I've read a lot of comics (and other) memoirs lately about depression, but none quite as lively and inventive as this. Faced with the knowledge that tI've read a lot of comics (and other) memoirs lately about depression, but none quite as lively and inventive as this. Faced with the knowledge that there are many such stories out there, and feeling self-conscious about her adding yet another one to the pile, she nevertheless sallies forth. But over the course of some 3,200 days Thorogood faces her depression, including some suicidal ideation, exacerbated by the isolation of the pandemic, and shares with us the meta-narrative of her stylistic choices.
For instance, she knows we have to in some sense "like" her if it is a memoir, even one about such an intimate subject. Anr she knows most memoirs are pretty straightforward; most authors in this genre don't want to make it too difficult for their readers. Nevertheless, she takes a stylistic risk; she decides to create animal-selves and other fictional characters that she engages with, dialogues with, argues with. I guess one point is that in spite of everything she doesn't give up; she keeps drawing and telling her story. Part of this book becomes a meditation on art in the creation of a/her self. It feels like it could be a very important book for a lot of people, as it considers the process of a story about depression even as she tells that story....more
Benji and his grandma, Bubbe Rosa, travel Manhattan and Brooklyn to get things for supper. But Rosa's memory is slipping; she sometimes wants to go toBenji and his grandma, Bubbe Rosa, travel Manhattan and Brooklyn to get things for supper. But Rosa's memory is slipping; she sometimes wants to go to places that no longer exist; and she is cantankerous; she hates street music, she tells people to dress better, and so on. Benji has to apologize for her all the time. Along their travels we meet first love baker Gershon, and her husband, Joe, and we learn about events in her past from around the world, including Brooklyn, where (spoiler alert) she meets with Gershon. A sweet, sweet tale of Jewish identity and aging, generational differences.
I probably liked it more because I, too, am becoming an "altekaker" (old fart). Lots of Yiddish in this one, that I like. Kudos (oops! I mean Mazel Tov!), to Ziggy Hanaor, for the story. And to Benjamin Phillips, too, for his Chagall-like, muted drawings....more
10/10/23: Reread for my ghosts/liminal spaces fall 23 class; ghosts, you ask? Well, that's a question, isn't it? The incident late in the story at the10/10/23: Reread for my ghosts/liminal spaces fall 23 class; ghosts, you ask? Well, that's a question, isn't it? The incident late in the story at the well? The foster family's recently deceased son is a kind of ever-present "ghost" in this story, or ghost, depending on your point-of-view. I LOVE this book, and showed excerpts from the beautiful and moving 2023 Academy-Award-nominated film based on the story, The Quiet Girl (available now on Hulu), as well.
One of the things I am paying attention to in this second read is the mention of "secrets," which I had not paid much attention to in my first reading, but other reviews I read later speculate on what is going on with that. In short, I think there are secrets throughout this story, though some are worth speculating about.
Foster (2010, but republished in 2022, as a wider group of people across the planet, including me, were introduced to her work through the Man Booker Shortlisted Small Things Like These [2021]) is a book about an economically disadvantaged girl from a growing Irish family who is fostered for a summer by a middle-class couple--her mother is a cousin to the host woman--we come to learn later in the story had recently lost their son, to drowning.
A personal reflection: When I was 9 and my sister N was 7 my father drove us to the farm of his childhood friend an hour or so from our house. At the time no one knew when or even if we were going back home. We knew very little about it, but we knew our mother was very sick; I think my parents thought she would die. We were in the same sense as this quiet girl being “fostered” on a farm. A trip to a research hospital was lucky, the cause of my mother's pain was identified and corrected and in the early fall we returned home.
So this is a weird way to talk about this book, maybe, but I’ll admit I was influenced in the reading of this book by my son’s photography project (I know!) about Liminal Spaces, and we have been taking lots of photographs together, talking about what is in the lines between light and darkness, as in noir art--possibility, sure, but also fear of the unknown, mystery, magic. So since I was in that mindset I thought the whole book was about liminal spaces, in various ways, for this girl who is, after all, growing up, in the liminal space between childhood and adolescence, comparing the state of her family to a family less precarious than her own.
Here’s some examples of what I mean:
“It is a hot day, bright, with patches of shade and greenish, sudden light on the road.” “In places there is bare, blue sky. In places the blue is chalked over with clouds. . .” “I picture myself lying in a dark bedroom with other girls, saying things we won’t repeat when the morning comes.” (whispering in the shadows) “It’s something I am used to, this way men have of not talking. . .” “There’s a moment when neither one of us knows what to say. . .” “There’s a moment of dark, in the hallway; when I hesitate, she hesitates with me.” “I am in a spot where I can neither be what I always am nor turn into what I could be.” “The presence of a black and white cat. . .” “. . . the woman’s shadow stretches, almost reaching my chair.” “. . . everything changes into something else, turns into some version of what it was before.” “He looks happy but some part of me feels sorry for him.” “. . . we can see everything and yet we can’t see.” “. . . the wind blows hard and soft and hard again. . “ “. . . things I don’t fully understand. . .”
In-between-ness!
There’s ominous signs of things to come, fear, worries. There are times in which the story is eerie. We learn over time that the foster parents lost their child to an accidental drowning, so the spectre of this tragic event hovers over the girl's time at the farm, climaxing at one key turning point in the story that calls forth Irish myth, in some ways. There’s a black dog, the black sea. . . she's early on wearing the boy’s clothes. . . is something beckoning in the well where the boy had drowned?
“I keep waiting for something to happen.”
This is a marvelous short book y’all should read right now!
“My heart does not so much feel that it is in my chest as in my hands, and that I am carrying it along swiftly, as though I have become the messenger for what is going on inside of me.”...more
I have read and/or seen several of Martin McDonagh's plays and loved almost all of them, but had not read or seen this one (2001), which is part of a I have read and/or seen several of Martin McDonagh's plays and loved almost all of them, but had not read or seen this one (2001), which is part of a trilogy. This is a crazy super violent farce about political violence in Ireland during the seventies, focusing on a psychotic torturer and killer Padraic, who spends most of his time bombing civilian targets in Northern Ireland as a one-man splinter group, and he has a lady admirer who wants to be his second-in-command.
Padraic turns up his lethal tendencies to eleven when he finds out someone may have killed his beloved cat, his best friend. Warning about multiple cat killings in this play, as well as torture and murder.
When was it that violence began to be played for (the darkest of ) comedy? I thought of Pulp Fiction as one reference. But I somewhat guiltily admit I thought it was often gruesomely funny, surely not for everyone, the point being to show the absurdity of political violence. The dialogue is amazing. It has a bit of shaggy dog story about it in that there is some question in the end about whether the very cat in question was actually killed....more
Two-time Caldecott-winner Sophie Blackall has another winner, a sweet book about a farmhouse she bought in upstate New York that had remnants of the lTwo-time Caldecott-winner Sophie Blackall has another winner, a sweet book about a farmhouse she bought in upstate New York that had remnants of the lives lived in it before: Marks on the wall for child growth, handmade clothes, a piano, and so on. Blackall carefully catalogues all she finds in the house (beyond repair, finally) and through the objects (fictionally) reconstructs the lives of the family that had lived there.
I think the story is good and the language, the poetry, even better, but the artwork also enhances and enriches. Blackall says the artwork in the book includes, watercolor, Chinese ink, gouache and colored pencil, and materials she salvaged from the house, including wallpaper, paperbags, string, curtains, clothes. The book suddenly sails into significance after you read the afterword, where Blackall explains that the house was actually a real house she bought, and we learn all about what she went through. Then you reread it again and see the deeper meaning of her purpose....more
2/14/24: Reread for Spring 2024 YAL class, sort of in conjunction with Dry by Neil Shusterman, a YA novel, also dystopian about our world set on fire 2/14/24: Reread for Spring 2024 YAL class, sort of in conjunction with Dry by Neil Shusterman, a YA novel, also dystopian about our world set on fire through climate change, and the kids on their own, left with the world we have given them, and what can they do? Millet's book is not a YA book, and is much better written, imo, but both can reach younger audiences with the urgency the topic requires.
Original review, 10/27/22: The Children’s Bible is a kind of dystopian allegory of a near future descending into chaos. Brought on by climate disaster that the kids are aware of more than the adults. The parents are just clueless--wealthy, educated, where “drinking was a form of worship for them. . . they respected two things, drinking and money." Climate change has come quickly to disaster; whoops, there it is, we thought we had more time, shoot! Then chaos, people rioting over food and water, as the parents pair up and “couple” in upstairs bedrooms.
The kids look at all this as they see the world burn. These children--some of whom are also careless jerks in this book--are aware of the sins of their parents; they know that greed, selfishness and general disregard for the planet is destroying their future.
“Do you blame us?” [a mom asks, late in the book] “Oh, we blame you for everything.” [a girl] “Oh, I don’t blame you. . ." [another girl]. The woman smiles gratefully. “I just think you’re stupid, and selfish. When the time came you just did what you always do, whatever you wanted to.”
“When we ran, if we chose to, we ran like flashes of silk. We had the vigor of those freshly born. Relatively speaking. And no, we wouldn’t be like this forever. We knew it, on a rational level. But the idea that those garbage-like figures that tottered around the great house were a vision of what lay in store—hell no. Had they had goals once? A simple sense of self-respect? They shamed us. They were a cautionary tale.”
“It was them and not them, maybe the ones they’d never been. I could almost see those others standing in the garden where the pea plants were, feet planted between the rows. They stood without moving, their faces glowing with some shine a long time gone. A time before I lived. Their arms hung at their sides. They’d always been there, I thought blearily, and they’d always wanted to be more than they were. They should always be thought of as invalids, I saw. Each person, fully grown, was sick or sad, with problems attached to them like broken limbs.”
If you think the parents are painted too broadly, too caricatured, consider that one thread of this pretty amazing, deeply angry and sad book is the darkest of comedy, satirizing adults--who are mostly considering their stock portfolio performance and getting wasted every day at the cocktail hour--from the perspective of the next generation left to clean up the mess. This is a view familiar to anyone growing up in the late sixties, where young people saw the post-WWII generation as racist, sexist, in denial about the environmental disasters that they were creating, pro-Viet Nam War, and so on.
Cue Greta Thunberg as the emblem of environmental responsibility:
and then, in the next slide, you'd want an image of a million adults partying and spending millions in Vegas, or whatever (yes, I saw the Super Bowl and enjoyed the whole billion dollar spectacle with hundred thousand dollar seats, but I take Millet's point here; I'm not sayin' I'm a saint; I crave escapism as antidote to despair, too).
And yes, there are actual deaths and disasters that happen in this book. It's not merely a light satirical joke. Millet is writing climate fiction. She knows what is coming.
What are the narratives of children without adults? Lord of the Flies is a central one, a view that debunks the idea of childhood as Edenic innocence, and instead embraces the Calvinistic notion of total depravity. The kids in Kevin Wilson’s Nothing to See Here periodically spontaneously combust, and recover, and are seen as the victims of upwardly mobile, negligent parents. I am most recalling as I read this novel a short story about neglectful parenting, “Pilgrims,” by Julie Orringer, where adults are so selfishly caught up in sex and drugs in the seventies, leaving the kids alone, and this neglect leads to violence. As with The Children's Bible, this story is a vicious castigation of generations of ignorance leading to catastrophe. And in these stories the adults are not right wing extremists but liberals, stoned-meditating as the kids run wild. Peace, indeed.
I also thought of Nathaniel West’s social chaos in The Day of the Locust. Not quite realism, on the edge of madness. I thought of a pre-meme bumper sticker from the sixties: Never Trust Anyone Over Thirty, or the Who’s "I Hope To Die Before I Get Old" (still alive, old Who guys. . . who? Who!? Can you speak louder, I can’t hear from years of playing this music too loud!). See Meg Rosoff’s YA dystopian How We Live Now. . . and maybe Peter Pan and the Lost Boys?
I didn’t love Millet’s most recent book, Dinosaurs, which might also be categorized as climate fiction. but I loved this one. It has a real edge to it, a sense of rage and despair and absurdity I relate to in it. Climate fiction at its best.
“That time in my personal life, I was coming to grips with the end of the world. The familiar world, anyway. Many of us were. Scientists said it was ending now, philosophers said it had always been ending. Historians said there’d been dark ages before. It all came out in the wash, because eventually, if you were patient, enlightenment arrived and then a wide array of Apple devices. Politicians claimed everything would be fine. Adjustments were being made. Much as our human ingenuity had got us into this fine mess, so would it neatly get us out. Maybe more cars would switch to electric. That was how we could tell it was serious. Because they were obviously lying.”
Ooh, burn (baby, burn).
And the title, The Children's Bible? My sister and I had one of those, growing up. Noah's ark, lots of animals there and in the Garden of Eden. As in this book, where a child carries a Children's Bible around. Always they leave out the Book of Revelation though--too disturbing for kids. I like that moral thread through this book, that threat. Oh, let's read the Psalms and all the happy parts, instead!
Delicious and horrible horror for Halloween at any time....more
Congratulations to Annie Ernaux for being the 2022 awardee of the Nobel Prize in Literature!
Having read several of her shorter books this year, just bCongratulations to Annie Ernaux for being the 2022 awardee of the Nobel Prize in Literature!
Having read several of her shorter books this year, just by chance, I now can suggest that the first book you should read by Annie Ernaux should maybe be A Frozen Woman, which gives the broader context of one of her over all purposes: What does it mean to have been a girl and woman in the fifties and sixties in Paris? In that book she mainly tells her own story, from early girlhood through an early marriage. It provides a kind of wider angle context for the shorter books: A Man's Story, A Woman's Story, A Simple Passion, Shame, and so on.
I think if the Nobel committee had read A Frozen Woman and then The Years, the longest book, which makes some of her purposes clearer, to tell a life—hers--but tacking back and forth between her own experience to the cultural and historical purpose in general, that might have been just enough to garner her the award. All of her books are memory experiments, autofiction, but in this one she uses the third-person “we” that seems to include others like her—from the time of her birth in 1941 to 2006, after which she published the book in 2008 in France. This English translation is listed at 2017.
The book sort of chronicles the history of all that time and her life in terms of it, and as a person who is roughly ten years younger than Ernaux, and though I'm American and a male, I felt like I could still relate to a lot of the cultural and political and even personal history she shares. The style is sort of a combination of narrating her life amidst a list of events, things she remembers from ads, songs, newspapers, tv and so on, from her childhood to grandmother-hood. This one is 250 pages, and many of those short novels come in at about 90-100 pages.
Ernaux is honored here with the Nobel—or if you don’t care about awards--just say she’s worth reading because she is, like Proust, experimenting with the problem of memory and how to speak to it, represent it. Very worthwhile reading....more
"Look at these powerful black-and-white figures, their features etched in light and shadow . . . Has not this passionate journey had an incomparably d"Look at these powerful black-and-white figures, their features etched in light and shadow . . . Has not this passionate journey had an incomparably deeper and purer impact on you than you have ever felt before?"--Thomas Mann
When Thomas Mann was awarded in 1929 he was asked to describe his favorite film, but he chose instead to name a “silent” 1919 graphic woodcut novel, Frans Masereel’s Passionate Journey that was also translated as/titled My Book of Hours. (like The Medieval Book of Hours). Later, when the widely known and popular Masereel’s works were republished in finer editions, Mann wrote an introduction to this work.
So Masereel was not an isolated comics artist. He was critically acclaimed, and friends with Mann, Hesse, Rilke, Grosz. He was shaped in part by the socialist ideas and political actions of his father, and early on, the poetry of Walt Whitman, whose ideas about--his celebration of--democracy Masereel admired.
This woodcut journey is auto-fiction, acclaimed as his greatest work, a life told in 167 illustrations. The story is one of discovered passions, over time, a recognition of the good and bad in human life, and a commitment to the good, to serving man. It is no great accomplishment maybe, but Hitler and his thugs declared his work “decadent” in large part because it recognized the needs of the lower classes. And because he had expressed opposition to WWI, from which his country benefitted. A celebration of life. One of the first and best graphic novels ever, though I like them all. I might even like his The City better. And some of you can read this and many of his works on Hoopla for free (which is consistent with his aim when he was publishing, to make his work widely available to anyone who might not be able to easily afford books)....more
Walk me to the corner is an enigmatically titled book about middle-aged romance.
I'm not looking for another As I wander in my time Walk me to the corneWalk me to the corner is an enigmatically titled book about middle-aged romance.
I'm not looking for another As I wander in my time Walk me to the corner Our steps will always rhyme--Leonard Cohen
This is a spoiled review.
A beautiful and and anguished graphic novel about Elise, happily married in her mid fifties, with two grown sons out of the house, who meets happily married Dagmar, who has two daughters and a wife. Unexpected, unsought attraction at first sight, an itch that must be scratched. They meet, Elise tells her husband, Dagmar tells her wife, they both love their spouses and don't know what to do about it, but it gets physical and Elise's initially supportive husband also turns to someone else. Hurt. But no real regrets. They want to be with their spouses and they want to be with each other. They know it is impossible. They know they can't "quit" each other easily. As they see it, they joke they are a Brokeback Mountain couple.
A tender, serious novel, beautifully and subtly illustrated by the author, Swedish Anneli Furmark, speaks honestly about the complexities of love. I thought as I read it about all the new categories of sexual identity by which you can associate yourself, and how that just might be more honest than the Kinsey Report detailed about how people who identify as straight are not usually straight all their lives. Elise loved men, and then met Dagmar. So now she's bi, we will say. But the older I get, the more people I know whose stories are more complicated than a single story. This graphic novel is sweet, sad, feels real and thoughtful, not provocative nor salacious. I care for each and every one of these people. Highly recommended, and a short read....more
George Orwell’s masterpiece, 1984, published in 1949, his last of 13 books, reads like a grim dystopian prophecy of the return of totalitarianism, posGeorge Orwell’s masterpiece, 1984, published in 1949, his last of 13 books, reads like a grim dystopian prophecy of the return of totalitarianism, post-Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Franco. But surely it can’t happen here again? Fido Nesti’s great--and grim--graphic novel based on Orwell’s work was awarded Best Adaptation from Another Medium at the 2022 Eisner Awards). I had not felt I needed to reread 1984 in this ne0-fascist period, as I have read and taught it a few times, and it had been vividly miserable to me; been there, done that. But I think the adaptation is both darkly beautiful and powerful; I was reminded while reading it of the darkly frightening 1984 film version with John Hurt, Richard Burton, Suzanna Hamilton and Cyril Cusack (here’s the trailer):
Nesti decides to include whole sections of the actual novel, which from a comics standpoint I was disappointed in: Not needed. We already got the point. But I did read those passages and they were a reminder to me of the passion and rage that fired Orwell’s writing in this ultimate capstone of his career. I am not going to recount the plot, as there are thousands of reviews that do this, and many of them admirably. I’ll just say that it was especially heart-breaking to revisit Winston and Julia’s romance, and also heart-breaking to revisit their encounters with Big Brother. 1984 is less a conventional novel than a political allegory, of course.
There’s not much about character or even plot. Is it didactic? Well, it’s an extension of his essay, “Notes on Nationalism,” a castigation of nationalist tendencies in various countries, but in human thinking in general. It’s a description of totalitarianism he had observed himself, hundreds of millions dead, even more injured, traumatized and incarcerated, and it’s a warning.
Just a few moments that seem prescient:
* Two Minute Hate, sessions; Hate Week, periodic required public screaming sessions
* Doublespeak, Newspeak, Crimestop
* Oceania-one of the three totalitarian states on Earth, always at war with each other
“. . . people ignorant of each other’s existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost the same.”
* The Ministry of Love is really the Ministry of Hate; The Ministry of Truth is really the Ministry of Lies, and The Ministry of Truth is really the Ministry of Endless War
“A nation of warriors and fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting, triumphing, persecuting - three hundred million people all with the same face.”
“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
“War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”
“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.”
“The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power.”
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
“The object of terrorism is terrorism. The object of oppression is oppression. The object of torture is torture. The object of murder is murder. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?”
“Big Brother is Watching You.”
Some more hopeful moments?
“Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.”
“I love you”--Julia’s dangerous note to Winston.
“There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.”
“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”
“If he were allowed contact with foreigners he would discover that they are creatures similar to himself and that most of what he has been told about them is lies.”
“In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” ...more
I'm tempted to say this is the crowning achievement of alt-comix icon Jim is Woodring, who has for decades been making wordless comics that abut stranI'm tempted to say this is the crowning achievement of alt-comix icon Jim is Woodring, who has for decades been making wordless comics that abut strange creatures. Woodring claims he is merely the vessel for visitations of images/stories that can only be seen as surreal, though possibly mad. Certainly a world of invention, sometimes veering into horror and darkness. Never warm and cuddly, though there is some empathy for his characters and the journies in which they engage.
This is what the publisher says: One Beautiful Spring Day combines three previously published volumes —Congress of the Animals, where Frank embarked upon a life-changing voyage of discovery, Fran, where he learned, then forgot, that things are not always what they seem, and Poochytown in which Frank demonstrated his dizzying capacity for both nobility and ignominy — along with 100 dazzling new pages conceived and drawn by the author."
The story of Frank, a cheery, bipedal creature who he has described as a “generic anthropomorph,” making his way through the Unifactor. So Woodring takes all the Frank works and makes them into a more or less coherent narrative, wordlessly. And since it is basically surreal, you don't always ask "what it is about," but in this 400+ page epic, some gaps are filled, some continuity is established. The work of a kind of consistently weird genius, with unquestioning cartoonist skills, engaged in the making of strange beauty.
Sort of like a combination of 100-year-old comics set in a strange dream world, This one is all black and white, but he also does bold colors in some of his work.
Here is a professional review, so you can see the fascinating and sometimes slightly disturbing images:
Michael DeForge is incredibly prolific, having done thousands of pages of comics online and in books. Call It surrealism, with a wink? Early on it wasMichael DeForge is incredibly prolific, having done thousands of pages of comics online and in books. Call It surrealism, with a wink? Early on it was collections of stories, all short form, and then he began stretching it out. I guess I would put him in the experimental camp, which means a lot of folks might be put off by him, but there is no doubt in my mind he is a great cartoonist, with insight into contemporary life, and a great--albeit weird--sense of humor.
For a few years he worked on Adventure Time comics, and my theory is that this helped him establish a wider audience, as he became more accessible. In Birds of Maine--all shared online in the process--he tells the stories of birds and invented supposedly bird-like creatures, focusing on Ginni, a cardinal, Ivy and Ramil. The story is hugely long, probably too long, more than 400 pages of six panels, but I think it is his best work.
The framework is post-apocalyptic, environmental. Humans have destroyed the planet, so--without the help of billionaires--they live in a glass bubble around the moon. Her father is a fungal computing expert and her mom is an historian of human Earth culture. There’s lof of inside ornithological jokes, and lots of light-hearted reflections about communism, technology and community/relationships. And, you know, what post-industrial, post-capitalist existence might be like.
I actually have a serious birdwatching book on my shelf, The Birds of Maine! And a framed watercolor print of the birds of New England. If you are looking for a birding book, though, this will disappoint, though the background is indeed about birds and other creatures who have had their habitats destroyed by humans. I was reminded of a sadly discontinued series, Duncan The Wonder Dog, by Adam Hines, a book that posits the rage and grief of many animals at the destruction of the planet, where some animals turn to ecoterrorism.
DeForge’s colorful book is more playful, with punchlines at the conclusion of every page consistent with the comics tradition of Nancy and Peanuts. Only way more surreal, by far, you can tell even from the cover art. But his heart feels like it is in the same humane place, ultimately. DeForge helps us see the natural world through a bird’s eye view, truly fresh and original and imaginative. His best work so far and one of my best books of the 2022.
Ada Limón became the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States in July of 2022, so I thought I would spend a little time with her work.
The Hurting KindAda Limón became the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States in July of 2022, so I thought I would spend a little time with her work.
The Hurting Kind 1. On the plane I have a dream I’ve left half my torso on the back porch with my beloved. I have to go back for it, but it’s too late, I’m flying and there’s only half of me. Back in Texas, the flowers I’ve left on the counter have wilted and knocked over the glass— I stay alone there so the flowers are more than flowers. At the funeral parlor with my mother, we are holding her father’s suit, and she says, He’ll swim in these. For a moment, I’m not sure what she means, until I realize she means the clothes are too big. I go with her like a shield in case they try to up-sell her— the ornate urn, the elaborate body box. It is a nice bathroom in the funeral parlor, so I take the opportunity to change my tampon. When I come out my mother says, Did you have to change your tampon? And it seems a vulgar life all at once. Or not vulgar, but not simple. I’m driving her now to the Hillside Cemetery where we meet with Rosie who is so nice we want her to work everywhere. Rosie as my dentist. Rosie as my president. My shards are showing, I think. But I do not know what I mean so I fix my face in the rearview, a face with thousands of headstones behind it. Minuscule flags, plastic flowers. You can’t sum it up, my mother says as we are driving and the electronic voice repeats, Turn Left onto Wildwood Canyon Road, so I turn left, happy for the mundane instructions. Let us robot at once. Tell me where to go. Tell me how to get there. She means a life, of course. You cannot sum it up.
2. A famous poet said he never wanted to hear another poem about a grandmother or a grandfather. I imagine him with piles of faded yolk-colored paper, overloaded with loops of swooping cursive, anemic lyrics misspelling mourning and morning. But also, before they arrive, there’s a desperate hand scribbling a memory, following the cat of imagination into each room. What is lineage, if not a gold thread of pride and guilt. She did what? Once, when I thought I had decided not to have children, a woman said, But who are you to kill your own bloodline? I told my friend D that and she said, What if you want to kill your own bloodline, kill like it’s your job? In the myth of La Llorona, she drowns her children to destroy her cheating husband. But maybe she was just tired. After her husband of 76 years has died, my grandmother, (yes, I said it, grandmother, grandmother) leans to me and says, Now teach me poetry.
3. Sticky packs of photographs heteromaniacal postcards. The war. The war. The war. Bikini girls, tight curls, the word gams. Land boom. Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe. Southern Pacific. We ask my Grandma Allamay about her mother for a form. Records and wills. Evidence of life. For a moment she can’t remember her mother’s maiden name. She says, Just tell them she never wanted me. That should be enough. “Red sadness is the secret one,” writes Ruefle. Redlands was named after the soil. Allamay can still hold a peach in her hand and judge its number by its size. Tell you where it would go in the box if you’re packing peaches for a living. Which she did, though she hated the way the hairs hurt her hands.
4. Why do we quickly dismiss our ancient ones? Before our phones stole the light of our faces, shiny and blue in the televised night, our elders worked farms and butchered and trapped animals and swept houses and returned to each other after long hours and told stories. In order for someone to be “good” do they have to have seen the full tilt world? Must they believe what we believe? My grandmother keeps a picture of her president in the top drawer of her dresser, and once when she was delusional she dreamt he had sent her and my grandfather on a trip to Italy. He paid for it all, she kept repeating. That same night on her ride to the hospital, she talks to the medical technician and says, All my grandchildren are Mexican. She says it proudly. She repeats it to me on the phone
5. Once, a long time ago, we sat in the carport of my grandparents’ house in Redlands, now stolen for eminent domain, now the hospital parking lot, no more coyotes or caves where the coyotes would live. Or the grandfather clock in the house my grandfather built. The porch above the orchard. All gone. We sat in the carport and watched the longest snake I’d ever seen undulate between the hanging succulents. They told me not to worry, that the snake had a name, the snake was called a California King, glossy black with yellow stripes like wonders wrapping around him. My grandparents, my ancestors, told me never to kill a California King, benevolent as they were, equanimous like earth or sky, not toothy like the dog Chacho who barked at nearly every train whistle or roadrunner. Before my grandfather died, I asked him what sort of horse he had growing up. He said, Just a horse. My horse, with such a tenderness it rubbed the bones in the ribs all wrong. I have always been too sensitive, a weeper from a long line of weepers. I am the hurting kind. I keep searching for proof. My grandfather carried that snake to the cactus, where all sharp things could stay safe.
6. You can’t sum it up. A life. I feel it moving through me, that snake, his horse Midge sturdy and nothing special, traveling the canyons and the tumbleweeds hunting for rabbits before the war. My grandmother picking peaches. Stealing the fruit from the orchards as she walked home. No one said it was my job to remember. I took no notes though I’ve stared too long. My grandfather, before he died, would have told anyone that would listen, that he was ordinary, that his life was a good one, simple, he could never understand why anyone would want to write it down. He would tell you straight up he wasn’t brave. And my grandmother would tell you right now that he is busy getting the house ready for her. Visiting now each night and even doing the vacuuming. I imagine she’s right. It goes on and on, their story. They met in first grade in a one room school house, I could have started there, but their story, their story is endless and ongoing. All of this is a conjuring. I will not stop this reporting of attachments. There is evidence everywhere. There’s a tree over his grave now, and soon her grave too though she is tough and says, If I ever die, which is marvelous and maybe why she’s still alive. I see the tree above the grave and think, I’m wearing my heart on my leaves. My heart on my leaves. Love ends. But what if it doesn’t?
One of the things I like about these poems is their accessibility and vulnerability amidst Our Present Age, anxious and fearful and mean-spirited as we often find it. Limón counts herself as one of the “hurting kind,” a weeper in long lineage of weepers, sensitive about the state of the world. One thing she acknowledges is nature in peril, so many of her poems feature animals and trees and nature in general as living beings, under assault. Often lyrical, she can also be direct and colloquial. I really like this book! ...more
William Trevor is one of the best short story writers ever. I have read some of these stories elsewhere, as in a selected collection of his stories, aWilliam Trevor is one of the best short story writers ever. I have read some of these stories elsewhere, as in a selected collection of his stories, and I may have even read this book before, but I enjoyed listening to it this time. Some of them are so subtle, Chekhovian studies of character, that if you are sort of power reading your way through it, you would miss what it is about. But as with Chekhov, you do not power read Trevor. You savor the sentences, the sensitive focus on the individuals that animate his stories.
I found the first story, “The Dressmaker’s Child,” for instance, sort of electric in a quiet way. Cahal, a garage assistant, gets a lucky chance to take a young Spanish honey-mooning couple to a local statue of a weeping Virgin. No one around there believes in it, since there are branches that drip down the face of the statue, but hey, Cahal, thinks, this is €50. Cahal is attracted to the young woman, whom he compares to his girlfriend. And on the way back, he hits a child, possibly a kid with disabilities, who is known for jumping out at cars near the roadway. The reclusive mother, a dressmaker, seems to know it was Cahal who hit--or did he hit?--her daughter, and approaches Cahal, somewhat accusingly, somewhat romantically. Cahal runs away from the woman, but in the end he knows he will be seeing her again and again, one way or the other.
The title story, “Cheating at Canasta,” is mostly an internal monologue of an older man who visits a romantic city he had hoped to revisit with his wife, who now has dementia. He has been daily playing canasta with his ailing wife, as she can still play it; “He cheated at canasta and she won.” She had insisted he go there anyway even if things proceeded to the point she could not accompany him. I know: Anguish. Then of course he regrets going, it’s no good, and when he listens to the petty squabbles of a young couple at a table near him he says the key line: “My god, what they’re wasting.” Anguish, my god! And never, in Trevor’s capable hands, sappy.
“Men of Ireland” is about Prunty, a kind of punk who left Ireland to try for better fortune in England. Not having found that, he returned to the town, stealing a drunk’s shoes along the way, as he is even more out of luck than when he left, basically a bum. He stops at his old priest’s church and tries to get money from him, lamely pressuring him, and the good priest finally relents, regretting he never really helped the boy when he was growing up. Touching.
*A line I liked from one story: “The best that love could do was not enough.” Whew!
I am only going to speak to those three stories but there are many others that are moving, enlightening, illuminating. Such a lovely writer....more
“When things go wrong and will not come right, Though you do the best you can, When life looks black as the hour of night, A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY M“When things go wrong and will not come right, Though you do the best you can, When life looks black as the hour of night, A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.”--Flann O’Brien, to which I say Amen (especially as it is Friday)
I had decades ago read Flann O’Brien’s At Two Swim Birds and liked it very much, but had not ever read this, The Third Policeman, and think I now I can even better appreciate both of them more than I ever could have. I read this because I have been going through a sort of rough patch and needed a laugh, and surely got one. The humor here is absurdist:
“Your talk," I said, "is surely the handiwork of wisdom because not one word of it do I understand.”
It’s not about plot so I won’t recount that, but you might get an idea if you’d like the humor if you have read Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Kafka’s The Castle, Beckett, maybe the later Joyce, Catch 22, The Good Soldier Schweik, books with a sense of humor about the absurdities of life. Even The Book of Disquiet by Pessoa, where oxymoron and contradiction are everywhere:
“To give love is to lose love.” “Only unhappiness raises us up.” “My joy is as painful as my grief.”
There is similar, logic play, malapropism, oxymorons in The Third Policeman, though it has its own humor.
“Is it about a bicycle?”
Yes, in this book there are sexually-oriented bicycles; you can fall in love with these curvy things, apparently:
“It is nearly an insoluble pancake, a conundrum of inscrutable potentialities, a snorter."
And about infinite digressions, wooden legs, murder, policemen (obviously), footnotes*, the omnium, an old Irish shaggy dog story, making fun of police and other bureaucracies, making fun of literary scholarship (the main character and narrator is a minor scholar of the works of de Selby), and sometimes just plain old goofiness:
“Put a thief among honest men and they will eventually relieve him of his watch.”
“Descartes spent far too much time in bed subject to the persistent hallucination that he was thinking. You are not free from a similar disorder.”
“I am completely half afraid to think.”
“There is no answer at all to a very good question.”
“Why is you say no all the time to my every questions??!!” “No is a better word than yes," he replied.”
The Third Policeman is a novel by Irish writer Brian O'Nolan, writing under the pseudonym Flann O'Brien. It was written between 1939 and 1940, but when no one would publish it, he always claimed he had lost it. The book remained unpublished at the time of his death in 1966, published by MacGibbon & Kee in 1967. A masterpiece of absurdist comedy misread by the idiot publishing industry! I can see some junior editor reading it: “This makes no sense at all! Trash!” To which I would say Exactly!
“You mean that because I have no name I cannot die and that you cannot be held answerable for death even if you kill me?" "That is about the size of it," said the Sergeant.
“Who is Fox?" I asked. "Policeman Fox is the third of us," said the Sergeant, "but we never see him or hear tell of him at because he is always on his beat and never off it and he signs the book in the middle of the night when even a badger is asleep. He is as mad as a hare, he never interrogates the public and he is always taking notes.”
“Human existence being an hallucination containing in itself the secondary hallucinations of day and night (the latter an insanitary condition of the atmosphere due to accretions of black air) it ill becomes any man of sense to be concerned at the illusory approach of the supreme hallucination known as death.”
One of the best books ever. Now I may have to reread At Swim Two Birds, which I hadn't thought as funny or just as plain good as this one....more
622 pages I read in one sitting, a comics coming-of-age story written by the Polish comics artist Wojtek Wawszczyk, one of my faves of 2022. Bleak, in622 pages I read in one sitting, a comics coming-of-age story written by the Polish comics artist Wojtek Wawszczyk, one of my faves of 2022. Bleak, in thick lines, sketchy, relatable, surreal, absurd, darkly funny, I am told it is a auto-fiction. A boy's (six) parents work in a steel mill, but one day is Dad is flattened like a pancake. They can roll him up like a crepe and take him to the doctor. At one point they blow him up to become a ballloon so they can carry him around on a string.
So the six-year-old kid stays home with Dad, but is essentially abandoned, so Mom takes the boy to work and exposes him to molten steel, he swallows a globule, it burns him inside out and he becomes. . . Bulb Boy, he can radiate heat and light. He's a loner, though he also draws comics. Mom also gets injured at the mill, and over time he decides to go to art school to draw Bulb Boy comics and find ways to be Mr. Lighbulb--I mean, you gotta eat! So find some work!! He gets jobs heating a house, as a streetlamp, and so on. A couple girls along the way are sorta impressed with him, support him.
So it's crazy absurd and underneath all of it is a kind of allegory about shining, doing what you can in adversity, but it is not sappy and sentimental or simple as in lighting a candle in the darkness. It's black humor/absurd and I loved it, very original to me.
Who knew that the popular humor cartoonist Kate Beaton would have this major work in her scope? Everything about it is a leap for her; artistically, dWho knew that the popular humor cartoonist Kate Beaton would have this major work in her scope? Everything about it is a leap for her; artistically, depth of story, passion, scope, all of it. More than a 400 page story that the focuses on two years in her life, post college, to travel to the oil sands to make big bucks and pay off her student loans. Which she did, but there was a pretty heavy price for it.
This was 2005, Kate had a double degree in History and Anthropology and no prospects for work in Cape Breton, in Eastern Canada. She wasn't exactly environmentally-oriented, and had she had no idea what this work would be like, but one stat might give you an idea: A ratio of 50 men to 1 woman. And on top of that these men were (absolutely no excuses!) lonely, depressed, getting fairly rich, doing a lot of drugs, and she was suddenly in a way she had never been before, an object of attraction.
Scratch that. While she made good connections with many men and women, and others who had left Cape Breton as well, and tried hard to maintain her signature positivity and sense of humor, she also learned something about men, and maybe men in isolation, not sure, but again, there's no excuse. She--like other women there--became the victim of endless sexual harassment and even assault. This shook deeply her sense of men, of humanity, that she had had growing up, and even the sense of men that had she seems to have maintained during college. In spite of this she invites her sister out to work there, where they share stories they had never shared with each other about assault as young women. She tries hard to be "fair" in sharing her good experiences in the place, friendships, but we are not left with a good feeling about what she went through.
In the process of being there, she and her sister find news the company there had attempted to block employee access to, the environmental impacts of the oil sand process on indigenous peoples on whose land the destruction takes place, and on the animals, including what made international news, ducks destroyed by the oil. That became the turning point for her, I think. Then she wonders what the sores they all have come from; she wonders what it is they breathe in and cough up all the time? She wonders about the reported perfect safety record that the company shares with the media.
Still, this turns out to be less of an environmental memoir than one about what it still means even in this century to be a woman in a world dominated by men. So why did it take so long for Beaton to tell this story? You tell me, but it clearly mattered to her then and has not gone away. Powerful work....more
I read The Colony by Audrey Magee because 1) it is longlisted for the 2022 Man Booker Prize, 2) it is an Irish book, focused on the late seventies perI read The Colony by Audrey Magee because 1) it is longlisted for the 2022 Man Booker Prize, 2) it is an Irish book, focused on the late seventies period there known as the Troubles, and 3) I had recently read (so far) eight books in Benjamin Black’s Quirke series, set in 1950s Dublin, and just read Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These, set in 1985, and 3) had read Anna Burns’ Milkman which like The Colony is set in the very same year as The Colony, 1979, the time of the Troubles.
So as violence erupts all over Ireland, two outsiders--one a French academic, the other an English artist--travel to a small island off the west coast where almost exclusively Gaelic is spoken. They both want to get in touch in their own ways with “authentic” or “pure” “native” culture and celebrate in their own ways (and they want to become famous doing it). For instance, the painter, Mr. Lloyd, insists on getting to the island by currach--no motors, rowed--in spite of the bad weather and the fact that he hates boats, and he wants to live in a hut as did Gauguin in Tahiti. He romanticizes the “primitive” as Gauguin did.
Jeanne-Pierre Masson is the linguist, writing his dissertation on the dying Irish language, seeing this island as one of its remaining havens, and he actively wants to support the preservation of this language (whether most of the Irish people want to or not). He understands issues of language and power, detests the way English has “colonized” Ireland, but why doesn’t he focus on his native country’s colonization of Algeria, and he similar language issues there? And why not let the Irish decide their own fate? He’s an intellectual, making his own quasi-colonizing power moves. The two hate each other, the Frenchman hating the Englishman for speaking English and “contaminating” the linguistic environment, the Englishman hating the Frenchman for bringing politics into everything and talking Gaelic, which he can’t do. The islanders really dislike both of these guys.
We meet, over the summer, islanders, of course: Great-grandmother Bean Uí Fhloinn, her daughter; the widowed Mairéad, and her fifteen-year-old James, who all have different views on language, power, politics. In short, this book is a kind of cultural forum on colonialism, especially wth respect to the history op=f Ireland leading to the Troubles, taking a decidedly post-modern stance, seeing events from a range of perspectives.
Periodically throughout the narrative there are “news clips” on murders happening mainly in northern Ireland, without commentary, seen as a kind of backdrop (or is it foreground) for the issues being explored on this tiny island. We also get stream-of-conscious monologues of various kinds. Chunks of the French linguist’s dissertation serve as a kind of political commentary, too. . None of the characters are without flaws, though we are perhaps most sympathetic to Mairéad, and her son Paul, who develops into an artistic tutee of the Englishman. The outsiders get satirized for their self-interests: Masson wants to use his work to get a French professorship, and Lloyd wants to become the English Gauguin, painting Mairéad nude as Gauguin painted so many Tahitian women. What he sees as his greatest potential accomplishment is his attempt at an Irish native remake of Gauguin’s painting, “'Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?”:
It took me a while to fully appreciate this books\--as with most post-modern books it prevents you from losing sight of the fact that it is was constructed; the various strategies call attention to themselves. But I came to like it even more than appreciating how ambitious it is. And I did fall in love with Mairéad and Paul, for sure. Finally: A very good book, highly recommended! I have no doubt it will make the Booker shortlist, at least.
An example of some of the stream-of-consciousness (though most of it is a very readable piece of historical fiction, not difficult), by Mairéad, in grief from the loss of her husband, father and brother, all fishermen who died at sea:
“. . . though god is good for he gave her first a son, a son who looks like his father so that her husband can live on, thanks be to god, thanks be to the lord god, a father living through his son, through him, with him, in him, thanks be to god, his father’s eyes, his father’s hair, his father’s chin, father, son and holy ghost, holy ghost of a man, of a husband, a lover, a friend, not a trace of him anywhere, in rocks, in grasses, in waves, in clouds, in rain, in prayers, in beads, in crosses, nothing, not a sign...for the sea took everything, beating him into fragments small enough to send across the earth on a journey of further erosion and rendering, pounding him into still smaller particles, atomised eternity granted unto him, oh lord, but nothing more, nothing for me to hold at night, to look at in the morning. . .”
Oh, the title? Colonized Ireland, a colony of artists, a colony of puffins. . .....more
Even the Dead is essentially part two of a two-book arc in the life and career of Dr. Quirke, a pathologist and consultant to the delightful though unEven the Dead is essentially part two of a two-book arc in the life and career of Dr. Quirke, a pathologist and consultant to the delightful though understated Inspector Hackett in a series by Benjamin Black. In these two books Quirke is at his lowest point, but since those are the moments in which stakes are highest, these turn out to be my two favorite books. Yeah, we solve the mysteries in these books, but the real mystery is, as any much literary fiction, the human heart.
The book opens with what Quirke really believes could not be a suicide, since the man who has slammed his car into a tree, Leon Corless, had an earlier blow to his head. The woman who had most recently been in Corless’s car, Lisa Smith, approaches Phoebe Griffin, Quirke’s daughter, to say she is pregnant and fears for her life, so Phoebe hides her away until--as it turns out--Lisa’s father--an enforcer for the Church and a criminal--captures her and places her in one of the infamous Laundries where “wayward women” were imprisoned, an institution that existed for nearly a century and a half in Ireland, the babies sold into adoption, many to U.S. Catholics.There was no legal abortion in Ireland in the fifties, so orphanages or adoption were the only legal options for women. Imagine how difficult that might have been for them!
This plot is connected to several other volumes in the series, where women and babies are also at peril. Why does it particularly matter to Quirke? Because he understands himself to be the product of such a pregnancy, where he was for years in an orphanage and then adopted. This case is, like most of the others on which he consults, are both deeply personal and political. One of the things making Quirke so morose is that he can’t quite understand that thing in his past that drives him. But In this book he finally realizes who his father and mother are, linking this book in a very real way especially to the first book, Christine Falls, where the titular character dies in childbirth.
So the admittedly slow-moving but beautifully written series offers many changes/resolutions in this important book, so maybe I should say spoiler alert for what are essentially my own notes to myself here: 1) Quirke had in the last book begun to have hallucinations, brought about by a brain lesion from his being beaten up by Church enforcers (don’t meddle in affairs of the Church, Quirke, we warn you), so he takes a two-month convalescence at his brother's house; 2) and then Malachy tells Quirke he has inoperable pancreatic cancer; 3) Phoebe seems to be separating from her relationship to Quirke’s assistant, David Sinclair, 4) Inspector Hackett suggests he is not well, too much booze, too many cigarettes, so will likely retire, and 4) Quirke has ended his relationship with actress Isabella. Quirke sees himself at the darkest moment of the book, as “a child standing alone in the midst of a vast, bare plain, with nothing behind him but darkness and storm.”
But on the good news side, Quirke is going back to work to solve the murder of Corless and rescue Lisa, and investigate the ways real, historical events, long silenced, implicate the Church and organized crime in fifties Dublin. The resolution of this book, like the resolution of the last book, resolves most of the key questions in the whole series. And it appears Quirke has become seriously smitten by Phoebe’s boss, a psychiatrist, so maybe we catch a break from all this sadness. Rose, Malachy’s wife, even tells Quirke she sees a change in him, something she never has seen: Happiness, and she guesses why. We’ll just have to see....more
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