The Plymouth Duster had been patched together for years.  Literally.   Once I found myself  epoxying chicken wire over a dent in the right passenger door and painting it with Rustoleum.  Then I lost myself again, and for years she took me to and from class, climbed the Allegheny mountains and transported kegs of beer to mythic realms where Bon Jovi and Madonna still reign as King and Queen (no one can convince them otherwise).

Anyway, it was a sad day when the tail pipe fell off and careened along the median strip, causing mayhem for the traffic coming in my rear-view mirror.  But the day that I’m recalling — that time of the infamous stalling in the midst of rush hour — is not that day…

During that particular turn of the Earth’s axis I called my father, an automobile mechanic for over forty years, and asked him for help.  I called him from the counter of the fitness center where I belonged and where the body-building guru had once taken a look at my torso and asked me if I’d left “my chest at home.”   My dear ol’ Dad could be just as calloused when it came to my feelings, but as I described for him the car’s diagonal position in the road and how we were about to make the evening news, he seemed downright cheerful and calm.  ”I’ll be there in ten minutes,” he said at 5:35 in the afternoon, and with the Fidelity Bank sign blinking the digits of 5:45 he appeared in his greasy overalls and got to work.

First on the agenda involved a problem I failed to mention over the phone.  That is, in my haste to exit the vehicle and run across the parking lot, I had locked the keys in the car.   (Don’t ask me how.)   And so, with the trusty bent-clothes-hanger technique, Mr. Fix-It opened the door.   He then popped the hood and stuck his head into the guts of the engine.  He yanked, twisted, tightened and told me to get in the driver’s seat and try to start her up.

I did and nothing happened.  Nothing…

Just a few clicks.   And the rain continued to pour.   The gutters along the curbs began to swell.  And the commuters maneuvering around us, in what now constituted a small lake, made their presence felt.

At this juncture, my father’s even-keel disposition took a hit from the side, which is to say, a guy passing by honked his horn and displaced a wave of water than crashed upon his head.  His blue Esso baseball cap had now been drenched.   And without much warning, he let fling a heap of expletives and pleasing consonant-combinations that I’d rarely heard him utter in my life…  Not long after that venting, the skies cleared and the spark plugs sparked and the timing belts squealed and the other Plymouth Duster gizmo’s began to sound like normal.  ”Thanks a lot, Dad,” I said, driving away.

But one thing about our circumstance had not been normal.   One thing in the midst of the chaos I could not leave behind, and neither could the mechanic who came to my rescue.  The spiritual core of that incident happened during the interval between my Dad’s tirade and the car’s repairs when some unknown pedestrian approached us and said, “Excuse me…  I noticed you cursing and I just wanted to tell you… ah… I mean… this doesn’t matter.”

This doesn’t matter.

This doesn’t matter?

Well, in the moment, it sure as hell mattered.

It mattered a great deal.

But now that I’ve had years and even decades to contemplate the words of this mysterious Buddha, I consider that multi-layed episode to be the paradigm of my existence — and it DID matter, but only in this sense — in the sense that Gary Snyder suggests that nothing matters, or that “emptiness” matters:

I first saw it in the sixties,

driving a Volkswagen camper

with a fierce gay poet and a

lovely but dangerous girl with a husky voice,

we came down from Canada

on the dry east side of the ranges. Grand Coulee, Blue

Mountains, lava flow caves,

the Alvord desert—pronghorn ranges—

and the glittering obsidian-paved

dirt track toward Vya,

seldom-seen roads late September and

thick frost at dawn; then

follow a canyon and suddenly open to

          silvery flats that curved over the edge

O, ah! The

awareness of emptiness         

brings forth a heart of compassion![--from Finding The Space In The Heart]

A riveting and rewarding read even if you can't name any of Belafonte's songs

Last week if you’d asked me who Harry Belafonte was, I probably would have guessed he was a singer. If you ask me now, I’ll say he is a brilliant man with passion for the arts and a creative fighter for human rights.

One of my favorite stories about Belafonte takes place in 1958 when he and his wife found an apartment they wanted to rent on New York’s Upper West Side. When they let the building manager know they were interested, it was no longer available. Belafonte asked a white friend to go see about renting the apartment and the place was suddenly available again. Belafonte’s friend took a copy of the lease and got Belafonte’s signature on it, turned it in, and Belafonte and his wife, Julie Robinson, moved in.

The building manager was not pleased to see he was renting to a black man (Robinson was white). Belafonte and Robinson were told they needed to pack their things and get out of the building, but Belafonte knew he had a year to work with since he’d signed a one-year lease.

He created three “dummy” real estate companies that engaged in a bidding war to buy the building. The owner of the building, accepted the highest bid and Belafonte bought the building. He then turned it into a co-op, which meant any tenants who wanted to could buy their units and those who didn’t could continue renting.

As owner of the building, Belafonte wanted to offer housing to others who might have experienced discrimination in their search for housing. Lena Horne moved into the penthouse suite, and Belafonte’s favorite bass player, Ron Carter, who was also black, moved into the building, too.

Belafonte’s scheme cost $2 million, but it worked. Throughout his memoir, My Song, which was published last year, there are stories like this that show the determination and ingenuity of this talented artist to fight racism and other prejudice. I’ve never read a celebrity memoir before and I probably would never have read this one if I didn’t live in Germany.

Last week I met with a German woman who is the Director of the German-American Institute in Nuremberg. She set up a talk for Black History Month and a reading from Belafonte’s book. From what I understand, Belafonte has a strong following here in Germany. My job is to select passages to read aloud from the book in which his fans can hear stories of the Civil Rights movement from the point of view of someone they “know” and admire.

I know many have strong views about whether or not there should be such a thing as Black History Month. Black history should be integrated into other sorts of history or other sorts of history should be integrated into black history and all aspects of history should be given their due year round. Still, I’m glad to have been invited to help with this particular Black History Month event. Without it, I might never have known more about Belafonte than that he was probably a singer. Now he is a huge inspiration to me: a creative thinker who isn’t afraid to keep demanding more. We all need to keep demanding more.

As Belafonte puts it:

All of us pushing for integration would have to do more than hold a rally now and then. Without an active mass movement to make the government truly uncomfortable, our elected leaders would not do anything—not because they didn’t want to do something, but because they needed political pressure to make decisions that many of their constituents would resent. (My Song 196-197)

I appreciate Belafonte’s reminder that we all need to work to remind each other of the discomfort we should be feeling regarding current injustices. What does and should make us uncomfortable today? What will this discomfort inspire us to do?

In which the Little People Drink Sake, Say Ho ho. (Illustration by Rokuro Taniuchi)

I looked it up, ok? Wikipedia says it’s wordplay, that kyu (Q) and kew (9) are homophones. So it’s 1Q84, not 1984. I was compelled to look this up because a friend of mine had been calling it “IQ 84″ and I kept calling 19Q4 for the first five hundred pages.

They were a long first five hundred pages. I didn’t understand why the first book ended where it did, at a point which didn’t seem complete or suspenseful, and did not leave me hungering for the second book. I assume that’s part of the reason the trilogy came out as one book in the U.S. A lot of the information seemed redundant, like filler. I kept telling myself that maybe it had to be when sold separately, that with months between publishing books 1-2-3, the audience would have forgotten everything. I’m a slow reader, and carried the book with me through many airports and different cities. It sat unopened in a hotel room in St. Louis for a week. I learned to skim to survive the repeated passages.

I had been so excited when the book came out. I think it was the first time that I bought a book the day it hit  shelves. I felt smug. I like Murakami. His short stories are fantastic, I empathize with characters who must enter wells to think, and I had a most pleasant time reading Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World while on a Delaware beach last summer.

I wanted my reading experience of 1Q84 to be untarnished, a sacred interaction of reader and text. I tried not to read any reviews of the novel, lest they give away some pertinent information, some delightful surprise. And the book is filled with some good surprises, like the “Town of Cats” story (which appeared in the New Yorker as a short story), or the idea that small, magical people would enter the world through a dead goat’s mouth.

My hands grew stronger during this process.

I took the book everywhere, like a pet, like I was a walking advertisement for literature. People commented on its volume and asked if it was any good. People seem to think that size matters with books. They felt proud reading Harry Potter. They think that War and Peace is probably “good for them,” like vitamins, but no one really takes vitamins daily. They want to know if this book I have is “fun” or “good for them.” But 1Q84 is the first Murakami book that I can’t recommend to most of the people I know. I think they would feel uncomfortable, because there’s a lot of sex that isn’t sexy and that doesn’t seem to matter. “It was like her pubic hair was part of her thinking process” is one line. Tengo’s penis is rarely called a penis, often called his “thingy.” This could reflect that diminutive cuteness of objects in Japan (Hello Kitty, how big is a square watermelon, anyway?), or I don’t know, a hypercoristic name like how a French lover might call you his little cabbage, or maybe an attempt at winning one of those worst sex scene ever writing awards. And there are a lot of loose ends, which is maybe a meta example of certain rules not applying to the 1Q84 universe.

But it has cults. It references several other awesome books and writers, which is something writers enjoy reading. And if I ended up in last fall again somehow, repeating a season and half, I would buy it again on the first day and slog my way through it, all the while recommending  Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World or Blind Woman, Sleeping Willow, because like in 1Q84 there seems be this absence of free will coupled with the necessity to take responsibility for one’s actions all the same.

in theory, it sounds like a good idea maybe.  it’s got all the things i used to love about the books section: reviews, recommendations, essays, interviews, fun little Q&A’s with book-loving peoples, best-seller lists, a calendar of literary events, all that good shit.  it’s even got a column from rick kogan, the best storyteller/old school newspaperman our town’s got since dear studs passed away.  but here’s the thing: the newspapers had all that before, and got rid of it.  probably because of economic inefficiencies, or economies of scale, or sliding scales, or because the terrorists finally won.  so, obviously, they had to do something different this time.  and what they decided to do was charge for it.

but the book-loving peoples won’t just pay for what they used to get for free, right?  so, obviously, they had to make it BETTER.  that way the book-loving peoples won’t feel like they’re getting screwed by paying for what they used to get for free.  but the book-loving peoples actually did used to pay for it.  they paid for their sunday papers which came with the books section and did not steal any of it off the interwebs, like the good law-abiding citizens they were.  they paid for this stuff because they liked the printed word, and in return for their years of patronage, the book-loving peoples had their favorite section stripped away & now have to pay even more to get it back.

how much more?  about 100% 200%.  right now, i pay about $1/week for a sunday paper subscription.  a subscription to this new printers row is $99/year.  but wait!  there’s more!  for that $99 i also get to be a “member” of the printers row community.  “special access,” and “events,” and “forums,” and such.  there’ll be a series of monthly author discussions, readings, and an online discussion board.  in other words, many of the things i can get for free at our city’s kick ass reading serieses, or about a gajillion websites aimed at the book-loving peoples.

that’s not to say there’s nothing good here.  those author discussions, “printers row live,” seem like they could actually be kinda cool maybe.  and from the free online preview of the first issue, it looks like the editors took a cue from their coverboy eggers’ own attempt at rejuvenating the newspaper business, mcsweeneys 33, and decided to do some bold layout work (just look at pages A12 & A14).  plus, this thing will come with a special pull-out original short story every week, not unlike one story.  but i’ve never actually been to one of those printers row live events, and most of the layout work (while nice) isn’t exactly bold, and i have no idea what to expect from newspaper editors who will essentially be running a lit mag (suffice it to say, i was once the managing editor of a journal, but i would never presume to know how to run a newspaper).

i guess i should be happy they’re at least trying, though, right?  it’s a noble effort, catering to those book-loving peoples.  but whether it’s also a profitable one for newspapers remains to be seen.

Fine, this is what it looks like.

It took me forever to get this review written.  I bought Blue Nights, Joan Didion’s latest work, in November, soon after it came out.  It’s a small book and I figured I could read it in a day and get to work. I started it pretty quickly and read 40 pages.  And then it sat on the night stand by my reading chair in my bedroom.  I took the cover off, and the back photo haunted me every time I saw it—Didion’s daughter, young, sitting on a chair, elbows on knees with towhead in hands, too serious. And I couldn’t read it.  I knew it was about mortality, and as Didion says “When we talk about mortality, we are talking about our children.” I knew her daughter, so ill in the first memoir, was going to die, had died, and so I spent a lot of time not reading it.  And when I went back to Blue Nights in January, I opened my reading journal to see what I’d written, to remind me.

“There’s a sense of clinging about this…it’s humbling and haunting and it makes me want to stop reading it and go read a book or play a game with my kids.”

Oh, right.  I’d stopped reading because it hurt too much.  All the seconds Joan wouldn’t get to spend with her child, and here I am reading about it instead of spending time with my child.  That’s a hard line to tread, but it occurred to me that as mothers (and fathers?), we do it all of the time, and I’m sure Didion’s no exception.

Didion’s fears about being a good mother are ubiquitous, and she bares them.  What mother doesn’t feel inadequate? “I do not know many people who think they have succeeded as parents.” And if we don’t feel inadequate enough, plenty of people are ready to point out what they see as our faults.  Enter “The Autumn of Didion” by Caitlin Flanagan in the Atlantic (but I found it through Byliner.com, which is like Pandora for CNF and which you should totally check out)  Flanagan seems to know what kind of mother Didion was, and she doesn’t paint a very good picture.  And that’s unfair.  There is every possibility that Didion and Dunne were exceptional parents to their daughter—gasp—while managing to work.  Maybe they weren’t.  But because parents are busy and value their careers does not immediately qualify them for Worst Parent of the Year.

Critiques of Didion’s mothering skills and social anxieties aren’t really here nor there when we’re talking about her work, though.  And a lot of people would agree with Flanagan when she said that Didion’s best works were Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album.   I’ve not read her fiction, but The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights both seem to rely on the fact that Didion’s audience already knows her and has some baseline from which to draw in order to get up to speed tone-wise.  Because I think it’s Didion’s tone that her fans love so much. Flanagan says Didion’s the Hunter S. Thompson for women:  “She was our Hunter Thompson, and Slouching Towards Bethlehem was our Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. He gave the boys twisted pig-fuckers and quarts of tequila; she gave us quiet days in Malibu and flowers in our hair.”

Oh, bullshit.  Didion didn’t give us quiet days and flowers.  Didion gave us subtle malaise and powerful ennui, a palpable pessimism, and we fucking loved it.  We emulated it, we studied it, we lived through those darkened sunglasses.  We learned from it.  And I think Didion’s still teaching us.  Over at The Guardian, Rachel Cusk writes:

 Didion’s strategy, or rather her instinct – the instinctive response to chaos – is to repeat herself. She struggles to revive the form and style of her earlier book, to make it live again; she repeats anecdotes, and often sentences, word for word; she creates repeating prose patterns whose effect, in the end, is to confer the author’s own numbness on the reader. What she cannot do is master her own material: instead of grieving with her, we are watching her grieve. This is a piteous and exposing process, and one which places a moral burden on the reader. And it is here that Didion’s lack of humility comes back to haunt her, for by burdening the reader she is also making herself vulnerable to judgment. Early on, describing a set of photographs of Quintana as a child, she writes: “In a few she is wearing a cashmere turtleneck sweater I brought her from London when we went that May to do promotion for the European release of The Panic in Needle Park.” What passed in The Year of Magical Thinking as the camaraderie of husband and wife becomes, at a stroke, something more disturbing – a kind of parental attention-seeking that again and again drives Didion’s sentences away from their subject and back to herself. “Was I the problem?” she asks. “Was I always the problem?”

She’s right about the language, the repetition, the construction. But Cusk misses the point here.  Didion’s self-aggrandizement is a terrifying part of being a parent—never knowing whether you’ve done enough; or rather, knowing you’ve never done enough.  Blue Nights is about apprehension of an ending, and the fact that Didion can’t stop bringing it back on herself is more about a parent’s guilt than narcissism.

I guess Cusk wasn’t drawn into Didion’s grief, but I certainly found parts of this book startlingly sad.  I didn’t just watch as she grieved, because Joan Didion knows how to write grief.  She offers us so many tiny moments of her unbearable grief—the “sundries” box, are you kidding me?!  “Again, the careful printing.  The printing alone I cannot forget.  The printing alone breaks my heart”—that she avoids being drawn down too deeply.  As in The Year of Magical Thinking, she circles the subject, because it’s too difficult to linger there. She’s not melodramatic, but that’s never been Didion’s thing.  I do love that in this book she comes right out and tells us what it’s about:

When I began writing these pages, I believed their subject to be children…the ways in which we depend on our children to depend on us…the ways in which our investments in each other remain too freighted ever to see the other clear.  The ways in which neither we nor they can bear to contemplate the death or the illness or even the aging of the other.  As the pages progressed it occurred to me that their actual subject was not children after all…their actual subject was this refusal even to engage in such contemplation, this failure to confront the certainties of aging, illness, death…only as the pages progressed further did I understand that the two subjects were the same.  When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children.

This is not in Didion style, and I think that’s why it feels so vulnerable.  My thesis advisor stressed that we are always evolving as writers:  “Do I really need to start this piece all over?”  “Yes!  You’re a different writer than you were two weeks ago.”  I think Didion’s style is evolving, and that fans of Didion like me (Didionheads? Joan Drones? Slouchers?) can appreciate where her work has come from and what it is now, and still believe we have things to learn from Didion.   Final words:  Quick read, sad, worth it.

Last month, I wrote about Sarah’s story, which I found handwritten on the flyleaves of a used book I bought online. That post includes a transcript of what little she left for the amateur internet sleuth, so I won’t belabor the details here. But there are a couple highlights that, if this were a TV mini-series, would surely appear in the “Last Week on…” montage that rolls before the theme song:

1. Sarah met and fell in love with a man named Mike. Mike was a park ranger who, according to Sarah’s friend Stu, had started an Outward Bound program in Seward, Alaska, where Sarah’s story takes place. According to Sarah, Mike was “her second half.” He “changed [her] life… gave [her] pure love.”
2. Sarah misspells his name when she writes it out. Instead of Michael Adrian Vanbeek, the standard spelling of the two given names, she writes “Micheal Adrain Vanbeek.”
3. She writes in vague terms about the loss of the relationship. Twice in the draft, she approaches this subject and then jerks away from it, like she has accidentally brushed against a wound.

Mike Vanderbeek is the one who looks like he's being attacked by the guy in the jean shorts.

Since I didn’t have any helpful information about Sarah, I began by googling Mike. I made the rookie mistake of starting with his full name, both Sarah’s rendering and the spelling-corrected version. Of course, this yielded no real results. Then I tried “Mike Vanbeek”—too many results. Then I tried searching “Mike Vanbeek” and “Outward Bound” together. Here where it got interesting.

Google suggested that maybe I meant “Mike Vanderbeek” and Outward Bound, and it showed me what I would find there. Mike Vanderbeek, as it turns out, started Outward Bound’s Alaska program in Seward. He was indeed a park ranger, an advanced mountaineer, and he would’ve likely been in Seward in the summer of 1997, when Sarah sets her story. All of this fits, but all of this information is found around the edges of the articles. For Google, the thing you need to know about Mike Vanderbeek is that he is dead.

In the spring of 1998, the year after his brief affair with Sarah, Mike Vanderbeek was working at Denali National Park as a volunteer climbing ranger. Two days before the end of his term there, as the ice routes were getting soft and dangerous, he was descending the heavily-traveled West Buttress of Denali ahead of approaching bad weather. About 100 feet above his position at about 16,500 feet, Venderbeek and his climbing partner Tim Hurtado saw a Canadian climber fall from a ridgeline, plunging toward Peter’s Glacier 8,000 feet below. Vanderbeek, an experienced climber but an inexperienced rescuer, along with Hurtado hastily climbed back to the point from which the Canadian climber, Daniel Rowarth, had fallen. They found his ice axe but couldn’t see Rowarth. Visibility was low, and the weather conditions were worsening. Gusts at the summit ridge were reaching 70 miles per hour.

Vanderbeek fell from just below this position. Image credit: Wildernesscapes Photography

Vanderbeek and Hurtado began down-climbing across treacherous terrain, descending a steep slope without first stopping to rope up. When they did, finally, decide to anchor themselves into the mountainside, their position was already precarious. They were on a 400-foot sheet of 45-55 degree blue-water ice, and as they moved toward a rock that they could use as an anchor, Vanderbeek fell, sliding down the ice and off the ledge toward Peter’s Glacier. The official report allows Hurtado a vivid memory: “Hurtado heard the sound of nylon on ice. He heard nothing else and shouted for Vanderbeek and received no answer.” Hurtado anchored himself to the ice with an ice screw and waited for help. The weather hampered the recovery effort, but Rowarth’s body was eventually found. He had died in the initial fall. Vanderbeek’s body was not recovered.

I imagine Sarah receiving this news. She is returned from her Alaskan adventure the previous summer. Returned to Seattle or San Diego or Topeka. Returned to her apartment a few blocks from campus or her bedroom in her parents’ house. Returned from her tryst with the ruddy but awkward Denali climbing ranger, re-immersed in her real life. And she receives word. Maybe she gets an email from Stu.

She begins to write everything down, but she doesn’t write this down. She wants, I think, to insert herself into this story, but she knows better. She knows better than to co-opt tragedy and call it hers. But what she feels is hers: the real loss of something that was, maybe, less realized than it might have been, something that, in retrospect, seems sweeter for being lost. Grief and tragedy are not hers, but a proximity to death is. And she tries to write it, but she stops short of the heart. She keeps her distance. She puts it back on the shelf.

And then what? Years later, maybe, she takes it down. She is married now; there’s a baby asleep upstairs. She is going through the old boxes of books that she moves and moves again without ever purging. She’s just gotten a Kindle. They’ve just bought their first house. Out with the old. She doesn’t know what she’s looking for, but when she picks up the book that she wrote in she realizes that this is it. This is the part of her past that she is now, at last, ready to expunge. But she thinks it would be merciless to throw this away. Mike is buried under ten winters of snow and ice. He is a stratum in Peter’s Glacier 8,500 feet above sea level, leaning into the cold side of Denali. He is wholly dead already. So, instead of killing him again, she turns him out into the world, a cold mercy. Better, she thinks, the quick-moving waters of commerce than the landfill. And maybe she is right. Maybe Mike’s new life on my bookshelf is a kind of rebirth. Not immortality, of course, because I will forget him there too. But better than another burial, at least.

At least I’m assuming, and shamelessly projecting upon others the alienation that I myself do not savor…

The fact is — as I write whatever I write — I do not really know what I’m intending to mean, and therefore appreciate another soul making the effort to comprehend that proposition or observation or truth claim around which my words take tentative and perhaps over-confident stabs in the dark.

This, I’m afraid, is the best any reader or any literary critic can offer by way of definitive credentials.   “Ours is in the trying,” muses T.S. Eliot (italics mine).  We put our stuff out there and hope for a dialogue partner, and at our best, do not react with a hyper-critical defense which degenerates into the slinging of mud or jello…  Or even the defense which ostensibly folds its arms and snickers in condescension.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Daisy Fried, in her New York Times articles and in her Poetry Foundation commentaries, has exercised her readership’s cerebral capacities for over a decade now.  I love that about the poetic graduate of Swarthmore College — that she pushes and prods and gets our synapse connections firing on all cylinders.   And I want her to know that I used to ride my bike through that upscale campus and pick up, as through osmosis, the academy’s deepest thoughts.   I did this, however, not for the sole purpose of one day asserting that  William Carlos Williams is the Dante of the American twentieth century (a comment that makes me want to dig further into the Inferno and perhaps learn the epic in the original Italian).  But I thought those thoughts, which were clearly above my blue-collar rank, because it seemed to me then, and seems to me now, that no one owns this dialectic terrain… that intellectual property is nothing more than a cold, stony seat in the amphitheater where scholars and non-scholars may cool their heels, listen and perhaps chime into the conversation.

In the review of Something Urgent I Have To Say To You, Daisy Fried fires off a few warning shots in the direction of Herbert Leibowitz (the unsuspecting biographer of Williams).   With gumption, she relishes what the co-founder of Parnassus: Poetry in Review must have missed in the poem, The Last Words of My English Grandmother, saying:

“To misunderstand this is to misunderstand — at least partly — the life.”

 

Now, whether or not I agree with Fried content-wise (and more or less, I do), her tone strikes me as strident.  Her rhetoric, although worthy of our deepest reflection and respect, is not a shut window or a locked door.  Moreover, while I can resonate with the Philadelphia moxie that sizzles off her tongue and that flares from her fingertips, I can also offer this feedback (as she has offered me her own feedback).

Ms. Fried — we all miss things, but for you to rub Mr. Leibowitz face in it by suggesting that he may have missed “the life” he’s trying to approximate on the page — that seems… ahhh… overly aggressive!

My argument has been and will remain that the lives of others are never fully grasped or comprehended.   That’s what makes them (philosophically speaking) OTHER.

We miss.  Ooops!  We lose sight of the maneuvers that Williams makes in his most potent verse (although we try to isolate and analyze them).   We miss, as Mr. Leibowitz has missed, how the husband to Florence Herman, wrote for a variety of reasons, many of which elude all readers and all writers — and this, as Ecclesiastes so aptly portends, is “nothing new under the sun.”

To live this way — to acknowledge the mutual and interpersonal misunderstandings between us — is, “at least partly,” [sic] to stand under the authentic nature of a sacred life…

I guess what seems so irksome to me is the presumption that literature and literary criticism ought to be an elite discipline in which only poets-in-residence from Smith and Bryn Mawr may participate.   On the contrary, Northrop Frye broadens our interpretative horizons when he notes that…

many of those who find it easy to write by an act of conscious will are those who are primarily concerned to say what is most readily acceptable in their cultural surroundings — in other words they are hack writers.   Poets who can  at will produce verse on approved moral, religious or patriotic themes seldom make a deep impression on the history of literature… (Words With Power, p. 52).

Of course, none of this repartee is meant to claim intellectual superiority over anybody, or to refer to Daisy Fried as a hack.   Far from it.  By the same token, self-deprecation and humility are not always the shortest routes to a moral high ground.  Nor are they automatic conduits to a stimulating cultural exchange.   And I wanted to make peace and not feel the burden of upholding this MFA program for exercising poor syntax.

The point is, whatever our cognitive, emotional and familial resources, lovers of poetry ought to feel welcomed to the party.   We ought to feel as if the splendor of the tradition outshines those who make it into the latest Billy Collins anthology and reflects off the wrench which has been thrown again and again into lecture halls mechanizations.  Let me emphasize  the combined celestial and corporeal banquet that we — the Herbert Leibowitz’s, the Daisy Fried’s and the Scott K-P’s — join in progress.   The reason for the feast is not simply that some may discern nuances in taste and texture, but that we’re starving!  Starving for news!

My heart rouses
thinking to bring you news
of something

that concerns you
and concerns many men.  Look at
what passes for the new.
You will not find it there but in
despised poems.
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.

Asphodel, That Greeny Flower, a late poem by Williams, delivers all the goods, hits all the right notes and casts all the shadows necessary for us to realize that lives will be missed, missed entirely…   Moreover, if we’re fortunate enough to have an audience for our life-product (our poems, our short fiction, our creative non-fiction, etc.), the famous words of Dana Gioia in Can Poetry Matter? require a follow up.   Gioia wrote,

A society whose intellectual leaders lose the skill to shape, appreciate and understand the power of language will become the slaves of those who retain it — be they politicians, preachers, copywriters, or newscasters.

I say, Amen!

And yet, a little “tact” [sic] goes a long way.   There’s a finesse to misunderstanding a poet, a poet’s biographer, a astute columnist, a reckless barking blogger — and I hope we never stop practicing.

Peace–

Maybe Nuremberg Needs One of These?

Der Klügere gibt nach.  (The cleverer give in.)
–A German Saying

A retired German man was walking in a German city not long ago. He saw a group of people trying to cross the street at a dangerous intersection. The cars wouldn’t stop so some women created a human chain as a barrier to help the others cross. An Audi drove up to the woman-made-chain and pushed their bodies out of the way with his car. The women were shocked; their hands dropped, chain broke, and they didn’t know what to say.

The retired man went over to the Audi and told the driver to stop pushing people around with his car. The man in the Audi opened his car door, got out, and yelled at this thin man who must be in his late sixties. The thin older man pushed the driver back into his Audi and shut the car door. The driver opened the door, got back out of the car, and towered over the old-ish man, yelling some more before driving away.

The retired man said when the Audi drove away, he looked around and no one was there. The pedestrians who all needed to cross the street, the women who made the chain—they were all gone. The only person standing by him was his wife. “And she was probably hoping this was her chance to get rid of me,” the retired man joked.

I heard this story in a short story reading group at the German-American Institute last week. We were discussing an essay about a woman who didn’t stand up to racism on a bus in London and later wrote her regret into the essay, “She Shall Not Be Moved.” The leader of the short story group asked us if we would have told the old white ladies on the bus in London to switch seats so the Nigerian woman could move her stroller out of the aisle.

Of course we all want to say we would stick up for the Nigerian woman with the stroller, but it feels juvenile to act too sure of what one would do in a complicated situation roiling with undercurrents of racism. Especially when you have a child to protect, as Sheeren Pandit, the author of the essay did.

In some ways the retired man’s story is inspiring, but he almost seemed to regret having stood up to the man in the Audi. In fact, he’s the one who quoted the German saying above (The cleverer give in) after telling us his–as he put it–”disappointing story.” I let him know how much I admired his act. He offered resistance to jerkiness, and he got concrete evidence of his wife’s loyalty that day. Besides, isn’t the regret of not doing something worse than the regret of having done something?

I can’t say I disagree with the quote about the cleverer giving in, but given Germany’s history, this particular value concerns me. Tonight I’m going to a book group to discuss The Book Thief, which is about a German family during WWII, who end up hiding a Jewish man in their basement. Despite the flaws of the book, I found myself drawn, deeply, into the story and can’t stop thinking about the Holocaust. Nuremberg was a significant place for Hitler. Therefore, the city was bombed into oblivion, and I see relics of these bombings daily.

Nuremberg has sites that document the area’s Nazi history, but I haven’t yet seen a memorial for the Jews in this city. I was surprised how comforted I was to see a giant menorah in a square in Munich on Christmas Eve. I haven’t yet seen any art in Nuremberg that pays homage to the Jews that this city sacrificed. And I want to.

Any ideas?

Some people are one-book-at-a-time readers. It’s one and done for them, one and done. I don’t understand these people.

I like books to fit my mood. I like having books for all the many occasions that might arise. For instance, if I were to take a trip tomorrow, do I have a book that would (1) pack easily, (2) not earn me strange stares in public, and (3) engross me enough so that I don’t get bored in the backseat of the car, in the airport terminal. Then, there’s the book I read over meals or in the bathtub. This book is almost always a reread, something I can pick up and put down at a moment’s notice, something I could do without if I dropped it in the water and had to wait a few days to but a new copy. (True story: I dropped a first edition in the bathtub the other day; this was actually a poor bathtub choice.) Finally, there’s the book I think will impress my colleagues or my peers. Preferably, this book is also somewhat unknown so that I can recommend it to everyone I meet and it will be a new discovery for them.

This all may or may not be related to the fact that I am a huge fan of rereading books. I have certain books that I return to year after year, waiting for January 1 to come along so that I can get credit for it again on my yearly reading spreadsheet. I love rereading because I discover so much more on subsequent reads, and sometimes this discovery continues through six or seven reads. It’s not just “dense” books, either, those of so-called literary merit. Recently I noticed something about how JK Rowling handles foreshadowing, and I’ve probably read those books a dozen times.

Some people claim to be bored on rereads. They don’t like having the suspense removed by knowing what’s going to happen. But for me, if I wait a year or two between reads, I often can’t remember anything but vague impressions of the book. Even in grad school, I had to take notes on the books we read in class, because I’d forget it so fast and I didn’t want to be suspected of not doing my homework—and we only had a week to read those books. Of course, that meant I read them fast, and each night before bed I’d put down the school book and pick up something for pure pleasure, even if for only five minutes. So I suppose that could be it. Or, it could be that I just like the idea of opportunity costs factoring into my reading time and so try to pretend they don’t exist.

Now, if you’ll go excuse me, I’m going to go read one chapter each of those main six books I’m working on. I’d hate to lost track of what’s happening.

Provocative, Searing, Blunt. Yes, please.

I came home with his office copy of Elizabeth Alexander’s “Body of Life”, disgruntled with another book that seemed to focus on the Black Experience. Didn’t I already know that CH wanted me to focus on the Black Experience?, I thought to myself. But didn’t I also know how small-minded and shallow it is to categorize a poem by a black person as a Black poem? I thought I did, but I didn’t until I started reading and found the reason why I think CH assigned this book for me in particular. I found the reason first in the poem The Josephine Baker Museum, in section 4 called Ablutions:

“…Do they really want to see

the nappy pussy underneath that sweats

and stinks and grinds beneath bananas,

turns to seaweed in the tub?”

This was my kind of frankness. This was my kind of imagery and such a way with language that comes at the reader so hard, for a moment you lose your breath because it’s so true. This is what I have always aimed to achieve but have done mostly willy nilly and without much discipline. Here was a blueprint that I could follow. Here was something I could steal.

I kept reading and found more to take: how Alexander created characters with unique voices, how she took famous people and made them into people I felt like I knew, how the body was loved even when it betrayed, how she took risks that made me uncomfortable, and how she made me adore being black.

Halfway through I reached Six Yellow Stanzas  and I was writing my own stanzas in my head before I even finished. I went to work at Sears and walked around helping customers, all the while thinking of my own Six Blue Stanzas. When I got home, I wrote it all down with furious productivity. The end result was no where near Alexander’s original but it was a start, a start at a technique of writing that wasn’t quite my own, which was the point.

I'm constantly being schooled

As a young writer I am still wet and malleable like clay. I take the shape of what I read, which is why I should be reading books of poetry like Alexander’s or Jackson’s or any other  poet of character that I can get my hands on so I can learn and steal what makes them successful. And then when I finally set into my own voice, I’ll have these tools in my toolbox that I”ll know how to use for a given problem. The Poem being the problem.

I have not written anything worthy of the Pulitzer or even an honorable mention but I am learning and I think the value of the latter is more than the value of the former. Until of course, I have the former.