"I kept wishing Snooky had come back to teach at Kahana. . ."

I'd go to talk to him. He was the only guy who helped you to see things as they were out there. The others ignored your questions or what they saw out there, or tried to make you see only the things they wanted you to see. He talked of freedom, while everybody else talked of duty and obligation.




Milton Muryama (1923-) was born in Hawaii to Japanese immigrants. When he was 12 his family moved to a sugar plantation at Pu'ukoli'i, a company town that no longer exists. His writings later drew much inspiration from there, including 1975's All I Asking for is My Body. Muryama received his B.A. from the University of Hawai'i in English and philosophy in 1947, followed by a master's in Chinese and Japanese from Columbia in 1950.

All I Asking for is My Body follows the life of Kiyo from fourth grade to his entry into the armed forces to fight on the European front in World War II. His father is an unsuccessful fisherman turned plantation worker and his mother sews kimonos. Despite their hard work, the family struggles to get by, with an inherited debt of $6,000 hanging over their heads. As Kiyo grows older, the proverbial "East-West" divide is increasingly pronounced and emphasized by the explosive outbursts of his older brother, Toshio. Their parents stress filial piety, obedience to rank, and social harmony, while mainstream culture promises personal independence. The subsequent dilemma is familiar to anyone who has read other works by second-generation Americans such as Anzia Yezierska, who, like Toshio, struggled violently against what she perceived as the limitations imposed upon her by the customs of the Old Country.

She was acting too damn haolified [white/American]. Whenever anyone spoke goody-good English outside of school, we razzed them. "You think you haole, eh?" "Maybe you think you shit ice cream, eh?" Lots of them talked nasally to hide the pidgin accent. At the same time the radio and haole newspapers were saying over and over, "Be American. Speak English." Pidgin was foreign. And whenever there was a debate about statehood for Hawaii over the radio, they always came back to the same question, "What about the Japanese and Japanese-Americans? They're foreign, their language and culture are foreign, they can't be assimilated, they can't even speak English after eight years of grade school. What if there's a war with Japan? Whom will the AJA's fight for?" Of the 350,000 people in Hawaii, 150,000 were Japanese.

Pointing out elsewhere that practically the only options for educated Japanese-Americans were as teachers or small business owners, Muryama also brings to light an issue glossed over by Yezierska, a Jewish Russian-American. While she would have faced oppression as a Jew, an Eastern European, and a woman, she has passing privileges and would eventually have white privilege as well (see Matthew Frye Jacobson's Whiteness of a Different Color). A person of color does not, and will always be seen as an outsider, particularly if one is of East Asian descent. Ronald Takaki, another Japanese-American from Hawaii, opens A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America with an account of a taxi driver who complimented him on his English and asked where he was from. Takaki's family has been in the United States for almost a century.

The issues of heritage and assimilation faced by ethnic/non-white Americans, particularly recent arrivals, are evident in Murayama's very title. All I Asking for is My Body is pidgin English spoken by the Japanese- and Filipino-American sugar plantation workers. As Kiyo explains, he and his friends speak three languages: Japanese at home, "goody-good" English at school, and pidgin for casual conversation. As with Their Eyes Were Watching God, the narrative voice is standard English which contrasts sharply with the dialogue, a disparity argued by Henry Louis Gates to represent a psychological fragmentation similar to W.E.B. Du Bois's ideas of the double-consciousness. As the narrator in this case is Kiyo - as opposed to Hurston's omniscient third person - his colloquial voice renders the divide more organic and less jarring. In fact, it seems to be a synthesis of sorts. All I Asking actually won Muryama praise for his skillful use of pidgin in a manner that was still understandable to a general readership. Kiyo can be said to represent someone who holds the possibility of success, even in a country that Others his body. The ending of All I Asking for is a hopeful one that promises new beginning.

Though not well received when it was initially published, All I Asking for is My Body received critical acclaim when reissued in 1988 and went on to win that year's American Book Award. A prequel called Five Years on a Rock came out in 1994. Unlike Anzia Yezierksa's overwrought drama, All I Asking for unfolds organically and offers a fascinating portrayal of daily life on a Hawaiian sugar plantation in the 1930s. Makes for a great companion to I Hotel.

No Man's Land

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) was a writer, sociologist, and utopian feminist. After supporting herself as an illustrator for several years, she married Charles Walter Stetson in 1884. She suffered severe postpartum depression following the birth of their daughter, Katharine Beecher Stetson, in 1885, only to be dismissed as just another hysterical woman. The "treatment" she received became the basis of her famous short story, "The Yellow Wallpaper." Charlotte and Charles separated in 1888 and legally divorced in 1894, although their relationship remained amicable. She remarried her cousin Houghton Gilman in 1900. Diagnosed with breast cancer in 1932, Perkins, a longtime advocate of euthanasia for the terminally ill, committed suicide three years later.

Throughout her career, Charlotte Gilman was active in socialism and other reform movements, making her living as a speaker and lecturer among similar-minded activists. Fame as an author came with the publication of In This Our World, her first volume of poetry, in 1893. She also wrote many essays and short stories. The 1915 novella Herland is her longest work.

Three young, adventurous American men are exploring the South American jungle when they hear rumors of a hidden, all-female civilization. Intrigued, they investigate further and are promptly captured and sedated. Upon awakening, Terry (über-masculine womanizer), Jeff (chivalrous Southern gentleman), and narrator Van (sociologist with a scientific mind) find themselves in the care of a group of matrons entrusted with their education. As the months go by and they learn the language, they discover that the men of "Herland" were wiped out some two thousand years ago by a combination of war and natural disaster. The women reproduce by parthenogenesis, each becoming pregnant automatically at age twenty-five and bearing five children each unless they direct their energies to other tasks. Still, whatever they do comes from a feeling of divine, universal motherhood on which their entire society is built. They are, without fail, entirely selfless, nurturing, and practical and focused not on their individual selves but on the world they are building for their daughters.

In terms of its structure, Herland takes a predictable route as primarily utopian exposition. The main female characters spend most of their time explaining how their world works to the ignorant outsiders who also stand for the reader, much like Dr. Leete to Julian West in Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, 2000-1887. As with Bellamy's future Boston, there is little description of Herland beyond that it is very clean and lovely and orderly. Terry exhibits no character development whatsoever and exists solely as a foil to the empowered women of Herland. You can see his Moral Event Horizon coming from practically the first page. Jeff does little besides occupy the other end of the spectrum, falling for Herland without a look back. Van is the straight man who balances skepticism with an open mind and desire to learn. The inevitable romantic subplot waits patiently for the last act, once we've gotten Gilman's fantasyland well established.

See, the problem with utopian fiction is its inherent narcissism. At the basis of every perfect world is the simple fact that it is perfect because everyone follows the author's ideas. Perfection is fulfillment, consummation, transcendence, completeness, the Platonic ideal beyond the grasp of physical reality. The very word "utopia," coined by Thomas More who was in fact writing a satire, means "no land." It is the secular version of the postmillennial Kingdom of God, the end of history and the final state of things. The future United States of Bellamy's Looking Backward actually came about following a mass conversion experience and America's subsequent rebirth as the ultimate society. (This also happened to humanity in Star Trek following first contact with an alien race.) Which they did by implementing every single one of Bellamy's theories, of course, which places him in the ancient role of messiah. Or even God, if you want to get metafictional, since he is the literal creator of this world.

Herland, as another utopia, faces similar drawbacks as a reflection of its maker. Gilman may have been a radical in her day but feminism has since been criticized as historically concerned only with the plight of white, middle-class, able-bodied, straight women (of which I am one, BTW) - a generally comfortable bunch who seek to be equal to white men pursuant to their racial privilege. Thus, feminism, the argument goes, has been a homogeneous movement that has erased the voices of women who do not fit a narrow mold. It has been, like Gilman's Herland, cut off and isolated from the majority of the world, seeing Western conceptions of gender as the only relevant form of oppression.

From start to finish, Herland reveals everything wrong with early feminism. It is racist, heterosexist, and ableist. The country is in South America, yet the women are explicitly described as white and indeed Aryan, with their perfect, advanced civilization in stark contrast to the primitive brown savages inhabiting the forests below. Gilman, through narrator Van, also lumps hospitals in with vice, crime, and poverty as the evils of our civilization. Disability and illness have long been vanquished in Herland. This may seem positive at first, but this is basically saying that disability is some kind of offense. Many people who are deaf or on the autistic spectrum (such as myself) will tell you that they are quite happy with who they are and would not wish to change. Really, what is "disability"? Who defines what it means to be able-bodied or neurotypical? I'm doing just fine - do I and others like me need to be purged in order for society to progress?

We also learn that the "sex instinct" has atrophied after two thousand years of no men and any woman who exhibits an "atavistic" sexual nature is denied motherhood. That female sexuality exists only in relation to the male, and vice versa, is obviously homophobic but there are darker implications here as well. Women who do not fit a certain mold are forbidden to have children. Women who do have children happily allow theirs to be raised by professional specialists. This is the era's Progressivism talking, with its emphasis on a rational approach to everyday life that effectively steamrolled traditional ways of childrearing, particularly those rooted in other cultures which tended to be marginalized in the American social hierarchy. As womanist blogger Renee Martin puts it,

It was White women who sought independence that organized the tenement movement. They came up with the idea of scientific domestic labour, and used their standards to attack poor immigrant women. Their racial biases can clearly be seen in the reports that they wrote. Families that had yet to be categorized as White, such as Italians and the Irish were constantly found to be substandard, even though these women were raising their children in a manner that was culturally appropriate for their countries of origin.

(She's written about this topic quite a bit.) At the vanguard of the Progressive movement were white, middle-class, native-born Americans who had grown disillusioned with their Victorian way of life and sought to improve things and "uplift the weak" according to their own standards. As a college junior I remember reading a report from a female volunteer at a local settlement house who quite arrogantly turned up her nose at the dirty Polish mothers who could not properly care for their children. And this is to say nothing of the Native American children taken from their mothers and sent to boarding schools under the care of white women or the forced sterilization of women of color and disabled women. Charlotte Perkins Gilman is so focused on gender oppression she can't recognize where she does have privilege.

With this we return to that question of homogeneity and the denial of other voices. Only in the most conformist culture would the restriction of dissenters' and outcasts' reproductive choices go without question.* It would take a completely uniform society to accept that other people can raise your children better than you can. To maintain such acquiescence requires isolation, which makes these issues even more troubling because it implies literal brainwashing. When presented with the opportunity to open themselves to the rest of the world, the women of Herland reject it despite their alleged curiosity and love of learning. Outside is messiness, a myriad complications and threats to the "exquisite order" of Herland. Even to hear of opinions and ideas foreign to their own - such as abortion or the Judeo-Christian Hell - causes near-violent reactions. And all this in juxtaposition to Van's constant rhapsodizing about the perfection of Herland which altogether evokes a sense of megalomania on Gilman's part. If only we could follow my ideas and get rid of everyone else and cut ourselves off from everyone else still remaining WILL WE CREATE OUR OWN HEAVEN YAY!

Herland is an archaic book. There is nothing in it that will appeal to anyone in the social justice movements today. Even from a literary perspective it is unremarkable. Herland's remaining value is as an artifact of American intellectual and reformist history. If monsters are physical manifestations of our fears and anxieties (vampires for sex, zombies for consumerism, Deep Ones for miscegenation), then utopian societies are their inverse, as imaginary worlds from which those things causing us fear and anxiety have been excised. Problem is, perspectives change and what was a threat or impediment yesterday is an accepted part of our lives today. It's time to move on.

* Update: I just realized I didn't phrase that very well. For a long time in the real world, the dominant culture has accepted these restrictions when it comes to marginalized women (arguably still does). But those women certainly did protest it, it's just that no one listened to them. What I'm saying here is that in Herland a woman in this position is completely alone. There is no recognizeable group of women targeted - it's on an individual basis in judgment of that woman's deviance from the accepted norm. Does that make sense?

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A Year of Feminist Classics is a project started by Amy, Ana, Emily Jane and Iris, four book bloggers who share an interest in the feminist movement and its history. The project will work a little like an informal reading group: for all of 2011, we will each month read what we consider to be a central feminist text, with one of us being in charge of the discussion. . . What we hope to achieve is to gain a better historical understanding of the struggle for gender equality, as well as a better awareness of how the issues discussed in these now classic texts are still relevant in our times. We welcome all voices and perspectives, and we would love it if you joined in and added your own.

"All pioneers have had to get hard to survive. . ."

"Look! My grandmother came to the wilderness in an ox cart and with a gun on her lap. She had to chop down trees to build a shelter for herself and her children. I'm more than a little ashamed to realize if I had to content with the wilderness I'd perish with the unfit. But you, child - your place is with the pioneers. And you're going to survive."



Anzia Yezierska was born in a shtetl in Russian Poland in 1882. Her father was a Talmudic scholar who devoted all his time to studying, leaving the neighbors' charity and her mother's occasional earnings to support the family of eleven. When the Yezierskas arrived in New York City in the 1890s, however, they found that pious poverty earned no accolades in America. While other Jewish immigrants shed the Old World and sought upward mobility, a few, including Anzia's father, clung stubbornly to tradition. But Anzia rebelled, leaving home at seventeen to work in sweatshops and laundries and attend night school and college lectures in her free time. After several failed marriages, she published her first story in 1915. Success quickly followed. A 1920 compilation of her work, Hungry Hearts, was purchased by Sam Goldwyn for $10,000, including a $200-week salary to help write the script. Still, despite her Hollywood fame and literary prestige, Yezierska found that she missed her culture. She returned to New York in the mid-twenties and continued to publish steadily with little fanfare. After 1932 she was strangely silent except for a few short stories and book reviews. Her final work, a fictionalized autobiography called Red Ribbon on a White Horse, came out in 1950.

Anzia Yezkierska's tales of poor people uplifting themselves through hard work fell out of fashion during the Depression Era, which seemed to make mockery of her favorite theme. But by the time she died in 1970, readers had begun to rediscover her work and students were inviting her to lecture. (Bread Givers Introduction) Today, Yezierska's concerns with acculturation and assimilation remain as relevant as ever.

Bread Givers (1925) is perhaps the most autobiographical of Yezierska's novels. Sara Smolinsky's life closely mirrors that of the author: she is a Jewish immigrant living in the Lower East Side whose headstrong ambition is opposed by a domineering, ultra-conservative father who does nothing but study Talmud and demand that his wife and daughters support him. After watching him crush her older sisters and throw away their chances at happiness all in the name of God and tradition, Sara vows that she will not submit to such Old World tyranny. She runs away at seventeen, finds work in a factory, and, operating on sheer willpower alone, puts herself through night school and then college. Her ultimate goal is not only material improvement but cultural and intellectual uplift as well. What Sara desires the most is a room of her own - the ability to live freely as a fully realized individual.

Sara's voice is highly significant. Bread Givers appears to be a direct story with little flair, but its narrator's Yiddish-inflected English has strong psychological underpinnings. Rahel Golub, a real-life Russian Jew and Yezierska's contemporary, recalled the impact of reading David Copperfield for the first time: "I turned to the first page of the story and read the heading of the chapter: 'I am born.' Something in these three little words appealed to me more than anything I had yet read. I could not have told why, but perhaps it was the simplicity and the intimate tone of the first person. I had not yet read anything written in the first person." (From Michael McGerr's A Fierce Discontent.) The word I is assertive: "I am [name]." "I want this." "I did this." To a young immigrant expected to subsume her identity in that of her family and culture, the individual as the very foundation and focal point of a story must seemed revolutionary. Just as David Copperfield is the story of David and his growth from boyhood to man, so too is Bread Givers Sara's own tale, expressing her bold personality, clear-cut goals, and strong opinions of the people and society around her.

The most influential person in Sara's life, for better or worse, is her father. You cannot talk about Bread Givers and Sara's journey without devoting some time to Reb Smolinsky. To put it simply: I have never wanted to throttle a fictional character more in all my life. Reb Smolinsky elicits a level of fury usually reserved for Complete Monsters. This sums up his philosophy:

The prayers of his daughters didn't count because God didn't listen to women. Heaven and the next world were only for men. Women could get into Heaven because they were wives and daughters of men. Women had no brains for the study of God's Torah, but they could be servants of men who studied the Torah. Only if they cooked for the men, and washed for the men, and didn't nag or curse the men out of their homes; only if they let the men study the Torah in peace, then, maybe, they could push themselves into Heaven with the men, to wait on them there.

(Heaven is a Boy's Club with few or no women? That's the most homoerotic thing I've ever heard.) Reb Smolinsky smothers his grown daughters to such an extent that they're incapable of resisting their forced marriages to, respectively, a scumbag, a gambler, and a widower their father's age looking for a babysitter. He brings the remaining family to ruin by refusing to listen to his sensible wife and falling for a financial scam. And every single one of his excuses and justifications for himself and his various hypocrisies is more misogynist and manipulative than the last: "You had a right to find out what kind of a man your husband was before you married him. . . As you made your bed, so must you sleep on it." He blames his mistakes on his victims!

Smolinsky is so over the top he's barely believable as a real person. He functions more as a symbol for the oppressive aspects of the Old World from which America seems to offer escape. But the big irony is that Sara's iron will came from somewhere, and in the end, she is the only daughter in any position to come to terms with him. The development of Smolinsky's character is actually the development of Sara's perception of her father in the context of her own struggles with acculturation. Finding that even her own intelligence and ambition are not enough to earn her a place with the proper middle-class Americans she encounters at college, she at last understands the source of at least part of Reb Smolinsky's despotism. He is the proverbial fish out of the water. Even the reader will start to feel for him, if only a little.

And while a first-person narrator is not inherently unreliable, it is still fundamentally an individual's subjective point of view. You start to wonder if a small part of Reb Smolinsky's characterization is colored by Sara's own desires for an unconventional, Americanized life, to which he stands in the way.

After a year in Hollywood, the very paragon of the American Dream's fulfillment, Anzia Yezierska found that personal reinvention was perhaps only possible for native-born men like Jay Gatsby. I was, she wrote, "without a country, without a people. . . . I could not write any more. I had gone too far away from life, and I did not know how to get back." Written after her return to New York, Bread Givers ends with a strained reconciliation between the Old Word and the New, despite all the incredible hard work Sara has put in to separate herself from the poverty of New York's Lower East Side. No matter what you do, your heritage will always be a part of you. Though as to how much, that's what every new American needs to negotiate for themselves. Bread Givers is a pretty simple read and can be quite Anvilicious, but its themes remain strong as ever.

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The institution of men studying Torah full-time and being supported by their wives is still prevalent in Charedi ("ultra-Orthodox") Judaism. It had been on the wane in the United States but experienced a revival following the influx of refugees in the 1950s who wanted to rebuild the communities lost to the Nazis. Today this is a real issue among ex-Orthodox Jewish bloggers (such as this one and this one) and even a few of the faithful. Some yeshivas barely teach secular subjects, resulting in native-born Americans who can hardly speak English. I was first made aware of this custom in the novels of Faye Kellerman, but reading about Sara's (and Anzia's) struggles in Bread Givers puts a whole new spin on things.

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Anzia Yezierska's Bread Givers was The Wolves' first reading selection for 2011. Please feel free to join us for the rest! You can find the complete book list here.

"Don't treat me like a girl. . . I'm not like any girl you ever saw."

JoAnn of Lakeside Musings did a post today on F. Scott Fitzgerald's short story "The Jelly-Bean" from his 1922 collection Tales of the Jazz Age. She also included a link to a complete online edition. Since I love Fitzgerald I decided to check it out.

"Jim was a Jelly-bean." Despite the whimsical sound, what this actually means in the South is that Jim is lazy and a loafer. His ancestors were apparently big property owners but those days have long passed and he spent the Great War polishing brass in New York. Now twenty-one, Jim does occasional odd jobs at Tilly's garage and spends his most of his time as a champion craps-shooter. Then his old friend Clark Darrow invites him to a posh dance, which Jim, long afraid of girls, reluctantly accepts. He ends up helping Nancy Lamar, a socialite with a wild reputation, scrap gum off her shoe (by draining gasoline from a parked car so she can rub her sole in it) and later saves her from a catastrophic loss at a craps game. Despite her hard-partying ways, Jim has fallen in love with Nancy and is inspired by her desire to distinguish herself from the gauche, unstylish mob. In the end, he resolves to better himself and salvage his own reputation.

Like many of Fitzgerald's works there is a strong element of class at play in the form of an outsider interacting with people of higher status. Jim is actually of a patrician background (however distant) and still retains an image of himself as a white man from a good Georgia family. "I got an old uncle up-state an' I reckin I kin go up there if ever I get sure enough pore," he says in the beginning. "Nice farm, but not enough niggers around to work it. He's asked me to come up and help him, but I don't guess I'd take much to it. Too doggone lonesome----" Of course, this sense of entitlement is ultimately empty, as is made quite clear to Jim as he observes the fashionable dancers from the sidelines. The premise of "The Jelly-Bean" is very simple: Jim must learn to overcome his inertia. In that respect he is similar to Gatsby as a lower-class man for whom an unattainable rich woman (Nancy Lamar, Daisy Buchanan) is the catalyst for social and financial self-improvement.

"The Jelly-Bean" is also very much a tale of the Roaring Twenties, with its party setting and hidden swigs of moonshine. Though muted by the indolent haze of the Georgia springtime, Fitzgerald once again demonstrates his skill at portraying scenes of leisure and recreation.

The Jelly-bean walked out on the porch to a deserted corner, dark between the moon on the lawn and the single lighted door of the ballroom.There he found a chair and, lighting a cigarette, drifted into the thoughtless reverie that was his usual mood. Yet now it was a reverie made sensuous by the night and by the hot smell of damp powder puffs, tucked in the fronts of low dresses and distilling a thousand rich scents to float out through the open door. The music itself, blurred by a loud trombone, became hot and shadowy, a languorous overtone to the scraping of many shoes and slippers.

To me, Fitzgerald has always been the master of description. But as JoAnn observes, "The Jelly-Bean" is very dialogue-heavy once the narrative moves past the opening exposition. Still, Fitzgerald strikes the right balance and I found the vintage slang quite enjoyable: "All right, babies, do it for your mamma. Just one little seven."Altogether, it's a wonderful little story.

Jim is disappointed the next day to hear of Nancy's shot-gun marriage to shaving-razor baron Ogden Merritt. He is nevertheless determined to leave for that uncle's farm (since the old family home has since been sold) and come back to town as a gentleman. Or is he? Fitzgerald ends on a lovely, if not entirely optimistic, note.

The Story of Zora

I have been in Sorrow's kitchen and licked out all the pots. Then I have stood on the peaky mountain wrapped in rainbows with a harp and a sword in my hands.






Zora Neale Hurston was an anthropologist and leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance. But by the time of her death in 1960 she had fallen into obscurity. Her novels were disparaged by other African-American literati, who were primarily male, for their use of black dialect (long a contentious issue - see minstrel shows and Mark Twain) and focus on individual (particularly female) self-empowerment instead of pressing racial issues. Not until the publication of Alice Walker's article "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston" in the March 1975 edition of Ms. magazine did Hurston finally receive the recognition she deserved. Her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, was published at the height of her popularity in 1942.

I have read Their Eyes Were Watching God twice (first on my own, second for a book club) and saw that saccharine Oprah movie starring Halle Berry. Learning about Hurston's life illuminated quite a bit of it, starting with Eatonville, Florida, America's first all-black incorporated township and main setting for Watching God. Dust Tracks on a Road opens with the history of its founding in the 1880s by the black citizens of the Town of Maitland (itself founded only a decade previous by two former Union officers). Hurston grew up there and her father even served as its mayor for a time. Today, Eatonville stages a Zora Neale Hurston Festival of the Arts and Humanities each winter. (Actually, Zora claims, in Dust Tracks, that she was born in Eatonville but that that is not true - she is a native of Alabama.)

Zora's mother died when she was thirteen. Her father quickly remarried a real-life Evil Stepmother who more or less kicked his eight children out of the family home and stopped paying Zora's school tuition which resulted in her expulsion. (Years later, Hurston would come close to killing her in a fistfight.) Drifting from one domestic job to another, Zora eventually fell in with a traveling theater company, working as a personal assistant to a young white soprano. When she finally returned to high school she was twenty-six but somehow successfully posed as a sixteen-year-old girl. (I'm twenty-five and there is no way I could ever get away with that.) She would maintain the facade all her life, claiming to have been born in 1901 instead of 1891. She naturally presents herself as a typical teenaged student in Dust Tracks in the Road, even going as far as to brag about her and her female classmates' stealing of college boys for dances. Moving right along. . .

Zora attended Howard University and then transferred to Barnard College, a women's school where she was the only black student. She was thirty-six when she received her B.A. in Anthropology. Working with Franz Boas of Columbia University, she traveled extensively throughout the American South and Caribbean collecting black folklore and participating in local religious ceremonies. The recollections of her years in the field are vivid and closely tied to her portrayal of rural African-American life in Their Eyes Were Watching God. Among the backwaters of Polk County, Florida she became acquainted with the lively but dangerous world of itinerant laborers and was nearly killed in a saw-mill jook by the jealous lover of one of her male sources. Luckily, Hurston had had the foresight to befriend one Big Sweet, a formidable woman who knew her way around a knife fight, and lived to tell the tale.

Hurston would later attract considerable controversy for her views on segregation and Brown v. the Board of Education. Specifically: she supported the former and denounced the latter. Her reasoning was that living apart had allowed African-Americans to build up their own societies, their own language, and their own music, all of which she loved and which formed the basis of her fiction. Inspired by her research, Hurston was also instrumental in bringing authentic gospel singing to the New York stage. Still, despite their foundation in a deep knowledge and appreciation for African-American culture, Hurston's views in this regard are unfortunate.

It doesn't help that Dust Tracks on a Road seriously downplays the era's open, virulent racism. We're talking about a time, designated by some historians as the "nadir of American race relations," when the KKK ran free and Congress couldn't pass an anti-lynching bill to save its life. Hurston's interactions with white people are depicted as wholly amicable, even in the South outside Eatonville. Now here's where it gets sticky - as a white woman living in the twenty-first century, it is most certainly not my place to "correct" a black woman's book about her own life in the early twentieth century. But I could not help but observe a strong chord of paternalism in some of the relationships between Hurston and her white contemporaries, particularly in her younger years. For example, the "observers" of Eatonville, her time as a maid and depiction of one household's "mammy," and even her relationship with Miss M-, the soprano she worked for who became one of her closest friends. In the book itself, the dynamic between her and the latter makes sense since Hurston writes herself as ten years younger than she really was, which would have made twenty-year-old Miss M- at least five years her senior. Or could Hurston deliberately have created this younger-older sister vibe for the purposes of reinforcing her own myth that she was born in 1901? That's the trouble with autobiographies and memoirs - "We are what we pretend to be," as Kurt Vonnegut once said.

(I just kept thinking back to Eugene Genovese's Roll, Jordan, Roll and the latent violence of the seigneurial society.)

From an historical standpoint, it's very jarring how just about the only time racism comes up is when Hurston was working for a black-owned barbershop in Washington, D.C. that catered to white politicians. A black man came in for a shave and was kicked out! (The paternalism also seemed really strong here - in my opinion, anyway. There's an exchange between a white journalist and a black porter that would likely be considered highly problematic if related by a white author.) We could have united as a race and nobly stood up for him, Hurston writes, but reality is, everyone's gotta earn a living. It's the main motivation of the human race - pull yourself up, take what you want, conquer, move forward. She had a certain amount of disdain for "Race" men and women, who allegedly "make whole careers" out of "Race Consciousness," as she believes individual people are much too varied to be represented as a single bloc. I do agree with her to an extent, but I also don't think it's possible to tackle issues of oppression from a strictly individual standpoint. Reality is, people are marginalized due to factors like race, gender, disability, sexuality, and so forth, and are likely to share experiences with other members of their communities.

Hurston did lead an unconventional and successful (in 1942) life, achieving and experiencing far more than many women of that age, regardless of race, ever did. And she did this in spite of some considerable setbacks that would have ruined others. Through her constant reading she maintained in her mind a vision of a world where she knew belonged - that of intellectual growth and stimulating friendships - and did everything within her power to earn her place there. So perhaps it is not surprising that she came to the conclusions she did about individual self-reliance since that so clearly worked for her. But this is still 1942, however, and Hurston had yet to encounter the troubles that would knock her back into obscurity. She never sold many books, to begin with, and was falsely accused of molesting a ten-year-old boy in 1948. Although she was able to prove she was in Honduras at the time the alleged incident took place, the scandal caused irreparable damage. She spent the last decade of her life as a substitute teacher and writing freelance articles that demonstrated strikingly reactionary opinions (coming from an African-American, no less) regarding segregation. Zora Neale Hurston died in 1960 in St. Lucie County Welfare Home in Florida and was buried in an unmarked grave.

You can argue that Hurston's steadfast faith in her own individual power failed her in the end. But I have to hand it to her - she stuck to what she believed in despite the criticism and seems to have remained true to herself throughout it all. Many writers fall of the radar in their lifetimes for a variety of reasons and earn the recognition they deserved only after their deaths, including Hurston's contemporaries H.P. Lovecraft and F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose works I also enjoy. While it's easy to pity her the end of her life, everything turned out right in the end and Hurston has regained her rightful place as a major American and African-American woman author of the twentieth century.

An Hour with Paul Auster

One of the perks of working in a university library is being able to take an hour off from work to go see a famous author. My supervisor allowed me to go in exchange for taking detailed notes and telling her all about it. (It was actually in our department. Practically right outside the door.) And this is how I came to attend a seminar headed by Paul Auster on Thursday afternoon.

Auster kicked off with a discussion on writing fiction vs. writing non-fiction. Memory, he said, is "tremendously ambiguous." According to Freud, what we remember about an event is simply the last time we thought about it. Although some things are objective and can be backed up by external sources (i.e. I was fourteen years old in 1973), Auster is highly suspicious of the explosion of memoirs published in recent years due to the sheer amount of detail they reveal. How the heck can some of these people recall entire conversations? That they overheard when they were three years old? In composing a work of non-fiction such as The Red Notebook, Auster merely tries to be as accurate as he can.

When it comes to fiction, by contrast, "all bets are off." There are "objectively no rules." Instead, you make your own. But naturally, we still draw from our own lives when inventing new ones. The third book of The New York Trilogy, entitled The Locked Room, features a character living in Paris who befriends a Russian composer. Does it really make any difference to the reader that Paul Auster too lived in Paris and befriended a Russian composer? No, but it would if this was a work of non-fiction.

The field was then opened for questions. One of the students asked what, if any, were differences between novels and screenplays, as Auster has authored both. "Writing a screenplay has nothing to do with writing a novel," was the reply. Screenplays are very visual; films are "jigsaw puzzles" in which the only words are dialogue. Novels, on the other hand, are 3-D. They are "whole worlds." But, Auster added, I have begun to incorporate film into my novels, in The Book of Illusions for example. Translating film to prose is very challenging. The trick is finding the right balance.

He then wondered why it is that characters in books never seem to read books.

The New York Trilogy was written in the present tense, which gives it a very cinematic feel. Tense is very important.

The professor conducting the seminar mentioned that she often heard echoes of Beckett in Auster. I never wanted to write like Beckett, Auster said. No one can. When I was your age, he went on, indicating the students, I was obsessed with literature. I drank it up. And this damaged me. Whenever I tried to write I felt the weight of hundreds of years, of millennia, on my back. I had to learn to write from raw need, to take a visceral approach and not focus on making it pretty or sound like a proper novel. Beckett was suffocated by "his own dexterity." He had to start from scratch. (Auster then related a story of Beckett and another Irish author in Paris, but I forgot what it was.)

What draws you to translation? another student asked. When Auster first started writing, he wanted to be a novelist but wasn't ready yet. Poetry was his preferred medium at the time: it is generally short and therefore manageable. He was learning French at Columbia University when he discovered contemporary French poets. He found translating them highly beneficial to his creative process. You "never penetrate a text more fully than by translating it." To translate a text one must "destroy it." It is a great tool to learn how to read and write because when you're translating, it's like the pressure's off.

English is a new language and therefore a very rich one. Only within the past four hundred years has it been recognizable. The British Isles used to speak Anglo-Saxon, which is much closer to Icelandic. But then the French conquered England and their language ruled the royal court for three hundred years. It was sixteenth-century poets like Thomas Wyatt in the decades before Shakespeare who made English what it was today.

New topic: The "only really subversive thing is clarity." A poet can decide they want to be "avant-garde" and start scattering words all over the page to somehow demonstrate the corruption of capitalism. But really, it's been done. Everyone wants to be subversive. But who was the most subversive writer of the twentieth century? Kafka. He was also the clearest writer of the twentieth century. And he's still scaring and disturbing us today.

Back to the relationship between fiction and non-fiction. Shortly after he moved to Brooklyn in the late seventies (or was it the Bronx?), Auster received a phone call asking if this was the Pinkerton Agency. Naturally he told them no, you have the wrong number. The next day it happened again! Again, Auster told them the same thing and immediately regretted it upon hanging up. Why oh why didn't he say yes, this is the Pinkerton agency! and see what happened next? Alas, there was no third phone call. But that's how The New York Trilogy became a saga about detectives who aren't really detectives.

Auster, like most authors, is always addressing that ideal reader.

Auster strongly recommends the works of Heinrich von Kleist, a German dramatist, novelist, poet, and short story writer who died in 1811 at the age of thirty-four. There is "no narrative style more ferocious" than that of Kleist. His works are like fairy tales with all the grit of real life.

Yes, Auster's characters do often surprise him. You're the writer, you can do whatever you want! someone once said to him. No I can't, he responded.

And lo! I got a question in! It had occurred to me right at the beginning, when Auster was criticizing how contemporary memoirs are written. My regular readers may have noticed a recurring topic of mine, that of the relationship between the narrative and human perception. As Auster talked, I was reminded of Gert Jonke's The System of Vienna, of an essay on Henry James by Louis Menard, and of my own interpretation of "The Part About Archimboldi." Since life itself is so vast, I said, is not the act of channeling it into a coherent narrative a sort of fiction of its own? Auster's answer was very simple. We write our own narratives. We live in the past, present, and future and what makes us who we are is how we comprehend it all. Without some sense of story in life there is no meaning. We write about ourselves to make ourselves. That narrative capability is what makes us human.

The seminar ended with students giving him random interesting facts about our school and city.

* * *

Something very strange happened that evening. Paul Auster was scheduled to give a talk on translation. That's what it said on the poster outside the door. But all he did was read from his upcoming novel Sunset Park. It sounds fascinating - the first selection he covered concerned a runaway from a wealthy family in New York City who has gotten a job cleaning foreclosed homes in the titular neighborhood (located between Park Slope and Bay Ridge in the NYC area). He feels compelled to take pictures of the detritus and destruction left behind (of which Auster gives a completely random list). Each house represents failure in the abandonment of things and the rage of the dispossessed. Great start.

I kept waiting for Auster to finish up with his reading and begin his talk. Except he never did and finally a whole hour went by and the event was finished! I have to confess that I eventually tuned him out, expecting each reading to be the last. I'm not sure what happened - if there was a miscommunication between planners or if Auster just changed his mind because he's famous and he can do that. Oh well. Weird but interesting.

Click here for my recap of Margaret Atwood at Hamilton College in March 2010. And click here for Emily's excellent review of The New York Trilogy.

Pearls Before Swine

The therapist, after a deeply upsetting investigation of normality at this time and place, was bound to conclude that a normal person, functioning well on the upper levels of a prosperous, industrialized society, can hardly hear his conscience at all.





I've concluded that Kurt Vonnegut is hit-or-miss for me. Thus far, I have read two and a half Vonnegut novels: Timequake (abandoned), Mother Night (loved), and now, for my local book club, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, or Pearls Before Swine. Conclusion: meh.

Our book club leader is a former English teacher in his early sixties. He first read Mr. Rosewater shortly after it came out while he was in high school. I was literally rolling off the bed, I was laughing so hard, he recalled. Similar reactions from the others: it was so funny! I was like That One Guy.

To make matters worse, I couldn't even articulate what it was that turned me off. We read quite a few passages out loud (such as the therapist's theories about Samaritphobia) and even I had to admit that they certainly were humorous. A couple of the older members were nevertheless surprised at how bitter the tone was compared to their first readings years or even decades ago. There were several comparisons made to Twain, who I do enjoy, and I could definitely see where they were coming from but. . . I just can't figure out why I didn't like this particular book! It was also agreed that Vonnegut's style is very plain and unsubtle, so maybe that was it. I do tend to approach prose from an aesthetic perspective.

Kurt Vonnegut is about as subtle as a sledgehammer, one guy summed up, but it's what's in the fine dust that matters.

"That's how Mother Night was for me," I said. "I don't know why this book wasn't."

Maybe it was a case of pearls before swine.

Brokedown Palace II: The Funny Edition

The Rose Tattoo
By Tennessee Williams
122 pages, plus supplemental material
New Directions
April 23, 2010
Original Pub. Date: 1950





They make the life without glory. Instead of heart they got the deep-freeze in the house. The men, they don't feel no glory, not in the house with them women; they go to the bars, fight in them, get drunk, get fat, put horns on the women because the women don't give them the love which is glory, - I did, I give him the glory. To me the big bed was beautiful like a religion. Now I lie on it with dreams, with memories only!

My first Tennessee Williams play was The Night of the Iguana, originally performed in 1961, which I read back in March as part of the Non-Structured Book Club. It was a bit much at times, but I enjoyed Williams's decadent setting and the vivacity of the characters. Another Williams production, The Rose Tattoo, which debuted at Chicago's Erlanger Theater in 1950, has been recently re-released with a new introduction by playwright John Patrick Shanley. Once again, I would like to thank Frances for sending me her extra ARC.

The Rose Tattoo concerns one Serafina delle Rosa, a first-generation Sicilian-American who lives somewhere on the Gulf Coast with her 15-year-old daughter Rose. Her husband Rosario, a small-time drug smuggler, was murdered and Serafina lost the baby she was carrying shortly thereafter. Since then, she has sequestered herself and her daughter from their small Italian community and spends her listless days in a worn shift, sewing gowns and fine clothes for other people's special events. Three years have passed and it is now Rosa's high school graduation, signaling her movement out from under her mother's authority and into adulthood and her own self-realization. This terrifies Serafina, who wants Rosa suspended in time with her and her late husband's memory. Even worse is that sailor Rosa has fallen for! But then Alvaro Mangiacavallo ("eat-a-horse" in Italian), a goofy truck driver with a sexy body, arrives that afternoon and - oh Dio! He reminds Serafina of Rosario and has even gotten his very own rose tattoo!

According to Shanley, "The Rose Tattoo is over the top. It is a lurid play, redolent of the smell of goats, the cries of ragged children and squawking birds. Its perimeters are defined by women, hairy-legged women, gossiping, clownish women, whores, and witches." I actually had a feeling of déjà vu. The oppressive tropical ambiance; the voluptuous, larger-than-life widow; the emotional stagnation and pervasive carnality - The Rose Tattoo and The Night of the Iguana feel like two versions of the same story. Written about a decade later, Iguana comes across as a more mature work, with its themes of sexuality, religion, mental illness, and human nature. It also lacks the neat resolution of The Rose Tattoo and the cast of characters is more diverse, ranging from pure and detached (Hannah) to Serafina-like (Maxine) to falling apart as we speak (Shannon).

Which isn't to say that The Rose Tattoo is a mediocre play or not worth it if you've already read/seen Iguana. It's a comedy starring a tacky, ridiculous woman who lives surrounded by dress dummies and Catholic kitsch. Alvaro is a love-struck doofus. The Italian accents are preposterously exaggerated and the overall setting is clearly a satire of the close-knit, gossipy immigrant community. Serafine tries so hard to be spiritual she simply ends up ironic.

SERAFINA: Oh, Lady, Lady, Lady, give me a sign!

[As if in mocking answer, a novelty salesman appears and approaches the porch. He is a fat man in a seersucker suit and a straw hat with a yellow, red and purple band. His face is beet-red and great moons of sweat have soared through the armpits of his jacket. His shirt is lavender, and his tie, pale blue with great yellow polka dots, is a butterfly bow. His entrance is accompanied by a brief, satiric strain of music.]

Iguana certainly has comic relief but Tattoo is such a self-parody that it borders on metatheater. It knows its atmosphere is overheated and blatantly sexual and populated by caricatures. The humor comes from its own premise and execution. If anything, The Rose Tattoo, despite being the earlier of the two, is also a parody of The Night of the Iguana, which has many of the same elements but asks to be taken seriously. It's like Iguana reflected in a funhouse mirror.

This new edition of The Rose Tattoo also includes The Dog Enchanted by the Divine View, an earlier one-act piece by Williams that became the genesis for Tattoo. I haven't read anything else by Williams so I wouldn't know if his other plays are more differentiated, but I found The Rose Tattoo to be a great companion piece and counterpoint for The Night of the Iguana. I enjoyed reading them and would love to see both onstage.

Sexism. Racism. And Rainbows.

In 1971 Paulette L. Williams, a student at Barnard College, attempted suicide. In addition to the recent breakup of her short marriage, she had struggled for years with feelings of alienation and depression, likely exacerbated by the racial taunts and attacks she had endured as a child following Brown v. the Board of Education. But throughout it all, her well-to-do parents always encouraged her artistic expression. Growing up, guests to her family's home included Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Chuck Berry, and W. E. B. Du Bois.

Williams's involvement in the Woman's Studies Department at Sonoma State College and discovery of dance eventually helped her heal. She changed her name to Ntozake Shange, which means "she who comes with her own things" and "she who walks with lions." In the introduction to her Obie-winning play, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf, Shange writes that, "Knowing a woman's mind & spirit had been allowed me, [and] with dance I discovered my body more intimately than I had imagined possible." In 1975, For Colored Girls, inspired by Judy Grahn's The Common Woman and the feminist theater work of Halifu Osumare, was performed for the very first time at the Bacchanal, a woman's bar outside Berkeley, California. By 1976 it was appearing on Broadway, where one witness recalls that ". . . all sorts of people who might never have set foot in a Broadway house - black nationalists, feminist separatists - came to experience Shange's firebomb of a poem." In September 2009, Tyler Perry announced plans for a film adaptation starring Janet Jackson, Mariah Carey, Whoopi Goldberg, Macy Gray, Kerry Washington, Kimberly Elise, Phylicia Rashad, and Jurnee Smollett.

Shange describes For Colored Girls as a "choreopoem." It's basically a series of nineteen connected poems recited by six women identified only by the color of their clothing: yellow, purple, red, green, blue, and orange. While some take the form of rambling monologues, there are also brief snippets of verse exchanged back and forth among the women, as though they were a group of friends engaged in conversation.

lady in blue
that niggah will be back tomorrow, sayin 'i'm sorry'

lady in yellow
get this, last week my ol man came in sayin 'i don't know
how she got yr number baby, i'm sorry'

lady in brown
no this one is it, 'o baby, ya know i waz high, i'm sorry'

lady in purple
'i'm only human, and inadequacy is what makes us human, &
if we was perfect we wdnt have nothin to strive for, so you
might as well go on and forgive me pretty baby, cause i'm sorry'

lady in green
'shut up bitch, i told you i waz sorry'

This deeply intimate feel is reinforced by Shange's use of very down-to-earth speech and metaphors to describe complex emotions and the deep psychological concepts of identity, internalized oppression, and coping with the pressures of racism, sexism, and classism. A near-loss of self and pride suffered in an unhealthy relationship, for example, is portrayed by the "lady in green's" monologue about how "somebody almost walked off wid alla my stuff."

somebody almost walked off wid all my stuff
not my poems or a dance i gave up in the street
but somebody almost walked off wid alla my stuff
like a kleptomaniac working hard & forgettin while stealin
this is mine / this aint yr stuff /
now why dont you put me back & let me hang out in my own self
somebody almost walked off wid alla my stuff
& didnt care enuf to send a note home sayin
i waz late for my solo conversation
or two sizes too small for my own tacky shirts
what can anybody do wit something of no value on
a open market / did you getta dime for my things /
hey man / where are you goin wid alla my stuff /
this is a woman's trip & i need my stuff /
to ooh & ahh abt / daddy / i gotta mainline number
from my own shit / now wontchu put me back / & let
me play this duet / wit this silver ring in my nose /
honest to god / somebody almost run off wit alla my stuff /

(In the video below it's the "lady in red" for some reason.) The weighty themes are further balanced by a good dose of humor, such as the story of a precocious young girl who ventures into the Adult Reading Room at the library, falls in love with TOUSSAINT L'OUVERTURE, and then meets a boy her age named TOUSSAINT JONES.

There is also, of course, dancing and movement throughout that reinforces the spoken word. At one point, which must be striking to see onstage, the ladies are all dancing and urging one another to find joy in herself and her worth to the world. Then the stage direction calls for a sudden change in light and for the ladies to "react as if they had been struck in the face." Then:

lady in blue
a friend is hard to press charges against

lady in red
if you know him
you must have wanted it

lady in purple
a misunderstanding

lady in red
you know
these things happen

lady in blue
are you sure
you didnt suggest

Unlike The Vagina Monologues, the ladies of For Colored Girls do not sit and rely solely on the emotional resonance and intensity of their lines to carry the play. They are constantly in motion, using both voice and body equally to express themselves.

My initial thought was actually that For Colored Girls was going to be similar to The Vagina Monologues, as a group of female performers each take a turn talking about the struggles and the lessons they've learned as women. There is an element of that, but For Colored Girls is not simply a play. When reading drama, there is always a tension inherent to the solitary, internal act of reading a work meant to be seen and heard, with each actor bringing their own interpretation. During the recent group read of Tennessee Williams's The Night of the Iguana, for instance, some participants felt that the dialogue was rather over-the-top but also wondered if being recited onstage or onscreen toned it down.

For Colored Girls, however, is equal parts poetry and can easily be read as such. In that way, it functions both as a group event and a personalized experience. Shange's words alone carry immense weight, and For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf is not soon to be forgotten.

Thanks to Tami for introducing me to this excellent work.

Brokedown Palace

How about Africa, Asia, Australia? The whole world, Latta, God's world, has been the range of my travels. I haven't stuck to the schedules of the brochures and I've always allowed the ones that were willing to see, to see! - the underworlds of all places, and if they had hearts to be touched, feelings to feel with, I gave them a priceless chance to feel and be touched. And none will ever forget it, none of them, ever, never!

Tennessee Williams's The Night of the Iguana is the third play I've read this month, following Thomas Stoppard's Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead and Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard. Incidentally, every one of these has been for a book club. In other words, none of them are something I read on my own, particularly since I usually don't read plays other than Shakespeare and a few Greek tragedies. The Night of the Iguana is the first selection of a "non-structured group read" consisting of the old 2666/Kristin Lavransdatter/Woolf in Winter circle, plus several new faces. We don't have a particular pattern this time, although somehow everything seems to sync with my literary tastes. How, I don't know because I've never been able to describe what exactly it is that I like. I can describe what I don't like but that's so negative.

The Night of the Iguana was first performed at the Royale Theatre in New York on December 28, 1961. The setting is a rundown hotel on the tropical coast of Mexico during the early years of World War II. That global calamity, however, is far far away, only occasionally intruding in the comical form of some blustering, loudmouthed German guests. The drama here is deeply personal and intimate. Larry Shannon, a defrocked Anglican priest with a taste for teenage girls, is currently employed as a tour guide. He has brought a busload of women from a female Baptist college in Texas to the establishment of one Maxine, a lusty, larger-than-life proprietor who is not mourning the recent death of her husband Fred. Shannon and Maxine have apparently known each other for years, and she recognizes the pending signs of another one of Shannon's periodic breakdowns. Dropping into the middle of all this is Hannah, a refined middle-aged New England spinster, and her grandfather Nonno, a minor Romantic poet. They travel together around the world doing sketches and reciting verse.

The impression is one of emotional, physical, and social isolation. The hotel is an island blanketed in stifling tropical steam and choked on all sides with rainforest. Only vague references are made to a nearby small town. Maxine gets away with sexually brazen behavior that will likely condemn her in the United States in this era, and Shannon is presently safe from arrest for his relationship with 17-year-old Charlotte Goodall. Any reminder of world-shaking events outside is limited to Herr Fahrenkopf's exclamations about one of the Fuhrer's speeches on the radio, which the American characters immediately dismiss as a mere annoyance. The stage direction at several points calls for the characters to be in "cells," meant to represent the rooms of the hotel but having other obvious connotations as well.

Although the setting remains fixed, Shannon and Hannah are both portrayed as perpetual travelers far from home - or rather, from their places of origin, since neither has an actual home to ever return to. Maxine's hotel is rather akin to a purgatorial stopover for people weary of the journey of life. A torpid, tumbled-down place where you have to remain for awhile until you've dealt with whatever issue you have that's taken you to the end of your rope, like the iguana struggling to escape. (A side note: Dante's Inferno presents sin as immobility, a lack of growth and movement closer to God. In complete contrast to the Mexican heat, the Ninth Circle of Hell is a frozen wasteland where the condemned are completely encased in ice. So the next time someone tells you, "When Hell freezes over. . .") There's a lot that comes out in the final act, which makes for a strong climax despite its complete lack of action beyond talking, laying on a hammock, and drinking tea. Heavy-handed, yes, but also enlightening at times and surprising in the revelations revealed about Hannah.

My initial reaction to The Night of the Iguana was similar to how I felt at first about The Cherry Orchard. Focusing entirely on human interaction seemed dull to me until both plays began to pick up about halfway through. I also loved the setting in this one and how well Tennessee Williams was able to create a vivid atmosphere of decay, stagnation, and powerful sexual tension. And a lot of the dialogue was enjoyable to read and must be wonderful to see performed. Shannon has the best lines:

[On the German family] "What in blazes is this? A little animated cartoon by Hieronymus Bosch?"

[On Hannah's poppyseed tea] "Caesar's ghost! - it could be chased by the witches' brew from Macbeth."

There is nevertheless a troubling amount of casual racism in Williams's depictions of Maxine's employees Pedro and Pancho, as you can see in the film adaptation below: the "lazy Mexican" stereotype mixed in with the "Latin lover" trope. Pancho and Pedro are basically props to flesh out Maxine's character and we never see any other Mexicans. There is something off-putting about a drama set in a foreign, non-white country starring only white Americans. But hardly unexpected, given the time in which the play was written. Beyond that, though, The Night of the Iguana is a truly intriguing character-driven story and I would very like to see the movie next.

---

Other readers:

• Claire at Kiss a Cloud
• Emily at Evening all Afternoon
  
• Frances at Nonsuch Book
  
• Jill at Rhapsody in Books
• Richard at Caravana de Recuerdos
• Sarah at What We Have Here is a Failure to Communicate
  
• Theresa at Shelf Love
  

The Labyrinth

"The human heart has never accepted the idea of total evanishment from the earth. We have always wanted to leave at least a particle of ourselves, at least a brief mention in a requiem prayer. We want to at least scratch our names on the dungeon wall before we are led out to the execution."




The great thing about used book sales is that you sometimes uncover the most fascinating, quirkiest, obscure, or otherwise unusual books. The Judgment Day Archives by Andrei Moscovit, pen name for Igor Markovich Yefimov, was one such find. Yefimov is a Russian-American writer and philosopher who has been living in the United States since 1978. He is also the founder of Hermitage Publishers. The Judgment Day Archives was initially released Arkhivy Strashnogo Suda in 1982; Robert Bowie's English translation came out in 1988. The jacket copy compares it to Bulgakov's Master and Margarita and promises a "heady brew of espionage, mysticism, political satire, and philosophy, laced with romance and earthy humor." Well, I thought, Bulgakov's been on my TBR list for literally years now and this one sounds like a sure winner!

Leida Rigel is an Estonian-Russian scientist with an interest in faith healing and shamanism whose underground research has been suprisingly successful. It has also led her to be stalked by a pair of KBG agents who have succeeded in making her a paranoid near-wreck. Then their higher-ups get wind of a mysterious corporation, known only as the Enterprise, and its interest in a defrocked Orthodox priest, Father Averyan, known for his heretical sermons regarding the resurrection of the dead on Judgment Day. Averyan believes that it will be man's descendants, not God Himself, who will perform the resurrection (via cloning or some other as-of-yet-unknown technology), and who will also judge each individual according to their own mysterious but enlightened standards. The KGB sends Rigel to work for the Enterprise, who see in her research a chance to make big bucks by bringing Father Averyan under their wing and opening the Judgment Day Archives. For only $3,000, a tape or video recording of your life story, and a frozen vial of your blood, you too can guarantee yourself a front-row seat to meet your maker one fine day in the future!

To further secure Leida's cooperation, the KGB has kidnapped her son Ilya. They enroll him in the Soviet army but have promised Leida that they will send him to a gulag or one of the uranium mines if she tries in any way to resist their instructions.

The Judgment Day Archives, therefore, certainly has the makings of a great satire on the interaction and intersection of business, politics, and religion. The roundabout plot is there: Yefimov is highly effective at entrapping poor Leida in a Kafkaesque labyrinth, in which powerful forces beyond her control continuously pull her in multiple directions and crush any glimmer of free will. When not being terrorized by Agents Yarishev and Mysheyedov, Leida is chained to her post at the Archive, caught between the overblown capitalism of the Enterprise and the religious fervor of the Archive's mission. She exists suspended between opposing forces exerting a kind of equilibrium. The only tangible thing left is her daily fear for her son's safety.

If Kafka portrayed bureaucracy as an omnipotent force acting under its own cryptic rules and carrying hapless humans along with it, Yefimov brings this worldview to its obvious conclusion: that the control which society's external forces (which also include the state, corporations, and organized religion) exert over the individual can be likened to the mysterious hand of God.

Leida refers to her KGB pursuers as the "all-knowing ones" who follow her every move and have memorized her habits. The strategies of Umberto Fanzoni, the Enterprises's head honcho, are compared to his old gambling habits. Now, instead of chips, he assigns his employees and subordinates the role of "pawn" in his many corporate games. "To force the metaphor a bit," one character explains, "I feel excited when the Big Chess Master picks me up with his fingers and moves me to another square. After all, as long as the game goes on, the pawn experiences life to the full." But several months of Father Averyan's holy acquaintance has forced Umberto to consider something new. "You know," he says, "I've become so accustomed to moving people about, like chess figures. And now I've suddenly begun feeling as though someone were moving me. In some grandiose game, a game I have no control over." One of the central questions Yefimov seems to be asking here is, what can we do to exert our own will? What can we hold onto admist all the powerful influences surrounding us?

Yefimov answers that it is love. Here, it is Leida's love for her family that keeps her going, and her love for her son that enables her to finally break free.

Of course, as a satirical novel, The Judgment Day Archives is also pure farce, taking each situation to its fullest realization in the hopes that comedy will ensue. (For the Archive to be successful, everyone has to move the United States, which, as we all know, is just about the only country in the world where you can take an innovative scientific idea, turn it into a religion, and make millions off it.) Not being familiar with contemporary Russian literature, I am guessing Yefimov was aiming for a tone similar to that of Kurt Vonnegut's Mother Night, which featured a cast of absurd characters and a plot full of bizarre twists. But where Vonnegut succeeded, Yefimov falls flat. Or seems to - when reading a translation one must always keep in mind that these really are not the author's original words. Still, I had the impression of a narative trying to rise above simple iteration of events, becoming a parody of real life, and ultimately being hilarious in its sheer ridiculousness.

But it never quite succeeds. Yarishev and Mysheyedov, for example - are they supposed to be evil bastards, hilariously evil bastards, or caricatures just too over-the-top to be taken seriously as evil bastards? Is Father Averyan a good soul who simply wishes to uplift his fellow man or is he drunk on the power of his fellow man's belief in him? Has the Archive really become a genuine, top-down, mind-controlling cult or is it basically just a harmless money-making machine that becomes dangerous only when people willingly invest too much faith in it? Although the story moves along quite smoothly, it just feels that something is lacking. That quality of satire is just not there.

I find myself referring back to The Wall in My Head anthology and Dubravka Urgesic's essay, "The Souvenirs of Communism." (Interestingly, I just noted that I referenced Mother Night in that review as well. Catch-22 is another intriguing thematic comparison to The Judgment Day Archives.) Urgesic contends that works of literature dealing with Communism in a humorous manner rarely achieve critical success in the West. We just don't have that grasp of its inherent incongruity: "Western readers did not have the feel for communist everyday life, the author's humor was not understood, the linguistic subversion left them cold, and the absurd and grotesque aspects of the totalitarian world remained opaque to them." Now obviously The Judgment Day Archives deals extensively with the absurdities of religion and capitalism as well, and there is arguably no country where such things are exhibited more often than in the United States. I got that but . . . I'm sitting here going "meh" because something never clicked with me. And I'm kind of smacking the keyboard because I can't quite articulate what it is, which makes me feel like I'm failing as a reviewer.

I liked the book well enough and it had some well-written passages, but . . . *thud*

Something Purple. . .

For the second meeting of Padfoot and Prongs's Good Books Club - held every third Sunday of the month, beginning at 7pm - we had chosen Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes. It's the story of two boys and an evil carnival that tempts and destroys. It is also a rumination on growing up and the loss of innocence. Totally seemed like something I'd like.

Alas, it became the first book in a long time I've ended up abandoning. (Around page 112.)

Awhile ago, on the Twilight Sucks! website forum, I came across a thread discussing Silk and Steel, a fantasy novel by one Ron Miller. All commentators agreed that this was EPIC PURPLE PROSE. All florid, nonsensical description, going on and on and on, and yet never actually describing anything.

(Click on the image to enlarge. Also, here is another discussion, plus additional pages, on Livejournal.) Yes, folks, not only was this actually published, but apparently Arthur C. Clark thinks Ron Miller is teh awesomeness.

Honestly, I felt similarly about Bradbury's prose (even though it made a heck of a lot more sense than Ron Miller's . . . um . . . uh. . . WTF do you even call that?). It was too much. I couldn't visualize anything (scenes or actions) and couldn't concentrate. Like, here's an example:

Another and another time under the sky and trees and Will whispering, Jim counting the times around, around, while the night air warmed to summer heat by friction of sun-metal brass, the passionate backturned flight of beasts, wore the wax doll down and down and washed him clean with still stranger musics until all ceased, all died away to stillness, the calliope shut up its brassworks, the ironmongery machines hissed off, and with a last faint whine like desert sands blown back up Arabian hourglasses, the carousel rocked on seaweed waters and stood still.

I realize that on its own, that probably seems like a very beautiful passage, but the whole entire book is like that (at least, up to page 112). I had to read this twice before I figured out what was going on (the evil, enchanted carousel is slowing to a standstill).

I do feel badly about it, though. One of the hosts (either Padfoot or Prongs) talked about having written a "love letter" to Bradbury and getting a reply and everything. Everyone else enjoyed Something Wicked This Way Comes, although one person did admit to skipping about 100 pages in the middle because all the elaborate descriptions just overtook the plot. I kinda felt like that one guy, but oh well.

Instead, I strongly recommend Dan Simmons's Summer of Night. Like Something Wicked This Way Comes, it deals with young boys battling supernatural evil in a small American town in the early '60s. It is also very evocative of childhood and has a strong theme of lost innocence. Actually, I recommend ANYTHING by Dan Simmons - check out my reviews for Hyperion, Fall of Hyperion, and The Terror. Guy is 100% pure genius.

Past Good Books Club selections:
Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut