Best of PDX Writer Daily

Gesture in Canadiacy: Found object, Portland, Oregon, 2009

2009-06-22T12:43:00.000-07:00

Found in SE Portland, June 22nd.

Gestures in (Statistical) Literacy: Graph of Lunches

2009-06-12T09:57:00.000-07:00

From an elementary school newspaper, in its original, vibrant grayscale, we proudly present: The Graph of Lunches.

For greater graphical detail, just click on the image. Never has the lunchtime quandary been captured quite this well.

From the Library: Getting Out of "Into the Wild": Tracking Christopher McCandless, from article to book to film to DVD

2009-06-09T12:30:00.000-07:00

Late in 2007, Sean Penn’s film Into the Wild stirred renewed interest in the story of Christopher J. McCandless, the young man on whom the film, and Jon Krakauer’s book of the same name, focuses. It’s been over fifteen years since the young man walked out of civilization and into the wild, and the story of what happened to him remains in the public consciousness. But the three depictions of him--the original 1993 magazine article by Krakauer, the resultant book (1996), and then the film--are fundamentally different.

A graduate of Emory, McCandless tramped across the nation for the better part of two years before thumbing his way to Alaska to embark on a solo, natural “odyssey” of his own devising. If you’ve never heard of him, the facts are these: McCandless hunted and gathered in the solitude of the Last Frontier for more than a hundred days, but eventually starved to death at the age of 24, and lay dead in an abandoned bus in the Alaskan bush. Moose hunters found his body in September 1992.

This PDXWD writer came to McCandless unchronologically, seeing the film first, then reading the article, and finally the book—a circuitous route, true to McCandless’ style. The question that remained after all this exposure to the story, however, was: What are we supposed to make of Chris McCandless and the wide range of responses—from anger to understanding—his adventures have incited from readers and viewers?

One of the main problems in discussing McCandless is that we are apt to interpret his actions before we know much about him, a situation that makes it difficult to describe what he did without using such words as “sad,” “tragic,” “unwise” or even, as some people do, “stupid.” Both Penn's movie and Krakauer's book make compelling interpretations of McCandless’s ill-fated sojourn (though perhaps McCandless wouldn’t have called it “ill-fated” at all), but they also succumb, inevitably, to the very impulses they warn readers against: Krakauer and Penn cannot help but want you to agree with their visions of McCandless.

The film, for instance, features carefully-timed Eddie Vedder tunes that jibe with McCandless’ letters being written over the action. I wished many times that more trust were put in cinematography and the story itself, rather than elaborately-planned pathos--the film lacks important silences and is worse because of it. Penn’s adaptation shines a sympathetic, if not overtly heroic, light on McCandless and his trip, romanticizing the man's hopes and dreams. Penn presents an homage to the man, but the McCandless character is rarely allowed to just exist onscreen, because McCandless the man is forever refracted through Penn’s vision of him.

As a book, Into the Wild is vigilant in continually paying respect to McCandless, never allowing the young man to be boiled down completely. Krakauer does not hide that the impetus behind turning “Death of an Innocent” into a book was in part to rescue McCandless from those who called him dumb and ill-equipped after the article first appeared. (Many Alaskans lambasted the magazine for publishing a piece that would encourage more "crazies" to trek to and through their state.)

Rather than convince us of McCandless’s bravery with catchy guitar riffs or extended comparisons to visionaries of the past, however, the film and book might have allowed us to decide on our own whether what McCandless did was courageous, ludicrous, or both. Though those second and third options are certainly plausible, the overwhelming evidence the film and book present is that McCandless rests safely in sainthood. Both seem to imply that they don’t want McCandless maliciously interpreted, though to graciously interpret him is okay.

First published in Outside in 1993, Krakauer's “Death of an Innocent” (the original article that he expanded to create the longer, more robust Into the Wild) was a finalist for a National Magazine Award, and is still available in Outside’s online archive. McCandless’ actions and inspirations were too complex and unconventional to be reduced to something simple, and lost in the film and book are the raw, uninterpreted facts of the original article’s reporting, and its unprocessed details that allow the reader to make of the situation what she or he will.

For me, therefore, these facts themselves—left alone, as they are in the magazine article, without elaboration or lengthy explanation—are the most compelling, because it seems that's what McCandless himself would have wanted. Indeed, the young man desired only to live as fully as possible without the burdens and layers of meaning and symbolism and interpretation heaped on him or what he did.

From the Library: Michael Davis's "Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street," and thoughts on the dreams of the 70s in the era of Obama

2009-06-01T04:45:00.000-07:00

One of this reviewer's earliest television memories is watching the upbeat intro to Sesame Street in a state of rapt attention. In the version I remember (aired in the early 1980s), Big Bird and pals run up and over a park hill and through the city as they ask in song, “Can you tell me how to get, how to get to Sesame Street?” And though I didn’t realize it until looking at Street Gang, Michael Davis's newly-released history of Sesame Street, a lot of what I learned about people, math, spelling, and society came from that show. But of all things on which to write a history right now, why Sesame Street?

“The show turns 40 on November 10th, for one,” Davis said via telephone with PDXWD recently, “but more importantly because the history of Sesame Street is the history of our culture. So many of the stages of children’s development are mirrored in the show, and I wanted to do a serious book about something we all know and all enjoy, giving people an opportunity to explore something they see every day, but never give much thought to.” Modeled loosely on the book Sea Biscuit, which Davis deeply admires, Street Gang tells the story of a pop-culture behemoth, letting readers in on the story of its development.

To read about Sesame Street is to notice that our society has experienced, as Davis puts it, “breathtaking change,” and that “the way we respond to each other is so very different than it was.” Sesame Street was one of the first shows in history to mandate that there be an integrated cast. African Americans, disabled Americans, and Latinos were all strong characters woven into the show’s fabric, even if the writers never drew much attention to the fact that it was teaching anything about diversity. Davis claims that exposing children to such diversity in the preschool years has a remarkable impact on the tolerance they extend as adults. “In fact,” Davis said, “I firmly believe that the progressive ideals of Sesame Street ushered in the era of Obama. It was a dream in the 1960s and 1970s that we could live in an integrated society, even if it really wasn’t like that then.”

And even though millions of its viewers have aged out of watching the show, Sesame Street continues to stay current. As Davis explained, Sesame Street has its own YouTube channel, and constantly takes on sensitive issues, such as a parent returning from Iraq disfigured. “The secret of Sesame Street’s success,” he said, “is they've never sat still for even a moment. They're continually asking what’s in the modern zeitgeist? What do children need now?”

As much as we may forget them in our daily adult lives, Oscar, Big Bird, the Count, Cookie Monster, Bert, and Ernie are by now part of our subconscious. “We hold these characters very dear to our hearts,” Davis said, “and they are so embedded in our culture that we want to share them.”

And Street Gang is a gorgeous and intelligent book that follows the creation and evolution of one of our nation’s most important shows. Because “Can you tell me how to get to Sesame Street?” has served, for decades now, as only a rhetorical question. The vast majority of us already know the way.

Interview: Object Mobile creator and proprietor Laura Moulton on Bing Lang Girls, pocket mustaches, and looking for the helper

2009-05-28T09:23:00.000-07:00

Telling our boss we were going out for a quick cigarette, this individual mitochondrian of the vast leviathan that is PDXWD wandered into the south Park Blocks yesterday to visit the Object Mobile and its creator/proprietor, Laura Moulton. We later emailed her some questions about the project, which she was gracious enough to answer:

PDXWD: So how did this project get started? Did you have an idea and then look for funding or a program, or did you get funding or get involved in a program, and then develop the idea later?

Laura Moulton: I was one of a group of artists invited to submit a proposal for an art project through the Oregon Arts Commission's "Percent for Art" program. The main stipulation was that it somehow involve the Smith Memorial Student Union building, and students in and around it. In this case I was accepted first based on a general proposal, and then I developed a more specific idea of what I wanted to do as time went on.

PDXWD: What kind of art pieces/projects/installations have you done in the past?

Laura Moulton: An early print project I did was called the "Taoyuan County Cowgirl Gazette" which was basically a very weird 'zine my friend and I made while living in Taiwan. It featured reviews of different "Bing Lang" girls (scantily clad betel nut vendors who worked in little brightly lit booths), scandalous suggestions for classroom management while teaching English, and an odd crossword puzzle that caused even the most hardened expat to stub out a cigarette at the bar and pick up a pencil. After I moved to Portland, I worked as a temp at the post office during a Christmas holiday and I put together a homemade yearbook for all of the temps (complete with the requisite photo, hobbies, and inspirational quote). There was a surprising amount of hugging after I distributed it. My sidekick Ben and I ran the literary journal Gumball Poetry (gumballpoetry.com) for about 9 years before we closed it down, and that was a project that distributed poems in gumball machines across the States and published online as well. More recently I helped create Project Hamad, a website that features the story of a Sudanese man named Adel Hamad whom the U.S. detained for more than six years at Bagram and Guantanamo Bay. This past fall I attended the weekly art lectures for PSU’s MFA series and created a 'zine about each artist and lecture, which I then distributed to the MFA students in January. I also make collage and work with encaustic wax, though it's been a while since I was doing that regularly. I'm raising 2 small children, so I have to be more careful with the hot tins of wax.

PDXWD: Who made the Object Mobile itself? What is it made out of? How did you transport it
to the site?

Laura Moulton: The Object Mobile was designed and built by Greenworks Design Studio, which is basically comprised of designer/architect/artists including my brother, James Moulton, as well as the artist Kari Merkle, who among other things designed and installed the beautiful red velvet upholstery behind each typewriter. It's made out of wood and has plexiglass boxes which feature meaningful objects contributed by PSU students.

PDXWD: Where did you get the objects and writing that are already displayed?

Laura Moulton: I gave my two student assistants, Rozzell Medina and Crystal Baxley, empty freezer bags with a collections form in each, and they set out to gather objects from PSU students. Each object is labeled and has a brief description contributed by its owner. It's a great collection: a Dopey mug from Disney on Ice, a doll, a mixed tape, a pair of ankle socks that say "You can't afford me," and so on. Some really funny, tender contributions.

PDXWD: Where did you get the typewriters? What kind of typewriters are they? How did they handle the stress of being transported?

Laura Moulton: The typewriters are from a very cool old shop in St. John's called "Ace Typewriters." The owner is named Matt and he reminds me a lot of the writer Tim O'Brien. I was standing in the store with my brother James, studying all the different types of antique typewriters there, when I reached in my pocket and felt this terrible hairy thing. Since Matt was in the middle of telling me about the features of one of the typewriters, I tamped down a yell and when he was finished, I fished the thing out of my pocket and held it up in front of my brother. "Did you put your fake mustache in my pocket?" I asked him. Matt laughed, which is how I knew he was a good sport. There's a great story about him and his family's history with typewriters here: http://www.acetypewriter.com/?page_id=2

So far the typewriters are holding up, though they are ancient Royals and by the end of today, the ink was getting faint on the page. The other problem is that we're all so used to this light, feathery typing on laptops now and these typewriters call for a serious finger-peck to make an impression. So as people sat down to describe their object, I think it was more of a workout than they'd anticipated. Hopefully not too much.

PDXWD: What kinds of difficulties did you encounter in getting this project completed?

Laura Moulton: Ugh. Bureaucracies. And just trying to spell the word "bureaucracies."

PDXWD: How have people responded to the Object Mobile? What have they asked you?

Laura Moulton: The Object Mobile is visually arresting and I've watched people spot the thing and then make a beeline for it, peer into its windows and really get into it. It's had a very enthusiastic response so far. I think people mostly asked about where the objects came from, whether the students will get them back (they will) and so on.

PDXWD: What kinds of things are people writing about? And what will happen to the things they've written?

Laura Moulton: A mushroom-shaped cookie container. A ring. A handheld tape recorder. A harmonica. A dirty little bunny. And many more great ones. My plan is to compile everything into an online 'zine (available in a pdf) and there will also be a print copy on hand with the final installation in the Smith building (2nd floor, just outside the elevators).

PDXWD: What will that installation in the Smith building be?

Laura Moulton: The permanent installation will be one wall of the Object Mobile, complete with the plexiglass windows that will feature several objects donated by students for the permanent collection. It will also have an explanation of the project, photos, and a hard copy of the collection of object descriptions (both typed and drawn) contributed by students who have participated over the last few days.

PDXWD: What has surprised you about the project? Any unforeseen events, feelings, thoughts, insights?

Laura Moulton: I guess with all the focus on building the thing, I hadn't given as much thought to how it would be to finally have it installed and interacting with the public. I had some really nice exchanges with people today, and I look forward to meeting and talking to others in the next two days.

PDXWD: What will happen to "the rest of" the mobile after Friday?

Laura Moulton: To be determined.

PDXWD: What will be next for you? Are you working on any other projects?

Laura Moulton: I have in mind a project called "Look for the Helper" that comes from an idea I got while reading "Mr. Rogers Talks With Parents." It's based on something his mother told him when he was a kid and he was troubled by some kind of terrible news article. She said that in every sad newspaper story, there was always someone who was trying to help the situation (doctors, nurses, friends). So that's how he approached media in general: he looked for the helper. I've got some different ideas going about that -- no specifics I want to trot out just yet. I'm also at work on a novel -- it's a bit slow-doing, but I remember: the oxen are slow but the earth is patient.

From the Library: Monica Seles's "Getting A Grip," and some thoughts on Hall of Fame induction and autobiography

2009-05-27T04:00:00.000-07:00

Peripherally watching the NBA playoffs this year, PDXWD has often thought about Michael Jordan and Larry Bird, now retired and relegated to the sideline (read: couch), from where they are forced to watch Kobe Bryant and LeBron James, their on-court successors and the league's two brightest stars. What must it be like, we wonder, for once-infallible athletes, now barely into middle age but ousted, to have to watch a new generation take over the sport they once dominated?

Contemplating your own athletic obsolescence is hardly an enviable situation, megastar or not. Add in early and unmatched success, an ongoing and debilitating battle with food, a freak and psychologically-paralyzing occurrence, and an attempted comeback, and you have a glimpse of the story Monica Seles tells in her new book, Getting A Grip: On My Mind, My Body, My Self.

Tennis prodigy of the 1990s, Seles won the French Open at 16 (the youngest champ ever), and has now, some 20 years later, written this autobiography to coincide with her induction into the International Tennis Hall of Fame this summer. That honor is complicated, of course, by the fact that in 1993, when Seles was at the top of the ranks, a deranged fan stabbed her in the back during a match in Germany. After the bizarre incident, Seles was out for two years, and never recovered enough emotionally to contend again. (And the assailant never served jail time.) “It’s a horrible thing that happened in my life,” Seles writes in the book, “and it irrevocably changed the course of my career and inflicted serious damage to my psyche. A split second of horror fundamentally changed me as a person.”

Still, Seles said in an email recently to PDXWD, “as a girl growing up in the former-Yugoslavia I never imagined I would be inducted into the Tennis Hall of Fame. It is a dream come true. Knowing that I will be a Hall of Famer is a great honor and a great way to celebrate my tennis career.” Asked if she studied any other athletes’ books or autobiographies before writing her own, Seles professed to having read athletes’ and non-athletes’ alike, including the work of Howard Hughes, Coco Chanel, Dara Torres, and Julie Krone. An autobiography of her own, she explained in her email, would help “spread the message to people out there who were struggling with their weight, like I did for nine years, and take control of it and win that battle in life.”

Last year, Seles agreed to appear on the sixth season of ABC’s “Dancing with the Stars,” an episode she details in her book. She was the first female celebrity contestant eliminated. “While staying out of the public eye" since officially retiring, she writes, "I’d been able to rebuild and fortify my core and I decided to put it to the ultimate test: ballroom dancing in front of millions of people. If I was going to test my newfound inner strength, what better way to do it than by risking total and complete public humiliation on reality television?” True enough.

After following Seles through these travails outlined in Getting A Grip, you begin to gain a fuller if sadder understanding of the pressures society puts on professional athletes, a fragile situation indeed considering the heaps of pressure athletes already load upon themselves. “Who was I without tennis?” Seles asks about halfway through her book, and the question reverberates because the answer is so simple: just a normal person. Unlike you and me, though, Seles — along with the Jordans and Birds of our world (and the Roman gladiators before them) — had to age, compete, struggle, and remake herself in front of a passionate audience that was always watching.

From the Library: The Last of Kevin Wilson's "Tunneling to the Center of the Earth"

2009-05-24T18:02:00.000-07:00

“The Choir Director Affair (The Baby’s Teeth)”
Two stories in the same collection written in the second person! This could be a record and entirely out of control. A little disappointing, however, is the fact that “The Choir Director Affair” is not as tidy and interlooping as the previous second-person foray, but it feels more heartfelt, at least. In this story, our narrator is friendly with a married couple whose baby is born with a mouthful of teeth, teeth that are beautiful and perfect, but the sort of teeth that make “you feel like a real son of bitch” when you see them for the first time, because “why wouldn’t someone have mentioned this beforehand? A small warning: this baby will smile and it will startle you.” The real movement of this narrative, though (in line with the second paragraph’s promise, “The story isn’t about the baby anyway, but the father of the baby”), is in the repetitive and awful behaviors in which adult people find themselves eddying. The mother and father, like so many of us, “are arguing,” the story says, “but quietly, under the surface. Too much sugar in one’s coffee, newspaper folded and refolded in the face of questions, mentions of after-school activities.” This is terrible to read because it is so spot-on and reminds you of your ex. And so it happens that the father has an affair, lies about his whereabouts, leaves the child often in the narrator’s care when he romps with this other woman, and then eventually leaves the mother and destroys a little family. He goes to Austria, has wild times, enjoys this other woman fully, but is inevitably left by her. Do mother and father then get back together in a storm of forgiveness and kisses and sex, though? Of course they do. And does the child age into an awkward normal-toothed teenager? Of course he does. Why? Because “the things we once loved do not change,” the story ends, “only our belief in them.”

“Go, Fight, Win”
Hot damn, this story is solid, even if the first half of it reads almost exactly like the relationship between Jane and Ricky Fitz in American Beauty (replicated in eerie and precise detail, we might add). Besides this bit of deja vu, though, the unfolding of a strange and touching relationship between a 16-year-old reluctant cheerleader and her 12-year-old neighbor boy is well-crafted and subtle, eliciting many fine comparisons to the shorter work of Salinger and Eggers. Of special enjoyment is the care with which the girl in the story works on model cars at her desk at night; it provides not only the image on the book's cover, but resonates as a metaphor for beginning to piece together in our early years what we should expect out of life, and what it expects of us.

"The Museum of Whatnot"
This reviewer will be so bold as to call this the best story in the collection. A bold move, per se, because it is probably the most straightforward and classic of the bunch--without much trickery or literary bells and whistles--but also because it is the most nuanced. Had we the space, we would offer a Marxist reading of the protagonist's desire to rid herself of her possessions, and tack on another even closer reading of her job: a curator for a, you guessed it, museum of whatnot. But since we are not afforded with the desire at present to flesh out such readings, let it suffice to say that what happens, in not so many words, is the female lead curates and curates and curates (choosing and sorting and displaying everything from garbage bags of rubber bands to millions of paperclips), until she concedes it's okay to own some things once in a while. In addition, spurred by the advances of a doctor fellow who frequents the whatnots, our protagonist slowly discovers that the lonely life she has been leading has been a conscious decision all along.

"Worst Case Scenario"
It is unfortunate that Tunneling to the Center of the Earth ends with this story, not because it isn't good, but because it's just not as good or as polished as the rest. Wilson has said the impetus for this story "came from illogical fear and loneliness, which is where a good many of my story ideas come from," which is a compelling and fruitful place to be working from as a writer, but only if you allow your characters to explore these feelings wholly, and without encumbering them with weird stipulations. In "Worst Case Scenario," for example, the main character's own psychoses are the thrust of what we care about him resolving, and yet Wilson weighs the narrative down by giving the character a crazy job (collecting and reporting on worst case scenarios), when really the worst case scenario is the character's life itself. There is nice resolution to the story, but by then, we just sort of wish we had reread "Museum of Whatnot" instead.

From the Library: The second third of Kevin Wilson's "Tunneling to the Center of the Earth"

2009-05-21T04:00:00.000-07:00

“Birds in the House”
This story is the strongest and most intriguing yet in the collection, due to the conflict in which it is rooted (Southern-style inter-familial loathing) and the likable protagonist Wilson has chosen to narrate it (a hopeful young boy). The premise goes: a old woman passes away and leaves her house to one of her three adult sons who have feuded long and hard. The catch: to determine which son gets it, they must compete in a contest that involves each of them folding 250 paper cranes and placing them on a table surrounded by fans on its four corners. The winner: whoever made the last bird on the table after the fans are turned on. Like its companions, “Birds” is full of excellent imagery (“The walls are soft from rot and feel like sponge against my fingers” and “Finally my father gave up, went into the house for the Colt .45, and put a bullet between the eyes of every cow still standing until he stood in a cloud of red-tinged dust,” and “The birds are flying, if only for a brief moment, and I watch a rainbow of cranes fly around the room, dip and loop and dive in the air”), though the fighting between the brothers is stereotypical in places. Overall, however, this story is the shit.

“Mortal Kombat”
This is your common teenage-boy-sex-story with a little twist and an alluring conceit. Scotty and Wynn are nerdy best friends whose “sole extracurricular activity involves traveling all over the state and competing against other very unpopular teenagers, answering random academic questions.” In short, “they do not fit into the spaces available to them.” What starts as a brief kiss between the two boys one lonely afternoon folds out into a story about each of them discovering what sexuality means to their bodies, their identities, their psyches, and moreover, their friendship. When the boys, who have each purchased a copy of that 1990s megahit videogame "Mortal Kombat" and have practiced it alone for days on end, finally sit down to play against one another, the game, as games often do, takes on significantly more meaning than what occurs onscreen.

“Tunneling to the Center of the Earth”
Goodness, this is a strange but moving story. Wilson has a penchant for splicing together the plausible with the totally implausible, caring not to distinguish or draw attention to either more than the other, and so we’re left in “Tunneling” with three recent college graduates who decide to dig a very, very deep hole in the backyard, from which they begin building a network of tunnels underneath the city. This is their life: they dig, they eat, they sleep, entirely lost and uninterested in the goings-on above ground. What an apt metaphor for post-college life and early adulthood, no? “Tunneling” is fresh and applicable (for many of us, at least) in its depiction of having to join the real world after being mired for years in useless academic abstraction.

“The Shooting Man”
This story launches and never comes back. It’s like a boomerang you throw that doesn’t adhere to the trajectory it promises and sails straight off into the distance, landing some many, many frustrating yards away. Then what happens is you don’t want to go get it because the game has been ruined; the boomerang has not behaved. Wilson admits in the interviews at the back of the book that he tried to “turn the story into something more akin to pulp, like the 1950’s horror and mystery comic books [he’d] read in high school,” and as such, he technically succeeds. So as not to fully give away the story, though, we’ll just say that the narrative hinges on a particularly disturbing circus show that no one in town can stop thinking or talking about: Maximilian Bullet, the man capable of shooting himself in the face. How does he do it night after night? everyone wonders. We’ll give you one guess.

Day 4: In which PDXWD/NYCWD skips Day 3 and goes directly to The Strand and finds Updike but no Baker

2009-05-20T13:40:00.000-07:00

Day 3 was a mess of Radio City Music Hall, overcaffeination, dinner, train transfers, and muffled discussions, so we're just going straight to Day 4 and concluding. [Ed. note: Lame! You're not getting reimbursed for the full four days, then. Expect that we'll go through your travel receipts with extra care. Anything from Day 3 is on you!]

Before that, though, we should mention--to further solidify the hunch we have about New York's feelings for us--that Stumptown has set up operations here in Brooklyn, a fact that certainly says something about this "special relationship" we're having, doesn't it?

Anyway, to bookend our love of Powell's with a similarly stimulating literary experience in New York, this PDXWD/NYCWD correspondent made a mad dash to The Strand ("18 miles of books") [Ed. note: You're not getting reimbursed for that mileage.], looking for many titles (such as a hardback edition of Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine), but not finding them, settled instead on others (a first edition bargain of Updike's Rabbit Redux, for example, as well a copy of Julie Orringer's gorgeous debut collection How to Breathe Underwater). Then we went back to the hotel and took off our socks and fell asleep and before we knew it it was morning and we were headed back to JFK. [Ed. note: This sentence should end "without having filed any further posts, in violation of our contract, thus rendering the contract and any pay rates or scales contained therein null and void."]

The thing about NYC, we've decided, is that it makes you feel so entirely inadequate. [Ed. note: Plz change "you" there to read "us", as per pdxwd style. Then change "us" to read "me," since it is only this employee who filed an inadequate number of words.] Walking its streets as an outsider, you never quite seem to know if you're going the right way or wearing the right thing, or if you're even in the right neighborhood to begin with. But just as it gives off this sense of exclusivity--and here's the paradoxical effect of the city--it also simultaneously extends an invitation to join its diverse hoards. New York wants you. It wants you to belong. It wants what you have. It wants you to be here and to call it home; that is, New York City wants nothing more than for you to become an insider, as much of an outsider as you feel you are.

As such then, as you ride the A train uptown, you secretly yearn to read The New Yorker as a New Yorker, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal as your hometown papers. There's something for you in this vast city, you can just feel it. [Ed. note: Deadlines for filing posts, we thought. But apparently you didn't "feel" that.] It pulsates, this thing for you, like the silhouette of the skyline, across the bridges, on the BQE, on each and every street, and it makes a very, very convincing argument that you two really do belong together.

If and when you leave, therefore, it's so that you can inevitably return. [Ed. note: On your own dime, pal.]

From the Library: "Lonesome Dove" by Larry McMurtry, including bonus thoughts on Sir Walter Scott's "Ivanhoe"!

2009-05-20T04:00:00.000-07:00

Dear Portland Writer,

Have you read Ivanhoe? It is awesome: engaging, emotional, chilling, thrilling, and some people will even admit it's good literature. Larry McMurtry, for example, obviously thought Ivanhoe was awesome, because he wrote Lonesome Dove in homage to it (we hypothesize).

Both novels begin with pigs. Ivanhoe (1819), after a few pages of history and pastoral description, starts like this:

"'The curse of St. Withold upon these infernal porkers,' said the swine-herd, after blowing his horn obstreperously, to collect together the scattered herd of swine, which, answering his call with notes equally melodious, made, however, no haste to remove themselves from the luxurious banquet of beech-mast and acorns on which they had fattened, or to forsake the marshy banks of the rivulet, where several of them, half plunged in mud, lay stretched at their ease, altogether regardless of the voice of their keeper."

And then Lonesome Dove (1985) starts like this:

"When Augustus came out on the porch the blue pigs were eating a rattlesnake--not a very big one. It had probably just been crawling around looking for shade when it ran into the pigs. They were having a fine tug-of-war with it, and its rattling days were over. The sow had it by the neck, and the shoat had the tail. 'You pigs git,' Augustus said, kicking the shoat."

Aren't those great pig-based beginnings? We didn't notice the similarities at first, but partway into Lonesome Dove the vibe suddenly seemed familiar: the books run at the same speed, with the same peaks and troughs. Then the evidence started piling up. Both have two or three main characters and six or seven vivid supporting characters important enough to get several chapters of their own. Most of the characters in both novels are intelligent and likeable, except for the villains, who are unforgettable and terrifying. The story goes along one thing after another for awhile and we stay absolutely involved, and then the action erupts and we grow actually breathless with excitement. In both novels, everything that occurs is either deeply satisfying, or deeply frustrating but in a literarily-satisfying way. In both novels, the ends of many chapters read like the ends of the best novels we know. We vow to hold all fiction to this standard forevermore, and know we cannot keep the vow and go on being avid readers.

So we had formed this hypothesis, about how Larry McMurtry loves Sir Walter Scott, and we're reading along and we're reading along, and then on page 651 of Lonesome Dove one of the characters is reading Ivanhoe (imagined pictorially at left) to her kids, and we're like, "Aha! We knew it!"

In closing: check out these books. They are terrific. If you like one, you will like the other. If you like awesomeness, you will like both.

Your pal,
PDX Writer Daily

Day 2: In which PDXWD continues being NYCWD, and buys and reads the Times, which is cheaper here, and is then posed a question at night

2009-05-17T07:28:00.000-07:00

The New York Times may be the only purchase on the planet that is cheaper in New York than in other parts of the country. Only $4 for the Sunday Times. We like this.

But PDXWD promised to keep you abreast of our goings-on, and so we should mention that last night we met up with New York in Brooklyn for some dinner at Pequena. While we waited for a small table at this small establishment, we went across the street to Cafe Habana for cheap beer out of corn cups and conversation about the sheer number of choices one has in this city, not to mention how much more comfortable this mitochondrion of PDXWD feels going out in Portland as compared to here. Something about the eyes of everyone being on you when you're in New York. Not that it's not fine, because it is, it's just less easy to relax, is all.

After those beers and that dinner, we walked up the hill to Washington Commons, and it was at that point that New York asked us what exactly we were looking for in coming here. "I mean," New York said, "are you looking to just hook up, or are you looking for marriage?" PDXWD was slightly taken aback, but smiled and replied, "Probably something in between." "Well," New York said, "I know some people here, and could help you out," and then leaned in close enough to communicate exactly what was meant by all of this. It started to rain about then, though, and being out on the patio as we were, this rain made everyone rush inside, and we were left alone in our wicker chair, wondering why people flee a little rain, especially the kind of bulbous drops that make everything seem more real. Maybe we're just more used to it...

This morning, there's talk of brunch at Dressler, but we'll see. For now, the Book Review is calling.

From the Library: "Tunneling to the Center of the Earth" by Kevin Wilson

2009-05-16T14:42:00.000-07:00

What an excellent epigraph Kevin Wilson has chosen to open his debut collection of stories, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth: “There is nothing in this warm, vegetal dusk / That is not beautiful or that will last.” Lovely, just lovely.

“Grand Stand-In”
Like the strange workplace stories of George Saunders that Kevin Wilson says inspired this piece, “Grand Stand-In” details the last few weeks of a woman in the business of “standing in” as a grandmother. In other words, the narrator is a grandmother for hire, which is a compelling idea initially, but one that the story too forcefully attempts to make real. The terminology and explanations of the narrator’s job are stiff and roughly-stitched, as if the occupation Wilson has created has been grafted too hastily onto our actual economic marketplace. Obviously, the story is not supposed to be a comfort (as it deals with confronting one’s own replaceability and inevitable death), but the loads of business jargon unnecessarily hyperbolize and thereby cloud the emotions the story sets out to explore, which is unfortunate. And though the narrator is likable enough as she comes to terms with her job and her life, there are a few scenes in which the narrative falters because she is just too aggressive to be believable.

“Blowing Up On The Spot”
Unlike “Grand Stand-In,” this story succeeds in its peculiarity because it does not make any apologies for its being so curious. It is about a young man who works at the Scrabble tile sorting factory looking for Q's, and whose parents spontaneously combusted on the subway. He lives with his younger suicidal brother and wonders if he, too, will blow up one day unannounced and, as entertainment, counts his steps everywhere he goes.

The legs of this story are the very many superb passages spliced into its short span. Take this description of the narrator’s girlfriend, for example: “Joan emerges from the kitchen carrying a tray of chocolate turtles. Joan’s hair is shiny black and falls pasts her shoulders. Her eyes gleam brown like caramel and when she catches my gaze, her smile creeps across her face in small increments, as if her happiness starts in one place and slowly moves out in all directions. She holds up one of the chocolate turtles and lets me take a bite. Pecans, chocolate, and caramel mix together in my mouth and I taste Joan’s fingertips on my tongue.” That is really nice, and sexy. Or, take the brother’s second suicide attempt: “Caleb has tried to kill himself twice in the three years since our parents died. The last time, he slit his wrists with a Swiss Army knife during practice and dove in the pool to swim a hundred-meter freestyle, trailing a cloud of blood behind him.”

There are more like this throughout the story, but you should come across them yourself, like happily stumbling into a meadow. When things are written this well, we more easily forgive and begin to enjoy any absurdness. The story ends up coming together like a tiny and beautiful painting of an impossibly strange animal, sort of like some exquisitely-rendered owl with a rack of antlers and oversized cougar paws.

“The Dead Sister Handbook: A Guide For Sensitive Boys, Volume Five (Laconic Method to Near Misses)”
[Full disclosure: this tentacle of PDXWD loves almost everything written in or using the second-person “you.” We even wrote a degree-earning piece of writing on the use of the second-person “you” and are without fail attracted to stories that are written fully, or almost entirely, in this way.]

This story is written in the second person and it is excellent. Composed of paragraphs that are supposed entries in a handbook for sensitive boys concerning the death of their sisters, it does little in the way of adhering to narrative structure or achieving linear progress--structure and progress within the piece occur through parenthetical references to other entries in the handbook itself, which unfolds as a gorgeous interlacing of anecdotes, warnings, and remembrances. Here is a sample entry, “Look Alikes”: “Sensitive boys will encounter between four and eleven women who resemble the dead sister. Do not, under any circumstances, attempt to talk to these women, follow them down crowded city streets, or pay them money in exchange for sexual favors. Nothing good can come from this.” This is just brilliant and you know you like this. You should read more stories like this one.

More to come...from the park benches of New York City.

Day 1: In which PDXWD briefly becomes NYCWD to have a talk about this relationship

2009-05-16T05:24:00.000-07:00

Good morning. It's still dark and you're still sleeping, but we're up and having coffee and a cream-cheesed bagel in the D concourse because one nut/bolt/mitochondrion of PDXWD is going on a field trip.

New York, as you may know, has a pretty serious crush on Portland. And we'd be lying if we said that this inordinate amount of fawning we've recently received has not given us pause. We thought, therefore, that it would be best to go out there for a weekend and have a little face-to-face talk, some alone time, just the two of us, to set the record straight, to put our cards on the table, to tell it how it is. "Just play it cool, NYC, okay?" is what we're going to say. "We like you, too, but we don't need to be in a hurry here, you know. There's time. There's so much time. No rush, then, right? Let's just date for a while, and be our own cities, and keep doing what we're doing. We're a long way from each other and we don't need or want to get in over our heads right away, do we?"

And so we shall.

Also, on the way and once we're there, starting just as soon as we board this aircraft, we'll be reading Kevin Wilson's new collection of short stories, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth, to which we are really looking forward, but will of course also keep you abreast about the goings-on we happen upon in the Big Apple.

All right. They just called our Zone #. Next stop: JFK.

From the Library: Ursula K. Le Guin's "Direction of the Road" considered alongside Paul Shambroom's "Picturing Power"

2009-05-13T05:00:00.000-07:00

Direction of the Road, by Ursula K. Le Guin, with original woodcut by Aaron Johnson, Foolscap Press: Santa Cruz, 2007; # 20 / 150, as held in the Special Collections Archive at the Multnomah County Library's Central Wilson Room.

Power is often a matter of perspective. "Powerful" people are usually those who perceive themselves to be such, and accomplish tasks and jobs with the belief that they are who they think they are. "Powerlessness," likewise, can be understood as perceiving oneself to be either in want of what one doesn’t have, or unable to procure that which others are already enjoying. Both situations—powerfulness and powerlessness—are contingent on a certain perspective.

But what if that perspective changes? What happens when people don’t want or don’t perceive themselves capable of handling the power they have been given? Two recent publications present conceptually different examinations of this interplay between authority and viewpoint.

Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story "Direction of the Road," originally published in the mid-1970s, has been given new life of late by Foolscap Press in a special limited edition book released in 2007. Pressed on linen wrapper paper made by La Papeterie Saint-Armand in Montreal, Foolscap’s edition comes in a portfolio box covered in Japanese cloth, and includes an original anamorphic woodcut by Aaron Johnson. The sum of this fine craftsmanship is a rare and slim volume that is itself an experience in perspective, corporeality, and power.

As the inside cover explains, anamorphic art, whose origins date as far back as Leonardo da Vinci, has enjoyed a long history in which artists have experimented with "perspective and other 'anamorphic projections'," while "challenging the viewer’s usual conventions of looking." The book's introduction suggests that "Aaron Johnson’s woodcut continues this exploration and achieves two things at once: his art casts the viewer into an active role in relation to the art and, more important for this story, it allows the image freedom of movement," which is most certainly true and alluring from the get-go.

The result is a stunning reading experience. Direction of the Road is told from the perspective of a large oak tree that believes its duty is to grow and shrink as people come and go in relation to it. It would be an understatement to say the tree “believes” in the role it serves, since the tree never vacillates in this conviction; it exists simply to grow and shrink as people come closer to it or recede from it. The tree strictly adheres to this place and purpose in the universe, a position it believes is secure.

Enter Johnson’s woodcut. Inside the large rectangular folded portfolio in which the story is bound, there is fastened a cylindrical mirror that the reader is instructed to place on end next to a semicircular, warped-seeming woodcut. Once the mirror is in place, it magically reflects the woodcut image as a crisp illustration of a large tree and a person sitting beneath it, while two birds fly past overhead. But the reflected woodcut also has another important characteristic: the reader can, by moving closer to and farther away from the mirror, experience the tree growing and shrinking in size, just as it behaves in the story.

The narrative doesn’t last long, but in its few pages, decade after decade pass atop a small hill from where the tree watches humanity progress, all the while remaining diligent in its duty of getting bigger as people approach and smaller as they retreat, never failing, as the story’s original 1974 introduction states, “to uphold Relativity with dignity and the skill of long practice.” Though it hardly needs upkeeping or modernization—since the story seems naturally timeless—Le Guin updated the introduction for this release, adding that if the tree that inspired Direction of the Road still stands on its Oregon hillside, “it is coping after the single outburst of anguish [that is recorded in the story] grandly and without complaint.”

That singular eruption to which Le Guin alludes is the crux of the story: one day, a car runs off the road and strikes the tree head-on, killing the driver. After this event, the tree objects to the power with which it has been imbued: to crush people unintentionally. Since the driver only really sees the tree for the first time when looking up at the last moment before striking its trunk—all these years, the tree was there, but was a mere afterthought for the driver, a part of the landscape that went unnoticed—the tree declares that “it is unjust to require me to play the part, not of the killer only, but of death.” Since the driver confuses the tree for death itself, the tree gets even angrier, or at least as angry as an old oak can become, and concludes: “For I am not death. I am life: I am mortal. If they wish to see death visibly in the world, that is their business, not mine. I will not act Eternity for them. Let them not turn to the trees for death. If that is what they want to see, let them look into one another’s eyes and see it there.”

The exhibitions catalogued in Paul Shambroom: Picturing Power (Weisman Art Museum: University of Minnesota, 2008) also explore the idea of who has power, what they do with it, and how they look from a particular perspective.

In a sense, Shambroom’s work, like the lens in Le Guin's book, is anamorphic: it forces the viewer to consider his or her own perspective in regard to the image. In many cases, the pictures Shambroom offers are of things 99% of us would never see, or at least not as they are presented here. Shambroom’s subjects include top secret locations (including military bases, nuclear weapons facilities, and security and defense training procedures) and often capture empty spaces: offices devoid of human presence, meetings before they begin, and the insides of factories.

Picturing Power is a gorgeous collection that is capable of making any reader/viewer wonder about who is actually in charge of our cities, our countries, and our world. In addition to over 40 full-color pages of prints, the book includes several insightful essays by notable art critics on Shambroom’s work, and a fascinating interview of Shambroom himself by Stuart Horodner, curator of the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center.

“The intersection of beauty and horror,” Shambroom says in the interview, “adds a tension that’s important to me and to any of the images I make.” It’s the presence of these opposing sensations that places Shambroom’s work in parallel with many historical conceptions of hegemony, since authority is always simultaneously a glorious and dangerous thing to possess. “They are supposed to present people as being heroic,” Shambroom states of his pictures, “but then there’s a series of questions that you start to [have]: this person is here to protect me, but do I really feel safe—safer—knowing that this person is in this gear doing this job?”

Take the image on the book’s cover, “Level A Hazmat Suit, Yellow (‘Disaster City’ National Emergency Response and Rescue Training Center, Texas Engineering and Extension Service [TEEX]),” as one example. In it, a strangely and menacingly outfitted person wields detection devices for, one guesses, identifying lethal substances in the atmosphere, but he stands amidst a bucolic setting, alone, as if seen through a Viewfinder. The response one has to this image is largely connected with the power one senses this person possesses. It’s as if the photo's subject knows and is equipped for a disastrous situation that the viewer, on this side of the image, is in no way prepared to handle. “I do have respect for these people,” Shambroom adds in the interview, “and that has nothing to do with whether I think the policies that they are carrying out are the best policies for our country and for the world…I’m just not sure these activities address the core of the problems we face in the world.”

Stark, usually sparsely populated, many of the photographs capture places without people, or a single person or lonely group that has been granted power, which gives the images a ghostly, dismal feeling. We wonder, much as we do of Le Guin's tree in Direction of the Road, whether these people actually want the power they have been given. “I really don’t set out to provide answers,” Shambroom says.

How do we determine who should be in power? Is it the person or people who know the most? The people who have the most experience? The people with the best ideas and plans? Our own recent Presidential election centered on many of these very queries. In reference to his having taken these pictures, Shambroom claims, “No one else knows how to do it. And I’m not going to let anything stop me because if I don’t do it, it’s not going to happen.” Echoing what the tree utters in Direction, Shambroom seems to wonder whose job it is to make decisions that impact everyone else. Not without his own sense of personal perspective, however, the artist concludes, “It is necessary to my process to have those delusions of grandeur as long as when I come down I realize that’s what they are and I still have to wash the dishes at home.”

From the Library: "Couch" by Benjamin Parzybok

2009-05-11T09:02:00.000-07:00

"From ten feet, a guardian angel's view, the view this tale will take, three men carry a couch. An orange, knit couch of considerable size." This statement, appearing on page one, is the last appearance of anything remotely meta or self-referential in Benjamin Parzybok's newish debut novel, Couch.

For the next two hundred and eighty pages, it's pretty straightforward omniscient third person narrative, more or less focalized on one of the book's three main characters. They are the young men carrying the couch. As it turned out, that was fine with PDX Writer Daily, which read it quickly and happily, and felt satisfied by the ending. PDXWD believed—as much as the intricate web-based mash of wires and ponies that is PDXWD can believe anything these days—in the characters, and enjoyed Parzybok's description of Portland's West Side.

Furthermore, PDXWD has already recommended this book to perhaps twenty people. You see, PDXWD has recently accepted a slew of odd jobs to make ends meet. (Those Doctor Bronner labels don't write themselves, people.) So as we were giving War & Peace a little break from us (it just seemed sort of tired, and looking away when we were reading, and generally, just, not present), we read Couch while making change at a very high profile, and thus unnameable, parking structure.

When drivers stopped to pay for parking, we looked up and smiled, and they asked, "Good book?" And we said, "So far, it's pretty great," and handed it to them. And now, through the power of a medium other than the parking structure, we say the same to you: Couch, written by Portlander Ben Parzybok (who won North America's Last Postmodern Manuscript Contest last year) is great so far.

Art as Life, Life as Art: Reviews of Three Documentaries

2009-05-04T09:45:00.000-07:00

[The following three documentaries keep coming up in conversation in the places we frequent, so PDXWD thought it best to just get on with writing about them.]

The Cruise, dir. Bennett Miller, 1998

“If I have an essential goal on the cruise right now,” says Timothy "Speed" Levitch in a documentary about his life as a bus tour guide in New York City, “I think that the simplest goal is perhaps to be able to exhibit that I am thrilled to be alive and to be still respected.”

Which is to say that The Cruise is really not about Speed’s life as a bus tour guide in New York City at all. Rather, the film centers on one man who speaks and thinks more precisely and eloquently about cockroaches and parks and desperation than you ever will about Shakespeare or mechanical engineering or memes. Speed, whose nickname most assuredly comes from the rate at which he talks (you may recall his vignette in Waking Life at night on a bridge), spends the entire film constantly navigating away from what he calls the “anti-cruise,” which is obviously everything that stands in the way of "the cruise." Right?

Though it’s difficult to put a finger on what exactly “the cruise” is, since it’s really an urban philosophical treatise more than anything else, Speed puts it this way: “The cruise is about the searchings for everything worthwhile in existence. It is about walking into the bar and lusting after all the worthwhile possibilities of the world. It is about flesh. It is about waves undulating. And it is about exhibitionism…I mean, that’s how I feel about cruising right now.”

With rants about the grid system, disappointing his grandparents, breaking up and getting back together with the city he loves, the myth of the lamed-vavniks and the Baal-Shem-Tov, a babysitter who tried to choke him, the solidity and solidarity of the Brooklyn Bridge, and the sensuality of terra cotta cornices (not to mention amazing recitals of poems, letters, novels, and speeches) The Cruise is nothing less than a whirling, twirling beauty, burning itself at both ends.

If you’re still confused after watching it, though, don’t despair. Simply rest assured that “having an intimate quote unquote love affair with a flower is far more psychotic and riveting than having a love affair quote unquote with some of the banal creatures of the human race, although I’d be into that, too.” So would we, Speed. So would we.

Man on Wire, dir. James Marsh, 2008

Philippe Petit’s ego is about as large as some of the abysses across which he has tightrope-walked, and yet this documentary about his 1974 crossing back and forth between the World Trade Center towers is supremely impressive mainly because it’s so damn unbelievable.

Mixing interviews, archive footage, reenactment, and still photography, Man On Wire is one of those rare films that makes you feel both completely inspired while also paralyzing you as you sulk and wonder what you’ll never do because you’re: 1) too scared; 2) too lazy; 3) too undetermined; or 4) all of the above.

Even if you’ve heard of Petit’s legendary feat before, this film is breathtaking in that it sheds light on the years of planning and reworking and disagreement that went into four men sneaking into the towers (costumed as workmen and businessmen) and stringing the wire between the two buildings in the course of a harrowing sleepless night. And though security measures in such places would probably thwart similar attempts today, the film does a beautiful job capturing this rebellious artistic act that somehow succeeded against all odds.

Petit, in the film’s climax, revels in the stunt for almost an hour on the wire in the crisp foggy morning air of August 7th, all while stunned and smiling onlookers below gawk and exclaim and swoon. The police, though irritated, also seem in awe of the man they arrest, even if they later let go him without pressing charges, citing the artistic quality of his deviance as reason to overlook his trespassing and impersonation and reckless endangerment.

Man On Wire reminds us of today’s street artists like Shepard Fairey (of Andre the Giant/OBEY and Barack Obama/HOPE) and Banksy (the artist who broke into museums to put up his own paintings), guerilla criminals who are beautifying our world one act at a time. Like Petit himself, whose spectacle has been called the greatest art crime of the 20th century, the philosophy “create now, apologize later” seems to live on. And god, if that’s the case, what the hell did you and I do today?

How to Draw a Bunny, dir. John W. Walter, 2002

Ray Johnson is the most famous artist you’ve never heard of. In fact, let's be honest: even as we were about to begin this review of the documentary we watched and loved that trumpets his life and work from the 1960s through the 1990s, this writer totally forgot his name. And yet despite his slipping from our collective memory relatively often, Ray Johnson was known by and involved with many of the biggest names in Pop Art (Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and Christo, to name a few) during his day.

Johnson, however, was one weird son of a bitch. Spending time on tasks and details no one else in their right mind would focus on (or even notice 95% of the time), Johnson constructed elaborate layered collages and paintings, but also involved himself as a performance artist (like hammering a box over and over and over, or throwing pieces of paper into the air and dancing around them, or dropping hotdogs from a helicopter) and considered himself to be the founder of mail art (in which he would send altered newspaper and advertisement clippings to different friends all over the country, calling the experiment the “New York Correspondance [sic] School).” His art was, very simply, his life.

The best aspects of How to Draw a Bunny are the interviews with Johnson’s colleagues who try to grasp him and sum him up for the camera, which is always a futile endeavor. The film is littered with hilariously frustrating stories: his agent recalls how nightmarish it was to represent such a slippery and rambling figure; a gallery owner says Johnson used to call and say he wanted to do a show of nothing, by which he may have meant something, or anything, but also maybe nothing; one of his portrait subjects shares letters from Johnson fraught with complicated and arbitrary price calculations for each artwork in a series.

Considering how integral Johnson figured a participating audience was to and in his work, it’s not surprising that he turned his own life, and death, into an exhibition. The very narrative framework of How to Draw a Bunny, and the concept that stays with you after the film, is the investigation of Johnson’s apparent suicide on January 13, 1995, through which he left us a byzantine, beautiful, and self-contained piece of art.

From the Library: "Zoology," painful asymmetry, and a chat with Ben Dolnick

2009-04-29T05:05:00.000-07:00

The task of reviewing Ben Dolnick’s debut novel Zoology lays not in deciding whether the book is an enjoyable read (we'll spell it out right here—this is a fresh and excellent portrait of a quizzical young man), but rather in distinguishing it from the vast number of other memoir-novels that have preceded it.

Not unlike the new kid in class, Ben Dolnick suddenly appeared on the literary scene last year. As such, he is a newbie in a prestigious all-boys school of popular pros, the halls of which are packed with the likes of Jonathan Safran Foer, Erlend Loe, Brad Land, Keith Gessen, and Benjamin Kunkel. Black and white photographs of alumni (all-time favorites like J.D. Salinger, as well as recent grads Augusten Burroughs, Rick Moody, Jonathan Franzen, and Dave Eggers) adorn the school’s display cases with books beside the pictures like trophies. (James Frey was expelled.) And so, like having to prove himself on the playground, this tenderfoot twenty-something Brooklynite has quite a challenge set out before him.

Zoology follows a hapless high school grad, Henry Elinsky, who flunks out of college in his freshman year. Floating in and out of the reality of this situation, Henry moves in with his successful brother in New York, where he lands a job at the zoo scooping poop and food pellets. Between meeting a beautiful girl in his building, playing ping-pong with the doorman, realizing that he is a terrible saxophone player, and being yelled at routinely by his boss, Henry finds himself pondering life’s weirdness and lowlights. So far, not much surprise.

If Zolnick sets himself apart, it's in the moments of his narrator’s self-depreciation, sentences that shine like nuggets of originality in an otherwise saturated genre. Asked over email about what he himself reads and on what he models his fiction, Dolnick told PDXWD that he likes books that “present a real-seeming reconstruction of what the actual minute-to-minute, year-to-year experience of being a person is like,” and it’s this facet that makes Zoology successful. “It should be a comfort,” he added in his message, “to read ‘honest-seeming’ accounts of being alive.”

At the heart of the novel, as Dolnick puts it, is the “painful asymmetry” of life’s experiences—that events and regrets and guilt don't align in a zero-sum game. In other words, we can’t fix everything we’ve ever broken, and likewise, Zoology doesn’t try to answer every question it poses. What's striking about Henry is that his reflections are offered without overwrought exertion. At one point late into the novel, for example, Henry muses, “It was hard to imagine now that I’d woken up that morning in a life without Dad’s heart attack in it, that I’d pulled my tuna sandwich out of its bag and had no idea.” Throughout the book Dolnick is honest and real without being gimmicky, and is able to render disappointment in terms that don’t resort to hyperbolized or flaunted self-loathing.

So if Dolnick is aware that he’s in a class of bestselling novelists/memoirists who use their life as fodder for comical and heart-wrenching books, he’s great at not showing it. And though Henry is an obvious nod to Holden Caulfield (both have trustworthy older brothers, lurk in downtown jazz bars, fail often, and attempt to regain composure near the end), Dolnick’s protagonist swears less than Salinger’s, and is far less angry at the world. Treading much the same territory with much the same outcome, Dolnick has produced another young male book on being young and male, but while adding something nice to the pot at the same time.

From the Library: "God Is Not Great" and a chat with Christopher Hitchens on morals, vanity, and comfort

2009-04-23T07:15:00.000-07:00

Christopher Hitchens’ 2007 and most recent book, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, is out in paperback this month, and so PDXWD decided to get in on the action and have a word with Mr. Anti-Christ himself.

The well-known and outspoken British polemic has written for a variety of publications over the years (from Vanity Fair to The Nation to Slate) and has made a name for himself as a radical thinker on lecture and debate circuits. But while he has taken on a number of different topics in his career (George Orwell, monarchy, Henry Kissinger, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, and the Iraq War, just to name a few), God Is Not Great represents an attempt to dive into some essential — and poignant — problems of human nature.

“Morals simply cannot be derived from religion,” Hitchens told PDXWD recently via telephone, “and yet we are condemned to be moral and ethical beings. It is innate in us to consider other people’s feelings.” This fact leaves us, as Hitchens argues in his book’s introduction, in a world where “religion has caused innumerable people not just to conduct themselves no better than others, but to award themselves permission to behave in ways that would make a brothelkeeper raise an eyebrow.”

So while God Is Not Great features a sensationalized argument, it doesn’t clarify how we might attain Hitchens' proposed “New Enlightenment” once religion is abandoned. The book ends with Hitchens quoting the old Greek adage “know thyself,” but an explanation of how this will help us move past religion and the awfulness it has caused our world is left to the reader's imagination.

As a result, we wondered if there is any place for religion in Hitchens’ republic. “Keep it in the home,” the author replied. “Religion is a private belief, and it should stay that way.” And yet home is of course not the only place religion resides, which is the problem Hitchens points out. The rhetorical question he raises at the beginning, and which pervades God Is Not Great, is: “How much vanity must be concealed — not too effectively at that — in order to pretend that one is the personal object of a divine plan?” From there, the book exposes and details the destruction religion hath wrought on human civilization — as well as the immediately alarming situation we’re all in when religion-based nations acquire nuclear arms — but it never goes so for as to offer much of a way out.

“Religion becomes a problematic mystery only if you believe that man was created in God’s image,” Hitchens said later in our conversation. “When several groups of people believe they are each ‘doing God’s will’ at the same time, there is going to be conflict,” which is not a reassuring situation, and one for which we as a species have no recourse.

To be fair, solving the religion problem wasn’t Hitchens’ explicit intention, and yet his subject matter and defamation all but make the reader beg for a solution. Furthermore, the book tends to hierarchize the aesthetics of religion and atheism (placing atheism on top, of course), but can’t religion in itself be seen as an art, or as a form of literature, we wondered. “I’m reminded,” Hitchens admitted, “that many religious texts are not available to me because I don’t speak the language in which their holy books were written. Religion, after all, is manmade.”

God Is Not Great therefore makes a recurring point that many people are religious because it is too scary to think that they alone are responsible for their actions without a framework on which to base their decisions. “Religion is comforting for people to maintain,” Hitchens said. If that's the case, though, how will a serious addiction to such an opiate ever be kicked?

Your guess is as good as ours.

From the Library: "The Ghost Map," engaged amateurism, and a chat with Steven Johnson

2009-04-17T09:40:00.000-07:00

Unless you are a hardcore lit nerd, it’s hard to imagine that a book about Victorian London would be an evocative and exceptionally fantastic read.

It’s even harder to believe that such a book would be wholly relevant to the plights of modern civilization, and yet that is exactly what Steven Johnson’s haunting historical narrative The Ghost Map is. From his cell phone in a cafe in Brooklyn recently, the best-selling author of the polemical Everything Bad is Good For You and the recently released The Invention of Air asserted that The Ghost Map is “not just a book about history,” but “a book about why this particular point in history is incredibly relevant for a number of reasons.”

That point in history is the horrifying cholera outbreak on Broad Street in London’s SoHo district in 1854 that ultimately claimed hundreds of lives in less than two weeks. Told in chapters named for each day that the epidemic ravished the neighborhood, Johnson follows the path of Dr. John Snow, an amateur epidemiologist who has a theory that the spread of the disease is somehow related to the water pump in the center of the district. Though it does so understatedly, The Ghost Map turns out to be a strong case against mass-market consumerism while drawing attention to “engaged amateurism,” as Johnson writes, and the underlying heroism and undervalued advantages of knowing one’s neighbor.

Both highly readable and wonderfully conceived, The Ghost Map, then, is a resounding and noteworthy lesson in perspective and the interconnectivity of everything, from microbes to city infrastructure. Not unlike Everything Bad, The Ghost Map utilizes what Johnson calls a “long-zoom approach,” backing up far enough to have a bird’s-eye view of patterns of life and death. “One of my favorite parts of the book was attempting to figure out why the miasmatic theory [that cholera and other diseases were transmitted through the air and not the water, as we know today they are] stayed around as long as it did.” Johnson’s speculation on this point is one of the book’s most venerable aspects. Tying together parallel facets of bacterial and human evolution, microbial and urban consciousness, as well as medical and political history, Johnson compels his readers to undertake a collective self-assessment of the way they live now.

Asked why he took on the topic of Victorian disease, Johnson said, “The history of bad ideas is especially important to teach. Every age in the history of humankind has had an enormous blind spot that they don’t know about. A hundred years later, though, we can look back and see our mistakes.” Answers and revelations about these errors often come from those who “think across many fields of study at once,” Johnson said. Success, it seems, is the result of working on different levels simultaneously.

The Ghost Map closes with musings on the future of humans, cities, and diseases that love nothing more than densely populated areas. And though the epilogue, with its ruminations on the next one hundred years, is truly terrifying, it doesn’t lack a dose of optimism. The book’s last line is, “So let’s get on with it,” a simple declaration that works to capture Johnson’s confidence that the human race can do monumental amounts (both individually and communally) to change our world, but only when it finally chooses to do so. And the local dedicated novice—the heroic figure at the center of The Ghost Map—it turns out, might just be our greatest weapon against disease, terrorism, and global warming.

Gesture in Identity: Found object, Vancouver, Washington, 2009

2009-04-14T10:25:00.000-07:00

From the Library: Thoughts on how Updike's Rabbit runs in Updike's "Rabbit, Run"

2009-04-14T05:00:00.000-07:00

Apologies for opening with a technical observation, but mid-way through John Updike's Rabbit, Run, he violates his established point-of-view. We have been with Rabbit Angstrom up to this point in the novel, closely following his movements and thought, until on 122 we zip into his girlfriend Ruth's head with the sentence "These eyes sting her and she turns her head away to hide the tears, thinking, That's one of the signs, crying easily." And then four pages later, after Rabbit has told Ruth that "If you have the guts to be yourself...other people'll pay your price," one turns the page and reads:

Making awkward calls is agony for Eccles; at least anticipation of them is. Usually, the dream is worse than the reality: so God has disposed the world. The actual presences of people are always bearable. Mrs. Springer is a plump, dark, small-boned woman with a gypsy look about her. Both the mother and the daughter have a sinister aura, but in the mother this ability to create uneasiness is a settled gift, throughly meshed into the strategies of middle-class life. With the daughter it is a floating thing, useless and as dangerous to herself as to others. Eccles is relieved that Janice is out of the house; he feels guiltiest in her presence. She and Mrs. Fosnacht have gone into Brewer to a matinee of Some Like It Hot. Their two sons are in the Springers' back yard. Mrs. Springer takes him through the house to the screened-in porch, where she can keep an eye on the children.

By that point it's clear that not only are we not in Rabbit's head, he's not even here. What started as a momentary zip across the room four pages earlier has now leapt away from our point-of-view character altogether.

And nicely done.

To readers who don't write fiction, the observation above might seem fussy, but when picking up Rabbit, Run in the wake of Updike's recent death, this reader was happily reminded of how loose, fresh, and confident Updike was with language, and how generous he was toward himself as a writer. When technical considerations or the following of standard point-of-view "rules" might prevent him from exploring certain aspects of his characters, Updike smoothly lets himself off the hook in order to explore the material he wants to explore and to keep the novel zipping forward.

Now, yes, they aren't rules, they're only guidelines. And yet a fiction isn't a fiction without dramatic tension, and one of the quickest ways to bore a reader is too let them know to much. The unknowns of the future, for instance, intrigue humans, while an omniscient god who knows the entirety of human history past and future has nothing to wonder about or look forward to. That god doesn't quite have "time" in the sense of that word meaning anything, in fact, and, even as a god, would only be able to write a novel in the usual way: leave some unknowns so that the reader wants to turn the page. Though there is something we call "omniscient point of view," that doesn't actually exist. And no one wants it.

This is all to say that, as has been pointed out by many readers over the last fifty years, Updike is a master of language--and yet one of the pleasures of reading an early novel like Rabbit, Run is that one sees him fine tuning the way in which he handles the technical challenges of crafting a novel in order to maximize his opportunities to explore (and, yes, occasionally to flex or preen) that linguistic facility. The scene above, in which Jack Eccles visits Rabbit's mother-in-law, goes on to include the following:

She leads him slowly; both of her ankles are bound in elastic bandages. The pained littleness of her steps reinforces his illusion that her lower body is encased in a plaster cast. She gently lets herself sink onto the cushions of the porch glider and startles Eccles by kicking up her legs as with a squeak and sharp sway the glider takes her weight. The action seems to express childish pleasure; her bald pale calves stick out stiff and her saddle shoes are for a moment lifted from the floor. These shoes are cracked and rounded, as if they've been revolved in a damp tub for years

It's silly to act as if writing is a competition, and yet: many of us would have made do with the workmanlike "Stiffly, she sat down." And if we workshopped it, we would probably be informed that we need to cut the scene, anyway, because we haven't stayed with our POV character. So the place Updike has gotten to at this point in the novel is a place we would never get to. And his handling of the moment is better than ours would have been, anyway.

There is a rather shocking attention to and stacking up of images in Rabbit, Run. There is verb play, body-ogling, stream-of-consciousness, and the linguistic fingering, hefting, and holding of many objects in the novel's world. We don't watch the characters in Rabbit, Run; we swim along beside them.

Though this is the first Rabbit novel, it isn't one of the Rabbit pieces that won a big prize. And yet this reader zipped happily through the 255 skillful pages here. And, yes, occasionally made a note in the margin: "POV?" The question mark, perhaps, will be erased.

From the Library: "Five Skies," along with some thoughts by author Ron Carlson

2009-04-10T09:30:00.000-07:00

There are certain books you read that once you’re finished you can’t believe you ever existed having not vicariously lived through the experience on which the book hinges. This feeling is often accompanied by an introduction to an author you can’t believe you didn’t know had been writing all these years while you read one mediocre memoir and unaffecting novel after another. It’s like meeting someone out of the blue one day and somehow having an intensely immediate bond after only a few bits of conversation in a bar or cafe.

But this, in fact, is exactly what happens with Ron Carlson’s most recent novel Five Skies. Radically simple, the novel involves three men who are hired and descend on a barren expanse of Idaho to build an enormous ramp that will be used in a daredevil stunt. Not knowing one another beforehand, the men work day in and day out as summer blooms and their own troubled pasts come to light. As anyone who has been there knows full well, there are hardly any hiding places on the grassy Western plains and accordingly, Darwin Gallegos, Arthur Key, and Ronnie Panelli find little to do there but work and think, think and work. And work, it turns out, is what Carlson himself believes the book is fundamentally about. Via telephone, Carlson told PDXWD he thought Five Skies showcased “people solving their problems by using [their] bodies to combat abstraction.”

When we asked Carlson if there were any overt influences on his creating Five Skies, the author said that his writing it “paralleled the way the men in the novel build the ramp—step by step, over many years.” Five Skies, in fact, is only the second novel Carlson has published in the last 25 years. “I kept interrupting it with other work,” Carlson said, unaware, it seems, of the irony of his statement. “My father was an engineer, a brilliant and very careful person. We talked a lot about that, using oneself to make something happen, to achieve something.”

Carlson, who teaches at the University of California at Irvine and who has written four collections of short stories and three other novels, considers the various distinctions his novel has garnered “pure gravy.” His sentiment, like many of the phrases and scenes that make up Five Skies, seems not only completely honest, but also perfectly descriptive, one of the author’s and the novel’s greatest attributes.

All told, Five Skies may end up reminding readers of Hemingway’s novella The Old Man and the Sea, especially in the sense that the characters are all forced to confront their mortality as each participates in, as Carlson’s character Gallegos puts it, an argument with God. “There’s a dichotomy of having a heart, but also having skin and a body—that outer/inner struggle,” Carlson said. “I wanted to write a book that dealt with that dichotomy because I distrust the easy generalization. I don’t know that we learn anything by the easy epiphany or the visceral realization. Decisions are complicated and messy.”

The novel is certainly not all flowers and gems of self-realization, however, like a lesser book would be. Even more thoroughly, if subconsciously, linking himself with Hemingway, when asked if there was any one thing he really hoped readers would take from Five Skies, Carlson said, “A simple story that’s as true as possible. That’s what I want them to get and take, because a day’s writing is something I can stand on.”

Gesture in Literacy: Injury Explanation

2009-04-03T05:01:00.000-07:00

From the Library: "Grey Seas Under" by Farley Mowat

2009-03-09T09:40:00.000-07:00

We have been wondering whatever happened to the procedural adventure novel. Remember how thrilling stories used to have a lot of how-to-ing? In between being shipwrecked and domesticating his man Friday, Robinson Crusoe explains in detail how he learned by trial and error to carve a canoe, or discovered how to fire cooking vessels. And in between being circled about by wolves and beating off locusts, we learn how the Ingalls family made maple syrup, or how Pa and Laura made a door with leather hinges for their little house.

Farley Mowat's Grey Seas Under -- which, you might know, we have been reading -- turns out to be another story in which daring exploits alternate with technical explanations. For example:

"Biederman saw that he could not hope to make the ship even remotely watertight and that there was no possibility of pumping her dry. Calling upon his long experience as a pneumatic-caisson engineer, he thereupon decided upon a risky but novel alternative. His plan was to seal number one hold from the top, making it airtight, and then force in compressed air until there was sufficient pressure to hold the water down to a safe level. Some hundreds of tons of wet and viscous grain, still remaining in the hold, were to be left in position to form a mattress nicely balanced between the pressure of the air above and that of the water below. On this, and on a cushion of air, he thought that Firby might conceivably stay afloat until she reached Quebec."

To be sure, the adventures in Grey Seas Under are thrilling: the "extraordinary ship...manned by no ordinary men" regularly takes on seas in which she "rolls so badly she put[s] her gunwales under." Her sailors undertake rescues which, "under the circumstances then prevailing seem to verge on the suicidal," with "the full weight of the Atlantic beat[ing] down through the open grille above them." All this derring-do is very nice.

Ultimately, though, PDXWD turns out to be in it for the procedures. The thrill of the novel of adventure finally comes -- does it not? -- from how it prepares us for the unlikely. Who knows if we might one day be called upon to rescue a hundred and twenty maimed, starved, and freezing Newfoundlanders from the ice, using only our wits, our courage, and our extraordinary ship? Or if we might need to know how to repair the nine-ton bilge pump in tank two? By reading these procedures, we believe we equip ourselves with knowledge we will probably need sometime. Somehow, the stuff just feels valuable.

And yet, with the exception of the crime genres, and of actual survival guides, we haven't seen a lot of novels like this published in the last few decades. (Grey Seas Under was published in 1958). So, Portland Writer, we put it to you: are we missing something, or are thrillers and spy novels the procedural novel's last stand? Discuss.

From the Library: "Bowl Of Cherries" and a chat with Millard Kaufman

2009-03-05T11:05:00.000-08:00

For a great many reasons, Millard Kaufman is an anachronism. For one, he doesn't have email, and for two, he thinks most movies today are "made for kids." At 90 years old, he stands as a noteworthy exception to our youth-obsessed society, and may force us coin a phrase at the opposite extreme of "child prodigy." With his debut novel Bowl of Cherries, Kaufman might be considered the antithesis of writers like Keats (whose entire oeuvre was written before his death at age 25) or Jonathan Safran Foer (who, in his mid-20s, published a highly successful first novel). "I'm a late bloomer, I guess," Kaufman said via telephone with PDXWD. "[Movie] producers are looking for writers as young as possible nowadays," said the Mr. Magoo co-creator who worked in film until the age of 86, "and I'm not as young as possible."

But why a novel? And why now? Like the book, Kaufman says, "It’s about existence. How do I do it? How do I keep going?"

This inquisitiveness and tenacity shine throughout the book. Slightly reminiscent of Sartre's "The Wall," Bowl of Cherries is the story of Judd Breslau (a 14-year-old genius, ironically enough), kicked out of his graduate program at Yale and, after a series of wildly unlikely events, thrown into an Iraqi prison to await his execution. Nowhere in the tale does Kaufman relax his sharp wit or penchant for lucid observation. As Judd ponders adolescent beauty alongside imminent death, Kaufman's writing summons the ghosts of Nabokov and Kafka. Judd globetrots in seek of his first and only love, Valerie, but finds himself in the shadow of a multi-armed political and intellectual beast, a conflict that Kaufman says is rooted in both human temptation and the mysteries of the world. "How the hell did the Egyptians build the pyramids?" he asked us rhetorically. "Umm, we're not sure, we're just book reviewers" we told him. "Exactly! No one seems to know!" he responded. "And why did Thomas Chatterton, a little-known English writer, commit suicide at such a young age? But above all," he went on, "what are humans supposed to do with their excrement?"

We left that last question alone. And needless to say, these conundrums are not easily answered, but, as Kaufman says, "Nothing is impossible. We have been through many terrible losses and defeats and each time we have survived," which explains why, as Bowl of Cherries progresses, Judd's past and future converge, as does world history. The cyclical, parallel motifs Kaufman uses suture together not only the threads of the plot, but his outlook on the plight of our world. "I'm not necessarily optimistic, but we'll manage, we'll get through this, too. We will not be defeated that easily."

Fruit, especially a bowl of cherries, is tempting, both allegorically and literally. The bowl of cherries in the novel, though, packs a wickedly subtle surprise, and like the book itself can be interpreted in a variety of ways. Fraught though it is with existential futility, the floor of Bowl of Cherries never falls through to hopelessness. "Sometimes we succeed, sometimes we fail—but we just have to keep plodding," Kaufman said, a statement that goes far to answer why he decided to write a book while most of his peers are watching The Price is Right reruns and drinking fiber in a glass of water.

Already at work on his second novel, Kaufman seems, if nothing else, intent on proving that younger isn't always better. At the end of our conversation he even asked us if we wanted to go to lunch in San Francisco soon, which we unfortunately had to turn down as we are not currently in that city, a fact that seemed to slightly, though only temporarily, perplex Mr. Kaufman. "Well, maybe someday, then," he said. Yes, Millard, maybe someday.

From the Library: "State By State," plus additional interview with editor Sean Wilsey

2009-03-03T05:00:00.000-08:00

This reader is fully on board with Matt Weiland, who in the preface to State By State asserts, “There is poetry in the Rand McNally Atlas.” A rhythmic beauty exists in watching the country unfold as you drive across it, witnessing firsthand how climates and forests and deserts and mountains blend and twist into and away from one another in a manner that often defies human-drawn borders. More intriguing than that, however, is experiencing the seismic cultural shifts that occur between Seattle, San Francisco, Chicago, Des Moines, Dallas, Boston, and Miami. You begin to wonder how all this could possibly be the same country.

And yet it is, which is precisely what Weiland and coeditor Sean Wilsey aim to capture in this collection of 50 essays by 50 different writers about the 50 states (actually, 51 when you count Edward P. Jones’s afterword about D.C.). Speaking with us via telephone last fall, Wilsey said that the idea for State By State came out of discussions with Weiland about the legendary WPA Federal Writers Project of the 1930s, which “gave jobs to writers and sent them out to write about the country.” One unfortunate part of this now-famous State Guide series, however, was that the thousands of publications that resulted “tended to be dry,” Wilsey said, “like guidebooks. We didn’t want that sort of stock Chamber of Commerce style, but rather wanted our collection to have a more memoir-esque feel to it.”

It seems that State By State could hardly come at a more timely moment, either, as we have just ushered in a historic new President and begin to seriously face several national challenges, including an economy in freefall, a housing crisis, soaring food prices, and a war whose dimensions are ambiguous, not to mention eight years of disastrous international relations. And before November 4th, we seemed as divided as ever: red, blue, solid, leaning, swing, toss-up. It would be no exaggeration, then, to say that we are a nation poised on a precipice, wondering: can anything save us?

This book might, actually. “We wanted something broad-minded and good-hearted,” Weiland writes in the preface, “something bold, intimate, and funny; something full of personal anecdote and strange characters and hidden truths,” and that’s exactly what they delivered. One of the most enjoyable aspects of the collection is noting which authors are present, which states they’ve been asked to represent (Oregon is rendered by Joe Sacco in a graphic short story comic about Portland, Eugene, and wine country), and which authors are missing. Over the two years it took to make the book, those who turned down the project included Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, Lillian Ross, J.D. Salinger, and Annie Proulx.

As you make your way across the landscape of State By State you’re surprised at a great many things about our country. America is an enormous place, made up of an extraordinary mélange of people and cultures. Wilsey said that in editing the collection, he sensed Americans are “hopeful, but not unthinkingly so, like people beginning to pull out of selfishness. Everyone everywhere takes pride in where they’re from, though, and honestly, there’s a lot to be proud of.”

From the Library: "No One Belongs Here More Than You" by Miranda July

2009-02-27T11:35:00.000-08:00

When it was first released, No One Belongs Here More Than You, a slim and sleek volume of stories, was available in pink and yellow. Now in paperback, however, still slim and sleek, it comes in four bright colors. And though that description could also easily work to open a review of naughty selections at truck stop bathrooms and seedy downtown shops, it works tremendously well here, too, considering the numerous times sex (and derivations thereof) plays into Miranda July’s debut collection. For anyone who has seen July’s 2005 full-length film You and Me and Everyone We Know this may very well not come as a surprise since sexual deviance is explored by many (if not all) of that film’s characters. If there is a constant to July’s off-the-wall work, then, it seems to be an investment in confirming that the abnormal is actually commonplace.

July herself (who once lived in SE Portland and would walk aimlessly up and down Division in the rain) is the sheer embodiment of awkwardness. She’s lanky, weird (though this could just as easily be aloofness or brilliance), has a shaky voice, and stares as though she is constantly lost (see photo above). In sum, she's wholly ethereal and waifish, but even so, there is something undeniably likeable about her, which must also be said of her stories. July’s writing is sometimes as awkward as she is, but its strangeness strikes a chord.

The stories in No One are all built on giddiness and straightforward honesty. Many of them seem as though they might collapse at any second (some of them do), but several do not and rather successfully ponder various internal dilemmas. In “The Shared Piano,” for example, a woman has no idea how to comfort or protect her neighbor, on whom she has a secret crush, when he unexpectedly begins convulsing. In fact, the narrator's decision at the height of the drama of this man's imminent death is to fall asleep and dream that he is caressing her breasts. In another story, a man is duped by his long-time coworker into taking Ecstasy and exploring, however reluctantly, his latent homosexuality in a painfully weird scene. In yet another, a woman dreams of being undressed and licked by Prince William. The list goes on.

The danger of all this crazy sex and weird arousal, frustration, and experimentation is that it becomes July’s schtick, not unlike gore and porn have become Chuck Palahniuk’s. The collection itself straddles a fine line between gimmicky and good, but its wonderful moments (of resonant uncertainty and recognizable humor) are worth wading through the weirdness to experience.

From the Library: "November 22, 1963" by Adam Braver, with additional author interview

2009-02-24T13:30:00.000-08:00

November 22, 1963: A Novel
Adam Braver
Tin House, 206 pages

Much like you, I remember exactly what I was doing September 11, 2001. I can repeat conversations I had in those first minutes after planes slammed into the towers and can recall sitting motionless that afternoon listening to the radio. Something ineffably enormous had just happened to me, though I was some 2000 miles from Manhattan.

Things could never return to how they were before and hence, this moment was truer and more real than all others simply because of how unreal it was.

The poetic horror of this paradox is the very issue behind November 22, 1963, an unsettling new novel by Adam Braver, published by Portland's Tin House Books.

As you have undoubtedly guessed, 11/22/63 recreates that historic day JFK was assassinated. Combining disturbing facts with delicate fiction, Braver succeeds from that foundation in building a beautiful contemplation of collective and personal trauma. In a way, then, the book is not unlike the investigation we have all come to know by heart. And yet the novel, told as is it through a mélange of different perspectives (from Jackie O, who refuses to change her blood-stained dress, to a motorcycle policeman on whom blood and brain splatter, to the man who almost didn’t catch the whole awful episode on film) really becomes more about shock and suffering than anything else.

The successes of 11/22/63 lie in Braver’s ability to gently and respectfully reside, like a professional surgeon might, in the stomachs and minds of the people who lived through that day. The sourness of nausea; the dizziness of nerves; the anger at the continuation of time; the limp paralysis of dread: these are the facts that Braver offers up.

Halfway through 11/22/63, you realize the novel is somehow not about JFK at all, but about us. A lesser writer would have failed at piecing this story together in such a way that we are okay reliving that monumentally awful day, but in Braver’s hands, we come back to the present wiser versions of ourselves, if also a bit sadder.

Q & A with Adam Braver

PDXWD: Was there ever a moment in which you felt somewhat irreverent having “fictionalized” one of the nation’s most tragic episodes?

Adam Braver: I never had a feeling of irreverence, in part because I was trying to be honest to the events and the people. Oddly enough, some of the seemingly most irreverent parts of the book are the most factual—such as the transcripts of the conversations between LBJ and Jackie Kennedy.

PDXWD: Was there specific criteria you used to decide how and with which pieces of information to take creative liberty?

Adam Braver: The most creative liberty was taken with the pieces where I had the least amount of information, like with Jackie Kennedy, where there is so little available insight into her mind in general, especially on the flight back from Dallas. My goal was to strip away the larger-than-life aspects and see her as a human being who is suffering real human emotions following the sudden loss of her husband. Of course in my portrayal, the public is always on the verge of interfering with the private, but I wanted to see a woman who was in a sense having her last private moment with her husband and the tragedy before both forever became owned by the public.

PDXWD: To what extent do you think that personal and communal catastrophe is always somehow immediately mythical?

Adam Braver: I agree for the most part. Certainly television had a big part of this instant nostalgia and mythology, as everybody could experience it in real time, with a collective reaction—and, equally important, all getting the same interpretations, images, etc. But that is what really drove the book for me. My intrigue was in the equation fact + memory + story = history and how often that combination is the beginning of mythology, depending on what people do with it.

From the Library: "The Grey Seas Under" by Farley Mowat

2009-02-24T04:55:00.000-08:00

You know the novels by obscure authors that your parents or grandparents had lying around when you were a kid? The books you read because grownups recommended them before you were old enough to doubt their opinions? In this reader's house, the author was Farley Mowat: first introduced as the author of the book about the guy who ate the live mice in the movie Never Cry Wolf, which was borrowed from the library, watched three nights in a row, the length of the rental agreement on one of the two VCRs available at the town's only store. Farley Mowat: author of yellowed paperbacks about Arctic survivors, one-man voyages across the Pacific in a sailboat, the long slow winter starvation of an Inuit tribe and the last minute day-saving killing of a whale.

Waiting for her parents' old computer to start up today, this reader noticed a never-read Mowat novel on the shelf: Grey Seas Under, the story of "Heroic Adventures of a Gallant Ship and the Brave Men Who Battle the Cruel Sea." Under this tagline, a Turneresque watercolor of a tugboat at full power, two stacks billowing black smoke, small figures standing on the bridge. The waves are high. In the background, an enormous ship burns. [Ed. note: a different edition of the book is pictured on this post.]

One always hopes that a book that looks like this will deliver on its promise. One always hopes that the beloved books of childhood will withstand the test of time. Two chapters in, Portland writer, the outlook is good. Stay tuned.

Nine Questions for Justin Vernon about the woods, Bon Iver, and For Emma, Forever Ago

2009-02-23T05:00:00.000-08:00

1. You have said that before moving to the cabin something “had gone wrong” with you and you were “on a path to nowhere.” So you left. You packed up and headed deep into the woods where you lived alone and, albeit unintentionally, made a beautiful album, For Emma, Forever Ago. Now that you’re back and touring as Bon Iver and being featured on TV and even putting out a new EP, how has it gone reconnecting with society after your time alone with no one and nothing but your thoughts?

2. What do you now care less about?

3. You have also been quoted as saying, “If you drown yourself long enough, you realize you are just running from some truth.” What truth was it that you confronted as you chopped wood?

4. Since you have mentioned that the song “Skinny Love” is, in a sense, directed at yourself, some lines such as, “Cut out all the ropes and let me fall,” “I told you to be patient / I told you to be kind,” as well as “Who will fight?” remind me of a scene in David Fincher’s film version of Fight Club in which Brad Pitt’s character burns Edward Norton’s character’s hand with lye. The point of this scene is that not until you hit rock bottom and lose everything will you ever truly be free, and only we can get ourselves to that point. Are you free?

5. Your album has a reverberant, plangent component to it, as if it was recorded in a cathedral or a canopied forest somewhere; that is, your voice floats around and echoes within the songs, giving the entire work a spiritual quality. I guess this really isn’t a question.

6. I find myself putting on For Emma, Forever Ago when it is cloudy and cold and rainy and really sort of depressing, especially when I want to be kicked in the ass to get going on being who I want to be. What do you think of this?

7. I have watched the several intimate performances you gave that were filmed by Vincent Moon and posted on La Blogotheque. You should do more things like that, don’t you think?

8. Do you want to have a pipe and talk about the recession? I would like that.

9. In the end, I keep coming back to the image and idea of you in the cabin: totally alone (except for the animals); hunting your own food; capturing your own heat; sleeping through the harsh winter nights; and then being prompted by something primordial inside of you to make this album, as if you had no choice. “It wasn’t planned,” you say. “The goal was to hibernate.” I mean, you really did it; you left everything behind and survived on your own for months in the woods. That’s an amazing feat in itself, and a gorgeous new album happened into existence, to boot. Why don’t more people do this?

#93.6 BON IVER - Skinny Love
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From the Library: Thomas Bernhard's "The Loser" and "Frost"

2009-02-10T14:32:00.000-08:00

When first encountering the fiction of Thomas Bernhard, the voice and form provoke the reader to make a decision: these are either the words of an unbalanced rambler, or we have before us the work of one of literature's major stylists. It only takes a few more pages of reading to realize it isn’t rambling.

Bernhard's career as a novelist spans the 1960s to 1980s (he died in 1989), but most of his novels weren't translated into English until the 1990s. Back-cover copy on the Vintage paperback edition of The Loser states that “his formal innovation ranks with Beckett and Kafka, his outrageously cantankerous voice recalls Dostoevsky, but his gift for lacerating, lyrical provocative prose is incomparably his own.” We enjoy the arch close-reading of a copywriter as much as anyone, and neither is mocking someone’s hyperbolic marketing beyond us, but after considering Bernhard’s work...and then looking at that sentence...and then turning back to Bernhard…well, okay. Maybe so.

The Loser is ostensibly a recounting of what happened to two talented pianists after they were unfortunate enough to study next to Glenn Gould—unfortunate, because time spent next to a genius incontrovertibly damages the confidence and vitality of the lesser artists. The narrator of the novel is one of the two, and the occasion of the writing is the death, by suicide, of Wertheimer, who was the other. The novel consists of four paragraphs: the first three are dispatched with on the first page, and the fourth runs 170 pages. Early in that fourth paragraph—it makes no sense to call it a paragraph, but you know what we mean—the narrator says:

We begin as piano virtuosos, and then start rummaging about and foraging in the human sciences and philosophy and finally go to seed. Because we didn’t reach the absolute limit and go beyond this limit, I thought, because we gave up in the face of a genius in our field. But if I’m honest I could never have become a piano virtuoso, because at bottom I never wanted to be a piano virtuoso, because I always had the greatest misgivings about it and misused my virtuosity at the piano in my deterioration process, indeed I always felt from the beginning that piano players were ridiculous; seduced by my thoroughly remarkable talent at the piano, I drilled it into my piano playing and then, after one and a half decades of torture, chased it back out again, abruptly, unscrupulously.

Bernhard’s writing reads, at a certain level, like the uncompromising work of a writer who takes, as his subject matter, the lives of characters who refuse compromise. It’s a fictionalized Glenn Gould who appears in The Loser, but the choice of name and position makes sense: if one isn’t interested in holding any chair other than the first, then the result of seeing or hearing someone of Gould's caliber moves that goal forever out of reach. The Loser concerns characters who gave their lives over to the piano, and who discovered there a transcendent beauty. What is unfortunate—the nasty turn they have had to deal with—is simply that the transcendent beauty they discovered wasn’t theirs, it was Gould’s.

A related passage from the novel—and this, too, appears early, is just Bernhard setting the table—appears when the narrator recounts a conversation he had with Gould:

The majority of even the most famous piano players haven’t a clue about their art, he said. But it’s like that in all the arts, I said, just like that in painting, in literature, I said, even philosophers are ignorant of philosophy. Most artists are ignorant of their art. They have a dilettante’s notion of art, remain stuck all their lives in dilettantism, even the most famous artists in the world. We understood each other immediately, we were, I have to say it, attracted from the first moment by our differences, which actually were completely opposite in our of course identical conception of art.

The overlapping, indefinite shifts of dialogue and narration, the eccentric use of italics, the ability to carry a tone that can shift, at any moment, from grotesque and disturbing to deeply, deeply funny: that is Bernhard.

Example: in Frost, Bernhard’s first novel, a medical student is sent by his supervisor to a rural German town to report on the supervisor’s brother, “the painter Strauch.” The medical student pursues this project under the cover of claiming to be a law student spending some time reading Henry James, a fraud so odd that of course no one ever questions it. The novel, ostensibly the contents of the medical student’s notebook, consists primarily of loose, circular, wide-ranging attacks the aging painter makes on the residents of the country town specifically ("Time sends them on their way to unchastity with a slap,” he complains darkly, "Some are more accomplished at concealing it than others. With the canny ones you only realize when they're all done. But it's for nothing. All of them live a sex life, and not a life.") and on humanity in general as he and the medical student take daily walks in the cold and snow. Alternately spinning out gnomic insights and shreds of seeming-nonsense, he seems a person without any connection to day-to-day life at all, outside of his thoughts on a former profession:

The substitute teacher's union had kept trying to force him to join. "Even though I was only an occasional substitute...Just imagine, they sometimes waited for me in the street. They made threats against me." But they didn't know how stubborn he could be when it came to sticking up for one of his principles. "In addition to the substitute teachers' union, there was also a 'substitute teachers' association,' which was an informal initiative on the part of the substitutes. They meet every Saturday afternoon. Apparently they pass resolutions. What resolutions? I have no idea what resolutions. How they mean to oppose their union. How to support their union against other unions. How to oppose the school authorities. The state. Their enemies. Anyone they feel is doing them wrong." Apparently, there was also a "substitute teachers' fund," for the support of the widows and orphans of substitutes. "I've got nothing against such support...But basically I don't care how worthy a cause can be, I'm not joining..."

It would be inaccurate to suggest that Strauch is as focused and funny as that throughout the novel. He is vicious, confused, hypchondriacal, wily, depressed, disgusted and disgusting, contemptuous and admiring, quiet, thoughtful, raving, and enraged, and the constant walk-taking in Frost lends the novel the quality of a picaresque whose characters never actually manage to travel anywhere other than back to the inn where they live. Bernhard overlaps the dialogue of the painter and narrator enough that we suspect, long before he admits it, that the narrator is beginning to internalize Strauch’s speech patterns, and is in danger of having his own identity drowned beneath the sheer oceanic volume of Strauch’s linguistic inventions. The student doesn’t have the slightest idea how to compose any kind of meaningful report to send back to his mentor. How does one summarize the unsummarizable? And if you can’t summarize it, if you can’t get a handle on it, can you ever hope to diagnose it? In a letter to his supervisor, the student writes, “He is one of those people who refuse to say anything at all, and yet who are continually driven to say everything. Who tie tourniquets round the arteries of their thought, but to no effect."

Is the narrator of The Loser a broken person? Is the project of the student in Frost a failure? These narrators brush up against forces they can neither control nor fully comprehend, and yet they understand that they don’t understand. They try to comprehend, or at least to put into words, not what they cannot comprehend—that, they give up on—but rather what, exactly, the terms of their own incomprehension are, and how, exactly, it feels to be lost in their particular bafflement. And failing that, they are left stressing just how inexact those attempts at exactness are. “It will make you suspicious: on occasion, I move in the same mysticisms as your brother,” Frost's narrator admits.

Bernhard was born on February 9, 1931, and died on February 12, 1989. There is more to say about him than can fit here, but in an interview toward the end of his life, he said, “That’s all art is--getting better and better at playing your chosen instrument. No one can take that pleasure away from you or talk you out of it. If someone is a great pianist, you can clear out the room, fill it with dust, and then start throwing buckets of water at him, but he’ll keep on playing. Even if the house falls down around him, he’ll carry on playing.”

From the Library: Alison Bechdel's "Dykes to Watch Out For"

2009-01-29T10:47:00.000-08:00

Alison Bechdel, author of the critically-acclaimed 2006 graphic memoir Fun Home, has been publishing the serial comic "Dykes to Watch Out For" every other week since 1988. And, dear Portland writer, it is awesome. Obviously a huge influence on the ever-more-ridiculous Showtime series "The L Word," DTWOF quite un-ridiculously follows the lives of a bunch of progressive lesbians in an unnamed American city: Mo, a paranoid ideologue; Lois, her best friend who likes dressing up in drag and grows more and more to look like Tintin; Clarice and Toni, who have a kid and never have sex anymore; Sparrow, who's into crystals and emotional dialogue, and scandalizes everyone by dating a man; Ginger, who can't finish her dissertation; and an ever-evolving cast of characters getting older, confronting challenges and conservatives and kids who grow up to like Halo 3, and cracking wise throughout.

Although it's ostensibly about lesbians -- and doesn't skimp on the sex scenes -- DTWOF often seems more like a comic about a diverse range of witty people with progressive politics. More than once, a character can't get in the mood because she's too freaked out about the lifting of the nuclear test ban treaty, or the Bush administration's exploitation of 9/11. And since the political climate is always at the forefront of characters' minds, reading The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For involves revisiting twenty years of American social and political history, from the gay rights movement of the late 80s, through the 2008 presidential primaries. It's like "Doonesbury" -- as topical, as smart, and as funny -- but with diversity, and, over time, better drawing.

Besides the jokes, watching Bechdel's drawing evolve is one of the real pleasures of the Essential collection. In '88, her drawings are relatively crude, but as years pass, little gestures like a character pulling off a neckwarmer, or a bored kid writhing in frustration take on incredible accuracy. And visual gags begin to abound: as two characters discuss their sex life, a featureless barista in the background holds up a hand to a customer; barista and customer lean forward; the main characters abruptly change the subject and the two in the background go back about their business.

Alright, look, it's hard to explain or quote a comic: just check this one out. Then you'll want to go read some of the more recent strips at www.dykestowatchoutfor.com. And then, we predict, you'll go buy the collection, an excellent value at only $25.

"I Once Was Young and Strong": Writers in the Schools student anthology available

2009-01-20T09:56:00.000-08:00

From our friends at Writers in the Schools:

I Once Was Young and Strong | 2007-2008 WITS Student Anthology

All great writers had their beginnings somewhere!

In 2007-08, Writers in the Schools placed 25 writers in 73 classrooms to lead semester-long writing workshops with students. During this dedicated writing time, students experimented with poems, plays, fiction, creative nonfiction, and graphic novels. Students wrote about themselves, their families, their friends, and the world we all share. Their voices are indeed young and strong. A selection of their honest, wise, and funny work comprises this collection.

Please note that the purchase of this anthology supports Writers in the Schools. Your anthology will go in the mail within three business days from your order. Thanks for your support.

The anthology is available online here.

The $12.00 price includes a $2.00 shipping and handling charge.

2008 Gestures in Literacy Champion: PDX Writer Daily

2008-12-19T15:25:00.000-08:00

Now that was a titanic battle--another instant classic, we say. (The action took place here.) Chris always gets his points--you can't stop him, you can only hope to contain him--and Ms. Swift came out of nowhere to hit shots from waaaaaay downtown, but without the help of past stalwarts like Miss Malaprop, Keri and Co., Ben, or the mysterious Matthew, PDX Writer Daily was able to hold on and win Gestures in Literacy #6. And because of the sports narrative we've fallen into, that means we are also declaring ourselves winners of the series, four games to two. So now we hoist the imaginary GiL Cup, the symbol of our 2008 Championship, while not actually showering each other with cheap champagne, on account of we are just making this up.

Except for the part about winning. We really are claiming to have won this game that has few rules and almost no oversight or consistency. But of course those aspects of the sport only further made this a truly, truly special season for our team.

But you probably just want the answers to Gesture 6:

Star Wars light saber building kit
pocket knife
Indiana Jones costume
Spiderman costume
Ironman toy
All of the Pokemon Level X's
10 packs of Bakugan
rocket launcher dart gun
one golden Pokemon card
machine gun dart shooter
an iPod
a Pokemon pack of cards
the Ironman movie
a web shooter
some pants and some shirts
from Ethan
Nintendo DS game "Pokemon"
and more, too

Yep. That's it. "Some pants and some shirts," right? That one would have taken a couple levels of literacy backtracking for you to solve. You have to imagine a scribe who not only sometimes switches up "th" and "sh," but who also often transposes the letters, so that "ht" can actually mean "sh". And you would also have to imagine a culture in which the correct spelling of "pants" is [Weird P]-E-S.

Not fair. We know. But that's the breaks, kids.

So we would like to thank all players for a lovely 2008 Gestures in Literacy season. God bless you, every one. We will cherish this title forever, and no one will ever be able to take it away from us. Mostly, yes, because it doesn't exist. But still. But still!

Poverty Holidays Gift #14: The sports fiction of Matt Christopher

2008-12-18T17:45:00.000-08:00

The classic is Catcher With a Glass Arm, but any number of Matt Christopher's original sports fictions for young readers are delightful. Some sample copy:

Catcher With a Glass Arm: "Just when he thinks he'll spend the rest of the season on the bench nursing his weak throwing arm, Jody learns what it takes to come through in a pinch."

The Kid Who Only Hit Homers: "When a mysterious man promises to make him a great player, Sylvester accepts and begins a phenomenal home-run streak."

Look Who's Playing First Base: "Mike Hagin offers his new friend from Russia the first baseman's position on the little league team before he finds out the boy can't play baseball."

There's more where those came from, folks--over a hundred more, according to an unnamed source. And it's not just baseball--Christopher covered all sports. And the books still sell at a price that is just right for the impoverished shopper.

Gesture #6 deadline tonight, midnight

2008-12-18T11:29:00.000-08:00

PDXWD Readers have stalled on their deciphering of Gesture in Literacy #6, while the clock continues to tick.

Can you pitch in? Can you unlock the code? Santa's elves desperately need you to help them understand what is on the list...

Poverty Holidays Gift #12: Rick Bass, "The Hermit's Story"

2008-12-16T14:10:00.000-08:00

Bass's The Hermit's Story is a short story collection. Of the title story, a reviewer earlier this fall said:

"'The Hermit's Story' is a story of the North, where once the boldest, most thrilling adventure stories were set. (The otherworlds we most commonly imagine today are farther off, in galaxies far, far away. Only the residue of polar glamour is left in our cultural memory, nostalgized now and then by McSweeney's). Bass's North is an unfamiliar North, though: a nighttime North, oddly warm and wet and cold at once, both frozen and so alive, ice-blue and fire-orange, of-the-earth and full of the smells of lake and mud."

The book has been seen around town.

We know everyone is curled in front of a fire reading books, but

2008-12-16T05:40:00.000-08:00

Gestures in Literacy #6 is still open, and despite reader attempts, it continues to withhold many of its secrets...

Update 12/16: Okay, it continues to withhold four of its secrets...

Poverty Holidays Gift #9: Philip Roth's "The Counterlife"

2008-12-11T12:40:00.000-08:00

Back in July, a PDXWD reviewer said of this novel:

"What was particularly impressive to this reader was the degree to which the shifts in reality and reflections-upon-writing in The Counterlife did not lessen the effects of the novel's realism. Roth's characters are vivid, their situations specific. He allows them to speak: when upset, his characters sometimes speak for pages. He allows them equality: the characters are intelligent, and when arguing, characters on opposing sides of arguments--whether those arguments are political or emotional--each make compelling points. He allows them honesty: his characters are frank about sex, about their most conflicted feelings, about the things they have done and why they have done them. And in this novel, he allows them the particular reflectivity built into a novel that features a novelist as the narrator: they discuss, quite naturally, the degree to which perhaps the narrator and main character, Nathan Zuckerman, likes to get himself into arguments and conflicts primarily because he thinks they will make for good source material for his fiction writing. Zuckerman responds to these thoughts. The novel proceeds."

It is available kind of close to our city.

Gestures in Literacy #6: The Christmas List Gesture

2008-12-11T09:33:00.000-08:00

Series summary: PDXWD took games one and two, but then the Readers roared back to take an incredible, classic game three and then a game four that had PDXWD talking to itself. PDXWD offered what seemed a less-challenging gesture in game five, so many expected the Readers to take that game, as well. But in a stunning turnabout, the Readers stole defeat from the jaws of victory, and PDXWD took game five--and then also, somewhere in there, began narrating as if the whole thing were a pro sports playoff series in the 2-3-2 format.

Which means that now you're back in OUR house, Readers! Game six, baby! A sellout crowd in the arena, our discourse community basically shut down, all eyes on the Gesture--and just kind of comma-splicing fragments at this point, so damn excited!

BOOM BOOM shoof. BOOM BOOM shoof. BOOM BOOM shoof. BOOM BOOM shoof. Singing: We. Will. We. Will. Rock you.

Sing it!

We. Will. We. Will--[Oh! Interrupted by shockingly tasty guitar lick!] All right! [Super-70's guitar solo! Shredding as if to end all shredding!]

You have one week. And every time we say something tough like that, you solve it in an afternoon, so who knows what will happen? That's why we play the games, baby!

Gestures in Literacy #5: "It is a great day for bi birthing"

2008-12-08T16:13:00.000-08:00

Gesture #5 is over. Here is how it played out:

Chris said...

"It is a good day for bike riding", I guess, although maybe there's a reading that doesn't require taking "b" for "d".

I'm glad you don't think "it's a good day for berating" your readers for solving these quickly.

December 4, 2008 6:16 AM

The PSU Writing Center said...

"It is a good day for bike riding" is not correct. The contest is still open.

December 4, 2008 11:58 AM

Miss Malaprop said...

"It is a Jar Jar for tie fighting"
That might be wrong, but I'm guessing it has something to do with Star Wars and Gungans.

December 6, 2008 4:16 PM

Matthew said...

"IT is a gift bag
4 bi birthing"

is a comment on California's recent passage of Proposition 8. as well as Prince Rogers Nelson's support of said Prop.

December 8, 2008 1:33 PM

Each of those is an excellent answer, and Miss Malaprop's would probably be very popular with the young-man-about-the-schoolyard demographic that produces some of our gestures. But the winner is "It is a gift bag 4 bi birthing," because that is the best answer.

Though it's not correct. But it kind of looks like it is, right? And maybe it should be.

Chris, we know you are disappointed. But it's not a good day for bike riding. "It is a great day for bike riding."

And so, in a shocking turn of events, it is actually PDX Writer Daily that wins, and that now leads Gestures in Literacy by a score of 3 games to 2. They say a series doesn't start until the home team loses, so let us claim that since we thought you Writer readers would solve this in twenty minutes, and yet since you didn't solve it at all: now we have a series. You are going to have to take it one Gesture at a time, and leave it all on the floor next game, so that you can claw and scrape your way back in, & etc.

Game 6 will be posted soon. And fair warning: we are bringing the thunder. It will be the most almost-readable-but-totally-not Gesture we have ever unleashed on this fair blogspace. Cower. Tremble. Prepare...to enter the Gesture!

Poverty Holidays Gift #6: Coupland's "Life After God"

2008-12-08T15:55:00.000-08:00

Hello there, down-on-your-luck present-searcher. In installment six of PovHoGeeGuy, we reach back to a book recommendation one of the nuts, bolts, and mitochondria that make up PDXWD made way back in May: Douglas Coupland's story collection Life After God. As the mighty mitochondrian wrote:

The greatest moments of Life After God occur when Coupland puts words to those many thoughts we've all had about where we are versus where we hoped we would be. "When you're young, you always feel that life hasn't yet begun--that 'life' is always scheduled to begin next week, next month, next year, after the holidays," and it's true. It's tempting to consider, for example, what may have happened differently had this reviewer read that line earlier in life.

But alas, that's not the way it works, and Coupland is wise to that fact. It's so difficult to heed the advice of other, older people because there is a belief innate to us all, especially in our youth, that everything is really yet to come. We don't need to worry that much because it doesn't quite count yet, right? "But then," Coupland writes, "suddenly you're old and the scheduled life didn't arrive. You find yourself asking, 'Well then, exactly what was it I was having--that interlude--the scrambly madness--all that time I had before?'"

The book is available at Powell's, bargain-hunter. See you tomorrow.

Gestures in Literacy #5: Speed Round!

2008-12-04T07:00:00.000-08:00

Forwarded to us by a reader with an alert eye, Gesture in Literacy #5 was rescued from annihilation at a local elementary school. We expect you'll solve this Gesture quickly, so consider GiL5 a sprint.

And we promise not to complain this time about your proficiency. Though maybe we're just in a good mood because we've got a doozy of a Gesture for you already lined up for next week...

From the Impoverished Holidays Gift Guide Library: Rilke's "Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge"

2008-12-03T13:38:00.000-08:00

Welcome to the Down-on-My-Luck Token of Holiday Acknowledgment From the Library Gift Guide #3! Today, a mitochondrian in the PDXWD corpus recommends Rilke's Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge:

Compared to many writers who publish fifty volumes in a lifetime, Rainer Maria Rilke's body of work is a slender one: several volumes of poetry, a book of letters, and one book of fiction. But the power of Rilke lives in his ability to say everything by saying nothing. More widely-known for The Sonnets to Orpheus or The Duino Elegies or Letters to a Young Poet, fewer discuss his Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Some critics have mistakenly called this book autobiographical because of its fragmentary nature, reliance on memory, and Parisian setting, but it is no more autobiographical than is Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises because it is set in Spain, or Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury because of its roots in the South. If you were to construct a span of Rilke’s life out of the events that occur in Notebooks, you would be left only shards of a broken mirror reflecting the image of the reader rather than the writer.

What is the novel about? One shouldn’t read Rilke looking for suspense or plot driven narrative anymore than one should read Proust and then be disappointed four hundred pages in to learn that Odette simply wasn’t Swann’s type. Rilke’s Notebooks has no ostensible plot, but rather fluidly moves through memories of Malte’s childhood, a woman he loved from afar, the ghost of things in the world, and the passing of time. Early on, Malte asks himself:

I sit here and am nothing. And never the less this nothing begins to think and thinks, five flights up on a grey Parisian afternoon these thoughts: Is it possible, it thinks that one has not yet seen known and said anything real or important? It is possible that one has had millennia of time to observe and reflect and note down, and that one has let those millennia slip way like a recess interval at school in which one eats one’s sandwich and an apple?

Yes, it is possible.

Is it possible that despite our discoveries and advances, despite culture, religion, and science, we have remained on the surface of life? Is it possible that even this surface which might still have been something, has been covered with an incredibly tedious material, which makes it look like living room furniture during a summer vacation?

Yes, it is possible.

Is it possible that the whole history of the world has been misunderstood? Is it possible that the past is false, because we have always spoken about its masses, just as if we were telling about a gathering of many people, instead of talking about a person they were standing around because he was a stranger and was dying?

Yes, it is possible.

Despite Malte’s affirmation here, ultimately, no questions are answered. The threads that hold together Rilke’s tapestry of fragments are death and love, but we are asked to forget everything we thought we knew about either of those terms. For Malte death is everywhere, not simply at the end of life in the room of his dying uncle, but in the faces of strangers on the street, in the wall of a waiting room, and in the memory of an ancient burnt-down mansion. Love, real love, exists only in solitude and in the independence of both the self and the beloved, for love used otherwise becomes almost a violence. These themes are familiar in many of Rilke’s works and are discussed in Letters to a Young Poet, but here they take on the scope and solidarity of objects and events in the world that speak because of their simplicity of existence.

It is a danger to think that because this book is small that it can be read quickly. Rilke’s descriptions should be carried in one’s pocket for a long time, read in solitude, read in crowded places, and re-read again because of the sound and sense a passages gives, and then, like a painting in a museum that one passes by many times until one sees it, the book will begin to speak. To quote Wallace Stevens, “There is a nothing that is and a nothing that isn’t.” Rilke’s prose draws from his ability to see both.

Poverty Holidays Gift #2: Luc Sante's "Kill All Your Darlings"

2008-12-02T16:09:00.000-08:00

If you buy this Verse Chorus Press collection of Sante's brilliant and entertaining essays on New York, smoking, H.G. Wells's Ouija board, and other sundry topics, you get to feel three nice things: the joy of giving an excellent book; the joy of supporting one of America's talented living writers; and the joy of supporting a publisher located right here in Portland. (And who knows what else you might be doing or feeling at the time you buy or gift the book? Maybe you'll be feeling even more than three nice things in that moment. We don't know you. We don't know how you buy or give books. Who's to say?)

We claimed some time ago that we had read this book and liked it so much that we were soon going to write a proper positive review about it. Then we never did. That is because we are doing this blog on. The. Clock. People! But in that original post we had spoken positively about the book, and now here we are, singing its praises again. So maybe we actually have given that positive review. Right? Kind of? Totally.

Or, if that's not enough, Peter Schjeldahl of The New Yorker called Sante “One of the handful of living masters of the American language, as well as a singular historian and philosopher of American experience.”

Tomorrow: Probably some other book or something. God, whose idea was it to do this every day of the holiday season? This was a bad idea! But like all of our bad ideas, we will see this through to its full badness. If that's even a word. Whatever. [muttering something] [complaint-sounding muttering]

PDX Writer Daily brings you: The Poverty Holidays Gift Guide

2008-12-01T15:14:00.000-08:00

As a service to the community, this December we offer you, our loyal readers, the PDX Writer Daily Poverty Holidays Gift Guide, wherein each working day of December, we resolve to offer you one inexpensive literary gift suggestion.

You may consider the Poverty Holidays Gift Guide to be PDX Writer Daily's gift to you this holiday season. This means that this very feature of this very blog--perhaps, indeed, this very post--is already the best poverty holiday gift, inasmuch as the cost to us, for giving you this gift, is: zero dollars. And yet the true value of this gift, it can truly be said, is: also zero dollars.

But we now forge ahead to the useful information. Let us turn to page one of our lovely, virtual catalog, where we find:

A Coffin for Dimitrios by Eric Ambler

In a recent review, an anonymous cog in the PDXWD machine said of this novel of spies and intrigue:

All of the characters are intelligent, and when they seem not to be, we find we have been misdirected. For example, there's this passage where one of the characters is getting into some purple prose, saying stuff like "International big business may conduct its operations with scraps of paper, but the ink it uses is human blood!" -- and just as the character bangs his fist on the table, and the reader begins to get really sick of the character's histrionics, the narrator comes in and tells us that the protagonist, too, "could never quite get over his distaste for other people's rhetoric." We grin. We feel like we are on the side of the good, intelligent character and the wise narrator, and we are all scoffing discreetly together at this blowhard character.... at which point said character says: "Of course I was exaggerating. But it is agreeable sometimes to talk in primary colors even if you have to think in greys." And we are forced to agree, and we see that we have been silly to condemn him.

The beauty of a novel like A Coffin for Dimitrios, it seems to us, is that it can satisfy so many different reader-types on your holiday-style list. Your Tom Clancy-loving uncle will be pleased to read about Dimitrios's coffin. Your very, very, liter-ary girlfriend will feel hip and cool carrying the tome wherein we learn of the coffin intended for Dimitrios. If you give it to your friend, you might be able to steal it back when he or she is done. And your mom? Well of course your mother appreciates anything you get her. You know that.

Though she hasn't heard of this writer. And this book looks kind of weird. Is this another one of your weird books?

Hold it. Sorry. That's not your mom. That's some other mom. Not yours.

Anyway. A Coffin for Dimitrios is available at your finer local bookstores in lovely, flexible paperback.

And don't miss the next installment of the Impoverished Special Time of Year Present List! Many times you've thought, "I, too, like Ahab, would enjoy raising and owning my very own white whale, but certainly that's not possible." Wrong you are, my friend. With the right tank and the right breed of whale, evenings of Melvillean cetacean enjoyment lie no further than your local pet store. Details tomorrow!

Gestures in Literacy #4 is over, defeated by--guh!--teamwork

2008-11-19T18:00:00.000-08:00

The old record was 2 hours, 25 minutes. But today you've set a new record, keri (and whatever nefarious forces are on your "team"): Gestures in Literacy #4 was up for all of 55 minutes before you solved it. As keri said...

The hospital people said the acid was running to his heart and all they could do was put a magnet in his body

Team effort.

chris, of course, set the expectation that solutions will also include the contents of the other side of the page. So at least we denied you that satisfaction, keri and co., didn't we?

The only mystery left for our other, non-team-using readers, then, keri and co.--if that even is your real names, you fancypants scoundrels--is the flip side. Which is:

"So they did." Ha. You didn't get that. Because we didn't show it to you, but so what? You didn't get it. So we tie. Yep, that's right--tie. Oh, we're being petulant? Really? We're being sore losers? Is that right? Well excuuuse us!

We're taking our gestures and going home now. Bye. Buh bye. Maybe we'll be back tomorrow, maybe not. Bye now. We're leaving. Going now. Bye.

Bye.

Gestures in Literacy #4: No hints

2008-11-18T13:34:00.000-08:00

You know how it works. And no hints this time. Should we assume you'll crack this code quickly? If you don't, we'll post the answer on Friday.

From the Library: Rick Bass, "The Hermit's Story"

2008-11-12T15:15:00.000-08:00

With the best stories, really, what is there to say? Maybe say what it is like: "It reminds me of Steinbeck's 'Chrysanthemums,' not for its plot or setting or characters, but for how it feels to read it." Say how it unwinds: "Every time it could have taken a wrong turn, it didn't." Say what it did to you: "It snapped into the part of my brain that was already shaped like this story, and waiting for it." Say its most conspicuous quality, ineptly, without evidence: "It is beautiful." And then qualify that: "but not in a boring way."

Or just read off one of the parts you like best:

There were little pockets and puddles of swamp gas pooled here and there, she said, and sometimes a spark from the cattails would ignite one of those, and all around these little pockets of gas would light up like when you toss gas on a fire—these little explosions of brilliance, like flashbulbs—marsh pockets igniting like falling dominoes, or like children playing hopscotch—until a large enough flash-pocket was reached—sometimes thirty or forty yards away from them, by this point—that the puff of flame would blow a chimney-hole through the ice, venting the other pockets, and the fires would crackle out—the scent of grass smoke sweet in their lungs—and they could feel gusts of warmth from the little flickering fires, and currents of the colder, heavier air—sliding down through the new vent holes and pooling around their ankles. The moonlight would strafe down through those rents in the ice, and shards of moon-ice would be glittering and spinning like diamond-motes in those newly vented columns of moonlight; and they pushed on, still lost, but so alive.

And through reading off the part, begin to think you should explain what's happening. Then think, can I just reprint the whole thing here?

"The Hermit's Story" is a story of the North, where once the boldest, most thrilling adventure stories were set. (The otherworlds we most commonly imagine today are farther off, in galaxies far, far away. Only the residue of polar glamour is left in our cultural memory, nostalgized now and then by McSweeney's). Bass's North is an unfamiliar North, though: a nighttime North, oddly warm and wet and cold at once, both frozen and so alive, ice-blue and fire-orange, of-the-earth and full of the smells of lake and mud.

So, this reader has been meaning to post reviews of A.S. Byatt's Possession and Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet. Both are already well-known, however; and since one is 600 pages long, with four or five narrators and five or six constituent texts, and the other demands to be reread several times in succession, they are high-maintenance reading recommendations for the working Portland writer. In place of reviews, suffice it that Byatt's novel and Rilke's letters, too, left this reader with little to say. Rilke writes: "works of art are of an infinite loneliness, and with nothing so little to be reached as with criticism." So the critic, when she encounters a true work of art, is left finally with only one thing to say: "read this."

Rick Bass's "The Hermit's Story" was originally published in The Paris Review in 1998. You can also read it in Bass's collection The Hermit's Story: Stories (Mariner, 2003) or The Paris Review Book of People with Problems (2005).

There are half a dozen copies of Letters to a Young Poet (about $6 each, used) in the back streetside corner of the blue room at Powell's, where the poetry is, at the end of the dictionary aisle. You can also get Possession at Powell's.

Michael Crichton passes, but a young boy's first reading experience lives on

2008-11-06T09:36:00.000-08:00

Michael Crichton, pictured at left and who died of cancer Tuesday, was never among America's best writers. His books, however, from Rising Sun to Congo, from Sphere to The Andromeda Strain, along with his successful forays into television and film (most notably, the perennially followed ER), were among the most popular and bestselling of his time.

As embarrassing as such an admission once was throughout college and grad school and well into early adulthood, when it was far more cool to cite and envy Kafka and Foucault, it seems appropriate now to mark Crichton's passing by mentioning without reservation or hesitation that for one of us here at PDX Writer Daily, Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park will forever remain one of the most notable books of all time. It has the unique distinction, in fact, of being the first real novel I ever truly read.

I won't lie: it took me a whole year to read Jurassic Park in the eighth grade. An. Entire. Year. As a young boy, I apparently found it difficult to focus on anything for more than about 48 seconds, even well-described and tense novel scenes involving dinosaurs and goats and people and cars. But over the course of those twelve months in 1991, I slowly plodded my way through the adventures of paleontologist Alan Grant and paleobotonist Ellie Sattler, as brought on by the misguided visionary billionaire John Hammond and his experimental dino park. (I should also go on record as saying that I was then thoroughly convinced that I would become a paleontologist when I grew up, which, as you might expect, did not work out so well.) My father, who had purchased the book for me as a surprise and was living out of state, would call a few times a week and check in on my reading progress, to which I'd usually respond with details I looked up in the current chapter just before we spoke. Caught unprepared, I would usually lie and tell him that it was going really well and that "there were dinosaurs everywhere!"

As slowly I as read, though, I eventually and inevitably finished the book on which I then wrote the proudest book report of my school career: a 3/4-page hand-written anaylsis of Ian Malcolm's line, "We were so busy thinking about whether or not we could, we never stopped to think about whether or not we should." The faint philosophical ramifications of this quote kept me busier thinking and pondering than anything I had hitherto encountered. I was, quite simply, astounded... and hungry for more.

By the time Jurassic Park's sequel The Lost World was released in 1995, I had learned, it seems, how to read more quickly. I remember I bought the book in the first week of its appearance on shelves and read the whole of it in under seven days (a record!), finding it exciting and extremely difficult to put down.

Here's the only thing I regret: though I have kept both books all these years (they are proudly though understatedly nestled on my shelves between Hemingway, Plath, Orringer, Eggers, Doerr, Shakespeare, and all the others), I threw away the dust jackets. Why did I do that? I can't remember now, but it's probably only a matter of time before I reread them both as a sort of personal archeological experiment.

I wonder what I would get out of the books now, having read hundreds of others since then? As Crichton's speciality was in presenting his readers with literary warnings about the perils of technology and human endeavor, I sense that I would probably find at least one line in there somewhere to mull over for the better part of a year.

So, though I've never seen even one episode of ER and have absolutely no intention of buying Crichton's last novel (which will be posthumously released in May 2009), I nonetheless grieve the loss of he who, with the gates of Jurassic Park, opened the world to me.

Gestures in Literacy #3: Behind the Gesture

2008-10-16T13:51:00.000-07:00

So we said we'd explicate Gesture #3 on Friday, but then the Gesture was solved almost immediately. The answer, as chris said...

Plato was very good friends with Socrates. But Socrates died. Socrates was the teacher of Plato. He wrote about Socrates. [Picture of Socrates in coffin near where Plato writes yet another book and throws it on the teetering pile of his collected works.] On the verso, in rubric, the title: The Death of Socrates.

Excellent work, Chris. The score stands: Gestures 2, Readers 1.

And now: The story behind the Gesture.

The author of this Gesture, recently seeing a parent-person's photos of Jacques-Louis David's 1787 painting "The Death of Socrates," naturally asked about the photos. (The painting's current home is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.) A brief conversation was had regarding what was depicted in the painting, who painted it, why this painter may have painted this painting, etc. The parent-person assures us the evening then moved to weightier topics, which included a screening of the second half of Ghostbusters 2, a discussion of why baths are necessary, what was available for dessert, and etc.

Before bedtime, however, during time in which The Author is allowed to draw or play in his room while the parent-person cleans up and has a second drink (there is apparently a two-drink minimum in this household), The Author, working from memory of the photos, produced the Gesture. (In the verso, pictured at right, third from top, you can see how The Author accurately recalls the posture of the follower in red, but has translated David's upright Socrates to, here, a figure on the ground. And that is why eye-witness testimony can be attacked in court, people! Especially from those in the grades that have early recess.)

And but then, as we know, Chris solved the whole thing in minutes.

So things are going to have to get tougher around here, Gesture fans. This is getting competitive. Encourage your Gesturers to write about Longinus. Maybe that won't be so easy to figure out.

Click on any images you want to see up close, and be warned: another Gesture will appear sometime soon. And thanks for playing. If you have a gesture you'd like us to post, the email is wcevents@pdx.edu.

Now get back to writing, writers.

Gestures in Literacy: "The Classics"

2008-10-15T09:44:00.000-07:00

Welcome to Gestures in Literacy, Vol. 3. We have entitled it "The Classics." Yes, that is a hint. Pretty oblique, but still a hint.

You know how it works. The answer will be provided Friday afternoon. And now: Welcome. Won't you...enter the gesture? Bwah ha ha ha!

Gestures in Literacy #2: The answer to HRASHES!

2008-09-30T11:53:00.000-07:00

It's time to present the solution to "Gestures in Literacy 2: This time it's HRASHES!" But first, let's honor those readers who had the fortitude to "enter the gesture."

Ben Parzybok said...
This is obviously some kind of funereal ritual. Here we see various implements that were important to this person during her life. At top right, her favorite banana, at left a treasured handbag. In the center is a painting she composed of 8 black crows flying over a somber beach.

At bottom, of course, is the bag of 'her ashes'.

My blessings to the departed.

Anonymous said...
The general tank image alludes to the current standoff between Somali pirates and the military powers racing to recapture a Ukrainian vessel full of tanks and other arms.

The symbolism at the tank's top (flag = nation; crescent = religion) mimic Marxian notions of base/ superstructure.

At the pyramid/tank's base is, in effectively grand lettering, the name of an international brand that, like the romantic dream of high-seas piracy, invades the heart of every boy: Thrasher Skateboard Company.

Short answer: Thrasher.

Those are excellent answers, Ben and Anon. Not correct. But excellent.

And now: The gesture was...

Top row, L to R: Zip-lock bag holding crackers, single apple slice.
Second row: Bottle of water, zip-lock bag holding sandwich.
Bottom row: A HRASHES chocolate bar (manufactured in HERSHEY, PA)

The parent of this child would like us to make clear the following: the packed lunch holds more than one apple slice; the water is never decanted in an old perfume bottle; and the child has never been given a giant Hershey's chocolate bar in the lunch. So this gesture in literacy is a suggestion: one apple slice is okay, perfume water would be cool, and why, again, can I not have a huge chocolate bar in my lunch?

Thanks for playing, folks! More gestures soon.

Gestures in Literacy: HRASHES!

2008-09-26T14:57:00.000-07:00

Gestures in Literacy is back. This week's contributor has given us a picture puzzle. What is the one word that appears in this picture? It is crucial that you decode the message! The fate of, um...of this game rests on it!

Answer on Tuesday.

(If you are in possession of a Gesture in Literacy you would like to contribute, feel free to email it to wcevents@pdx.edu, and we'll try to work it in.)

Cat's in the Cradle, last verse

2008-09-19T05:00:00.000-07:00

The answer to Thursday's Gestures in Literacy puzzle:
"Busy. Don't come in. Even if you have to."

PDXWD's new game: Gestures in Literacy

2008-09-18T10:16:00.000-07:00

(Some of the people who make up the loose collective that is PDX Writer Daily have, through their own moral laxness and irresponsibility, been charged with the raising of children. Some of these children are working, these days, on acquiring written language. So now, in the first of what may become an ongoing series, we present to you PDXWD's new puzzle game, sweeping the, um...sweeping the neighborhood. Or sweeping a few houses. Kind of.)

Gestures in Literacy

Here's how Gestures in Literacy works: we post an image of something a person--a small person, probably, and very young--has written. You: try to decode what it says. We: post the answer the next day.

Okay? Okay! Today's image is posted. Look at it closely. What does it say? What do you think? Show your friends. Show your co-workers. Work the problem, people. Talk it out. You can do it.

Answer tomorrow!

From the Library: Eric Ambler's "A Coffin for Dimitrios"

2008-09-16T09:29:00.000-07:00

One of us has just finished reading another excellent novel about a writer: Eric Ambler's thriller, A Coffin for Dimitrios. (Ambler is pictured at right, in 1952. Photo by Elliott Erwitt) It begins like this:

A Frenchman named Chamfort, who should have known better, once said that chance was a nickname for Providence.

It is one of those convenient, question-begging aphorisms coined to discredit the unpleasant truth that chance plays an important, if not predominant, part in human affairs. Yet it was not entirely inexcusable. Inevitably, chance does occasionally operate with a sort of fumbling coherence readily mistakable for the workings of a self-conscious Providence.

The story of Dimitrios Makropoulos is an example of this.

The fact that a man like Latimer should so much as learn of the existence of a man like Dimitrios is alone grotesque. That he should actually see the dead body of Dimitrios, that he should spend weeks that he could ill afford probing into the man's shadowy history, and that he should ultimately find himself in the position of owing his life to a criminal's odd taste in interior decoration are breathtaking in their absurdity.

Yet, when these facts are seen side by side with the other facts in the case, it is difficult not to become lost in superstitious awe. Their very absurdity seems to prohibit the use of the words 'chance' and 'coincidence.' For the sceptic there remains only one consolation: if there should be such a thing as a superhuman Law, it is administered with subhuman inefficiency. The choice of Latimer as its instrument could have been made only by an idiot.

This opener set this reader a-wondering from the second clause, and kept us interested, amused, and thinking right on through. Admittedly, we were in the mood for this heady stuff when we happened to begin reading it, and would probably not have remained that way if the philosophizing went on for too long; but it didn't.

Here are a few of many other good things about A Coffin for Dimitrios, which are not discernible from the opening passage:

All of the characters are intelligent, and when they seem not to be, we find we have been misdirected. For example, there's this passage where one of the characters is getting into some purple prose, saying stuff like "International big business may conduct its operations with scraps of paper, but the ink it uses is human blood!" -- and just as the character bangs his fist on the table, and the reader begins to get really sick of the character's histrionics, the narrator comes in and tells us that the protagonist, too, "could never quite get over his distaste for other people's rhetoric." We grin. We feel like we are on the side of the good, intelligent character and the wise narrator, and we are all scoffing discreetly together at this blowhard character.... at which point said character says: "Of course I was exaggerating. But it is agreeable sometimes to talk in primary colors even if you have to think in greys." And we are forced to agree, and we see that we have been silly to condemn him.

A Coffin for Dimitrios features an interesting story against a glamorous backdrop, both characteristics we like in novels. What happens is, a writer of detective novels becomes obsessed with an international criminal whose body he has just seen laid out in a Turkish morgue, and he undertakes to trace the criminal's steps across Europe over the past two decades. In so doing, he traverses Turkey, Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, Croatia, and Switzerland before finally ending up in way over his head in Paris. He meets reporters, spies, drug dealers, madames, blackmailers, murderers, and other exciting and unsavory characters. All of these people are constantly saying interesting things to him, and he to them.

Nobody learns any moral lessons. They could, but they don't.

The main thing we dislike about A Coffin for Dimitrios is that Ambler wrote it when he was 30 years old. This makes us jealous, and diminishes our own sense of personal accomplishment. The next time we read an Ambler novel, which will probably be soon, we resolve to pretend that he was 55 when he wrote it, or possibly 80. And the next novel we write, we will pretend that we are Eric Ambler.

New Bitch Magazine on the stands yesterday, already

2008-09-11T09:13:00.000-07:00

Will someone please tell us the next time that Bitch Magazine hosts a quarterly release party/ Pop Culture Debate Club? Cloning your pets? The In Other Words bookstore? Bitch Magazine? There are so many cool things about this party... we can't believe no one told us about it. We had to find out about it for ourselves on some blog posting by Unpaid Arts Intern over at the Portland Mercury.

It makes us want to write a letter:

Dear Bjork,
We're sorry you couldn't invite us to your party.
love, PDX Writer Daily

A Compendium of Miniatures is still available

2008-09-03T10:16:00.000-07:00

A Compendium of Miniatures, pictured at left (your left, our right), looks like a pretty cool thing. There seem to be other cool things for sale over at Plazm Web hq, but this thing seems especially cool, according to the local blog Seed Cake and Plazm's catalogue:

by Tiffany Lee Brown
(Portland: 2GQ/Tiger Food Press, 2007)

"Miniature narratives and rhythmic metaphors redefine the words that tell life's big stories. Limited edition of 50 signed, numbered books hand-bound in silk. Hand-set in Deepdene and letterpress printed in two colors on recyled (sic) paper using soy-based inks by Clare Carpenter of Tiger Food Press. Case-bound, 48 pages, approximately 4" x 6"."

It costs about $85 for most people (well, it's "hand-bound in silk"; what did you expect?), but we here at PDX Writer Daily consider ourselves book reviewers, and we expect to receive our promotional copies any day now. Except that UPS does not deliver to our current address, the empty upstairs bar Apothoke, where we continue to scuttle around the floor, searching for drops of weird Scandinavian cordials left behind when the bar closed several months ago.

From the Library: Philip Roth's "The Counterlife"

2008-07-16T09:31:00.000-07:00

This reader purchased The Counterlife while on vacation, and read the first half while on said vacation. The second half of the novel was read after the return to day-to-day work-world reality.

The novel was published in 1986. It has five sections, entitled "Basel," "Judea," "Aloft," "Gloucestershire," and "Christendom."

In the first section of The Counterlife, the narrator, a novelist, writes about his brother, a dentist. In the second section, something that happened in the first section has been undone. In other words: the narrator is the same narrator and the brother is the same brother, but the reality of the novel's second section proceeds from a possibility that did not occur in the first section. Roth declines to surround this shift with any particular narrative frenetics: there is no time travel or other physical explanation for the shift; it is not treated by the author as a shocking or rebellious move of wild postmodernity; and it does not particularly undermine the novel's "realism." One simply begins reading the second section of the novel and, eight pages in, realizes that something that occurred in the first section now did not occur.

Each succeeding section of the novel proceeds accordingly: decisions or events that occurred in previous sections are changed or undone. The reader quickly recognizes this--the shifts are not intended to be mystifying or confusing. The novel proceeds.

Because the narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, is a novelist, thoughts on the construction of fiction occur and are spoken about by Zuckerman and the characters. After Zuckerman visits Mordecai Lippman, a militant Jew living on a settlement in Judea, whom Zuckerman's brother has left his family to follow, an Israeli friend writes to Zuckerman:

What worries me is that what you will see in Lippman and his cohorts is an irresistible Jewish circus, a great show, and that what is morally inspiring to one misguided Zuckerman boy will be richly entertaining to the other, a writer with a strong proclivity for exploring serious, even grave, subjects through their comical possibilities. What makes you a normal Jew, Nathan, is how you are riveted by Jewish abnormality.

The reader's response to these lines, of course, is to think: But the fact that I just read about Lippman in this novel means that Zuckerman did, indeed, turn Lippman into a character in a novel...or, no, wait: Roth used a character named Lippman as a character in a novel in exactly the way Zuckerman's friend seems to be hoping to pre-empt, though he is hoping to pre-empt Zuckerman from writing about Lippman.

Hmm.

Reviews of the novel at the time seem to have focused on its "metafictional" aspects, which made some reviewers grumpy. It strikes this reader, though, as pointless to be grumpy about "metafiction" in a novel in which one of the characters is a novelist. (We're putting "metafiction" in quotes because there are about five hundred flavors of it--even so-called "regular" fiction writing has "metafictional" qualities, if you're looking for them.) If reviewers dislike this, then they are essentially outlawing novelists from using writers as characters in novels. According to this view, we can have dentists as characters, for instance, or characters who possess any other profession in the world, but characters simply cannot be writers.

This seems arbitrary and silly. It is also seems small-minded to want to limit the terrain a writer covers, or to outlaw him from pursuing particular novelistic possibilities. So we dismiss these old reviews out of hand. Including yours, John Updike.

What was particularly impressive to this reader was the degree to which the shifts in reality and reflections-upon-writing in The Counterlife did not lessen the effects of the novel's realism. Roth's characters are vivid, their situations specific. He allows them to speak: when upset, his characters sometimes speak for pages. He allows them equality: the characters are intelligent, and when arguing, characters on opposing sides of arguments--whether those arguments are political or emotional--each make compelling points. He allows them honesty: his characters are frank about sex, about their most conflicted feelings, about the things they have done and why they have done them. And in this novel, he allows them the particular reflectivity built into a novel that features a novelist as the narrator: they discuss, quite naturally, the degree to which perhaps the narrator and main character, Nathan Zuckerman, likes to get himself into arguments and conflicts primarily because he thinks they will make for good source material for his fiction writing. Zuckerman responds to these thoughts. The novel proceeds.

There is a section in which an italicized voice simply asks questions to one of the characters. She responds as well as she can. We are not "grounded in scene," but because these voices are personal, and the questions are about a relationship we have read about in the novel--and probably because there is a tremendous amount of talking in this novel, in general--the section does not play particularly differently from others. One does not have a sense that we are somehow, now, "outside" of the novel. Two voices are talking. We know to whom the voices belong. We are still "in" the novel.

This novel consists primarily--as may already be clear--of scenes in which two people discuss something. Who the two people are, and what is being discussed, changes. The scenes, however, at all times possess an urgency and sharpness which this reader found impressive and enjoyable. Philip Roth, of course, is famous. But it is nice to be able to say that consistently, when reading him, one thinks: and he merits this fame. The Counterlife, at least, is excellent.

Happy birthday, Maurice Sendak

2008-06-10T10:06:00.000-07:00

Good morning, Writer readers. Today, June 10, is Maurice Sendak's 80th birthday. Maurice Sendak (right) is one of those rare artists who, rather than responding to the world, may actually have created a part of it.

Think of Where the Wild Things Are. Now think of the world without it. Now think of the world with it. Now without it. Those aren't the same two worlds.

More than one tentacle of PDXWD has children who are kid's-book age, so we are fairly up-to-date with the world of children's lit. Sendak's work transcends that genre. Because what is Where the Wild Things Are? It isn't a social allegory, a la the work of Leo Leonni. It's not the colorful diversion of Eric Carle, and neither is it didactic, teaching children the value of some kind of appropriate behavior, as in most of the rest of children's lit. Max gets sent to his room (for mischief, and his threat, "I'll eat you up!"), but after his fantasy time with the Wild Things, he finds that his dinner has been sent up to him. That's it.

We never see his parents, so there's never any lecture about, or "real world contextualization" of, the situation. The Wild Things don't teach Max any life lessons. He is neither victim nor victimizer: they bare their claws and teeth to him, but he is unafraid, and makes them cry. Neither side apologizes. They also have that big party together.

The work that graphic artist Dave McKean does, for instance--especially the kids' stuff he has done with writer Neil Gaiman--is hard to imagine without first thinking of Sendak. Same goes for Chris Van Allsburg. And any number of other writers and/or illustrators.

From Wikipedia:
"Sendak’s book In the Night Kitchen, first published in 1970, has often been subjected to censorship for its drawings of a young boy prancing naked through the story. The book has been challenged, and in some instances banned, in several American states including Illinois, New Jersey, Minnesota, and Texas. In the Night Kitchen regularly appears on the American Library Association's list of 'frequently challenged and banned books.' It was listed number 25 on the '100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990-2000.'"

That's not correct. Mickey, the boy in In the Night Kitchen, does not prance. He floats out of his bed (and his clothes) and down through the floors of his house, into "the night kitchen." He ends up in batter and gets placed in the oven, but leaps out. He wears a suit of batter, and flies a dough airplane. He floats (naked) down into a huge bottle of milk. At the end, he floats back into his own bed, secure in the knowledge that there will be cakes for the morning breakfast, because he saw--and flew a dough airplane over--the bakers working.

For further proof that Sendak's work transcends conventional children's lit, look at Outside, Over There. It looks like a children's book, but...it kind of isn't. And we're not trying to be evasive with that "kind of." One looks at the book. One thinks: Could I read this to my children? One thinks: Maybe. Or maybe not. Or, but, maybe. Or, oh, maybe not. Hmm.

Sendak is 80. He continues to work. Below, enjoy the animated version of In the Night Kitchen:

Portland's Paige Saez publishes "Visual Mixtape" through Blurb

2008-05-27T10:31:00.000-07:00

We here in the lower echelons of PDX Writer Daily have no idea what Blurb is, but it apparently is being used by noted Portland artist Paige Saez (pictured at right), and apparently one can order a copy of her book Visual Mixtape (pictured at left) from the Blurb bookstore, which apparently will be printed on demand (though the upper echelons of PDX Writer Daily have often hinted that their preferred term is "print-on-request," for the moment we trust that the generally acceptable terminology will not raise too many hackles).

Unpurchased periodicals trump online infosnacking

2008-05-26T09:25:00.000-07:00

One of PDX Writer's many tentacles was standing in the doorway of Kir watching the lightning and the rain Saturday night, when a friend who recently dropped out of college listed her reading for Spring Term--or what would have been Spring Term had she stayed in school. Naturally, the list included Sartre's Roads to Freedom trilogy, a samovar of Italo Calvino (yes, samovar is the correct term for a singular grouping of Calvino books), The Future of an Illusion, and a little pulp courtesy of Thomas Mann.

As the tentacle counted the thirteenth thunderclap and watched a crazy bicyclist ride by while singing (or shouting?) aloud, s/he decided to 1) cease all online reading in favor of those baggy monsters; 2) begin by reading the books already on his/her shelf, rather than purchasing new ones.

How is our tentacle's project working? Well... Tentacle has discovered that many perfectly intelligent periodicals are available for free in print form. On Sunday alone, Tentacle picked up a copy of Rain Taxi, the latest issue of Context, and spring's Arcade. So Tentacle may not have finished--or even started--reading any novels since Saturday night, but after thirty-six hours, the experiment is still intact. Writer readers, we'll keep you posted.

Please, Margaret Wise Brown. Release us. Please.

2008-05-23T09:56:00.000-07:00

Welcome to May 23rd, Writer readers. Children's author Margaret Wise Brown was born on this day in 1910. Brown's most well-known book is probably Goodnight Moon, which this blog also nominates for Most Unsettling Children's Book Ever. Evidence?

The copy on the back of the book reads, "A little rabbit is getting ready for bed. And as the night gets later and his room grows darker, he bids goodnight to everything around him."

Everything, folks. He bids goodnight to: Every. Thing.

Things that have occurred to this blog on, oh, roughly every one of the approx. 200 times we have had to read the book aloud: Why does the room slowly get darker, when it was already night at the beginning of the book? Who is the mysterious larger rabbit that appears in the chair? Why is there a page in this book that is empty except for the words "Goodnight nothing"? Why does the "Goodnight nothing" page reek to us of death, or at least of existential panic and despair?

Why does all of David Lynch's work seem somehow derivative of the room depicted in this book?

Why this, from Wikipedia: "Brown bequeathed the royalties to many of her books including Goodnight Moon and The Runaway Bunny to Albert Clarke, the son of a neighbor who was nine years old when she died. In 2000, reporter Joshua Prager detailed in the Wall Street Journal the troubled life of Mr. Clarke who has squandered the millions of dollars the books have earned him and who believes that Wise Brown was his mother, a claim others dismiss."

Why do we cover this book with other books? Why, when we turn off the light in the room, does this book seem to pulse in a strange and menacing way? Why, when we throw this book into the garbage can, does it reappear the next day, back in its same spot on the shelf? Why, when we attempt to burn the book, does it not burn? Why, when we attempt to throw it into the street, does it somehow fly through the air in a boomeranging arc and land inside of our home again?

Why will no one believe us? Why will no one help us?

It's Margaret Wise Brown's birthday. Something awful is going to happen when we fall asleep tonight. Help us. Please. Help us.

From the Library: Douglas Coupland's "Life After God"

2008-05-01T12:03:00.000-07:00

Okay, here goes. PDX Writer Daily has started a new department: From the Library, in which the little nuts, bolts, and mitochondria that make up the leviathan-that-is-us report their reading experiences.

What's that we hear? A signal? A voice? A mitochondrian? Go, mitochondrian! Speak!

Though it was published almost 15 years ago, this mitochondrian recently read Douglas Coupland's Life After God for the first time. The author of several works of fiction and nonfiction, Coupland has made a habit of examining the philosophical tension that lies below the surface of modern daily existence and Life After God, a collection of rather bizarre stories, is no exception.

The strongest piece in the book is its title story "1000 Years (Life After God)," a wandering tale that traces the lives of a group of twenty-something friends who knew each other closely during late adolescence. As each of them inevitably follows his or her own path (drug addiction, parenthood, hippiedom, mental and physical transience, etc.), Coupland is able to tease out the universal existential angst most people go through in reaching "stable" adulthood before the age of 30.

In the tradition of stories by, say, Kafka, "1000 Years" caused this reader to pause on several occasions, steeping in quiet interpersonal evaluation, forced to take stock of all that happens (and doesn't happen) in the third decade of life. "This is not to say my life is bad," Coupland's narrator admits. "I know it isn't...but my life is not what I expected it might have been when I was younger. Maybe you yourself deal with this issue better than me. Maybe you have been lucky enough to never have inner voices question you about your own path--or maybe you answered the questioning and came out on the other side. I don't feel sorry for myself in any way. I am merely coming to grips with what I know the world is truly like."

The method in which several of the stories in Life After God reach off the page like this, addressing the reader almost directly by way of using the second person "you" over and over, makes the experience of reading it sort of harrowing, which is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, Coupland's virtuosity lies in writing fiction that successfully frames some of our more common abstract longings and intangible disappointments.

"Gettysburg," for example, a story told from the point of view of a father who attempts to make sense of and explain to his child his failed marriage, dwells on life not working out how we expected it to. "I say that I know life has gotten so boring so quickly in so many ways--and that neither of us planned for this to happen," the father says. "I never thought that we would end up in the suburbs with lawnmowers and swing sets. I never thought that I'd be a lifer at some useless company. But then wasn't this the way of the world? The way of adulthood, of maturity, of bringing up children?" The dream-crushing facts of life are so well-established that they become impossible to change or question without also taking on the very truth and nature of the modern world.

The greatest moments of Life After God occur when Coupland puts words to those many thoughts we've all had about where we are versus where we hoped we would be. "When you're young, you always feel that life hasn't yet begun--that 'life' is always scheduled to begin next week, next month, next year, after the holidays," and it's true. It's tempting to consider, for example, what may have happened differently had this reviewer read that line earlier in life.

But alas, that's not the way it works, and Coupland is wise to that fact. It's so difficult to heed the advice of other, older people because there is a belief innate to us all, especially in our youth, that everything is really yet to come. We don't need to worry that much because it doesn't quite count yet, right? "But then," Coupland writes, "suddenly you're old and the scheduled life didn't arrive. You find yourself asking, 'Well then, exactly what was it I was having--that interlude--the scrambly madness--all that time I had before?'" Again, the second person "you," though Coupland uses it nonchalantly, becomes one of the most riveting components of the story, and one on which the whole collection pivots.

If, as a middle page of Life After God reads (the page is not connected to any story, and looks more like a poem between stories), "You are the first generation raised without religion," then what has filled that spiritual void within us? Is it television, email, and material possessions? Hummers and Wiis and DVDs? Or is there simply a void there inside us still, a lacuna in want of filler?

Coupland never explicitly speculates, exactly, nor does he even seem that interested in the answer. Perhaps (and this may have been Coupland's plan), it's our job to find out.

Oxford Commas, Pin-Stripes, and Fact Checking

2008-04-30T09:39:00.000-07:00

If you haven't already listened to Vampire Weekend's self-titled album (left), we think you should. The group of Ivy League punks (is that an oxymoron?) wax lyrical on a number of writing-related topics in the course of their 11-track debut.

Here at PDX Writer Daily, we were just arguing the other day, in fact, about the Oxford Comma, but it seems VW beat us to the punch: "Who gives a fuck about an oxford comma?" Well, we do, it turns out, but we're smiling again by the time frontman Ezra Koenig sings, "I haven't got the words for you/All your diction is dripping with disdain."

The album really picks up steam on track nine, "I Stand Corrected," a tongue-in-cheek homage to errata, editing, and self-rebuke. "You've been checking on my facts," the tune goes, "And I admit I have been lax/ ... I stand corrected." As if reading our minds, making a perfect slogan for our collective daily existence here in Cramer Hall, Koenig adds, "No one cares when you are wrong/ ... I've been at this far too long."

And perhaps we have. A good day to you, nonetheless.

Kerouac round-up (mostly so we can post the photos)

2008-03-18T10:36:00.000-07:00

Photos taken Friday. They refer to this, and this. And this. And this. (For a better look, just click on the photos.)

While traveling, PDX Writer Daily sustained by Verse Chorus Press

2008-03-17T12:17:00.000-07:00

While some of us were in New York recently, we carried Luc Sante's Kill All Your Darlings around with us. The book features a number of essays about New York, and was recommended to us by...ourselves. Okay, the first person plural breaks down in certain constructions. Just look the other way when that happens. But nevertheless, Sante's book was our reading material while traveling, and a review of the book will appear on PDX Writer Daily soon.

But our point is: When, out of idle curiosity, we looked to see who had published Sante's essays, we were surprised and delighted to discover that the publisher was right here in Portland. It's Verse Chorus Press, and their full catalog of titles is right here.

WHAM! POW! PDX Writer Daily loads up on superhero supplies

2008-03-14T08:37:00.000-07:00

Because this blog is multi-celled, it can divide itself. And so part of PDX Writer Daily is currently in New York, having writing-related conversations with writing-related people.

Yesterday, we chatted with 826NYC, a writing center in Brooklyn. 826NYC (which is hidden in the back of the Brooklyn Superhero Supply Co.) is one of multiple 826 writing centers founded by some of the same people who brought you McSweeney's and The Believer. This blog attended a workshop at 826NYC last year, and said workshop was an excellent source of ideas and strategies for use in writing centers, and said workshop led almost immediately to our ongoing "Project of Awesomification" at the PSU Writing Center, which, like the 826 centers, is open to the public and offers a variety of programs.

If you're looking for fun and creative ideas for writing projects, you might want to check out the sites of any of the 826 centers around the country. If you require superhero supplies, though, you have to visit 826NYC in person.