The Pemmican Eaters

I don't often start a review by saying that a book reminded me of something else, but this gorgeous book of poetry was accompanied by a haunting song that I heard sung live several years ago. The Wailin Jennys introduced a song that they had recently written called "Starlight." The women explained that, in their native province, scandal had broken when it had been revealed that police were picking up First Peoples' women late at night, and leaving them to die in the cold miles from home.

The words of Marilyn Dumont's THE PEMMICAN EATERS feel like the pull of the bow across the string of the fiddle, the high notes hit by a woman in childbirth, the clutch at one's heart when one hears bad news. The words are gorgeous as the matters they call to mind are hard to think with, hard to let in; for me, I needed the melody of someone else's song so that I could try to translate how Dumont's words made me feel.

Rather than quote from a poem out of context, even though the words are capable of standing on their own, I will suggest that you purchase this book and support the work of this artist.

White Feminists Must Speak Out Against the Deaths of Black Men at the Hands of the Police

Sometimes, those of us on the left who are white get ourselves so worried over being accused of appropriation, or accused of thinking that our discourse is the normal discourse, that when the time comes for us to be making a lot of fucking noise, we are quiet. And with our silence, we end up supporting the status quo in this country, which is that ALL black men are suspect, and if the cops shoot a black man, well, what did that man do to deserve it?

Do you know where I've heard that kind of bullshit before?
Yes.
You guessed it.
Rape Culture.

At the campus where I teach, when a rape gets reported, the first question out of other students' mouths are, "Was she drinking?" followed by "What was she wearing?" followed by "What was she doing walking around outside alone at two a.m." Followed by the grandaddy of them all: "Well, what did she expect was going to happen? She must have wanted it."

Similar questions get asked when a black man is shot. Did he have a gun? Was he wearing a hoodie? What was he doing in that neighborhood at night? Followed by the grandaddy of them all, "He must have been a thug."

I have two white daughters growing up in rape culture. I am a woman who has been raped on a date. While I cannot know the pain of sending my African-American sons out into the world and hoping that they make it home each night, I do know the pain of waiting for a phone call from an emergency room, or from a dorm room on a Saturday morning. I know what it's like to hear your child sobbing because of what happened.

So, as a white feminist, why would I not say something about the wholescale slaughter of young African-American men in this country? I am ashamed that people with whom I share a skin color believe that they are the only people who matter in this country. I'm tired of arguing with students who think it's okay to use the "N" word because it doesn't mean what it used to mean in "my" day. No, because young black men use that word with one another does not mean you get to use it, too. What on earth do you gain, white boy, by being able to use that word?

If, young man, you really want to be part of African-American culture, then get out there in the streets and march with your brethren. Protect young African-American women who are just as susceptible to rape culture as your own sister is. Listening to hip-hop does not make you understand the plight of black men and women. Stop telling me, student who lives in an all-white town on Long Island that racism doesn't exist anymore.

On Wednesday, a white female student who told me on the first day of class that she hadn't read a book over break, who doesn't read the newspaper, who doesn't understand climate change, or racism, or who refers to feminists as "they," rather than "we," tell me to my face that she thought her generation was the greatest, and that they were doing more to change the world than any generation that had come before hers.

I nearly swallowed my teeth.

I found it hard to believe that she believed the words that were coming out of her mouth.

So when I asked her what had happened in North Charlotte over the weekend and she couldn't tell me, I just sucked my teeth and counted to ten.

If white feminists out there are not making NOISE about the murder of African-American boys; if we are not linking arms with our black feminist sisters and crying with them; if we are not writing letters to our representatives, or having these discussions with our students -- again, and again, and again -- then we have no room to bitch if we are accused that our silence makes us complicit.

Stop hiding behind the walls of the categories that we construct that keep us from assuming someone else's voice. I'm not assuming anyone else's voice but my own. And I am telling you today that what is happening to African-Americans, what has been happening to black Americans is a stain on our national character. The United States is covered with the blood of the young men who keep getting shot down in the streets.

Next time, don't ask what that young man did. Ask why that cop did what he did. Just as it's the rapist's fault--not the woman's--when she gets raped, neither is it the young man's -- but the cop's fault -- when another African-American lies dead in the street.

I will not be silent. We are in this together. Let's focus on forging alliances instead of keeping our side of the street clean. The blood on the other side of the street stains us, and we have no way to wash our hands if we do not offer ourselves as allies.

John Donne was right 400 years ago. "Don't ask who those sirens are after, where that coroner's cart is going to. It is coming for all of us."

What are you going to do to make it stop?

Laughing at the Last Chance Saloon

The Collected Poems of Fran Landesman made me howl with laughter. I did that because otherwise, I might have had to weep with recognition of the impossible situation that women continue to find ourselves in.

Some of the poems touch on the politics of being a woman. Others touch on the politics of being in love with a man. Nearly every poem walks this razored line; one misstep and what is funny becomes tragedy, or what was intended as tragedy becomes a sad joke.

Still, despite topics that might turn to parody or bathos in less capable hands become sleight of hand. It's a magician's trick; just as we think we cannot bear the suspense or the ennui of the broken-down marriage, the half-wasted life, Landesman drops us into a seat facing the theatre of the absurd, and we laugh in spite of ourselves.

Take the poem "Cigarettes." How many stories begin, "He said he was going down to buy a pack of cigarettes, and we never heard from him again?" Landesman has a solution:

       It doesn't seem to matter if it's day or if it's night        
      A man will get distracted if you let him out of sight       
     So chain him to the bedpost, that's the only thing to do       
     If someone's gonna mess around it might as well be you

Landesman apparently has a best friend like mine. My best friend is a lesbian, and while there's no sexual attraction between us, she talks about how, in the past, I was treated badly by the men I hooked up with.  Still, my thoughts would sometimes turn to "thinking about it." As does Landesman in "Why I'm not gay."

         You'd think that I might risk it           
          If only for a thrill           
         But I'm too masochistic           
        And so I never will

Or, as my girlfriend tells me, I'm too "addicted to the stick." And I did find the right one after I stopped deliberately looking for the wrong one.

Her poetry is not all about love gone bad, or sour, or how tough it can be to be a woman. Sometimes, she paraphrases Augustine's famous prayer (taken from his Confessions), like this from the "Song of the Procrastinating Penitent:"

Oh Lord I wanna be good  
Dear Lord I wanna be good 
 Sweet Lord I wanna be good 
But please not right away

Or "Song from Salvador"

Soul of the poet haunts the panic's heart 
Razors are singing as the teardrops start  
Dreams are exploded in the city's face 
Monkeys are mourning for the human race

The collected poems will keep you reading for hours. Whatever mood you want to be in, you can find it here. And there's a mystery to solve: one of the books is dedicated to Elton John. But she doesn't say why. Something to think on.

Why Make Tourism Out of Observing the Suffering of Others?

 Come See the Mountain by Tom Zoellner (DECA: 2014)

I've been blown away by the quality of the work published by DECA in its first year in existence. While I hate telling anyone that anything is a "must read," I will break my own rule to tell you that COME SEE THE MOUNTAIN is, in fact, a must read. Some of you are aware that, bored by tourism where one travels to a place of beauty, or to relax in the sun, or to learn where one has come from, or any of the various things we do on vacation to escape the mundane qualities of the 9-5 life, certain privileged travelers have opted to see how the other half lives.

As a way of doing something "interesting," this new wave of tourists goes to places where they can observe horror. Auschwitz has long been on the horror tour, but these days, one can tour the slums of Mumbai, the favelas of Brazil, the charnel houses of Rwanda, places where something "interesting" happen(ed). Zoellner documents his experience with a group of tourists who come to Potosi, a silver mine in South America where it is estimated that eight million miners died between 1545 and 1900 in order to sate our lust for silver.

The tourists are not interested in saving anyone. They don't go to these places with the intention of doing something about suffering on such a scale; rather, they venture to such a place as Potosi to have the experience. And later, when they're back snug and warm in their bars and pubs, they can tell their friends that they have seen true suffering--they've experienced it--because of the 2.5 hours they spent crawling underground where men spend their entire lives digging out the silver.

Zoellner does a fantastic job of writing in that, while I was outraged, again, at the lengths that people with too much money and not compassion will do to entertain themselves, Zoellner is not overtly critical of those he traveled with. He tells the story and leaves it up to the reader to fashion his or her own reaction to the idea of tourists who mistake profundity with observing the suffering of others. The miners are objects to be examined, and, as if the miners were trained animals, tourists are encouraged to buy them treats that they can give to the miners for their willingness to let themselves be looked at.

Zoellner's writing is first-rate. My only critique was that I wanted to know more about this topic. When I finished the essay, I wanted to read more about these types of tourism. Perhaps that's the purpose of the essay. It made me want to know more while also moving me to sympathy for the miners, and disgust with the tourists for whom verisimilitude is close enough to real suffering for them.

When DECA did its original crowdfunding campaign over a year ago, little did I know that my $25 would bring me so much good writing. I anticipate each piece. My hope is that, after they have published their first ten or so long-form journalistic pieces, they will collect them and publish them in a hard copy book. Last semester, I wanted to assign this particular essay to my class. Since many of them did not have e-readers, it wasn't possible. But I hope that they are so successful that they will be able to offer hard copies for those who haven't gone digital.

Thinking with Travel

This book could not have come for a better time for me. I teach creative nonfiction at a small university in New York state. This summer, I had intended to teach travel writing as I took students through Spain and France. A couple of logistical issues, mostly having to do with university bureaucracy, has delayed the class for at least six months. Which turned out to be a good thing.

On the application for the class, students were asked why they wanted to learn travel writing? Almost without exception, they wanted to travel; they had no interest in writing about it, which means most of them would have been miserable when they realized that they had signed up for a six-credit course where the instructor intended for them to earn those six credits.

This was the context in which I asked to read this book. And I like it so much that I am thinking of assigning it next semester in the creative nonfiction (on-campus) course that I will be teaching on the subject of traveling.

Most travelers are happy to be tourists. They pile on to cruise ships or tour buses, happy to have someone keep them safe by arranging all of their accommodations, getting them menus in their native language, making sure the wait staff that are waiting on them speak their language, and getting to believe that the countries where they are being tourists are delighted to have visitors walking around and looking at things as if they were at the zoo. Or worse, a zoo where everyone is deaf, so tourists don't think about the fact that just because they're speaking in their native language, doesn't mean that no one else can understand their language. You would not believe what people speaking English on board a TGV will talk about, with their assumption that no one can understand them.

These are among the dozen or so issues to consider about the travel experience. Why do people travel? What do they expect to see? What are they hoping to gain? Why, if they are traveling to a foreign land, do they search out the places where they can find people just like them?

After a month spent in Barcelona and southern France in January, my new question is: why are people spending all of their time (now with selfie sticks) taking selfies of themselves? It's not as if they are taking photos of the architecture in front of them, or the statue, the natural wonder, or the street scene. They are taking photos--over and over again--of their faces while the things they came to see blur out in the background.

Whenever someone starts in on one of their "people are so rude in ____" stories, I usually find out that it's because the person relating the tale KNEW that the person they were struggling to communicate with must have spoken English; they were just refusing to speak it so they might embarrass the traveler. My usual response is to ask how many McDonald's or WalMart employees speak French, or Italian, German? So why do they expect every person in another nation to speak English?

The best thing about this smart book, which does a fantastic job of pointing out that the historical precedents established by travelers years ago have carried forward into the present age; that the seeing the world through the lens of a camera is a problematic issue; that cultures that overvalue long work weeks have a tendency to turn leisure time abroad into time to continue working, just in different countries.

And, at the heart of it is the difference between travel and tourism:

"The degrading slide from culture to commodity, from leisure to free time, from authenticity to phony reproduction--described with such visceral disgust by Adorno--is similar to the way many have described the transition from travel to mass tourism....[Adorno says] Amusement under late capitalism is the prolongation of work."

While this book is published by a university press, that should not scare off any person who thinks about their participation in traveling. It's important to know what you are doing, why you are doing it, and what you hope to get out of going to another country.

Reading this book gives one a great field guide of questions to ask yourself before you set off on your trip.

Letter to a Student About Some Favourite Novels about Hidden Manuscripts

 One of my students and I are working together on an independent study course in which she would read lists of nonfiction books on a number of subjects, and novels that are linked by some type of trope. This week, we were working on novels that comprise linked short stories, and I wandered off-track and started thinking, instead, about novels within novels. 

This is the letter and the list I came up with. 

We didn't talk about this possibility, but another type of novel that I happen to love, and which might be of interest to you because it seems to me that you could make an argument that there is an element of fan fiction here is the trope in which a story is about the discovery of a book or a manuscript that leads the characters who discover said book to have an adventure.

Sometimes, the author of the novel actually writes an entire new manuscript within his/her own novel. Sometimes, as with the Sixteen Pleasures by Robert Hellenga, Hellenga builds a story about the recovery of a long-lost book called The Sixteen Pleasures by Ariosto. The book was banned at the time it was produced because the sixteen pleasures referred to are sixteen different ways of making love. Not quite the hundreds contained in the Kama Sutra, but enough that it was shocking for its time.

In recent years, the execrable Da Vinci Code was loosed upon the world by Dan Brown. I reject that book on the basis that it's not literary. It's barely pop fiction. It's dreck, and the fact that he got rich off a book in which he doesn't even know the name of his main character is shocking. (Da Vinci was where Leonardo was from. He did not have a patronym because his family was neither nobility nor rich.) Leonardo would have been known as Leonardo. When you take Renaissance history, he is referred to as Leonardo. To do otherwise would be like you being called Savannah: Bridgette of Savannah. Vinci was the small village when Leonardo came.

So, these ten books are ones that I have read and enjoyed. I haven't listed The Decameron on here, because I would argue it's not a book within a book, but rather 100 linked stories. Ten stories on ten days for a total of 100. If we opt to read some of Decameron and the Tales of Genji, then I would suggest we read one day's worth of stories from the Boccaccio and figure out whether we wanted to read all of Genji. (There's also a famous Japanese book that is a pillow book. I can't remember the title, but know that it was produced sometime around the 1400s.)

Here are ten books.There are certainly others including the one that contains a play within a play, the most famous of all: Hamlet. 

Ten of my favourite novels based on recovery of documents

Possession  by A.S. Byatt (Two academics, who are having an affair, discover evidence that the famous writer that they are both researching may have had an affair with another famous writer. Byatt is brilliant because she is writing a love story within a love story. This was the first of this type of book I had ever read and I remember thinking that I would never be smart enough to write this type of book.

The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon by Richard Zimler

(this might be a great choice because Richard and I became friends after he liked my Amazon review of the book. He contacted me, and we've been talking ever since. I interviewed him for Talking Writing, and he wound up writing more stuff for us. I think Richard would love to talk to you about how he accomplished this feat.)

Sixteen Pleasures by Robert Hellenga.

Hellenga does a wonderful job of writing this novel in such a sensual way.

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne. (You would only know this if you read the prologue to the novel. A lot of high school teachers skip this part, thus robbing students of the knowledge that Hester Prynne's story was recorded in criminal records from seventeenth century Massachusetts.)

Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks (one of my favourite books ever. It's about World War I.)

Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco. (Dan Brown ripped off Eco to write his version of the story.)

The Missing Diary of Elizabeth D.by Nichole Bernier. (A modern-day mystery, as Elizabeth D.'s friend has been asked by her widower to go through his wife's diaries. Elizabeth died at the World Trade Center on September 11.)

The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova. (I don't remember much about this book other than that I devoured it in a couple of days.)

The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruis Zafon. (A book about Barcelona during the Civil War (1936) in Spain. I would require students going to Barcelona with me to read this. It's a quick read; I'm not certain if it's considered YA or not. )

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood. (one of our greatest living writers. Why she hasn't won a Nobel Prize is beyond me.)

The Princess Bride by William Goldman. (Goldman also wrote the screenplay for this film years after he wrote the book. This was the same year that he wrote the screenplay for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, one of the few westerns that I love. Robert Redford and Paul Newman at the top of their game.)

The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson (I've never read this. Rob loves Stephenson and he recommended this book to me.)

 ---

And so dear readers, I open the floor. What is your favourite book within a book, and why? 

The Perfect Gift for the E-Reader Owner Who Wants to Experience Poetry (Wait! Really! It can be done!)

Even though my own attempts to write poetry have convinced me that I am a prose writer who should stick to what she does best, I often long to be able to write poetry. I envy a poet's ability to make language sing. I feel as Flaubert did when he complained that all he was capable of doing was banging on cracked pots when what he longed to do was to move the stars. So, while April is the cruelest month up here in northern New York, I  love April's tribute to poetry.

For those who are not familiar with poetry, this book is a perfect amuse-bouche or several for the neophyte to curl up with. And, for the veteran fan of poetry, it's a wonderful collection of some of poetry's brightest stars' greatest hits. I would consider teaching this book in one of my writing courses. I have started having students in my "writing for magazines' course read a collection of poetry each semester, because I want to make certain that I produce students who will feel comfortable reviewing poetry collections, and to affirm for the poets among the group that I think the genre is deserving of being taken as seriously as we take prose. Perhaps even more so.

What makes ESSENTIAL POEMS so wonderful is that the publishing company, Open Road Integrated Media, has unlocked the key that allows a poem on an electronic reading device look like a poem  that you would see in a paper book. Poets lay out their words in a particular way for serious, not-to-be-messed with reasons. It would be frustrating if one were to open a book of poetry to find the words scattered or jumbled on the page or a sonnet that looks like a prose poem instead of its distinct shape. What a shame it would be if Robin Morgan's "Arraignment" were not to be in the shape of a voice gaining courage as it declares its "J'accuse!" against Ted Hughes?

How can
I accuse
Ted Hughes
of what the entire British and American
literary and critical establishment
has been at great lengths to deny,
without ever saying it in so many words, of course:
the murder of Sylvia Plath
?

Whether one thinks Morgan's accusations against Hughes to be unfair, or if one sees him as the husband who drove his wife to suicide, the ability to read the poem as it was intended allows the reader to notice the build-up of Morgan's voice.

Or the incomparable May Sarton, who taught us about solitude. Her lines are presented as she intended.

Read between the lines.
Then meet me in the silence if you can,
The long silence of winter when I shall
Make poems out of nothing, out of loss,
And at times hear your healing laughter.
Or the anguish conveyed in the poem without punctuation as "No Goodbyes" by the too-soon gone Paul Monette:

for hours at the end I kissed your temple stroked
your hair and sniffed it it smelled so clean we'd
washed it Saturday night when the fever broke
as if there was always the perfect thing to do
to be alive for years I'd breathe your hair
when I came to bed late it was such pure you

and so on, until he breaks our heart:

my darling one last graze in the meadow
of you and please let your final dream be
a man not quite your size losing the whole
world but still here combing combing
singing your secret names till the night's gone

This book should be a great gift for the new e-reader owner. Perhaps a chance to appreciate that poetry can be read on the new technology without losing any of its magic will make even the most ardent tech head make room for the poet in his or her collection.