painting a day project

Please visit my new site, http://www.wrack-line.blogspot.com, where every day for a year a new painting of beach finds will be posted. Above, some of the objects that have washed ashore recently.

orient boatyard

antique post cards

Many old post cards instructed correspondents to write only the address on the blank side; therefore people used odd leftover spaces in the photos to convey their messages.

spring evening at the boatyard

rainy afternoon in brooklyn

These photos taken from a car window on the way to Barette bar, temporary home of the latest Uncalled for Reading series (until Unnameable Books opens in a new location). The events feature talented poets and letterpress! That's right, LETTERPRESS of each writer's work. Highly recommended. To learn more, visit http://uncalledforreadings.blogspot.com/.

recent greenport scenes

Photographs taken on a foggy spring afternoon in Sterling Harbor.

door, man, & star in figueres

more book art

Pages from a book made a few years ago.

Oklahoma dreams.

Gram & the Carambar.

Malini & Nietzsche.

Mrs. Molly Moore, the last knocker-up.

barcelona sketchbook, part four

All the snacks on the plane ride home from Barcelona were not from Spain.

barcelona sketchbook, part three

From a visit to the Miro museum on Montjuic.

ice boating

For the first time in about five years, temperatures were low enough to freeze Hallocks Bay, & local ice-boat enthusiasts brought out their craft. Some are the latest lightweight models; others, like the large wooden gaff-rigged boat (shown in the second photo), are over a century old.



ice skaters share the smooth surface with the boats




Jack Frost




The Platter

barcelona sketchbook, part two

barcelona photo journal, part three

Indoor markets are found throughout Barcelona, & gosh, are they fascinating.

barcelona sketchbook, part one

New year's eve, Au Port de la Lune, where the hosts served oysters harvested that morning in France &, of course, much Champagne.



paper wrapper for lemon



a great font used at one of the shops in el Mercat Central Abateria

end matter

the last pages of the black-&-white moleskine.

barcelona photo journal, part two

Today, presenting some spectacular patterns.




Sidewalk & umbrella love relationship.


What are the chances a customer would match a store's interior so precisely? Such luck.

barcelona photo journal, part one

Back from Barcelona & wishing to share some of its visual splendor, I begin with images from a ceramic store that still uses a beautiful old cash register. Look for many many more postings on this city in the coming days & weeks.

more moleskine excerpts

featuring the magnolia pod


beginning outlines

happy holidays

Wishing a lovely holiday to all!


snow mounds on a frozen mountain lake


having a spirited & powdery romp

olive observing the moleskine documentary process

The shiny black nose goes well with the moleskine cover, too.

two-part mystery mail

A long ink drawing that was cut in half & then mailed to two different recipients. The women's (& that is the only clue given here) identities were not disclosed to each other, so one wonders if the two separated sections will ever be reunited.

new black-&-white moleskine

Started a second Japanese folding moleskine now that the colorful sea-themed one is nearly complete. These images are from day three of work.

mail exchange, post election

it's time to get to work

This is really important mail--thus it's going to be posted on both blogs.

Vote on November 4th!

block of one letter

notebook, unfolding

Old-school menfolk are witnessing the pen & paintbrushes at work.

continuation

Will post images of the folding notebook as it develops.

japanese folding notebook in progress

coming october 11th

Please visit kapellgallery.blogspot.com for details.

dumpster diving

Hard to believe what can be unearthed in the trash.

a good mail day

No bills or circulars; instead:


McSweeney's 28--eight separate illustrated hardback books; the four shown here fit together to make one cover.



A friend's prizewinning novella from Low Fidelity press.



A lovely surprise packet of ephemera.



The New Yorker, with short story by Tobias Wolff & poems by Mahmoud Darwish & C.K. Stead.



Handmade postcard from artist Arden Scott.

some summer drawings

summer is light & sea glass

invitation flyer

new work on paper

advance notice

"Circulation: Letters & Lives" will open at 3 in the afternoon on Saturday, July 5th, at Floyd Memorial Library, Greenport, Long Island. These are some of the many pieces that will probably be on the walls, along with the series of altered library cards.

the latest from the ledger

work table with stripes & scraps

Making letters out of cast-off library cards.

sneak preview

from an upcoming solo show of correspondence.

some pastels to herald spring

good old quirky objects

(thanks to the Kapells...www.kapells.com)

bookstore confessional

Just the other day at St. Mark's bookstore a woman from another time whispered secrets to the novels belonging to a century she had never lived in. She chose the L-M stack because, she figured, it corresponded to the topics foremost in her thoughts. "Is there a connection between love & egg labels?" she asked, for both evoked in her an image of seemingly fragile but pure & mysterious smoothness. "& what of Madagascar--has there been correspondence from the endemic species? I have not checked my post box in so long."

the nearly empty diner on the cusp of spring

new & snowy boatyard photographs

this week: black cat books

At one reader’s prompting, another Sag Harbor independent bookstore gets its due today on auk wrecks & ark larks. Black Cat Books, located in the Main Street shopping cove, a double row of red-brick buildings just to the right of the landmark movie theatre, is exclusively used stock. If you’re expecting musty disarray, however, think again—owner Dawn Hedberg’s shelves are tidy & organized, & her offerings range from the inexpensive paperback to the vintage collectible. The warm red walls, tonally corresponding to an array of Oriental rugs, add a large measure of coziness that continues with the use of antique glass-fronted display cases containing some of the more expensive volumes.
The store seems to be about half the square footage of Canio’s, but it’s clear that Hedberg is also very selective about her merchandise; you won’t find the junk that gives many of the chains that cheap huckster appearance.

Again, an initial focus on the poetry section yielded some treasures.

Anne Sexton, The Awful Rowing Toward God (1st edition, Houghton Mifflin, 1975), with quote from Erica Jong on back of the dustjacket. In this, her eighth book, the poet’s subject matter is made clear by the title. Sexton died in 1974.

from “Riding the Elevator into the Sky”

As the fireman said:
Don’t book a room over the fifth floor
in any hotel in New York.
They have ladders that will reach further
but no one will climb them.
As the New York Times said:
The elevator always seeks out
the floor of the fire
and automatically opens
and won’t shut.
These are the warnings
that you must forget
if you’re climbing out of yourself.
If you’re going to smash into the sky.


Autumn Eros and Other Poems, by Mary Kinzie (1st edition, Knopf, 1991). As the book jacket posits, “the central subject” is the poet’s daughter.

From “Faith”

How should I let her go?
Her hair in fine
Sparse waves conforms to a small glowing head.
In all lights she looks thoughtful like a smith
Gathering up his blow.
Chirps issue from her high and spirited

When the shadows pass.
Hi, hi, she calls,
Looking from them to me if no reply
Cascades upon her watching, then we sing
The reasons why, alas,
Few of them hear. I love her till I die.


The curiously wonderful Letters, by Eric Rensberger, a chapbook signed by both poet & printer (Raintree, Bloomington, Indiana, 1981) & containing an envelope with enclosed epistolary poem—this before the successful Griffin & Sabine series. It’s worth reproducing some of the letterpress pages here:


















































Maybe the guy is at home now, shaking his head at the inventive things he did nearly thirty years ago & how few paid attention. But...


Dear Eric,
Someone noticed.

And in the nonfiction realm, the vintage My African Neighbors, Hans Goudenhove (1st edition—but no dust jacket—Little Brown, 1925). The author proclaims from the start that he has become “estranged from things European” since he came to Africa in 1896, & proudly states that he has “never seen an airplane, or a dirigible balloon, or a motor-bus, or a taxicab, or a motor-boat, or a wireless apparatus, or a cloud-picture, or the president of a republic, or a portrait of Einstein, or a Bolshevik.” He has not “seen any of the modern dances—‘jazz,’ I think they are called.” Even his fox terriers were terrified the first time they encountered a white lady. Despite these claims, Goudenhove does not profess to be an expert on African natives, but he does set out to dispel many of the myths of white superiority & tell a good tale in the process.


None of the above acquisitions was priced higher than $9.50.















Black Cat Books
Main Street Shopping Cove
Sag Harbor, NY
631.725.8654

independent feature: canio's books

Canio’s Books, established in 1980, is on Sag Harbor’s Main Street, but not, as one might surmise, in the middle of downtown. Take the right fork in the road leading away from the stores, galleries, & cinema, & do so preferably on foot so that you can marvel at the stupendous architecture along the way. Burlapped hedges, slumbering through the winter like massive overfed brown caterpillars, lend an unintentionally comic effect to the classic features of the historic houses they front, & a jolly conversation outside the steps of the deli can be heard on a quiet Sunday morning from four blocks away.

Maryann Calendrille & Kathryn Szoka welcome newcomers warmly but unobtrusively, then continue chatting with each other in between stocking the shelves. Canio’s offers both new & used books, & even though the store is on the small side, the poetry section is admirably vast, with multiple copies of many titles available; & fiction, biography, art, history, & cooking are among the other subjects well represented. Somehow the owners have also carved out room for framed photographs, lithographs, & collages--many by local artists & all for sale. The shop is crammed but organized, bright & with cheerfully painted planked floors.

A first visit to a bookstore brings with it the desire to discover something new, which will in turn make the trip more memorable. In that spirit, one temporarily bypasses the favorite poets or the literary fiction lucky enough to be getting the great reviews in favor of making new & unexpected friends. A while later (it’s impossible to accurately gauge time when absorbed in scrutinizing the stacks) a small pile has formed:

Askance and Strangely, new & selected poems by Edmund Pennant (signed hardcover, published in 1993 by Orchises Press). Pennant lived in Bayside, Queens; earned fellowships to Yaddo & MacDowell; & taught at Adelphi University. He died in 2002. Sample excerpt, from “Incident on Times Square”:

An old man struck by a taxi in the theatre district
bled lightly onto a page from a book that went sprawling
with him in the gutter. Passersby picked up man and book,

dusting them. They had no way of knowing the book was
a first edition. So, for that matter, was the man
himself, with blue numbers fading on his arm.


Lilies Without, poems by Laura Kasishcke (Ausable Press, 2007), with a daguerrotype by John Adams Whipple (1852) reproduced on the cover. From “I Am the Coward Who Did Not Pick Up the Phone”:

I am the coward who did not pick up the phone, so as never to
know. So many clocks and yardsticks dumped into an ocean.

I am the ox which drew the cart full of urgent messages straight
into the river, emerging none the wiser on the opposite side,
never looking back at all those floating envelopes and post-
cards, the wet ashes of some loved one’s screams. How was I
to know?




So I Will Till the Ground, Gregory Djanikian (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2007). The fifth book by this author, an Egyptian-born Armenian who moved to the United States at the age of eight. From “Immigrant Picnic”:

It’s the Fourth of July; the flags
are painting the town,
the plastic forks and knives
are laid out like a parade

And I’m grilling, I’ve got my apron,
I’ve got potato salad, macaroni, relish,
I’ve got a hat shaped
like the state of Pennsylvania.


And a second excerpt, from “Whenever I Had American Friends Over”:

there would be no speaking
in Armenian no wearing the old clothes
or referring to the time when
not even the names of foods
my mother had prepared survived
lahmajoun became “garlic pizza”
kufteh the Swedish meatballs
we never had everything rounded
into shape by the prevailing friendships
which were American and ok by me […]




The next selections both turned out to be written by Sag Harbor residents. Fish, subtitled A Memoir of a Boy in a Man’s Prison (Carroll & Graf, 2007), is T. J. Parsell’s account of being incarcerated in 1978 for having held up a Fotomat with a toy gun when he was seventeen years old. He was gang raped on his first day behind bars & had to figure out how to survive. Parsell is, according to the book jacket, “one of America’s leading spokespeople for prison reform” & the former president of Stop Prisoner Rape. It promises to be a disturbing & necessary read.

When polled as to what they are currently enjoying, Kathryn Szoka replied, “Irish writers, mostly,” & specified The Gathering, Anne Enright’s Man Booker-prize winning & extraordinary novel of grief. Maryann is keen on memoirs & just finished Lucette Lagnado’s The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit (Ecco, 2007). The visitor mentioned having had an eye on that book yet regretted being too late for the first edition hardcover (doing quite well, it is now in its fourth printing). “Actually, I think we have a secondhand copy around here—& it’s signed, too,” Maryann said, putting aside some wonderful-smelling avocado sushi & rising from the desk that serves as the till (though there is no cash register in sight; the surface is chiefly used to display more wares). Within thirty seconds she efficiently located the promised volume & had a deal. Then the women laughed & allowed themselves a bit of publicity: Kathryn, some of whose photos adorn random shelves in Canio’s, did Lagnado’s jacket portrait. This additional news seemed like the perfect punctuation to a day of shopping locally.













Canio’s Books
209 Main Street
Sag Harbor, NY 11963
631.725.4926
www.caniosbooks.com

oh, gosh!

winter drawings, part two

better than "seas the day"

winter drawings

lucky cabbage & black-eyed peas

In the local coffeehouse yesterday afternoon C____, who has travelled all over the world & worked more jobs than you could count, was dispensing advice for 2008. “Make sure you cook somethin' green between midnight tonight & tomorrow,” he said. “Got to have something green in the house. And whatever you do in that twenty-four hours, that’s what you gonna be doin’ all year. If you lay there watching TV, the rest of the year you won’ be able to get away from that TV set.” G___ had put money-tree pieces in his Christmas wreath & asked C___ if that would bring financial luck. “The money ain’t gonna just come to you—you got to DO somethin’—you got to go where the money is! Whether that’s playing the numbers or whatevah, you caint just expect the money to come to you,” C____ responded with the indignity of a man used to other people’s consistent deficiencies in wisdom.

To start off the new year in the spirit as C___, kookaburra suggests--no, commands--a meal of black-eyed peas, cornbread, & cabbage, & gives you the low-labor, low-on-technical-details way to do it.



If you have a roomy pan, buy the largest green cabbage in the store, because cooking reduces it by about a fourth of its original volume. Hallmarks of this dish: it’s simple, damn good, & there’s never enough. Cut up two or three medium-sized onions & begin to sauté them in olive oil as you slice the cabbage into big wedges (they’ll break apart easily as they simmer); season with black pepper, garlic, & a bit of salt. Add the cabbage when the onions have been acquainted with the heat for five or so minutes, then cover the pan & keep the stove on medium heat. Lift the lid & turn the mixture over periodically so that it browns evenly. It should take about an hour.



Black-eyed peas: also easy. Skip the dried bags & go for the canned (Goya are excellent). Again, onions are the base, and if you’re doing both cabbage & peas, slice twice as many onions at the start & just divide them—one half for each recipe. For color & flavor, chop red bell & Italian green peppers and sauté them with the onions. Add black pepper & garlic, plus something with a kick—hot Hungarian paprika or dried chili, for example—but no salt, as there is plenty in the canned peas already. Stir in the black-eyed peas once the onion & peppers are softened, then let it cook until it tastes good.



One caveat: you will smell like an onion restaurant for days. But perhaps that, too, could bring good fortune?

Lastly, do NOT even think about going for the boxes of Jiffy cornbread mix. No—make it from scratch; it’s worth the extra (but really minimal) effort. Indian Head stone ground yellow corn meal is a fine choice, & the recipe on back is as follows:

1 cup corn meal
1 cup sifted flour
¼ cup sugar
3 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
¼ cup soft shortening
1 cup milk
1 egg, beaten
Preheat oven to 425 degrees F.

Combine all dry ingredients in a bowl. Cut in shortening. Mix egg & milk together and add with a few swift strokes. Bake in greased 9 x 9 x 2 pan for 20 to 25 minutes.

And a very happy new year to all.

the leather-bound ledger

Unearthed at a fall yard sale & never written in, this lovely old record book is gradually becoming a visual journal in the twenty-first century. Note the folios stamped in indigo ink.



The first entry.



Can anyone guess what these are?



Inking in progress (as of this morning).

a war not to be taken in a local-library way

The Slaves of Solitude, Patrick Hamilton’s wise, witty, & psychologically penetrating novel from 1947 (New York Review of Books Classics, 2007) is but one of this author’s underrated works. Hangover Square has been released in the United States (Europa Editions, 2006), & the trilogy Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky will soon be available (also from NYRB Classics, February 2008).



Set in Thames Lockdon, a fictional suburb of London, the slaves of the title are the temporary denizens of a somewhat downtrodden boarding house during the Second World War. Dominated at mealtimes by Mr. Thwaites, a ghastly, emotionally immature old man, the residents of the Rosamund Tea Rooms endure his variable moods, which can range from expansive to bullying, all of which, however, are obnoxious in their particular ways. When in good humor, Mr. Thwaites speaks to the others in a ridiculously arch language called Troth, in which a library is a House of a Thousand Volumes & one does not simply take a walk but “goes forth into the highways and byways, to pay thy due respects to Good King Sol.” On other occasions he egotistically repeats bland or ignorant statements, or resorts to his syrupy “I-with-the-third-person business” (“I keeps my counsel, like the wise old bird” or “I happens to know the law”). And on top of this he secretly remains a “hot disciple” of Hitler even at this late date: as Christmas approaches in the winter of 1943.

But it is the bullying around which this novel revolves. Miss Enid Roach, a woman David Lodge terms, in his introduction, the principal “center of consciousness” of the novel, is slim, nearing forty, “with a nice face and liquid brown, appealing eyes.” She was bombed out of her home in London—thus found lodging at the Rosamund Tea Rooms—and continues to work for a publishing house in the city editing manuscripts. It is this decent heroine who inexplicably arouses dislike in Mr. Thwaites, and day after day she must parry his insistent interrogations and false imputations. Upon discovering that Miss Roach reads literary political publications Mr. Thwaites, in his warped logic, thereafter associates her with Russia and communism, & is forever commenting on her “friends’” activities on the Eastern Front. No amount of polite dodging can sway him from being unpleasant to her at every opportunity on this or any number of other topics: her personality; her appearance; her association with Lieutenant Pikes, an American soldier--even the time she makes it down to the common dining room is scrutinized & judged.

Well known in his time for the Victorian thriller Gaslight (1938), Patrick Hamilton was clearly familiar with maddeningly clever malicious intent.

When Mr. Thwaites asks whether Miss Roach plans to “partake of the noxious brown fluid” with “a certain dame of Teutonic origin” on Sunday, he means coffee with Vicki Kugelmann, a seemingly timid German friend toward whom Miss Roach feels protective; the two met in a grocery store when Enid defended Vicki against the hostile staff. However, Vicki proves to be quite other than a shrinking violet: not only does she secure lodging at the Tea Rooms but forms an instant alliance with the hateful Mr. Thwaites and flirts grotesquely with the Lieutenant in blatant contrast to the thoughtful, analytical Miss Roach. Enid’s demeanor during drunken outings with these friends is mocked as being unsporty; if she states that she prefers to go home it quickly leads to her being called a prude and a jealous woman.



Worse still is the method by which Mr. Thwaites and Vicki now torture our protagonist back at the boarding house: in the stultifying atmosphere of the dining room, all is cowardly, indirect implication that infuriates and sickens Miss Roach. This novel feels fresh because it is: the way people project their own dishonorable behavior onto others and poison a friendship is a frighteningly common practice in the twenty-first century as well.

Despite her unfortunate surname, Miss Roach sounds like a character you could root for with her scruples and mounting desire to seek revenge. No need to spoil the ending, but you’ll have a front-row seat when the spotlight of justice swings her way.

drydock

In the Greenport boatyard with golden December light & long, slanted shadows. Corrugated tin outbuildings loom in rust, greys, beige. My hands had nearly reached their tolerance limit for exposure to cold air while photographing the skeleton of a wooden boat on a trailer when a man with a large, black-crusted scab on his lip came over. “That’s someone’s overambitious dream,” he stated in a voice that sounded like a ventriloquist’s. After we studied the keel & chines, then noted the extremely low water line painted in yellow, he pointed out that the screws originally used weren’t bronze & were therefore gone from the gaping battens.




The boat, we agreed, nevertheless had a fine shape—beamy, said the man, who introduced himself as C___. He backed out of the camera’s purview, admitting that he felt strange about his banged-up face. No longer with the time to restore boats, he renovates houses instead. Recently, in a hurry to complete a job, C. moved a ladder in the dark & failed to notice a caulking gun hanging from one of the rungs. Its direct impact cut him clear to the inside of the mouth as well—hence the stiff speech. He chose not to go to the hospital, though, because they’re liable to stitch you up tight the way they once did his eyebrow. “See? I look like I’m perpetually surprised. Perpetually surprised!” he said, feigning severe amnesia & indicating the right brow, which was indeed set higher than its mate.

A scattering of scraps lay on a table next to the slip where C. keeps his fiberglass-hulled sailboat, among them a rectangular piece of wood with circular drill marks in cookie-cutter pattern. “Those are bungs. You can also call them plugs. That’s teak; I got it off ___’s old wooden boat—you know, the big blue one right by the entrance. I also made a railing out if it. You can have it if you want.” He added that the plugs (which are glued atop countersunk fasteners in planking) should taper slightly, while I commented that the chunk of wood was like a mini sculpture.



It’s generally accepted that the wise old boatwrights are mostly gone now. So who will teach the craft to the next generation?

C. laughed at a recent memory. “I was reading Wooden Boat magazine—the last issue had a feature on plugs, & the two guys in the article, well, they were both doing it wrong. I mean, I know these guys—I like Brian—but they were promising to demonstrate how the experts do it, & here he doesn’t even know how to make a bung.”

milk pots, anyone?

For those of us whose hearts race at craftsmanship combined with a beautiful & functional object.

www.labourandwait.co.uk/products.asp?category=all

boatyard revisited

Jane Cooper, 1924-2007

From "March," a poem in eight parts


Coda

An air of departures. Silences.
Again the pines are sheathed in a wet snow.
The chimney breathes its slow, transparent smoke.

Everything has been offered, nothing given.
Everything, not the first thing has been said.
After me who will sit here, patiently writing?

Words over a page: a slow smoke
scrolling across the sky what is unconsumed
by the deep, thunderous fires of the house--

An air of departures. Now the tall city
stoops to receive us, where we blur like snow
leaving behind a breath of loves and angers.



First published in The Weather of Six Mornings: Poems 1954-1967 (1969)

water sonata

lessons from maira

The jacket flap of Maira Kalman's The Principles of Uncertainty (The Penguin Press, $29.95) asks, "What is this book? What is anything?" Well, to partly answer the first question: it's a visual journal of a year in the life of a renowned artist, designer, & author of children's books. And it is, of course, more than that.

It's almost certain that few people fail to describe Kalman's work without relying on a certain nine-letter, three-syllable word beginning with wh-, so it won't be employed here. Better, perhaps, to point out that the great thing is she gets to do whatever she wants--to focus on a pickle tag one moment & on Abraham Lincoln or Fyodor Dostoevsky the next; to follow ephemeral, sometimes oddball thoughts & turn them into drawings, musings, memories. She illustrates selected items from her collections of empty boxes, sponges (Cleanbot is one, Trista another--the latter a "sandwitch scrubber"), mosses of Long Island, & candy bars (the most treasured of which is Cuban & called Cratch).

Despite the vivid colors & pages devoted to major hairdos, abandoned sofas, & everyday objects that, like the accidental art of a photograph unearthed in a thrift shop, deserve to be immortalized, it is evident that serious issues are ever present in this artist's head. Early in the book she abruptly writes, "What can I tell you? The realization that we are ALL (you, me) going to die and the attending disbelief--isn't that the central premise of EVERYTHING?"

Kalman talks about her mother, "and why she did not marry the man she loved, but instead married my father." A suitcase she owns once belonged to a man who fled Danzig in 1939. "As if I need reminders of the Holocaust. That's ALL I think about." But the pages of Principles of Uncertainty are also peopled by the likes of Lolita, in pink bunny costume, who "has a thick Brooklyn accent, but she says she is British. Oh well." After this encounter Kalman goes home & washes dishes, which she says is an antidote for confusion.

And what of her realization that we are all going to die? "IT stops me DEAD in my tracks a dozen times a day. Do you think I remain FROZEN? No. I spring into action. I find meaningful distraction."

orionids

A clear night with the moonset a bit after two meant excellent conditions for watching this year's Orionids shower. Wrapped in a yellow sleeping bag, yr. correspondent lay on a slight rise by the bay at four thirty in the morning & confirmed the experts' assertion that meteors would shoot across the sky at a rate of twenty to fifty an hour. Anyone observering last night did not have to wait long in between appearances: once, two meteors headed in different directions burned up simultaneously; another time, three streaks of brief light in less than a minute. Sirius was so bright it seemed as though someone had left on a naked bulb in a bedroom, but there was no chance of asking for it to be turned off. The Big Dipper stood on its handle, the magician who commanded it to defy gravity hidden offstage. Only the rhythmic sounds of crickets & wavelets interrupted the calm until the night train in the distance sent out horn calls as it headed into town.

The gorgeous stars are, however, indifferent to our lives. It's up to us to care for each other.

go on, make up a narrative

graphic tips

Adrian Tomine's full-length graphic novel Shortcomings releases on October 2nd. That means over a hundred pages of the Berkeley native's irresistible clean-lined drawings & his incisive, witty portrayals of often self-absorbed & frustrated characters. A few people have criticized Tomine's emo sensibility in the remarkable Optic Nerve (of which issues 11-13 make up Shortcomings), but they'd probably prefer not to acknowledge their own similar experiences in the realm of relationships. Or they should just stick to "Stuff" magazine & let the rest of us ponder the ever-mysterious workings of the heart. October 16th brings Acme Novelty Library #18, in which Chris Ware continues his profoundly affecting "Building Stories." It's going to be a good month.

And if you haven't experienced Jason Lutes' Berlin, a supreme combination of story & illustration set in the Weimar Republic, then you need to rethink your priorities. The series is ongoing, with issue #13 in comic-book format available now, but Drawn & Quarterly has also collected the first eight in book form.

Just so you know.

handy dandy laffy taffy

KOOKABURRA tells us about meeting Rudolf Delson's novel, Maynard & Jennica (September 8, 2007):

Noticed it the other evening in the window of Three Lives bookstore, placed backwards on the display shelf because the red script of the title, like, runs in reverse on the back of the dustjacket--admittedly a good gimmick. Next day Amanda, behind the counter, beams & says M & J is really good, but that some other customers (read: staid traditionalists) would definitely hate the narrative style. Naturally, I hand over twenty-four bucks.

My mother often says it's really hard to write a comic novel. She also tends to read such works with initial enthusiasm, then without warning one hears, "I HATED that book! Yes, I liked it at first, & then it became ENTIRELY predictable." Will have to see if this book escapes that pattern for her--it did for me.

Told through various people's recollections, the novel features Jennica Green, a New Yorker via San Jose who was definitively out of a relationship in the 1990s 68.53 percent of the time, & Maynard Gogarty, who wears snappy vintage clothing, makes art films, & is still married (for visa purposes) to a woman who fakes her death to cash in on World Trade Center victims' funds.

And speaking of September 11, the author gets extra credit for a difficult trick: making "some totally unacceptable" statements about that time six years ago via Gogarty. Kind of like a young angry hipster cousin to Susan Sontag in her essay "9.11.01," the film maker scoffs at the American flag decals on the subway, the new definition of patriotism, & even the choice of words used to title "A Nation Challenged," a special section that ran in the New York Times for a while after the attacks. And Delson pulls this off in the middle of entertaining fiction.

It's a modern love story with Manhattan a lively, lovable main character & plenty of other folks (parents, college friends, & even the emergency brake on the 6 train) lending support. Aside from being a little worried that Delson ripped off Harryette Mullen in order to create Puppy Jones' chart-topping rap of words that rhyme with themselves, kookaburra swears you'll have a fine time reading this book.

Maynard & Jennica is 304 pages long & is published by Houghton Mifflin.

noxious quote patrol

The following comes courtesy of "One Day in the Life of Melvin Jules Bukiet," an essay published in the spring 2007 issue of The American Scholar. The author, a professor at Sarah Lawrence College, writes of his unexpected arrest one evening & subsequent stint in Manhattan's House of Detention, aka the Tombs.

"...my new pen felt distinctly less congenial than the first. It was smaller and more crowded, and--call me racist--I couldn't help but realize I was the only white person, the only middle-aged person, the only person wearing a camelhair Brooks Brothers outlet-store jacket. I was the only person in the cell with glasses. Surely, 20 random men, though young, didn't all have perfect vision. Maybe their lives didn't require certain minor skills, like reading."

Naturally, a family friend & lawyer shows up just in time to offer bottled water to the author, who confesses without irony that it's a great idea because he doesn't drink plain milk nor wish to touch the water fountains. (Note to the Tombs: please add organic vanilla soy milk to your beverage menu.) Privileged Bukiet, elbow patches intact, thus escapes the fate of many of the other detainees, about whom he says, "Jail was my cellmates' life; they knew it the way students know a classroom." Whoa--that makes two noxious quotes in one post. One is certain that former editor Anne Fadiman would have crumpled & tossed this dreck into the rubbish bin.

red hots & smelly socks

Matsutake, a variety of mushroom favored by the Japanese & whose odor has been described as a combination of the items in the title of this post, is the subject of Burkhard Bilger's piece in the August 20 issue of the New Yorker. To read it is to enter the secretive world of self-described misfits who make their living sussing out edible fungi. It's no easy job: they spend hours traipsing around mountainous terrain, endure harsh weather, & live in campsites with balky electricity for months at a time. And forget about flavoring the steaming soup served at the camp with shavings from the day's haul--sometimes the mushrooms can sell for a hundred & sixty dollars a pound and are therefore too precious for the hunters to eat.




Finding matsutake takes skill & intuition, for they grow at the tree-root level and are usually concealed beneath the duff. One expert, John Getz, describes his particular method of scanning the forest floor: "You get so you can see the tension in the ground. Just that pressure. And when it's raining you can see these little light-colored rings. It's really trippy. Your eyes tune in, your brain is keeping inventory, and you just get a feeling. Something taps you on the shoulder and tells you to pick." The ability to visually detect pressure in the ground--the adaptive genius of people is mind boggling. Given that "fully half of a forest's biomass lies belowground, and half of that is fungal," it's clear a lot of activity goes on beneath the placid-appearing surface.

More fun facts abound in the article. The air around us is laden with fungal spores. The largest known organism is a mycelium that spans two thousand acres in Oregon & is many thousands of years old. Nobody knows precisely what conditions foster ideal edible mushroom growth, & most of the prized species have resisted persistent efforts at cultivation. Happily, the failure to domesticate is what keeps the determined hunters, with their cache of esoteric knowledge, in business.

a queasy question

Attended a free screening of "Invisible Children" tonight at the local library, & while the subject matter is indisputably important--the youth of the title are Sudanese who have known nothing but war--the film is uneven & ragged. It begins in the now-familiar style of MTV's "Real World," with three white college students taking turns sitting in a small room close to the camera, posing & answering questions about the impending journey to Africa & their intentions of making a movie about it. When one of them earnestly informs viewers that television & movies are basically where we all get our knowledge, & another asks more than once, "Is this thing [the camera] on? The red light is blinking," it's unclear whether we're watching a spoof. The young filmmakers do not pretend to be experts in making documentaries & admit that they pretty much have no idea what to expect in Sudan, & perhaps their "everyman" quality appeals to a certain segment of the populace. There are some random frat-boy antics at the start of the trip--setting fire to a termite mound & killing a "giant" snake--& then an unintentionally hilarious exchange when one of the filmmakers, now with beard & backwards baseball cap, tries for serious journalism by approaching a military officer about an attack on the truck ahead of them. "What do you mean, shot?" he asks. The uniformed man dryly replies, "They used a gun to shoot them."

The official website (invisiblechildren.com) is a trove of disconcertingly jokey writing (on the snake incident: "Double up on the panties, cause your gonna laugh one of them off"), pop-religious sentiment ("We know God is with us and continues to hook us up and provide us with some incredible stories"), & a bizarre synopsis of the people of Sudan ("They have no education, no concept of the outside world, and yes they still think the world is flat. The crazy thing is: If they did know that the world was round, it wouldn\'t really change how they live. If you think of \"Encino Man\" plus \"The Flintstones\" minus the technological breakthrough, otherwise known as \"The Wheel\", plus \"Half Baked\" you will get a clearer picture as to how these people live, and have been living for thousands of years. We concluded, it must be too hot to even think of making a wheel.") Yikes.

While the three Americans visit a number of refugee camps early on, it is when they encounter formerly abducted child soldiers that the voiceover states, "We had found our story." This is immediately punctuated by an overly long montage of rapid-fire scenes, set to a frantic beat--a directorial decision due to having grown up on a steady diet of music videos, it seems. At last we are given portraits of boys who have left their villages, which are vulnerable to rebel attack, for bigger towns, as well as some who have escaped conscription despite the odds. They form a family unit--studying together & staking out a dank underground corridor as sleeping quarters--although how they find food is not explained. Unfortunately, the interview process is downright insensitive: after one boy tells of his murdered brother, one of the white men asks if he'd like to go to the U.S. someday, then follows that with "What's your favorite music?"

An effort like "Invisible Children" raises the queasy question of how one approaches the well-intentioned but badly made documentary. Is it worthwhile or even ethical to put it under the critical microscope? If the film is this particular group of Sudanese boys' only chance to be heard, does it matter terribly if the medium is flawed?

los poderes del aire, las llaves submarinas

Listening to "Neruda Songs," interpreted by mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson. M____ told me the tale of her & composer Peter Lieberson, who were once married to other people but fell violently in love. In a gift shop at the Albuquerque airport Peter noticed "the bright pink paperback with orange dots displayed on the rack"--Pablo Neruda's 100 Love Sonnets--& bought them for Lorraine. The poems were perfect for two people who would sometimes "cry in each other's arms out of gratitude that they had finally found each other." Friends noted the lovers' insularity with a certain amount of regret, but perhaps this is an inevitable consequence of all grand affairs; in any case, the liner notes state "The two moved ever closer in temperament once they became a couple."

The CD, which consists of a setting of five sonnets, is performed by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, conducted by James Levine.

Lorraine died in 2006, a year after her premiere performance of "Neruda Songs."

watercraft

blooms, basil, beetles, bees

It's midsummer, and the echinacea, balloon flowers, lilies, & phlox are in bloom. The early varieties of tomato have already paired with basil for one of the simplest & best home-grown treats, while string beans, okra, eggplant, & pepper contentedly ripen in the sun. The butterfly bush, bought as a Y-shaped baby last year, shot up eight feet high, has purple cones longer than a Dodger Dog, and daily hosts honeybees & native bees; monarchs, swallowtails, viceroys, & sphinx moths--and, of course, the attractively attired but unpleasantly omnivorous Japanese beetle. A few mornings ago it appeared that one of these unwelcome visitors was getting an early start on its gastronomic tour, but a closer inspection revealed a drowsy bumblebee who'd spent the night among the soft, scented flowers. The shiny black triangle head stirred at the human presence, decided there was no danger, then remained in semi torpor a while longer--after all, it wasn't a school day.

of diamond jigs & porgy rigs

Fishing with Bill & Charlie usually begins when one of them strolls up & announces, "We're going to go make a drift. Want to come along?" We head down the white gravel road to the inlet where their Steiger craft awaits, check the killie traps, & stow the unruly plastic bags of provisions (crackers, salted almonds, beer, rough-hewn sandwiches) in the cabin. One of the men lifts the engine cover to verify that no fuel leaked out overnight, but probably also admires the powerful inboard machine, which will soon plunge to life; the other sets up the rigs. As the boat navigates past the jetty of the marina, where cormorants stand on ragged pilings, wings held out to dry, someone cuts the bait, slicing off squid heads on newspaper, removing the "cellophane" inside the body, & knifing long strips that will dangle temptingly from cunning hooks. Or perhaps it’s a day for the diamond jigs, which will be dropped to the bottom of the bay & reeled up quickly & repeatedly until hungry predators strike them & turn prey.

Bill & Charlie are great advocates of fishing locally, which means in their front yard--on various spots on the bay with a view of home. Often the first stop is near the buoy that steadily blinks jade on clear evenings; there they’ll allow the tide to carry the boat on a gentle run in the waters where the bluefish, fluke, or striped bass are likely to be feeding. Or, "Let's try the green lawns," Charlie will suggest--across from a section of Shelter Island with mammoth houses set upon immense lush acreage. No one in the boat cares what rich person owns them; they're just a convenient, analogue global positioning system for those who are endlessly fascinated by the piscatory world offshore.

The banter starts as soon as the engine is cut: “I bet I’ll get icebreaker [the first catch] even though you guys already have your poles in the water,” Bill says, eyes crinkling handsomely at the corners. As the session continues, someone will feel a tug & boast that it’s going to be the biggest fish of the day, or when a particularly small species gets hooked, Charlie will tease, “Look, it’s cryin’ for its mama!” The men discuss aspects of the water—the changing or standing tide, a strong rip—or note with satisfaction that this is a nice drift, but often we are companionably quiet. They’ve marked the size limits (19.5 inches this year for fluke; 28 for bass) along the side of a spare plank that doubles as cutting board, & reminisce about the plentiful numbers of fish that used to be. They both admire a fish with spirit, & frequently will throw one back that’s a keeper—“That one gave a good fight,” they’ll say, watching the long, silver body fin its way back down into the depths.

And on days when nothing is biting, Charlie might comment that you’d think there were no fish at all in the bay. Yet somehow no one on the boat ever feels disgruntled. “That’s why they call it fishing and not catching,” Bill grins as he guides the boat homeward.

north fork natural

floatie with accidental poppy

bush: disregarding dissent & still at war

scenes from the edge of the pacific

horn calls of the pirahã

One of the more gripping magazine pieces to appear recently, John Colapinto's "The Interpreter" (The New Yorker, April 16, 2007) introduces readers to Pirahã, a language spoken by the Hi'aiti'ihi, a tiny, remote Amazonian tribe whose unique linguistic features may challenge Noam Chomsky's theory of universal grammar. Travelling to Brazil with Dan Everett, a former missionary who, along with his ex-wife, Keren, are the foremost Western experts in Pirahã, the reporter pens his initial encounter with the tribe & its tongue:

"On the bank above us were some thirty people— short, dark-skinned men, women, and children—some clutching bows and arrows, others with infants on their hips. The people, members of a hunter-gatherer tribe called the Pirahã, responded to the sight of Everett—a solidly built man of fifty-five with a red beard and the booming voice of a former evangelical minister—with a greeting that sounded like a profusion of exotic songbirds, a melodic chattering scarcely discernible, to the uninitiated, as human speech. Unrelated to any other extant tongue, and based on just eight consonants and three vowels, Pirahã has one of the simplest sound systems known. Yet it possesses such a complex array of tones, stresses, and syllable lengths that its speakers can dispense with their vowels and consonants altogether and sing, hum, or whistle conversations."

What the tribe does not do is use recursion, which Chomsky argues is a cognitive skill unique to the human brain & the "cornerstone of all languages." The term refers to a linguistic combining of separate ideas, as when someone states, "The monkey with the broken tail is mean." Pirahã does not permit such constructions; a speaker would instead say, "The monkey has a broken tail. The monkey is mean." After decades of noting the idiosyncrasies of Pirahã, Everett theorized that the language is created by the culture. And the Hi'aiti'ihi live completely in the present--they do not farm, as that would engender imagining a result months down the road; they do not employ a verbal past tense, & ancestors are not venerated but forgotten. "Committed to an existence in which only observable experience is real, the Pirahã do not think, or speak, in abstractions--and thus do not use color terms, quantifiers, numbers, or myths," Colapinto summarizes. While I quibble with the assertion that color is abstract, this is exciting stuff indeed.




Much of "The Interpreter" focusses on linguistic academicians (all male, as it happens), & only near his conclusion does Colapinto return to Keren Everett. Perhaps she has been slighted due to her gender or because "her primary interest...remains missionary" (see http://www.canadianchristianity.com/cgi-bin/bc.cgi?bc/bccn/0101/supgod for a summary of the connection between her mastering Pirahã & proselytizing); no matter the reason, it is she who provides a crucial perspective that the men with their data & their computer programs have consistently overlooked. "The key to learning the language is the tribe's singing, Keren said: the way that the group can...communicate purely by variations in pitch, stress, and rhythm." By chance, the author secretly observes a woman "intoning this extraordinary series of notes that sounded like a muted horn" as a toddler played at her feet. When he asks Dan Everett about the scene, he's told it's how tribe members sing their dreams. Fortunately, Colapinto thinks to ask Keren as well, & she excitedly explains that the woman was teaching her child how to speak. With a language as mysterious to outsiders as Pirahã, it is extraordinary that most of the scholars have neglected this obvious key to understanding.

By concentrating on the tribe's prosody, Keren was able to grasp concepts of the language that she'd struggled with for years. She began to sing along with the Hi'aiti'ihi, which eventually led to a breakthrough: " I realized, Oh! That's what the subject-verb looks like, that's what the pieces of the clause and the time phrase and the object and the other phrases feel like." Her approach greatly contrasts with, for example, that of the Chomskyan Tecumseh Fitch, whose simple grammatical experiment with tribe members does not go as anticipated, & he becomes frustrated that it confounds established theories. An openness to the unconventional is as necessary to the linguist as it is to the scientist, yet it is clear that even the most sensitive scholars allow a certain amount of cultural bias to cloud their perception of unfamiliar people.

Likewise it is disturbing that while those who study the Hi'aiti'ihi note the tribe's successful 200-year resistance to outside influences, they nevertheless persist in trying to inject bits of Western culture (examples: playing ipods to the villagers, attempting literacy classes, conducting experiments that require subjects to engage with a computer screen). Why not keep such things to a minimum rather than risk diluting the portrait of the tribe's unique characteristics?



The fascination with Pirahã continues, with Dan Everett analyzing additional data & conducting new studies even as experts in the field respond to his controversial theory that social forces can alter the structure of language. Peter Gordon's focus on the tribe's lack of a counting system, which led him to conclude in a 2003 article in Science that the Hi'aiti'ihi "cannot seem to entertain concepts of...other language[s]" has also spurred numerous debates. Many of these threads can be followed on the blog Language Log (simply google Pirahã + Language Log) & are a useful supplement to the New Yorker piece. Also, Dan Everett's personal website (http://www.llc.ilstu.edu/dlevere/) provides sources for supplemental news articles, photographs, & video clips on Pirahã.

the city of angele

rebuilding: it's about more than concrete

Ann Jones, who has written extensively on women's rights, spent four winters volunteering in Afghanistan after American president George Bush proclaimed that the country had been liberated from the Taliban & the women there had thrown off their burqas & gone back to school. What has come to be the familiar modus operandi of the United States--invade a nation about which we know little, fabricate its past, & issue outlandish propaganda about subsequent glorious improvement thanks to Westerners--is well documented in Winter in Kabul (Picador, 2006). Jones' clear-eyed, angry reportage is the appropriate & necessary response to what she witnesses in a country hamstrung by both its cultural traditions & a long stream of invaders who have contributed mightily toward its instability.



The book is divided into three sections: "In the Streets," "In the Prisons," & "In the Schools." The first details American insistence upon fighting communism in the 1980s by supplying & training Islamic militants; Jones (as others like Mahmood Mamdani, author of Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, & the Roots of Terror, have done) points out that most Islamic extremists & terrorists can be traced to the Afghan War. Hundreds of millions of dollars in aid went to the mujahidin during that time--$700 million alone in 1989--& in one of many instances of dirty deception, the U.S. paid Chinese manufacturers to make Soviet-style weaponry to cover up American involvement in the arms pipeline.

"In the Prisons" is an utterly maddening & wrenching account of victimhood. Jones visits the Welayat, where incarcerated women she at first mistakenly identifies as bundles of rags in the semi darkness huddle on the frigid floor of a common room. The guards sit on the two beds, yet are not that much better off than their wards--poorly paid, they await the visitors' gifts of raisins, soap, & wool sweaters with equal need. Through an interpreter named Zulal, who initially balked at the impropriety of going to a prison, Jones interviews the prisoners & quickly learns most have been charged with morality offenses. A typical case: a man ends his marriage by saying "I divorce you" three times to his wife; she later reweds. Husband #1 finds out about the second marriage & shows up with the police to charge the woman with bigamy. She's sentenced to eight years. Almost all of these "criminals" have been locked up for "illegal" marriage, for running away from domestic abuse, for being raped, or for being forced by family members into prostitution. When the author heads to the Ministry of Women's Affairs to seek legal support, she asks the lawyers there to go to the Welayat.

"Now the discussion was vigorous and firm. Zulal translated: 'They say they cannot look into these cases because these women are bad women.'
'Ask them what makes them think these women are bad.'
'They are criminals.'
'What makes them think they are criminals?'
'They are in prison.'
'Ask them if they will go to the Welayat just once.'
'No, they cannot go there.'
'Why not?'
'It is a prison.' "

In the section on schools, Jones recounts her experiences training high-school teachers in a country without the means to buy textbooks or construct schools, & in a city where receiving three hours of electricity is a lucky day indeed. She writes of earnest adult students with "old-fashioned idealism" who are "too young to remember what peace looked like, but they want to do something to help their country attain it." Soon, however, Jones is trying to get modest funding for her teaching program & pondering where all the much-ballyhooed U.S. aid is going. She grows increasingly aware of how the game typically works: the profit-making contractors connected to the U.S. government receive massive deals with little or no competitive bidding, & most of the money fails to reach the people it's earmarked to help. She calls it phantom aid & deplores how seventy percent of the time it's given with a capitalist catch--the recipient is required to purchase donor-made products with the money. Jones' request for twelve thousand dollars is repeatedly denied: as an acqaintance at USAID later explained, she made the mistake of asking for too little. Americans like big, they like profit, & they like to put up impressive concrete structures to show they're fixing a country. They're not so good at asking citizens themselves what their needs are, or sticking around to finish projects once the glamor of press releases & news stories has faded. "Foreign aid...seems to ordinary Afghans something that only foreigners enjoy, living like kings in their big houses, driving around in their big SUVs." In 2005 Laura Bush visited Afghanistan for six hours--yes, hours-- to assist women in their struggle for rights, then pledged $3.5 million...to an English-language prep school for the children of internationals.



After Winter in Kabul, yr. correspondent will next delve into another of Ann Jones' books, Looking for Lovedu (Vintage, 2002), which details her mission to locate a legendary matriarchal tribe in Africa said to live by the principles of tolerance, compassion, & peace.

spotlight: colum mccann

Colum McCann, born in 1965 in Dublin & owner of a degree from the University of Texas, has recently published Zoli (Random House, 2007), whose eponymous hero we meet in the 1930s after most of her family is murdered by Czechoslovakian fascists. Zoli's surviving grandfather teaches her to read & write, an extremely rare skill among Gypsies, who consider it a gadje (outsider) practice. The girl becomes a poet when she grows up; however, her own culture clashes greatly with her unasked-for role as poster child for socialism, & she is banished from her kumpanija (group of caravans).



McCann is the author of half a dozen works of fiction, including the masterful This Side of Brightness (1998), Everything in This Country Must (2001), & Fishing the Sloe-Black River (Picador, reprint edition 2004). He frequently makes use of actual people & events as the genesis for his fiction: in This Side of Brightness, three sandhogs working in subway construction are shot "like a spat cherry stone" out of a pressurized tunnel deep beneath the East River, through the riverbed & into the air on a geyser of water. As improbable as this sounds, it's a precise echo of what happened one day in Manahattan in 1916.

In an interview today with Michael Silverblatt on KCRW's "Bookworm," McCann recalled how the character of Zoli came to him. His wife was reading Bury Me Standing, Isabel Fonseca's 1996 account of modern-day Roma in Eastern Europe, & in the front of the book was a photo of Papusza, the exiled Gypsy poet. After Dancer, his fictionalized account of the life of Rudolf Nureyev, McCann was hoping to write a novel that was light on research. But the woman in the photograph grabbed McCann "& wouldn't let go." Papusza, a Polish Gypsy named Bronislawa Wajs, was beaten as a child whenever she was discovered reading, yet she persisted. Like the character Swann in Zoli, a gadjo poet named Jerzy Ficowski "discovered" the adult Papusza & convinced her to write down her songs so that they could be shared with the mainstream culture; the Polish government also used her as part of their effort to settle the Romani in housing estates. Naturally, Papusza & the fictional Zoli were viewed as traitors by their own people.

"I think it's a book about the human heart in conflict with power and power structures," said McCann, adding that the Polish regime would drop leaflets from airplanes urging citizens of Gypsy origins to join them--that is, to give up their nomadic way of life--and that it ordered that the wooden wheels of the beautiful caravans be sawed off as part of the resettlement campaign. Zoli's kumpanija no longer spoke her name after her exile; ironically, she then wandered about the countryside, somehow managing to survive extreme depredation with only occasional help from kind strangers.



An excerpt from "Tears of Blood," written by Papusza about the suffering of Gypsies under the Germans in 1943-1944:

When big winter comes,
what will the Gypsy woman with a small child do?
Where will she find clothing?
Everything is turning to rags.
One wants to die.
No one knows, only the sky,
only the river hears our lament.
Whose eyes saw us as enemies?
Whose mouth cursed us?
Do not hear them, God.
Hear us!
A cold night came,
the old Gypsy woman sang
a Gypsy fairy tale:
Golden winter will come,
snow, like little stars,
will cover the earth, the hands.
The black eyes will freeze,
the hearts will die.

dorland's lad

"and our faces, my heart, brief as photos"

no retreat from violence

Books & bombs should never be mixed, yet here is today's sad news from Iraq (excerpt courtesy of the New York Times).


Suicide Bombing Kills 20 in Baghdad Book Market

By EDWARD WONG and WISSAM A. HABEEB
BAGHDAD, March 5 — The book market along Mutanabi Street was a throwback to the Baghdad of old, the days of students browsing for texts, turbaned clerics hunting down religious tomes and cafe intellectuals debating politics over backgammon.

Somehow it survived the war, until Monday, when a powerful suicide car bomb hit the market, slicing through the heart of the capital’s intellectual scene. It killed at least 20 people and wounded more than 65.

In the hours after the noontime explosion, books and stationery, some tied in charred bundles, littered the block. Plumes of black smoke billowed above ornate buildings dating to the Ottoman Empire. The storied Shahbandar cafe, where elderly writers puffed away the afternoon on water pipes, lay in ruins.

Firefighters unleashed powerful sprays of water, only to have flames reignite because the paper had been transformed into kindling.

This part of Baghdad dates back centuries, to the era when the Abbasid caliphate ruled over the Islamic world. On Monday, victims lacerated by shrapnel were carried over shards of glass to waiting ambulances.

“There are no Americans or Iraqi politicians here — there are only Iraqi intellectuals who represent themselves and their homeland, plus stationery and book dealers,” said Abdul Baqi Faidhullah, 61, a poet who frequently visits the street. “Those who did this are like savage machines intent on harvesting souls and killing all bright minds.”

The bombing was the latest of a half-dozen major blasts aimed at civilians in the capital in the three weeks since the Iraqi government and American military announced the start of a new Baghdad security drive. The number of gunshot killings attributed to sectarian death squads appears to have dropped as militia leaders have ordered their followers to lie low. But deadly bombings have continued with ferocity.

None of those bombings have had the symbolic resonance of the one on Mutanabi Street, the embodiment of Baghdad’s venerable intellectual history. Avid readers could find novels by the Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz and Newsweek magazines from the 1960s. Merchants often spread their wares out on the sidewalk, down the block from a building used for administration by Ottoman-era officials and, after World War I, British colonial officers.

Religious texts, particularly on Shiite ideology, began to appear after the toppling of Saddam Hussein, who had banned them from markets across Baghdad. The conversations at the Shahbandar cafe blossomed into free expressions of political opinion. The cafe became popular with foreign reporters seeking comments from Iraqi intellectuals on the changes roiling Iraqi society.

But commerce along Mutanabi Street began to decline last summer after the Iraqi government imposed a citywide curfew every Friday for security reasons, making it tough to get to Mutanabi on its traditional market day.

The bombing on Monday shattered hopes for a rebirth. An Iraqi colonel on the scene said the suicide car bomb, which was loaded with gas cylinders, had left a crater more than 9 feet deep in the middle of the street. At least 20 cars were set ablaze.

“Those terrorists do not represent Islam,” said Wissam Arif, 45, an engineer and eager browser of the book market. “They are fighting science. They hate the light of science and scientists. Haven’t they killed hundreds of prophets and intellectuals?

“Yesterday they killed the prophets and today they are killing the books. But hopefully the just, the science and the light will win. We’ll be patient until we achieve victory.”

There are fewer and fewer public spaces where one can retreat from the violence of Baghdad. An animal market nearby has been bombed three times. Parks where couples once embraced are now empty of life because people are afraid to leave their homes. Some renowned restaurants have shut down and reopened in Amman, Jordan, a city brimming with Iraqi refugees.

Ahmad Fadam contributed reporting from Baghdad, and employees of The New York Times from Kirkuk and Baquba.

scoping the merchandise

Major art fairs hit Manhattan this past week, among them the long-established Art Dealers Association at the Seventh Regiment Armory and, well, The Armory Show at Pier 94. The L.A. Art fair in Chelsea featured California (& not just Los Angeles-based) artists. Those who wanted more of a focus on young &/or emerging artists headed to the giant white tent outside Lincoln Center for scope, at which sixty-five galleries peddled their wares.



Indeed the emphasis at art fairs is on commercialism, which is why P.S. 1 in Long Island City organized a counter exhibit, “Not for Sale” (now through April 16th), whose intriguing premise is to hang work by famous artists that is not available at any price. In an article this month in the New York Times, the director of P.S. 1, Alanna Heiss, explained that she’d wanted to do something to counter the frenzied art market; also, she feels the show will be a test of integrity, for it’s likely collectors will be interested in trying to acquire the nonofferings by artists like Robert Rauschenberg, Mark di Suvero & Maya Lin. “If you sell a work out of this show...[i]t’s your problem,” she warned. And if Richard Tuttle were to accept money for any of his contributions, he’ll be in trouble with more than one woman: the pieces in the show are gifts he made for his wife, poet Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge.



So while the fairs are very much about commerce—one commonly sees the artists’ names & titles pencilled on the walls over half-erased descriptions of work that buyers snapped up minutes before—it’s great fun just to go & look. At scope, where two men in silver spandex outside the entrance made one chuckle at the definition of general admission, painting & photography dominated. An older woman who’d battled the crowds earlier at The Armory Show asked, “Emerging artists—lots of video, then?” Nope—the emphasis these days continues to be on draftsmanship, & there’s a ton of varied talent out there. The Cuban duo El Soca & Fabian (Adrian Soca Beltran & Fabian Pena Diaz) met at the Instituto Superior de Arte & came to the United States in 2004; on display Saturday afternoon were three wineglasses, each with a delicate caramel-colored mosaic (a lip print, a World War II-era plane, & a pattern of barbed wire) made from crushed cockroach wings. The artists are also fond of using houseflies on canvas to create what appear at first to be gorgeous compositions in graphite.



A crimson dot accompanied every Mike Bayne piece—oil paintings of suburban houses done in an extremely realistic style heightened by their size: at 4 x 6 inches, the dimensions match those of a snapshot. The Ottawa-born artist says he works with Old Masters such as Vermeer in mind, & that he is continuing their tradition of using the camera as a tool for painting. Shannon Lucy, who lived in Halifax & Nashville before moving to Brooklyn, has been at work on a series of “Bad Thoughts”—No. 7 was a seductively beautiful musical score hand drawn in ink over which the words “I’m sorry” appeared in ragged red capital letters. Huge, boldly colored & futuristic canvases by Goetz Valien stopped people in their tracks: "To-Morrow," with its perhaps intentionally humorous throwback title, depicted a clean-lined building with two curved glass enclosures. In each a woman waited—it was unclear whether they were gazing at the dying golden light of the day or preparing for teleportation…or if the red dots above their head might be a wry commentary on the art world.

Yukiko Suto & Marcel Gahler are two of the many artists working small & in pencil. Suto’s love for nature manifests itself in pieces like “The Garden,” which seems very un-Japanese inasmuch as the plot of land depicted is lush & unruly, with tiny weeds beginning to spring up on the path. Gahler carries a camera during night walks & typically records foliage or the roofline of a building, then uses the photos as the source for his tiny (6 x 9 cm) drawings in graphite.



Numerous photographers showed strong work—among them April Tillman, Regina Verserius, & Esko Mannikko. Mannikko’s oddly cropped portraits of horses & geese were set off by lovely, thick frames that seemed to be flea-market finds. Although Verserius uses the decidedly modern ink-jet technique, her nudes, posed against dark backgrounds, hearkened to an era before the invention of electricity. But Yossi Milo gallery in New York took the crown for best stable of photographers: Loretta Lux, with her surreal headshots of children; Pieter Hugo’s portraits of honey collectors in Ghana & hyena handlers in Nigeria; & Sze Tsung Leong’s sweeping documents of China, the best of which captured a foggy maze of grey brick rooftops in Shanxi province.



Then there was the downright whimsical. A man ensconced in a cramped wooden house would, for two dollars inserted into a slot, fashion original art from Sculpey & bequeath it to the buyer on the dwelling’s outgoing tray. One came upon ipods decorated with plastic arabesques & incorporated into bright organic-looking blobs and asteroids cut away to reveal neatly ordered bedrooms. And Ma Jun’s enamelled television set done in the style of classical Chinese vases was at once hilarious & a technical marvel. All served as a reminder that despite the commercialism, a healthy spirit of fun persists at these fairs.

apradhis & apsaras

Sacred Games, a new novel by Vikram Chandra, is at once literary, cultural, and compelling thriller. At nine hundred pages in length, it could appear daunting to a bookstore browser contemplating her next purchase, but most readers will be quickly hooked on this fascinating tale of Bombay crime & police work, which opens with a white dog named Fluffy screaming as she is hurled out the window of an apartment complex.

Chandra’s portrayal of his two main characters is one of the biggest pleasures of the book. Sartaj Singh, a Sikh policeman who first appeared in “Kama,” a short story published in the New Yorker in 1997, is divorced, introspective, & incredibly savvy. Thrust into an investigation of the hugely powerful crime boss Ganesh Gaitonde, Singh considers himself too small a man for the job, yet before long is uncovering crucial evidence from sources as diverse as street urchins to Miss India. Alternating with the tough yet sensitive police officer’s determined legwork is Gaitonde’s narrative, in which he reveals his most private personal history. He details the killings, arms smuggling, political payoffs, & daily operations of his G Company, but also holds nothing back in other, more human areas: the humble origins he would like to forget, the overwhelming love he feels for his infant son, & even a growing spirituality. The ruthless gangster who is devoid of compassion for his endless supply of whores (most quite young & a good many of them virgins) is nevertheless a sympathetic individual due to Chandra’s skillful pen.

Sacred Games also contains a number of subordinate characters & stories that greatly broaden its scope. The widow of Sartaj Singh’s murdered partner struggles to raise her two sons on a limited income. A sheltered young girl witnesses the violence of Partition. A determined Moslem woman abandons her family with a brief note (“Don’t try to find me”) & comes to Bombay to be a film star. And Sartaj Singh himself may find love at last. An essential (yet unfortunately incomplete) glossary of terms appears at the back of the book: Vikram Chandra sprinkles Hindi, Bombay slang, Malayalam, Punjabi, Urdu, Sanskrit, Gujarati, Marathi, Bengali, Kashmiri, & even Konkami at a steady clip throughout. A warning: if you take on this amazing novel, you’ll find it’s impossible to resist learning & perhaps employing some of its excellent curse words.

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Baghdad Is Burning, created by an unidentified “girl blog from Iraq,” provides readers with an insider’s opinions on life in that occupied, chaotic country (see link above & at right). While the author tends to post sporadically, in recent days she has written about Sabrine al Janabi, a young woman who went public on Monday night with allegations that Iraqi security forces abducted & raped her. (An article also appears on the front page of today’s New York Times but, in keeping with that newspaper’s editorial policy, does not identify al Janabi.) Given that women in Iraq (& numerous other cultures) are generally shunned rather than nurtured if they’re victims of sexual assault, it is incredibly brave of this 20-year-old to describe her ordeal on television & to use her real name. The Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Kamal al Maliki, initially promised a full investigation; however, only hours later he issued a second statement that smeared the victim as a liar & a wanted criminal.

random journal excerpts

the bravest girl in yemen

Issue #3 of Wholphin, a quarterly DVD magazine of rare and unseen short films, is at newsstands & bookstores now. While it also features the early work of Alexander Payne & Dennis Hopper, it's the documentary by Khadija al-Salami that will stay with you. Born in 1966 & said to be Yemen's first female filmmaker, al-Salami escaped an arranged marriage at age eleven when she attempted suicide, after which her mother helped Khadija obtain a divorce. The girl who had been criticized throughout her childhood for a rebellious personality went on to find work at a local television station, which enabled her at sixteen to afford secondary education in the United States (she eventually received a master's degree in communications); she has since made approximately twenty documentaries. Family relatives who once opposed her now say she is a role model for their daughters.

So it is no surprise that al-Salami would immediately connect to a thirteen-year-old girl she spotted one day in the streets of their hometown, Sana'a. In an interview with McSweeney's, the director explains that while touring a group of French journalists around the old city as part of her job at the Yemeni embassy in Paris, she noticed Nejmia, an unveiled teenager who freely roamed & played with the boys in the neighborhood. "Fortunately, I had my camera with me and started shooting spontaneously," al-Salami recalled. The result is "A Stranger in Her Own Country" (2005). At the beginning of the 29-minute chronicle, the filmmaker observes (in voiceover) that it is only in the last fifteen years that her city has taken on an austere air: the glittering dresses of the women have been replaced with "phantoms"--figures covered in black from head to foot. Although this is persistently cited as Moslem tradition, the veil actually dates from the Byzantine era & is not a creation of Islam, she says.

Nejmia, ponytailed, bright eyed & with an impish smile, says of her veiled compatriots, "They're crazy. I like fresh air." The film director follows the girl as she rides a bicycle (unheard of for a girl in al-Salami's day, & clearly unusual in the 21st century as well), plays soccer & field hockey, & fends off a continuous stream of insults from strangers with clever, bold comebacks. "Put on your veil," a man hisses as he slides past. "It's none of your business, you fundamentalist!" Nejmia shoots back with a confident grin. Joking aggression is the order of the day: after kidding good-naturedly with her, three men in a large group lounging on a street corner describe the particular methods they'd use to tie up Nejmia if she were their sister, including hanging her from her feet with an electrical cord. One of them asserts that women are a disgrace & "flawed from start to finish." Nejmia scores the winner, though: "Why don't you all get jobs? Why are you hanging out here day after day?" And like everyone who knows her, the men laugh--despite themselves, they admire her. In fact, one of the most heartening moments occurs when the imam of the Great Mosque appears on camera. Putting an affectionate arm around Nejmia, he declares, "This girl is the smartest in the neighborhood! She is worth five boys!" The imam does not interpret Islamic teachings to mean that women are the inferior gender. "Let her play," he says with kind authority, planting a kiss on the girl's forehead.

Seven months after the documentary was shot, Nejmia's father put a stop to the girl's education & ordered her to wear the veil. A year later, "A Stranger in Her Own Country" won the grand prize at the Beirut Film Festival. The president of Yemen heard the news & asked al-Salami to show him the film, after which he offered to pay for Nejmia's schooling. The girl went back to the classroom, & in November 2006 some Wholphin subscribers, similarly inspired by this courageous portrait, started a college fund for Nejmia (contact acquaintance@wholphindvd.com for more information).

Khadija al-Salami has since filmed the story of Amina al-Tuhaif, who was sentenced to death in 1999 after being unfairly convicted at the age of fourteen for murdering her husband, whom she'd been forced to marry two years before. She has been imprisoned for nine years. When "Amina" was screened at the Dubai 3rd international film festival last year, the place was mobbed, & hundreds of attendees could not get tickets.

hepimiz hrant dink'iz

Hrant Dink, writer and editor of the bilingual newspaper Agos, was shot at close range & died in the street outside his office in Istanbul on January 19th. Identified by his father, who saw a video taken at the scene of the crime, 17-year-old Ogun Samast has confessed to the murder & says he is not sorry he did it. That a teenager would kill a man he'd never met can be attributed in part to Article 301 of the Turkish penal code, the first clause of which declares "A person who publicly denigrates Turkishness, the Republic, or the Grand National Assembly of Turkey shall be punishable by imprisonment of between six months and three years." Or it can get you three bullets to the neck.

Like a number of prominent literary figures in Turkey, Hrant Dink was brought to court for ostensibly violating Article 301. At a human-rights conference in 2002, he objected to his country's national anthem, particularly the line "Please smile upon my heroic race"--for as an Armenian minority, Dink felt the emphasis on race to be discriminatory. Although he was acquitted, he & four other journalists were later charged for having penned criticism of the decision to ban a 2005 academic conference on the mass killings of Armenians in 1915. To say that Turkey does not recognize the Armenian genocide is a huge understatement; it has spent considerable energy denying that a systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing occurred & maintains that the 1.5 million Armenians who died were "one of the tragic consequences of war." The United States considers Turkey an ally & therefore does not use the word genocide to describe the horrors perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire in the early part of the last century; twice the Bush administration has disavowed resolutions on this issue.

In Turkey, over sixty cases--most concerning the Armenian genocide--have been filed against writers, activists, & journalists, the most prominent of which is that of Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk, author of "Istanbul" (Knopf, 2005) and "Snow" (Knopf, 2004). In 2005 Pamuk was retroactively indicted for remarks made in "Das Magazin," a Swiss weekly supplement: "Thirty thousand Kurds and one million Armenians were killed in these lands [Turkey] and nobody dares talk about it," he said. (Four months later, Article 301 was adopted by the Turkish government.) Publisher Ragip Zarakolu found trouble by printing "objectionable" books, including George Jerjian's "History Will Free All of Us: Turkish-Armenian Reconciliation." This week's New York Times Book Review (which went to press before Hrant Dink's murder) contains a feature on Elif Shafak's novel, "The Bastard of Istanbul" (Viking, 2007), which "recently led to a suit by the right-wing attorney Kemal Kerincsiz, who declared that Shafak's Armenian characters were 'insulting Turkishness' by referring to the 'millions' of Armenians 'massacred' by 'Turkish butchers' who 'then contentedly denied it all.'" According to the Times, Kerincsiz opposes Turkey's bid to join the European Union and is well aware that applying his country's censorship laws helps his cause. The Times reviewer, Lorraine Adams, presciently remarked that in comparison to Pamuk & Shafak, "there has been decidedly less clamor about the suits brought against Turkish-Armenian journalists."

With Hrant Dink's death, however, that is no longer the case. An estimated 100,000 mourners (the Turkish newspaper Hurriyet put the figure at "possibly up to 200,000") turned out for the funeral procession on Tuesday, many carrying placards that read "We are all Hrant Dink" and "We are all Armenians." Archbishop Mesrob Mutafayan, who spoke during the service, noted "It is mystical that [Dink's] funeral turned into an occasion where Armenian and Turkish officials gathered together." The New York Times also quoted the archbishop of the Armenian Church of America as saying that Dink's "soul will be in peace when he sees that his assassination created some positive steps between two countries." Certainly the emotional outpouring of Turkish citizens in response to the murder of their fellow patriot is an encouraging development; however, the sinister nature of nationalism continues to fester. Six additional suspects have been brought into custody in recent days, and one of them, Yasin Hayal (a militant convicted in 2004 for bombing a McDonald's), chillingly yelled, "Orhan Pamuk needs to wise up!" as he was being led by police into a courtroom in Istanbul.

elegies, haiku, & pork

A stellar duo of writers showed up at the Strand bookstore in New York City Thursday night. Colson Whitehead & Kevin Young, former Harvard classmates who have already published nine books between them, read from their latest work to a packed room. Young, whose just-issued poetry collection, "For the Confederate Dead" (Knopf, 2007) references the famous "For the Union Dead," explained to the crowd that his middle name is Lowell & that he'd always intended to address this via writing one day. The book contains elegies to Gwendolyn Brooks, Phyllis Wheatley, & Young's friend & author Philippe Wamba, who died in an automobile accident in Kenya at age 31; "April in Paris" describes Lionel Hampton's last weekend in concert in Paris. Young started off, however, with a black binder that held new poems such as "Ode to Pork" & "I Walk the Line" (of the latter he complained, "The trouble with movies is that they often steal the best lines"). The poet's trademarked wordplay did not take long to surface: "I am the African-American sheep in the family," he intoned in mock seriousness during one piece.

Colson Whitehead, lean, tall, & severe while Young is plump, of average height, & given to frequent smiles, nevertheless opened with a dryly hilarious essay proposing an alternate use for the Empire State Building: storage for all the fiction writers, with demarcated floors for realists, those undergoing a sophomore slump, & huge successes like John Grisham. "A loud alarm goes off every couple of hours or so to warn you when someone starts a new literary journal," he read. And the poets? They're in Madison Square Garden--"where else would they all fit?" "Apex Hides the Hurt" (Doubleday, 2006; Anchor paperback, 2007), Whitehead's third novel, tells the story of a nomenclature consultant--one who can create the perfect name for a product--& is composed of clipped, clever sentences that expertly reflect its protagonist. He (ironically unidentified throughout) is hired to settle a dispute in a Midwestern town called Winthrop. Is the name good enough, or should it be changed to New Prospera (as suggested by a white software tycoon) or revert to the original Freedom, chosen by the former slaves who founded the town?

In the question & answer session that followed the reading, the authors spoke on topics ranging from inspiration to adaptation (Young's "Black Maria" is being staged, & Whitehead's "The Intuitionist" has been optioned "several times, but no one's been able to figure out how to film it yet"), but they also gently elbowed each other as encouragement to share personal reminiscences, a number of which ended with "and then we got drunk." Finally, a big revelation: Colson Whitehead composes haiku. At the audience's request, he grinned slightly & recited one about... "Little House on the Prairie."

boatyard suite

numas then & now

Happy new year to all who adhere to the Gregorian calendar. Celebrating in January is a relatively recent tradition; the ancient Roman calendar consisted of only ten months with the year starting March 1st, which is why the Latin roots of November & December, the last months of the year in our modern method of timekeeping, mean ninth & tenth, respectively. Numa Pompilius, the second king of Rome, added the months of January & February around 700 B.C., & under Julius Caesar’s reign the new year moved from March to January. Many folks still celebrate in March, however: in Iran, norouz (“new day”) occurs at the moment of the vernal equinox & marks the beginning of twelve days of festivities—there is much visiting among families & friends, and of course a lot of food. Although norouz is a traditional Iranian holiday, it is also observed in many other countries, including India, Afghanistan, Iraq, Albania, Azerbaijan, Turkey, & Kazakhstan.

Being a Westerner, I went to a new year’s eve party December 31st, & found myself in a charmingly appointed house formerly owned by a sea captain. The guests sat talking in an intimate, lively circle, & welcomed a newcomer. Suddenly our host announced it was time for everyone to practice the numa numa dance; while I was trying to decipher this odd order she rushed over to her laptop & called up youtube—specifically a video in which a doughy white man has recorded himself lipsynching & gesticulating to a pop song. These forms of self-expression can be highly entertaining (even if vapid; & I did admire the large fellow’s eyebrow control); however, with much of our everyday lives inundated with various electronic input, the times we gather with friends should be an opportunity to put aside the gadgetry & do some old-fashioned listening. To learn more about these real human beings who are beside us during this temporary, precious life.

Needless to say, everyone but yr. correspondent enthusiastically obeyed the injunction to imitate the numa numa moves. On these occasions I always hope to convey my enjoyment while simultaneously holding firm to my conviction to not follow the crowd. A few days later it was gratifying to discover an article by anthropologist & essayist Roger Sandall on the subject of herd mentality (view the entire piece at http://www.culturecult.com/sandall_dec06.htm).

“I once attended an event at the Sydney Opera House where some 2500 people had gathered. A Danish percussion group were performing and they wanted the crowd to participate. Their leader stood and gave orders—clap, shout, stand, pat your knees—and 2500 men and women obeyed his commands. I myself declined to take part, but the elderly woman beside me, with shining eyes, followed every movement as though she had been waiting eighty years for instructions. She would have stood on her head if they asked.”

The audience behavior Sandall witnessed is far from uncommon: it happens at sporting events, where adult fans gladly pound out primitive rhythms on command or repeat simple, shouted phrases suitable for kindergartners; & it also occurs in corporate meetings, where it seems to take on more sinister overtones. So for this new year, consider stepping outside the herd sometime. But not because I told you so.

happy birthday to the prestidigitator

Hope everyone is having a fine holiday season with loads of good treats. An exciting recent discovery: James & Kay Salter's "Life Is Meals" (Knopf). Set in diary form, with each day detailing anything from the history of the fig to anecdotes & favorite recipes from the authors' frequent & convivial dinner parties, the book is a pleasure to dip into anytime. It's got exquisite illustrations & a different type color for each month, too. A great choice for your hungry friends.

Since I'm sending this short post from the library, I thought it a wise idea to verify the spelling of today's title, so I walked over to the podium that holds the fat second edition of "Webster's." Rather magically, it was already open to page 1958, where one will find, among other offerings, the word "prestidigitator."

what is the what

Here is the book you should read now: “What Is the What” (McSweeney’s, 2006). Billed as a fictionalized memoir, it’s a collaboration between Dave Eggers, the writer who first achieved fame with “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,” & Valentino Achak Deng, a Christian Sudanese who became one of the Lost Boys when civil war broke out in his country. Arab militiamen on horseback raided Marial Bai, Deng’s small village, when the boy was approximately six years old; he & his mother were boiling water over a simple fire when the ominous rumble of hoofbeats vibrated the bare earth. “This is the end,” my mother said. “They mean to kill us all. Achak I am so sorry. But we will not make it through this day.”

Separated from his mother during the invasion, Deng hid as the marauders burned & murdered, then set out on foot, eventually joining a group of uprooted boys & young men headed toward Ethiopia. After a journey fraught with nearly unfathomable perils & gruesome sights, Deng & the other survivors make it across the Gilo River, only to find it is not the paradise they’d been imagining. “I looked at the land. It looked exactly like the other side of the river, the side that was Sudan, the side we left. There were no homes. There were no medical facilities. No food. No water for drinking. … We are not in Ethiopia, I thought. This is not that place.”

Deng would spend three years in that place, & a decade in Kakuma, another refugee camp in Kenya. “There is a presumption in the West that refugee camps are temporary,” says Deng. “What Is the What” debunks this misconception & shows what life is like in such camps, detailing everything from methods for survival to how a boy might approach a girl for a date. Interspersed with the lengthy saga of hardship in Africa are the narrator’s experiences in the United States, where he is granted relocation on September 9, 2001. While the U.S. provides more than Deng could have dreamed of, it is far from perfect: the book begins as he is being robbed & battered by a couple of thugs in his Atlanta apartment. His goal of college remains elusive as he works a series of menial jobs; he frequently holds silent conversations with, for example, the members of a gym in which he mans the front desk. “Do you have any idea? Can you imagine this?” he longs to say to their seemingly carefree faces as he swipes their cards.

Although Eggers spent countless hours interviewing Deng & published several excerpts (in different form) in “The Believer,” he ultimately left himself out of the full-length version & tells it from the Sudanese man’s point of view, which gives “What Is the What” unsurpassed emotional depth. It may seem risky for a white American to inhabit the voice of a Dinka refugee, but Eggers wholly succeeds in taking the reader inside the mind of one who has been marked by the two sides of humanity’s conflicted coin: its savagery & its selflessness. Proceeds from the book will go to the Valentino Achak Deng Foundation (www.valentinoachakdeng.com), whose aim is to fund other Sudanese refugees in the U.S. as well as to help rebuild Southern Sudan.

art studs & pencil stubs

This morning's read: #17 in Chris Ware's Acme Novelty Library series, featuring no-luck bucktoothed Rusty Brown, secret superhero & possessor of a disturbing helmet of red hair. Ware, I've determined, is the Michelangelo of the "joli laid": homely characters who are at the same time beautiful & the essence of human. It's still snowing in this issue (part two of Rusty's story) & the school bullies continue to carry out their time-worn tricks with expert unctuousness. Ware gives us classroom scenes in blue, black, ochre, & olive--one can practically smell the canned peas & the tyranny--& includes himself as a prominent figure: Mr. Ware, art teacher. The creator of Jimmy Corrigan & "Building Stories" (which ran this year in the New York Times Magazine) seems to be endlessly uncertain of his own joli-laid status, yet in this latest Acme graphic novel, new & cute girl Alice White, besieged by indigestion, sequesters herself in a bathroom stall & spots a bit of graffiti (printed in a neat hand suspiciously similar to the artist's) above the toilet paper on an otherwise blank wall. "Mr. Ware is a stud." The sequence of panels is classic Chris Ware: clever, self-referential, layered, funny, & melancholy all at once. As for his implied question, well, if I had such an inventive, profound body of work to my name, I'd be feeling pretty studly indeed.

on zitting cisticolas & spotted pardalotes

Field guides rank high on my list of life’s excellent things. You can open them anytime & discover a creature new to you; transport yourself to another world by, say, reading about flora typical of wetlands in the Indus valley in Pakistan; or simply confirm the identity of a visitor to your back-yard feeder. And if you’re fond of words, well, there’s an abundant supply of specialized vocabulary & downright good names in books about insects, mushrooms, or tropical fish. All this & plenty of illustrations, too—what’s not to love?

Peterson’s guides have long been the standard, & deservedly so; you can’t go wrong spending part of your paycheck on any volume in that series. The huge popularity of birding means more bookstore shelf space devoted to the subject than ever before, & in the interest of keeping today’s post a manageable size, I’ll mention several notable entrants in the wing & beak category.

National Geographic’s “Field Guide to the Birds of North America” has been the one I reach for most often, & the fifth edition, published earlier this year, contains 967 species. The familiar northern cardinal & American robin are here, of course, but so too is the tawny-shouldered blackbird, an accidental sighted in Key West back in 1936. In other words, if you’ve got out your binoculars in the United States, whatever you encounter is going to be in this book. The plates are lovely—more than once I’ve turned to the index for the name of the artist (Cynthia J. House paints ducks stunningly; H. Douglas Pratt & Diane Pierce are great with songbirds). Indexes of bird families & species on the cover flaps allow you to quickly locate the sections on woodpeckers, hawks, or warblers.

Princeton University Press rocks. I own “Birds of Australia” & “Birds of Kenya and Northern Tanzania,” but I’d gladly make room for a dozen more titles. While the illustrations may not be as consistently fine as National Geographic’s, nearly a third of “Birds of Australia” is given over to “The Handbook,” highly readable notes on behavior, nests, courtship, breeding, & migration. There you’ll learn that lorikeets have specialized brush-tipped tongues for collecting nectar or see the diving sequence of the azure kingfisher. Australia’s geographic location means it has loads of endemic species (12 types of fairywrens & 41 kinds of honeyeaters alone), which are indicated by an E in the field information opposite the plates. As with the Australian guide, when you flip through “Birds of Kenya” you’ll be treated to a host of avian wonders. Wattle-eyes & batises, leaf-loves & bristlebills, widowbirds & whydahs—no wonder birds find their way into poems so often. I particularly delight in the pages depicting what must be a gerund-crazed species, the cisticola. Besides the singing & the whistling varieties, there are also the trilling, rattling, croaking, winding, siffling, wing-snapping, & zitting cisticolas.

Another Princeton offering is “Finches and Sparrows” (1999), which is concentrated beauty, since it focusses on two of the most colorful & attractive bird families. Every plate is dazzling, &, as is expected from this press, the notes are excellent. Spend an hour of two in the company of red-eared firetails, dusky twinspots, & magpie mannikins—you’ll be glad you did.
Although I tend to prefer guides that feature artists’ renderings, the quality of photography has risen impressively in recent years, & “The Shorebird Guide” (Turtleback, 2006) is astonishing in this regard. Its extensive detailing of the seasonal changes within a species—juvenile, breeding, or molting birds can appear quite different from each other—is essential information, but the full-page portraits that occur throughout the volume are gorgeous. I marvel that we are on the same planet as these birds.

hommage a tasilo ribischka

New Directions Publishing celebrated its 70th anniversary Tuesday evening at Housing Works Used Books Café in SoHo, & some of the talk centered around whether poet Nathaniel Mackey (“Splay Anthem”) would win a National Book Award the following night. The party was also an occasion to show off a beautifully illustrated tribute to ND Founder James Laughlin, who died in 1997 at the age of 83. “The Way It Wasn’t” is packed with photographs, letters, & ephemera of a man who, at the advice of Ezra Pound, became “something useful”—a publisher. At twenty-two Laughlin started New Directions with funds from his father—the family had made its fortune in steel—and went on to amass a list of some of the most important Modernists as well as brought numerous works in translation to American audiences. Pound, Vladimir Nabokov, Tennessee Williams, Jorge Luis Borges, Djuna Barnes, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry Miller, William Carlos Williams, Pablo Neruda, Yukio Mishima, Dylan Thomas…the lineup of authors almost defies belief. In addition to its amazing backlist, the small press continues to unearth a host of original voices: W.G. Sebald, Javier Marias, Forrest Gander, Dunya Mikhail, Kamau Brathwaite, Robert Bolano, Susan Howe, & Yoko Tawada, to name a few.

Which brings us to Nathaniel Mackey. “We knew it was a longshot,” recalled Jeffrey Yang, Poetry Editor at ND, “but we also had a slight hope because of the panel.” Several judges were fans of Mackey’s work, he said; still, the National Book Award traditionally has gone to the most famous author in the group of finalists. “Jean Valentine [who won in 2004] was a surprise, but when I look at the list of past winners, it’s all big names.” Nathaniel Mackey is not only not a big name, but, Yang explained, "was unread by most of the poetry establishment, and was for many years published by City Lights and now-defunct Sun & Moon press and belonged to a group of innovative writers who kind of kept each other going—no one like him since maybe William Carlos Williams ever won before."

Yang, Barbara Epler (Editor in Chief at ND), & Mackey rode up the glass elevators in the Marriott Marquis Hotel to last night’s ceremony, described in the New York Times as “a splashy event drawing many of the most prominent names in the book publishing industry.” “We barely knew anyone from the enormous publishing houses,” Yang said, laughing infectiously. In fact, ND usually doesn’t nominate its authors for National Book Awards because of the expense—$250 for the entry fee, & an obligatory $1,000 for publicity if an author is shortlisted. In a world in which independent presses generally struggle to survive, this is one more way in which the scales are weighted in favor of big corporations.

But at this black-tie affair, the little guy would triumph. When Nathaniel Mackey’s name was announced, “Barbara & I jumped up & yelled, ‘Whoooo-hoooo!’ Nate was totally taken aback,” recounted Yang. Those at the Norton table (which the ND people shared, saving on the cost of seats) all stood up applauding, with Adrienne Rich (winner of one of the evening’s two lifetime achievement awards) leading the tribute.

When asked what it will all mean for New Directions, Jeffrey Yang said, “It will affect sales for sure. It will certainly affect Mackey—already people have called requesting interviews. It’s a well-thought-out book, & more people are now going to find out who he is. We’re just so happy.” The press today placed an order for an additional print run of 6,000 copies of “Splay Anthem.”

political turnaround & readers' poll

With Jim Webb’s victory in the Virginia Senate race, the Democratic Party now controls the two houses of Congress. Donald Rumsfeld is gone. Rick Santorum has been soundly spanked. We have a female speaker-elect in Nancy Pelosi & even a Moslem from Minnesota joining the House of Representatives. The loss of Republican power is largely due to voters’ reactions to the violence & mess in Iraq, & I am hoping for an end to the American invasion in the near future. Nevertheless, it’s impossible to change the stark fact of the dead & maimed soldiers sacrificed by both countries.

The war has been the obvious focus of these midterm elections, but one of the most heartening developments reported in today’s New York Times is that Senator Barbara Boxer, a liberal from California, will likely take over the Environment and Public Works Committee, replacing Senator James M. Inhofe (R-Oklahoma), who has denied the existence of global warming. “He thinks global warming is a hoax and I think it is the challenge of our generation,” Boxer was quoted as saying. “We have to move on it.” I couldn’t agree more.

Although I have not read David McCullough’s biography of John Adams (Simon & Schuster, 2001), I’m going to recommend it during these times to anyone interested in a genuine American hero. My dad, who has had his nose in the book for the past week or so, pretty much finds a way to admiringly mention the second President of the United States in every conversation lately, & is indignant that no Washington monument honors the man.

Clearheaded, hardworking, and fluent in French at a time when such an asset was crucial, Adams also had integrity, a quality we almost expect to be missing from present-day politicians (and often find lacking in figures from the past, if we delve deeper than the school textbooks). He tirelessly pushed for the Declaration of Independence when the colonies weren’t ready for it: McCullough writes that “It was John Adams, more than anyone, who had made it happen.” My dad, however, might be more impressed by accounts of less-important events that illustrate Adams’ character, like the time a fire broke out in the Treasury Building & the President immediately ran over & joined the bucket brigade. Or how, unlike materialistic Thomas Jefferson, John Adams was never extravagant. Sunday dinners in Quincy were “plentiful but modest.” Clearly this was not a guy who’d spend $90,000 of state funds on limousine service for his wife if he were alive today. When his presidential term ended, Adams left Washington with no fanfare & took a public stagecoach home to his farm in Massachusetts.

Being able to talk to my family about books is a great & fortunate pleasure—which leads me to pose a question to those of you checking out this blog: do your parents like to read, & if so, what’s on their bookshelves & nightstands? What fiction (or essay, or graphic novel) has your dad or mom mentioned lately? I’d like to hear about it.

the heft of a hardback

Several handsome new volumes of the Everyman's Library are being released in time for the gift-giving season, including collections of Alice Munro, Roald Dahl, & Joan Didion. So either buy one for a friend, or hint without shame about your own wish list. Alice Munro is probably the best short-story writer you're likely to come across, & this month it's a double treat, because "The View from Castle Rock: Stories" (Knopf) hits the shelves tomorrow as well. As for Dahl, I not only loved his children's books, but had a worn copy of his adult tales when I was a kid, & read it more times than I can count. (If he, Edgar Allen Poe, & Paul Auster could have a dinner party together, I'd sure like to hear that conversation.) Publishing Joan Didion's nonfiction in a single volume ("We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction") is a fine idea; it's a book I'd recommend without hesitation. Plus there's that irresistible ribbon bookmark in each Everyman tome. Given that I'm in the mood to reread "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" & am always thinking about California when winter approaches, photographs taken in Los Angeles will illustrate today's entry.
An update on Eden, for those of you who checked the Jonah House site & might not have seen the news in small type: her charges were dismissed last Friday.

book report #1

Last evening Nell Freudenberger returned to Three Lives & Co. (my favorite bookstore on Earth) to read from her new novel, The Dissident. Her debut book, a fine collection of stories called Lucky Girls, immediately established the young writer’s lively intelligence and understated wit, & I am happy to report that her sophomore offering is even better. Freudenberger said she was “glad to have the chance to spend three years with these characters,” as opposed to undertaking the quicker process of composing a short story.

The dissident is Yuan Zhao, an experimental Chinese artist who has accepted a yearlong residency in Los Angeles, where he will teach art to private-school girls & live with a wealthy family whose dysfunction becomes quickly evident. Freudenberger’s skill is that she’s equally at home describing illegal performance art in the hutongs of Beijing as she is revealing the self-aware inner workings of overprivileged yet dissatisfied Americans. I never like being given too much information about a book before reading it myself, so I will limit this to the briefest of summaries—& add that you, too, will be grabbed by the tale. “Just one more chapter,” you’ll promise yourself as the clock approaches two a.m., “I just want to see what happens next.”

You know how, if you run into a friend you haven’t seen for a couple of years, you want to be able to give a compelling answer to “So, what’s new with you?” Well, Nell Freudenberger is the kind of cool girl who can. Since she last visited Three Lives (where, as it happens, she had the first reading of her career), she’s travelled to Asia, won a Whiting Writers’ Award, & started learning Chinese. And, of course, given us The Dissident. Go & get yourself a copy.

reassessing the concept of legal

Instead of posting about little, perhaps mundane things, I'm going to give over today's entry to my friend Eden, who joined Jonah House this year (see their website, www.jonahhouse.org, to learn what they're all about). When she's not working with goats, llamas, & other barnyard animals, or clearing brush, or getting herself dirty in a variety of ways, Eden has been writing dispatches about her experiences. Her latest missive, however, details why she may soon be incarcerated for nonviolent protest. Often we hear the phrase "radical activist" to refer to people like Eden, but it is of course the U.S. government that perpetrates radical actions every hour of the day. Since Eden's own words best tell the story, here she is:



I'm preparing for my trial this Friday. I'm hoping that you all will think good thoughts about me and keep me in your prayers, whatever form those prayers may take. If you want to go have a few stiff drinks for me, I totally accept and affirm that type of support. I know some of you are worried that I'm gonna go to jail. I won't say that I'm not worried--I mean, who wants to go to jail? No one I've ever met. I don't know if this will help, but here's what I'm thinking about the whole deal.

On August 9th, I was part of an action at the Pentagon. We were there to remember the victims of the atomic bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki on that day in 1945, and to witness against the U.S.'s continued slaughter of people around the world. Instead of standing in the fenced-in area some call the free speech zone, five of us walked up onto a pedestrian bridge that Pentagon employees use to go in to work. We all did slightly different things--whatever we felt moved to do. I was holding an enlarged picture of the devastated city, and I knelt on the bridge in silent prayer. I was off to the side, not blocking traffic. I held up the picture so that people entering the Pentagon could see it and maybe give a thought to the real effects of war, while I asked forgiveness for the ways in which I am also responsible for economic violence and war. Because as an American, as one of the richest and most privileged folks in the world, I directly profit from the suffering and death of people in other countries as well as the suffering and death of poor people in my own country.

We were there about five or ten minutes before Pentagon police arrested us. They cuffed, searched, and detained us for several hours for processing. We were charged with "failure to obey a lawful order" (that order was "move"), and we'll appear in federal court on November 3rd to answer to those charges.

Others in our community have already been sentenced for similar actions at the Pentagon--basically all just holding signs, praying in silence, etc. Susan got thirty days; Betsy Lamb got twenty. It's hard to believe (even for me, and I'm pretty jaded about the state of democracy in the U.S.) that a person can get sent to jail for a month for a nonviolent protest. Nobody knows what the outcome of our trial will be. The maximum sentence for our charge is six months, so it's possible (though very very unlikely) that we'll get six months. Folks around here are guessing about ten days for me, though I could get more or less--or nothing at all. What it seems to depend on is how the judge is feeling about us personally that day.

It sucks that we've lost our basic First Amendment rights, though it's important to remember that most of us never really had them. Only the richest and whitest among us could ever claim those rights as our own. I don't want to go to jail, but I don't regret my presence at the Pentagon that day.I would do it again, and I will do it again. I live in a country where my government jails people who dissent. That sucks--but my response is not to be silent because my protest is illegal. I refuse to recognize these unjust laws.

Liz, who lives here at Jonah House, said this once in an interview: “You can make it legal, but you can never make it right. Slavery was legal, as was the genocide against native peoples in this country. It was all legal; the devastation of our earth for profit; it's all legal. The research, the development, the construction, deployment and use of weapons of mass destruction; it's all legal, as is the massacre of Iraq.
 
"So if they blow up the world, and when they cut down the last tree, it's all going to be legal. What does that say to our attitude toward the law? The more lawless this government becomes, the more it prosecutes lawbreakers and the longer it sends them away to worse and worse prison situations."

I'm not going to have a lawyer; my codefendants and I will represent ourselves. I plan to plead "no lo contendre," or "no contest." That means I neither accept nor deny the charges against me. I don't feel comfortable saying I'm "guilty" or "not guilty," because I'm not thinking in those terms. Yes, I knelt in front of the Pentagon on August 9th, holding a picture of a devastated Nagasaki. But that doesn't make me guilty of anything, and no one can force me to say it does. Some judges won't accept a nolo plea, and if my judge won't accept it I'll plead not guilty. People do and say different things during their trials; some remain silent in protest. I'm not really making any plans about it--I just want to go in feeling calm, strong, and willing to deal with the whole experience in a loving and honest way. The judges can be pretty nasty, I hear, so I want to be prepared for that and feel okay about it.

"The judge is gonna hurt your feelings," Susan told me. I was feeling brash at that moment, so I was all, "She can't hurt my feelings! I have to let her do that. She can say whatever she wants to me, but she can only hurt me if I let her." We'll see how that goes. I'm talking tough, but I fully expect to start crying when they start yelling at me. I'm kind of a wimp that way. Anyway, all bullying aside--I may be found guilty, and it's possible I could get sent to jail. I don't know what to expect about that, and I've been reeling back and forth between total panic and a creepy, zenlike calm. The other night I couldn't sleep and was staring at the calendar counting down days to the 3rd and freaking out about it. Finally, after worrying and worrying, practically in tears, I suddenly thought--So what? What's going to happen that's so bad? I'll go to court, and something will happen. I'll either go home and have a milkshake, or I'll get time. And if I get time, what will happen? The marshals will take me out of the courtroom, and then I'll be in jail. And then I'll just move through that time.

Yesterday afternoon I was stacking wood with Liz out by the new shed. The air was cold and sharp, leaves turning, the sky in and out all day between clear autumn blue and thick, heavy clouds. She asked me how I was feeling about jail, and I told her what I just told you. And she said this:

The first weekend is the worst. They take you to the basement and leave you there all Friday, Friday night, all Saturday and Saturday night, and into Sunday. You're sleeping on a mat on the floor, crowded in with everyone who's been sent to jail that day. You can ask for a book or a Bible, and maybe you'll get one, and maybe not. It's boring, and it's uncomfortable, and it's hard. And then you're put into a unit where you get a cell (which you share with one other person). There's books, a common area, and a gym with roof access. You play cards, watch tv, eat horrible food, run on the treadmill, fight over who gets to do the sudoku puzzle in the newspaper. For the most part the women will be welcoming and interested in your story. And remember, Liz said: These people are in pain. And you are there to be with them, hear their stories, be a good listener. "If you think about it that way," she said, "your time will be very different."

At the very least, I'm thinking, having to go to jail will make me understand in a very real way what so many people in this country have to live every day. Everyone's intense concern about me only underscores our privilege: we don't know people who go to jail, because we're rich and we're white and so that's not part of our lives. Maybe I can just be there, and be humble there, and try and be helpful if I can. Like I said, though, I don't know what's gonna happen. We could all be sent home, and then--well, we'll have a seriously hot party Friday night. Either way, I want to be prepared, and I hope I can carry your support and your love with me into the courtroom and wherever I might go from there.

I'll send out an update on Friday if I'm free; if you don't hear from me you can find out what happened on the website at www.jonahhouse.org. You can also get the address of the jail on that site, and if I'm in, I would seriously appreciate mail.

thanks and love,

e.

 
 

an appreciation

I write today's communication from a beautiful old stone library on the North Fork of Long Island. And I'm tired in that good physical way from putting up a tongue-and-groove ceiling with my dad this afternoon. Sitting here with the glow of the lamps on the shelves of books & feeling the satisfaction of having made something happen with my hands. This "honest labor" has been the story of my summer this year, as I've spent most of it renovating a small cottage by the shore that I still can't quite believe I own. The season is winding down, & the cold weather a persistent guest rather than weekend visitor, so it's a good time to thank my parents for all the amazing help they've given me--they're the best.

travels with myself & another

Reaching the end of a couple of fairly grueling weeks of working full shifts at two different companies. Like many people holed up in offices, I daydream of travel--of getting away to where life & beauty are happening. (OK, life is happening right here in these grey & black corporate hallways, but it's preferable not to think about that much.) Lucky to be a freelancer, because if I want to work a bunch all at once & then take off, well, I can. This setup has given me the chance to drive across the U.S. with another four times in recent years, taking different routes on each occasion but always holding to our philosophy of avoiding the freeways as much as possible in favor of small roads & towns. Never in possession of more than a general plan ("Let's check out the South" would be about the extent of it), we'd stop whenever something caught our interest (which, in my case, usually meant getting out a camera). Once the sun went down we'd keep our eyes out for motels with VACANCY signs. With that in mind, I'll start to put up some photographs from these journeys...& hope it won't be too long before it's time to get out the maps again.

two sides of a coin

el reclamo de las bisagras

A blue jay is calling in the courtyard formed by the brick buildings behind mine; no matter what time of year it is, the sound always makes me think of fall. My spacey neighbor just interrupted, however, showing up with an ironing board & a fireplace screen someone gave her--then she did the very thing I dread about the former: opened it. Thereby releasing the hideous screeching that all of those treacherous devices seem to share. In order to calm down after this aural assault, I'm going to tell myself to be thankful that if there's an ironing-board mating season, I've unwittingly managed to avoid it so far.

living with objects

The stash of photographs & artwork that have been patiently hanging out in my apartment are demanding a greater audience. They kind of won't shut up about it. So, I promised that starting a blog would guarantee them a dozen new fans. (Please don't tell them I'm wildly optimistic.) Here goes.