Fun Home on Broadway

Yesterday, one week before the Broadway run closes for good, and thanks to the sweet generosity of a dear friend, I saw the musical Fun Home at Circle in the Square. It. Blew. Me. Away. By which I mean, to be more specific, it left me a sodden soggy wrung-out distraught overwrought wreck. How great is that? This is what art ought to do. Shake us. Make us think.

I'd of course read Alison Bechdel's acclaimed book Fun Home soon after it was published in 2007. Strangely, though I liked it I didn't love it. It's strange because I never did manage to put my finger on what I didn't-love about it when just about the whole world was loving on it so hard, and when I've always loved, adored, her long-running series Dykes to Watch Out For, read and loved every installment, every collection, since DTWOF first started running in the 1980s. I still can't account for why I was relatively unmoved by Fun Home the book; I'd even say I've felt vaguely ashamed of myself for what must be a readerly failure on my part.

Well, never mind all that. I was swept away by Fun Home the innovative, exquisite, gut-wrenching masterpiece of musical theater. It is at once a very fine piece of political art--deeply relevant social commentary of the sort you rarely see in the theater anymore, certainly not on Broadway where the big-money profit-takers' lock on things is now pretty much complete--and a powerhouse of a tragic, gut-wrenching personal story. All presented by a brilliantly talented cast performing a stunningly written book and score by Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori.

Tesori was also the composer for another breathtakingly creative, howlingly painful, and cracklingly political Broadway musical, Caroline, or Change, which had a criminally short run on Broadway in 2004. I lucked into free tickets for this show and can never forget its devastating impact, or that of its unbelievable powerhouse of a star, Tonya Pinkins. As it did for Caroline whose book and lyrics were by Tony Kushner, Tesori's music for Fun Home meshes soaringly with the sometimes startling, sometimes funny, sometimes sardonic, mostly searing, profoundly affecting lyrics. You know I'm a words gal, but even more than that I'm a sucker for words when they're sung straight into my heart. Caroline, or Change's did that, shatteringly. Now Fun Home's have too.

Studying the clouds

As I believe I've mentioned from time to time, I'm not exactly a live-in-the-moment kind of gal. More of a dread-the-next-moment type. My catalogue of worries, personal and political, is endless, expectation of doom, personal and political, certain. In this I am a terrible communist indeed, and it's a constant struggle to push down my innate pessimism. In my own defense let me say that I do make this effort earnestly, I do foment revolutionary optimism in my own psyche daily, so I hope I get some credit for that. Then too, there's this contradiction: I am also an inveterate fantasist, a daydreamer. In the midst of everything else, I'm quite capable of stopping to, if not smell the roses, confabulate imaginary flowers. For my feverish little brain is always concocting all sorts of story lines, for me, my family, my comrades, my class, the struggle, the planet--story lines that are, come to think of it, fully imbued with hope. Perhaps, then, the pessimism is merely the surface layer. Perhaps my daydreaminess reveals a fundament of optimism after all.

These musings are occasioned by the book I've just started: The Cloud Collector's Handbook by Gavin Pretor-Pinney. This is a delightful little volume of education and enlightenment about, yes, clouds, in all their beauteous variety. Its purpose, like that of the Cloud Appreciation Society, which Pretor-Pinney founded, is to get us to look up. To stop, stand still, look up and marvel. The photographs are stunning, the pages are informative, and the writing is delightfully droll. I think I'm going to have a ball with this one, and I just might take up the challenge and begin keeping a record of cloud sightings.

"Cloudgazing," the author notes, "is the preferred pastime of daydreamers, wonderers, and poetic souls the world over." If I've just outed myself as among this company, so be it. I think cloudgazing, like its cousin stargazing, like birdwatching or flower appreciation (hey, I think the orchid show is coming soon!) is a wholly defensible activity for a revolutionary socialist. It's restorative. It lightens the load and bolsters resolve, or at least that's how it works for me. There's this, too: the clouds belong to everyone. They're one realm the greedy bosses are incapable of appropriating for their own profit. When I look up and appreciate their snowy formations, I know that my sisters and brothers around the world, all the billions of oppressed and exploited masses, can do the same. We share the cloud-filled skies, as one day we'll share the earthly world's riches.

Great Expectations

Yes we remain enthralled by the uprising of the Egyptian workers and students and have the greatest expectations of where it will all lead. My confession, though, is that I haven't yet been to any of the street demonstrations here in solidarity with them because I'm down with the flu. And that, while I have been following the news, I've also been doing what I do when sick, which is read and watch junk TV. As for the junk TV, um, don't ask and I won't have to tell. As for what I'm reading, it's an oldy but goody that I've meant to get to for some time: Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. It is tremendously entertaining, a rip-roaring good story told with wit, charm and marvelous language. Who knows, this may set me off on a Dickens phase. Most of his books are available in cheap paperback editions--this one in my hand cost $4.95--and I could certainly do worse when in need of a good read.

Leading in to the Dickens, and as I was nursing my lover Teresa through and thereby catching her flu, I made my quick way through two volumes provided by their publishers as free review copies. (There, I've met my legal obligation.) The first is a slim volume of tiny poems by Andrew Rihn titled America Plops and Fizzes. There are 50 of them, two or three to a page, each page faced with an illustration by David Munson, most of them unflattering images of the bosses and bankers. It's all to my liking--the take, the quirk--but, unschooled poetically as I've confessed myself to be, I feel ill equipped for any meaningful comment. In lieu of my own, then, let me commend you to the publisher's comment, following, and then to a recent interview with the poet.

When Jack Kerouac deviated from the traditional haiku form, he began calling his poems "pops." Andrew Rihn deviates even further, to the edge of formlessness, adding a new entry into the rubric of "American pops." With short, sudden flashes, the reader is given glimpses of pop culture--the celebrity, the sloganeering, the fetishism. These poems remind us that we are all tethered to something dark, violent, and absurd that lies hidden below the surface of late capitalism.

Next I read Wingshooters, the new novel by Nina Revoyr. She is a favorite of mine; I loved all three of her previous novels. This one continues her exploration of issues of racism, identity,  the clash of communities, but far afield from her previous usual setting of Los Angeles. The story takes place in rural Wisconsin, in 1974. I'm not sure why it didn't quite grab me the way Revoyr's other work has--it may simply be that I was getting sick--but it's an important story and I'm glad to see that it's getting stunningly good reviews all around. What I found most interesting was the way this novel forced me to view that time and that place in a new light. I'd never have thought of Wisconsin as a backward place, especially not that late along in the 20th century. Somehow I had a vague sense of it as a more enlightened spot, no doubt substituting Madison and Milwaukee and the Progressive Party and Father Groppi and other flotsam of information and misinformation lodged inside my brain for the more various, complicated and nuanced truth of the whole state, whose rural precincts, as Revoyr portrays them here, were redoubts of backwardness and racism. This is a terrible tale that culminates in horrid violence--what amounts to a lynching and its aftermath--and Revoyr makes the reader see how all of it is perpetrated by solid citizens who are roundly respected, admired, loved. It made me think of the assassins of Medgar Evers and others of their ilk in the 1960s South, of how an apparently benign paragon can at the same time be a racist terrorist murderer. That this is 10 years later and many miles to the north shouldn't make the story all the more shocking, but it does, and it's a good contribution that Revoyr brings it to light with Wingshooters.

It was 30 years ago today

So far it's been a crappy New York morning. Not one but two nasty screaming people on the trains. Not one but three trains not running or delayed or otherwise screwed up. Angry impatient crowds crowding each other. Me all the while uptight about running late because there's a new regime at work clocking my arrival to the minute. Just what I need, on top of all my ongoing complaints. I'm tired. I'm not eating right or exercising and as a consequence my body's in awful shape. I'm not getting much writing work done, I'm not doing my part in the struggle very well.

And John is dead.

No, it's not new news. Yes, he's been dead for 30 years today. Yet even after three decades, on this anniversary of the murder of John Lennon, I can still call up the feelings from that night, the awful knowledge that Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play nevermore. Two years ago on this same anniversary I wrote about how I heard that night, when I got home from work after the late shift as a city bus driver in Ann Arbor. In that post I also mentioned my story "John and Yoko and Rowena and Me," published in Cream City Review. I wish it were online to link to, because I'm fond of it and would like to share it. While it's of course fictional, it does call up some of the feel of those days. Maybe I'll figure out a way to make it available, says I, as if someone other than me is clamoring for it.

John was no saint. He was at his death rich as Croesus; it's nice to think that if he'd lived he would have shared the wealth, but who knows. He was guilty, by his own admission, of violence against women. His politics were an odd amalgam of anarchism/pacifism/socialism/yippie/performance art. They're easy to dismiss as unserious. On the other hand, he was really committed to his anti-war principles--and did pay a price for that, having to wage a years-long battle against the U.S. government's efforts to deport him. He was working hard at raising his feminist consciousness. He and Yoko brought Bobby Seale onto the Mike Douglas Show, and sang their great song "Attica State" in solidarity with the prisoners who'd risen up and been slaughtered at NY Gov. Nelson Rockefeller's orders. There's fair cause, then, I think, for this wistful pit-of-the-stomach sadness that lingers 30 years on. It's all the what might have beens. He was a great artist. His music is magnificent, and he did contribute in his way to the struggle for peace and justice. What more might he have done?

If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend the movie The U.S. vs. John Lennon for a pretty decent introduction to all this. Plus, I like to think that you can hear my 17-year-old voice shouting during the footage from the December 10, 1971 Free John Sinclair concert.

Kugel & books

I had a wonderful time off, visiting with my best friend who came from San Francisco to stay with Teresa and me for a week. We packed in a lot of fun and interesting New York stuff, from the food-oriented (Yonah Shimmel's knishery, Russ & Daughters Appetizing, Essex Street Market, Carnegie Deli, Veselka, De Mole, La Flor, an all-macaroni-and-cheese restaurant, plus home-cooked feasting) to the historic (the Tenement Museum,where I'd never before gone and now will go again as it was considerably better, by which I mean more honest and accurate, than I'd expected), to the cultural (Complexions Contemporary Ballet, an amazing company that we were thrilled to see at the Joyce Theater, and also a silly/fun backstage tour of Radio City Music Hall), to the tried and true like Central Park, the Strand bookstore, the garment district, and lots and lots of walking in Queens and Manhattan.

I read hardly at all while Rosemary was here because we had too damned much to say. Time together is precious since we generally only see each other every few years; although we talk on the phone a lot, and I mean a lot, the in-person experience is a whole other thing. So I didn't finish the book I'd been reading until after she left. And then I started a new one this morning: Mary Ann in Autumn by Armistead Maupin. Rose and I bought it together last week at the Strand. She read it while she was here, each night at bedtime, which was time enough, for as anyone who's read the Tales of the City series knows, these books are extremely fast reads. Then she left it for me, and now I'm already almost halfway through it. It was kind of perfect for her as one of the series' original followers and for its San Francisco-ness, and now it's kind of perfect for me as a sort of immediate memento of her visit. When I finish I'll pass it along to Teresa.

Rose had brought another book as a present for me, and I hope to get to it soon: Lois Lenz, Lesbian Secretary by Monica Nolan. How yummy does this look?!

I, a lesbian secretary, hope I like it because I'd love to move on to Nolan's other titles: Bobby Blanchard, Lesbian Gym Teacher and The Big Book of Lesbian Horse Stories.

So now it's back to the grind, and I have a grinding week ahead of me. Work, including overtime; an unavoidable dental appointment; some editorial work. Which means I may not have time to get right back into a blogging groove. But I'll try to soon.

28 years later

It's a busy time for me at work, which means I have less brain power than usual outside of work, and I'm in a bad sleep cycle, which means I have less brain power period in addition to being tired and cranky and whining about it as much as possible … therefore sorry, blogiverse, expect no substantive contributions from me for now. Instead, in brief:

Literacy, the brain power thief—I'm always fascinated by new findings about the brain and literacy. We did not evolve to read, which of course is why human beings have to learn this skill anew, not a single baby being born with reading an inbred function. This latest study hones in on which brain structures are used for reading—and which other more natural functions suffer as a result when the brain areas that evolved for those functions are co-opted instead for reading. Of course, it's not quite that simple, but still. I'm not too bad with faces, contrary to what these findings might suggest. I am, however, truly terrible at spatial relations—I flunked geometry in junior high, can't do puzzles for shit, and if there's ever a household task that requires anything to be eyed and moved about or fitted together in any way, I'm hopeless—so unless I'm extrapolating completely wrongly from this article, it seems that my early and ever intensifying involvement in reading might have something to do with this.

Rise like lions after slumber—Earlier this month students in London took some righteous and oh so welcome action against the reactionary British government's moves against social benefits, and to mark the occasion Rust Belt Radical reprinted a 1992 Paul Foot essay on poet Percy Byshe Shelley, commenting that it's "easy to imagine him among the throngs of young people who marched for their future. He might have written a few stanzas on the occupation of Tory headquarters had he witnessed it. Hell, he might have broken a window or two himself." Read the Foot essay.

Freedom's just another word—Check out this fantastic piece by novelist Percival Everett about sexism against women authors. If a woman had written the book Jonathan Franzen just did, it would be considered a domestic family saga and never considered anything close to, you should excuse the expression, the Great American Novel.

Point of personal privilege—Tomorrow my best friend arrives from San Francisco for a weeklong visit, her first to New York in many years. Having tacked some vacation days on to next week's four-day "holiday" weekend so we can spend some good quality time together, I'll be doing just that, starting tomorrow night, for the next week or so. I don't expect to blog at all. When I get back online, I will have passed a landmark of sorts. I'll have now lived in New York for 28 years. I was 28 when I moved here, so I've now lived half my life here and am as much a New Yorker as a Michigander—more, I think, for though I was formed there I've done most of my adult living here. Here's how I moved: the evening after "Thanksgiving," with $20 in my pocket, personal items crammed into a small backpack and a few clothes stuffed into a shopping bag, I boarded and rode a bus filled with Palestinian sisters and brothers, all of us headed overnight from Detroit to Washington for a demonstration the next day; there we marched and got tear-gassed; then I boarded a different bus, this one taking demonstrators from New York back home and me with them to my new home. Maybe I'll write more about all that, but for now I'll just say from this vantage point, 28 years later, that I made the right decision with that move—and that the best decision for any of us next week is, if possible, to march with United American Indians of New England to mark the National Day of Mourning, and if we can't get to Plymouth then at least to take whatever action we can in solidarity with the ongoing struggles of Native nations whose lands were stolen and civilizations decimated by the European invasion the turkey holiday celebrates.

This week

• I worked too damned hard and
• I slept too damned little and
• I started and stopped too many disappointing books and
• I wrote not one sentence and
• I contributed not one whit to the class struggle

all of which have something to do with not blogging. I'm not in a fugue state or anything, but it's just been one of those weeks when getting to work and back is pretty much all I could manage. I've been collecting stuff for this blog, though, wisps of this and wonders of that, so I should be back soon with some substantive words.

Speaking of words and what I haven't done, I believe something else happened this week. I can't quite be sure, for who knows, I may yet flare back into rage and resistance, but I think I entered the last stage of the mourning process over not getting my novel published. Acceptance, or something like it. Something finally clicked, it seems, and I recognized this is one dream, the dearest dream I've ever dared, at least on the puny level of my own little life, that's dead. I'm nearly ready to make my peace with this, it seems. I'll never know why I failed, I'll never know if it's all about the market and the industry and all the changes and so on and I would have succeeded had this book been written 10 years ago, or if it's simply not good enough for any bookshelf. No way to know. So frustrating. In my long, initially enthused and energetic and ultimately sporadic, pessimistic and doomed effort to find a route to publication for this novel into which I poured so much of my heart and soul, I mostly found firmly closed doors--but I also had enough responses of the "it's not for me but it's great and I'm sure it'll find a home" variety that I kept slogging onward, kept holding onto hope, probably much longer than I should have. If the hope, better recognized as delusion, has at last slipped out of my grip it's a good thing, I think, a relief, to finally put the sucker away and shut that drawer. Who knows, maybe I'll open it again some day after I finish the second novel I'm now writing.

That kind of week, right? And to top it off, the travesty of all travesties came last night on Project Runway when the awful, hypocritical, pinched, smug, myopic, uncreative, anti-innovation, bourgeois judges snatched victory away from the miraculous Mondo Guerra, who'd clearly earned it. This is the second season in a row that the obviously superior designer was passed over for the PR prize and the obviously superior designer was Latino. Last year it was Emilio Sosa. Nor can we forget how Korto Momolu was robbed a few seasons back. In fact, only once has a person of color won PR. In the thousands of tweets, blog entries, columns and commentaries that you can find today on the PR finale, 99 percent of them horrified laments at the outcome, quite a few characterize this and past decisions as racist. It's hard to argue with that interpretation.

Next week: next week!

Adaptation

Needing a break last night, I watched a movie I'd DVRd a couple weeks ago. Adaptation, written by Charlie Kaufman and directed by Spike Jonze. I'd loved it when it first came out in 2002, a time when I was deeply engaged in, nearly obsessed with, writing my first novel, but felt frustrated at having no other writers to discuss it with. This time--I loved it again! And I'll discuss it with you!

Briefly, because I have a busy day ahead and also because I can't claim to know anything about film as an art form; my reaction to this movie is all about one aspect, the aspect that seems to me to be central but I don't know if I'm right.

Anyway, to me this is a gloriously slant movie about creativity. About the impossible terror and horror of creating art. The story itself, all about "Charlie Kaufman"'s excruciating efforts to write a screenplay adaptation of New Yorker writer Susan Orlean's bestselling nonfiction book The Orchid Thief, all the while being driven up the wall by his doofus freeloading hack of a twin brother's concomitant effort to write his own derivative action-thriller-drivel screenplay, is hilarious and strangely touching. The scenes with Charlie berating himself in voiceovers about his failures as a writer, a few passages of which I'll share below, are priceless. I think any writer would probably react as I did, loving, recognizing, wallowing along with Charlie in the torture of art. And there's the question of how or whether to "adapt"; the movie teases out multiple meanings of that word, all of them fascinating. Ultimately, there's a brilliant turn as the plot plays out the alternative against which Charlie had struggled for the first two-thirds of the film, taking the road he wanted so desperately not to take, the road he'd tried so hard to turn away from in his quest to strike out in an original direction and find some new means of creative expression. So that the movie ends as a full-on satire of--or, you might say, a full-on ironic plunge into--all that is commercial, trite, lowest-common-denominator-shallow about Hollywood's product. With that, with Charlie and his movie becoming all he'd never wanted himself or his art to be but what Hollywood rewards with money and fame, with this adaptation to the way of the world, the movie ultimately becomes a profound meditation on what it is (and is not) to be an artist. What it means to stay true to your vision, or not.

I'll note here that I've had mixed feelings about other Charlie Kaufman movies I've seen. The other one that I loved was Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which has as much to say about love, and in as new a way, as Adaptation has to say about art. On the other hand, I found Being John Malkovich misogynist. And I can't even begin to list my objections to the abysmal mess that is Synecdoche, New York.

Never mind that, let me finish with this, some lines from Adaptation. All are in voiceover, from the mind of the character Charlie Kaufman as he's trying to write the screenplay. The first is as he first sits down at the keyboard to begin.

Begin. How to start? I'm hungry. I should get coffee. Coffee would help me, I think. I should write something first, then reward myself with coffee. Coffee and a muffin. OK. So I need to establish the themes. Maybe banana nut. That's a good muffin. [He writes four or five sentences.] I need a break.

OMG--this is so me! Every time I sit down to write!

Later, as he stares at another blank page:

I have no understanding of anything else but my own panic and self-loathing and pathetic little existence. It's like the only thing I'm actually qualified to write about is myself.

Who hasn't felt this way? Finally, with my long, ongoing failure to get my first novel published, I can't help but relate to this.

My jaunt into the abyss brought me nothing. Well, isn't that just the risk one takes for attempting something new?

That's the spirit! That's the ticket! We carry on. As we must.

I won't be blogging again until at least late this week, possibly not till next week. I'll be on the couch eating bonbons for a couple days after taking care of a minor medical matter and then once I'm back at work it's back to the couch each evening, legs up, no computer. Till then, then, toodles.

Queer youth: hang in there! Love is coming!

I've never told this to anyone except my lover Teresa but what is the internet for if not oversharing, and what is this moment for but saying what needs to be said?

When I was 19 and in the throes of coming out of the closet as a lesbian I tried to kill myself. I thoroughly botched the attempt, thank heavens, and perhaps that's because subconsciously I wasn't as sure of my decision as I thought I was, but I did think I couldn't face going forward in life. There were of course many and complicated reasons, but the main one was that I didn't feel strong enough for the life I believed was in store for me. What I thought was in store for me was being a weird pariah, being whispered about, made fun of, shunned, maltreated, at school, at work, in the world at large; losing all my friends; being alone and lonely forever. Above all, I expected to lose the love of my family once they knew I was a lesbian. I didn't see how I could survive that.

Now, at 56, I know that what was actually in store was very different. I didn't lose any of my old friends and I made many new ones in and out of the LGBT community over the years. Sure, I've lived in an anti-gay society and felt its effects in general and specific ways, but that's life under capitalism, you find your way through it and if you're lucky, like me, you find the struggle and find your voice via activism and tap into your righteous anger and find strength from that. You discover a community--the LGBT community, and sisters and brothers in other oppressed communities with whom you link up to wage united battle for equality and peace and justice.

As for my family, well, I can't report that things went all that well. It's one of the sadnesses of my life that my mother died before ever really coming around to acceptance and understanding as I'd like to think she would have eventually. But that doesn't mean she stopped loving me, she always did and always expressed it, and yes, these things are complex, your family can oppress and love you at the same time and you know what else? Somehow you get past the pain and disappointment and you grow and thrive and life your life. Even if your family never does embrace your true self the way they should, that does not destroy you. You find support elsewhere, from teachers and elders and friends and lovers, you look around and realize that the joy and fulfillment of living as your own true self, your gay as a goose queer as the moon self, will sustain you.

I've segued into speaking to you, my dear precious beloved queer children and youths, so let me go on and address you directly. You may feel like you're the only one. You may be sure your family and friends will reject you. You're not the only one, not by a longshot. And for most of you, your family and friends will not reject you. They'll keep loving you. Many will accept and embrace you immediately--that's the result of these last 40-some years of the LGBT liberation movement. We've changed consciousness. There is much less bigotry and ignorance. Still, there will be some who let you know that they love you but also express their displeasure. This will hurt you terribly, but remember that you've got the rest of your life to watch them change, watch them come around and get over their homophobia; and in any case, your self-worth does not, must not, depend on them.

For those few whose family, captive to reactionary ideology, do reject you, hang on! You will find love elsewhere. You'll end up with a whole other family. You will! This will not destroy you, not as long as you can hang on at this most difficult moment.

In addition to the terrible string of suicides this week, I heard a heartbreaking story a couple weeks ago from a schoolteacher friend. There is a 7-year-old child in her school who is transgender. He's a boy who identifies as a girl. He tells everyone that he's going to be a girl soon. His parents are kind and supportive, as is his teacher. But a couple weeks ago this child told a classmate about his feelings and his hopes and dreams to become a girl--and the classmate told him that this would entail many surgeries, much blood and pain, that he'd suffer a lot physically and never be normal or happy. Who knows where the other child heard this but he thoughtlessly, or perhaps maliciously in that mean way children sometimes have, said it to his friend the trans child. And the 7-year-old trans child went home and tried to kill himself that night. He tried to drown himself in the bathtub. Luckily, he was found in time and survived. But how tragic is this, that a little child, because of some ignorant oppressive twisted hurtfulness passed along by a schoolmate, felt that his life was without hope?

Hope is the thing to hold on to. If you don't know that you'll find your way forward, if you can't believe it just because all of us who've come through the other side are telling it to you, what you must do is hope for it. You'll only have to hope for a little while. Before you know it you'll find yourself living your own true life. 

Your way forward may be different than mine was. Maybe you'll play first base in a slow-pitch softball league and find the dyke friends and lovers of your dreams. Maybe you'll cuddle up with a batch of big hairy bears. Or join a gay chess club. Or write your way through the hard early years, and your writing will help show the way for the next batch of LGBT youth. Most of you won't end up as communist revolutionaries like I did (though some will, and I can't wait to meet you)--but the hope I hold on to is that many of you will turn toward activism of one sort or another. Because by taking action, by joining your sisters and brothers in united militant action, you'll help make things better, help bring us toward the day when no queer youth will even consider suicide. And you'll make your own life better, happier, fuller and more rewarding. I guarantee it.

The reason I've never told anyone about my own close call at age 19 is that I've felt deep shame about it. The fact that I nearly succumbed to homophobia always seemed such a weakness. Now I want to say to queer youth struggling with feeling hopeless, alone, unloved and unloveable that these feelings are not shameful--they are exactly what this oppressive society means for you to feel. There's nothing wrong with you, not for being queer and not for feeling scared. You've just got to hear and believe all of us telling you that it will get better.

I'm going to follow up as soon as I can with some notes about books for and about LGBT children and youth. Such books were few and far between, if they existed at all, when I was in my teens, but I know they would have been such a help. They do exist now. I'm going to study up on them.

My e-reading devolution

I woke up too early today and got into the city an hour before time for work, so I took myself out to breakfast at Veselka. Ssh, don't tell Teresa, who's out of town. Oh hell, she's got nothing to be jealous about--she's in Los Angeles, and after that San Antonio, so she's getting plenty of her own comfort food, the cuisine of her people, there in the Southwest, AKA stolen Mexico, and I know she wouldn't begrudge me treating myself to the food of my people. Well, strictly speaking, not my people so much as the people who tried to wipe out my people ... but much of the food is the same, naturally enough, since the Jews and the Ukrainians (and Poles, Lithuanians, Russians, etc.) lived in close proximity for several centuries until they got rid of us. 

Potato latkes. Borscht. Blintzes. And kasha, especially kasha, oh how I love kasha. It's a deep dive down the nostalgia well for me, I'm aware that it's not merely a matter of taste though I do love the taste. The merest whiff of the aroma of kasha sends me back, way way back to my teeny tiny years, to my Lithuanian Jewish immigrant grandparents' house on Broadstreet in Detroit. Kasha and mothballs, those are the two smells that evoke that house for me. You don't come across the smell of mothballs too often anymore--why is that? is it because all the material of which our clothes are made is treated with such an oh god I'd rather not think about it range of chemicals that no moth would come anywhere near them anymore?--so it's left to kasha alone to remind me of those otherwise nearly lost memories.

Before the plate of kasha and eggs arrived, before I ate breakfast in a buckwheat-bouquet reverie, I had of course been reading a novel. By which I mean I was deeply engaged in a profound experience in single-minded concentration; I was exercising vital areas of my thinking, creative, and imaginative brain; I was building new brain cells in those and other areas; I was, and though this might seem contradictory it's not, resting and refreshing my brain, among other things. Most of which, in any case the complex combination of which, is uniquely achieved by reading a book, especially fiction, is not and cannot be achieved via interaction with electronic devices.
 
This link is to a recent article about studies showing the dangers, detriments, shortcomings of high-tech multi-tasking--the texting/tweeting/emailing/web surfing/iPod-listening routine. It does not directly address the issue of your brain on e-readers. But the connection seems clear to me, and I have read several other pieces in recent months that are specifically about the difference between reading a physical book and reading text on a Kindle, Sony Reader or other screen device (pieces to which unfortunately I can't find the the links, but surely you trust me that I'm not making this stuff up)--differences not of the "I love the smell of books" variety but rather the crucial issues about depth, thought, learning, memory and so on.

It is becoming more and more clear, it seems to me, that there is a distinguishable difference in the mental processes and the effects on your brain--on you, that is, your self, your mind, the way you think, dream, imagine, understand, grow--that occur and accrue via the two different types of reading. And that the processes and effects experienced with reading old-fashioned books are superior to those that come with e-reading. In other words, we may lose something very precious indeed--the capacity for deep engagement, engagement at those under-levels of consciousness that churn away while we read a book and that, it's beginning to seem if I understand the reports on these various studies correctly, is not available to us when we interact with an electronic screen for reasons that are still not entirely understood--if we abandon physical books entirely.

I'd been leaning the other way for a while. As I wrote here earlier this year, I have no ideological objection to the new reading technologies. Furthermore, I'm sick of lugging heavy books around everywhere, would love to be rid of that burden and exchange it for a single light object that could hold within it many books. The development of e-readers under capitalism is necessarily driven by the search for profit, and so it's going to be a long, slow ride until these devices are available for the masses at affordable prices and with the capacity for borrowing library books instead of being limited to buying books, from pre-selected vendors to boot. All that aside, though, I'd been open to the eventuality.

Now, however, I'm rethinking. Of course, my view will remain tentative until I try out an e-reader for myself, and since nobody I know has one to lend me, it'll be a while till that happens. Who knows, perhaps I'll be surprised. Perhaps I'll find it as deep and rewarding as reading the page made of paper. I've come to doubt it, though. Even to fear it. My mind is challenged enough of late, what with words, names, all sorts of data constantly vanishing into thin air. The last thing I need is one more variable, along with hormone changes and lack of sleep, making me yet more pixilated than I already am.

Plus, I love reading in bed with my lover on a Sunday morning. Let an e-reader come between us? Never!

Turn the beat around, she writes

Got to hear percussion!

Yesterday, my birthday, I posted a silly note on Facebook that the day's theme was "Hot Flash," which I imagined as a Junior Walker and the All Stars type of catchy little brassy number. Today, settling in to the still shocking and appalling reality that I've turned the corner of my 50s and am tumbling downhill toward 60, I'm singing a different tune. It's all bass and drums. Disco, baby! The music of my 20s, the days I spent driving bus and nights dancing under that glittering spinning silver ball. I've never stopped loving disco, and it's still the music most likely to get me up off my aged old butt and shaking my groove thing. OK, sorry, I'll stop ... although in general I feel you shouldn't stop till you get enough ... OK, there, now, I'm done, really.

Not only have I never ceased loving it, but I have also always felt that the backlash against disco that started in the 1980s and in certain circles has never since abated has a very strong racist and anti-gay subtext. So this past spring I was happy to hear about a new book that makes this case while also celebrating the glorious life-affirming joy of disco music. Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture by Alice Echols. I knew Alice for a little while back in the disco days when we both lived in Ann Arbor and I was a bus driver and she was a graduate student. She's also written a critically praised biography of Janis Joplin that I've long meant to read (obviously her academic career took, while my bus driving didn't), but I most love that she's taken on a defense of disco, a genre maligned by meanspirited, racist, homophobic commentators.

Photo by TheCuriousGnome

I didn't mean to write a paean to disco this morning. I meant merely to mention that for some reason the great old Vicki Sue Robinson number (no, not the counterrevolutionary Gloria Estafan's version, no thank you very much) "Turn the Beat Around" has been pumping at my brain since I woke up this morning, and to say that this seems to me to be a good sign. Assuming it's not some Oliver-Sachs-worthy symptom of brain dysfunction, I take it as my subconscious reassuring me that there's still some kick in the old girl yet. And that I should and can settle into the rhythm I've charted out for myself on re-entry after my vacation. 

Work. Write. Contribute, as best I can, to the class struggle. Eat right, exercise, sleep. Read, and that's correct, I list reading as the last priority, which probably doesn't mean I'll do it much less since I've still got my subway sessions every day but does mean I won't allow my reading to intervene in my writing or activist life. It won't be my default mode. Write: this is the bass line I wish to bring back to the fore from the hush to which it had faded.

I have two to three stories in completed or nearly completed draft form that I'm rushing to rewrite and finish. And then I'll be recommencing my great project, the novel I began two years ago at my Saltonstall Colony residency, on which I've worked only sporadically since then. A couple writers whose opinions I respect have read the opening 50-ish pages and seem to think they're pretty good and have been on my case to get to it and finish the damned thing. My first novel remains unpublished but that fact can't be permitted to block my progress on this second one anymore. And so I proceed.

Meanwhile, I've just joined the online women writers' community called She Writes. I have my doubts that it will prove useful or meaningful but we'll see. As far as I can tell, it's sort of like Facebook but specifically for and about women writers. Given that I'd drifted toward a reprehensible tendency to waste time on Facebook and have recently broken myself of that bad habit, I have no desire to replace it with another equally pointless diversion. As a full-time worker with very limited time and energy outside of work hours, and determined as I am at this post-vacation moment full of new-year-resolution earnestness to stick to a disciplined, productive writing regimen, I don't plan to start hanging out at a new social-networking site, albeit one with a she-writes angle. On the other hand, who knows. Perhaps there's more there than meets the eye. Perhaps I'll make some new virtual friends who will enrich my writing life in as yet unforeseeable ways. I'm willing to give it a try.

Withal, another year begun. Uptempo now. That's all she writes.

Vacation summation: I love New York

It is perhaps a fitting denoument to my month of full retreat from real life: I just realized, 100 pages into the book I'd started reading yesterday, what was to be the last book of this vacation, that, gol darn it all, I've read this sucker before! Sheesh, I hate it when that happens. Especially when it takes this long, 100 pages or more, until the realization hits. Ah well. I shut the thing and pulled out another volume, which I may or may not get a chance to dive into today since I've got lots of practical stuff to attend to as well as my wits to gather in preparation for re-entry.

So there we have it: 10 books read, which averages out to one every three days, which is off the pace of previous years but reflects a nice balance of being out and about, so it's all cool. Here is the briefest of recaps.

The Passage--eh.
Sag Harbor--yay.
The Three Weissmanns of Westport--tee hee.
A Short History of Women--nah.
So Cold the River--yippee.
The Thing Around Your Neck--damn.
The Disinherited--wow.
The Song Is You--bleh.
I Am Not Sidney Poitier--oh my.
The Great Perhaps--okay.

I've already blogged about some of the out-and-aboutness of my time off. MOMA, the Morgan Library, South Street Seaport, Coney Island, the main library. I referred to but haven't yet written about my afternoon at P.S. 1 Museum of Contemporary Art; I will soon, I hope, because there was some standout work on display there in the Greater New York 2010 show. For now, a few other tidbits.

Last summer I found myself in Park Slope several times for some reason. This summer it was, again who knows why, Astoria. I spent parts of four or five days there. Strolling, eating, lolling, reading. Hanging out in Astoria Park and watching the East River flow. Shopping among the astonishingly many varieties of feta cheese, olives, Greek pastries and the like at Titan Foods (no, I don't tout for retail businesses here but yes, I love this store).

I also spent a nice long browsing (and, yes, buying) session at a great, relatively new bookstore on Broadway in Astoria, right across the street from one of our old favorite restaurants Uncle George's. Seaburn Books. It's a stuffed-to-the-rafters cornucopia of books, some new and slightly discounted but mostly used books in good condition and very cheap. This is the kind of wonderful bookshop where you can lose yourself for a good long time, reading in one of the old chairs, chatting with the owner Dr. Sam Chekwas, who also runs a small press that seems to publish a variety of books and that I intend to investigate further. Downstairs there's an event space where there are author readings and the like. This was a great find and I'm sure I'll find myself returning again and again.

Right in my own neighborhood of Woodside, a short block and a half from the train station, I made another new bookstore find, this one kind of kooky and quirky in a weirdly delightful way. Housed in a ramshackle, hot as hell tiny old garage at the absolute end of a dead end abutting on the Long Island Rail Road track, it's a funky little used book paradise. Only open weekday evenings from 6:30 to 8:00, and Saturdays from 11 to 4. Huh? I can't figure those hours out, but whatever; they buy books and they sell books, every one of them for $2, or three for $5. I went three times over these four weeks, motivated to cull my shelves a bit so I could sell some and then use that cash to buy some. There's no order, all the books just thrown onto the shelves in a haphazard mishmash, so you have to commit to standing there and sifting through all the dross in hopes of finding some gold. Which I did. It's worth the effort, because I was surprised at how many good books I found.

Best of all, though, was this. The first afternoon I was there, as I stood and browsed, a young woman came in and said to the proprietor, "Do you have any books by Tolstoy?" He replies, "Tolstoy? That's that philosopher, right?" I looked at the woman who was trying to keep a straight face as she said, "Um, well, sort of, he wrote a lot of books. Novels. I'm especially looking for one, Anna Karenina. Do you have a copy?" "Anna--um, Anna something, hmm, well, that doesn't ring a bell, but I'll keep an eye out for it." But wait, there's more. Yesterday I was hanging out with a friend and I told her about this place and suggested we go check it out together. As we walked there, I told her the "Tolstoy the philosopher" story. We were both chuckling about it as we entered the garage/bookstore. I said hi to the owner, who knows my face by now, and he starts telling me they've got a lot of great new books and how people have been telling him they keep finding unexpected stuff there. "For instance," he says, coming up to me and brandishing a copy of none other than Anna Karenina. "There's a lady who's been coming in every week asking if we have a copy of this ... this Anna Kuh-Kuh--Anna-Something-or-Other. And look, now we have it!"

I don't get it. The bookseller who doesn't know books. The bookshop that isn't open hardly ever. There's some sort of business model at work here but I'm the last one to figure it out. In any case, I hope it lasts because I'd like to keep stopping in, selling and buying and eavesdropping.

Why else do I love a New York vacation? Try this. After my lovely afternoon gazing at the water on a South Street Seaport lounge chair last week, I returned for more of the same, this time with my lover Teresa. I was afraid I'd hyped it too much, you know how that goes, but happily she loved it as much as I had. We stayed for several hours. And we had, in addition to the simple pleasure of sitting in the river's breeze, two grand new experiences.

First, after a good long time on the upper deck, we went down to the first level and sat on a bench for a final few minutes. After a while an elderly Chinese couple sat down next to us. Some employees of one of the tour boats that ply these waters came around handing out promotional fliers. The man sitting next to me on the bench took several, placed all but one aside and began doing something with the one, working with some delicacy and care on a series of intricate folds. I was trying not to stare but then he turned to me and said, "Chinese origami." Then Teresa and I watched as he created, with deft handwork that baffled me, a whale, a bird whose wings move up and down, and a frog that jumps. Created, and presented to us as gifts! It was a thrilling experience to watch his artistry and to be its beneficiary. All we could do was ooh and ah and thank him profusely and bask in one of those I Love New York moments.

Next came another. The highlight of my whole vacation, I do believe. We'd spent all that time watching various boats coming and going in the harbor, and we'd gotten curious. Many of them are tourist boats--dinner cruises, harbor tours and the like that charge an arm and a leg--but some of them seemed to be something else. So as we walked off, we stopped at one of the ticket kiosks and inquired. We found out that the next pier down, the Wall Street pier, a very short walk from the Seaport area, houses a scene that I never knew existed. A commuter ferry terminal, with boats that travel between various towns in Jersey (Hoboken, Weehauken, others) and Wall Street, between various points in Brooklyn and Wall Street, and between Queens and Wall Street. Who knew that hundreds if not thousands of workers from the financial district commute to and from work every day via boat? Well, it turned out that there was a 5:15 ferry due to leave for Hunters Point, Queens. We got to the pier in time to buy tickets, watch the bustling rush-hour scene, and board a boat for our home borough.

O.M.G. What a splendid, wondrous 20 minutes we then spent, gorgeous vista of the harbor opening up behind us, the city rising around us, sights of waterfront industry that you'd never otherwise see, but most of all the late-afternoon sun sparkling on the water like a million dancing diamonds and the sea breeze brushing our faces and blowing our hair. Utter joy.

Sure, Hunters Point, where we got off, is a godforsaken nowheresville and we had a long walk to a train station where we could enter the subway to get the rest of the way home, but it was worth it for that 20 minutes of bliss on the water.

I do love New York. Because, heat and stink and crowds and all, there are also quirky little book nooks and unexpected origami gifts and 20 varieties of feta cheese, and water all around.

Vacation photo gallery

I'm going to start posting some pix from my various outings during this vacation. They're more or less random, as in, reflecting the rare occasions when I thought to take a picture and, further, filtered by how crappily the cell phone photos turned out.

For starters, this.

 

I hesitate to write about it because it's one of those obscure spots you don't want to become better known in fear of its being overrun, but there's a lovely corner tucked away in, believe it or not, the South Street Seaport that offers a splendid way to while away a summer's afternoon in relative peace and quiet. For free. The Seaport is generally considered a ghastly tourist trap, to be avoided by any real New Yorker, and with good reason. It's replete with garishly tackily fake Ye Olde Harbor crap, with lots of high-priced stores, with very expensive and not very good restaurants. Furthermore, in the summertime it's completely overrun by tourists. You practically have to use your arms to part your way through the throngs of them to make your way around back. To where the Seaport also has, if you know where to find it, a wonderful deck situated right over the East River, furnished with wooden lounge chairs where you can sit. And sit. And sit. Contemplate the waterfront, watch the boats wafting to and fro, gaze across at Brooklyn, ease your pulse down to the rhythm of the drifting current, regard the beautiful beautiful Brooklyn Bridge (pictured here). Read. Nap. Think. Write.

I spent some three hours there one July afternoon. OK, it ain't the country. It's not even Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco, where at least you can put the city behind you and look out upon a natural watery prospect. Here you haven't escaped the city. It's all around you. But you can at least, if you time it right and you luck out in terms of noise and crowd, find yourself at a remove, find a way to relax. I managed the feat, and had a lovely afternoon.

Oh--and there's a miniature golf course back there too! Could you just die?

Hello from Hotsville

Before I started my vacation I said I probably wouldn't blog much but I wasn't thinking about what the real reason would turn out to be. It's too damned hot. (Kiss Me, Kate! Or no, please don't, it's too hot for any bodily contact.) As a result of recent household budgetary cutbacks, we no longer have a wireless internet connection, and the computer desk is in the hottest corner of our apartment, to which I've been unable to chain myself for more than a few minutes at a time. Has there been a day that hasn't hit or surpassed 90 degrees? I don't think so. Today is one of the worst, but I've moved the fan so it's looming right on top of me, and let's see if I can't endure this for long enough to get a few things said.

One success I've managed during this break is getting myself to some museums and looking at some art. Twice, amazingly, the first week, and once the second.

My first stop was at the Morgan Library and Museum. Not without mixed feelings, naturally. This spot houses the collection of the most larcenous of the robber barons, old J.P. himself, houses it, partly, in his old Madison Avenue mansion. So I knew I'd be sort of half sick the whole time. But really that's no different than most of this town's museums, all of them built on plundered riches. You have to swallow down your bile and get on with it if you're ever going to look at the art. I'd never been to the Morgan before, and have meant to forever, but I made a stupid mistake. At the front desk they told me that "Mr. Morgan's library is closed for renovation" but that the museum section with all the current special exhibits was open. Hothead that I am, I kept too busy smirking and whispering to myself nasty comments about "Mr. Morgan" to take in what this meant--that the very material I'd always wanted to see is what's housed in the thief's currently closed library. That is, all the fascinating manuscripts, stuff like Thoreau's handwritten journals, Byron's letters, etc., is exactly what my $12 entrance fee wouldn't buy me. Once I figured that out, I'd already paid and begun looking around, so ah well, I took in what there was to take in.

Starting with a foreshortened viewing of what was billed as an introductory film about the library and museum. Made it through only about four minutes of that. Four minutes of high-culture talking heads extolling Pierrepont's virtues as a lover of art, with the quickest, most euphemistic reference to the source of his riches. Something about his "success" in "steel, banking and other industries." Could ya puke, or what? No matter. Onward.

I did take in an interesting, though small, exhibit of drawings and etchings by Albrecht Duhrer that I liked a lot. And a fun exhibit of "romantic gardens" and books and art inspired by them, all this quirky demented stuff from England, France and Germany from the 1800s mostly. It ended with some U.S. material, saving the best for last: the original proposals for Central Park by Olmsted and Vaux, the actual drawings, plans, prints, etc. Of course all of this is packed with political meaning. The English gardens directly related to the flowering of colonialism. The history of Central Park rife with racism, super-exploitation of labor, and the most snobbish class elitism you can imagine--the place was supposed to be a retreat where the moneyed swells could get a break from the hoi polloi. Good to see and lots to think about. But not lots to see, what with Mr. Morgan's library off limits and all, so I was finished earlier than I'd hoped and emerged into the heat of the day. What to do, what to do? What I decided to do was walk the few short blocks to the main library and hang out there for a while.

There too I encountered many annoyances, starting with whatever the hell monstrosity they're constructing out front that blocks the beautiful old facade--what are they doing? what can they be thinking?--and extending to the naming frenzy that seems to have taken hold since I last visited, which has the whole library building itself and every room and bench within it now bearing the moniker of some thief who bought the bragging rights. Grrr. Do we not pay taxes? Why must our public treasures be auctioned off to these parasites? Come now, we all know the answer. Our taxes go for war and occupation, for bank bailouts and tax breaks to corporations. The richest person in New York City is the mayor of New York City. Do people throughout the country know this? Do folks see what an extreme state things have come to, where the bankers and biggest of the big bourgeoisie have taken direct control of state power? It's as if we're in the Florence of the Medicis. Anyway, this is the context for the wonderful beautiful main library being auctioned off piece by piece--or, in P.R.-speak, not being able to survive on public funding and being saved by generous benefactors. Yecch. And grrr again.

That off my chest, I must also say oh my. How I love the main reading room. I'd forgotten. Somehow years had passed since I last used it, and I'd forgotten how gorgeous it is, how wondrous and special.

There is the architectural grandeur. That drop-dead-gorgeous ceiling. There is the cool air whooshing through. The high windows and somehow perfect lighting. The spaciousness that engulfs you so you don't feel crowded no matter how many people are sitting at those rows and rows of long tables. Magical. So that's how I finished that afternoon, sitting and reading (although the "reading room" is actually a work and research room, most people using it to work) and looking about me and remembering what a lucky girl I am to have a nice paid vacation and a big pile of books to get through.

I'll get to that, the books I've read, and also to my other artsy adventures, in upcoming posts if and when the heat lets up. Meanwhile, I'm heading to the Astoria Pool! Another NYC public treasure--hey, I'm surprised they haven't named it after some billionaire yet--oh wait, oops, Astoria itself is named after another 19th century scoundrel, John Jacob Astor, the first multi-millionaire in U.S. history--well, anyway, the city pools are great, and the Astoria Pool is I believe the greatest of them all.

It was a WPA project, and it is absolutely beautiful. Can't wait to cool off, for free!

Into the ether

That last was the red of it. Here is the read of it. My vacation begins any ... moment ... now ...

Today I made my final crazy round of libraries. When I leave work I'll be lugging home two more bags of books. I have four weeks off so I had to be sure I'd have enough books on hand to allow for the possibility that some will be duds that I'll start and quickly give up on. Now I do, I think.

I don't expect to blog much while I'm vacating. Who knows, though.

Zombies & other divertissements

As must be obvious from my infrequent posts, I'm sinking well and good into week-before-vacation mode, a.k.a. so tired I can barely drag my ass to work and back/so excited that soon I won't have to for a while. This three-day weekend is a nice taste of what's to come. Yesterday my love Teresa and I walked to the Sunnyside farmers' market early and more or less relaxed the rest of the day; today's agenda consists of household chores and relaxing; tomorrow more of the same plus, supposedly, some writing. My coming week will consist of some slight political activity, some major wage work as I rush to finish what must be finished before I shut down the department for four weeks, and some nutty vacation prep in the form of running among libraries to finish my panicky amassing of a vacation books pile and lugging said books home as well as checking online for various vacation activity possibilities.

Books? Well, yeah, it goes without saying that my major vacation plan is to read. But activity? Yeah, come on, old girl, try to rouse yourself to leave the house and possibly even the delightful borough of Queens and go somewhere, do something. All year long I think of the museums I'll hit during my summer vacation; the days I'll spend in heaven at the beach which, one of the joys of living in NYC, is a mere subway fare away; the parks; the free concerts; and so on. And most summers I do very little of it, because after another year of sleepless nights and endless weeks of dragging myself out of bed and in to work every fucking day all I want to do is sleep and read and hang close to home. And write. I must write. I'm trying to finish two stories and some poems, and then re-enter my novel in progress.

But this time around, I really am going to try to get out and about a bit more. Otherwise what's the point of living in a city where there's so much to do and so much of it is free or cheap? If and when I do manage to partake of some cul-chah, I'll pop in here to report on it. For the most part, however, blogging will probably be spotty at best for several weeks from here on out.

Getting back to books, though, I do want to report this: I couldn't help myself, this morning I started one I'd meant to save till my vacation. I've been forcing myself to slog through John Updike's Rabbit, Run, a thoroughly loathsome, repugnant work of essential misogyny shot through as well with casual racism and homophobia yet one I promised a friend I'd read. And I will finish it, probably this coming week on the train to and from work. But this morning, in semi-vacation mode, I just couldn't force myself to pick it up. Instead I opened Paul Is Undead: The British Zombie Invasion by Alan Goldsher. Oh my gosh what fun. When I picked it up the other day I showed it to a young friend and while she was amused she didn't get the title reference. Then I talked on the phone to my best friend, who's about my age, and I simply said the title and she burst out laughing. Those of you who didn't live through those days in 1969/1970 when the rumor ran round the world that Paul McCartney was dead* simply can't appreciate the deliciousness of this title. When I first saw it last week, I immediately remembered sitting in my high school Italian class where one of my classmates told me she'd heard that the Beatle had died and it had been covered up, and then all that followed, investigating the "clues" on the cover of Abbey Road and Sargent Pepper, playing "Revolution #9" backwards and hearing that weird voice say "I buried Paul" and so on and so forth. It was with considerable glee, then, that I picked up this book, thinking it would be a great start to my vacation reading as well as a cool lead-in to the more serious vampire novel The Passage that's thick on my pile. Rigid? Who, me?** Plans are meant to be changed, and so today I'm reading the tale of the zombie Beatles.


*Of course we all would later come to despise Paul--"Sir" Paul that is, for of course he happily accepted the British colonialist "order of empire"--and wish oh wish that he, not John, had died.

**You who get it, get it.

TV, fatigue, war: yes, everything is political

I've been kind of pooped on account of this and that, not least the muggy heat, which I grew up with in muggy hot Detroit and used to love, or at least thrive in, but which I can no longer take. It saps me. I wilt. Summer used to be my season. No more. Oh how I long to be the girl I used to be ... but that's another song altogether. The song I've been singing this week is--oy the shame of it!--the TV song. Yes, that's right, my confession of the week is that I've been on a TV kick.

A week ago we signed on to that cheap Time Warner Cable offer they've been promoting the hell out of, because it is indeed cheap. For a year, anyway, after which we'll have to go cold turkey and switch back to some lesser, cheaper deal since TWC will jack up its charges. For now, though, we'll be paying at least $50 a month less than we had been for cable, phone and internet--and getting much more, including fancier phone features, much faster internet connection, and, heaven help us, about 120 additional TV channels plus a sharper digital screen plus DVR.

Those new channels. They're doing me in. A series on the origins and future of the universe, guided by Stephen Hawking! Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman! Surgery, childbirth, real ER drama (from all of which I have to constantly avert my eyes to avoid fainting)! Broadway musicals 24/7! That silly new sitcom with Betty White, the adorable Valerie Bertinelli et al crafted for precisely my age and sex demographic! Noah's Arc, which I watched for the first time last night and became immediately hooked on! Old movies galore! And that DVR! I'm spending nearly as much time roaming the guide and programming shows and movies to record as I am actually watching. Teresa's out of town, at the U.S. Social Forum in my hometown, which she tells me is, strangely enough, not hot and muggy at the moment, and, as often happens when she travels, despite all my resolutions to use the alone time to write and attend to overdue projects, I'm instead just sort of functioning, getting to work and back and that's about it, only rather than sinking into a chair reading in the evenings I've devolved to the couch and TV.

It will pass, I'm told. It's the novelty, I'm assured. Let's hope.

This week is the anniversary of the start of the Korean War. In my manic perusal of the TV channel guide I discovered that all day today Turner Classic Movies is running films on this topic. Nowadays the U.S. media routinely call it "the forgotten war" but at the time Hollywood apparently took due note of it, churning out a goodly number of salutes to that despicable exercise in U.S. imperialist mass murder, starring such notables as Sterling Hayden, Alan Ladd, Richard Widmark and Paul Newman. I was nearly tempted to set the DVR to record one or two of these, just to get a look at how the bloodfest was portrayed, but decided not to, knowing that neither Teresa nor I would be able to stomach their lies.

Want the truth about the U.S. war against the people of Korea and their revolutionary upsurge? Head over to my comrade Greg's blog Fuck Yeah Marxism-Leninism, where he's posted a series of images from and about the Korean War. As I noted last week in a post about Chang-Rae Lee's novel The Surrendered, the U.S.-allied forces carried out many horrific massacres in Korea. This shot was taken after one of the early ones, at Taejon.

Today in Pyongyang, the northern city that the U.S. invaders totally leveled during the war, leaving not a single building standing, over 100,000 people rallied to mark the anniversary of the war's start and pledge ongoing vigilance against the never-ending U.S. and Japanese war of threats and provocations against the DPRK.

A fourth, and maybe a fifth? Oy vey!

Now there's a fourth book listed under currently reading. It's a reread actually, probably the third or fourth time I've read this book, Labor's Untold Story by Richard Boyer and Herbert Morais. I'm diving back into it for a fast refresher course as part of my preparation for the class I'm giving next weekend on labor's upsurge in the 1930s. This is a great book, probably the best for anyone looking for an introduction to or a basic survey of U.S. labor history up to the 1950s or so. It's not the be-all and end-all and it's not perfect politically, but for anyone who didn't learn anything in school about the rich history of labor struggle in this country, and that means everyone since none of us were taught this, it's a great way to correct that gap.

A fifth book may even be looming. One evening this coming week I'm going to an information session at the local offices of the Alzheimer's Association with my lover Teresa because a beloved member of our family has the disease and we need to understand it better in order to help as best we can as the crisis worsens. We've already been reading some of their printed material, handouts on this and that aspect, but my guess is that we're going to ask for and they're going to suggest some book titles for deeper insight. Voila, a fifth volume, if I feel compelled, as I expect I might, to delve immediately.

Multi-tasking as applied to book juggling? Attention diffusion? Brain sharpening? None of the above? Who knows, we'll see, and anyway it won't last, this odd moment in my reading life. I'm quite sure that within a couple weeks I'll be back to my normal one book at a time.

Tra-la! It's Spring!

Everyone everywhere else in the country will probably want to clobber me for the New-York-centrism of this, but I gotta say it: I don't think anyone welcomes the coming of springtime with the joy and fervor of New Yorkers. Why would it be otherwise? We live in the most cityish city in the U.S. We don't have the hardest winters, not by a longshot, but a case can be made that winter here is hardest to endure for the way it combines with, well, everything else about living here, to sap the spirit. Especially toward the end.

But then.

But then we find we have traversed the long slog that is March and we have come out the other side. And suddenly I have blossoms gentling me outside my Manhattan office window.
And suddenly the masses pour into the out of doors, jumping for joy, practically, with the sheer relief of the thing. Great gobs of humanity jostling each other for every inch of park space, sidewalk, every open window, every tiny patch of what passes here for yards and gardens.

And suddenly mushrooms trumpet forth underneath a tree in my Queens neighborhood. I had to leave the cigarette butts in the picture, for they are just as much a part of the scene. Ma Nature, stubborn gal, goes about her business as best she can against the odds.
The planet staggers. The damage mounts. For today, though, we sing. Tra-la! It's Spring!

I'm heading out now to spend the rest of my lunch hour touring tulip sites.

UPDATE: What did I tell you?And yes, the tulips are here! (Two weeks earlier than last year, but I'm trying not to think about what that means.)

The Book of Grace

Boy, do I got cul-chah or what? Two theater outings in two weeks, after a long drought away from the boards. This is more like it!

Last night, having nabbed last-minute cheap tickets just a few days before its run closes, Teresa and I saw The Book of Grace at the Public Theater. This is Suzan-Lori Parks' latest play. It is intense.

The writing is marvelous, and comprises several dimensions. There are at various points clever wordplay, ideas and ideologies playing off each other, deep drama, startling humor. Three terrific actors, one of whom, recent Julliard graduate Amari Cheatom, I guarantee we will be hearing more from.

The play is on its most obvious level a family tragedy, but the personal links with the political in sometimes obvious and sometimes less clearcut ways. The setting is a Texas border town. One of the characters is a Border Patrol cop. Parks takes us where we need to go.

Not necessarily always as far as I'd have liked, politically speaking. There are points in the play, especially in a monologue by Cheatom's character Buddy/Snake, where some strong statements are made that bring out the broader context for the family drama, but then this veers off away from the larger platform of social-cultural analysis and back onto the smaller personal-psychological stage. This leeched a bit of the impact out of it for me, but the character study remained powerful enough to make this overall a provocative, stirring evening of theater. In fact, I must dissent from the reviews in which bourgeois drama critics have taken Parks to task for what they see as her jamming her characters into boxes as archetypes rather than creating fully fleshed out real human beings. I can't believe these guys saw the same play I did. The characters are fully wrought, beautifully so. Whereas I wish Parks had taken the politics a little further, these critics can't bear that there are politics in the play at all, and concoct a specious criticism with which to scold her for the crime of acknowledging the world. Don't listen to them, Ms. Parks!

An unexpected added treat: after the play, there was a "talkback" with the playwright. We stayed for this and I'm especially glad we did because I found her comments on the background and process of writing this play really interesting. Particularly because I've been thinking lately about trying my hand at drama. It has always seemed a mysterious if not impossible form to assay, but something has been shifting, clicking, inside my artsy-fartsy little head and I'm starting to wonder whether I shouldn't try to get up the nerve to make an attempt.