Sunday Fiction: Theater of Cruelty
A balcony, a bed, a windswept curtain parting and falling, a white hand, candles reflected in distant mirrors – my actress’s eyes are suddenly lit as if by fire. She stumbles across the tiered stage. Rising illumination brings her arms back into focus. Footlights peel away shadows that conceal her face and body. Motion stops. The orchestra next to the stage plays a sad melody when my actress confronts the child actor who is supposed to be a younger me. As she looks back across her shoulder, in this play, the audience never realizes that she is my sister, or rather, that she is performing the part of my deceased sister, and the child is playing the part of the boy I once was. Therefore, my actress’s shoulder is my sister’s shoulder, and her eyes are my sister’s eyes, glazed as if awakening from a dream. Haze rises from the smog machines blasting under the floor. That haze is the fog outside the apartment windows on that evening long ago, hours before my sister was attacked and blinded in my childhood home.
She, who had raised me as if she were my mother, was raped when I was only seven years of age, shortly after I began dreaming of Shakespearean tragedies she had once read to me. The reality of what she had gone through was too painful for me to accept. Perhaps this is why I began to cultivate the notion that the world was a theater and everyone but me was merely an actor. Truly, I imagined a creative god who was putting on a performance just for me, the only real thinking being in the world. I began to believe that my sister, like the man who attacked her, was only acting.
I was living in my own Theater of Cruelty long before, as a teenager, I discovered the writings of Antonin Artaud and immediately felt a kinship with the misunderstood genius whose theories struck a chord with me because of what I had seen at a young age.
I witnessed the entire attack. Later, even though I blamed myself for not being able to save my sister, I could only identify with the attacker. Because I could not forgive myself, I forgave the evil man, and then became obsessed with reliving what I could not avenge.
The man was never found, leaving a void in my life that became the shadow side of me. Justice was never served. In order to keep my sanity, I found ways to recreate the act of violence, ways to allow me to take control over the senselessness of what changed us forever. Secretly, I’ve always believed this is why I became a director, why I started my own theater and became a devotee of Artaud.
*
My sister was a woman who loved to sing lullabies and to draw pictures of the characters in the lullabies. She was endlessly eating pistachios in the evenings before she sang to me. She planted red and violet tulips in the narrow garden walkways of our apartment complex.
She had such a high and clear voice, and such strong and capable hands that could easily locate and separate bulbs clustered in the dark earth.
Long before she died, I found a way to replace her, just as I found a way to replace myself while I became the evil man in my mind. Somehow one of my sister’s hands had been broken, shattered. Later, I dreamed I was the one who blinded her and I was the one who broke her hand. In dreams, I was no longer me but the man who had hurt her.
Every spring after the attack, I had to describe for her the brightness and the quality of the tulips she could no longer see. She was not the same woman, even though she had survived. She would never be the same. Neither would I. That’s why the lullabies, the drawings, the tulips, and the pistachios will never appear in any of my plays.
*
Tonight, on stage, when my actress reaches her hand through the bars of the kitchen window to touch the boy’s face, the boy takes hold of her hand and won’t let go. He ties it into the vice; she cries out, and the audience feels her bones grinding against each other merely because of the authenticity of her screams. Some of the men in the audience rise from their seats, entranced by her performance. Just before she loses consciousness, the curtain falls, concealing her and the boy.
I run to her. When she wakes, her hand is twisted and curled like a dead spider, and she can’t move her fingers, three of which are tilted backwards to her wrist.
She falls into the props, and the hollow walls slide away to reveal the rest of the cast and crew, who have to pry us apart.
“It was your finest performance,” I tell her.
“Don’t touch me,” she says, but I hold her tightly and refuse to let go. On the way to the emergency room, she is silent in the back of the car, convulsing, collapsed against the window.
*
On August 21, 1963, my actress broke her hand, for the first time, on the stage above the sunset orchestra. When the scene went bad on the blue terrace, she cried, setting the audience of travelers free to embark on more personal journeys. Through the dim streets of summer, the women’s faces were obscured like the high leaves of the distant park trees nearest the black sky. I once asked her what came over her, why she did everything I told her to do, even though she must have known that it would hurt her, that it was wrong.
“It’s a presence, a mood,” she once said backstage in the little dressing room with the bare bulb swinging on its chain, the arc of light illuminating her pale face as she rose from her disintegrating chair. Months later, after her cast had been removed, the bones remained in a fragile arrangement and never quite healed properly as she had used the cheapest doctor she could find.
In truth, it might not have been the doctor’s fault. I do not know whether or not he was a capable, competent, or trustworthy man, although I assume he wasn’t yet a charlatan. Furthermore, he did warn her that certain bones never heal, not after certain types of breaks. In the years to come, beneath crates of old dresses, her disfigured hand twists and breaks again, the delicate bones hollow like a songbird’s made to last through only three summers carrying the branches to nests made of simple hair and long grasses woven into song.
On sunny mornings, sparrows mate in strange patterns near my upstairs windows. Falling after rain, the wet eggs later break in the gutter, a stream of fractured limbs on the concrete ground of the theater alley. In the violet room this evening, the room with its crumbling wallpaper that leaves blue-gray dust like powder, a moonlit mist of pollen on our palms, I hear the birds calling to each other and forget where I am, why I am here – with her. Her hair is buried on the white sheets, burned into my eyes. Bruised, she is calling my name.
*
We were here, in this room. Here. Together.
Near the low cabinet stocked with red wine, the cabernet gleamed in its green bottles. I fell asleep gazing at that gleam and knowing the merlot was taken.
When I woke, my actress was snarling in her sleep beside the gray dog, Badger. Badger had been dead for twenty-seven years, his corpse perfectly preserved by a talented taxidermist who matched the dog’s exact shade of blue-green eyes in glass. I hated to stare at those glass eyes. But I had to stare. They reminded me of my sister. My actress still loved Badger, the pet of her lost childhood.
“My first and only pet, the only one who will continue to love me unconditionally even after death,” she said while stroking the preserved corpse.
“But what about all these cats?” I asked her.
“What about them? Cats aren’t really pets because they have no souls. They’re not like dogs.”
“I like the cats,” I said, reaching out to stroke the tabby and then the ebony tom.
“If only you were as good as Badger,” she used to tell me, “if only you were as good as a dead dog, then I might love you.”
I tried – oh, how I tried to be as good as Badger! I never was. No matter how I willed it to happen, I could never live up to the legacy of her dead dog.
But that was long ago. The dead dog was still alive in her for many years, along with the rest of her childhood, which is mostly gone now, even in her memory. She has no sense of self. Once the child in her had died, even Badger’s ghost was lost. I felt it moving through the room, fading like smoke from an extinguished candle.
Through my actress, merlot coursed like a transfusion racing through a child’s veins. As she emptied another bottle, I said, “This can’t be happening, not to us.”
“It happens to everyone,” she whispered before tossing the bottle onto the carpet.
“The wine,” I said, “the wine,” and she halfway rose from the bed, looking up at me as I struck the match to light her cigarette. She refused my match and leaned into the candle flame instead, her breath raspy so that the flame danced beneath the cradle of her hair.
After taking a few drags, she gazed at me in a more personal manner, as if she suddenly recalled who I was, or rather, who I used to be. There was that hint in her eye, that strange glint. Now it seems odd to say she was afraid of me, but not as afraid as I was of myself.
“Collin,” she said.
“What?” I answered back. It was the first time she had spoken my name in over three years.
“I can’t. I just can’t.”
The balcony doors were wide open for anyone to see what we weren’t doing. The torn curtains shuttered in the night air that smelled of gasoline and steaks burning on a giant charcoal grill near the highway.
“Are you hungry?” I asked because I was. I wanted a huge steak, burnt to a crisp, even though the blackened meat sizzling on the big white plate seemed obscene. As I was still languidly contemplating the steak, she took off her gown, and wanted me to touch her. I was desperate for affection, but it had been a long time since I had sunk that low. I knew her too well, we had too much history, and the doors were still wide open.
“I’m falling,” she said. “I feel myself falling when I close my eyes, then I’m spinning and falling, even though I’m still down.”
I felt the need to state the obvious. “You drank too much,” I said as I handed her a bunch of stale crackers to chew.
A siren wailed in the distance, and the sound grew louder before I finally saw the blue lights in the curtains, cutting into the room only to fall on the yellowed walls like ghosts in a cage.
She blew out the candles, finally, as the ambulance sped away. She closed the balcony doors, drew the curtains tight. “Dark enough for you?” she asked. I didn’t answer. Why should I have? She knew my estranged and reclusive sister had been blind. She despised my dead sister more than she had ever despised any other woman and for no known reason.
I heard my actress drawing nearer, slowly, so slowly, making her way around the room, as I kept moving backward to keep distance between us. When she walked to me, calling my name, her normally soft voice took on deeper tones. Playfully, she threw her voice and changed it to a husky masculine groan and then to something more feminine, higher pitched, squealing like a girl and then oinking like a pig, howling like a wolf. I wasn’t amused. The whole charade was creepy, not funny, and not at all appealing.
Yet in the dark room, I was fascinated with the concept of keeping away, remaining as silent as possible as I moved while the sounds of her voice alone let me know where she was, the changing inflections the only clue to her state of mind.
Don’t let her catch me, I thought. I don’t know why. Suddenly, I thought of my sister, a woman without eyes. When she had regained consciousness and tried to escape that night, the man with the mask was still chasing her around the bathroom even though he had put out her eyes and was no longer wearing his mask. I felt like her, or rather the way I always assumed she must have felt later, years later, when she claimed he came back for her. When she was eighteen, that man broke into our apartment and blinded her so she couldn’t see his face after he took off the mask. In the years that followed, every time I went to visit her in the hospital or the nursing home, she touched my mouth as I spoke, just to make sure I was who I said I was. I suppose it was just to make sure my voice matched my face. I was just a child when it happened, hiding in the shower behind the curtain but I would never reveal what his face looked like, even now. I said I didn’t know. I told the police that. But I did know.
I never knew what she was thinking, even before she was attacked. Once she was blind, at least I knew what she saw. There were patches of time, days and months, as well as seasons I couldn’t remember.
Since then, I have willed myself into selective amnesia, and one day I hope to forget her, what happened to her, just before I forget myself, who I am, who I used to be. Sometimes I am taken off guard by the way the light falls on a woman’s hair, the city lights, the actresses’ faces in the photos at the old theater where even as a young man I failed miserably. And the actresses ran to me, practically ran into me, thinking I was a genius and could make or break their careers, asking what they should do – not just on stage – but with their lives, long after the play was over. “Can my sister have your eyes?” I wanted to say because they had shut their eyes to everything except themselves, and therefore no longer needed to see. Even before my sister was blinded, she seemed to perceive everyone but her.
“The man in the mask?” she used to ask me. “Why did he do it? Why do you think he chose me? What could he have been thinking when he did that?”
*
When I first saw the x-rays of my actress’s broken hand, in my mind, the stage grew dark. Then, when the light returned, it matched the color of the sky outside of the hospital windows – a gray blue so pale it was almost white. Upon waking, just before she realized we were not in the theater anymore, her stifled cries were as real as the new plaster cast resting in its sling. After she refused to file a police report, the nurses helped her down from the bed and into the wheel chair to escort her out of the hospital. Shortly after, I helped her up the flight of steps leading to the rooms above the theater stage where old set designs were pinned against crumbling walls.
That night while she slept I moved the props across the theater floor, attempting to erase the boundaries of the old stage. After creating a lighting machine to cast a blue flame, using a red light and orange cloth, I tacked a faded silk sky high above the lights where the ceiling once was. I wanted to make the sun rise and set above my audience, who would now be a part of the stage. Sometimes I asked actors and members of the chorus to sing amongst the audience, and the chorus would suddenly burst into song among startled people. Mechanical gulls suspended on fine wire soared beneath the silk sky just before real doves were released into the theater. I changed the light to violet, casting strange angular shadows on upturned noses, spotlights suddenly focusing upon certain faces in the crowd, the colored light making painted lips seem black or gray.
In my mind, I saw it all – every scene I was creating – the play I had produced so long ago.
In the fan’s wake, beneath the massive blades, the splendid white banners rippled like waves across the ocean. Parallel to the footlights, my actress bowed as the teal backdrops fell away, revealing a garden in front of a distant painted ocean, fake roses of yellow and red and blue fading on their trellis. The painted ocean background was wheeled away to reveal a hidden stage within the stage so that behind the garden was a pastel washroom beside a red kitchen where prison bars cast shadows across my actress’s luminous face.
Lights blazed harshly. Shadows streamed the stage, the light flattening the large painted gray men in the garden, the human statues who now opened their eyes, blinking at the audience in wide-eyed wonder. In the reflection of the large mirror, candles cluttered tables heavy with giant irises in silver or lead-crystal vases. I wanted to dazzle the audience. It was one of the few things I knew how to do – to put on a huge spectacle of romance – to take them up high before I tore them down with the opposite of romance. The crystal vases fractured the spotlight, making dazzling prisms reflected in the mirror that faced my actress as she undressed for bed as if no one was watching her gown falling, her bra coming undone, the delicate straps tangling slightly around the agile fingers of her unbroken hand.
Even the women grew silent. The men forgot to breathe.
Silence – this silence I created – disarmed the audience in the rose light that faded from blue to black before my actress, who still played the part of my sister, stumbled across the room just before all the lights went out – on stage and off. A woman screamed, and then the silence returned, haunting the darkness. The male statues in the garden kissed like lovers before my actress and my sister traded identities that night.
However, my sister did not yet know that play was about her – not until weeks later when the nurses turned on the radio at the hospital and she heard details of the nonexistent plot rehashed in a scathing review.
“You robbed me of me,” she later said, weeks before she took her own life. “You took me from me,” she whispered, as if I were the one who blinded her, not the masked man who was so quick and so skillful with his knife.
Would it kill me to kill her on stage, night after night?
Part of my conscience was already gone, beyond any metaphoric death. Besides, although I did not believe in art as therapy when traditional narratives and dialogues and happy endings were involved, I knew it could only heal me and make me feel more alive to find ways to face the truth of irrational violence. The illogical nature of animalistic destruction was the demon inside all man, the demon that had invaded my childhood home.
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Filed under Poetry | Tags: Cruelty, fiction, Sunday, Theater | Comment (0)Able-Bodied Praise
OK, so what’s the opposite of faint praise? We’ve all read the reviews that are stretching for something—anything—positive to say about a book: it’s un-put-downability, how faithful the translation is, how nice the binding, how sumptuous the cover stock. But what about the really meaty compliment, the one that sends a reader immediately clicking, or off to the nearest bookstore or library? Whatever a reviewer might offer up about tight plot, fascinating characters, or driven dialogue, truly compelling acclaim is a bit ephemeral. You know it when you see it, but maybe not the moment you write it.
So whether you love Ernest Hemingway or find him an insufferable pompous boor, you can’t deny that when he sets out to praise a book, it stays praised. Lists of Note reprints a bit from an article Hemingway wrote in 1935 for Esquire magazine titled “Remembering Shooting-Flying: A Key West Letter.” While the piece is mainly, and unsurprisingly, concerned with hunting, he also offers up a list of 17 books that he “would rather read again for the first time [...] than have an assured income of a million dollars a year.” There are no great surprises in his choices—
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Far Away and Long Ago by W. H. Hudson
Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
A Sportsman’s Sketches by Ivan Turgenev
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Hail and Farewell by George Moore
Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
La Reine Margot by Alexandre Dumas
La Maison Tellier by Guy de Maupassant
Le Rouge et le Noir by Stendhal
La Chartreuse de Parme by Stendhal
Dubliners by James Joyce
Autobiographies by W. B. Yeats
—but my goodness, that’s a hell of a compliment. Especially considering what a million dollars was worth in 1935.
The Esquire article is actually a very nice reflection on reading and where it fits in with other beloved memories. If you don’t have fond lifetime reminiscences of hunting parties, you can substitute something else that brings you back—meals cooked, trips taken, sports played—and call up much the same effect:
When you have loved three things all your life, from the earliest you can remember; to fish, to shoot and, later, to read; and when, all your life, the necessity to write has been your master, you learn to remember and, when you think back you remember more fishing and shooting and reading than anything else and that is a pleasure.
You can read the whole piece here. (via Poets & Writers Daily News.)
(Photo of Hemingway courtesy of John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.)
All Over Coffee #575Collaboration with Lou Beach
Click image to enlarge:
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All Over Coffee, by Paul Madonna, is published in the Sunday Datebook section of the San Francisco Chronicle, on SFGate.com, and in two book collections by City Lights Press. The second and newest book, Everything is its own reward, was just released this spring. A free interactive APP of Everything is its own reward is also now available.
Go here to read The Rumpus interview with Paul Madonna
…
Lou Beach is an illustrator, artist, and writer. He recently published 420 Characters, a book of short fiction which also features 10 original collages. He inhabits many states of mind but is most at home in Los Angeles where he lives with his wife, the photographer Issa Sharp. Their days are spent hob nobbing with celebrities and the literary elite, heads of state and captains of industry. Lou is debonair, fluid in twelve languages and an expert marksman.
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Go here for more information about All Over Coffee collaborations
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Filed under Poetry | Tags: #575Collaboration, Beach, Coffee, over | Comment (0)Why I Chose Linda Hogan’s Indios for the Rumpus Poetry Book Club
Rumpus Poetry Book Club Board Member Camille Dungy on why she chose Linda Hogan’s Indios as March’s selection.
Sometimes a book teaches me more than I knew I needed to know. Linda Hogan’s Indios is such a book. The horror here is greater than I would have ever imagined, but Hogan has written this long poem with such compassion and grace that I could not help but read on and on. And as I read, I learned an ancient story. Though the old tale had been warped and changed and watered down, Hogan’s Indios reclaimed and renewed it, reinforcing a true history and giving me new language to describe an old grief.
In Indios, without dulling any edges or softening the impact, Linda Hogan re- presents the awful beauty of the Medea story. She reframes its lessons, returning to an original story and thus redefining what it is we know. In the Author’s Preface, Hogan reveals the source of the story she conveys in her long poem:
“When I researched the story I found that her children–
not the ones of the later rendering of the Greek tragedy-
-had been stoned by those who feared a mixed-blood
child would come to power in their land. But the story of
that time was changed for the sake of politics so that in
the Greek tragedy Medea, the queen was recorded as the
one who killed her children.” (XV)
Hogan reframes the Medea narrative, using as her source the unpolished horror that originally seeded the myth. In doing so, she releases the original hero from a prison of neglect.
When I have loved the Medea story it is because of the way it reveals the depths to which we might sink in order to reap revenge, and the heartache that might come of such anger. No one was clean in the tale, and no one got out unscathed. Medea was the opposite of the Disney narratives that were vying to be the dominate narratives of my youth. Medea, with its horror and its unbridled hatred, felt much more real to me. But Hogan’s retelling reconfigures the focus of the story in a way that makes it even more relevant than it had been before. I see the story now as much more than a love triangle gone wrong. Hogan’s version is so much richer in depth and even more revealing about the horrors we visit on each other because of lust for power, mistrust of difference, indifference to the needs of those who don’t resemble us in custom or appearance.
Indios recasts the conventional Medea story through the voice of an indigenous woman who suffers the loss of home and family and trees and love as a result of merciless colonizing forces. Hogan’s Indios is the original woman, beautiful and powerful and vilified and castigated. Before we were invited into the prison from which she narrates, she had lost control over even her story. But she has not lost her memory, she has not lost her mind, and she has not lost her ability to speak. This poem, “A performance” as it is called on the title page, is the record of that speech.
The language in this book is crisp as an apple and sharp as a scythe. It is also very sad, and very lonesome. With her spare diction and direct statements, Hogan helps us hear her hero’s every gasp and groan.This is not a book of acquiescent resignation, nor is it a book about turning away. There is, in fact, a refusal to turn away, an acknowledgment that the story has been ignored for too long. “In here the women cry at night,” Indios says about her prison.
“They talk in their sleep
The forgotten ones
Falling as if there is no bottom to their fall.In our stories, the world grew from songs and love.
Now I wake to find tears falling from my eyes.
How I want to go to the high place in the mountains
Or to the water that is in my blood.
I want to go to the beautiful world
Where we loved even the spiders.
Hogan weaves the very flora and fauna of a remembered world into every page of this poem, creating a song that is too beautiful to ignore and too heartbreaking to forget. Listening to this “performance” I understand newly and more completely what it means to love and lose. I understand America and history and hope. I understand horror, and I understand grief.
When Ezra Pound said, “Make it new,” I’m pretty sure this book wasn’t what he had in mind. But this isn’t about Pound. This isn’t even really about anything new. This is about an old old story, an old old truth. This is about the story before the story we all know. The story beyond the story we all know. The story beneath the story we all know. I chose Indios for the Rumpus Poetry Book Club because in this book Linda Hogan has found a new way to tell me something I already and always knew.
Would you like to join the Rumpus Poetry Book Club? Here’s how you do it.
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Filed under Poetry | Tags: Book, Chose, Club, Hogan’s, Indios, Linda, Poetry, Rumpus | Comment (0)Rainbow Book Fair
4th ANNUAL NEW YORK RAINBOW BOOK FAIR
Saturday, March 24, 2012 11am–5:30pm
The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center
208 West 13th Street NYC
Welcome to the 4th ANNUAL NEW YORK RAINBOW BOOK FAIR On this website you can find out how you can become a Sponsor of the Rainbow Book Fair, how to become an Exhibitor, and keep abreast of Panels, Readings and the Poetry Salon for the 2012 Fair.
Plan to be a part of the most exciting LGBT book event in the U.S., the
4th Annual New York Rainbow Book Fair. More than 1OO publishers, writers, poets, editors, booksellers, and the 15OO+ readers who love and want to buy their books—from serious to wild, zany, and super hot. It’s totally free to the public with book discounts, giveaways, panels on writing and publishing, author readings, a non-stop Poetry Salon.
The event is sponsored by: CLAGS The Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies web.gc.cuny.edu/Clags/
Silver Sponsors:
. 
Hosted by:
Media Sponsor:
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…
Steering Committee:
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http://www.glreview.com/
http://www.gaywisdom.org/
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Soccer to the Rescue?
At The Atlantic, Rumpus contributor Chris Feliciano Arnold looks at efforts to draw Major League Soccer to Tucson, Arizona and wonders whether building a community around the game can be a healing force in a region “facing one of the most tumultuous periods in its history.”
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Filed under Poetry | Tags: Rescue, Soccer | Comment (0)Rainbow Book Fair
4th ANNUAL NEW YORK RAINBOW BOOK FAIR
Saturday, March 24, 2012 11am–5:30pm
The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center
208 West 13th Street NYC
Welcome to the 4th ANNUAL NEW YORK RAINBOW BOOK FAIR On this website you can find out how you can become a Sponsor of the Rainbow Book Fair, how to become an Exhibitor, and keep abreast of Panels, Readings and the Poetry Salon for the 2012 Fair.
Plan to be a part of the most exciting LGBT book event in the U.S., the
4th Annual New York Rainbow Book Fair. More than 1OO publishers, writers, poets, editors, booksellers, and the 15OO+ readers who love and want to buy their books—from serious to wild, zany, and super hot. It’s totally free to the public with book discounts, giveaways, panels on writing and publishing, author readings, a non-stop Poetry Salon.
The event is sponsored by CLAGS The Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies web.gc.cuny.edu/Clags/
Sponsors:
.
Hosted by:
.
Visit us on Facebook
Links
http://www.glreview.com/
http://www.gaywisdom.org/
Filed under Poetry
| Tags: Book, Fair, Rainbow |
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The Great Singapore Penis Panic, and Other Fantastic Titles
I am ever-so-slightly obsessed with literary prizes (I’m sure this goes back to my childhood somehow), so I know all about the Bookers and the Whitbread and the Orange and the NBCCs. But somehow I’ve overlooked this one for years: the Diagram Prize for the Oddest Book Title of the Year. It was first bestowed in 1978 (on Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice). Like the Bookers, it’s known its share of controversy: the 2009 winner, The 2009-2014 World Outlook for 60-Milligram Containers of Fromage Frais, was apparently not authored so much as it was computer generated. (Sadly, the nude mice book is out of print, but if you are concerned about the future of cheese, the fromage frais tome can be yours for a mere 5.)
Today, the Diagram Prize released its 2012 shortlist, and what a list it is:
- A Century of Sand Dredging in the Bristol Channel: Volume Two by Peter Gosson.
- Cooking with Poo by Saiyuud Diwong. (Tragically not available on Amazon. Also, I feel that I should clarify: “Poo” is both the Thai word for “crab” and the author’s nickname.)
- Estonian Sock Patterns All Around the World by Aino Praakli.
- The Great Singapore Penis Panic: And the Future of American Mass Hysteria by Scott D Mendelson.
- Mr Andoh’s Pennine Diary: Memoirs of a Japanese Chicken Sexer in 1935 Hebden Bridge by Stephen Curry and Takayoshi Andoh.
- A Taxonomy of Office Chairs by Jonathan Olivares.
- The Mushroom in Christian Art by John A Rush.
The Great Singapore Penis Panic is my personal favorite of the bunch, but I think you can make a case for most of them. And I think I’d read almost all of them, with the possible exception of the sand-dredging book. To be perfectly honest, I’m not entirely sure I don’t already own the Estonian sock book.
Want to make your voice heard on this important issue? Cast your vote.
RIP Barney Rosset
Barney Rosset—maverick publisher, filmmaker, and literary provocateur—died Tuesday, at the age of 89. Rosset, founder of Grove Press, was the man responsible for bringing Samuel Beckett to American audiences, and for pushing Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Tropic of Cancer, and Naked Lunch past censors in the 1960s. He also began the counterculture literary magazine Evergreen Review in 1957, which printed Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” in its second issue, imported the Swedish softcore film I Am Curious (Yellow), and published Che Guevara, Eugène Ionesco, Gene Genet, The Story of O and The Autobiography of Malcolm X. So no, you’re not hip. I’m not hip. Barney Rosset—he was hip.
Also, crazy like a fox. In his 1997 Paris Review interview, he describes setting up Lady Chatterley’s Lover for an obscenity trial:
We prepared very carefully. We decided the best thing to do was send the book through the mail so it would be seized by the post office. We thought this would be the best way to defend the book. The post office is a federal government agency, and if they arrest you, you go to the federal court. That way you don’t have to defend the book in some small town. If we won against the post office, then the federal government was declaring that this book was not objectionable. That was the idea, and it worked out in exactly that way. The post office has its own special court, where the judge and the prosecutor are the same man. We brought in all these famous writers. Malcolm Cowley was a witness. He was particularly good because he was deaf and couldn’t hear the questions of the prosecutor—so he gave a lecture.
Time Magazine called Rosset a “Smut Peddler” in 1969. Nearly 20 years later the PEN American Center presented him with its Publisher Citation for “distinctive and continuous service to international letters,” and another 20 years after that the National Book Foundation presented him with a lifetime achievement award for his contribution to American publishing. He was a true champion of free speech and progressive art, and a number of obituaries have already tagged him a First Amendment crusader. No doubt he’d have gotten a kick out of that, although he always claimed that he published what he did because he enjoyed the racy stuff. Those days are gone, publishing is a whole different animal now, and it’s pretty safe to say there will never be another Barney Rosset. He’ll be missed.
The 2008 documentary Obscene: A Portrait of Barney Rosset is streaming on Netflix—a hell of a story and a killer soundtrack to boot. Go watch it.
(Photo of Barney Rosset, 2005, from OBSCENE, an Arthouse Films release.)
A Safer World for Books: Bookninja Closes Up Shop
I was able to fool myself for a while… six months, nine months. Maybe he’s busy, I thought. I know he’s got a lot of other things to do. At first I’d keep checking, full of hope—today? Well no, OK. He has a lot on his mind. Maybe next week? But eventually, you can’t delude yourself any more. You know it’s over. Time to move on. There are other blogs on the internet.
But… Bookninja was special. It was one of the first blogs I followed, for one thing, back in a more innocent day when they were a whole lot fewer and farther between, when the prevailing ethos was Why not? rather than Why bother? In 2003, when George Murray started up his smart and witty literary site, people still laughed at the word “blog.” Well, I did. But a little laughter doesn’t stop Ninjas. As George described it over at the National Post’s Afterword last week:
Along with one of my best friends, novelist Peter Darbyshire, I decided to create a website for our group of friends to visit. We came up with a silly name, designed a logo and site, posted some links to articles along with our usual saucy commentary, and added an area for discussion. The initial announcement that we’d launched a website probably went out to 25 people. Within two months, several hundred people were visiting the site, which we’d dubbed Bookninja. Within two years, traffic had grown to thousands.
And that’s not surprising. George and his fellow Ninjas, Peter Darbyshire and Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, were not only on the scene at the right time but they had the right voice, the proper ratio of serious news to humor, the correct dash of snark (which is to say: generous). And a rapid-fire delivery—Bookninja was always timely. You could almost hear the teletype machines in the background, and I always got the sense of George hovering over the keyboard, poised to snap up the latest literary news and break it to the rest of us. In fact, I may not have been so far from the truth about the hovering part. Now that I’ve been blogging for a few years I’m far more appreciative of just how much sheer grunt work it takes to stay current:
It was an exciting place to visit, but for those of us running it, the pressure was on. If I was late posting the links, I’d get angry emails from readers asking why there’d been a delay. “Listen, buddy,” I wanted to write back, “It’s a thing we do for FREE in our SPARE TIME!” But, of course, that was the problem—we ran the site around our other work and obligations.
And you can’t really argue with that. It seems like George just finished promoting his last book, Glimpse: Selected Aphorisms, and here he is announcing his upcoming collection, Whiteout. The world is a better place for poetry. But still, it’s hard not to feel a touch of wistfulness for Bookninja’s passing.
Full disclosure: I was a stand-in Ninja in the summer of 2009, when George took an actual week off, and it was a gas. Blogging may be a solitary act, but the sense of audience always lurks below the surface. Yes, I know, I have an audience here—although Like Fire was only the barest gleam in my eye at that point—but this was bigger, not to mention international. It was being read all over Canada! I felt so cosmopolitan, and honored to fill even a small Ninja shoe for the week.
I do take issue with one point of George’s farewell address, though, and that’s his statement that ”Bookninja was still well-read, but it wasn’t really ‘needed’ like it once was. The void it had filled was no longer a void.” We’re going to have to part company there, because I think there’s always a need for snappy, sharp commentary in the crazy literary world, and the blog’s closing is going to leave a major void of its own. But you’re supposed to leave ‘em wanting more, and Bookninja has certainly done that. Thanks for the blog, George and Peter and Kathryn. Supposedly you never stop being a Mouseketeer, and I know I’ll always be a Ninja ’til the day I die. The site’s motto was “No Book is Safe.” Well, it’s a safer world for books now, but a sadder one for the rest of us. Thanks, Ninjas.