by Nadine Gordimer (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005)
South African Nadine Gordimer received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991. It's surprising to me that I've never read anything of hers previously, except perhaps a short story or two. This book has certain qualities of mastery that a really mature and experienced writer can produce. It reminds me of the novels of Doris Lessing post-The Four Gated City. Towards the end of that novel, Lessing shifted her perspective unexpectedly from the personal to the global and began a new era for herself. An interview with Lessing I saw in the Vancouver Sun yesterday (12 March '06) had Lessing saying the books of hers she most wanted people to read were the Shikasta series. Of the Lessing works I've read, I'd say those are the most clearly didactic -- I hope that word is not too unpleasant, as the books are very good -- containing distilled analysis of human tendencies, patterns, and failings, couched in something ostensibly like science fiction tales.
In Get a Life, Gordimer starts off very personally and intimately, and dealing with a subject that is suddenly of interest to me as my friends and I age and decline or get ill. A youngish man who is a father of a young son has thyroid cancer and as the treatment has made him temporarily radioactive, his parents take him into their home and he resumes his relationship, especially with his mother, in a pattern that has parallels with his childhood. Gradually we learn he is an environmentalist and his wife is in advertising and promotion. The tale, which is fairly brief, races through permutations and ironies and big-picture and small-picture observations, including a substantial amount about a majestically self-renewing African river system that is about to be wrecked by dam-building projects. The mother and father's marriage also comes to represent a substantial amount of the plot. Overall, the plot is very unusually shaped and composed. The sentences are also unusual for our time, as they are long and contain unusual combinations of clauses. Occasionally I had to read one over a few times to figure out what it was really saying, what was the relationship of these clauses, but I never felt that the writer had made an error and did not convey what she must have meant. The language gave me a sense of beauty that more often comes from reading good poetry.
The high point of the story seems to me almost a throwaway, in which the author successfully manages to care intensely about the fate of the river and the hero's role in the movement trying to save it, yet be able to simultaneously hold a faith in the ability of nature to make itself work in some way despite all obstacles, and also the view that all of reality is fleeting and perhaps meaningless. The river seems paralleled by several other elements including the marriage of the parents, which decomposes in a complex and more or less organic way.
Finally, this book reminds me of a story told by the very great critic and fairly mediocre poet Richard Howard, in a course he taught at The University of Texas in the 1970s. The painter James Whistler, Howard told us, sued the critic John Ruskin in 1878 for libel, over an insulting review about Whistler's painting of a rocket falling at night. As I recall Howard's telling of the tale, in court the defendant's attorney asked: "Mr. Whistler, how long did it take you to paint this?" "Ten minutes," and as the lawyer began to smirk, "and a lifetime of experience."
Tuesday, February 21, 2006
Saturday, January 28, 2006
Women's Review of Books
Just a note to let readers know that the Women's Review of Books is back in publication after more than a year on hiatus. Published since 1983, and based out of Wellesley College in Massachusetts, it's a great source of information about books and their contents. In the last issue before hiatus, there was a much-appreciated article about the 2004 Nobel Prize winner for literature, Elfriede Jelinek from Austria. The article can be found online at www.wellesley.edu/womensreview/archive/2004/12/highlt.html#milkman .
Subscription information for the renascent WRB is at www.wcwonline.org/womensreview/
Subscription information for the renascent WRB is at www.wcwonline.org/womensreview/
Thursday, January 12, 2006
Swiss Sonata
by Gwethalyn Graham (Toronto: Cormorant Books, 2005)
The Canada Council for the Arts and Ontario Arts Program provided support for the re-publication of this work. It was first published in 1938, and won the Governor General's Award in that year, for its 25-year-old author. The revival of the book is due in large measure to Elspeth Cameron, who wrote its Introduction. Cameron is a well-known biographer of some male Canadian writers, and chronicles her growing interest in female writers in a memoir called No Previous Experience.
While I'm very grateful to Cameron for bringing this book back to readers, and for giving us some biographical and historical background, I have some disagreements with her assessment of the book, which I find unjustly critical. Cameron describes some of the discussions between the international residents of the Swiss girls' school as "forced," and "vehicles for [Graham's] strongly held views." She also finds the portrayal of the main character, Vicky Morrison, to be the book's "greatest flaw" -- the character "too good to be true." Maybe I should thank Cameron, actually, for lowering my expectations of the book up front, because perhaps in reaction I found it unusually good.
Swiss Sonata takes place during three days of January 1935, on the eve of the plebiscite in the Saar coal-mining region that returned this valuable resource to Germany ( and would give Germany fuel to make steel for the war). The politics of the moment contribute to stressful dynamics among the students -- students ranging in age from fifteen to 25 and coming from 14 countries. (I was very grateful for a list of dramatis personae that appeared in the front of the book, listing the names of the students and the staff and their countries -- it's rare to find a book with so many characters all having a share of the action.)
The staff of the school are a bit out of their depth both in controlling and helping their young charges, as is pretty typical of educational institutions. They also (and one teacher in particular) develop some animosity towards the 21-year-old Canadian Vicky Morrison, whose way of interacting with the others carries an authority of its own that shows them up. It has come to their attention that she is exercising what I like to call "leadership from below," as opposed to deferring to authority for leadership.
As the book begins, Vicky is a mystery figure to the reader, and the most visible characters are a sympathetic young sports teacher named Mary Ellerton, from London, and a friend of Vicky's named Theodora Cohen, a Jewish girl from St. Louis, Missouri, USA. Ted is outspoken and raffish, and gives a lot of life to the tale.
One of the advantages of this book having been written in 1938 instead of today is that none of the characters is required to come out as a lesbian. Nor are there any heterosexual sex scenes. Instead, this is that rare thing, a very homosocial book. There are sympathetic friendships and also obsessive fixations on others, but the simplistic and dyadic (and one might even say the "exchange-oriented"*) motivation of sexual attraction is eschewed in favour of other focuses. There is a lot of dynamic around being accepted or rejected, and being accepting or rejecting, and also around conflicting loyalties. Life decisions on the table for the characters include choices between being married and having an education and a career in some cases, and in others between introversion and caring.
The portrayal of caring, including gratuitous (i.e., gift*) caring, was much more common in earlier eras' fiction it seems to me than it is in today's. Modern hedonism has probably shaped us much more than we realise. Swiss Sonata reminds me of Louisa May Alcott's book Little Men, which I enjoyed in my childhood -- also about a school and the work of molding youth into strong, caring and and self-realized adults. I'm also put in mind of the Canadian girls' classic Anne of Green Gables, in which a young girl also teaches life lessons to her elders. But Graham's book is an adult work, and about characters in the age range of from mid-teens to mid-fifties; the compromises, the paradoxes, and the failings of caring are much more in evidence.
To return to the character of Vicky Morrison and the question of whether she is believable or not: On one level, she turns out to be a bit of a Miranda, having been given a classical education in an isolated setting. I found that bit of her history somewhat unbelievable (my opinion is that home-schooling is more likely to make one narrow). However, the observation that she and a few of the other characters are intellectuals who apply their knowledge to understanding people, while other characters do not, I found realistic. Perhaps the fact that her leadership-from-below is noticed by the authorities and excites their jealousy is far-fetched -- it seems to me that this kind of leadership is very rarely observed by the authorities (but then, I've never gone to a girls' school). Her "saintly" nature may be carried a bit too far, but I liked the way she herself characterizes it -- that her persona takes on a meaning for others that hasn't too much relationship to how she feels inside. I think she is fairly portrayed as trying to feel her way with others and not always understanding or being able to help them. She herself says of her failed attempts that it's as if you were asking a medical student just graduated to perform brain surgery. In the end some of the authorities come to admire her people sense.
The line I liked best was one character's description that Vicky "has the gift of self-dismissal." This is a very real gift that some of us only learn to practice later in life. (There is in fact a school of study called "non-defensive communication" [ see www.pndc.com] that tries to help people acquire this way of interacting.) Apropos of the period in which Vicky was living, with national and political partisanship coming strongly to the fore, I'm also thinking of the ideas of Sisela Bok, contrasting the partisan and non-partisan ways of thinking. The partisan can think of only his own views and can't set them aside for the purpose of feeling, imagining or understanding the other's situation. Bok sees times of war bringing people more strongly into partisan relationship.
Today (Jan. 12, 2006), I was listening to CBC radio and heard an interview with a Canadian who has just written a book about values in the United States and Canada. He said he found more than half of those polled in the US were hedonists who didn't believe in empathizing with others. The proportion of people with those values in Canada is much lower.
Vicky Morrison is a character who has a very marked ability to set her own priorities aside and just listen to others, and then to think about the happiness and growth of the people she has heard. As Elspeth Cameron explains it, the characters in Swiss Sonata represent their own respective countries. I infer from this something about the persistence of Canadian values between 1938 and today, and I hope that they can survive the onslaught of American media and guns coming across the border and continue to set an example for the world.
-----
*For more about gift-giving and exchange, see Genevieve Vaughan's book For-Giving: A Feminist Criticism of Exchange ( information and text online at www.for-giving.com )
The Canada Council for the Arts and Ontario Arts Program provided support for the re-publication of this work. It was first published in 1938, and won the Governor General's Award in that year, for its 25-year-old author. The revival of the book is due in large measure to Elspeth Cameron, who wrote its Introduction. Cameron is a well-known biographer of some male Canadian writers, and chronicles her growing interest in female writers in a memoir called No Previous Experience.
While I'm very grateful to Cameron for bringing this book back to readers, and for giving us some biographical and historical background, I have some disagreements with her assessment of the book, which I find unjustly critical. Cameron describes some of the discussions between the international residents of the Swiss girls' school as "forced," and "vehicles for [Graham's] strongly held views." She also finds the portrayal of the main character, Vicky Morrison, to be the book's "greatest flaw" -- the character "too good to be true." Maybe I should thank Cameron, actually, for lowering my expectations of the book up front, because perhaps in reaction I found it unusually good.
Swiss Sonata takes place during three days of January 1935, on the eve of the plebiscite in the Saar coal-mining region that returned this valuable resource to Germany ( and would give Germany fuel to make steel for the war). The politics of the moment contribute to stressful dynamics among the students -- students ranging in age from fifteen to 25 and coming from 14 countries. (I was very grateful for a list of dramatis personae that appeared in the front of the book, listing the names of the students and the staff and their countries -- it's rare to find a book with so many characters all having a share of the action.)
The staff of the school are a bit out of their depth both in controlling and helping their young charges, as is pretty typical of educational institutions. They also (and one teacher in particular) develop some animosity towards the 21-year-old Canadian Vicky Morrison, whose way of interacting with the others carries an authority of its own that shows them up. It has come to their attention that she is exercising what I like to call "leadership from below," as opposed to deferring to authority for leadership.
As the book begins, Vicky is a mystery figure to the reader, and the most visible characters are a sympathetic young sports teacher named Mary Ellerton, from London, and a friend of Vicky's named Theodora Cohen, a Jewish girl from St. Louis, Missouri, USA. Ted is outspoken and raffish, and gives a lot of life to the tale.
One of the advantages of this book having been written in 1938 instead of today is that none of the characters is required to come out as a lesbian. Nor are there any heterosexual sex scenes. Instead, this is that rare thing, a very homosocial book. There are sympathetic friendships and also obsessive fixations on others, but the simplistic and dyadic (and one might even say the "exchange-oriented"*) motivation of sexual attraction is eschewed in favour of other focuses. There is a lot of dynamic around being accepted or rejected, and being accepting or rejecting, and also around conflicting loyalties. Life decisions on the table for the characters include choices between being married and having an education and a career in some cases, and in others between introversion and caring.
The portrayal of caring, including gratuitous (i.e., gift*) caring, was much more common in earlier eras' fiction it seems to me than it is in today's. Modern hedonism has probably shaped us much more than we realise. Swiss Sonata reminds me of Louisa May Alcott's book Little Men, which I enjoyed in my childhood -- also about a school and the work of molding youth into strong, caring and and self-realized adults. I'm also put in mind of the Canadian girls' classic Anne of Green Gables, in which a young girl also teaches life lessons to her elders. But Graham's book is an adult work, and about characters in the age range of from mid-teens to mid-fifties; the compromises, the paradoxes, and the failings of caring are much more in evidence.
To return to the character of Vicky Morrison and the question of whether she is believable or not: On one level, she turns out to be a bit of a Miranda, having been given a classical education in an isolated setting. I found that bit of her history somewhat unbelievable (my opinion is that home-schooling is more likely to make one narrow). However, the observation that she and a few of the other characters are intellectuals who apply their knowledge to understanding people, while other characters do not, I found realistic. Perhaps the fact that her leadership-from-below is noticed by the authorities and excites their jealousy is far-fetched -- it seems to me that this kind of leadership is very rarely observed by the authorities (but then, I've never gone to a girls' school). Her "saintly" nature may be carried a bit too far, but I liked the way she herself characterizes it -- that her persona takes on a meaning for others that hasn't too much relationship to how she feels inside. I think she is fairly portrayed as trying to feel her way with others and not always understanding or being able to help them. She herself says of her failed attempts that it's as if you were asking a medical student just graduated to perform brain surgery. In the end some of the authorities come to admire her people sense.
The line I liked best was one character's description that Vicky "has the gift of self-dismissal." This is a very real gift that some of us only learn to practice later in life. (There is in fact a school of study called "non-defensive communication" [ see www.pndc.com] that tries to help people acquire this way of interacting.) Apropos of the period in which Vicky was living, with national and political partisanship coming strongly to the fore, I'm also thinking of the ideas of Sisela Bok, contrasting the partisan and non-partisan ways of thinking. The partisan can think of only his own views and can't set them aside for the purpose of feeling, imagining or understanding the other's situation. Bok sees times of war bringing people more strongly into partisan relationship.
Today (Jan. 12, 2006), I was listening to CBC radio and heard an interview with a Canadian who has just written a book about values in the United States and Canada. He said he found more than half of those polled in the US were hedonists who didn't believe in empathizing with others. The proportion of people with those values in Canada is much lower.
Vicky Morrison is a character who has a very marked ability to set her own priorities aside and just listen to others, and then to think about the happiness and growth of the people she has heard. As Elspeth Cameron explains it, the characters in Swiss Sonata represent their own respective countries. I infer from this something about the persistence of Canadian values between 1938 and today, and I hope that they can survive the onslaught of American media and guns coming across the border and continue to set an example for the world.
-----
*For more about gift-giving and exchange, see Genevieve Vaughan's book For-Giving: A Feminist Criticism of Exchange ( information and text online at www.for-giving.com )
Sunday, November 06, 2005
Green River, Running Red: the real story of the Green River Killer - America's deadliest serial murderer
by Ann Rule (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004)
I chose this book out of what was on offer in paperback in a small airport bookstore. Aside from the fact that there was little else in my price range, I chose it for two reasons. One was that I had recently read Desert Blood: The Juarez Murders [see my review in this blog] and I wanted to continue my education on femicide and compare the two books. The other reason was that I had heard about feminist protests around the Green River murders in the 1980s, but had not seen any details about the killer being caught. Rule only published this book in 2004, after his conviction, though she had been keeping notes for many years.
Rule is a writer who specializes in true crime stories. Unlike Truman Capote, she is not very literary. Her style is clear, but tends to be repetitive, and this book could have been edited somewhat for brevity. It weighs in at 661 pages, not including the acknowledgments. The only book this long I can remember reading all the way through was The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth, which had the redeeming feature of being very funny. I'm not sure if I will ever finish this one, so I am writing it up though I'm only on page 383.
If I do finish reading it, it will be for the same reason she says she finished writing it at such a length -- i.e., because of her commitment to giving a human face and a personal story to most if not all of the women who were murdered by Gary Ridgway. There are 47 women's faces pictured at the front of the book. All of them are named during the course of it, and their situations described; and in many cases their friends' and families' reminiscences are included. Many of them were teenagers, and many but not all of them made money from street prostitution, a class of persons that Gary Ridgway both patronized and despised. Quite a few of the women had children. Some came from unhappy homes, others not. Many lived with their boyfriend/pimps; others with mothers, real boyfriends, husbands, or friends. Some were young and rebellious; some financially desperate; some were hitchhiking; some were only in the wrong place at the wrong time. Many were white and many black. Some were pregnant. There's a feeling of the cautionary tale hovering about this story, but because Rule is scrupulous about including masses of detail, the cautionary aspect is not played up. True, you could get killed for being a teenager sexually out of control; or, you could be killed because you walked down the street to visit a relative.
As a crime writer, Rule works closely with the police, and she devotes a good part of the book to their work. During the course of the so-called Green River Killer's sequence of murders, Rule writes, the term "serial killer" was coined, the use of computers for police work was pioneered, the art of profiling suspects was further developed, and forensic science went through major changes. The amount of money and the numbers of people working full time on solving this long series of murders also grew vastly. There were several changes of command. According to Rule, the police withheld most of what they were doing from press and public in order to build a prosecutable case when the killer was found. They also had to wade through tens of thousands of leads and many false confessions, and eliminate many likely suspects. They did have police watching the area where women picking up johns were most frequently abducted, and they also had police decoys. Eventually, through reading this, I'm sure I'll find out what it was that worked for the police, how they caught the killer.
In taking the part of the police, Rule gives short shrift to the feminists, stopping just short of demonizing them for causing the police additional grief. If you want to find that section, turn in the paperback to page 281 ff, where Rule talks briefly about the Women's Coalition to Stop the Green River Murders and the U.S. Prostitutes Collective having a parade in March of 1984. I'll quote from page 282:
". . .Women's Libbers were often strident because they felt there was no other way. 'The issue is the killing of women,' [Melissa] Adams said. 'But we are showing unity with prostitutes who are the victims of this killer --and victims of a sexist society.
"'Violence against women is an all-American sport.'
"Perhaps it was. . . . But the coalition had chosen the wrong target, and it wasn't the Green River Task Force, whose members yearned to catch the man. . ."
Rule breaks up the story by jump-cutting back and forth among descriptions of the women and their lives at the time they disappeared; their families; a few people who interjected themselves into the case as psychics and police wannabes; the finding of bodies (mostly in clusters); the identification of the mostly skeletonized dead; stories by people who knew and interacted with the killer; and, the most imaginative part, a description of the life and state of mind of the killer himself, apparently boiled down from interviews with Ridgway. Her portrait of the murderer shows a not very smart child who was dissed by his family and found power in killing animals, went through a phase of religious fundamentalism, suffered some losses in divorce, and discovered prostitutes as both a source of pleasure and easy marks, whom he could rationalize killing. He was both a sex addict and a murder addict.
Most shocking from a female point of view is that Ridgway seems to have managed to appear like a reasonably nice guy and even a gentle lover or a normal husband to some women, while abducting and killing others. And he was good enough at dissembling that even though he'd been questioned by police, other people seemed more likely suspects.
The crux of this book seems to be that it's unlikely one can tell by looking whom to be afraid of, and it's unwise to trust your guts about whom to trust. I'm reminded of the credo of Vancouver Rape Relief: "Every man is a potential rapist." But shouldn't there be better ways to tell which ones are?
I chose this book out of what was on offer in paperback in a small airport bookstore. Aside from the fact that there was little else in my price range, I chose it for two reasons. One was that I had recently read Desert Blood: The Juarez Murders [see my review in this blog] and I wanted to continue my education on femicide and compare the two books. The other reason was that I had heard about feminist protests around the Green River murders in the 1980s, but had not seen any details about the killer being caught. Rule only published this book in 2004, after his conviction, though she had been keeping notes for many years.
Rule is a writer who specializes in true crime stories. Unlike Truman Capote, she is not very literary. Her style is clear, but tends to be repetitive, and this book could have been edited somewhat for brevity. It weighs in at 661 pages, not including the acknowledgments. The only book this long I can remember reading all the way through was The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth, which had the redeeming feature of being very funny. I'm not sure if I will ever finish this one, so I am writing it up though I'm only on page 383.
If I do finish reading it, it will be for the same reason she says she finished writing it at such a length -- i.e., because of her commitment to giving a human face and a personal story to most if not all of the women who were murdered by Gary Ridgway. There are 47 women's faces pictured at the front of the book. All of them are named during the course of it, and their situations described; and in many cases their friends' and families' reminiscences are included. Many of them were teenagers, and many but not all of them made money from street prostitution, a class of persons that Gary Ridgway both patronized and despised. Quite a few of the women had children. Some came from unhappy homes, others not. Many lived with their boyfriend/pimps; others with mothers, real boyfriends, husbands, or friends. Some were young and rebellious; some financially desperate; some were hitchhiking; some were only in the wrong place at the wrong time. Many were white and many black. Some were pregnant. There's a feeling of the cautionary tale hovering about this story, but because Rule is scrupulous about including masses of detail, the cautionary aspect is not played up. True, you could get killed for being a teenager sexually out of control; or, you could be killed because you walked down the street to visit a relative.
As a crime writer, Rule works closely with the police, and she devotes a good part of the book to their work. During the course of the so-called Green River Killer's sequence of murders, Rule writes, the term "serial killer" was coined, the use of computers for police work was pioneered, the art of profiling suspects was further developed, and forensic science went through major changes. The amount of money and the numbers of people working full time on solving this long series of murders also grew vastly. There were several changes of command. According to Rule, the police withheld most of what they were doing from press and public in order to build a prosecutable case when the killer was found. They also had to wade through tens of thousands of leads and many false confessions, and eliminate many likely suspects. They did have police watching the area where women picking up johns were most frequently abducted, and they also had police decoys. Eventually, through reading this, I'm sure I'll find out what it was that worked for the police, how they caught the killer.
In taking the part of the police, Rule gives short shrift to the feminists, stopping just short of demonizing them for causing the police additional grief. If you want to find that section, turn in the paperback to page 281 ff, where Rule talks briefly about the Women's Coalition to Stop the Green River Murders and the U.S. Prostitutes Collective having a parade in March of 1984. I'll quote from page 282:
". . .Women's Libbers were often strident because they felt there was no other way. 'The issue is the killing of women,' [Melissa] Adams said. 'But we are showing unity with prostitutes who are the victims of this killer --and victims of a sexist society.
"'Violence against women is an all-American sport.'
"Perhaps it was. . . . But the coalition had chosen the wrong target, and it wasn't the Green River Task Force, whose members yearned to catch the man. . ."
Rule breaks up the story by jump-cutting back and forth among descriptions of the women and their lives at the time they disappeared; their families; a few people who interjected themselves into the case as psychics and police wannabes; the finding of bodies (mostly in clusters); the identification of the mostly skeletonized dead; stories by people who knew and interacted with the killer; and, the most imaginative part, a description of the life and state of mind of the killer himself, apparently boiled down from interviews with Ridgway. Her portrait of the murderer shows a not very smart child who was dissed by his family and found power in killing animals, went through a phase of religious fundamentalism, suffered some losses in divorce, and discovered prostitutes as both a source of pleasure and easy marks, whom he could rationalize killing. He was both a sex addict and a murder addict.
Most shocking from a female point of view is that Ridgway seems to have managed to appear like a reasonably nice guy and even a gentle lover or a normal husband to some women, while abducting and killing others. And he was good enough at dissembling that even though he'd been questioned by police, other people seemed more likely suspects.
The crux of this book seems to be that it's unlikely one can tell by looking whom to be afraid of, and it's unwise to trust your guts about whom to trust. I'm reminded of the credo of Vancouver Rape Relief: "Every man is a potential rapist." But shouldn't there be better ways to tell which ones are?
Sunday, October 23, 2005
autobiography of a blue-eyed devil: my life and times in a racist, imperialist society
by inga muscio (Emeryville CA: Seal Press, 2005)
Usually when I read books of personal essays, I don't start at the beginning and work straight through to the end, I skip around in them and dig out things I like. I did that with Inga Muscio's previous book, Cunt; but this book pulled me straight through very fast from beginning to end. It's well-written, fresh, full of different tales and varied approaches to telling the stories; yet there's a logic that builds from chapter to chapter and becomes very convincing. The theme is that a young woman from a not-terribly-privileged white background who is open to others and desires social change learns from both her experiences and her research, not only that there is racism in her society and that it is much deeper and more serious than she imagined, but also how it has put its tentacles into her own mind and behaviour. To me, this is a book about working to overthrow colonization of racist ideas in a person's own brain. Yet it's never too heavy, always giving you that breath of poetry or narration or whatever it takes to keep you hanging in. Very interesting and valuable and refreshing book.
Usually when I read books of personal essays, I don't start at the beginning and work straight through to the end, I skip around in them and dig out things I like. I did that with Inga Muscio's previous book, Cunt; but this book pulled me straight through very fast from beginning to end. It's well-written, fresh, full of different tales and varied approaches to telling the stories; yet there's a logic that builds from chapter to chapter and becomes very convincing. The theme is that a young woman from a not-terribly-privileged white background who is open to others and desires social change learns from both her experiences and her research, not only that there is racism in her society and that it is much deeper and more serious than she imagined, but also how it has put its tentacles into her own mind and behaviour. To me, this is a book about working to overthrow colonization of racist ideas in a person's own brain. Yet it's never too heavy, always giving you that breath of poetry or narration or whatever it takes to keep you hanging in. Very interesting and valuable and refreshing book.
Strike Sparks: Selected Poems, 1980-2002
by Sharon Olds (NY: Knopf, 2004)
I was in a big argument once (it was 1985) with Saul Sosnowsky, a scholar of Latin American literature. He was chairing a panel of consultants deciding which authors should be included in a projected 13-part series profiling Latin American writers for radio; I was writing the grant. I proposed including Gabriela Mistral, whom I knew had won a Nobel Prize for literature. In refusing her, the professor accused that Mistral didn't write about "literary subjects. She just writes about things like motherhood." Everyone at the table, including him, flashed on the deeply sexist scholarly prejudice he had just pronounced.
Sharon Olds is such a good poet that I buy her books new even though I don't personally know her. This collection omits some of my favourite poems of hers but it includes wonderfully meaty poems about motherhood. I use meaty advisedly -- physical selves and bodily acts are very vivid in her work, and the physicality gives tremendous support to the emotional and imaginative aspects.
Olds writes so avidly about her enjoyment of heterosexual marriage and sex in marriage that it rehabilitates my image of that condition. And she managed to arrive at that pleasing state despite a sexually active and activist youth in a time when "sex was a crime." The poem about trying to insert a diaphragm that keeps springing and landing on the floor in a seedy hotel bathroom is so vivid and stunningly original it brings tears to my eyes, especially because of the way at the end she claims the power of this young self who was so determined to control her own life.
What drew me to this book most while I was considering it in the store were the poems about the aging and death of her father, and especially the one about a rat and a cockroach who appear to her after her father's death. Something similar happened to me.
If you don't read anything else in this book, find it in the store and turn to the short poem "The Pope's Penis." The patriarchy really does have no clothes.
I was in a big argument once (it was 1985) with Saul Sosnowsky, a scholar of Latin American literature. He was chairing a panel of consultants deciding which authors should be included in a projected 13-part series profiling Latin American writers for radio; I was writing the grant. I proposed including Gabriela Mistral, whom I knew had won a Nobel Prize for literature. In refusing her, the professor accused that Mistral didn't write about "literary subjects. She just writes about things like motherhood." Everyone at the table, including him, flashed on the deeply sexist scholarly prejudice he had just pronounced.
Sharon Olds is such a good poet that I buy her books new even though I don't personally know her. This collection omits some of my favourite poems of hers but it includes wonderfully meaty poems about motherhood. I use meaty advisedly -- physical selves and bodily acts are very vivid in her work, and the physicality gives tremendous support to the emotional and imaginative aspects.
Olds writes so avidly about her enjoyment of heterosexual marriage and sex in marriage that it rehabilitates my image of that condition. And she managed to arrive at that pleasing state despite a sexually active and activist youth in a time when "sex was a crime." The poem about trying to insert a diaphragm that keeps springing and landing on the floor in a seedy hotel bathroom is so vivid and stunningly original it brings tears to my eyes, especially because of the way at the end she claims the power of this young self who was so determined to control her own life.
What drew me to this book most while I was considering it in the store were the poems about the aging and death of her father, and especially the one about a rat and a cockroach who appear to her after her father's death. Something similar happened to me.
If you don't read anything else in this book, find it in the store and turn to the short poem "The Pope's Penis." The patriarchy really does have no clothes.
Saturday, October 22, 2005
Number Ten
by Sue Townsend (London: Penguin Books Ltd., 2002)
This is a bit of silly fiction with a few good laughs and tidbits of gratifying political fantasy. The premise is that the Prime Minister of England (Labour Party, but the leadership is looking for another name) skips out of Number Ten and goes about the countryside disguised as a woman, getting in touch with some repressed emotions and feminine parts his personality, while failing miserably in picking up on the political lessons he might have learned. Traveling with him is a policeman who has had to leave his elderly mother in not the best hands. One could wish there was a bit more substance to this story, but its political heart seems to be in the right place, there are occasional good insights, and any sort of laugh is awfully hard to find now, int it? Suzette checked this one out of the Vancouver Public Library. Townsend is also the author of the acclaimed Adrian Mole books, which I have not yet read.
This is a bit of silly fiction with a few good laughs and tidbits of gratifying political fantasy. The premise is that the Prime Minister of England (Labour Party, but the leadership is looking for another name) skips out of Number Ten and goes about the countryside disguised as a woman, getting in touch with some repressed emotions and feminine parts his personality, while failing miserably in picking up on the political lessons he might have learned. Traveling with him is a policeman who has had to leave his elderly mother in not the best hands. One could wish there was a bit more substance to this story, but its political heart seems to be in the right place, there are occasional good insights, and any sort of laugh is awfully hard to find now, int it? Suzette checked this one out of the Vancouver Public Library. Townsend is also the author of the acclaimed Adrian Mole books, which I have not yet read.
Friday, October 21, 2005
Desert Blood: The Juarez Murders
by Alicia Gaspar de Alba (Houston: Arte Publico Press, 2005)
When I pick up a book from a small press I confess I often have doubts about how good it will be. All doubts were definitely allayed in this case.
Gaspar, who is an associate professor of Chicana/o Studies and English at UCLA, spent years doing research on and even holding a major conference about the large and horrifying number of vicious sex murders of women that continue to be perpetrated in and around Juarez, Mexico, the city across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas. The extensive acknowlegements section at the end gives some insights into that work.
But to go from research to a good work of fiction is not very easy. Most fiction "based on a true story" tends toward the wooden. I don't want to overpraise because discovering that you continue to like a book as it goes along is part of the suspense. But this holds up very well against all the genres it participates in: "true crime" as mentioned, the feminist mystery novel, the lesbian novel, and the bilingual chicana/o novel.
Things I like about this book include: The number of well-drawn and highly original characters; the tight and credible dialogue; the descriptions that carry their weight and don't go on for too long; the terse incorporation of information and ideas through the use of different characters' perspectives. I especially liked that Gaspar didn't try to perfect or apologize for any of her characters' behaviour or thinking or morals.
I found this book in a feminist bookstore (Bookwoman, in Austin, Texas http://ebookwoman.booksense.com ). I'm sure you can order it from them if you don't find it where you usually shop.
When I pick up a book from a small press I confess I often have doubts about how good it will be. All doubts were definitely allayed in this case.
Gaspar, who is an associate professor of Chicana/o Studies and English at UCLA, spent years doing research on and even holding a major conference about the large and horrifying number of vicious sex murders of women that continue to be perpetrated in and around Juarez, Mexico, the city across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas. The extensive acknowlegements section at the end gives some insights into that work.
But to go from research to a good work of fiction is not very easy. Most fiction "based on a true story" tends toward the wooden. I don't want to overpraise because discovering that you continue to like a book as it goes along is part of the suspense. But this holds up very well against all the genres it participates in: "true crime" as mentioned, the feminist mystery novel, the lesbian novel, and the bilingual chicana/o novel.
Things I like about this book include: The number of well-drawn and highly original characters; the tight and credible dialogue; the descriptions that carry their weight and don't go on for too long; the terse incorporation of information and ideas through the use of different characters' perspectives. I especially liked that Gaspar didn't try to perfect or apologize for any of her characters' behaviour or thinking or morals.
I found this book in a feminist bookstore (Bookwoman, in Austin, Texas http://ebookwoman.booksense.com ). I'm sure you can order it from them if you don't find it where you usually shop.
The G-String Murders
by Gypsy Rose Lee, afterword by Rachel Shteir (NY: The Feminist Press, 2005).
This is part of a new series The Feminist Press is issuing called Femmes Fatales, reprinting popular pulp fiction written by women in the 1930s, '40s, and '50s. The Publisher's Foreword makes a great defense of the importance of these writers, who were read by many more people than more literary types (say, Proust) were.
The G-String Murders is not all that well plotted (a few weeks after reading it I can no longer even remember whodunnit), but it is interesting in its depiction of the burlesque industry, a sort of transitional form between Vaudeville and the strip clubs of today. The book is full of particulars about costuming, dressing rooms, toilets, food and drink, stage cues, regulations and the violations of them, police raids, and the slang of the period (the book was first published in 1941, but probably written in the '30s).
The afterword with biographical and publishing details added a lot. As a special treat, there is GRL's correspondence with her publisher (or, perhaps a pseudo-correspondence written for publicity purposes). The point is made that Lee was a woman who was proud of her intellect and vocabulary, and enjoyed freaking people out by being an intellectual and a stripper at the same time.
This is part of a new series The Feminist Press is issuing called Femmes Fatales, reprinting popular pulp fiction written by women in the 1930s, '40s, and '50s. The Publisher's Foreword makes a great defense of the importance of these writers, who were read by many more people than more literary types (say, Proust) were.
The G-String Murders is not all that well plotted (a few weeks after reading it I can no longer even remember whodunnit), but it is interesting in its depiction of the burlesque industry, a sort of transitional form between Vaudeville and the strip clubs of today. The book is full of particulars about costuming, dressing rooms, toilets, food and drink, stage cues, regulations and the violations of them, police raids, and the slang of the period (the book was first published in 1941, but probably written in the '30s).
The afterword with biographical and publishing details added a lot. As a special treat, there is GRL's correspondence with her publisher (or, perhaps a pseudo-correspondence written for publicity purposes). The point is made that Lee was a woman who was proud of her intellect and vocabulary, and enjoyed freaking people out by being an intellectual and a stripper at the same time.
It's One O'Clock and Here Is Mary Margaret McBride: A radio biography
By Susan Ware (NY: NYU Press, 2005). Mary Margaret McBride is sometimes called the creator of the radio talk show. In the 1940s and 1950s she "regularly attracted six to eight million listeners." As a radio woman myself, I loved the descriptions of how she ran her program, getting into deep conversations with people and just throwing in the advertising endorsements when she could fit them into the conversations. She only endorsed products she herself approved of -- often foods. MMM was a great eater, as her pictures in the book definitely show. Ware says the secret of McBride's interviewing success was that she really and warmly listened to people. She also was very generous with her listeners and always wrote back and often mentioned them in her shows. Another secret of McBride's success was her longstanding relationship (likely lesbian at some point, and involving shared housing) with her manager and publicist Stella Karn. Stella is a great character and I wish there were even more of her in this book. Because Stella was in her youth an advance publicist for a circus, I have formed an hypothesis that Djuna Barnes may have known or known about Stella before she created the character in Nightwood known as Robin Vote. Barnes and Karn were not of the same generation, but they did overlap in their tenure in Greenwich Village.
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