O Pioneers!

"The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman"

O Pioneers! is a love letter to Willa Cather's memories of her native Nebraska homestead and the immigrant Swedes, Bohemians, and French who settled on that vast and blustery land of mystique and melancholy during the 1880s. True to Cather's nature, she christens the novel with an independent and iron-willed heroine by the name of Alexandra Bergson, who after her father's death takes over the family farm, this much to the chagrin and jealousy of her disagreeable older brothers. For approximately 30 years we follow Alexandra and other occupants of the Divide, all of whom are hoping not to 'blow away' on this wild and unpredictable land they call home.

What drives this tale is Cather's picturesque prose. She is by far one of America's greatest minimal wordsmiths. She doesn't need to bleed purple to capture a feeling. Even at its barest, her prose snaps crisp and clean, getting right to the root of emotion. As this is her second book, written in 1913, Cather is still maturing into her style. She doesn't quite handle character development well as she has moments where she tells more than shows, and the characters aren’t as vividly explored as one would want. Timelines are also often skipped because we hear of Alexandra making a success of her farm by sheer gumption and keen, almost scientific planning, but we don't get to experience the toil or the complications she ran into as we're just simply told of it all. It was rare for women in Alexandra's era to accomplish a task of this caliber, and it would've made for great reading and a deeper sense of Alexandra’s character if this wasn't so lightly glossed over.

Still the word magic Cather casts make up for the lightweight action. As stated, Cather's prose is just so damn exquisite and it touches all the senses in the simplest of ways. It leads you by the hand through the yellow fields, points skyward to admire the purple and reds of dusk, turns your attention to the elegance of a duck in motion --- an intimate guided tour it is.

"She had never known before how much the country meant to her. The chirping of the insects down in the long grass had been like the sweetest music. She had felt as if her heart were hiding down there, somewhere, with the quail and the plover and all the little wild things that crooned or buzzed in the sun. Under the long shaggy ridges, she felt the future stirring." 

Changing My Mind On Zadie

Zadie Smith's prose and I do not get along.

I tried befriending it when I started (and stopped) reading White Teeth and On Beauty a few years back, this on the recommendations of well-meaning bookish friends. Of what I read, I felt afterward...detached...disengaged...just dunce cap dumb. Her prose just flew over my head, making me second guess what I read, how I read it. Did I not get it? Do I even know how to read? Ugh.

I saw a reviewer on GoodReads brand her right: she is a "glib genius". Her text truly preens in the mirror with little regard. Now, don't think me emerald green envious of her obvious gifts. Smith is an intelligent and perceptive writer who crushes stereotypes that woman of color can analyze Middlemarch one moment and label 50 Cent as a "leading man" with a straight face the next (and all in the same book, mind you), but she's still in a glass casing of academia, removed from a sense of realness.

I thought Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays would be an easier meal to digest and get on the right track with Zadie instead of a sprawling novel that I'd end up getting lost in. All it is is a collection of essays that cover various subject matters ranging from literature to film, and just possibly Smith would be better read in smaller, concise portions?

No such luck.

Changing My Mind --- while meant to be an inconsistent collection of random thoughts --- works in theory, but on paper the thought processes within just don't come together in an effective way.

They Shoot Horses, Don't They?

"Maybe it's just the whole damn world is like Central Casting. They got it all rigged before you ever show up." 

Numerous books were released during the Great Depression, but no book struck more of a cultural chord or contained a decade's worth of human resilience during economic and social disparity better than John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. Even if you haven't read it (*coughs and looks away*), you know something about it, as the title alone has almost become synonymous for the era of hardship it represents within its pages. Just Google "The Great Depression", and its at the top of the results. A teacher you once had probably assigned it in class. It no doubt resides on a bunch of required read-before-you're-casket-ready reading lists. It's a book that is just impossible to ignore.

Now, no disrespect to Steinbeck, but Grapes wasn't the only book to explore one of America's most harrowing hours. Okay, maybe these books weren't out there winning Pulitzer Prizes, but they did exist. Coming up blank? Let me steer you over to a neglected corner, where you'll see cussing and fussing for attention Horace McCoy's They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, the anti-Grapes...the anti-everything, really.

Horses was released in 1935, in the thick of the Great Depression, and it's with no surprise that it ended up faring better with French existentialists such as Simone de Beauvoir (who dubbed it the first "American existentialist novel"), and Albert Camus (who'd seven years later would pen a similar sketch of human doom with The Stranger). Americans wanted hope and relief and sympathetic characters they could relate to --- not someone extolling pessimism and framing them as farm animals being led to the slaughter. They Shoot Horses, Don't They? doesn't offer a mustard seed of faith, or even a 'this too shall pass' reassuring pat on the shoulder. This lean, mean novella instead sneers at the migrant farming sojourn of the Joad brood as it ensnares its disparate youths Robert Syverton and Gloria Beatty in a thorny fate, all while lifting a soiled middle finger towards the sweet apple pie of Americana optimism and prosperity.

A Girl Grows Up In Brooklyn

"I had Sylvia, Angela, and Gigi, the four of us sharing the weight of growing up Girl in Brooklyn, as though it was bag of stones we passed among ourselves saying, Here. Help me carry this."

Black girlhood has never been written with such poetic potency.

Even though I grew up in a suburban South Texas neighborhood during the 1990s and went to predominately White schools, I understood this story fully. Reading this book was like re-entering my childhood, just this time I got to view it from a distance, finding myself appreciating the sometimes arduous, often awkward journey that was growing up Girl.

It is true that we all experience growing pains and angst. We all at some points of our lives vie to belong somewhere and find “our people”. We all have felt the flutter of first love. We all begin to see our elders live confusing, convoluted lives, and hope to God we don’t turn out like them in the end. We have all become aware of our maturing bodies, wondering where our unique beauty lies within the images we see on TV screens. We all have friendships that are fleeting, sometimes one-sided, but shape us beyond the time frame. And we will at some point, by some strange osmosis, have these friendships come back to us, just that a new script will be in tow.

No matter the gender or the race, we all come of age in similar ways, but Another Brooklyn pinpoints a unique adolescent. The announcement is right in the title. This is 'another Brooklyn', a Brooklyn removed from the Irish immigrant experience of Colm Toibin's Brooklyn, and more specifically, a city, a time era, and a racial community removed from Betty Smith’s classic A Tree Grows In Brooklyn. I don’t know if this was Jacqueline Woodson's intent --- I’m just taking a stab in the dark --- but while reading echoes of A Tree Grows In Brooklyn sound, with Another Brooklyn's narrator August sharing the same lonely, but fiercely determined spirit as Francine Nolan. Still, I feel, Woodson is also making a point to say that Brooklyn is too often defined through a White lens, when the city holds so many more conversations and stories outside of that limited focus.

Union Street

Who wants to read a book about working class women and girls who live in squalor in the back avenues of an industrial city north east of London?

Well, I do.

See, my hand is raised?

Still I'm not everybody.

Hollywood couldn't handle what British author Pat Barker was trying to convey in the pages of this book because in 1990 they released it as a sweet romance story called Stanley & Iris, starring Jane Fonda and Robert De Niro. In the film Fonda and De Niro play two working class individuals who are at a standstill in their lives, with Fonda's character later on teaching De Niro’s how to read and write, the two of them falling in love during the process. I admit, it's an excellent film, and one of my favorite romance stories, Fonda is fun to watch and De Niro pulls out one of his best performances in it --- but the film isn't Baker's 1982 debut Union Street. Fonda's Iris King, the cake factory, a pregnant teen, and a man who can't read are the only elements that have any sort of association to this book, and these elements are still sprinkled with sugar crystals on it when they made it to screen.

Book publishers couldn't handle what realism Barker had written as she had a difficult time trying to find a publisher for the book. Nobody wanted to give Union Street the time of day because it isn't a pretty book. It just isn't a book that goes down easy. It's a book about worn-out, hard-working women and young girls, but it's not in the Norma Rae-rah-rah spirit, or wraps itself in warm camaraderie like Gloria Naylor's classic Women of Brewster Place. Baker wrote a book that is a stark and unsettling contrast to the usual working-class woman narrative.

"Freaks"

"The Michael Jackson cacophony is fascinating in that it is not about Jackson at all. I hope he has the good sense to know it and the good fortune to snatch his life out of the jaws of a carnivorous success. He will not swiftly be forgiven for having turned so many tables, for he damn sure grabbed the brass ring, and the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo has nothing on Michael. All that noise is about America, as the dishonest custodian of black life and wealth; the blacks, especially males, in America; and the burning, buried American guilt; and sex and sexual roles and sexual panic; money, success and despair [...] Freaks are called freaks and are treated as they are treated–in the main, abominably–because they are human beings who cause to echo, deep within us, our most profound terrors and desires."

- James Baldwin, from "Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood" - Playboy, 1985

Love Is A Battlefield

Inside Room 186 of the Wagon Wheel Inn, Elise will be kneeling on the carpet, which is orange like a tangerine. Her hair is greasy and braided, and a name---tattooed in calligraphy on her neck---is visible. She keeps both hands on the shotgun---the muzzle pressed into Jamey's breast. 

He'll be sitting on a chair in the middle of the room, hands on thighs. 

"Don't you love me?" he'll ask, quiet and desperate. 

"Elise. Come on. Don't you love me?" 

We begin here at this intense scene, in June of 1987. How we get here is to go back to the year before, where a crass vagabond girl from a troubled lower-class home meets a yuppie pretty boy, and they both fall headfirst into a seedy spiral of lust, obsession, and love.

Of course this familiar set-up is a tale as old as time. Shakespeare has got to be pissed from the grave realizing that nobody has come up with a better story line for doomed lovers --- or he's smiling smug, realizing how much influence he continues to have after all these centuries. Either way, Jardine Libaire's White Fur is touted as a "modernized Romeo and Juliet", and it doesn't take much to figure out the destination of the star-crossed in these pages.

How To Write An Autobiographical Novel

"The story of your life, described, will not describe how you came to think about your life or yourself, not describe any of what you learned. This is what fiction can do--I think it is even what fiction is for"

I find a lot of writing books redundant.

I should clarify: I find a lot of books about the instruction and lifestyle of writing to be redundant. Even a little pointless, and sometimes polarizing after a while.

It's not because I don't like to be told what to do, it's just that you can read so much advice, so much instruction that you spend more time on reading about writing, than actually writing. Also sometimes after reading, I'm left with a tinge of inferiority, that I don't fit the "criteria" for what makes one an illustrious author. How I didn't go to this school, graduate this particular program, know these awesome kooky writing peers, don't live in this bookish cliquish area, not tapping into the right writing 'zen'...catch my drift? Some authors just polarize, marginalize an aspiring writer, making them feel as if us peon hardscrabble scribes can't live up to whatever impossible lifestyle standard, all cause we are not this, that, and come from a certain background.

Granted there are some writing books that don't waste trees, and authors who in innocence just want to humble brag and dish freely about their writing lives, but I myself have certain criteria for what constitutes as a biblical tome for the written word. I prefer a book where the author is conversational, not instructional, and that they come from a real place, not some mythical fantasia of vintage typewriters, high-rise socials, and wrap-around scarves, pipes in the crooks of mouths. Leave that pretension at the doormat, I don't want it tracking in my house. I tend to like a book that just gets to the damn point, and tells me how fucking frustrating, spirit shattering, bloodletting, and all-around grueling writing is, while patting me on the back in support, showing me its ultimate rewards. I like a book that possesses lines like these:

"I think writers are often terrifying to normal people--that is to non-writers in a capitalist system--for this reason: there is almost nothing they will not sell in order to have the time to write. Time is our mink, our Lexus, our mansion. In a room full of writers of various kinds, time is probably the only thing that can provoke widespread envy, more than acclaim" 

"Being a writer can feel a lot like writing and giving up on writing at the same time." 

"Writing fiction is an exercise in giving a shit---an exercise in finding out what you really care about." 

YES. This is what I want. Give me more.

Foxfire Burns and Burns...

Exploring female disenfranchisement and rigid class structure within a 1950s cultural backdrop, Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang is the saga of a girl gang from the working class factory town of Hammond, New York. With immediacy this book appealed to me as I have an odd affinity for films and stories about gangs and so-called misfits who live on the outer fringes of society. Something about the fierce loyalty and camaraderie coming out of isolation and misunderstanding hits me right in the feels. I don't know. Either that or I watch The Outsiders and The Warriors way more than I need to.

Foxfire is of a different breed than the bro-fests like The Outsiders as it allows you to ride shotgun to all the mischief and patriarchy dismantling with a band of fierce teen girls. They are unique in that they aren't an off-shoot of a local boy gang, nor are they the 'property of' a bunch of hoods. No, the Foxfire girls have formed this group on their own accord, and have done so more as a survival tactic than out of obligation. Flotsam and jetsam these girls are, misbegotten throwaway junk that is cast out into a briny ocean of problems that are largely not of their making. These girls all come from broken, dysfunctional, and financially strained households, and are looking for a way to just get the hell out of them. The only option for them, the only way they can have some sense of dignity and to fight back against their struggle, is to band together. With bruised knuckles and pride, the Foxfire girls and their aggressive social justice crusade make the Pink Ladies look like mere powder puffs on Sandra Dee's vanity table (...and yes, I’m ignoring Rizzo's cold stare right about now...).

Hope

I began talking about hope in 2003, in the bleak days after the war in Iraq was launched. Fourteen years later, I use the term hope because it navigates a way forward between the false certainties of optimism and of pessimism, and the complacency or passivity that goes with both. Optimism assumes that all will go well without our effort; pessimism assumes it's all irredeemable; both let us stay home and do nothing. Hope for me has meant a sense that the future is unpredictable, and that we don’t actually know what will happen, but know we may be able write it ourselves.

Hope is a belief that what we do might matter, an understanding that the future is not yet written. It’s informed, astute open-mindedness about what can happen and what role we may play in it. Hope looks forward, but it draws its energies from the past, from knowing histories, including our victories, and their complexities and imperfections. It means not being the perfect that is the enemy of the good, not snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, not assuming you know what will happen when the future is unwritten, and part of what happens is up to us.

-Rebecca Solnit, from "Protest and Persist: Why Giving Up Is Not An Option"  -The Guardian, 2018

Ambition Is Putting A Ladder Against The Sky...

"Stealing is very bad. Only really bad people take things that don't belong to you..." 

"Where do you get your ideas from?"

A question deemed formulaic and dreaded by most artists alike, as the answer is complicated, albeit a touch annoying and even difficult to answer. Divulge too much you come off pompous, say too little and you just might be hiding something. You just can't win.

Maurice Swift is someone who knows exactly where his ideas come from. They come to him easy.

Utilizing his charms and smoldering good looks, he ingratiates himself towards famous writers, not to learn the craft or be around like minds, but to steal from them. Maurice is a plagiarist, a story vampire if you will. He has taken the infamous quote --- "good artists copy, great artists steal" --- as a mantra for himself so he can reach his literary ambitions, for there is no other way for him to do so. See, Maurice lacks not only a soul, but writing talent. He wants to be a famous writer and win literary awards such as "The Prize", but he cannot come up with a original idea to save his life, and doesn't possess a flair for prose, thus he must feed off of others to replenish the fantastical image he so fashions for himself.

His climb begins in Berlin in the late 1980s, when while working as a waiter at the Savoy he captures the attentions of renowned novelist Erich Ackermann. Ackermann, lonely, aging, and fresh off of literary acclaim and a Prize win for his latest novel, becomes enraptured with Maurice and his desires to become a success, thus he allows him to become his assistant while he travels for his book tour. After some time Ackermann becomes consumed by Maurice, desiring to further an intimate relationship with him, but when he lets his guard down, Maurice takes advantage and uses his charms to coax Ackermann to divulge a secret that poses damaging consequences for the author. This secret enables Maurice to launch his career, leaving Ackermann's career and livelihood in a shambles.

Then it is onward, and upward the ladder to the next victim...