Shirley Jackson's taut 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House opens with the words "No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream." The collective dream visions of the four figures who commit themselves to spending a part of a summer at the titular manse range from fireside banter about their imagined lives as a courtesan or a bullfighter to an image of a blood-drenched bedroom; the reader spends most of her time at the elbow of Eleanor Vance who has spent most of her adult life "caring for her invalid mother, which had left her with some proficiency as a nurse and an inability to face strong sunlight without blinking."
Eleanor's adolescent experience with a poltergeist who had showered her family's house with stones for three days puts her on the radar of the anthropologist who seeks to scientifically document supernatural presences in the house; at Hill House she finds that she has the ability to make up an entirely new life for herself by weaving together stray images and overheard bits of conversation -- a glimpse of two lions standing guard outside a house she passes in the car she has surreptitiously taken, a mother's explanation to a disinterested waitress about her daughter's demand for a cup full of stars -- and finds herself strangely at home in a place where she finds herself literally as well as figuratively in the grip of unseen and restless forces.
One way to read The Haunting of Hill House is as an allegory for the pleasures and perils of wholly giving one's self over to one's imagination: Eleanor Vance could be an eccentric aunt of Alexandra, the central figure in Audrey Niffenegger's graphic narrative The Night Bookmobile who comes across a Winnebago on a deserted Chicago street in the wee hours of the morning as she walks off her anger following a lovers' spat; Alexandra discovers that the RV is a bookmobile that contains everything that she has ever read from Pat the Bunny and Charlotte's Web to cereal boxes and Gravity's Rainbow (which has text only on the first 57 pages, since that is as far as Alexandra was able to get through Pynchon's novel). At dawn, closing time for The Night Bookmobile, the Librarian ushers Alexandra out of the Winnebago and she returns to the apartment she shares with her boyfriend, finding him skeptical about her story of The Night Bookmobile, she asks the reader:
"Have you ever found your heart's desire and then lost it? I had seen myself, a portrait of myself as a reader. My childhood: hours spent in airless classrooms, days home sick from school reading Nancy Drew, forbidden books read secretively late at night. Teenage years reading -- trying to read -- books I'd heard were important, Naked Lunch and The Fountainhead, Ulysses and Women in Love...It was as though I had dreamt the perfect lover, who vanished as I woke, leaving me pining and surly."
Alexandra's second encounter with The Night Bookmobile kindles a desire to be a Librarian; told that no positions are available at The Library but that she could become a regular librarian, she goes to library school and rises through the stacks of the Chicago public library system and is eventually named the director of one of its branches on the day of her third encounter with The Night Bookmobile; her desire to spend all her time in that realm leads her to suicide, after which she wakes to discover herself in her favorite dress and in her most comfortable shoes in The Central Reading Room of The Library, where her own Librarian congratulates her on having been hired and where she is handed a copy of Goodnight Moon, the inaugural book in the library of her own patron. Alexandra's initial elation is deflated a bit when she discovers that her own library has been deaccessioned, since "only living people can be Readers."
Alexandra's ambivalence over her new position is counterbalanced by the final frame of the book that shows her leaning comfortably against the doorway frame of the Airstream trailer that houses her patron's collection; in The Haunting of Hill House, Eleanor's determination to stay in Hill House's realm despite her compatriots' decision to send her back to her drear domestic life sends her careening down the driveway of the house on a straight shot to a large tree that marks the crash site of the house's first mistress who died before ever reaching the front the door. Jackson delivers the reader from the grip of the narrative into a moment of lyric time with the line "In the unending, crashing second before the car hurled into the tree she thought clearly Why am I doing this? Why am I doing this? Why don't they stop me?" Both stories seem to suggest that in wholly giving one's self over to the imaginative realm, one loses one's traction in one's waking world that, paradoxically, the very ground of one's dreams, yet The Haunting of Hill House suggests that Eleanor's real downfall comes when she began to believe that her imagination could shift the terms of her everyday world, a prospect that frightens her companions more than the elusive beasts and invisible intruders of the house itself, and which compel them to cast her out of their small circle. As the others go back to the comforts and disappointments of their public and private lives, Eleanor's sharp insights and fully realized sensory experiences continue to haunt even when the book is placed securely back on the shelf -- the kind of afterlife that might in fact be actively sought by most Readers.
Friday, December 31, 2010
Thursday, December 23, 2010
From Batman to Atropos
In "Night on Earth," a 2003 issue of Planetary, an occasional serial written by Warren Ellis for DC Comics and (most often) illustrated by John Cassaday, the series' three main characters who function as a kind of archeological team go to Gotham City to track down John Black, a young man suspected of perpetrating some very gruesome deaths in the city. The organizing conceit of this issue is that in this particular universe, Batman doesn't exist, but the man the Planetary team is tracking has been subjected to insidious experiments that have left him with the power, and pain of cycling through alternate universes, so when the team finds Black he has something akin to an epileptic seizure and cycles everyone into a parallel reality, one in which the caped crusader does in fact exist.
When a muscle-bound, ninja-style fighting Batman shows up on the scene, the trio are at a loss as to what to make of this guy in the fetish costume; Jakita, the character most likely to be played by Angelina Jolie in the movie adaptation of the comic book, takes on this interloper while her compatriots try to catch Black as he stumbles down an alley. When they catch up with Black, he seizes again, and Jakita finds herself in a candy-colored universe with a slightly portly guy in a slightly baggy leotard who looks a lot like Adam West, who played Batman in the television series that ran from 1966-1968.
As Jakita tries to recover from a blast of "Bat Female-Villain Repellent" the Drummer, one of her team members, sees "some kind of transvestite hooker running down the alleyway at us" while it dawns on Elijah Snow, the other member of the Planetary triumverate, that they're encountering different iterations of this mysterious "cape guy." Elijah has the bad fortune to come face to face with a Frank Miller-esque, Dark Knight version of the character as Black cycles into yet another universe; and the team members find themselves having to renegotiate the terms of Black's capture and custody with figures whose solutions to the problem at hand range from long-term treatment at Arkham Asylum to an immediate bullet to the brain. I'm thinking about the ways in which comics offer an example of how to consider the radically different iterations one can have of one character, one life in thinking through some editorial and ethical issues in cutting footage to fit a key moment in a documentary in which how we choose to frame a few seconds of video can have the effect of casting a kid's life as a downward spiral of violence or as a wellspring of creative production. Tune in next week....
When a muscle-bound, ninja-style fighting Batman shows up on the scene, the trio are at a loss as to what to make of this guy in the fetish costume; Jakita, the character most likely to be played by Angelina Jolie in the movie adaptation of the comic book, takes on this interloper while her compatriots try to catch Black as he stumbles down an alley. When they catch up with Black, he seizes again, and Jakita finds herself in a candy-colored universe with a slightly portly guy in a slightly baggy leotard who looks a lot like Adam West, who played Batman in the television series that ran from 1966-1968.
As Jakita tries to recover from a blast of "Bat Female-Villain Repellent" the Drummer, one of her team members, sees "some kind of transvestite hooker running down the alleyway at us" while it dawns on Elijah Snow, the other member of the Planetary triumverate, that they're encountering different iterations of this mysterious "cape guy." Elijah has the bad fortune to come face to face with a Frank Miller-esque, Dark Knight version of the character as Black cycles into yet another universe; and the team members find themselves having to renegotiate the terms of Black's capture and custody with figures whose solutions to the problem at hand range from long-term treatment at Arkham Asylum to an immediate bullet to the brain. I'm thinking about the ways in which comics offer an example of how to consider the radically different iterations one can have of one character, one life in thinking through some editorial and ethical issues in cutting footage to fit a key moment in a documentary in which how we choose to frame a few seconds of video can have the effect of casting a kid's life as a downward spiral of violence or as a wellspring of creative production. Tune in next week....
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Circles
This past weekend, I was in the Smokey Mountains of North Carolina for an Advent retreat organized by four women -- Elaine, Joyce, Kate, and Lydia -- whom I have the privilege and pleasure to know through a community called Word and World, a group of activists who are variously and manifoldly artists, musicians, pastors, teachers, dancers, cooks, care-givers, fundraisers, singers, masseuses, students, weavers, farmers, organizers, poets, and travelers who cast their work from a faith-based perspective.
This is the kind of community in which you find yourself being the recipient of the grace of a total stranger who has offered to give you a ride from the Asheville Airport to the heights of Bryson City (thank you, Amy!), then find yourself, three days later, being shepherded down the mountains by other total strangers (thank you, Rachel, Jim, Mark, and Michael!) who have given up their Sunday to put chains on the 14 cars driven by your comadres to provide traction for the icy roads that skirt the coves, hollers, and gaps that feature near-vertical crops of several hundred feet.
As part of the weekend, Kate invited me to lead a writing workshop in light of the retreat's themes of lamentation and celebration, and in reflection of the Magnificat, which, as Kate noted, is one of those points at which the Bible becomes a bit like a musical insofar that folks are moved to burst out in song. I was using the framework of Lynda Barry's writing workshop that she shares in What It Is; to help folks settle down to do the actual work of moving the pen across the page, she has folks engage in a relaxation exercise at the end of which she reads a poem by Rumi, then offers the prompt that will start the next session of writing. I didn't have Rumi on me, but I did have Joy Harjo's How We Became Human and read her "Eagle Poem":
To pray you open your whole self
to sky, to earth, to sun, to moon,
to one whole voice that is you.
And know that there is more
that you can't see, can't hear
can't know, except in moments
steadily growing and in languages
that aren't always sound but other circles of motion.
Like Eagle that Sunday morning
over Salt River. Circles in blue sky, in wind
swept our hearts clean.
with sacred wings.
We see you, see ourselves and know
that we must take the utmost care
and kindness in all things.
Breathe in, knowing we are made of
all this, and breathe, knowing
we are truly blessed because we
were born, and die soon, within a
true circle of motion,
like Eagle rounding out the moment
inside us.
We pray that it will be done
in beauty.
In beauty.
The writers in the workshop engendered amazing pieces in the space of seven and nine minute writing sessions. I was so grateful for the gift of those words that I decided to leave How We Became Human in retreat center's library, knowing that we would be carrying Joy Harjo's words with us in our various travels back to California, Connecticut, Ontario, Nebraska, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Oregon, Indiana, Georgia, New Hampshire, Virginia, and North Carolina, and hoping that some future visitor would discover the collection and have the opportunity to spend some time with Harjo's words.
When I got home, I found a message from a local friend, Kaye, in my email inbox, with the message that she had found a poem that struck her with its power and beauty, and wanted to share it with me. The poem in question was Joy Harjo's "Eagle Poem," so I very much felt that while I had left the physical book back on the shelves of Sabbath House, the poem had indeed accompanied me home.
This is the kind of community in which you find yourself being the recipient of the grace of a total stranger who has offered to give you a ride from the Asheville Airport to the heights of Bryson City (thank you, Amy!), then find yourself, three days later, being shepherded down the mountains by other total strangers (thank you, Rachel, Jim, Mark, and Michael!) who have given up their Sunday to put chains on the 14 cars driven by your comadres to provide traction for the icy roads that skirt the coves, hollers, and gaps that feature near-vertical crops of several hundred feet.
As part of the weekend, Kate invited me to lead a writing workshop in light of the retreat's themes of lamentation and celebration, and in reflection of the Magnificat, which, as Kate noted, is one of those points at which the Bible becomes a bit like a musical insofar that folks are moved to burst out in song. I was using the framework of Lynda Barry's writing workshop that she shares in What It Is; to help folks settle down to do the actual work of moving the pen across the page, she has folks engage in a relaxation exercise at the end of which she reads a poem by Rumi, then offers the prompt that will start the next session of writing. I didn't have Rumi on me, but I did have Joy Harjo's How We Became Human and read her "Eagle Poem":
To pray you open your whole self
to sky, to earth, to sun, to moon,
to one whole voice that is you.
And know that there is more
that you can't see, can't hear
can't know, except in moments
steadily growing and in languages
that aren't always sound but other circles of motion.
Like Eagle that Sunday morning
over Salt River. Circles in blue sky, in wind
swept our hearts clean.
with sacred wings.
We see you, see ourselves and know
that we must take the utmost care
and kindness in all things.
Breathe in, knowing we are made of
all this, and breathe, knowing
we are truly blessed because we
were born, and die soon, within a
true circle of motion,
like Eagle rounding out the moment
inside us.
We pray that it will be done
in beauty.
In beauty.
The writers in the workshop engendered amazing pieces in the space of seven and nine minute writing sessions. I was so grateful for the gift of those words that I decided to leave How We Became Human in retreat center's library, knowing that we would be carrying Joy Harjo's words with us in our various travels back to California, Connecticut, Ontario, Nebraska, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Oregon, Indiana, Georgia, New Hampshire, Virginia, and North Carolina, and hoping that some future visitor would discover the collection and have the opportunity to spend some time with Harjo's words.
When I got home, I found a message from a local friend, Kaye, in my email inbox, with the message that she had found a poem that struck her with its power and beauty, and wanted to share it with me. The poem in question was Joy Harjo's "Eagle Poem," so I very much felt that while I had left the physical book back on the shelves of Sabbath House, the poem had indeed accompanied me home.
Monday, November 8, 2010
Hints from Eloise's first cousin, Peg Bracken
I just read a great piece by the painter and memoirist Beth Castiglione that speaks openly of her starch fetish:
http://www.interrobangzine.com/essays/performance-piece-housewife/
which led me to think about the ways in which we work to save future generations from certain things -- i.e. starching and ironing handkerchiefs -- which may in and of themselves be what actually saves them; my own intimacies with the iron these days have been along the lines of rediscovering the joys of iron-on appliques -- something about the transformative properties of heat....and of rhinestone-studded skulls and crossbones have been bringing me a lot of pleasure, which makes me feel that I can now out myself for being completely in a Peg Bracken groove right now.
Much has been made of the recent publication of the 50th anniversary edition of her I Hate to Cook Cookbook, but my own personal favorite title from her oeuvre is The I Hate to Housekeep Book, subtitled "When and how to keep house without losing your mind." The edition I have is from 1962 and has the most fabulous Hilary Knight illustrations; every now and then, you see an image of a figure who could be Eloise's first cousin, or even perhaps her long-absent mother.
The book is chock-full of straightforward bits of housekeeping advice: did you know that toothpaste could be used to shine silver? That one way to hammer in a nail without banging your thumb is to position it between the teeth of a comb? That you can cut up old rubber gloves when you're in need of rubber bands? But she also speaks directly to issues that anticipate The Feminine Mystique, which Betty Friedan published the year after some crafty housewife first picked up my copy of Bracken's survival guide; as Bracken notes in a chapter entitled "How to be Happy When You're Miserable":
"...sometimes you stumble over a day of doing nothing -- or a series of them -- which you can ill afford. For if you continue to stand immobile among deeds undone and resoutions vain, you'll find that you can't even do the things you want to do, and presently you may lose your mind. Every girl owes it to herself to hang onto her mind as long as she can.
The reason for these occasional periods of standing and staring while the work piles up is usually malaise of the spirit. It can stem from any one of three or four thousand deep-seated causes which there isn't room to tackle here, much as I'd like to have a try.
Still, we might consider some random antidotes which random housewives have found helpful..."
Of Bracken's helpful hints, my favorite is the following:
How to Comfort Yourself When You Have Acted like a Jackass
Everyone does this occasionally, and you shouldn't feel too upset about it unless it happens quite often, such as three times a day, in which case you must simply get used to it. Remember, other people like you as well or better for it, because it makes them feel superior; so you've at least spread a little sunshine. And at the very least, you've served as a bad example.
http://www.interrobangzine.com/essays/performance-piece-housewife/
which led me to think about the ways in which we work to save future generations from certain things -- i.e. starching and ironing handkerchiefs -- which may in and of themselves be what actually saves them; my own intimacies with the iron these days have been along the lines of rediscovering the joys of iron-on appliques -- something about the transformative properties of heat....and of rhinestone-studded skulls and crossbones have been bringing me a lot of pleasure, which makes me feel that I can now out myself for being completely in a Peg Bracken groove right now.
The book is chock-full of straightforward bits of housekeeping advice: did you know that toothpaste could be used to shine silver? That one way to hammer in a nail without banging your thumb is to position it between the teeth of a comb? That you can cut up old rubber gloves when you're in need of rubber bands? But she also speaks directly to issues that anticipate The Feminine Mystique, which Betty Friedan published the year after some crafty housewife first picked up my copy of Bracken's survival guide; as Bracken notes in a chapter entitled "How to be Happy When You're Miserable":
"...sometimes you stumble over a day of doing nothing -- or a series of them -- which you can ill afford. For if you continue to stand immobile among deeds undone and resoutions vain, you'll find that you can't even do the things you want to do, and presently you may lose your mind. Every girl owes it to herself to hang onto her mind as long as she can.
The reason for these occasional periods of standing and staring while the work piles up is usually malaise of the spirit. It can stem from any one of three or four thousand deep-seated causes which there isn't room to tackle here, much as I'd like to have a try.
Still, we might consider some random antidotes which random housewives have found helpful..."
Of Bracken's helpful hints, my favorite is the following:
How to Comfort Yourself When You Have Acted like a Jackass
Everyone does this occasionally, and you shouldn't feel too upset about it unless it happens quite often, such as three times a day, in which case you must simply get used to it. Remember, other people like you as well or better for it, because it makes them feel superior; so you've at least spread a little sunshine. And at the very least, you've served as a bad example.
Saturday, October 23, 2010
Prayer flags and Walking Words
I went to Swarthmore's campus yesterday to catch the last day of the installation of Pato Hebert's work; I realized in the morning that the exhibit was closing, and was kicking myself for not making it down earlier in the month since I wanted to revisit an Arboretum installation that was scheduled to come down at the beginning of the month. At the end of Pato's official lecture as the Cooper Artist-in-Residence back in September, members of the audience were given Sharpies and those little flags that usually denote that some herbicide has been recently applied and is now sinking down to the water table.
On the red flags, folks were invited to respond to the prompt "I struggle when...." and on the yellow flags their their responses to the cue "I am at my best when...."; at moments like these, I am reminded of just how much I am asking of students when I do these kinds of in-class assignments since I myself usually like to present pre-polished statements to the world. As we walked over the library for the reception, we planted our little flags in a triangular bit of groomed lawn in front of the building; as I was walking up from the van stop, I was happy to see the small field covered with what looked like fluttering prayer flags - many more than we had first planted, which means that passers-by have been inspired to add their own thoughts.
Solipsist that I am, I went looking for my own words but didn't find them; rather than brood over whether they had been washed away in a recent rainstorm or mowed down by an inattentive spectator, I found myself caught up in the words that others had shared: "I am at my best when I am with my daughter"; "I struggle with finding an alternative to self-righteousness and self-hatred"; "I am my best every day because I know I am a child of God." It's amazing to me how the weight of one's own struggles feels so much lighter when one is aware of the burdens others are carrying; being attuned to others' struggles and taking full account of others' joys can have the effect of lightening one's own load.
My physical burdens actually multiplied when I entered McCabe to see Pato's photo exhibit and window installations; in the middle of the space which was hung with photos capturing images of Pato's breath on a wintry L.A. evening was a booksale conducted by Friends of the Library - trade paperbacks for $2.00, and mass market editions for a buck. Collections of writings by Howard Thurman and Martin Buber! A Moon guide to Pennsylvania! Benedetto Croce's Aesthetics! And a new (to me, anyway) work by Eduardo Galeano entitled Walking Words, with woodcuts by José Francisco Borges. Galeano intersperses his retellings of folk tales and urban legends with aphorisms, tabloid headlines, and random observations: in a short section entitled "Windows on Walls" he shares the following:
In Lima: We don't want to survive. We want to live.
In Havana: You can dance to anything.
In Rio de Janeiro: He who is afraid of living is never born.
On the red flags, folks were invited to respond to the prompt "I struggle when...." and on the yellow flags their their responses to the cue "I am at my best when...."; at moments like these, I am reminded of just how much I am asking of students when I do these kinds of in-class assignments since I myself usually like to present pre-polished statements to the world. As we walked over the library for the reception, we planted our little flags in a triangular bit of groomed lawn in front of the building; as I was walking up from the van stop, I was happy to see the small field covered with what looked like fluttering prayer flags - many more than we had first planted, which means that passers-by have been inspired to add their own thoughts.
Solipsist that I am, I went looking for my own words but didn't find them; rather than brood over whether they had been washed away in a recent rainstorm or mowed down by an inattentive spectator, I found myself caught up in the words that others had shared: "I am at my best when I am with my daughter"; "I struggle with finding an alternative to self-righteousness and self-hatred"; "I am my best every day because I know I am a child of God." It's amazing to me how the weight of one's own struggles feels so much lighter when one is aware of the burdens others are carrying; being attuned to others' struggles and taking full account of others' joys can have the effect of lightening one's own load.
My physical burdens actually multiplied when I entered McCabe to see Pato's photo exhibit and window installations; in the middle of the space which was hung with photos capturing images of Pato's breath on a wintry L.A. evening was a booksale conducted by Friends of the Library - trade paperbacks for $2.00, and mass market editions for a buck. Collections of writings by Howard Thurman and Martin Buber! A Moon guide to Pennsylvania! Benedetto Croce's Aesthetics! And a new (to me, anyway) work by Eduardo Galeano entitled Walking Words, with woodcuts by José Francisco Borges. Galeano intersperses his retellings of folk tales and urban legends with aphorisms, tabloid headlines, and random observations: in a short section entitled "Windows on Walls" he shares the following:
In Lima: We don't want to survive. We want to live.
In Havana: You can dance to anything.
In Rio de Janeiro: He who is afraid of living is never born.
Thursday, October 7, 2010
I think I can, I think I can....
I spent most of the day yesterday in jury duty (though neither I nor the guy with the 7 inch high blue Mohawk was ultimately called to serve) which, in addition to being a good education on the judicial process in this country, was an opportunity to read uninterrupted for hours at a time. I've been carrying Rebecca Solnit's Hope in the Dark around with me and find that each time I dip back into that collection I draw new insights and visions; what occupied most of my time, though, was a 114-page study commissioned by the Department of Education back in 2000 entitled Champions of Change: The impact of the arts on learning.
I had this in hand because I was preparing for a Parent-Teacher Organization meeting to which members of the local school board had been invited; there had been some talk that the district might cut back on "specials" -- that is, art, music, library, and gym -- in order to bolster science instruction...in order to boost PSSA test scores, which now drive curricular planning thanks to what one of the school board members defined as "the nightmare that is No Child Left Behind." Because of this rumor, and the fact that class sizes have been increasing, folks came to the meeting loaded for bear; what was disarming was the realization that the school board members were basically on the same page as the parents. In fact, what became clear was that the school board is struggling with the constrictions on their ability to do what they feel is best for the students, given the PSSA parameters that are becoming an end in and of itself, rather than the assessment tool that would help figure out how to increase support where it is most needed.
A laugh-out-loud moment for me came when the board president noted that the only group that consistently engages the school board members are band parents, who always make an immediate show of force whenever music programs are being threatened. As my friend Daphne pointed out, "sure, it's because they know how to march in formation, and can still do so if necessary."
In any case, one fascinating moment among many in Champions of Change was from a report co-authored by Shirley Brice Heath and Adelma Roach, writing as linguistic anthropologists; they note that in observing kids in community-based arts programs "They talk about 'what if?' 'what about...?' 'could we try this?' 'let's try...'....They pepper their sentences with 'could,' 'will,' 'can,' -- asserting possibility. They preface suggestions with subject-verb phrases that attribute responsibility to their own mental work: 'I wonder,' 'I came up with this crazy idea...' 'I see this going some other way.'
As Heath and Roach go on to write "Such talk can slip past the casual listener as nothing special. However, in arts organizations, the frequency of 'what if?' questions, modal verbs (such as could) and mental state verbs (such as believe, plan) as well as a complexity of hypothetical proposals amounts to lots of practice....This abundance and intensity of practice for these types of language uses is rarely available to them in any other setting."
So I'm thinking about involvement in the arts as one register where kids learn to articulate what has heretofore been unimaginable, and learn how to work in relation with one another so that when a collaborative effort is needed -- and collaborative efforts are always needed And if you know that you can in fact execute a perfectly spaced 90 degree turn by the flume ride at Kennywood Park with the entire percussion section while performing Fleetwood Mac's Tusk, organizing to lobby your state and federal legislators on the importance of arts-rich curricula in the public schools seems not so daunting. And done creatively, it could actually be some fun.
I had this in hand because I was preparing for a Parent-Teacher Organization meeting to which members of the local school board had been invited; there had been some talk that the district might cut back on "specials" -- that is, art, music, library, and gym -- in order to bolster science instruction...in order to boost PSSA test scores, which now drive curricular planning thanks to what one of the school board members defined as "the nightmare that is No Child Left Behind." Because of this rumor, and the fact that class sizes have been increasing, folks came to the meeting loaded for bear; what was disarming was the realization that the school board members were basically on the same page as the parents. In fact, what became clear was that the school board is struggling with the constrictions on their ability to do what they feel is best for the students, given the PSSA parameters that are becoming an end in and of itself, rather than the assessment tool that would help figure out how to increase support where it is most needed.
A laugh-out-loud moment for me came when the board president noted that the only group that consistently engages the school board members are band parents, who always make an immediate show of force whenever music programs are being threatened. As my friend Daphne pointed out, "sure, it's because they know how to march in formation, and can still do so if necessary."
In any case, one fascinating moment among many in Champions of Change was from a report co-authored by Shirley Brice Heath and Adelma Roach, writing as linguistic anthropologists; they note that in observing kids in community-based arts programs "They talk about 'what if?' 'what about...?' 'could we try this?' 'let's try...'....They pepper their sentences with 'could,' 'will,' 'can,' -- asserting possibility. They preface suggestions with subject-verb phrases that attribute responsibility to their own mental work: 'I wonder,' 'I came up with this crazy idea...' 'I see this going some other way.'
As Heath and Roach go on to write "Such talk can slip past the casual listener as nothing special. However, in arts organizations, the frequency of 'what if?' questions, modal verbs (such as could) and mental state verbs (such as believe, plan) as well as a complexity of hypothetical proposals amounts to lots of practice....This abundance and intensity of practice for these types of language uses is rarely available to them in any other setting."
So I'm thinking about involvement in the arts as one register where kids learn to articulate what has heretofore been unimaginable, and learn how to work in relation with one another so that when a collaborative effort is needed -- and collaborative efforts are always needed And if you know that you can in fact execute a perfectly spaced 90 degree turn by the flume ride at Kennywood Park with the entire percussion section while performing Fleetwood Mac's Tusk, organizing to lobby your state and federal legislators on the importance of arts-rich curricula in the public schools seems not so daunting. And done creatively, it could actually be some fun.
Thursday, September 23, 2010
I made the mistake of starting Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety very late last night: this is a book that I think I either should have read twenty years ago, or perhaps should read twenty years from now, or maybe I’m just blaming the book for not ending -- and perhaps exacerbating -- a bout of insomnia last night, and yes, I know that it’s strange to take issue with a book for not putting you to sleep. Or maybe it’s just that there is a particular time to be in right relation to a particular book, and so much depends on being able to find that sweet spot when you can fully commune with a writer’s words.
I should have held the course with Shirley Jackson’s posthumous collection Come Along With Me. It’s been a pleasure to read others’ responses to her work, catalyzed by the recent Modern Library edition of her work, though I’ve been finding that -- as with episodes of Phineas and Ferb -- when people try to recount the plot of a particular story or novel of hers, it doesn’t actually convey very much about the work. Which is, perhaps, as good a definition of a good short story as any that I can come up with while in the grip of the grippe (having tempted the gods who are jealous of human happiness by announcing not once, but twice yesterday that I was finally getting over it), or, rather, an insight into what a useful reflection on a work can convey – something about how a piece works, rather than the basic mechanics of the thing.
Having written that, though, Jackson writing on the basic mechanics of writing short stories is some of the most wonderful writing I know: “It is most agreeable to be a writer of fiction for several reasons – one of the most important, being, of course, that you can persuade people that it is really work if you look haggard enough – but perhaps the most useful thing about being a writer of fiction is that nothing is ever wasted; all experience is good for something; you tend to see everything as a potential structure of words” (“Experience and Fiction”).
Which all brings me to my embarrassing admission, which is that….I paid retail (but at an independent bookstore, thank you, Powells.com) for Helen Vendler’s Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries because this woman knows how to pay attention to structures of words with an insight and clarity that shows you why it matters, and why you should care. She so attunes you to the rhythms of language and the structures and mythologies in which words circulate that you come to realize that “Helen Vendler” is two trochees, the metrical pattern where the first beat is stressed, familiar to us from nursery rhymes (MA-ry HAD a LITtle LAMB). Wondering if this is why so many good fictional names are trochees (Perry Mason! Morgan Fairchild!), even though Helen Vender may be one of the few non-fictionalized names in Isabel Gillies’ Happens Every Day, which is on some level a contemporary variation on the lives-of-academics theme Stegner sounds in Crossing to Safety that I promise I will give a good go-round sometime in the next twenty years.
I should have held the course with Shirley Jackson’s posthumous collection Come Along With Me. It’s been a pleasure to read others’ responses to her work, catalyzed by the recent Modern Library edition of her work, though I’ve been finding that -- as with episodes of Phineas and Ferb -- when people try to recount the plot of a particular story or novel of hers, it doesn’t actually convey very much about the work. Which is, perhaps, as good a definition of a good short story as any that I can come up with while in the grip of the grippe (having tempted the gods who are jealous of human happiness by announcing not once, but twice yesterday that I was finally getting over it), or, rather, an insight into what a useful reflection on a work can convey – something about how a piece works, rather than the basic mechanics of the thing.
Having written that, though, Jackson writing on the basic mechanics of writing short stories is some of the most wonderful writing I know: “It is most agreeable to be a writer of fiction for several reasons – one of the most important, being, of course, that you can persuade people that it is really work if you look haggard enough – but perhaps the most useful thing about being a writer of fiction is that nothing is ever wasted; all experience is good for something; you tend to see everything as a potential structure of words” (“Experience and Fiction”).
Which all brings me to my embarrassing admission, which is that….I paid retail (but at an independent bookstore, thank you, Powells.com) for Helen Vendler’s Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries because this woman knows how to pay attention to structures of words with an insight and clarity that shows you why it matters, and why you should care. She so attunes you to the rhythms of language and the structures and mythologies in which words circulate that you come to realize that “Helen Vendler” is two trochees, the metrical pattern where the first beat is stressed, familiar to us from nursery rhymes (MA-ry HAD a LITtle LAMB). Wondering if this is why so many good fictional names are trochees (Perry Mason! Morgan Fairchild!), even though Helen Vender may be one of the few non-fictionalized names in Isabel Gillies’ Happens Every Day, which is on some level a contemporary variation on the lives-of-academics theme Stegner sounds in Crossing to Safety that I promise I will give a good go-round sometime in the next twenty years.
Saturday, September 11, 2010
"september song"
Lucille Clifton's "september song" from Mercy (Rochester: BOA Editions, 2004)
1 tuesday 9/11/01
thunder and lightning and our world
is another place no day
will ever be the same no blood
untouched
they know this storm in otherwheres
israel ireland palestine
but God has blessed America
we sing
and God has blessed America
to learn that no one is exempt
the world is one all fear
is one all life all death
all one
2 wednesday 9/12/01
this is not the time
i think
to note the terrorist
inside
who threw the brick
into the mosque
this is not the time
to note
the ones who cursed
Gods other name
the ones who threatened
they would fill the streets
with arab children's blood
and this is not the time
i think
to ask who is allowed to be
american American
all of us gathered under one flag
praying together safely
warmed by the single love
of the many tongued God
3 thursday 9/13/01
the firemen
ascend
like jacobs ladder
into the mouth of
history
4 friday 9/14/01
some of us know
we have never felt safe
all of us americans
weeping
as some of us have wept
before
is it treason to remember
what have we done
to deserve such villainy
nothing we reassure ourselves
nothing
5 saturday 9/15/01
i know a man who perished for his faith.
others called him infidel, chased him down
and beat him like a dog. after he died
the world was filled with miracles.
people forgot that he was a jew and loved him.
who can know what is intended? who can understand
the gods?
6 sunday morning 9/16/01
for bailey
the st. marys river flows
as if nothing has happened
i watch it with my coffee
afraid and sad as are we all
so many ones to hate and i
cursed with a long memory
cursed with a desire to understand
have never been good at hating
now this new granddaughter
born into a violent world
as if nothing has happened
and i am consumed with love
for all of it
the everydayness of bravery
of hate of fear of tragedy
of death and birth and hope
true as this river
and especially with love
bailey fredrica clifton goin
for you
7 monday sundown 9/17/01
Rosh Hashanah
i bear witness to no thing
more human than hate
i bear witness to no thing
more human than love
apples and honey
apples and honey
what is not lost
is paradise
1 tuesday 9/11/01
thunder and lightning and our world
is another place no day
will ever be the same no blood
untouched
they know this storm in otherwheres
israel ireland palestine
but God has blessed America
we sing
and God has blessed America
to learn that no one is exempt
the world is one all fear
is one all life all death
all one
2 wednesday 9/12/01
this is not the time
i think
to note the terrorist
inside
who threw the brick
into the mosque
this is not the time
to note
the ones who cursed
Gods other name
the ones who threatened
they would fill the streets
with arab children's blood
and this is not the time
i think
to ask who is allowed to be
american American
all of us gathered under one flag
praying together safely
warmed by the single love
of the many tongued God
3 thursday 9/13/01
the firemen
ascend
like jacobs ladder
into the mouth of
history
4 friday 9/14/01
some of us know
we have never felt safe
all of us americans
weeping
as some of us have wept
before
is it treason to remember
what have we done
to deserve such villainy
nothing we reassure ourselves
nothing
5 saturday 9/15/01
i know a man who perished for his faith.
others called him infidel, chased him down
and beat him like a dog. after he died
the world was filled with miracles.
people forgot that he was a jew and loved him.
who can know what is intended? who can understand
the gods?
6 sunday morning 9/16/01
for bailey
the st. marys river flows
as if nothing has happened
i watch it with my coffee
afraid and sad as are we all
so many ones to hate and i
cursed with a long memory
cursed with a desire to understand
have never been good at hating
now this new granddaughter
born into a violent world
as if nothing has happened
and i am consumed with love
for all of it
the everydayness of bravery
of hate of fear of tragedy
of death and birth and hope
true as this river
and especially with love
bailey fredrica clifton goin
for you
7 monday sundown 9/17/01
Rosh Hashanah
i bear witness to no thing
more human than hate
i bear witness to no thing
more human than love
apples and honey
apples and honey
what is not lost
is paradise
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
Marginalia, and a modest proposal
In “Marginalia,” (which is collected in Picnic, Lightning) Billy Collins writes:
Sometimes the notes are fe
rocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the border of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard or Conor Cruise O’Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.
…
Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls “Metaphor” next to a stanza of Eliot’s.
Another notes the presence of “Irony”
Fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.
…
And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written “Man vs. Nature”
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.
Leaving aside, for the moment, my friend Elaine’s conviction that A Modest Proposal was intended as a serious intervention in British public policy, I’m thinking about the fact that there are certain books that I’m shy about lending out because I’m embarrassed about the marginalia. The attempts to compose poems “after” (or right next to) Lucille Clifton. The fact that the only thing that the freshman reader of the paperback copy of The Woman Warrior had to say was “so true!” The damage to one’s street cred if the person who pages through Blindness and Insight sees the suspicious lack of commentary on the entire last section of “The Rhetoric of Temporality.”
If only all of one’s marginalia testified to one’s muscular intellect, stunning creativity, or prodigious breadth of reading -- “cf. Lessing’s footnote in Laocoön on location of Helen’s mole,” say, or nullo metro compositum est.
Perhaps now is the time to let go of such anxieties because it seems to me that books want to be read, and that most are happy to entertain even the most naïve reader because sometimes she’s the one who is going to be able pick up on a register of meaning, or to draw out an insight that will animate the work anew.
Sometimes the notes are fe
rocious,skirmishes against the author
raging along the border of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard or Conor Cruise O’Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.
…
Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls “Metaphor” next to a stanza of Eliot’s.
Another notes the presence of “Irony”
Fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.
…
And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written “Man vs. Nature”
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.
Leaving aside, for the moment, my friend Elaine’s conviction that A Modest Proposal was intended as a serious intervention in British public policy, I’m thinking about the fact that there are certain books that I’m shy about lending out because I’m embarrassed about the marginalia. The attempts to compose poems “after” (or right next to) Lucille Clifton. The fact that the only thing that the freshman reader of the paperback copy of The Woman Warrior had to say was “so true!” The damage to one’s street cred if the person who pages through Blindness and Insight sees the suspicious lack of commentary on the entire last section of “The Rhetoric of Temporality.”
If only all of one’s marginalia testified to one’s muscular intellect, stunning creativity, or prodigious breadth of reading -- “cf. Lessing’s footnote in Laocoön on location of Helen’s mole,” say, or nullo metro compositum est.
Perhaps now is the time to let go of such anxieties because it seems to me that books want to be read, and that most are happy to entertain even the most naïve reader because sometimes she’s the one who is going to be able pick up on a register of meaning, or to draw out an insight that will animate the work anew.
Monday, August 30, 2010
On Emily Dickinson and the Girl from Ipanema (also, cats)
Listening obsessively to a new (to me) band called Cotton Jones, which is something of note because over the last several months, most of my reading and writing has been happening while listening to Meklit Hadero’s On a Day Like This and Charlotte Gainsbourg’s Master’s Hand.
I’ve listened to these albums so often that they’ve taken up residence in the deep limbic structure of my brain, to the point that I find that I can sing fluently (albeit atonally) in languages in which I am merely “proficient” (French) and in languages that I know not at all (Amharic and Portuguese). How to explain this? Iain McGilchrist writes:
“Poetry engraves itself in the brain: it doesn’t just slip smoothly over the cortex and language normally does. It has all the graininess of life, as it rips into being from deep within the limbic system, the ancient seat of awareness and affective meaning. Sometimes this is most obvious in a foreign language, because there the smooth, familiar words recede, and the sheer awesomeness of what is meant comes refreshed by the new encounter. As a child, I was bewitched by the poem of Heine that my father would recite to me while shaving. Im Abendsonnenschien…I remember thinking then that the real w
ord for sunshine was Sonnenschein. So, too, something seemed missing when things disappeared: they only truly disappeared when they were verschwunden. This is odd because my father was a Scot and my mother English. It seems like a sort of latent knowledge.”
McGilchrist shares this reflection in the most recent issue of Poetry, the same one that has the most excellent essay by Lynda Barry, who gives a most fabulous interview that is on the Poetry Foundation’s website. She talks about how she used to lie about understanding Emily Dickinson then discovered that when she memorized Dickinson's work “the thing just unfolds….it’s like food coloring, when you just need a little drop.” She notes that Dickinson’s cadence works not only with “The Yellow Rose of Texas” but also with “Rhapsody in Blue” and “The Girl From Ipanema,” and begins to sing “I felt a cleaving in my mind” a la Gershwin, then a la Jobim, illustrating her point that poetry opens up in radically different ways in different contexts, or as you bring new experiences to bear.
McGilchrist writes that “Although I have favorite periods for music and painting, I do not for poetry. Poetry can occur anywhere there are words, even in daily life. After twenty years I still remember the response of a psychotic patient of mine when asked to distinguish between a river and a canal. Without hesitation he responded: ‘A River is Peace, a Canal is Torment,’ a line worthy of Blake. The forging of unusual links – metaphor – in which poetry resides depends on the right hemisphere of the brain, where the overall meaning of language, rather than mere syntax and semantics, is appreciated. It is here, too, in the right hemisphere, that experience is fresh, truly present, not pre-digested into re-presentation.”
Or as Cotton Jones sings of everyday miracles of transformation and regeneration:
There came yesterday a cat
I had no love for cats
I had no words for cats
But I love the cat
And now I’m a grandpa
I’ve listened to these albums so often that they’ve taken up residence in the deep limbic structure of my brain, to the point that I find that I can sing fluently (albeit atonally) in languages in which I am merely “proficient” (French) and in languages that I know not at all (Amharic and Portuguese). How to explain this? Iain McGilchrist writes:
“Poetry engraves itself in the brain: it doesn’t just slip smoothly over the cortex and language normally does. It has all the graininess of life, as it rips into being from deep within the limbic system, the ancient seat of awareness and affective meaning. Sometimes this is most obvious in a foreign language, because there the smooth, familiar words recede, and the sheer awesomeness of what is meant comes refreshed by the new encounter. As a child, I was bewitched by the poem of Heine that my father would recite to me while shaving. Im Abendsonnenschien…I remember thinking then that the real w
ord for sunshine was Sonnenschein. So, too, something seemed missing when things disappeared: they only truly disappeared when they were verschwunden. This is odd because my father was a Scot and my mother English. It seems like a sort of latent knowledge.”McGilchrist shares this reflection in the most recent issue of Poetry, the same one that has the most excellent essay by Lynda Barry, who gives a most fabulous interview that is on the Poetry Foundation’s website. She talks about how she used to lie about understanding Emily Dickinson then discovered that when she memorized Dickinson's work “the thing just unfolds….it’s like food coloring, when you just need a little drop.” She notes that Dickinson’s cadence works not only with “The Yellow Rose of Texas” but also with “Rhapsody in Blue” and “The Girl From Ipanema,” and begins to sing “I felt a cleaving in my mind” a la Gershwin, then a la Jobim, illustrating her point that poetry opens up in radically different ways in different contexts, or as you bring new experiences to bear.
McGilchrist writes that “Although I have favorite periods for music and painting, I do not for poetry. Poetry can occur anywhere there are words, even in daily life. After twenty years I still remember the response of a psychotic patient of mine when asked to distinguish between a river and a canal. Without hesitation he responded: ‘A River is Peace, a Canal is Torment,’ a line worthy of Blake. The forging of unusual links – metaphor – in which poetry resides depends on the right hemisphere of the brain, where the overall meaning of language, rather than mere syntax and semantics, is appreciated. It is here, too, in the right hemisphere, that experience is fresh, truly present, not pre-digested into re-presentation.”
Or as Cotton Jones sings of everyday miracles of transformation and regeneration:
There came yesterday a cat
I had no love for cats
I had no words for cats
But I love the cat
And now I’m a grandpa
Friday, August 27, 2010
You can't have it all (or, gather ye sneakers while ye may...)
On the last stretch of a multi-leg road trip I stopped in at a used book store housed in an actual barn on the road between Lancaster and home, despite the fact that I had made not one, but two trips to the used bookstore in town in the previous 72 hours and there were several bags in the trunk of the car that carried a bit of laundry and several pounds of books, some still waiting to be read.
There are times when I practice the speech I’d give to the folks from Child Protection Services when they ask me why household money went to volumes of poetry, comics anthologies, and cookbooks instead of to keeping the kids shod and fed. Truth be told, what I’ve spent in second hand books comes out, almost to the penny, to two pairs of new kids’ sneakers at the buy one, get one half off sale, which itself is reminding me of Liz Windover’s poetry cycle that revolved around memorable pairs of sneakers, so perhaps the trip to the Sketchers outlet was in fact seeding the ground for poetic revelations.
At the bookstore on Strasburg Pike, you set off the electric eye when you open the bottom half of the dutch door; as you try to figure out the layout of the place, a woman with kind eyes swings by to tell you “he’ll be out here in a minute,” and you begin to hope that you will find something that you actually want to take home with you since you’ve probably roused the proprietor from his early afternoon nap to make a special trip out to tend the shop. If you read mostly contemporary stuff, this may cause particular anxiety because most of the volumes on the dusty shelves have something to do with military history, or were published around the turn of the last century – the poetry section is very heavy on the names that have been assigned to the streets in the subdivision next to my folks’ development: Whittier, Longfellow, Tennyson.
Tennyson has been surfacing in unexpected ways: Patti Digh writes about finding her copy of “In Memoriam” which she read shortly after her father’s death and seeing her marginalia as a trace of her spirit and state of mind at the time. More prosaically, the poet is namechecked in an animated cartoon my son is obsessed with right now about a kid who can turn himself into mutant alien
animals with the aid of a wrist watch; he wore his Ben Ten(nyson) sneakers to shreds over the schoolyear.
Amidst the shelves of 19th century volumes were several collections by contemporary poets, conspicuously slender, tall, and dustjacketed, like volunteers from the Ardmore Junior League Thrift shop crashing the local Assembly of God jumble sale. Someone has offloaded their collections of Garrett Hongo, Li Young Lee, and Alison Hawthorne Deming and I almost picked up Deming’s Science and Other Poems because I like it so much, and was trying to think of to whom I could give it; then I saw Barbara Ras’ Bite Every Sorrow. The cover image is a painting by Robin Eschner entitled Sallie Always Wondered Whether She Was Adopted. Here’s the opening to the opening poem:
You Can’t Have It All
But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown hands
gloved with green. You can have the touch of a single eleven-year-old finger
on your cheek, waking you at one a.m. to say the hamster is back.
You can have the purr of the cat and the soulful look
of the black dog, the look that says If I could I would bite
every sorrow until it fled, and when it is August,
you can have it August and abundantly so. You can have love,
though often it will be mysterious, like the white foam
that bubbles up at the top of the bean pot over the red kidneys
until you realize foam’s twin is blood.
There are times when I practice the speech I’d give to the folks from Child Protection Services when they ask me why household money went to volumes of poetry, comics anthologies, and cookbooks instead of to keeping the kids shod and fed. Truth be told, what I’ve spent in second hand books comes out, almost to the penny, to two pairs of new kids’ sneakers at the buy one, get one half off sale, which itself is reminding me of Liz Windover’s poetry cycle that revolved around memorable pairs of sneakers, so perhaps the trip to the Sketchers outlet was in fact seeding the ground for poetic revelations.
At the bookstore on Strasburg Pike, you set off the electric eye when you open the bottom half of the dutch door; as you try to figure out the layout of the place, a woman with kind eyes swings by to tell you “he’ll be out here in a minute,” and you begin to hope that you will find something that you actually want to take home with you since you’ve probably roused the proprietor from his early afternoon nap to make a special trip out to tend the shop. If you read mostly contemporary stuff, this may cause particular anxiety because most of the volumes on the dusty shelves have something to do with military history, or were published around the turn of the last century – the poetry section is very heavy on the names that have been assigned to the streets in the subdivision next to my folks’ development: Whittier, Longfellow, Tennyson.
Tennyson has been surfacing in unexpected ways: Patti Digh writes about finding her copy of “In Memoriam” which she read shortly after her father’s death and seeing her marginalia as a trace of her spirit and state of mind at the time. More prosaically, the poet is namechecked in an animated cartoon my son is obsessed with right now about a kid who can turn himself into mutant alien
animals with the aid of a wrist watch; he wore his Ben Ten(nyson) sneakers to shreds over the schoolyear.Amidst the shelves of 19th century volumes were several collections by contemporary poets, conspicuously slender, tall, and dustjacketed, like volunteers from the Ardmore Junior League Thrift shop crashing the local Assembly of God jumble sale. Someone has offloaded their collections of Garrett Hongo, Li Young Lee, and Alison Hawthorne Deming and I almost picked up Deming’s Science and Other Poems because I like it so much, and was trying to think of to whom I could give it; then I saw Barbara Ras’ Bite Every Sorrow. The cover image is a painting by Robin Eschner entitled Sallie Always Wondered Whether She Was Adopted. Here’s the opening to the opening poem:
You Can’t Have It All
But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown hands
gloved with green. You can have the touch of a single eleven-year-old finger
on your cheek, waking you at one a.m. to say the hamster is back.
You can have the purr of the cat and the soulful look
of the black dog, the look that says If I could I would bite
every sorrow until it fled, and when it is August,
you can have it August and abundantly so. You can have love,
though often it will be mysterious, like the white foam
that bubbles up at the top of the bean pot over the red kidneys
until you realize foam’s twin is blood.
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
This is dedicated to the one I.....
In a review of the new Library of America edition of Shirley Jackson’s work in Slate, Laura Shapiro duly notes that the series includes Harriet Beecher Stowe, Willa Cather, Zora Neale Hurston, Edith Wharton, and Eudora Welty, but then goes on to ask: “James Thurber and no Dorothy Parker? Alexander Hamilton and no Elizabeth Cady Stanton? Manny Ferber on film and no M.F.K. Fisher on food? I know, I know, it’s all women’s fault, too many kitchen tables and broken engagements, not enough whales and wars – which is why it is such a pleasure to welcome Shirley Jackson’s work into the ranks of chunky, black-covered books with pages as thin as strudel dough….Jackson took that kitchen table and ran with it.”
I’m wondering if high school juniors are still reading “The Lottery” in their language arts class and if that is still blowing their minds with its portrait of the lethal undertow of the currents of tradition and social conformity in a picture-perfect small town. Knowing her for that, and for The Haunting of Hill House I was surprised to discover Jackson’s Life Among the Savages which shares stories of raising four children in a rambling pile of a house in a Vermont town -- unlike the haunted houses of her stories, this one seems to share its secrets gladly,
cuing its inhabitants on where to hang the wash in wintertime and such. Life Among the Savages includes the most perfect story “The Night We All Had the Grippe” which speaks of that fateful night by depicting the constant circulation of sick, solace-seeking family members between different beds with blankets, pillows, glasses of juice, jiggers of brandy, cigarettes, and the family dog in tow, presented as an exercise in logic.
Our household paperback edition of Life Among the Savages fell apart from repeated rereadings, so I’m constantly on the lookout for other copies at secondhand book stores, for myself and for others contemplating or experiencing parenthood, since it strikes me as sharing what really should be contained between the pages of all those tomes with titles like What to Expect When You’re Expecting. I found “The Night We All Had the Grippe” in the posthumous collection Come Along With Me, which was edited by Jackson’s husband and which appeared three years after her death from cancer. At the end of his introduction, he thanks “my present wife…for help in assembling, selecting, and editing the contents of the book,” which struck me as a bit…off, in a very Shirley Jackson kind of way.
This kind of contemplation/speculation about the baroque dynamics of authors’ personal lives is the kind of thing that the folks associated with the school of new criticism tried to wring out of literary analysis; here, one might turn to Jackson’s essay on “Experience and Fiction” where she notes that she wishes to quarrel with a statement made by a young writer that a particular experience “cannot be improved upon because that is the way it really happened. The only way to turn something that really happened into something that really happens on paper is to attack it in the beginning the way a
puppy attacks and old shoe. Shake it, snarl at it, sneak up on it from various angles.” A strict formalist would say that to dwell on the life of an author would be to create a frame for a work that takes your attention away from the actual work on the page.
I’m also thinking of the desire to know more about an author’s life as part of a drive to think about the interrelations between stories, that to understand something about another’s experiences – the bad batch of strudel dough, the bedtime ritual, the broken engagements – that may open one’s imagination rather than shut it down, the way that I am forever intrigued by the life evoked in M.F.K. Fisher’s dedication to her book With Bold Knife & Fork: “For my grandmother, born Mary Frances Oliver, July 14, 1838, Dungannon, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland; died Mrs. Bernard David Hobrook, April 15, 1920, Whittier, California, U.S.A”
I’m wondering if high school juniors are still reading “The Lottery” in their language arts class and if that is still blowing their minds with its portrait of the lethal undertow of the currents of tradition and social conformity in a picture-perfect small town. Knowing her for that, and for The Haunting of Hill House I was surprised to discover Jackson’s Life Among the Savages which shares stories of raising four children in a rambling pile of a house in a Vermont town -- unlike the haunted houses of her stories, this one seems to share its secrets gladly,
cuing its inhabitants on where to hang the wash in wintertime and such. Life Among the Savages includes the most perfect story “The Night We All Had the Grippe” which speaks of that fateful night by depicting the constant circulation of sick, solace-seeking family members between different beds with blankets, pillows, glasses of juice, jiggers of brandy, cigarettes, and the family dog in tow, presented as an exercise in logic.Our household paperback edition of Life Among the Savages fell apart from repeated rereadings, so I’m constantly on the lookout for other copies at secondhand book stores, for myself and for others contemplating or experiencing parenthood, since it strikes me as sharing what really should be contained between the pages of all those tomes with titles like What to Expect When You’re Expecting. I found “The Night We All Had the Grippe” in the posthumous collection Come Along With Me, which was edited by Jackson’s husband and which appeared three years after her death from cancer. At the end of his introduction, he thanks “my present wife…for help in assembling, selecting, and editing the contents of the book,” which struck me as a bit…off, in a very Shirley Jackson kind of way.
This kind of contemplation/speculation about the baroque dynamics of authors’ personal lives is the kind of thing that the folks associated with the school of new criticism tried to wring out of literary analysis; here, one might turn to Jackson’s essay on “Experience and Fiction” where she notes that she wishes to quarrel with a statement made by a young writer that a particular experience “cannot be improved upon because that is the way it really happened. The only way to turn something that really happened into something that really happens on paper is to attack it in the beginning the way a
puppy attacks and old shoe. Shake it, snarl at it, sneak up on it from various angles.” A strict formalist would say that to dwell on the life of an author would be to create a frame for a work that takes your attention away from the actual work on the page.I’m also thinking of the desire to know more about an author’s life as part of a drive to think about the interrelations between stories, that to understand something about another’s experiences – the bad batch of strudel dough, the bedtime ritual, the broken engagements – that may open one’s imagination rather than shut it down, the way that I am forever intrigued by the life evoked in M.F.K. Fisher’s dedication to her book With Bold Knife & Fork: “For my grandmother, born Mary Frances Oliver, July 14, 1838, Dungannon, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland; died Mrs. Bernard David Hobrook, April 15, 1920, Whittier, California, U.S.A”
Monday, August 9, 2010
Joy Harjo and the work of transformation
So Joy Harjo has extended an invitation to readers of her blog (http://joyharjo.blogspot.com/2010/08/your-chance.html) to ask her readers if there is anything we would like her to address in her upcoming memoir, which is about “moments of transformation.”
I am very, very excited by the news that she is working on a memoir, and reminded of the fact that what I love about her poems like “The Power of Never” from her collection A Map to the Next World is that they offer the reader meditations on the power of language, reflections on processes of transformation , and a working through of the complicated relations
hip between the words we speak and the changes we enact.
The insight that many of Joy Harjo’s poems about the difficult, sometimes painful, and often beautiful work of transformation was brought home to me by a mathematician, Siggy Moore. In addition to being an astute mathematician, Siggy had built a reputation on campus as a gifted dancer, and in a Contemporary Women Writers class, as part of a group presentation on Joy Harjo’s work, Siggy invited all of us in class to stand in a circle and to do a kinesthetic exercise in which we were to act out our interpretation of central images in Joy Harjo’s work.
The group had come up with a list of images – crows, trees, perfume, snakes, flowers – that recur in Harjo’s poetry, and Siggy told us that he was going to choose one of the images, act it out and have the person standing next to him enact her own interpretation of what she had seen, and so on around the circle. As the interpretations were moving from body to body, we were supposed to try to mark the points at which, in our eyes, the image changed.
I never thought that I would be in a position in which I would be standing in front on my own classroom following a student’s directives that would have me take on the role of a non-migratory bird, which the person next to me saw as a tree -- or at least that’s what I think was what she saw. Suffice it to say that for me, the exercise became a profound enactment and reflection of the ways in which individual interpretations and actions can transform our communal vision of this crazy and beautiful world.
I am very, very excited by the news that she is working on a memoir, and reminded of the fact that what I love about her poems like “The Power of Never” from her collection A Map to the Next World is that they offer the reader meditations on the power of language, reflections on processes of transformation , and a working through of the complicated relations
hip between the words we speak and the changes we enact.The insight that many of Joy Harjo’s poems about the difficult, sometimes painful, and often beautiful work of transformation was brought home to me by a mathematician, Siggy Moore. In addition to being an astute mathematician, Siggy had built a reputation on campus as a gifted dancer, and in a Contemporary Women Writers class, as part of a group presentation on Joy Harjo’s work, Siggy invited all of us in class to stand in a circle and to do a kinesthetic exercise in which we were to act out our interpretation of central images in Joy Harjo’s work.
The group had come up with a list of images – crows, trees, perfume, snakes, flowers – that recur in Harjo’s poetry, and Siggy told us that he was going to choose one of the images, act it out and have the person standing next to him enact her own interpretation of what she had seen, and so on around the circle. As the interpretations were moving from body to body, we were supposed to try to mark the points at which, in our eyes, the image changed.
I never thought that I would be in a position in which I would be standing in front on my own classroom following a student’s directives that would have me take on the role of a non-migratory bird, which the person next to me saw as a tree -- or at least that’s what I think was what she saw. Suffice it to say that for me, the exercise became a profound enactment and reflection of the ways in which individual interpretations and actions can transform our communal vision of this crazy and beautiful world.
Friday, August 6, 2010
"Life! Get it while it's hot!"
A friend had sent me the latest issue of Poetry, which has a short essay by Lynda Barry entitled “Poetry is a Dumb-Ass Spider” in which her musings on the work of a spider that has spun a web outside of her 14th floor hotel room lead to thoughts about the interrelation between the execution of political prisoners in China and the commercial display of bodies in Las Vegas. This drives her to drink, and as she pops open the $9.00 beer from the mini-bar “a fragment of an A.E. Housman poem memorized two years ago presents itself as vividly as if someone were shouting it at me.” She gives us the poem:
When I watch the living meet,
And the moving pageant file
Warm and breathing through the street
Where I lodge a little while,
If the heats of hate and lust
In the house of flesh are strong
Let me mind the house of dust
Where my sojourn shall be long.
And she notes that “[o]nly now it means the exact opposite of what I thought it meant. It’s not about forbearance and taking the long view in life at all. It’s saying, Life! Life! Get it while it’s hot!”
I’m thinking about this as a I prepare to go to a memorial service at the Society for Ethical Culture in Brooklyn for Joannie Chang who, in her life, was a labor lawyer who devoted a lot of time calling out corporations on their crappy employment policies; she also spent a lot of time training for epic bike rides in Hawaii and Alaska to raise money for AIDS service organizations, reupholstering and refinishing furniture, singing karaoke, and baking cupcakes.
For the last several years, Joannie and her partner Luna were working actively to start a family and she birthed twin girls just two months ago, managing to carry the girls until their 32nd week -- a medical miracle in the minds of the doctors who discovered that Joannie's constantly upset stomach was not just indigestion but stomach cancer. After Joannie brought the babies into the world, she started a very aggressive course of treatment but passed away last weekend.
As I’ve been reading all the stories people have been sharing about Joannie’s vitality, strength, tenacity, good humor, and vision, I’ve been thinking of all the ways in which people continue to inspire and move us even after they’ve moved on. In the memories that we carry, in the words that circulate in lette
rs, poems, and books, in the spirits of their children, in the reverberations of their actions, in the stories that their lives generate. Thinking that one of the ways in which we do justice to the lives of those whom we love is to continue to do our own work in a manner that honors their spirits.When I’ve needed to lift my own spirits in these last few months, I’ve been turning to Alex Pearson’s interpretation of Sarpedon’s articulation of the hero’s code to Glaukos at the end of Book 12 of the Iliad:
“Friend, if we could live forever, unaging, you and I would simply walk away from this fight. But now that the angels of death and destruction swarm around us on the field of battle, let’s go get our asses kicked, or kick some ass ourselves.”
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
Mahjong in the afterlife, and pot roast today
I started rereading Kevin Brockmeier’s A History of the Dead last night, focusing on the odd numbered chapters, the ones offer a glimpse of the lives of those who have passed on, but who are still tethered by the memories of the living: these people are starting new businesses, renewing affairs, reading books they never got around to in their earthly lives, and tucking into ham and egg sandwiches in a city that has its own monuments, jewelry vendors, and a newspaper run off of a mimeograph machine by a guy who used to teach journalism at Columbia.
After a mysterious “great leaving” catalyzed by a plague that has swept over the earth, everyone left in the city is lodged in the memory of a young woman who is isolated in Antarctica, as part of a research expedition funded by Coca-Cola. So the city houses her parents and grandmother, several Coke executives, her best friend from third grade and her first lover as well as a guy to
whom she once gave a pack of matches, an aggressive panhandler who used to be stationed outside her office, and a quartet of elderly Korean women who played mahjong in her favorite park.
One quibble with a scene set in a diner: we are told that a character can hear the tiles clicking from the booth where these women are playing….but who plays mahjong in a booth? You need to be at a square table so that your neighbor doesn’t see your tiles! Should pass this information along to Penelope, the mother of Brockmeier’s editor posthaste.
The book raises the question of what memories make up our lives, what encounters leave an impression that we carry for days, weeks, or months, what the web of the world would look like if we were the connecting thread. One of my favorite characters is one of the Coke executives who is, on the one hand, a complete asshole who is spending much of his time in this station of the beyond trying to figure out how to erase all signs of the corporation’s culpability in the spread of the deadly virus. On the other hand, Brockmeier gives you a sense of the guy’s full humanity – perhaps most acutely at a moment at whic
h the character is cursing out the young woman left on earth since she never knew his wife, his girlfriend, or his mother, leaving him without his family in this other realm; thus a reader is left empathizing with his lyin’, cheatin’ self.
Regarding the moments that make up the days of our lives (cue the soap opera announcer’s voice here): I have been dipping back into Julie Doucet’s 365 Days, a sketchbook/journal published by Drawn and Quarterly in which she documents those experiences that usually seem to effervesce into the atmosphere: the trouble she has converting a computer file for a grant proposal, the day’s horoscope reading, making the perfect pot roast for a dinner with friends.
After a mysterious “great leaving” catalyzed by a plague that has swept over the earth, everyone left in the city is lodged in the memory of a young woman who is isolated in Antarctica, as part of a research expedition funded by Coca-Cola. So the city houses her parents and grandmother, several Coke executives, her best friend from third grade and her first lover as well as a guy to
whom she once gave a pack of matches, an aggressive panhandler who used to be stationed outside her office, and a quartet of elderly Korean women who played mahjong in her favorite park.One quibble with a scene set in a diner: we are told that a character can hear the tiles clicking from the booth where these women are playing….but who plays mahjong in a booth? You need to be at a square table so that your neighbor doesn’t see your tiles! Should pass this information along to Penelope, the mother of Brockmeier’s editor posthaste.
The book raises the question of what memories make up our lives, what encounters leave an impression that we carry for days, weeks, or months, what the web of the world would look like if we were the connecting thread. One of my favorite characters is one of the Coke executives who is, on the one hand, a complete asshole who is spending much of his time in this station of the beyond trying to figure out how to erase all signs of the corporation’s culpability in the spread of the deadly virus. On the other hand, Brockmeier gives you a sense of the guy’s full humanity – perhaps most acutely at a moment at whic
h the character is cursing out the young woman left on earth since she never knew his wife, his girlfriend, or his mother, leaving him without his family in this other realm; thus a reader is left empathizing with his lyin’, cheatin’ self.Regarding the moments that make up the days of our lives (cue the soap opera announcer’s voice here): I have been dipping back into Julie Doucet’s 365 Days, a sketchbook/journal published by Drawn and Quarterly in which she documents those experiences that usually seem to effervesce into the atmosphere: the trouble she has converting a computer file for a grant proposal, the day’s horoscope reading, making the perfect pot roast for a dinner with friends.
Monday, August 2, 2010
Maira Kalman, and a pop quiz
I have in front of me two books by Maira Kalman: one, Smartypants (Pete in School) which is a children’s book that involves a dog who eats an encyclopedia and momentarily earns most favored canine status in the narrator’s grammar school; the other, Various Illuminations (of a crazy world) is the catalog for a retrospective of Kalman’s work that was at the Institute for Contemporary Art in Philly earlier this year; it is currently at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, and will be moving on to the Skirball Cultural Center in LA (where I’m wondering if someone has done a Skirball Skeeball installation; thinking now of an exhibition of major cultural institutions reimagined as arcade games – the Guggenheim in NYC could be a great gumball dispenser) and then to The Jewish Museum in New York.
The retrospective includes a host of Kalman’s paintings, primarily gouache on paper, as well as a number of installations of objects -- such as some incredibly well-preserved onion rings -- set out in vitrines, on ironing boards, and in a pie chest. I think I first saw her artwork in the book Stay Up Late, in which she provided illustrations for lyrics to the David Byrne song;
the characters who populate her books and paintings remind me a bit of the long-faced figures in Modigliani portraits, if those Modigliani models would ever be allowed to let their hair down and maybe get a hot dog from one of those street-corner vendors who fish the wieners out of water that has been on a high simmer since the spring of 1973.
I like Kalman’s focus on everyday objects – a Snickers bar, a hole punch, a rubber band -- as well as her eye for the extraordinary in the day to day – the sight of a disheveled sofa upholstered in a cabbage rose print on a city sidewalk, an elaborate black lace bow in a woman’s hair, someone’s carefully preserved collection of “mosses of Long Island.”
She’s also really good at creating visions which take the everyday stuff of everyday life and replacing it in a world that is familiar but just slightly more fantastical than the ones we have gotten used to. In Smartypants, the food in the cafeteria line becomes a boxed set of pain
ts; Pete the dog devours a box of crayons, the math teacher’s pants, and a 34, 591 pound block of cheese; people’s hairdos communicate their ideas and anxieties, which for the narrator include the fear of being “stupid in front of the whole class” and pop quizzes – one of which concludes the book itself (a heads up for the wary: two of the question involve stating your name, and making a mistake will actually help you complete the quiz).
Pop quiz for today:
1. Who is the artist discussed in this entry?
2. Who is the person responsible for taking the author of this blog entry to the Maira Kalman exhibit at the ICA (hints: she is a former Maple Queen of Somerset County, and her superpower is the ability to instantaneously fall asleep while riding any form of public or private transportation)?
3. What is it about eggbeaters?
4. Name the illustrator of a recent edition of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style (hint: the answer is the same as #1).
5. What do you want to eat for dinner?
The retrospective includes a host of Kalman’s paintings, primarily gouache on paper, as well as a number of installations of objects -- such as some incredibly well-preserved onion rings -- set out in vitrines, on ironing boards, and in a pie chest. I think I first saw her artwork in the book Stay Up Late, in which she provided illustrations for lyrics to the David Byrne song;
the characters who populate her books and paintings remind me a bit of the long-faced figures in Modigliani portraits, if those Modigliani models would ever be allowed to let their hair down and maybe get a hot dog from one of those street-corner vendors who fish the wieners out of water that has been on a high simmer since the spring of 1973.I like Kalman’s focus on everyday objects – a Snickers bar, a hole punch, a rubber band -- as well as her eye for the extraordinary in the day to day – the sight of a disheveled sofa upholstered in a cabbage rose print on a city sidewalk, an elaborate black lace bow in a woman’s hair, someone’s carefully preserved collection of “mosses of Long Island.”
She’s also really good at creating visions which take the everyday stuff of everyday life and replacing it in a world that is familiar but just slightly more fantastical than the ones we have gotten used to. In Smartypants, the food in the cafeteria line becomes a boxed set of pain
ts; Pete the dog devours a box of crayons, the math teacher’s pants, and a 34, 591 pound block of cheese; people’s hairdos communicate their ideas and anxieties, which for the narrator include the fear of being “stupid in front of the whole class” and pop quizzes – one of which concludes the book itself (a heads up for the wary: two of the question involve stating your name, and making a mistake will actually help you complete the quiz).Pop quiz for today:
1. Who is the artist discussed in this entry?
2. Who is the person responsible for taking the author of this blog entry to the Maira Kalman exhibit at the ICA (hints: she is a former Maple Queen of Somerset County, and her superpower is the ability to instantaneously fall asleep while riding any form of public or private transportation)?
3. What is it about eggbeaters?
4. Name the illustrator of a recent edition of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style (hint: the answer is the same as #1).
5. What do you want to eat for dinner?
Friday, July 30, 2010
A compendium of treasures from the Junior League Thrift Shop
My thrift store of choice, the Pennywise, closes down over the summer since folks are down the shore, up in Maine, out in Colorado or Montana or off to Honduras or Fire Island. My backup thrift store is the Junior League Thrift Shop which recently yielded an oboe cleaning kit (which includes an oboe swath, a cleaning brush/duster, cork grease, a polish cloth, a reed guard, and a thumb cushion all for $3.00), a brand new pair of Saucony running shoes, size 6 ($8.00), two collections of easy pieces for beginning piano players and several books: Julie Powell’s Julie & Julia (subtitled 365 days, 524 recipes, 1 tiny apartment kitchen, and now a major movie starring Meryl Streep and Amy Adams!), A Bear Called Paddington by Michael Bond and illustrated by Peggy Fortnum whose ink drawings bristle with energy, Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety, and Kevin Brockmeier’s The Brief History of the Dead.
The thing about the Junior League Thrift Shop is that while prices run a bit high for clothing – a blouse or skirt is usually $8.00, while at Pennywise they usually are about half that – the socioeconomic milieu of donors is such that there is a rack dedicated to Lily Pulitzer clothes, the kids’ selection usually has beautifully tailored dresses and blue blazers in all sizes which is great for those occasions which demand formal presentation of one’s children (or for a Halloween costume of Clark Kent midway in his transformation into Superman) and you can find an huge selection of hardback novels that have recently been at the top of the New York Times best-sellers list, or which were personally inscribed gifts to people connected to the publishing industry, as was the case in The Brief History of the Dead (“To Penelope, with thanks for raising my wonderful editor”).
The Brief History of the Dead opens in a city populated by those who have recently passed over, where folks seem to stay while they’re still part of the living memory of those who are still on earth; while there are a set number of ways in which people can meet their death, every individual’s experience of crossing into this realm is unique: “Lev Paley said that he had watched his atoms break apart like marbles, roll across the universe, then gather themselves together again out of nothing at all. Hanbing Li said that he woke inside the body of an aphid and lived an entire life in the fles
h of a single peach. Graciella Cavazos would say only that she began to snow – four words – and smile bashfully whenever anyone pressed her for details.”
The conceit of the book, as far as I can tell being a couple of pages into chapter two which is set in an isolated research station in the Antarctic (though I guess when you’re talking about polar research stations the “isolated” is kind of a given), appears to be that a virulent virus is rapidly emptying out the earth’s population, and all those in the city of the living-dead are disappearing more quickly than the newcomers come in – my guess is that the remaining inhabitants of the city are all folks who are tied in some way, shape, or form to the woman at the station whose two co-workers haven’t returned from an expedition to find help after their communication system breaks down. Thus far, the writing is so pleasing that the conceit doesn’t become the driving force of the book, like those buildings under construction or renovation where all you see is the scaffolding.
Otherwise have been spending time with Daniel Raeburn’s monograph on Chris Wa
re. I’m liking the fact that Raeburn is conveying Ware’s aesthetic not only through the images of selected works (amazing Joseph Cornell-like constructions, contraptions like a vending machine that spits out a small hand-made comic book when the purchaser inserts a house key, a wedding invitation that can be converted into a rocket if the recipient follows the printed directions) as well as through the tone of Raeburn’s own writing; my favorite line is one where he solemnly announces that given the critical and popular success of Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth, “Ware has escaped the comics ghetto. He recently purchased health insurance for himself and his wife, Marnie, as well as a three-bedroom dwelling and a used Honda Civic.”
The thing about the Junior League Thrift Shop is that while prices run a bit high for clothing – a blouse or skirt is usually $8.00, while at Pennywise they usually are about half that – the socioeconomic milieu of donors is such that there is a rack dedicated to Lily Pulitzer clothes, the kids’ selection usually has beautifully tailored dresses and blue blazers in all sizes which is great for those occasions which demand formal presentation of one’s children (or for a Halloween costume of Clark Kent midway in his transformation into Superman) and you can find an huge selection of hardback novels that have recently been at the top of the New York Times best-sellers list, or which were personally inscribed gifts to people connected to the publishing industry, as was the case in The Brief History of the Dead (“To Penelope, with thanks for raising my wonderful editor”).
The Brief History of the Dead opens in a city populated by those who have recently passed over, where folks seem to stay while they’re still part of the living memory of those who are still on earth; while there are a set number of ways in which people can meet their death, every individual’s experience of crossing into this realm is unique: “Lev Paley said that he had watched his atoms break apart like marbles, roll across the universe, then gather themselves together again out of nothing at all. Hanbing Li said that he woke inside the body of an aphid and lived an entire life in the fles
h of a single peach. Graciella Cavazos would say only that she began to snow – four words – and smile bashfully whenever anyone pressed her for details.”The conceit of the book, as far as I can tell being a couple of pages into chapter two which is set in an isolated research station in the Antarctic (though I guess when you’re talking about polar research stations the “isolated” is kind of a given), appears to be that a virulent virus is rapidly emptying out the earth’s population, and all those in the city of the living-dead are disappearing more quickly than the newcomers come in – my guess is that the remaining inhabitants of the city are all folks who are tied in some way, shape, or form to the woman at the station whose two co-workers haven’t returned from an expedition to find help after their communication system breaks down. Thus far, the writing is so pleasing that the conceit doesn’t become the driving force of the book, like those buildings under construction or renovation where all you see is the scaffolding.
Otherwise have been spending time with Daniel Raeburn’s monograph on Chris Wa
re. I’m liking the fact that Raeburn is conveying Ware’s aesthetic not only through the images of selected works (amazing Joseph Cornell-like constructions, contraptions like a vending machine that spits out a small hand-made comic book when the purchaser inserts a house key, a wedding invitation that can be converted into a rocket if the recipient follows the printed directions) as well as through the tone of Raeburn’s own writing; my favorite line is one where he solemnly announces that given the critical and popular success of Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth, “Ware has escaped the comics ghetto. He recently purchased health insurance for himself and his wife, Marnie, as well as a three-bedroom dwelling and a used Honda Civic.”
Thursday, July 29, 2010
Looking for Louise Erdrich
Just finished Louise Erdrich’s Shadow Tag: early on in the novel, on
e character is described as “an undisciplined reader” who keeps “a mess of half-read books beside her bed, as well as on the coffee tables and in the bathrooms” who is married to someone whose “reverence for books had started with the cast-off marvels his mother had brought home. The smell of mildewed pages. The broken spine, torn, showing the cardboard. Nothing mattered but that the book be rescued like a human thing….She was a raucous, impertinent, even disrespectful reader. [He] wouldn’t dream of using a Kleenex for a bookmark. He looked at splayed books with anxiety, and always fetched a strip of paper to close gently within the pages. He seemed to think he needed a bookmark at the ready when he shut his books, the way a medic has a bandage handy to stanch a wound once he lifts away direct pressure.”
I (over)identify with both of these characters, as someone who literally can’t leave home without at least three books, maybe seven or more if I’m going away for the whole weekend, just in case I find myself with a stretch of time and realize that what I really need is some poetry/a good novel/something that I’ve already read that I can ease into reading again/a collection of essays/some scary short stories/a specific series of issues of a comic book serial from the 1990s/a guide to foraging
for herbs in suburban Philadelphia, etc.
Books are a kind of anting-anting for me, yet I’ve left some precious ones on trains, in hotel rooms, on dining hall floors. I have been known to skip to the end of long novels, so I can brace myself for characters’ fates or figure out whether I should make the investment of continuing to live in the universe the writer is crafting. I do not have good boundaries when it comes to other people’s reading materials: when a much-coveted copy of The Passage entered into the household earlier in the summer, I not only would wait until the alpha reader fell asleep to steal it for my own reading pleasure, but also would let slip key plot points that were just too good to keep to myself (“there’s a newspaper report that quotes a person who is trying to reach family members in Johnstown! And it turns out that Philadelphia and its western suburbs are somehow immune from the early waves of sickness, and it is actually true that Philly girls will in fact be the ones who will survive the coming apocalypse!”)
It’s been a summer of trying to catch up with Erdrich’s prodigious output – I finally made some progress through The Master Butchers Singing Club, even while feeling slightly put out by the fact that at some point she not only wrote The Plague of Doves but also published it to great critical acclaim and I am just now realizing that the book exists. I had picked up a copy of Four Souls on the shelves of DogStar Books in Lancaster several weeks ago when I was trying to find a copy of Jane Smiley’s Moo since my own is AWOL. I had remembered taking Four Souls out from the Ludington Library last summer (which was a false memory – I actually had Four Souls on the shelves at home), and wanted to reread her description of the construction of a grand mansion that conjures the lives and landscapes that are ravaged to build the house – the ancient trees that are felled, the brownstone carved from an island that the Ojibwe hold sacred, the lead paint that poisons the family, the bricks that take their hue from blood from a slaughterhouse, the animals driven to death over the course of construction, the laborers who lose their lives in the work of the accumulation of one man’s wealth.
Reading this made me want to reread the moment in The Painted Drum in which an estates appraiser who has taken the drum from the attic of a family descended from a corrupt trader braces herself as the local sheriff breaks into her kitchen, since she (and we) believe that she is going to be arrested for theft -- as it turns out, the DEA thinks that she’s a drug runner because she had been seen hiking through a patch of marijuana planted by a ne’er do well in the neighborhood who, as it turns out, is extremely talented in his tending of plants.
I also want to go back and reread all of The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse which is one of those books that I read straight through in one 24 hour period and wanted it to never end, and her travel narrative for National Geographic entitled Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country where she writes of modern day miracles such as the fact that her toddler had managed to keep a small stone in her mouth for the better part of the day, with no ill effects or tragic end, and that Erdrich herself has opened an independent bookstore in this era that seems to be so inhospitable to such ventures, places that I think maintain the life of a community.
These stories circulate with others, such as a narrative of a community that literally breaks itself apart when one member falls ill, since they’ve learned that a disease can annihilate a tribe and that the self-imposed diaspora may be the only way of ensuring that they can live on. Thinking of the ways in which our lives have been shaped by such experiences and incidents; wondering what is created and recreated when such stories are told and retold.
e character is described as “an undisciplined reader” who keeps “a mess of half-read books beside her bed, as well as on the coffee tables and in the bathrooms” who is married to someone whose “reverence for books had started with the cast-off marvels his mother had brought home. The smell of mildewed pages. The broken spine, torn, showing the cardboard. Nothing mattered but that the book be rescued like a human thing….She was a raucous, impertinent, even disrespectful reader. [He] wouldn’t dream of using a Kleenex for a bookmark. He looked at splayed books with anxiety, and always fetched a strip of paper to close gently within the pages. He seemed to think he needed a bookmark at the ready when he shut his books, the way a medic has a bandage handy to stanch a wound once he lifts away direct pressure.”I (over)identify with both of these characters, as someone who literally can’t leave home without at least three books, maybe seven or more if I’m going away for the whole weekend, just in case I find myself with a stretch of time and realize that what I really need is some poetry/a good novel/something that I’ve already read that I can ease into reading again/a collection of essays/some scary short stories/a specific series of issues of a comic book serial from the 1990s/a guide to foraging
for herbs in suburban Philadelphia, etc.Books are a kind of anting-anting for me, yet I’ve left some precious ones on trains, in hotel rooms, on dining hall floors. I have been known to skip to the end of long novels, so I can brace myself for characters’ fates or figure out whether I should make the investment of continuing to live in the universe the writer is crafting. I do not have good boundaries when it comes to other people’s reading materials: when a much-coveted copy of The Passage entered into the household earlier in the summer, I not only would wait until the alpha reader fell asleep to steal it for my own reading pleasure, but also would let slip key plot points that were just too good to keep to myself (“there’s a newspaper report that quotes a person who is trying to reach family members in Johnstown! And it turns out that Philadelphia and its western suburbs are somehow immune from the early waves of sickness, and it is actually true that Philly girls will in fact be the ones who will survive the coming apocalypse!”)
It’s been a summer of trying to catch up with Erdrich’s prodigious output – I finally made some progress through The Master Butchers Singing Club, even while feeling slightly put out by the fact that at some point she not only wrote The Plague of Doves but also published it to great critical acclaim and I am just now realizing that the book exists. I had picked up a copy of Four Souls on the shelves of DogStar Books in Lancaster several weeks ago when I was trying to find a copy of Jane Smiley’s Moo since my own is AWOL. I had remembered taking Four Souls out from the Ludington Library last summer (which was a false memory – I actually had Four Souls on the shelves at home), and wanted to reread her description of the construction of a grand mansion that conjures the lives and landscapes that are ravaged to build the house – the ancient trees that are felled, the brownstone carved from an island that the Ojibwe hold sacred, the lead paint that poisons the family, the bricks that take their hue from blood from a slaughterhouse, the animals driven to death over the course of construction, the laborers who lose their lives in the work of the accumulation of one man’s wealth.
Reading this made me want to reread the moment in The Painted Drum in which an estates appraiser who has taken the drum from the attic of a family descended from a corrupt trader braces herself as the local sheriff breaks into her kitchen, since she (and we) believe that she is going to be arrested for theft -- as it turns out, the DEA thinks that she’s a drug runner because she had been seen hiking through a patch of marijuana planted by a ne’er do well in the neighborhood who, as it turns out, is extremely talented in his tending of plants.
I also want to go back and reread all of The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse which is one of those books that I read straight through in one 24 hour period and wanted it to never end, and her travel narrative for National Geographic entitled Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country where she writes of modern day miracles such as the fact that her toddler had managed to keep a small stone in her mouth for the better part of the day, with no ill effects or tragic end, and that Erdrich herself has opened an independent bookstore in this era that seems to be so inhospitable to such ventures, places that I think maintain the life of a community.
These stories circulate with others, such as a narrative of a community that literally breaks itself apart when one member falls ill, since they’ve learned that a disease can annihilate a tribe and that the self-imposed diaspora may be the only way of ensuring that they can live on. Thinking of the ways in which our lives have been shaped by such experiences and incidents; wondering what is created and recreated when such stories are told and retold.
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
From "Everybody Poops" to "Epileptic"
Mira pulled Taro Gomi’s Everyone Poops off the shelf to accompany her bowl of dry Trix cereal (yes, I am the kind of parent that allows her offspring to eat ridiculously sugared cereal just moments before bedtime) and we settled down for a fully scatological r
ead; I’m trying to figure out whether the book’s straightforward and extremely aesthetically pleasing take on this most basic bodily function reflects a general Japanese cultural sensibility or if it is all Taro Gomi. It’s just difficult for me to imagine a children’s book writer successfully pitching this project to an American publisher ("I smell a Newberry!").
Among the 350 books that Gomi has created is “a really giant coloring and doodling book” entitled Doodles that includes pages like this, which states on the upper left corner "These elephants have a problem. What is it?"
Gomi published Everyone Poops in Japan back in 1977 as Minna Unchi, and come to think of it, the late ‘70s were a free to be you and me time here in the states when it came to cultural production geared toward children, manifest in what was pretty radical educational experimentation -- thinking here about the “team” classes at Maple Ridge Elementary where the curriculum worked to fully integrate 4th, 5th, and 6th grade classes. It seems that the only material trace of things like team classrooms is the fact that now kids’ desks might be grouped together in little pods rather than set up in straight rows, but this material reformulation of the classroom is in and of itself something of note.
Thinking about this in light of a comment by Brad Downey, an artist whose work is featured in Francesca Gavin’s Street Renegades: New Underground Art; the design of the book itself plays with strategies deployed by artists whose materials include wheat paste and spray paint by having the title and author’s name affixed to the cover image on a peel-off orange sticker that is precisely the size of those “Hello, my name is” tags. Downey’s work includes installations like one called Madonna and Child (2004) in which he created s small scale version of a street lamp with a bus stop sign and set it up next to the actual bus stop; he notes that “Construction workers are invisible because they are…working for the city….I feel the same way about street objects and control devices….They ar
e the visual manifestations of the rules or the truth.”
Among the artistic interventions showcased in the collection that caught my eye are Carla Ly’s vinyl stickers that look like plasters (to take the British term and avoid the brand name) that she places on broken sidewalks on dented car bumpers and (image at left) the duo Thundercut who essentially give character to those little figures in crosswalk lightboxes that flash to signal when it is safe to walk.
In a graphic moment because I’ve been slowly rereading David B.’s Epileptic, focusing on the way in which the work represents the process of learning how to see. David B. was raised by art teacher parents in Orleans in the late 60s and early 70s, and Epileptic delineates their attempts to cure the narrator’s brother of his epilepsy. This saga brings the Beauchard family in contact with several countercultural communities, most of which seem to fully replicate the hierarchies and dysfunctions of the society for which they're supposedly providing an alternative.
As the narrator explains the basic tenets of a macrobiotic diet -- an introduction to the family’s disastrous visits to macrobiotic communes – he speaks to macrobiotism’s end goal to balance yin and yang in individuals as a means of creating a more peaceful community, and produces a panel in which he invites the reader to identify the yin and yang elements in the image. Thinking about this invitation for some audience participation as a kind of pedagogical moment in the work that asks us as readers, simply, “what do you see?”
ead; I’m trying to figure out whether the book’s straightforward and extremely aesthetically pleasing take on this most basic bodily function reflects a general Japanese cultural sensibility or if it is all Taro Gomi. It’s just difficult for me to imagine a children’s book writer successfully pitching this project to an American publisher ("I smell a Newberry!").Among the 350 books that Gomi has created is “a really giant coloring and doodling book” entitled Doodles that includes pages like this, which states on the upper left corner "These elephants have a problem. What is it?"
Gomi published Everyone Poops in Japan back in 1977 as Minna Unchi, and come to think of it, the late ‘70s were a free to be you and me time here in the states when it came to cultural production geared toward children, manifest in what was pretty radical educational experimentation -- thinking here about the “team” classes at Maple Ridge Elementary where the curriculum worked to fully integrate 4th, 5th, and 6th grade classes. It seems that the only material trace of things like team classrooms is the fact that now kids’ desks might be grouped together in little pods rather than set up in straight rows, but this material reformulation of the classroom is in and of itself something of note.
Thinking about this in light of a comment by Brad Downey, an artist whose work is featured in Francesca Gavin’s Street Renegades: New Underground Art; the design of the book itself plays with strategies deployed by artists whose materials include wheat paste and spray paint by having the title and author’s name affixed to the cover image on a peel-off orange sticker that is precisely the size of those “Hello, my name is” tags. Downey’s work includes installations like one called Madonna and Child (2004) in which he created s small scale version of a street lamp with a bus stop sign and set it up next to the actual bus stop; he notes that “Construction workers are invisible because they are…working for the city….I feel the same way about street objects and control devices….They ar
e the visual manifestations of the rules or the truth.”Among the artistic interventions showcased in the collection that caught my eye are Carla Ly’s vinyl stickers that look like plasters (to take the British term and avoid the brand name) that she places on broken sidewalks on dented car bumpers and (image at left) the duo Thundercut who essentially give character to those little figures in crosswalk lightboxes that flash to signal when it is safe to walk.
In a graphic moment because I’ve been slowly rereading David B.’s Epileptic, focusing on the way in which the work represents the process of learning how to see. David B. was raised by art teacher parents in Orleans in the late 60s and early 70s, and Epileptic delineates their attempts to cure the narrator’s brother of his epilepsy. This saga brings the Beauchard family in contact with several countercultural communities, most of which seem to fully replicate the hierarchies and dysfunctions of the society for which they're supposedly providing an alternative.
As the narrator explains the basic tenets of a macrobiotic diet -- an introduction to the family’s disastrous visits to macrobiotic communes – he speaks to macrobiotism’s end goal to balance yin and yang in individuals as a means of creating a more peaceful community, and produces a panel in which he invites the reader to identify the yin and yang elements in the image. Thinking about this invitation for some audience participation as a kind of pedagogical moment in the work that asks us as readers, simply, “what do you see?”
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
In the beginning....(or, late last night)
Last night I fell asleep reading Laocoön, subtitled "an essay on the limits of painting and poetry" by the 18th century German critic Gotthold Ephraim Lessing; this is one of those books that has been surfacing as a citation in essays on art history and visual culture studies, so when I saw it on the shelves on The Title Page (the used bookstore in Bryn Mawr that is holding its own right across the parking lot of the massive Borders) earlier this summer, I picked it up, basking in the proprietor's approval of this particular purchase.
I think this helped counterbalance the fact that I am a known buyer of Stephenie Meyer books, having picked up Eclipse there last summer as part of a haul that included Mark Doty's Still Life with Oysters and Lemons and a huge volume of essays on feminist art in the 1970s -- which, truth be told, stayed unread until very recently when I was looking for something on Judy Chicago's and Miriam Schapiro's "Womanhouse" project. It is now safely in the hands of a friend who is planning to organize some choreographers to present work in an abandoned squash court - wondering if abandoned squash courts will be the architectural legacy of the 1970s and 1980s, as old knitting and mattress factories are for the 1870s and 1880s, and if architects ever go into a project knowing that some day the structure will be repurposed as an arts space.
Lessing is actually very funny and piquant in his observations, which I wasn't expecting since I was going into the book with a sense of duty rather than of anticipation; he notes at the outset that "We Germans suffer from no lack of systematic books. We know better than any other nation in the world how to deduce anything we want in the most beautiful order from a few postulated definitions" which makes me think that we could probably trace a direct aesthetic genealogy from Lessing to Anthony Lane, who has been the reason I had been justifying a subscription to The New Yorker since I usually flip directly to the back of each issue to see if there is a film review from him.
And I must admit that I was reading Laocoön primarily because I couldn't find my copy of M. T. Anderson's Feed, a young adult novel about a dystopian future in which about three quarters of North Americans have information feeds directly implanted into their bra
ins; this came in the mail from Powell's earlier this week, along with three copies (I hit the wrong button on the on-line ordering system and couldn't figure out how to rectify my error without canceling my whole order; luckily, they were on deep discount and there are several recent and impending births in my circle of friends) of Helen Oxenbury and Mem Fox's Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes.I have a sentimental attachment to Helen Oxenbury books because they were a great favorite of Sam's when he was much younger, and love the fact that Mem Fox's illustrations of the babies' splayed toes look like Dorothea Lange's photo of her own gnarly feet, which is making me think of Tobin Sieber's book on the aesthetics of disability which compels me to view Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes, as beautiful as it is, as a celebration of corporeal normativity. So I'm wondering if any package of books for a new baby should also include some Charles Addams - thinking of the comic in which the parents are cooing over an infant's supernumery digits -- or of a collection of Lucille Clifton poems.
Here is a Lucille Clifton poem from homage to mine collected in good woman: poems and a memoir 1969-1980:
i was born with twelve fingers
like my mother and my daughter
each of us
born wearing strange black gloves
extra baby fingers hanging over the sides of our cribs and dipping into the milk.
somebody was afraid we would learn to cast spells
and our wonders were cut off
but they didn't understand
the powerful memory of ghosts. now
we take what we want
with invisible fingers
and we connect
my dead mother my live daughter and me
through our terrible shadowy hands.
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