Tag Archives: non-fiction

Republic of Words: the Atlantic Monthly and Its Writers, 1857 – 1925, by Susan Goodman

Posted on January 14, 2012 | Leave a comment

The history of the Atlantic Monthly is also the history of America.  Susan Goodman’s Republic of Words: the Atlantic Monthly and Its Writers, 1857 – 1925, traces the intellectual and editorial history of the magazine.  Conceived by luminaries including Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Greenleaf Whittier, and James Russell Lowell, the Atlantic began with an adamant pro-Union perspective.  Lowell, the first editor, brought together numerous contributors associated with the Abolition and Transcendentalist movements.

Goodman excels at bringing American history to life, charting the course of the magazine and the nation through the Civil War, Reconstruction, the Gilded Age, and the First World War.  Throughout the book a cavalcade of the famous passes before the reader.  These include novelists, humorists, poets, environmentalists, journalists, and philosophers.  With biographies of Edith Wharton (an Atlantic contributor) and William Dean Howells (an Atlantic editor), Goodman has a firm grasp on her subject matter.  The history of America proceeds either in lock step or in counterpoint with the history of the Atlantic Monthly.  The magazine undergoes periodic transformations with each successive editor.  As an example, Howells slowly changed the perspective of the Atlantic from a more East Coast, Boston-area, Harvard-educated milieu to one that looked westward.

The book ends in the Roaring Twenties, the Atlantic battered but enduring in its commitment to act as a purveyor of culture.  Two insurgent forces threatened its mission of mass appeal, the Crisis, the militant African-American magazine helmed by W.E.B. du Bois and the elitist New Yorker.

A final note, Republic of Words sports a playful cover by the artist Jonathan Wolstenholme.  Wolstenholme’s book-centric illustrations, like Republic of Words, will delight anyone with a passion for literature and American history.

 

→ Leave a comment

Posted in book reviews, books, nature

Tagged , , , , , , , , ,

What I’m Reading 2012 and Other Business

Posted on January 4, 2012 | Leave a comment

What I’m Reading 2012

Overview: I’m currently reading five books.  Each poses certain challenges (in some cases, self-imposed challenges) to me as a reader, reviewer, critic, historian, and aesthete.  While New Year’s Resolutions get broken seconds after they’re uttered, these challenges will form an informal backbone to my reading schedule.  As it stands, I want to increase the frequency of my blog posts from bimonthly to weekly.  (The same goes for my other blog, Coffee is for Closers.)  The positive responses from readers has really inspired me to do more.

As you’ll see with these challenges, I want to “raise the bar” with the Driftless Area Review’s content.

The Book: The Brethren: Inside the Supreme Court, by Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong

The Challenge: Woodward and Armstrong’s book chronicles the Burger Supreme Court from 1969 to 1975.  The Supreme Court decided on many significant cases, including the Pentagon Papers, Roe v Wade, and others.  Reading The Brethren has inspired me to write a multibook, deep-reading-style review, focusing on the Supreme Court.  For this review, I will also read The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court, by Jeffrey Toobin, and Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR’s Great Supreme Court Justices, by Noah Feldman.

As a historian, the review will pose a great challenge.  The nice thing about the three titles is how each reflects off each other.  The Brethren follows the decisions of Hugo Black and William O. Douglas, two long-lasting Justices and FDR appointments.  Black died in 1971, paving the way for President Nixon to nominate and appoint William Rehnquist.  The Nine examines the Court during the Dubya Years, including the consequences of Rehnquist’s death, Rehnquist having then been elevated from Justice to Chief Justice.  The three books reveal the slow movement from a liberal to a conservative agenda.  The differing genres will be interesting to evaluate, since Brethren and Nine are works of investigative journalism and Scorpions is popular history.  It should prove to be an interesting project.

The Book: Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 2, by Karl Marx

The Challenge: Currently back-burnered for more compelling books.  Unfortunately, some sequels are worse than the originals.  Unlike Marx’s first volume, Volume 2 is a slow, tedious, bone-dry work, more akin to an economics textbook.  In addition, Friedrich Engels edited the present volume following Marx’s death.  The work exists as an amalgamation of several of Marx’s notebooks.  While the work presents relevant material on the operations of political economy, it is almost too dull to read.  The challenge will involve trying to read it without falling asleep.

A further challenge involves me writing more essays in my series Essays on Capital.  I want to continue this series, since the first volume presented a rich seam to mine.

The Book: Shadows Walking, by Douglas R. Skopp

The Challenge: Douglas Skopp’s self-published novel is a revelation, a well-written exploration of two doctor’s lives in Nazi Germany.  I will review the novel on its own, but it will become part of a larger project.  This project involves reading three massive, controversial novels about the Third Reich.  Two specifically focus on the Eastern Front: Europe Central, by William Vollmann, and The Kindly Ones, by Jonathan Littell.  The third novel – The Tunnel, by William Gass – is technically a “university novel,” but the subject matter associated with the protagonist feeds into the works of Vollmann, Littell, and Skopp.

The final challenge will be psychological, since these four novels survey the darkest aspects of modern history.

The Book: Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution, by Simon Schama

The Challenge: This is the second history by Simon Schama that I’ve read.  I previously read Rembrandt’s Eyes, his magisterial double biography of Peter Paul Rubens and Rembrandt von Rijk.  As with Rembrandt’s Eyes, Citizens is an epic account, mixing biography, pop culture history, visual culture, politics, foreign policy, and tax law into a compelling page-turner.

French history is a particular enthusiasm of mine.  The challenge will be tempering this enthusiasm with the disinterested eye of a historian and bringing to bear my previous knowledge in French literature, historiography, and pop culture.

Blog Feature Revival

This year will see the revival of blog features on long hiatus.  The first will be the return of The Art of Reviewing.  French theorist Roland Barthes and prolific Gnostic Bardolator Harold Bloom are the first two on the docket.

The limited series 5000 Pages of Kissinger will conclude with my review of Years of Renewal, Kissinger’s final volume of his memoirs.  I have the skeleton of a review in place that I wrote several months ago.  The Arab Spring of 2011 and the nascent Occupy movement have made it a challenge to contextualize Kissinger’s work without seeming immediately outdated.  Both Arab Spring and Occupy have overturned the Nixon-Kissinger paradigm of supporting US-friendly free market dictatorships and absolutist monarchies in the Middle East.  These movements, along with the Tea Party movement and Ron Paul’s Small Government Neo-Isolationism, present opportunities for the government that acts in our name (if you’re a US reader of this blog) to reassess its global strategy, foreign policy interests, and free market cheerleading.

For decades, the Nixon-Kissinger paradigm had operated as a given within the global foreign policy architecture.  That given is no longer true and no longer equipped to deal with the Middle Eastern calls for freedom and the end of economic inequality.  As of this writing, the Arab Spring has become the symbol for freedom and liberation from oppression.  The end-result of these protests and coups is still unwritten.

“The Best 80s Sci Fi and Fantasy Films” will continue with an installment on Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Other Business

While I would like to this blog a major part of my life, creative projects and personal obligations inevitably get in the way.  These include a random assortment of personal and professional business.

I am getting married in early October and planning a wedding is a time-consuming endeavor.

On the reviewing front, I have a small pile of books from the Permanent Press I want to get around to reading.  I also have a couple novels from Archipelago Books I want to read and review.

My job is second shift and a temporary assignment.  Like many, many others who have been displaced, abandoned, or simply eliminated from the free market economy, I have a very real and very pressing goal of achieving full-time employment.  (The kind of employment associated with health benefits and paid time off.)  Working second shift has made it more challenging to post reviews, but with any challenge, it can be overcome.  On that note, if any blog readers like what they see and want to hire me as a writer, I’m all ears.  My contact information is in the Submitting Materials section.

Finally, I am working on the last round of revisions for a science fiction thriller.  I am planning to resubmit it to a small publisher who showed interest in the work.  In my query letter, I described my story as “The Sopranos meet Dune.”  I’m making this creative project a priority, since I am nearly finished with the revisions.  Overall, I have been pleased, since the revisions have strengthened the novel.

→ Leave a comment

Posted in 5000 Pages of Kissinger, 80s SFF, book reviews, books, books I'm reading, Critic's Notebook, Essays on Capital, film, Permanent Press, The Art of Reviewing, TV

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Drive Me Out of My Mind, by Chad Faries

Posted on October 22, 2011 | Leave a comment

These days memoirs are a dime a dozen, glutting the market with tales of the self-absorbed.  Fortunately, Chad Faries stands out in this crowded field with his unique tale of childhood in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.  Drive Me Out of My Mind: 24 Houses in 10 Years, a Memoir, follows Chad’s childhood from roughly 1971 to 1980.  Chad’s singularly strange upbringing and poetic sensibility create a memoir unlike any other.  Most memoirs focus on bourgeois nuclear families and the travails of growing up middle-class in the suburbs.  In childhood, Chad discerned the differences of his family and “families on TV.”

Chad’s non-traditional family includes his mother, his aunts, and his grandmother.  On occasions, he encounters the Man-Worth-Mentioning, a father figure who isn’t a danger to him or his mother.

In abandoned mining towns in the UP, Texas trailer parks, and a central Wisconsin university town, Chad witnesses a cavalcade of father figures.  Throughout his memoir, we see his relationship with his mother grow stronger and stronger, despite her many failings and weaknesses.  Throughout the tale, the mood is both childishly naïve and culturally postapocalyptic.  His transformation from child of the post-Sixties lumpenproletariat to university professor makes him, in the words of the late Hunter S. Thompson, like “a monster reincarnation of Horatio Alger.”

Because Chad is a poet, he creates a memoir that is both feral and visionary.  Other critics have compared him to David Sedaris (and like Sedaris, Chad is indeed funny), but his kaleidoscopic vision comes closer to that of reclusive visionary artist Henry Darger and the early years of Iggy Pop.  Scenes of graphic violence combine with passages of strong maternal love and a boy trying to find his place in the world.  In order to make sense of the chaos, the drugs, and the poverty, he seeks comfort in a Barbie doll and his homemade Green Lantern ring.

The Green Lantern ring becomes a talisman.  During the tough times, Chad, like his hero, uses his ring and his imagination to make things materialize to solve whatever problem faces him and the ones he loves.  Each chapter ends with the words, “And then we moved.”  In a life of wild events and constant movement, it provides a kind of refrain, contextualizing the events.

The memoir ends with a transcribed interview between Chad and his relatives in 1981 – 1982.  In the chapter, he is getting a tattoo from his aunt while he talks with his mother about her life experiences.  The chapter comments upon everything that came before as it calls into question what was true and what was misremembered.  Like tattooing, the memoir is a process, with words and memories creating a compelling narrative whereas a tattoo artist creates art from ink on skin.  Drive Me Out of My Mind is a visionary memoir of love and art and passion and scars, an indelible life where the raw materials of abandoned mines, a Marvel superhero, and controlled substances create a visionary artwork.

 

→ Leave a comment

Posted in book reviews, books

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Hav by Jan Morris

Posted on October 2, 2011 | 1 Comment

Hav by the Welsh travel writer Jan Morris is a very Borgesian work, bringing to mind the Argentinean writer’s love for mirrors and labyrinths.  There is even a character named Dr. Borge and Hav’s major cultural motif is the labyrinth.  Morris achieves distinction in creating a place that goes beyond being a second-rate pastiche of Borges themes.  Unfortunately, the field of science fiction is riddled with examples of good ideas soured when executed.  Poor execution usually involves sloppy writing where the author received payment by the word.

New York Review Books has released a stellar volume with Jan Morris’s Hav.  The book compiles her two works of science fiction, Last Letters from Hav (1985) and Hav of the Myrmidons (2006).  The volume also includes an introduction by science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin and an epilogue by the author.  In the introduction Le Guin notes how readers began booking trips to Hav, not knowing it was fiction.  After reading Morris’s Destinations: Essays from Rolling Stone, one can understand the reader’s oversight of Hav’s non-existence.  Her travel essays for Rolling Stone, written in the 1970s, envelop the reader with a keenly constructed sense of place, quirky characters, and a narrative drive, though not necessarily plot-based.  This non-fiction writing is reflected in her fiction, creating a plausible locale.  Hav, a tiny Mediterranean peninsula off of Anatolia, possesses a culture frozen in amber, isolated from the world at large, but also an amalgamation of Eastern and Western cultures reflective of the wars, conquests, and commerce that passed through the area.

Last Letters sees Hav as a sleepy community with an outdated bureaucracy, an ambiguous British colonial political presence, and a multicultural kaleidoscope.  On the Escarpment reside the primitive Kretevs.  Arabs, Greeks, and Chinese reside in their own ethnic enclaves.  Hav has the westernmost settlement of Chinese, owing to the proximity of the Silk Road.  The Venetian and Russian empires made their marks in art and architecture.  A muezzin cries along with Missakian’s trumpet call, a remnant of the Crusader’s retreat.  The back cover summary describes Hav as having “chaotic and contradictory splendor.”

One should note that this is not alternate history.  Hav’s fate follows the ebb and tide of history, albeit from the perspective of a geographic asterisk.  A humorous passage in Last Letters involves the local intellectual circle hating Ferdinand Braudel because he never mentioned Hav in his monumental survey The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II.  Le Guin states in the introduction,

Probably Morris, certainly her publisher, will not thank me for saying Hav is in fact science fiction, of a perfectly recognizable type and superb quality.  The “sciences” or areas of expertise involved are social – ethnology, sociology, political science, and above all, history.

Morris’s writing is what makes Hav such a treasure to read.  Described as a “romantic traditionalist Welsh author,” she approaches travel at a different speed and pitch than Anthony Bourdain.  Morris’s character of Jan Morris is indistinguishable from her presence in her non-fiction travel essays.  She seems like a nice middle-aged lady who, despite all evidence to the contrary, sees the best in people and has the bad habit of asking awkward questions to stage-managed power brokers.  Not conservative in the vulgar faux populist mutation common to the United States, but one whose conservatism cherishes the artifacts and lessons of the past and seeks to preserve them for future generations.

Morris’s “traditionalist” leaning comes to the fore in the sequel, Hav of the Myrmidons.  Morris returns to Hav twenty years later to find a series of unsettling changes.  Following the Intervention, Hav is now a theocracy run by the Cathars, a Christian heresy long thought extinct.  The Holy Myrmidonic Republic of Hav exists both as a Catharist theocracy and as an emerging capitalist power.  A new airport, highway, and resort hotel – the Lanzaretto! tower – have been carved out of the rubble.  One thinks of Dubai and China’s emergent industrial hubs, whereas Old Hav bespoke of Danzig or Trieste, political “free cities” with their own syncretic cultures.

A chilling episode occurs when Jan is invited to a meeting at the ominously named Office of Ideology.  She meets Hav’s political deputies.  “They reminded me of the ideologues of apartheid who, long before, had greeted me with similar earnest solemnity at Stellenbosch in South Africa.”  Nothing is more stultifying and possibly unintentionally comical than the long-winded prattling of a totalitarian state’s cog, all ideological purity and true believer crazy eyes.  In Destinations (1980), she summarized the ideology of apartheid as “the intricate political device – part mysticism, part economics, part confidence trick – by which the white race maintains its supremacy over the blacks.”  With its omnipresent icon of Achilles’s helmet, Hav expresses that same combination.  The Greek community on San Spiridon, an outlying island, has become reborn, albeit with a troubling fanaticism.

This new iteration of Hav reflects the Post-911 world in its admixture of aggressive free market capitalism and political authoritarianism.  One need only look at China (and the countless Chinese products we all buy without a second thought) or the political autarkies of Silvio Berlusconi and Vladimir Putin.  The United States has catered to the whims of dictators, so long as the bananas were cheap and the despot made the appropriate anti-communist slogans.  Morris reverses Marx’s quote by showing the old Hav as a farce and New Hav as tragedy.  Hav is on the make, aspiring to rekindle its Venetian or Arabic drive to link itself again to a global marketplace.  Morris wonders at the human and cultural costs of those aspirations.  Is the material gain accrued from integrating with globalization really worth it, especially if all one caters to are incurious tourists blathering on about a place’s safety and comfort?  Travel without risk, at least the risk of random discovery, is a pointless endeavor.  Reading Hav is not.

 

→ 1 Comment

Posted in book reviews, books

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Fasting for Ramadan: Notes from a Spiritual Practice, by Kazim Ali

Posted on September 19, 2011 | 1 Comment

Food is one of the essential requirements for existence.  One cannot go about one’s daily business without caloric intake.  However, beyond the needs food fulfils, one takes pleasure in eating.  That is why people read restaurant reviews or watch No Reservations.  Food also represents a mirror of a specific place, culture, and personality.  Why a book entitled Fasting for Ramadan has recipes in the back also requires explanation.

Fasting for Ramadan: Notes from a Spiritual Practice by Kazim Ali is a stunning literary jewel.  An extended meditation on the Muslim practice of fasting during the month of Ramadan has appeal for the practicing faithful, those curious about the Muslim religion, and to those with or without faith.  Faith is not a requirement for the enjoyment of this book.  In fact, one of Kazim Ali’s frequent refrains is, “I’m not sure what I believe.”  This is less an example of alleged agnostic fence sitting (a caricature lobbed by zealous theists and atheists alike), but a cri de coeur against the tyranny of dogmatism and certainty.  But before we place Ali within the spectrum of Muslim theology, it is important to elucidate what Ramadan is and isn’t.

Ramadan is one of the Five Pillars of Islam.  These pillars (Arkan) are as follows:

1. Shahada (The profession of faith): There is only one God and Muhammad is his messenger.

2. Salat (prayer): Traditionally, the five prayers recited at specific times during the day.

3. Sawm (fasting): The obligatory time of fasting during the month of Ramadan.

4. Zakat (alms-giving): The act of giving to those in need by those who are financially capable.

5. Hajj (Pilgrimage): A Muslim must visit Mecca and perform a specific battery of rituals.

Ramadan is not a hunger strike or torturous asceticism.  Ramadan involves the withholding of food from dawn until sunset.  Since the Muslim calendar is lunar (like the Jewish calendar), Ramadan is measured in terms of the moon’s waxing and waning.  In his journal, Ali tells how his first Ramadan fast with his mother was during the month of July.  July’s long days made for an arduous experience.  But the fasting isn’t without celebration, since Ali discusses his fast-breaking meals with fellow students.  Even with the fasting, there is still food and joy.

Kazim Ali is unique in relation to other devout Muslims in that he practices the Ramadan fast, but not the daily prayers.  In the book, he also explains how he practices yoga and is a vegetarian.  (While Muslims are forbidden from eating pork, they can eat other meats.)  For Ali, the vegetarianism and yoga make sense, since he was born in India, a nation with a massive Muslim population.  Ali is also a self-described Shi’a Muslim, the minority sect that has sizable populations in Iraq and Iran.  Ali works as a creative writing teacher at Oberlin University.  Ali is also gay.

Fasting for Ramadan is comprised of two main sections.  The first “New Moon in the Western Sky: Ramadan Essays” are free-associative essays first written for an Oberlin University blog.  Ali discusses his thoughts on Ramadan, dinner gatherings, and matters literary and personal.  The former blog entries give the essays a semi-public feel, not necessarily confessional, but definitely for public consumption.  (The essays pique this reviewer’s interest in seeing what the comments board revealed, since blog posts can act as one half of a public dialogue.)  The second section is called “Absence of Stars: A Fasting Notebook.”  Written years earlier, this is Ali’s personal journal during the Ramadan month.  The tone is more confessional, the feelings more naked, and the impressions more immediate.  In both sections, Ali’s calling as a poet are revealed.

Islam, like Christianity and Judaism, is a religion of the word.  Ramadan celebrates the Prophet Muhammad’s injunction from God (Allah, al-Ilah, literally “The God”) to write the Quran.  Ali writes:

It’s a sacred month, regardless of fasting, because it is said to be the month in which the revelation of the Quran began.

When Gabriel came to the prophet in cave and said, “Read.  Read in the name of the One who created you, made you from a clot of blood.”

And what night of the month was that?  Complicated question.

Supposedly: An odd-numbered night in the third week of the month.  Cryptic.

(NB: Spacing and paragraph spacing in original text.)

Ali’s writing wavers from the ruminative to the epigrammatic, the text a dancer making split-second turns and unexpected reversals.  The hunger for food becomes the engine of his writing, propelling him forward and inward.  The inwardness yields to questions about his faith, his world, and his writing.  The inwardness remains even as the prolonged nature of the fast allows his gnawing hunger to fade away like so much fog on his morning runs.

Amidst the meditations, epigrams fly out and beckon second looks: “Fasting is first to abstain and then to embrace emptiness.  Then to give emptiness back.”  (How can one not think of Beckett?)  “But since I am not sure what the nature of god is (or God if you prefer, or G-D, or whatever) I don’t know how to speak.”  (Shades of the Daoist; serenity in uncertainty.)  “Eden is over, if ever Eden was real.”

The reviewer hopes to gain further pleasure from the text with the recipes in the back.  The emptiness of Kazim Ali’s experience gives back again, this time with the sensations of the tongue and the nose, the eye having been sated on the words.  This is literature to be savored by a writer that bucks the usual stereotype our culture has given the faithful Muslim.  On a rudimentary level, Fasting for Ramadan gives the reader an understanding of the physical and spiritual efforts involved in this month-long practice.  On another level, the book gives a double portrait (one public, another private) of an individual’s attempt to understand himself and his world.

→ 1 Comment

Posted in book reviews, books, food, nature, The Internet

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The Long Night: William L. Shirer and the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by Steve Wick

Posted on September 9, 2011 | Leave a comment

“There are reminders to all Americans that they need to watch what they say, watch what they do, and this is not a time for remarks like that; there never is.” – Ari Fleischer, White House Press Secretary, September 26, 2001.

During a cold December day, William L. Shirer, foreign correspondent for CBS, hurries to Berlin’s Tempelhof airport.  He wants to catch a plane to take him out of Germany and on to Spain, from Spain eventually to New York City and the safety and security of the United States.  Steve Wick’s The Long Night: William L. Shirer and the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich opens like a taut political thriller.  Like Shirer, Wick is a journalist writing history.  This gives the book immediacy with a palpable “you are there” quality.

Shirer grew up in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, listening to radio broadcasts of the Great War, his fingers following the routes of the armies on the maps shown in the newspapers.  When he graduated from the local Coe College, he set his eyes on Europe.  Shirer thought himself destined for greatness and his ambitious proved unflagging throughout his journalistic career.  In that career, he went on to work for the Chicago Tribune and CBS.  His years in Europe began with hanging around other literary members of the Lost Generation, including Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, eventually gaining a lowly position in the Tribune’s Paris office.  He worked his way up and then, without warning or cause, got fired.  Through happenstance following a year in Spain, Shirer met Edward R. Murrow and worked alongside him at CBS.  Following his career as a journalist, Shirer, beset by tough financial times, set out to write The Big Book, what we know today as The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

The Long Night spends very little time on the actual writing of that large book.  (Relegated to a few pages in an Epilogue.)  Instead, the book focuses on Shirer’s years as a foreign correspondent living in Berlin.  Once Hitler’s Nazi Party consolidates its power, Shirer faced the challenge of balancing accurate reporting from a totalitarian state and not getting expelled.  The balancing act involved dealing with the censors at the Propaganda Ministry.  Once the Second World War started, he had to deal with three censors (from the Propaganda Ministry, Foreign Office, and Military).  Shirer’s continuous quest to report the truth made him a high-profile target for the Nazis.  He saw colleagues expelled and sources vanish.  While his commitment to journalistic integrity created a situation where he could get expelled at the merest criticism of Nazi lies and distortion, he felt obligated to perform the balancing act because the United State and the world needed to hear about Nazi atrocities.

Shirer himself proves a rich source of information.  An eyewitness to history, he wrote personal diaries from a very early age.  Coupled with the Big Book and his later memoirs, we get a variety of perspectives on this momentous time in history.  Wick used Shirer’s diaries to reconstruct his life and times.  This gives Long Night a clarity and immediacy associated with thrillers and unfazed by the murky nostalgia that sometimes infects popular history books.  The Long Night is a short volume for those interested in the daily struggles of a journalist in a hostile state and a doorway to unlocking the interpretations forwarded in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

→ Leave a comment

Posted in book reviews, books

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Interview with Author Mary Kennedy Eastham

Posted on August 23, 2011 | Leave a comment

West Coast author Mary Kennedy Eastham has been quite busy lately.  Her book of poetry, the Shadow of a Dog I Can’t Forget, was one of my first review copies I received.  I talked with her via an email interview.  Here is what she had to say about her recent projects, the art of writing, her love of dogs, and her favorite writers.

WHAT ARE SOME OF YOUR CREATIVE PROJECTS?

I am trying so hard to finish my novel NIGHT SURFING.  Writing a novel is very different from writing a short story or writing a poem.  There are so many more layers you must add to the whole.  I keep a Fragment File which is where I put story ideas, character traits, names I like, interesting snippets of conversations I’ve stumbled upon while pumping gas, standing in line at the grocery store, or at the bar waiting for a Take-Out order.  Oh, my, give a person a drink or two and they spill their guts!  They say the best writers steal.  I’ll add to that, nothing is lost on a writer.  It makes the world so much more interesting!  And I can actually say this: ‘I wish I had another life left to write even more!!!’  Although I probably wouldn’t be able to afford my health insurance!

About a week ago, I decided to take a break from my novel and start working on something new, a short story, “The Girl With Sand in Her Hair”, it’s almost writing itself.  This changing gears approach has taught me that when one thing isn’t working, you MUST start something new.  I am hoping to finish a first version of this story this week.  Beyond that, maybe this story can become the title for my second book, The Girl With Sand in Her Hair and Other Little Love Stories.  I’ve also been working on a long prose poem, “The Divorce Diarist”, for over a year.  A cinematographer I met recently wants to film a version of “Divorce Diarist” to post on YouTube.  That’s given me the incentive to finish the poem and start thinking about camera angles, flashpoints, where to film it.  Doing a mini-documentary was one of my 2011 writing goals, so I am very very excited about this project.

MY EXPERIENCE AS A CONTEST JUDGE…

To be a Judge frees you in a way as a writer.  You realize that  behind every Judge is a person, a person who is usually a writer or teacher or both, a person with writer’s styles and topics they are drawn to.  I have judged poetry, creative non-fiction, humour, memoirs, short stories and novels.  This year was my first experience judging e-books.  Wow, that was challenging, especially trying to read 150+ pages per entry online.  I closed down my laptop after a particularly long reading session and I swear for a few minutes, all I could see was a blurry cloud of jumbled words swirling in front of me.

The e-book competition asked its Judges what categories they wanted to Judge.  I put down Women’s Fiction and High School poetry.  The gave me Paranormal Romance and Fantasy.  Okay…but guess what?  I learned a very valuable lesson and it was this: a good story is a good story, no matter the genre.  I actually liked being in the otherworlds created by these very talented writers.  Near the end of the competition, they gave me the High School poetry entries to Judge, so the experience ended up being WIN/WIN.

My advice to all of you is to send your work out to a LOT of contests.  It will definitely increase your chances of being noticed.

WHAT WAS THE INSPIRATION FOR THE SHADOW OF A DOG I CAN’T FORGET?

Wow, Karl, you’re really making me work here!  Let’s see … I’d been writing for a while, and I simply wanted to get a book of mine out there in the world.  I took a class online with New York City writer M.J. Rose called BUZZ YOUR BOOK.  I used this experience as a challenge to complete a book.  My next decision was what to include.  That was a tough one.  But it helped me hone everything down to its purest.  Then I had to decide the order of stories and poems.  That took a while, a long while actually.  I knew what the very last piece would be because I loved the last line … the place where he last loved me …  Inspiration for me has turned into necessity.  I have to write.  I wouldn’t know what else to do.

The title of the book came from a poem of the same name.  I like its last line as well … as if he could tell me what follows love …

I think I’ve been questioning love for a long while now.  Like so many writers, moviemakers and poets before me, it’s a most fascinating, frustrating and forever after pursuit!

WHAT’S UP WITH MY FASCINATION WITH DOGS???

I think it was Thomas Jefferson who said we become one with what we surround ourselves with. I live in a house full of Golden Retrievers.  I’m a part-time breeder and there is always one or two or three or four dogs underfoot as I write, work-out, cook dinner, live my life.  I remember the wonderful writer Raymond Carver (Google his short story ‘Cathedral’ to read  this succinctly brilliant work of art) was an alcoholic for many of his early writing years.  When I would read one of his stories, he was primarily a short-story writer, at some point in the story the main character would open a beer or take a swig from a near empty vodka bottle or pour himself glass after glass of wine.  As a reader, you would almost get dizzy drunk reading Carver’s words.  When he quit drinking, Carver wrote a story about a man who was going back to a reunion at the prestigious university he graduated from.  Carver graduated from Stanford.  In the story, as Carver’s character sits down to be served drinks and dinner, he turns his wine glass upside down on the table.  Small, heartbreaking details like that one are my daily inspiration/motivation to get better and better at this craft we call writing.

WHO ARE MY FAVORITE WRITERS?

Karl, you always intimidate me with your own extensive reading list.  I like any writer who tells a good story.  I know that sounds so simplistic and if I could teach that skill to myself and get paid to teach novice writers that secret, I could retire to Paris!  I like being surprised in an O’Henry sort of way.  I like being whisked away to a world I know nothing about like the circus world Sarah Gruen creates in her novel Water for Elephants.  One of the first short stories I couldn’t put down was Michael Cunningham’s “White Angel”.  He went on to THE HOURS book and movie fame.  He also wrote the screenplay along with another fave writer of mine, Susan Minot, to the movie adapted from Minot’s book EVENING.  I love the poet Pablo Neruda.  Writer/political & social activist Simone De Beauvoir was one of my very earliest influences.  I like Lorrie Moore, I like the author of White Oleander whose name escapes me right now.  [It’s Janet Fitch.  – KW]  I like the vulnerable quirkiness of Annie Lamott.  I love Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, William S. Burroughs, Gabriel Garcia Marquez.  I just know I’m forgetting someone.

Oh, I like your mind and your writing, Karl, and I can’t wait for you to put a book out there into this crazy world. One more writer just popped into my head – Muriel Barbery – author of The Elegance of the Hedgehog.

WEST COAST LITERARY SCENE CRAZINESS…

That ANY of us continue to write at all in a Twitter/Facebook/YouTube obsessed world is a feat in and of itself. Sadly, most of the writer’s groups I belong to are online, so I don’t know how much insight I can shed on the California literary scene.  Writer/Filmmaker/Performance Artist Miranda July seems to have cut quite a fancy swath across this state with her book, No One Belongs Here More Than You, her films, Me and You and Everyone We Know (she directed and starred in the film) and The Future, a film debuting in New York and L.A. this week.  She also has a participatory website learningtoloveyoumore .  Google her.  She seems as quirky as the characters she writes about.  I’m a little, no, make that a LOT jealous of her genius in promoting herself and her work.

Dave Eggers, author of the memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, is a prominent San Francisco writer/ social activist who started 826 Valencia, a writing program for underprivileged kids in the city.  I believe there’s now a program in L.A. as well.  Dave’s own back story is quite interesting – Dad leaves mom and kids early on to basically become a drunk, Dad dies, then mom dies of cancer, leaving poor Dave to raise his younger brother Troph.  Again, I act like I know these people, I don’t, but they are I guess prominent California writers. Jennifer Egan, author of The Geek Squad lives in San Francisco and seems really lovely.  I asked if she would be my ‘friend’ on Facebook and she sent me a lovely response.  Karl, this question has made me realize I need to get out more!

WORDS FOR ASPIRING WRITERS…

I think I’ll end with my philosophy on writing: I really like my writing.  I believe in my writing. To be successful, you need to do your best every dayfor a really long time…

Thanks, Karl, this was fun!

Website: www.RP-author/MKE

 

 

 

 

 

→ Leave a comment

Posted in books, film, Interviews, nature, The Internet, TV

Tagged , , , ,

Play Fair! The Art of Friendship and Relationship by Kimberly A. Taylor

Posted on August 21, 2011 | 1 Comment

    One doesn’t have to walk far into a bookstore to get assaulted with self-help books and memoirs.  Much like people with blogs, everyone thinks they have something valuable to say.  In addition to memoirs by randomly generated Kardashians the upcoming election season brings with it the fatuous “campaign biography” ghostwritten by the candidate’s staffers not currently concocting an attack ad or planting a piece of journalism with a compliant member of the Fourth Estate.  It is with relief that Kimberly A. Taylor’s hybrid memoir/self-help book is available.  Play Fair! The Art of Relationship and Friendship presents the reader with a fusion of personal reminisces and informative sections on how to deal with others.

Play Fair! begins with Kimberly at age four chiding a fellow classmate for taking away a toy.  Throughout this small book (only 84 pages), we see Kimberly’s assertiveness and confidence.  Her extroverted personality eventually led her to a Fulbright scholarship in the former Yugoslavia, only a couple years after the Cold War ended.  The strange culture and awkward political transition create ample opportunity for Kimberly to explain issues about interpersonal relationships.  She encounters strange laws, especially those concerning removal of large amounts of currency from former Eastern Bloc nations to Austria and Germany.  She also uses her privileged position as a visiting student to help others, including defusing potentially dangerous situations with oppressive officials and bureaucrats.  (This tiny book is a wonderful complement to William T. Vollmann’s coverage of the former Yugoslavia in his massive Rising Up and Rising Down.)

Zagreb, Croatia

     Aiding in her development is Kimberly’s acquisition of languages.  Boasting fluency in at least five languages, this allows her to streamline through dangerous or exploitative situations.  Several times, native residents comment on how she sounds like she was born there.  The languages she mastered include challenging tongues like Slovak, Czech, Hungarian, and Russian.  She also knows relatively easier languages like German and French.  (Easy by terms of comparison, since learning a language is tough.  This reviewer learned German and Latin, but found learning Arabic truly difficult and alien.)

Dr. Miller and her ad agency clients.

While language acquisition and intercultural encounters mean certain things within the academic realm, Kimberly eventually became a professor of psychology and applied it to international business.  Season 4 of Mad Men was illustrative of this very thing.  In one episode, Don Draper and his hard-drinking colleagues compete against a rival ad agency to win the Honda account.  This involved an understanding of the Japanese culture and their business ethic, not to mention reining in Roger Sterling’s racist belligerence.  (Sterling was a veteran of World War II and saw the Japanese, not as business partners, but as The Enemy.)  The season also saw the introduction of a female business psychologist, Dr. Faye Miller.  She worked with several firms in dissecting the preferences of potential customers.  She also dealt with male prejudice and many seeing her job as fake or a kind of trickery.  In the Sixties, many still saw the reliance of psychology as a manifestation of personal weakness.

The second half of the book elaborates on the notion of interpersonal interaction, specifically relationships with the client.  How should one treat an analytical personality?  Or an extroverted personality?  The explanations are terse and informative.  Since this is for the business class, the book is free of New Age-y half-baked psychobabble.  Granted, one needs self-confidence and assertiveness in the cutthroat world of modern business, but Kimberly explains how one can thrive and survive in this environment.

Play Fair! also shows that a self-published work can be done effectively.  At under 100 pages and a simple black and white cover avoids the usual opportunities for self-indulgent silliness.  The Internet is full of websites mocking badly done self-published works.  Play Fair! is professionally done with an eye towards brevity and high quality.  If the major publishers churning out Kardashian Extruded Product would do the same, perhaps they might not be in a financial scramble.

Kontains krap.

→ 1 Comment

Posted in book reviews, books, The Internet, TV

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

My Business Is to Create: Blake’s Infinite Writing by Eric G. Wilson

Posted on June 23, 2011 | Leave a comment

Within the confines of 85 pages, Eric Wilson’s My Business Is to Create: Blake’s Infinite Writing offers a cornucopia for the aspirant writer.  The tiny book defies conventional categories, much like its subject, William Blake (1757 – 1827).  A Blake biography, a creative writing manual, and a map of influences, epigrams, and philosophy all come into play.

William Blake was a poet and artist living in the Britain, who, like his contemporary the Marquis de Sade (1740 – 1814), lived between the Age of Enlightenment and the Romantic Era.  Blake grew up as a Christian Nonconformist and struggled with making a living.  In the introductory chapter, we see how Blake’s innovative printing method took a fatal toll.  Despite his relatively short life, Blake produced a body of work, visual and textual, that has evaded critics and scholars for centuries.  His work is simultaneously religious, visionary, sexual, satirical, and politically radical.  His self-created mythology is labyrinthine and sensational, with references to everything from political events of the day to Biblical figures and a stylized visual style reminiscent of Michelangelo.

How does this figure into the process of creative writing?  One of Wilson’s assertions is that all writing is revision, not simply rewriting the first draft.  Put simply: “Writing is rewriting, and vision revision.”  Wilson, like Blake, has a gift for the epigrammatic.  Using the crude tools of language, the writer must endlessly toil in an attempt to create the sublime.  While Wilson avoids telling the writer how to create visionary works, he re-emphasizes the need for the writer to go beyond measured and observable phenomena.  He borrows Blake’s term, calling it “the ratio.”  Blake’s mythology had Urizen, the scientific dictator who set up barriers and limits.  Nevertheless, Wilson (and for that matter, Blake) are not idealist reactionaries, since they understand the need for figures like Urizen.  Visionary writing needs to be corralled and sculpted, or else it is a loose and sloppy structure.

Wilson’s book is a fresh burst of creative energy within the overcrowded field of creative writing books.  He also penned a volume that stands out from the usual dross occupying the field, since some books read like dispatches from The Sausage Factory or self-help books masquerading as creative writing books.  In the end, the demands of a publisher or agent shouldn’t matter.  The writer should write what he or she wants to write, giving free rein to their visionary impulses.  Only when writers become too self-obsessed over how many pages a chapter should have or what agents or publishers really like these days (if your name isn’t Snooki, don’t concern yourself), do writers end up producing tedious prose that sounds beige and forgettable.  As Blake said in the Marriage of Heaven and Hell, “Damn braces, bless relaxes.”

→ Leave a comment

Posted in book reviews, books

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Digging Deeper: A Memoir of the Seventies, by Peter Weissman

Posted on June 19, 2011 | 2 Comments

Peter Weissman’s I Think, Therefore Who Am I? took place during the Summer of Love.  It was an intimate exploration of the Sixties, the most glorified or vilified decade in recent history, depending on how far one lives from Real America™ (patent pending).  His second volume of memoirs, Digging Deeper: a Memoir of the Seventies, chronicles Weissman’s life during a decade not liked by anyone, except perhaps the occasional roaming hipster burnishing his or her sense of ironic superiority.

The memoir begins with Weissman crawling from the muck of hallucinogenic incoherence.  Weissman’s inability to speak to others provides a dark comedic undertone to the opening chapters.  Through willpower and workplace demands, Weissman transitions from an introverted state brought about by his extensive experimentation with drugs.  One of Weissman’s first jobs is for a marketing research firm.  Verbal connections established through the short-term exchanges he has over the phone.

While working he meets Noreen again (she appeared in his previous volume of memoirs).  She helps Weissman in his reintegration to society.  Then, like clockwork, the pair become a couple and then a married couple.  One of the underlying themes in Digging Deeper is negotiating with “Normal Society.”  Weissman, a Red Diaper Baby, faces additional challenges, since the Sixties weren’t simply an extended vacation by rich college kids to take lots of drugs and sleep around (at least according to historians siding with the conservative victors).  The Sixties brought with it a revolutionary promise.  The promise remained unfulfilled, resulting in the cavalcade of characters Weissman profiles in Digging Deeper.  He works with disgruntled Postal Service employees, dines with wannabe artists, and spiritual con artists.  Realizing the revolution has been lost or simply co-opted, Weissman chronicles these engagements and negotiations with a detached precision leavened with cynical observations.

Weissman and Noreen eventually move to the Bay Area.  He works at the Post Office with a multiracial work force, including a patchwork of black and white supervisors and managers reflecting the explosive calculus of affirmative action.  The Post Office scenes have the flavor of Barney Miller-meet-the Wire, where race, class, and capital expose the fissures of the socioeconomic system in its latter years of global dominance.  The sequence where he delivers mail to wealthy patrons of an apartment complex is especially cutting, the shrill spoiled scions of money old and new sounding like the entitled dingbats from Arrested Development.  (For added irony, Noreen is the daughter of a major chemical magnate.  The magnate prides himself in his part in developing napalm, one of Vietnam’s more horrifying legacies.)  However, Weissman’s rage against the capitalist machine isn’t exactly pure.  Unable to work on his writing, supporting his wife, and dealing with the frustrations of everyday coalesce into his need to get a hobby.  That hobby is horseracing.

I Think, Therefore Who Am I? gave a street-level view of adolescent exploration during the Summer of Love.  Digging Deeper expands on that vision, examining a decade rather than a year, and showing the travails of growing up.  Forced from the Eden of psychedelic visions and personal experimentation, Weissman has to perform that alchemical miracle of turning sweat into greenbacks.

→ 2 Comments

Posted in book reviews, books

Tagged , , , , , , , , , ,