In this Issue:
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When I
settle in to do one of these newsletters, I always discover that I've
collected a lot of notes to turn into responses and short reviews. I
also collect responses from readers (and often use those for my own
ideas for free reading).
Please! Send me your notes on what you are reading too!
The first book I want to talk about in this issue is John Van Kirk's novel,
Song for Chance.
This is the story of a rock star/song writer/lounge pianist, Jack
Voss, whose early breakthrough album was a romantic rock opera with a
triple suicide at the end that became the catalyst for several real
life suicides. The story line follows how, as
a man approaching 60, Jack's past comes back to destroy his own
daughter, who he has only recently begun to know. He goes on a road
trip seeking answers, and in the end learns the humility of taking
responsibility for your own actions.
I don't think, however, that the story-- or
Jack's personal insights arethe most important reason to read the
book. There's lots of interesting background-- drugs, sex, and rock 'n
roll through two generations. The flashback material to life on the road
with a carousing young band in the seventies is vivid and well-done;
the all-American road trip has wonderful descriptions of landscape (and
sky-scape) from New Jersey to Carmel, California, across Canada to poor
rural New York State. There are also solid minor characters and the
contemplation of the changes we go through as individuals and a nation
with the passage of time.
But for me, the the most powerful element
of the novel is how it captures something of how an artist works– not
in a moment of inspiration, which most likely all human beings
experience, but for the long haul.
Jack Voss in this novel's present is not as
famous as he once was, but he has wealth enough to do most things he
wants, and what he really wants to do as he approaches old age -- the
same as when he was young -- is to create songs. Van Kirk does a good
job of managing the slight of hand of using language to give the reader
an idea of how ideas must come to a musician. Jack is also, of
course, a lyricist too, so his sense of the world comes in words as well
as music. This is all brilliantly done: the life of a musician who no
longer fills amphitheaters with screaming teen fans, but still makes
music. Towards the end, after Voss has learned a few things about
himself and about life, Van Kirk writes this about his efforts to do
some give-back in the world: "Voss was a selfish man, and there was no
point in deluding himself with the idea that he was doing this for
anyone but himself. It would be an escape and a refuge, and that was
what he needed now. And when it came to an end...when it came to an
end, the next thing would present itself and he would deal with it
then."
Jack Voss really has loved his art more than he ever
loved his best friend or his wife or his daughter. He has been a man
who hires other people to manage his life (he calls his accountant
periodically and asks if he can afford a certain car, a house, an
important act of expiation). He drinks too much and smokes too much
grass even after he has officially given up drugs. But he is also a man
who is, by the end, making a serious effort to take actions guided by
compassion (he is also an occasional practitioner of meditation). He
wants to try to ease some small part of the suffering he has been
associated with, even if he hasn't caused it, but he also wants to do
this while he continues to make his art. .
This is, at its heart, a book for grown-ups,
about how little we can change from who we are, yet how essential it is
that we make the changes we can-- and how for those of us who are
lucky, creative work abides.
Carter Taylor Seaton's Hippie Homesteaders is
a nonfiction account of back-to-the-landers who went to West Virginia
in the nineteen-seventies. I suspect I'll return often to this as a
reference and because it makes a wonderful balance to my own experience
as one of the West Virginians who left. These people are more or less
my age, sharing many of my values--but they made the reverse move.
Interview by interview, too, this is a striking book.
Seaton has interviewed dozens of people, many of whom she already knew
from her involvement in the craft world in West Virginia as it
evolved. The homesteaders in the book were essential to developing West
Virginia's arts and crafts, both the revival of old traditional crafts
and the introduction and creation of new ones. The story is also,
indirectly, about how government and nonprofit support helped people
find a new way to make a living.
Many of these out-of-staters (and 
the
native craftspeople as well) thrived under the support of the state
arts council and the Mountain State Arts and Crafts Festival and--
eventually, the high-end outlet for West Virginia arts, Tamarack.
It's a fascinating and complex story. First there were the artistic
and craft-inclined young people looking for a rural life who found cheap
land in West Virginia. Then there were the old timers living around
them, who were generally extremely generous and friendly. These rural
people were often the ones whose own children had left the land, and
there must have been an element of vindication for those who stayed when
these new young people chose their life style or elements of it. They
gave the in-movers farming advice and in some cases taught the newcomers
folk art. The newcomers in turn honored the folk art and farming
techniques and in some cases shared new techniques as well as marketing
strategies.
Almost all of the events and people in this book live
outside of the industrial West Virginia where I grew up. That is, the
lives of miners and the power of Big Coal are almost absent from the
book, except indirectly, as when sculptor Bill Hopen is offered a
commission to do a statue of Senator Robert C. Byrd, names his price,
and no one even blinks. No one blinks because money available, and not
from the small dirt farms or the black lung miners.
Hippie Homesteaders gives us the information and
tells us a story about lives and art forms of some wonderful people who
taught themselves pottery and weaving and stained glass and basketry
and music. I love the fascinating interplay between the natives of my
beautiful, often exploited state and young people (young no more of
course) looking for a better life, a rural life, a safe place, a
communal life. Sometimes it didn't work out, and Seaton writes about
that too. Sometimes it led to deep roots and an influx of energy and
ideas into the state. Carter writes with thoroughness and affection
about a complex situation, and this is in the end, perhaps the best way
to capture history: on the ground, through a multitude of individuals
and their individual stories that, in the end, describe the arc of
history.
Another excellent nonfiction book I read recently is The Murder of Helen Jewett: The Life and Death of a Prostitute in Nineteenth-Century New York by Patricia Cline Cohen. This is quite a move from rural West Virginia in the nineteen seventies-- a 
wonderful dip into early nineteenth century New York City when men were
vicious in their privilege and sex workers were surprisingly
independent.
The focus is on a crime but also on the life of
prostitutes and the "respectable" young single men who did business with
them. Then it is about how the judges and lawyers close ranks to save
someone they identify with. At the trial, the testimony of the
prostitutes is devalued and not admitted. Since "good women" are not
even supposed to know these things happen, there is breathtakingly
circular logic: no decent woman could be involved in a trial for
murder, and you can't believe the women who do know what happened--
because they aren't decent.
The prostitutes aren't angels, of course, but they are
very interesting, especially in how they choose the men they'll sleep
with. Helen Jewett/Dorcas Doyen, the victim, always offers and demands
a patina of romance with her clients--she reads poetry with them and
writes them flowery letters. Her world (located around present day City
Hall in New York City) is one where brothels are next door to expensive
private homes and legitimate boarding houses.
The book also includes a lot of information about the
penny press and the legitimate press, and about police and court
procedures two hundred years ago. Part of the story takes place in small
town Maine, and finally in frontier East Texas where Richard Robinson
the probable killer goes into exile. He makes a lot of money and has a
respectable life, but-- to my satisfaction-- dies young.
Finally-- and I seem to be on a nonfiction roll today-- there is How to Read Like a Writer by
Francine Prose . This will go on my list of books that I return to for
thinking about literature. My other ones include Camille Paglia's Break, Blow, Burn, James Woods's How Fiction Works, and Joan Silber's The Art of Time in Fiction– as well as the book that opened my high-school-senior eyes, How Does a Poem Mean? by John Ciardi.
At one level, then, How to Read Like a Writer is an
excellent book. Francine Prose has read tremendously much and well, and
she has a long list of books to "read immediately." One enthusiastic
chapter details the wonders of Chekhov, and I promptly ordered the
collected stories for my Kindle. Her love of literature is infectious
and stimulating and a tonic for someone like me who has to read too many
student pieces and other work not always of my own choosing.
But her advice for writers pretty much sucks.
She makes the case that the essential thing about
literature–what matters fundamentally– is language. Obviously language
is what we use to make literature, but Francine Prose insists that this
is the most important thing to learn about and read for– and that
somehow you can write by being conscious of language. This sits all
wrong with me. In my writing practice, I certainly work hard to polish
and select the right words, and I cast around for images that suggest
ideas I don't have precise words for, but this my late stage revision.
These are also only some of my tools for plunging into material that
interests me.
Please don't misunderstand: I was trained as an undergraduate in explication de texte,
and I get a lot of pleasure out of following someone's discussion of
how a poem or paragraph works. But for me, the language is always in
the service of understanding experience and thus the world. Art and
Experience in my mind move back and forth in a sort of dance: sometimes
the language and form take precedence, and sometimes it's the raw
witness of a voice telling a story. We read, I believe, millions of ways
for millions of reasons. But Francine Prose– not in her enthusiasm for
individual works but in her prescriptions for how to read and write– is
too sure that her way is the only way, and that people who don't do it
her way are somehow spiritually inferior.
Fifty years ago, you could make a case that the practice
of high literature was one of a handful of the greatest endeavors of
human beings. It's harder to do that today. The necessary great
audience for great literature still exists, but it is smaller and
increasingly scattered. Thus, for me, How to Read Like a Writer is a book that offers little to writers beyond the perennial advice to read great literature.
It is, however, full of excellent commentary of a certain kind on some works of fiction.
Meredith Sue Willis
SHORT TAKES (by MSW Unless Otherwise Noted)
Tetched by Thaddeus Rutkowski
Tetched is a minimalist and intense novel,
almost all heightened moments, leaving the reader to draw the
connections. It concerns an eccentric childhood under the influence of
an angry Caucasian father, often drunk, who is the 
caretaker
for his children while his Chinese wife earns most of the family
income. For the children, there is no one around them who looks
half-Asian, or, for that matter, like any other kind of minority.
The narrator becomes an unhappy adolescent and a young
man with a taste for bondage. He yearns to hog-tie women, but is
mostly made to suffer by the women he chooses. There is lots of sexual frottage,
especially with the women who aren't interested in the role playing
games. A lot of it also captures the world of funky New York City
apartments with their claustrophobic close quarters.
There is certainly a creepy element in all of this, but
you find yourself more taken with Rutkowki's wonderful directness and
humorous honesty.
Harmony by Susan Taylor Chehak
Susan Taylor Chelak is known as a practicioner of Midwestern Gothic (see her webpage here),
and this is an excellent example of it-- the rising waters of evil
come seeping up into a material culture of home sewing and jell-O
molds. The objective of the protagonist, Clodine Wheeler, is to escape
the suffering endemic to smalltown midwestern life.The novel is set in a
kind of perpetual nineteen fifties where the surface is an aggressive
all-
American goodness, with evil just under the crust.
The changes begin in Clodine's life when she meets her
doppelganger, a pathetic trailer-trash young woman named Lilly Duke,
whose baby was conceived in a prison waiting room. Its father is an
admitted killer on Death Row in Nebraska. The women of the town,
necessarily, shun Lily (and thus Clodine).
The visual setting for the novel centers on a manmade lake from
which the branches of dead trees rise, giving a constant source of
hopeless imagery– if you stay here, you drown. If you stay here, you
live with hidden threats. Clodine creates a relationship with Lily, and
gradually all of what was inside Clodine but expressed outwardly in
Lily's life becomes exposed.
Clodine also has a baby in the course of the novel, and her husband
has telltale icy blue eyes. We are told that he is deeply in love with
Clodine, but, in fact, his character is far more opaque that that of Tim
Duke, the death row inmate who never even appears directly in the
novel. Somehow Tim's told confession and self-explanation are clear,
and oddly understandable, but Clodine's husband Galen is more like a
locus of evil-- the kind of character that Cormac McCarthy likes to put
in his novels: an ultimately inexplicable human demon.
Chehak doesn't write about the supernatural, but her gripping, tightly focused noir novel has a lot of that mood without wandering out of the natural world.
That may be scarier than supernatural evil anyhow.
American Gods by Neil Gaiman
Endlessly inventive, Neil Gaiman's novel American Gods has
that delightful vision of someone whose America is imagined over a
scaffold of facts. Towards the end, I got a little bogged down in the
strong silent American heroics of the protagonist Shadow, who is
repeatedly killed or almost killed, but always suffers (nine days tied
to a tree at one point, topping Jesus). Some of the plot is clunky at
best, but the thing with fantasy is that you can do as you please.
What I liked best were the surprises and the physicality of it.
Gaiman also has an appealing idea of the essential humanity of our
gods-- and of us people too. This is a novel about the decline of gods
who become grifters and performers of magic. Gaiman doesn't need my
endorsement-- he's wildly popular and clearly brilliant. I'd read read
more, occasional, in small doses, maybe his work in graphic novels
next..
PHYLLIS MOORE NOTES ON READING
The beat goes on! I've no hopes of keeping up with all
the books I'd like to read. Yesterday I put them out of my sight. But
today I finished two. FIELD NOTES FROM GRIEF: THE FIRST YEAR by Judith
Gold Stizel, a retired WVU professor is one I think you'd like. It is
the painfully honest look at the death of a spouse; a spouse of long
standing.
THE PRISONERS is one of those books you read in support of the author
but don't expect to like. There should be a title for this genre.
Written by Huntington's Ace Boggess, it describes his just completed 5
years in prison. It is honest and hopeful. Much better than I expected,
it recalled DARKNESSS AT NOON.
Ace is a WVU School of Law grad who didn't take the bar exam.
I did finish TENDER IS THE NIGHT and found large portions of it very
boring. I did admire [Fitzgerald's] descriptions of the landscapes as
well as his well rounded, mostly unlikable, characters. It felt as if he
was writing from scenes in a photographic memory and didn't know what
to cut. I will say, he does women well. Zelda [Fitzgerald]'s WAITING TO
WALTZ seemed more alive to me. She does so much so well but blew
descriptions out of proportion, at least for me. I like her style
better than Scott's.
RESPONSES FROM READERS
In response to the discussion of Pearl Buck's work in # 169,
Belinda Anderson wrote: "People admire her but I don't think they
really know her works. I went through a period, probably shortly after
I moved to Greenbrier County, West Virginia, near the birthplace of her
father, where I read about her intensively– those books, a bio, a novel
of hers I didn't know, etc. I found it a very powerful experience."
Laura Treacy Bentley of WV Living Magazine drew our attention to
interviews she did about the Pearl Buck homestead in Hillsboro, West
Virginia:http://www.wvliving.com/Summer-2011/Conversations-about-Pearl-S-Buck/index.php?cparticle=2&siarticle=1#artanc
http://www.wvliving.com/Summer-2011/Conversations-about-Pearl-S-Buck/index.php?cparticle=2&siarticle=1#artanc .
Laura also mentions the 1958 Mike Wallace interview of Buck available as a video on the Internet: http://www.c-span.org/video/?288844-1/mike-wallace-interview-pearl-buck . Buck's voice is lovely, and Wallace's constant smoking is pretty amazing.
BACKCHANNEL REPORT
Back Channel directs us to The Guardian on Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie . Here's my take on it in Politerature: http://politerature2012.wordpress.com/2013/07/
More from Back Channel: A nonfiction book about the gastrointestinal tract: "Charming Bowels" -- bestseller! http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/07/gut-reaction-book-digestive-tract-german-bestseller
. "While this is a non-fiction book, note the author also wrote "a
novel about an 18-year-old girl sent to hospital for a haemorrhoid
operation." Great idea for constipation in the article: a stool for the
stool.
THE E-READER REPORT WITH JOHN BIRCH: HOW FAST DO YOU READ?
How fast do you read? I've just done a test of how fast I read. It's fun, and if you'd like to try it, just type: "What speed do you read?" into Google.
In my case it showed how slowly I read, rating be me 16% below the
national average! The interactive test, unexpectedly on the Staples
website, will ask you to read a passage and then pose multiple choice
questions to check that you were paying attention. It then tells you
your speed in words per minute, and, compares your score with the
natural average.
My wife, Lynn, an avid reader, and not usually a shy wallflower,
actually refused when I suggested she do the test. Surprising, when
she's just read Donna Tartt's wonderful 771 page bestseller The Goldfinch in a few hours longer than a couple of days.
John Birch's latest post is about spring cleaning! Check it out at www.JohnBirchLive.blogspot.com.
HAVE YOU SIGNED UP FOR THE CREATIVE WRITERS OPPORTUNITIES LIST (CRWROPPS)?
This is an excellent, free, several-times-a-week
aggregation of resources, contests, and publishing opportunities. To
add yourself to the list, send a blank email to crwropps-b-subscribe@yahoogroups.com .You will receive a return message with further sign-up instructions.
THINGS TO READ ONLINE
ANNOUNCEMENTS, NEWS, CONTESTS, WORKSHOPS, READINGS ETC.
Kirk Judd's book MY PEOPLE WAS MUSIC
is a fabulous collection of Kirk's poems, and as a bonus, there is a
bound in the book CD of his spoken word performances. He's accompanied
by some of the greatest musicians that West Virginia has to offer.
Beautiful photographs throughout the book. A wonderful treat! Order from
Mountain State Press, http://www.mountainstatepress.org/
THE NOTEBOOK is now accepting submissions for the Fall 2014 issue (their third!). The theme for this issue focuses on SECRETS, BETRAYALS, LIES and REGRETS.
All genres of writing or digital imagery will be considered as long
as some aspect of the theme is related to the experience of rural or
small town women or girls, either directly or indirectly. You'll find
details for submissions at www.GrassrootsWomenProject.org.
Stevie Phillips's memoir has just been acquired by St. Martin's Press for summer 2015.
ABOUT AMAZON.COM
The largest unionized bookstore in America has a webstore at Powells Books. Some people prefer shopping online there to shopping at Amazon.com. An alternative way to reach Powell's site and support the union is via http://www.powellsunion.com. Prices are the same but 10% of your purchase will go to support the union benefit fund.
For a discussion of Amazon and organized labor and small presses, see the comments of Jonathan Greene and others in Issues #97 and #98 .
WHERE TO FIND BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS NEWSLETTER
If a book discussed in this newsletter has
no source mentioned, don’t forget that you may be able to borrow it from
your public library as either a hard copy or a digital copy. You may also buy or order from your local independent bookstore. (To find a bricks-and-mortar store, click the "shop indie" logo left).
To buy books online, I often go first to Bookfinder or Alibris. Bookfinder gives the price with shipping and handling, so you can compare what you’re really going to have to pay.
A lot of people whose political instincts I respect
prefer the unionized bricks-and-mortar bookstore Powells (see "About
Amazon.com" above) that sells online at http://powellsbooks.com.
Another source for used and out-of-print books is All Book Stores. Also consider Paperback Book Swap, a postage only way to trade books with other readers.
If you are using an electronic reader like Kindle, Nook, or Kobo, don't forget free books at the Gutenberg Project—mostly classics, but other things as well.
Kobobooks.com sells books for independent brick-and-mortar bookstores.
RESPONSES TO THIS NEWSLETTER
Please send responses to this newsletter and suggestions directly to Meredith Sue Willis . Unless you instruct otherwise, your responses may be edited for length and published in this newsletter.
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1 comment:
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