’d been hoping for a cheap paperback but just yesterday I’d been wondering if I ought to fill out a want slip at one of the town’s used bookstores. What, I’d asked myself, was I willing to pay? Ten bucks? This copy was $5.98. I tucked it under my arm and made a final swing by the graphic novels and DVDs.

At Comic Relief I let myself be seduced by De: Tales, a collection of “stories from urban Brazil” by Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba. The artists are twins. Long heads and bodies and big facial features. The drawings match. And I like the way the perspectives are often looking down from above or up from below. I recently read an anthology called Autobiographix that included one of their stories (the story also appears here). I also bought Alixopulos’ Mine Tonight. Alixopulos is a local and I first became aquainted with his work via a self-published mini-comic I picked up at Comic Relief. His art is scratchy and hungover-looking.

A block later I did a doubletake at the stationery store which is closing. Big signs announced, “50% off marked price.” One can always use office supplies, right? Cheap blank books are good, too. And I found a cheap blank book with an “ostrich print” cover. Plucked ostrich skin? I also bought a spiral notebook for my book log and a USB cable. I saw Joyce Jenkins, who had some new pens in hand. She says she’s putting the finishing touches on a new print issue of Poetry Flash. “There’s always something more to do,” she said. I told her I was working on the Poetry & Pizza calendar for the fall. She said she would try to make it to a reading.

For the last paragraph Sutra has been in my lap. He seems to be tolerating my typing. But he pokes my arm with his nose; why aren’t I rubbing him up?

thoughts on reading

Used to be I would only read one book at a time. It was a resolution. I couldn’t plunge into a new book until I finished the one I was reading. So what changed? What made me switch from a single book to a mini-library?

What made me think I could only read one book at a time? Maybe I thought I wouldn’t be able to keep different books separate in my thoughts? I still try to avoid reading more than one novel at a time. Not that I’m fastidious about it. I was just reading Steinbeck’s Pastures of Heaven and that’s certainly different enough from Proust’s Swann’s Way that there’s little likelihood of the two getting mixed up in my head.

One difficulty came with long books. I’m not a fast reader. Was I to stack up comic books while I forced myself to attend only to Tom Jones? Did I really restrict myself to the deathbed edition of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass until at last I closed the cover on the final page?

Poetry was a big reason I threw aside the notion I could keep myself to a single book. I decided forcing myself to read poem after poem after poem without a break was doing nothing for my appreciation of poetry. Especially when it was difficult or I wasn’t sure I liked it or I plain didn’t like it but felt I ought to keep reading so I could learn something about what not liking meant.

Comics were, too. Many a comic story is played out over several issues. And nobody’s expected to save up all the parts to read at one sitting. If you buy more than one series you’re immersed in more than one ongoing story. It’s not hard to pick back up where the story left off a month previous.

By the time I was going to college, of course, there was no way I would be able to restrict myself to a single book – each class had its own list of books to hurry through. And there were plenty of things I wanted to read that had nothing to do with my classes. I remember thinking I would limit myself to five books – one book of poetry, one book of nonfiction, one novel, one book of short stories, one graphic novel. Something like that.

A book will come along and take over and I’ll just read that until I’ve finished. Then there will be the evenings I read a page or two from each of eight volumes. Books – particularly anthologies of poetry, short stories or whatever – will be pursued regularly then forgotten for a month or so. There are probably a few books I’ve started and never will finish. But I like to get all the way through a book. I finger the pages, look at the thickness of what’s been read, what waits, ponder what needs resolving in the story or whether I’ll enjoy more of the poems to come than I’ve enjoyed what’s passed.

pile of reading

Tropical Truth: a story of music & revolution in Brazil, by Caetano Veloso

Eyes of Desire: a Deaf Gay & Lesbian Reader, edited by Raymond Luczak

Long Walk to Freedom, the autobiography of Nelson Mandela

The Pastures of Heaven, by John Steinbeck

X-Men, vol 3: nos 22-31, by Roy Thomas & Werner Roth

The New Yorker, the Debut Fiction issue from June ’05

Swann’s Way, by Marcel Proust, C.K. Scott Moncrieff translation

Poems for the Millennium, vol 2: From Postwar to Millennium, edited by Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris

The Collected Poems, Sylvia Plath

924 Gilman, compiled by Brian Edge

Kona Village Resort: a Village is a Family, an historical account published by the resort, although no author is credited, “We would like to acknowledge Lani, our Kona Village historian, who worked so tirelessly on this book …”

Liaison, by Joyce Wadler

Parthenon West Review, issue 3, Fall 2003

Snapshots: 20th Century Mother-Daughter Fiction, edited by Joyce Carol Oates & Janet Berliner

The Company of Animals: a naturalist’s adventures in the jungle of Malaya, by Ronald McKie

D. Jayne McPherson

Material Lost

I forfeited my first and only LTD
to the junkyard in East Palo Alto
my first love to his mother's wishes
I was robbed of my silver coins by
a landlord's son; my federal paycheck
in the mail; of two borrowed IBMs and
one down mummybag by Marilyn in Mendocino

Things disappeared right in front of me
the cross-country snow trail during sunset
those nature lithographs stored at Mother's
my wallet in a phone booth near Boston
that 16th birthday, blue sapphire ring

As punishment, others drifted away
my best friendships Peggy and Sue
from my living out of state; walk-to-school
mate, Terry, from her husband's gunshot
wound; puppy Heidi in old age

But once I lost my voice, my name, my home
Perhaps I must face it: this body
too, slowly dissolves. But who would
be left to count it up
as only recombinant material lost?

-- D. Jayne McPherson


... Got a call from Jayne today. Sorta outta the blue. But it was nice reconnecting. Made me ponder what of hers I might have in the house. My eyes lit on an issue of The Tomcat, a poetry zine. It was sticking out of a box of papers I need to file. There were, what, five or six issues of The Tomcat. It declares itself, "a literary showcase for Northern California poets." I knew many of the poets editor Richard Benbrook published (& I knew Richard). I like Jayne's poem better than the poem of mine that appears in the same issue. My poem was from a series of poems in which a character named Bert used the telephone in various (metaphorical?) ways. I remember writing several Bert poems, writing them quickly so I would have more poems to mail out to magazines. I thought they were as good as/better than many of the poems I was seeing in the lit mags. Someday I'll revisit them. The one in Tomcat isn't bad. But I would have to fiddle with it some before republishing.

I like the catalog of things in "Material Lost" ... I don't like the word "recombinant" ... I remember not knowing what an "LTD" was ...

There are poets I didn't know back in 1990 (when this Tomcat was published) that are now familiar to me. Dorothy Jesse Beagle runs a poetry reading series at a cafe in Berkeley. John Selawsky ... is he the Berkeley School Board member and Green Pary activist? Jaimes Alsop started the webzine, The Alsop Review. Gary Mex Glazner ... same poet who first hosted poetry slams in this area?

There are poets who have since have died: Judy Stedman, Paul Mariah, William Talcott ... I knew the first two and met the third more than once.

Victorian prudery

My sister Bernice was in town last week. We had opportunity for long talks and one of the things that came up was whether the Victorians were really so repressed as we've long been told.

There's a post up at Grumpy Old Bookman on the topic. Among other things GOB says, "In 1857, the medical journal The Lancet estimated that the capital could offer over 6,000 brothels and about 80,000 prostitutes: one woman in every sixteen -- of all ages -- was a whore."

So what makes us think they were prudes? The two men most known for the morals crusade, GOB says, were also "proprietors of the two most successful commercial lending libraries; and the libraries were huge buyers of fiction."

Now and then we hear about how evolution (or some other Christian-right opposed fact) has been reduced to a few mealy-mouthings in school textbooks. The publishers of textbooks know they won't be able to sell anything truthful (which would be controversial) to the biggest buyers of textbooks, which would be Texas and, despite its reputation for liberalism, California, and suchlike. Would a reader of U.S. textbooks take away an accurate view of science (or anything much else?)

The publishers of the Victorian era had to look out for two things -- the law (they could be -- and some were -- imprisoned for publishing sexually explicit works) and their biggest customers (who scoured new books for improprieties). The Victorian literature we have to read today, does it really reflect Victorian society?

I

I filled the poetry notebook I’ve been working in for the past year. The first lines in the book were written on June 27, 2005. The last were written last night. A year.

The first lines were written at a bed & breakfast in Calistoga. I was sitting on a lounge chair on the little patio by the pond.

The last lines were written sitting on the edge of the bed. I was thinking about this book as a unit. As with the dates making a unit, June to June, one year, there were so many sheets of paper bound together making this book. I don’t know how many. I haven’t counted them. I don’t know how many poems I wrote in the book. They are contained, like the days, in one unit. A book.

The title, a title I gave it somewhere past halfway, is: I

The first two lines on page one go:

I could say something,
but that would be telling, wouldn’t it?

And the last two sentences of the piece I wrote last night:

Its title is on the unbending spine: your name. Or is that the author?

Well-Versed: poems for the road ahead

A few days ago I posted about the poetry chapbook anthology produced by Starbucks. I’m only writing about Well-Versed: poems for the road ahead because it is more what I would expect from a corporate poetry anthology. The booklet fell out of one of the New Yorker’s from last year. The AIG logo is prominent on the front & back covers, “insurance / loans / retirement.” There are eight poems in AIG’s anthology and an illustration for each poem (in one case two short poems share an illustration). The pictures illustrate the poems, that is, the poem that talks about looking in the mirror is accompanied by a drawing that shows a man holding up a mirror. There are the tired old anthology pieces – Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” Rudyard Kipling’s “If,” Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “First Fig.” No doubt they seemed harmless. There’s a Rainer Maria Rilke (“Future, who won’t wait for you? / Everyone is going there.”) and an Edgar Lee Masters (“In my youth my mind was just a mirror / In a rapidly flying car, / Which catches and loses bits of the landscape.”). Philip Booth and Lucille Clifton get to represent contemporary poetry with poems of bland exhortation (“may you in your innocence / sail through this to that”). It seems to me Frost’s “Road” is a very dry joke (the path “less traveled by” shows wear “about the same” as the one not chosen and “that has made all the difference”?); either that or he was just being sloppy. There’s a poem by a poet of whom I know nothing. David Filer’s “I Worry More” was first published in Rattle, issue #21. I wonder how it found its way into AIG’s poetry anthology? “I worry more now that my son is out / On his own, earning a handsome salary / Back east.”

The Playboy Interviews with John Lennon & Yoko Ono

from the diary: “Monday 1/27/86

“I’m reading The Playboy Interviews with John Lennon & Yoko Ono.

“I didn’t do anything today. Dropped by the library and read some Atlantic and some Ms. [magazines].

“Mom went to a Nuclear Free meeting but I don’t know what they did. She also took David to the passport office to clear up his sex. [D’s new passport indicated his sex as F.]”

A day later I wrote, “The Lennon/Ono interview book is a disappointment. boriiiiing.”

I like the Beatles. There are Beatles songs that I will never tire of. “Yellow Submarine”, “All You Need Is Love” … all together now! But I never felt like I needed to own (or even hear) everything the Beatles did and I was always a little foggy on which Beatle had done what after the band broke up. If I’d been steeped in Beatles trivia I suppose I would have gotten more out of this book. But I can be obsessive. Once I start a book I have to read it all the way through.

I just had the second volume of Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentleman requested out from under me – that is, I won’t be able to renew it now. And it’s a good thing. Because I’d been trying to work my way through this long prose piece in the back of the book, a “Traveller’s Almanac” that seemed to be Moore’s summarizing of all the fantastic literature he’d read for research. The League consists of characters from Dracula, King Solomon’s Mines, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and so forth. The second volume incorporates elements from at least three H.G. Wells novels -- The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds, and The Island of Dr Moreau. Moore also throws in allusions to more obscure tales during the narrative. But it’s in the Almanac that he goes overboard. His narrator takes readers on a tour of the world – on this island live the Skeezies, under this mountain live the immortal Boogers, a legendary city is said to appear out of the mist in this valley every hundred years. There’s only occasionally any story to it. And the writing is dry. So I’m glad the book’s been yanked away. Now I can stop reading it!

As I recall the Playboy interview with Lennon included a catalog of songs. The interviewer would name a song and Lennon was supposed to say whether he or bandmate Paul McCartney had written it. All Beatles songs written by Lennon or McCartney are attributed to both. Obviously many had to have been more John than Paul (or vice versa), right? I remember turning page after page of this going, I wonder if I know that song?

The Kiss of the Spider Woman

from the diary: “Sunday 1/26/86

I dropped by to say hello and “Ninnah & Adam … invited me to The Kiss of the Spider Woman at the Plaza in Petaluma. I’d been wanting to see this for a long time cuz it has two men kiss – Raul Julia and William Hurt.

“The movie was absorbing. I really liked the interplay in the cell. The movie fantasies were funny. I was never bored. But Molina (William Hurt) annoyed me. He spouted some lines that sounded as if they’d been lifted from The Naked Civil Servant (the film of Quentin Crisp’s autobiography of the same name) about always looking for a real man but never being able to find him because even if he did the real man couldn’t love him because a real man could only love a woman. He said at one point (about his penis), ‘If I had any courage I’d cut it off.’ I made some comment about the first point to Ninnah during the movie and she said, ‘That’s the eternal homosexual dilemma.’ (meaning the desire to be female, I thought). I bristled but didn’t say anything.

“Later in the car we discussed the movie. I told them I thought Molina was too close to being a cliché and was too unrelentingly tragic – of course he had to die at the end, no faggot can ever be happy. Just another tragic misfit destined to come to a sorrowful end in a world where he can’t fit in. hmph. I enjoyed the movie until Molina left the cell, then I thought it became too much like one of Molina’s fantasies; slightly absurd and more than a little overdone. But the cell interaction was great. I love intimate conversations (like My Dinner with Andre). The close quarters, the two (or small number) interacting so you can feel their presence.

“But the kiss – I was knotted and nervous, my hands were cold, I got no jolt from it – the circumstances with Molina working for the authorities, Raul left to be tortured again.”

No, it’s not about a book. It’s about a movie. But it’s a more thoughtful response than most of the excerpts about books I’ve been posting.

Original Sins

from the diary: “Saturday 1/25/86

“Lisa Paulick’s new (used) car had konked out on Huntley across … from our house. … This is the same Lisa who has dropped by the house – once with Becky, and just after Xmas with Becky and Jim. [Lisa] called her dad from someone else’s house. He showed up and Dad and Mom and me and the man who is fixing our roof (whose name I have forgotten; don’t I feel like a bourjour (how the fuck do you spell that) creep in the midst of reading Lisa Alther’s second novel, Original Sins, that I don’t even know his name – this guy Mom thinks is great, oh boodle) all stood around trying to figure out what to do. [Lisa’s] dad got the car going while I was in the house getting a pizza bagel.”

This is such a mess of a piece of writing I find it has odd charms. Oh boodle?

I remember liking Alther’s first novel Kinflicks. She wrote sex scenes I found hilarious. Plus there was much bisexuality going on.

I’m not going to try to unknot the personal relationships in this paragraph other than to say I went to high school with Lisa, Becky, and Jim. And “bourjour”? Did I mean bourgeois? If I did, what did I think “bourgeois” meant? I guess I was exploiting the working class. In that I wasn’t working. I haven’t gotten any better at diagnosing cars.

Poems from the Coffee Lands

This is a chapbook anthology of poems from eight countries; it’s about the dimensions of a postcard, 32 pages including bios, publication histories of the poems, small guidebook-pretty pictures and a contents page. Says the introduction, “These countries, whose soil, topography and climate combine to produce the world’s best coffee beans are also lands with a rich heritage of poetry. A coincidence?”

I picked up this little book a couple years ago, having stopped in at the Starbucks a half block from the library for my morning coffee and croissant. It was a freebie and maybe it came with a bag of beans or a tiny scoop or something, I don’t remember quite. The poetry isn’t bad. Yes, I was surprised not only that the poetry wasn’t bad but that it also wasn’t familiar, that I recognized only three of the fifteen poets (Octavio Paz, Jimmy Santiago Baca, and Ruben Dario), and that most of the poems are translations. No editor is credited, though a note on the back cover says, “Prepared by TidbitBooks.” A Google search returns nothing.

It did sit around awhile before I finally read it through. “garden detached / from any idyll / or atrocity” – Duda Machado (tr. R. Alfarano) … “the sky walked / from eye to eye” – Eunice Odio (tr. M. Collins)

Too bad they haven’t made this a regular thing. On the other hand, it’s now time for me to throw it away. Toujours gai!

Famous Ghost Stories

from the diary: “Wednesday 1/20/86

“Finished the book on beauty and am on Famous Ghost Stories edited by Bennet Cerf.”

And I ask myself, “Is there something I should do before / for my twenty-first birthday?”

Like, maybe, come out?

Face Value: The Politics of Beauty

from the diary: “Saturday 1/18/86

“I’m reading another provocative book -- Face Value: The Politics of Beauty. The authors tend to raise more questions than they answer: What is beauty? What makes a woman beautiful? Is beauty quanitifiable? Why is beauty so important?

“They make a good case for the importance of the questions but so far they haven’t gone a long way toward answering them. But then, they point out, nobody else much has either.

“… Whenever I hear or read about beauty or even when shown beauty (all of this usually being feminine beauty) I (consciously or unconsciously) run beauty past my mind’s eye in masculine forms. Female beauty, while it interests me and sometimes delights me, doesn’t have the powerful emotional oomph of male beauty for me. And yet I can’t admit it in words – even to myself in a great number of cases. Nonverbally and in private I can gasp at gorgeous men but in public, to anyone else, I hide, cover up, qualify.”

The Nazi Extermination of Homosexuals

from the diary: “Friday 1/17/86

“Mom and I talked about the Nazis and how horrible they were (this prompted by a TV special I saw last night, photos of the Third Reich. ick) I threw caution to the wind (from the stinking furnace) and showed Mom a book I’d checked out from the Santa Rosa library. The Nazi Extermination of Homosexuals. She read the captions under a few pictures.

“This was some bit after Mom read an article in the latest West County News about school AIDS policy – including sex ed. – and Mom says, ‘Would that mean talking about … (anal sex)?’ She makes a face.”

“Mom, you hate sex back, front, and sideways. You’re probably (how can this not be true?) one of the reasons I’m so hung up about sex.”

men and lambs

So one of the books I’ve been reading, Of Men and Monsters, discusses The Silence of the Lambs rather extensively. The confluences with Jeffrey Dahmer both in rough time period and in characteristics of the kills were enough to catch one’s notice. Hannibal Lector in fiction is a killer and a cannibal. Buffalo Bill, the killer at large, whom FBI agent Clarice Starling hopes to catch, is queer – if not gay or transsexual, at least a transvestite. He likes to wear women’s clothing. He likes to wear, as I recall, women’s skin. Jeffrey Dahmer, the real life killer, became notorious both for being queer (he was gay) and for being a cannibal (he dismembered and claimed to have eaten at least a token quantity of the flesh of his victims).

Richard Tithecott’s Of Men and Monsters also talks about how society and the media view the serial killer. In some ways, he’s the hero. He’s just acting out what many, too repressed, bound by laws, dream to do. Hannibal the Cannibal is a hero, isn’t he? He’s virile (straight), athletic, and oh so scary. Movie scary. Almost one of those misunderstood monsters of yore – King Kong, you know, or the Frankenstein monster. Could Jeffrey Dahmer be a hero? Even though he’s queer? Just because we abhor, says Tithecott, it doesn’t mean we can’t also admire.

I avoided The Silence of the Lambs for years because I didn’t want to contribute my own little bit of financial reward to the reinforcement of the killer queer stereotype. That plus I don’t care for serial killer horror movies. I like monster movies. Like The Blob or Valley of Gwangi. Nonhuman menaces from other worlds. And I didn’t figure I’d ever read anything by the author of Silence of the Lambs. Only, I find I have. Black Sunday is also by Thomas Harris. The same Thomas Harris. Thirteen years separates Black Sunday and Silence of the Lambs. I wonder if femme in a boy equals evil in all his books?

pile of reading

Walden / Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau

Poems for the Millennium: the University of California Book of Modern & Postmodern Poetry, Volume Two: From Postwar to Millennium, edited by Jerome Rothenberg & Pierre Joris

The Collected Poems, Sylvia Plath

The Long Walk to Freedom, the autobiography of Nelson Mandela

Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust, the C.K. Scott Montcrief translation

The Woman in the Shaman’s Body: Reclaiming the Feminine in Religion and Medicine by Barbara Tedlock, Ph.D.

Tropical Truth: a story of music and revolution in Brazil by Caetano Veloso

Queer Crips: Disabled Gay Men and Their Stories, edite by Bob Guter & John R. Killacky

How We Die: Reflection on Life’s Final Chapter by Sherwin B. Nuland

Of Men and Monsters: Jeffrey Dahmer and the Construction of the Serial Killer by Richard Tithecott

Pictopia #4, a Fantagraphics anthology of art comics

Drawn & Quarterly #5, a DQ anthology of art comics

a May 2005 issue of The New Yorker

critique

After high school I was a member of a couple different writers’ groups. One was an offshoot of the Russian River Writers’ Guild readings. This group only met a few times. In my diary (1/13/86) I recorded a critique:

“Stan brought the same thing he brought last time. We picked at his grammar and construction, transitions and such, all the way through. Then I wrecked his punchline. The philosophy went something like this: You (the man in the story) will not have any new dreams until you have made real the dreams you have already had. I said, “There are two different kinds of dreams in this statement. The first is sleeping dreams that, it is made obvious from the preceding, the man cannot have. But the second is dream in the sense of wish or hope as in The dream of universal happiness. Peace on Earth. Love between peoples. etc. 'Why,' I asked, 'cannot the man have sleeping dreams? These two different types of dreams seem to me unrelated. Why can’t the man have sleeping dreams?' Stan couldn’t answer. He said that wrecked the whole thing. I don’t really think it did, but I leave that up to him.”

Black Sunday

from the diary: “Friday 1/10/86

“I find myself identifying a bit with the luny who plans to blow up the Superbowl. He has/had a rotten self-image, only able to see himself in short pants, a sissy. I can only see myself ‘fay’ with long hair I push behind my ears, long slim fingers, folded legs, swishing. And I don’t swish. Try to replace this image with reality. at least.”

The next day, “I did today what I do most every day, sat around and read … Black Sunday (which was an okay book, but for a thriller it didn’t produce enough thrills). Then I went for a walk.”

Ach! I was being so fastidious about the chronology of the diary. Then! Today's entry was written before the Mother Tongue entry. And I overlooked it when it came time to post. My development as a person is getting all confused!

The right metaphor?

I don’t really remember anything about Black Sunday other than what’s obvious from the cover or the poster for the movie – something about bombing the superbowl from a blimp. But reading the old diary entry I’m reminded of the killer transvestite in Freebie and the Bean. I remember rather rooting for her. Yeah, she was an evil queer but a kickass fighter – and she kicked ass in a dress. Who else was I going to root for? Freebie? The Bean?

Another Mother Tongue: Gay Words, Gay Worlds

from the diary: “Sunday 1/12/86

“Almost every time I read a particularly good book on theories/histories of human development – cultural, emotional, physical – little clicks go off in my head as the previous theories are checked against the one I’m now reading. Inadequacies are discovered, fallacies struck out, gaps filled or opened. And they subtly shift and change to accommodate one another. That’s delightful. I’m not chagrined that no one theory works perfectly to explain all behavior, all human characteristics, because no one person in one culture can see everything at once. What thrills me is that so much can be discovered beyond the taken-for-granted. Even the taken-for-granted casts new shadows in a different colored light.

“The latest good book -- Another Mother Tongue: Gay Words, Gay Worlds by Judy Grahn. This book is helping me transform the shame. I can’t say ‘I’m proud to be gay.’ Because I’m still closeted. Still terrified of myself and the world. But it helps to know that ‘gay’ is not an aberration or an accident, not a failing [that needs] to be corrected or cured, but an essential, integral part of the human being. Modern Western civilization views the world scientifically, morally, socially through its own set of skewed spectacles. Perhaps what we need is not a polishing of our glasses, a new prescription, or an operation on our corneas. What maybe we need is a taking off of our glasses so we can see ourselves as we really are. But then again there rises the question – Who are we? And who’s got the answer?”

We should close our eyes sometimes. Even when that makes it difficult to read a book.

I’d like to read this book again. I bought it a couple years ago. It’s sitting upstairs in the library waiting to be filed. We need more shelves.

Gay men are called faggots, says Grahn, not because they were as cord wood to be thrown on the pyre but because the word recalls the role of firecarrier, firebringer for the tribe. Lesbians have long been teachers, healers, warriors.

I was damn grateful for a book that told me I wasn’t a biological curiosity at best, an example of “social deviance”, but a person and valuable. Poet is a gay role. And Grahn gave me permission to own the role Poet as well as Gay man.

One of Judy Grahn’s poems is included in the Berkeley Poetry Walk and at a reading to celebrate the installation of the poetry panels I shook the woman’s hand and said, “Thank you. I read Another Mother Tongue at a time I really needed it.” And she bowed her head over my hand quietly then looked me in the face and smiled.

The Ox-Bow Incident

from the diary: “Friday 1/10/86

“Read The Ox-Bow Incident. Books don’t affect me the same way as movies. If I’d watched the hangings in a movie the thing would still be haunting me. As it is I’m reading Black Sunday and Ox-Bow is fading.”

It disturbed me at the time but, consonant with what I said then, I barely remember The Ox-Bow Incident. Wasn’t it about a lynching?

On the other hand the visual of the two teen brothers hanged for rustling in the Clint Eastwood starrer Hang ‘Em High throws itself up on my mental movie screen every so often and does not fail to disturb. That at the beginning of the movie Eastwood himself is lowered from a tree where he has been strangling after a botched hanging adds something (brotherly? fatherly? erotic?) to Eastwood’s watching the execution. He’d argued for their lives.

book buying

Wednesday I went to the gym, checked my mailbox (I could go on an Olivia cruise, subscribe to The Lambda Literary Report or send money to The Pacific Center; plus a card from my brother who is going to be in town Friday); I ate lunch at the Jazzschool café and wrote in my diary; then I browsed Half Price Books, mostly the clearance shelves. Surprisingly good shit turns up on their clearance shelves. I’ve even seen a buyer from one of Berkeley’s other used book stores filling up a basket at the Half Price clearance shelves. The books below (‘cept for the Dykes books which I paid more for) cost me a buck apiece:

Dykes to Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel

More Dykes to Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel

Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee: an authentic Eighteenth-Century Chiense detective novel translated and with an introduction by Robert Van Gulik

The Old Man in the Corner twelve mysteries by The Baroness Orczy

The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle

A Member of the Family: Gay Men Write About Their Families edited by John Preston

I do like poking around bookstores. The two mystery books are Dover editions and I have a fondness for Dover’s mission to rescue long out of print, public domain literature and make it available in sturdy editions. My first and favorite edition of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was a Dover edition. That thing stuck together through several readings (& much travel).

I guess I buy books for comfort. I imagine all those cozy hours tumbling through their pages. Then, of course, it takes me ten million years to get around to reading them. The library is cheaper. Free! But when you’re spending a dollar or less for a book isn’t it almost free?

Rumblefish

from the diary: “Tuesday 1/7/86

“I been reading Rumblefish, my first S. E. Hinton, so her and me’s style’s getting screwed around together. Not doin’ neither of us justice excuse me.”

Pretty early I noted the effect a strong style would have on me. Shakespeare was the worst. If I read any Shakespeare I would but unable to write anything but execrable Shakespeare pastiche.

These days styles are pretty much a jumble in my head. I switch between them almost as fast as Robin Williams doing stand-up (or just an interview, have you seen that guy?). It’s one of the things I like about poetry. I have more leave to mix things up than I feel in prose. Writing prose I think I’m supposed to maintain a consistent voice. And the longer I gotta do that the less likely it goan hapn. Y’dig?

Every time I pass Hinton in the library’s Young Teen fiction section I tell myself, I’ll read one of her books someday. And it turns out that one day was ten years ago. Boy, that takes the pressure off. I wonder, if I saw the movie version of Rumblefish, would any of it seem familiar?

The Caves of Steel

Twenty years ago I was living with my mother. My brother had moved out. My father lived several states away. I was having “Anxiety Attacks” and feeling, as I say below, “trapped.”

from the diary: “Thursday 1/2/86

“I’m starting to read Asimov’s Robot novels starring Lije Bailey. Only a few chapters into the first [The Caves of Steel] and it strikes me as historical fiction – “This is what they thought the futue would be like back in the olden days. But we know better now.” I wonder what the third one [Robots of Dawn] will be like, being as it was only written a couple years ago. Well, science fiction dates, sometimes easier than mainstream fiction. Asimov, though, is always a quick read.”

A few days later: “Finished The Robots of Dawn. That was a good series. I particularly like the titles, The Caves of Steel, The Naked Sun.”

The diary goes on, “Slept late. Didn’t wake up till 12:30. Did I already say I decided I’m agoraphobic? That’s ‘fear of the marketplace.’ Asimov uses it as ‘fear of open places/spaces’ in the Bailey books … but my phobia seems more a performance one, except that it relates directly to the marketplace – I’m too terrified to ask anybody for a job.

“A lady was on Donahue some bit ago … defining phobias. [She] gave the profile of a phobic. ‘Bright, creative, perfectionist, etc.’ don’t remember the rest, but it all fit. Yes, yes, amateur diagnoser me. But I’m not a hypochondriac, I don’t tailor diseases to my symptoms. I’d thought about phobias before and thought they didn’t really bother me. But now I’m trapped. I can empathize with the woman on the show who’d been cooped up in her home 30 years. but shit. I wanna get unscrewed up much, much faster than that.”

Dayna Macy

So I was wandering around this afternoon with my camera. I don't do that much. When I'm walking with the camera I'm searching for a good photo. I see things that I like to look at but many times I know what I'm seeing won't end up a good photo. I posted a snap of an elephant carving over at LoveSettlement. Shortly after taking that I was walking through the new gourmet food court on Shattuck when a woman looked in my face and said, "I know you." She raised her finger, "Uh," she said, concentrating for the name. "Glenn," I supplied. "Wait," she said. "Not Craig. Glenn! That's it! You worked at Nolo! Do you still write poetry?"

Yes, I said. Google me. Lots of Glenn Ingersoll and it's just about all me.

I didn't remember her name. Dayna Macy. That's right. I remembered her. She was the woman who ran Nolo's PR. She also attended some of our afterwork yoga classes. As I recall she had good poses. Dayna has a website. But many of the internal links seem to be broken. One of the pages has links to writing, including this one in Yoga Journal about foraging in the East Bay parks. "When my foraging walk at Tilden comes to an end, I thank Muscat for a truly eye-opening day. My pockets are filled with chickweed and miner's lettuce, which I'll prepare for tonight's dinner. I head home, already tasting them, fresh and sweet."

My mother knew a few edible wild plants and miner's lettuce is one I learned from her. (Or maybe we both learned about it from one of her hiking buddies.) Whenever I go for a walk in the woods and see fresh leaves I pluck a couple and munch as I walk along.

Mom knew puffball mushrooms so I'll pick one if I see one and pop it in my mouth. There's such fear of poisonous mushrooms that whenever I've done this with someone around they gibber at me. There was a recent feature in the SF Chronicle about mushroom hunters. And another article in the East Bay Express covers the likelihood of getting ticketed for foraging in the East Bay parks; it's illegal.

Lost Girls

I like Alan Moore's work. I can't say as I quite love it. There's something a little Victorian curiosity case about it. He likes magic & mysticism. He has allowed eroticism into his mainstream comics writing in a way that feels adult rather than adolescent. He's always detailed and his work well crafted. A bit cluttered. A bit high strung. Kind of chilly.

As an Ozzy I'll have to say I'm feeling more trepidation than anticipation over Moore's forthcoming Lost Girls. Says the publisher, "For more than a century, Alice, Wendy and Dorothy have been our guides through the Wonderland, Neverland and Land of Oz of our childhoods. Now like us, these three lost girls have grown up and are ready to guide us again, this time through the realms of our sexual awakening and fulfillment."

Little Women

from the diary: “Thursday 1/2/86

“finished Little Women. Louisa May Alcott’s sweet preachments really got boring after awhile.”

Doesn’t everybody like Jo the best, Jo the tomboy? At least until she finds her Darcy … and becomes just another male appendage like her sisters.

The whole text is on the web if you sold your own at a garage sale.

Thomas M. Disch

Yes, the poet is also the science fiction writer. And he's gay. I think I thought there were two or three Thomas Disches out there.

But (wracking his brains) have I read anything by him? I'm pretty sure I've read a poem or two.

Judging by these, though, I can't say's Disch is my dish.

"How many moments make one slice of cake?"

the poet Lynn Emmanuel says

“[F]or a writer to say in the year 2004 that she doesn’t want to know anything about critical theory is like a writer saying, in the 1930s and 40s, I’m just not going to read Freud.”

-- quoted in the Winter/Spring 2006 issue of Poetry Flash [no, the interview is not online]

I’m okay with knowing something about critical theory, I guess, but it would be nice if she defined the term. Despite the concreteness of her analogy (Freud!), “critical theory” is left vague. Emmanuel does not recommend a single critical theorist. In the sentence that comes just before this one Emmanuel refers to “the critical context in which [a poet is] writing.” Is “critical theory” the “context” of the poem?

I’ll have to say my tolerance for theory is low. And I figure the context of poetry is the times and other art. Not that theory can’t be part of that. Josh Corey’s blog, for instance, is worth visiting those evenings one needs a theory nightcap.

pile of reading

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince by J.K. Rowling

Tropical Truth: a story of music & revolution in Brazil by Caetano Veloso

Of Men and Monsters: Jeffrey Dahmer and the Construction of the Serial Killer by Richard Tithecott

Walden / Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau

Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust

The Collected Poems, Sylvia Plath

Poems for the Millennium, vol 2: from Postwar to Millennium edited by Jerome Rothenberg & Pierre Joris

a May 2005 issue of The New Yorker

Compare to last month's pile.

How to Stop Worrying and Start Living

From the diary: “Monday 12/9/85

“I’m down to two books from that pile of 30 I had mounted up. I’ve checked out new ones (and read some) since I achieved the goal – whittle the 30 to 5. … I started Carnegie’s How to Stop Worrying etc.”

The “pile of 30” refers to the number of books I had out from the library.

I worked my way through a few self-help books. I liked Dale Carnegie’s How to Stop Worrying and Start Living and How to Win Friends and Influence People. The advice is good. People like it when you remember their names, for instance. Politicians know this well. Clinton is famous for remembering personal details (& names!) of virtual strangers. Even dumbya gets a lot of points for his handing out of nicknames and remembering whether you have kids or that your mother is getting on in years.

I could pick up the principles for being popular but I could no more make myself a social animal through book learning than I could learn to speak German or Russian from poring over a textbook in my bedroom. To be good with people you need a lot of practice being good with people.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

From the diary: “Thursday December Fifth 1985

“Finally reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. And I like it. … And read a bunch of poetry. Gosh. There isn’t a lot of happy poetry being written I guess. Just when I’m about to give up on poetry as being incomprehensible I run across a few that are really wonderful. But why is that only about 10%?”

A couple days later I wrote, “Finished Finn. Didn’t live up to expectations and I do understand why some consider it racist.”

The “nigger” of “Nigger Jim” grated, but what do I know, right?, maybe “nigger” wasn’t really considered an insult at the time Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn. Maybe? But it was hard to have any respect for Nigger Jim, anyway. Twain had him childlike and loyal, certain that the boy Finn always knew what was best. Nigger Jim, as I recall, never had an independent thought and it was up to Finn to prevent Jim from just giving up and turning himself in.

I like Mark Twain. But he was racist. Big surprise! The racism of his time was so casual, so taken for granted that questioning it was like saying water doesn’t run downhill. In his account of travel to Lake Tahoe in California Twain has nothing good to say about the people native to the area. He calls them “diggers” and speaks with contempt of their dirtiness and poverty. Twain can be quite funny and is often ready to lampoon the arrogant and scoff at unexamined attitudes but it doesn’t mean that he was always ready to poke himself.

The Descent of Woman

Both The Naked Ape and The Descent of Woman helped me get my head out of the man-as-pinnacle of evolution/created-in-God’s image conflation.

From the diary: “Sunday December 1, 1985

“Am reading The Descent of Woman by Elaine Morgan. Great book. Great sequel to The Naked Ape -- it refutes a lot of Desmond Morris’ sex constructions – breasts [are] for babies to hold onto instead of fur [our ancestors having lost their fur, rather than the] pseudobuttocks [intended to redirect sexual attention from the behind to the upfront that Desmond Morris suggests].

“I started to tell Mom about some of this and she had to know first what the woman’s qualifications were. Her first reaction wasn’t, as mine would be, ‘Oh, what do they say?’ but ‘Oh, what gives them the right to say that?’”

This diary entry comes before the one that refers to The Color Purple. Same argument?

The Uses of Enchantment

A few days ago when I began quoting from the old diary again I quoted from a page where a bookmark was resting. For some months I’ve been composing directly in the blogger box. But up to last fall I’d carefully written everything in a Word file because, you know, blogger used to lose stuff. Now that my mind is clearing and I’m feeling up to looking to the long term I am once more saving everything into that Word file and what do I find but diary-quotings I’d prepared and never posted.

So, what the heck, here’s the 20 years ago me reading a famous psychoanalyst:

From the diary: “Saturday November 30, 1985

“I’ve been reading a book called The Uses of Enchantment about how fairy tales provide essential pschological material to children so they can grow to become productive, mature adults – ‘live happily ever after.’ And I think I’m learning something, but I’m also getting anxiety attacks. I feel so overwhelmed by the attempt to understand myself. I want to retreat. I’m lost and confused and I hate it.”

A few days later I wrote, “Been really bogged down in Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment. Been boring me for days.”

The wikipedia entry on Bruno Bettelheim is decidedly unflattering. It declares Bettelheim’s theories on autism “erroneous” and says he was a plagiarist, calling him “Bruno Borrowheim”. Yow. Who knew?

The Circle J

In an article, "Historic Circle J club closing", that appeared in a November issue of the Bay Area Reporter:

"Unlike sex clubs ... the Circle J's primarily hands-off code of conduct is a rarity, and 'the people who come here don't come here to have sex. They won't let you touch them. They're exhibitionists, or they like to watch. We've never had word of mouth because nobody would tell their friends where it's at. It's their place and they don't want the company of people they know.'"

The article describes the room: "[S]ome of the same clients from 35 years ago sit in one of seven church pews lined up in a small room with a large movie screen. On a recent afternoon most pews had one guy in it, pants unbuttoned to the waist, sitting and staring straight ahead, jacking off in close quarters barely making a sound."

"Circle J will be taken over by a neighboring church organization ... [Youth With a Mission] simply offered the landlord more money."

Bats at the laundomat

Bats at the Laundromat is the title I gave the poetry notebook I was working in at the time. That would be late 1985.

The Enchanted Apples of Oz

From the diary, Friday, 12/27/85 ...

"Eric S[hanower] showed me galleys of Enchanted Apples of Oz. They looked good. He wanted to know if I could accept it as canon. No. I can't. I can't lie and say, 'yes! oh yes!'"

This from an entry about visiting Eric at his house in Novato. We were Oz club chums and both had strong notions about what constituted an Oz book. A real Oz book. I'm not nearly so dogmatic as I once was. Hell, I knew at the time there were a zillion inconsistencies in the books written by Baum himself, but there were inconsistencies and there were unacceptable inconsistencies. In his first Oz graphic novel Eric locates the source of Oz's enchantment in an apple tree in a garden (tres Biblical, no?). Should the apples ever be picked the magic will go away. I didn't like the idea, tho Eric's art was exciting.

We watched Midnight Cowboy, which depressed me (or, rather, didn't improve my already low mood); ate pancakes for dinner; I fended off the what-are-you-going-to-do-with-your-life questions.

Gah. Miserable period.

Some Angels Wear Black

When I was at APE I saw Jennifer Joseph at the table for her Manic D Press. We dedicated the proceeds of a night at Poetry & Pizza to, as I termed it, the Eli Coppola Publication Fund. Eli was a poet much admired in the SF poetry scene of the 80s-90s. She died in 2000. Plans were in the works to publish a selected poems. After the P&P reading, which was partly a tribute to Eli with others reading her words, Jennifer Joseph said she would let us know when the book appeared.

Among other things at APE I asked Ms J what had happened with the Coppola book. "Oh! Didn't we send you a copy?"

I shook my head. J had me write down my address and the book arrived today. Some Angels Wear Black: selected poems. How neat. Flames all over the cover. A backwards question mark of a plant stem ... it's not a fern, are those leaves or flowers along the stem?

I was surprised to discover my name in the "publisher wishes to thank" paragraph on the copyright page. Jennifer includes me and my P&P mates, Clive, Katharine & Paul.

AMAIOGIG

From Kimberly C. Patton's "Seas of Light Swept Through It", an essay included in Best Spiritual Writing 1998:

"[S]houted one older male [colleague] as our two large classes exchanged the lecture hall[,] 'I hear you have something in your belly!" At a faculty Christmas party: 'Bun in the oven, huh?' ... 'Why do these reactions bother me ...' I asked a dear friend ... who is devoutly Jewish. 'Am I hypersensitive?' ... He thought for a minute. 'Because they trivialize the mystery.'"

On the previous page Patton describes the awe she felt seeing the first ultrasound pictures of her fetus. Picking up some of the words she uses I wonder if Patton would have felt exalted by a colleague coming up to her in the crowded hall and exclaiming, "I hear you have 'a miniature, animate icon of God's incarnate glory' in your belly!"

did you like it?

I decided to go find a poem on the web and read it and say whether I liked it.

a poem by Tonnus Oosterhoff

Have you read it yet? You don't have to. I didn't like it. But maybe it's the translation.

I liked this line: "a wheelbarrow lull lull"

What I bought at APE

Kent's been suffering with a cold/flu thing. The same one that had me down? Sure. Probably.

So today I went over to the Alternative Press Expo by myself. It was at the Concourse Exhibition Center in San Francisco.

I've just emptied my bag of goodies on the floor. A lot of freebies -- comics, postcards, a poster, business cards. I decided to allow myself a bigger budget than usual. This is what I bought:

Strugglers and Cavalcade of Boys, vol 3 by Tim Fish

True Travel Tales, issues 1 & 2, by Justin Hall

Grand Gestures by Robert Ullman

Don't Be a Crotte!, starring bi-dyke Liliane, by Leanne Franson

Hats by Vasilis Lolos

Brown Paper Bag, issues 1 & 2, an anthology of comics by Jonathan Hill, Tyler Owings, and Jason Rainey

Friends, issue 3, by Francois Vigneault

Little Scrowlie, issue 13, by Jen Feinberg & Todd Meister

The Far Shore, The Milkmaid, The Den of Sin, three mini-comics by Tim Swope

And Then One Day, issue 4, a mini-comic by Ryan Claytor

The Homeless Channel, issues 1 & 2, by Matt Silady

... I talked to several of the creators, not that I'm much at shootin' the shit, and got a sketch or two ...

paperbacks

One of my new duties at the Claremont Branch is maintaining the collection of uncataloged paperbacks. This is a purely browsing collection. When I say "uncataloged" I mean you cannot find any of these books by looking them up in the library catalog. Should you check one out glance at the check-out receipt; the receipt will not list the title of the book, rather it will say your "paperback" is due on such-and-such a date.

Four years ago when I was putting in 15-20 hours a week at North Branch substituting for someone who, I think, was off on a several month sabbatical, I watched over the paperbacks for awhile. The mass market paperbacks, the thrillers and not-quite-formula romances and family dramas circulated like mad. I remember one lady bringing back a grocery bag filled with slightly cigarette scented paperbacks she'd plowed through. The trade paperbacks had half the circs.

I've been weeding the paperback collection at Claremont, getting rid of the stain-rumpled, underlined, and cover-loosened copies. At North I recall the turnover was pretty ruthless. The paperback had a year. At the end of the year you discarded it. If the condition was decent the book was put on the Friends of the Library sale shelf to sell for a big quarter. I don't know if it's just that it's been no one's steady duty but the paperbacks at Claremont have been allowed to age. One I deleted this week has been doing its rounds since 1995. I've deleted none whose tour has been so brief as one year.

Now that the RFID tag makes it harder to remove a book from the collection in presentable condition (y'gotta tear the thing out) most of the deleted books have their covers yanked off and get dumped in recycle. I'm realizing doing this where patrons can see the process is likely not a good idea. It's been convenient to do it at the Info Desk when things are slow but ... very public. Some people get tetchy over seeing books thrown in the trash.

Judging by my review of the circulation statistics of the books I discard I'd say the users of the Claremont Branch have different reading habits than those who visit the North Branch. A trade paperback (which tends to be more literature-like) would have twice the circs of a mass market paperback. When I was scanning the donations for candidates to add to the collection I'd been looking with most interest at the mass markets. I'll shift my attention.

thank you note

I've been reading Marguerite Duras's The Lover about a young French woman coming of age in Saigon. I picked up the book from a used bookstore clearance shelf. Neatly folded and stowed in the back of the book is the following note:

Derek (& tell Sylvia)

This book is like a calm quiet Tidal Wave! What realistic beautiful power must dwell in Marguerite Duras. I was moved to tears many times. I shall never forget it. Thanks for sharing.

Mom

Beeswax

I stacked up all the issues of The New Yorker from my subscription. The stack is by the bed. I'm a little surprised to find myself enjoying working my way through them. With books I feel bound to push through from page one to page last. There are books I've been reading for years ... Walden, for example, recently rejoined my active reading pile but I probably only get through 3 of its pages each week. I'm about halfway. Magazines, however, are much more a miscellany. Frankly, there's many an article the subject of which just does not interest me. Sports teams, most humor ... I like funny but I don't seem to have much taste for humor.

I don't currently have any magazine subscriptions going but a new issue of something will make it into the house now & then. When I've read it, do I discard it? With The New Yorkers I've decided yes. Finish the issue, stuff it in the recycle bag.

I used to buy a literary magazine or two a month. But they piled up. I would read a few poems then put the issue aside and forget what if anything I'd read in it. But I do have a soft spot for the locals.

A couple days ago I bought the first issue of a new litmag out of Oakland, Beeswax. The cover is letter press -- means you can feel the impression of the print in the paper. A honey bee. Simple and friendly. At five dollars it's pretty cheap. There's no masthead. Only an invitation to address correspondence to "the editors" ... no email. Though there is a website address and there the editors name themselves. John Peck and Laureen Shifley. I wonder why they neglect the credit in the physical magazine? They include their own work in the first issue. None of the poets/fictionists/visual artists on the contents page are names I recognize.

I'm up to page 15. So far the work is competent. Short stories in litmags are usually not of much interest. I've given myself permission to skip over them. Nicole Ankowski's "It's Called Dancing" is a relationship dance. Rather slow moving but there are nice turns of phrase. "I wondered if a tattoo needle felt like teeth on skin, a mechanical ferret nipping over my chest." I might make it to the story's end.

The poetry so far is unobjectionable. I like that the editors like comics; it was one of the reasons I bought.

When the clerk was ringing up the purchase he made a comment about it being the first issue. "Number one?" he said. "An auspicious number."

The Color Purple

I haven't excerpted from my diary in a long time. Here's an entry dated 12/20/85. I was twenty. Mom was 63.

"Mom doesn't go in for fiction. It seems she literally can't understand the distinctions and accept the conventions of fiction. She laments and curses 'serious' dramas for 'oh they wouldn't really act like that' or 'so-and-so isn't a very good actor.' I don't think she is very qualified to pass judgment on acting ability.

"I went to The Color Purple. It opened in Santa Rosa today. Mom dropped me off on the way to a [substitute teaching] job. I took the bus home. I made the mistake of telling her a little about it when she got home from square dancing. She was instantly on the attack. I mentioned, just commenting on an observation, that the word 'nigger' is not used once in the film. Mom frowned, 'But they would've.' Fuck, so what? So it's a little revisionist. It worked.

"All right. Maybe I've exorcised some of the anger. [I've deleted some cursing.] I keep forgetting that I can't discuss movies and novels, in fact most of the stuff I read and see, with Mom. Documentaries are generally okay. Cuz then she can watch 'em for herself, I guess. Anyway -- I really enjoyed The Color Purple. My only real complaint is that both book and movie are a little too manipulative. But with that reservation I am glad to say I shed tears about three times during the film. I cried at the end of the book, too.

"... It's so frustrating. I can't seem to make Mom understand what I mean when I talk about -- The Color Purple, f'rinstance. And she gets so defensive. She said when she sees a movie filled with black faces she assumes the movie is a chronicle about what black people are like. I said, I don't. I see them as people first. She got a sorta fierce expression on her face and didn't seem to consider her position at all silly."

pile of reading

The Martians, a collection of short stories by Kim Stanley Robinson, his follow-up to the Mars trilogy

A Scanner Darkly, a novel by Philip K. Dick

Walden / Civil Disobedience by Thoreau

Of Men and Monsters, an exploration of the role of the serial killer in contemporary America by Richard Tithecott

The X-Men, a reprint of the first ten issues by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby

Choteau Creek, a "Sioux reminiscence" by Joseph Iron Eye Dudley

8 Men and a Duck, "an improbable voyage by reed boat to Easter Island" by Nick Thorpe

Bitter Fame: a life of Sylvia Plath by Anne Stevenson

The Collected Poems by Sylvia Plath

American Elf: the collected sketchbook diaries of James Kochalka, 1998-2003

The Best Spiritual Writing 1998, edited by Philip Zaleski

an issue of The New Yorker from March 2005

diary

poetry notebook

I last listed my pile of reading about a month ago. You might note that there are books that are still in the pile. I've moved some pages forward in each but even with my new parttime schedule I'm not devoting a big chunk of my new time to reading. I'm a slow reader in any case. I like to hear the voice of the text.

American Elf

I've started reading the fat volume of James Kochalka's sketchbook diaries, Oct 98 - Dec 03. I remember reading somewhere a collection of the diaries he drew around the time of the 9/11 attacks.

"Each day I pick," Kochalka says in a drawn introduction, "one of [the little things that happened that day] and draw a comic strip about it. ... The days go by, the pages fill up, and the row of black sketchbooks grows on my shelf."

He draws himself as a big-eared, buck-toothed elf because, he says, "it reflects my relationship with the world. The magic & mystery of life and my awkward grappling with it." The strips are typically 3 to 4 panels, presented in a square. Kochalka doesn't try to tell a joke, does not necessarily go for a unity of effect. In the strip for Nov 18, 1998, for instance, the first panel depicts elf walking through melting snow, the caption, "All around me, sounds of melting snow" and word balloons within the panel cry out, "Gurgle" and "pitter patter" ... the day's other two panels show elf tapping away at a laptop computer. He glances askance at the reader, "Email is boring."

I find the dailiness of these charming.

Today at my new branch library gig Karen (my new boss) said to me she was working on a Christmas story but was dissatisfied with it because there wasn't any conflict in it. Her story was about a real Christmas, one that sticks with her because it came not long after her parents died and she spent the time with, I think, her sister & husband. She was trying to apply to her personal tale advice she's read in books on how to write.

There are different kinds of writing. Even if Karen succeeded in producing something commercially salable, it does not mean therefore she had produced something that would please her audience, for her audience is family and friends. And some of those people would be pleased by her writing because it included them and what happened happened to them and to people they love. Should the group of them walk into a bookstore together would they all agree on what book to buy? Surely not. One would go for racy romance, one for hard SF, one for experimental poetry, and one would quickly get bored and bow out for a cup of coffee.

Unless you're a staff writer or a freelancer whose bills will go unpaid without the sales of the ancillary rights, when you write you write for yourself first. You are your audience. And usually your worst critic.

I've been reading Anne Stevenson's biography of Sylvia Plath and Stevenson quotes from Plath's diaries many times. Plath was ambitious, determined, and methodical about marketing her work. She gnashed her teeth over rejection, probably dropped to darker depths over them than most of us can handle, yet she kept putting her work out there because that was damned important to her. She did not, however, write the diaries for publication. Much of what she did write for publication included scenes and details from her daily life and the lives of her loved ones and the result could be brutal, lacerating, and cruel. Full of conflict, mostly figurative but sometimes literal.

You can read today's American Elf here.

rewards

I was going to reward myself for a successful first day at Claremont by checking out books. Go figure! I'd put aside Elmer and the Dragon, Alan Alda's recent memoir Never Have Your Dog Stuffed, and Craig Thompson's European travelogue in sketchbook/comic book form Carnet de Voyage. But then the computers went on the blink and were down more than up for most of the afternoon. When closing time rolled around I returned the books to the sorting trucks. They'll be there another time. It's OK. And I have books piled up here at home anyway.

The Best Poems of 2005

I got a note from Val Gerstle, one of the poets whose poem I'd included in my list of the Best Poems of 2004. She thanked me for liking her poem.

Since I haven't yet posted my favorite poems of 2005 I might as well do that now. The list is in the order I copied them out. I won't bother mentioning where I found them. Usually it was an anthology. A poet's own collection. Occasionally a magazine. I don't think there were any last year that I discovered on the web. They are listed in the order in which I found them.

Oni Buchanan ... "The Walk"

Kenneth Koch ... selections from "The Man"

Al Young ... "Third Street Promenade"

Gary Rosenthal ... "Ghetto Dokusan"

Tassajara Zen Center ... parking a car gatha

Lawson Fusao Inada ... "A Nice Place"

Czeslaw Milosz ... "Gift"

Leslie Scalapino ... poem beginning "A man getting on a bus..."

Dale Jensen ... "A New Ring"

Albert Goldbarth ... "The Bar Cliche"

Marcelin Pleynet ... "The New Republic"

Philippe Soupault ... "Sporting Goods"

Dave Etter ... "Bueno"

Nezahualcoyotl ... "Can it be true that one lives..."

Anonymous (Korean) ... "Wind Last Night Blew Down"

Allen Ginsberg ... "On Neal's Ashes"

Dorianne Laux ... "Late October"

Dorianne Laux ... "Aphasia"

Dorianne Laux ... "Twelve"

Kirmen Uribe ... "Notes on a Loose Piece of Paper"

which book should I read to the first graders?

I volunteered to read to a classroom of kids on Drop Everything And Read (DEAR) Day. That'll be this Tuesday. Have I ever read to a group of kids before? Hmmm. Nope. Guess not.

Last Thursday the Children's librarians had a workshop on choosing a book. They spread lots of their favorite read-alouds across the tables in the Children's Services Room. And gave a little demonstration on how to read and when to turn a page.

I took five books home. Which should I read?

And Tango Makes Three by Justin Richardson & Peter Parnell, illustrated by Henry Cole

The Eye of the Needle a Yupik Eskimo tale by Betty Huffman, retold & illustrated by Teri Sloat

Traveling Man: the journey of Ibn Battuta, 1325-1354 by James Rumford

The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs by A. Wolf as told to Jon Scieszka, illustrated by Lane Smith

CLICK, CLACK, MOO: Cows that type by Doreen Cronin, pictures by Betsy Lewin

Possible problem with the last one: having to explain to the kids what a typewriter is.

Leaning toward Tango, the story of the gay penguins that raised a penguin chick in the Central Park zoo, and Needle, because it's a book my mother owned, I think she got it from Teri Sloat herself, and because I was born in Alaska and interviewed a Yupik dancer/storyteller for a school project. I read Tango to Kent. He teared up. Me, too.

pile of reading

diary

poetry notebook

The M Word: writers on same-sex marriage

The Best Spiritual Writing 1998

issue of The New Yorker from 2005

A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick

The Best American Poetry 2005, guest editor Paul Muldoon, series editor David Lehman

Ox-cart Man by Donald Hall

my booklog which was supposed to / may someday provide the source material for this blog

The Martians by Kim Stanley Robinson

Choteau Creek by Dudley

Song of Rita Joe: autobiography of a Mikmak poet by Rita Joe

Walden / Civil Disobedience by Thoreau

Bitter Fame: a life of Sylvia Plath by Anne Stevenson

Fadeout by Joseph Hansen

World Poetry edited by Washburn, Major, Fadiman

The X-Men, nos 1-10, a volume in the Marvel Masterworks reprint series

The Tedlocks

Dennis Tedlock and his wife Barbara Tedlock came to Black Oak Books last week. They both have new books. Dennis's is a translation of the Rabinal Achi, a Mayan text for performance. Not much Mayan literature survived the book burnings of the Spanish priests. The Rabinal Achi is a play depicting a sort of trial, said Dennis. A nobleman whose city & family have been traditional allies of the City of Rabinal has been captured. He led enemy armies against Rabinal and the trial is a dialog between him and his disappointed captors. Eventually the traitor is executed. "Europeans want him 'sacrified' by having his heart cut out," said Dennis. "That was the Aztecs. The Mayans typically used decapitation. Europeans don't find that exotic enough. Decapitation is too ordinary, too European. Capital punishment, after all, means cutting off the head."

Dennis spoke softly with many vocal pauses (uh, um), presented as the quiet academic, sincere and so full of knowledge that he couldn't say one thing without having to lead up to it from two or three directions.

Although I was very interested in what he was saying I found myself getting sleepy. Barbara Tedlock was much more dynamic, her excitement & delight bubbling out in her voice and gestures. Last year she published a book on women shamans, even finding out in her research that sources that had been represented in previous works as examples of male shamanism actually referred to women.

I'd planned only to buy the Mayan book but ended up getting both. Rabinal Achi: a Mayan Drama of War and Sacrifice by Dennis Tedlock, 2003, Oxford University Press. The Woman in the Shaman's Body: Reclaiming the Feminine in Religion and Medicine by Barbara Tedlock, 2005, Bantam Dell/Random House.

Afterward I got both authors to sign their books. Both also dated them. The date was the first day of the Mayan New Year, 7 deer / 7 kiej.

In his presentation Dennis said last year was a wind year, which is a difficult year. This year ought to be a little bit better.

Best American

So the Best American Poetry series is not published by Houghton Mifflin, the publisher of Best American Short Stories, among other Bests. BAP is so obviously modeled after the 80s revival of BASS, when BASS instituted a series of guest editors after its longtime editor retired/died (although there remained a series editor who would lighten the burden for each year's famous author/guest editor). It was with BAP's success that Houghton Mifflin realized what a good brand they had going ... and by the late 90s they had started annuals for spiritual writing and science writing and sports writing.

I like the idea of these anthologies. One wants a convenient sampler of recent words. And now one can refine the choice to words on a certain thing. I worked my way through several BASS anthologies back in the 80s (plus some O. Henry Award annuals). When I discovered BAP in its second year I was thrilled as I had very little access to literary magazines in Sebastopol and there was no such thing as the internet. Here was my opportunity to read what was being written NOW. Being a baby poet I wanted to see who my contemporaries (or contemporary elders) were.

I don't think, even then, I was buying the notion that what was contained between any particular Best's covers was objectively the BEST poetry (or whatever) that had seen print that year. I did like the notion that I was being exposed to what that year's famous poet thought great. I've found poems I like in BAP. And poems I don't. BAPs are better than any single issue of your average literary magazine. And you get to know the well-published names.

Houghton Mifflin even registered Best American as a brand. I guess they didn't think of it till after BAP was a going concern at another house. But to anyone who rails about the imprimatur of Best that these anthologies confer I say only: Best American Nonrequired Reading?

Cook's Illustrated

My sister gave us a subscription to Cook's Illustrated. Kent has said how he enjoys watching the PBS series, America's Test Kitchen, which is produced by the same people.

We got our first issue last week. Kent made use of one of the magazine's suggestions when he was making soup last night. When he added an egg he first mixed some corn starch with the egg. "Adding just 1/2 teaspoon of cornstarch to the egg that's drizzled into the soup at the end of cooking seemed to have a tenderizing effect," says a sidebar to an article on making hot & sour soup.

The nerdiness of America's Test Kitchen is more appealing on TV than in print. Whenever they make something they always wonder if they're using the best utensil for the job, or the best brand of vinegar, or whether the casserole cooks better on the upper shelf or lower shelf of the oven, or whatever. So they get together the different brands and test them. You want your bundt cake to fall easily out of the mold? There are spray on nonstick coatings that work better than the others (Pam for Baking and Baker's Joy). They put together panels of tasters who sip gallons of vinegars. Or they cook 18 casseroles, 3 on the top shelf front, 3 on the top shelf back, 3 on the middle shelf front, 3 on the middle shelf middle, and so on. It's like Consumer Reports devoted to cooking. The only color photos are on the cover. Gourmet this is not.

"In barbecue circles, the fat cap is almost always left face up, and many recipes repeat the same admonition when the meat is destined for the oven. But does it matter?" The short answer: Yes. The long answer: Three paragraphs. They cooked two briskets, one with fat on top, one with fat on bottom then compared. The fat, by melting over the meat, sealed in moisture.

where you're coming from

I added a new utility to my links column (on the right), "Web pages referring to this page". I've seen it on Avoiding the Muse and Dale gets lots & lots of referrals. The referrals utility has been up since last week and so far the only referral it's recorded is the one I did as a test.

I had a referrals utility before (which I'd also picked up from AtM) and I'd always been dubious about its statistics -- was I really getting 90 referrals a day from LoveSettlement (my other blog)? The new referrals utility seems not to agree with the old one. But are no search engines leading people here?

2/3/06 update: I deleted the referring links utility.

interview question II

In prep for an interview for a position in Children's Services I checked out a handful of books. The interview was today. Last week I was on an interview panel myself and on this blog talked about the answers candidates gave to the What've-you-read-lately question.

The question came up today, too. How did I answer?

The books I checked out were ones I'd picked from the lists of recommended books the librarians have drawn up. Bunnicula by James & Deborah Howe, My Father's Dragon by Ruth Gannett, Two Bad Bears in the Big City by Daniel Pinkwater (actually this is a sequel to the one the librarians had listed), The Not-Just-Anybody Family by Betsy Byars, and poet Donald Hall's Ox-Cart Man.

I read none of these as a child -- but then only two were available when I could have read them "as a child". Besides, there being so many interesting books I haven't read, I didn't consider rereading any (even if it's been decades since the first time).

I often find Hall's poetry dull but liked Ox-Cart Man for its simple details and slightly stiff (old fashioned?) structure. Hall wasn't in pronouncements mode the way so many a contemporary poet goes wrong; he was just saying, this is what the farmer & his family did and this is the order they did those things.

I enjoyed Betsy Byars' Not-Just-Anybody Family, though in a short book swinging back & forth between the distinct points of view of five characters in five different places I got a twinge of whiplash. I think the story only takes place over two days, but the boy whose legs got broken seems to wake up & fall asleep enough for three or four days.

Bunnicula was cute and a bit overly joshy. Still, gotta give 'em points for a vegetarian vampire.

I read a Daniel Pinkwater book every few years, just to keep up. He's a funny guy.

In the interview I only talked about My Father's Dragon, having taken it from the shelf partly because of the striking stripes on the dragon. I liked the folktale (hero's journey) structure of the tale. It's told as something that happened to someone else (the narrator's father), in a (relatively) distant time, the hero goes on a quest, taking with him a bundle of objects that only prove their utility in unexpected circumstances (as when lollipop-loving alligators make a bridge across a river when the boy attaches a lollipop to each alligator tail, the boy able to cross on the alligaors' backs as each 'gator licks the lollipop tied to the tail of the next), the boy is clever without being obnoxiously brilliant, and the dangers seem real (the wild animals have a taste for boys). I thought it would read aloud well. I recommended the book to children 6 to 11. It has a great beat, you can dance to it.

and

The interviews I discuss in the post below, by the way, were for a 15-hour a week job affixing RFID tags to items in the library's collection -- not the sort of task that requires (or invites?) intellectual engagement. So the answers to the book question probably made no difference one way or the other.

interview question

At Berkeley Public Library nearly every job interview includes the question, "Tell us about a book you've read recently that you enjoyed. Who would you recommend it to and why?"

What with my recent promotion I guess I'm of a high enough rank to join interview panels -- I was on one today. The two other people on the panel have been supervisors for years and years and have hired lots of staff. I think I was there more to gain experience myself (& to provide a warm body) than for my expertise in sussing out the great workers.

We interviewed five people. None of them did very well on the what've-you-read-lately question.

One actually said she was enjoying the work of a poet. Sadly, she blanked on the poet's name. "She lists nonsense syllables that, as you read them, make a musical sense." I made one guess at the poet's name, but didn't hit it.

Another, after biting her lips, said she'd been reading to her kids a lot lately and could recommend The Cat in the Hat. "It's fun to read," she said. "Last night my son kept telling me not to sing as I read."

Our youngest interview mentioned Guns, Germs, and Steel, but the best he could offer about it? "It reaffirmed a lot of my ideas." Nice! Which ideas were those?

One of the other members of the interview panel went off, after this candidate left, about how poorly written the book is. Curious, I quite liked it. I don't recall thinking it at all poorly written.

The Historian has "an engaging plot", said another candidate. I thought the title vaguely familiar so prodded, "Is it a thriller?" "I guess you could classify it that way," she said. "The hero chases Dracula around." Who would she recommend the book to? "Probably to my best friend."

The Screwtape Letters. When my brother and I read the Chronicles of Narnia as kids we got interested in C. S. Lewis. I remember David talking about reading The Screwtape Letters. What did our candidate say? Our candidate alluded to the subject being "theology" and (like the young man who liked Guns, Germs, and Steel) found it a good book for "starting discussions".

"None of them gave good reader's advisory," said one of the other panelists.

"What were these books about?" I said.

Wicked

Gregory Maguire seems to have wanted to explore the nature of wickedness. So he wrote Wicked: the Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. Contemplating the project I thought Maguire would use his novel to explain how the witch became wicked and, incidentally, explain other things, like why a pail of water melted her.

But it turns out Elphaba (the name Maguire gives "the Wicked Witch of the West", basing it on the initials of the author of the Wizard of Oz) is neither wicked nor a witch nor from the Winkie Country (Oz's western province). She did some things that could be construed as bad -- sicced a swarm of bees on a man, killing him (but the command seems to have been unconscious -- the bees did her will without her realizing it) and she neglected her child (she treats him like a stranger). Though, oddly, she seems to have been born with some evilesque characteristics -- like sharp teeth that make breastfeeding hazardous for Mom. She never studies witchcraft (though her sister, the WWotE, does) but powers seem to manifest nevertheless -- as when she races across a river to rescue a monkey and the river freezes under her feet, saving her from dampness -- but maybe this was coincidence, as even the text suggests, since if a river can freeze instantly why not a pathetic little pail of water? But, and this left me most dissatisfied, what was the basis of Elphaba's allergy to water? No explanation is ever offered -- other than it being inherent, I guess.

At least L. Frank Baum gives us this: "Once the Witch struck Toto a blow with her umbrella and the brave little dog flew at her and bit her leg in return. The Witch did not bleed where she was bitten, for she was so wicked that the blood in her had dried up many years before." One may decide that her dryness had become essential to her in some way. Thus the deadliness of a spot of water.

Though born in the Munchkin Country Elphaba ends up in the Winkie Country because that's where the father of her child lived. Elphaba is seeking forgiveness from her dead lover's widow (forgiveness for having seduced the husband). The widow seems uninclined to give it mainly because it's boring and lonely in Winkieland and if she forgives Elphaba the woman will go away and make Winkieland more boring & lonely than ever.

While Maguire's prose can be well-wrought the text is frequently grim. This is an Oz with a fascist ruler (the Wizard tortures people, has secret police); famine stalks the land; the weather kinda sucks; and amoral capitalists engage Elphaba in tiresome arguments about the nature of evil.