Not that spring is evident today. We're having a full-scale, impudent, and aggravating March snow storm here in Chicago. All right, it's pretty. The fluffy sort of snow, clinging creamily to tree branches and all the cables and wires that make things such as this blog possible. But we were so much happier to see crocuses and robins.
The stubborn hold of winter does not impede the blossoming of books. April, May, and June will bring many works of tremendous insight and beauty our way. And this month has delivered the third annual Orion Book Award.
I had an excellent time serving as judge along with Roger D. Hodge, editor for Harper's magazine; Scott Russell Sanders, the author, most recently, of A Conservationist Manifesto, Susan Straight, whose novel Highwire Moon is always playing somewhere in my mind, and H. Emerson Blake, Orion magazine editor-in-chief.
Here's the deal: The Orion Book Award was founded in 2007 to recognize books that deepen our connection to the natural world, present new ideas about our relationship with nature, and achieve excellence in writing. It is made possible in part by a grant from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation.
Here are the finalists:
• Trespass, Amy Irvine (North Point Press)
• The Wild Places, Robert Macfarlane (Penguin Books)
• The Bridge at the End of the World, James Gustave Speth (Yale University Press)
• Inventing Niagara, Ginger Strand (Simon & Schuster)
• Finding Beauty in a Broken World, Terry Tempest Williams (Pantheon Books)
And the winner is Amy Irvine's Trespass. A book I raved about in the Chicago Tribune, nearly a year ago:
Memoir of sadness
A wilderness activist mourns the damage to Utah's desert landscape and her own personal tragedies
By Donna Seaman
February 23, 2008
Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land
By Amy Irvine
North Point/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 363 pages, $25
Amy Irvine's family tree reaches back to one of the original Mormon saints, but it also bears the sharp, sometimes bitter fruit of nonconformists. Her paternal grandmother, Ada, was an atheist and an artist enthralled by the dramatic beauty of southern Utah's red-rock desert. Irvine's father had the pedigree and demeanor of a good Mormon, but he could not abide the strictures of Salt Lake City life and took off hunting every chance he got. Add to that his alcoholism in an aggressively teetotaling world, and you get a sense of the misery that induced him to turn his gun on himself. As Irvine tries to come to terms with her father's death, she ponders her inherited apostate and "peripatetic ways."
A loner and wanderer who yearns for acceptance, Irvine explores the red-rock canyons, observing that "the mark of the ancients is everywhere," even though pueblo ruins have long been stripped of every artifact, with the exception of rock art visible only in certain slants of light. As she tries to imagine the lives of the hunter-gatherers who once lived in this arid, sculptured place, she braids together threads of Mormon history, her own family's stories and her quest for illumination, creating a singularly elegiac and astringent memoir of dissent.
Not long after her father's death, Irvine is working for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance and madly in love with Herb McHarg, a longhaired, Catholic, wilderness-defending attorney. She tries to fit into her small, high-desert town near a Superfund site, even though her neighbors' pickup trucks sport "a window sticker displaying the cartoon character Calvin, pants down. He is urinating on the acronym" of the wilderness alliance.
Seeking a fuller immersion in the glorious place they are working so hard to protect, and more privacy, the couple buys 10 acres and a dilapidated, off-the-grid cabin in spectacular and xenophobic San Juan County. The four-state panorama is thrilling - - the vista embraces swathes of Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado - - but the risks associated with their advocacy work remain high.
Irvine staves off her fears by hiking and pondering the past. And the conclusions she reaches are startling. Take her bold paralleling of the natural histories of coyotes and Mormons, sworn enemies. Both have been despised and hunted, yet both have thrived, even though the Mormon modes of survival are proving environmentally deleterious. Irvine acidly critiques the damage done by cattle ranching, the razing of foothills to build golf courses (guzzlers of precious water) and, widening her view to encompass the entire problematic development of the West, the damming of the Colorado River. Her environmental survey also covers a rarely examined consequence of 9/11: the federal government's loosening of restrictions on oil and gas leases on public lands, including Utah's most-scenic places.
Readers versed in the fiery eloquence of Irvine's kindred red-rock defenders Edward Abbey, Terry Tempest Williams and Ellen Meloy will have a ready context for her probing critiques of the exploitation of this sacred yet much-sinned-against land, but her views on the demise of hunter-gatherer societies and the rise of agriculture are unique and provocative. Irvine suggests that men and women foragers were equals, and that their roaming way of life was active, varied and healthy. With the advent of farming came punishing labor and a sedentary existence. Women had too many children too close together, and a divide opened between the sexes. Inevitably, the impact on the overused land was equally depleting.
In her sorrow, anger and feelings of helplessness, Irvine seems to be channeling six generations of outraged and lonely Mormon women restricted to obedient lives as wives and mothers in polygamous marriages. Outsider Irvine preserves her freedom but still suffers wrenching losses. Her first child dies in utero, and during her second pregnancy she endures a harrowing health crisis, tragedies of the body she can't help but equate with the accelerating destruction of the living world all around her.
To trespass is to violate, to infringe, to unlawfully enter, to err or sin. Irvine composes a staggering litany of trespasses great and small that ultimately reveals the interconnectivity of life; the fact that everything matters: every cow, every blade of invasive cheat grass, every dam, every hole drilled into the desert, every life-crushing off-road vehicle, every betrayal. For Irvine - - passionate, imaginative, furious and visionary - - language is a ladder out of the silencing cave of despair. And what, after all, is a voice for if not to praise life? Of what use is a gift for metaphor and argument if not to provoke, entrance, persuade? After her steeling trials of body and soul, Irvine turns away from the rigors of advocacy to take up the more radiant and fluent defense of life that is art. Beauty and truth, she hopes, will speak to everyone.
Copyright © 2008, Chicago Tribune
Amy Irvine will receive a cash prize of $3,000, and the finalists will each receive $500 each. You'll welcome to honor them and celebrate green books at a public event on April 15, 2009 at the CYNTHIA-REEVES gallery in New York City. I'll be there.
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Saturday, February 14, 2009
For the love of books on Valentine's Day
The AWP (Association of Writers and Writing Programs) annual conference is here in Chicago: 8,000 writers, readers, teachers, publishers. It's quite a party. Today I'm speaking with Chicago writer Stuart Dybek in the Grand Ballroom at the grand old Chicago Hilton. I wanted to revisit my Chicago Tribune review of his magnificent book, I Sailed with Magellan:
A young man and a young woman squeeze into the conductor's compartment in the first car of an express El train and kiss passionately as they rock past crowded station platforms. This is a much loved scene from "Pet Milk," a short story in Stuart Dybek's The Coast of Chicago, and a moment exquisitely emblematic of Dybek's stereoscopic vision of the city's steely reality and penchant for risk-all romance. Published in 1990, The Coast of Chicago followed Dybek's first collection, Childhood and Other Neighborhoods, by a decade. A book as essential to understanding life in the prairie metropolis as works by Algren, Brooks, Bellow, and Cisneros, The Coast of Chicago was resoundingly praised by critics, treasured by readers, yet woefully neglected by publishers. Meanwhile, Dybek, a true artist, continued to work slowly and intensely for another dozen years until his third cycle of interconnected short stories took shape, making publication of I Sailed with Magellan, an eleven-part saga about the evolution of a young man's sense and sensibility within the bricked grip of a big city on a great lake, a true literary event.
The meshed short stories in I Sailed with Magellan spotlight transformational moments in the lives of Perry Katzek and his family, friends, and neighbors over the course of his rough-and-ready boyhood on through and beyond high school. Perry, his younger brother Mick, their good-deal-loving, junk-collecting, Harvester plant-worker father, called Sir, and their nervous mother, called Moms, live in Chicago's Little Village neighborhood during the 1950s and 1960s. An amalgam of Polish and Mexican communities, it, like all of Chicago's ethnically defined neighborhoods, truly is a village in that everyone knows everyone else and considers everyone's business their own. Not only does Dybek masterfully evoke the intricate, singing web of urban life--the crossing paths and tangled destinies of intimates and strangers; the percussive energy generated by people at work and play; the contrapuntal mix of street action, classroom exchanges, bar talk, domestic banter and confrontation, the confessions of friends, and lovers' duets--he also aligns the longings and aspirations of his empathically rendered characters with Chicago's often forbidding, sometimes radiantly beautiful cityscape.
The ability to elucidate the complex symbiotic relationship between people and place is part of what makes the fiction of select writers so rich and resonant, so authentic and true. Dybek accomplishes this crucial feat by using music as the connecting tissue between the inner and outer lives of his characters. Music is built into the Katzek DNA and consequently plays a role in each story, whether the focus is on Perry's beloved Uncle Lefty, a derailed musician, or on Perry's brother when he falls in love with a Puerto Rican exotic dancer who performs to John Coltrane's masterpiece, "A Love Supreme."
Saxophonist Lefty, bedeviled by his combat experiences in Korea, is the book's touchstone and tragic hero. He loves to bet on the ponies at Sportsman's Park and take his young nephew around to the neighborhood taverns, of which there are way too many to get to in a day, where plucky Perry, a real ham, sings for their drinks (the boy gets root beer). Lefty also likes to play his sax on the roof of his Blue Island Avenue apartment building. When he takes his nephew up through the trap door to see the view and his neighbor's rooftop pigeon coop, he says, "Welcome to Dreamsville," and Dreamsville is, indeed, the perfect name for the city of unrequited desires Dybek so tenderly and knowingly conjures. Lefty, an artist and gambler who plays with all his heart even though he's been dealt a losing hand, initiates Perry into the holy realm of music, and, inadvertently, teaches him about the abyss into which sensitive souls can so easily fall.
In "Song," the opening story--a tale frank and edgy in its revelations of the grittiness of Chicago life, and funny and charming in its delight in our capacity for casting caution to the wind and giving in to sheer pleasure--a ragtag school marching band is so caught up in pounding out their kick-ass version of "Rock Around the Clock," they blissfully follow their unsavory, boozy, but well-connected band leader out of their Little Village enclave into forbidden territory, Douglas Park, a primarily African American neighborhood. "The El station was the kind of boundary that doesn't show up on street maps," (20) muses Perry, and sure enough he and his fellow band members are rudely awakened from their trance. Clutching his clarinet, Perry runs like crazy until he finds himself on a block where every hydrant has been opened. As great torrents of water pour into the street, a "prismatic mist of phantom rainbows" hovers in this "strange neighborhood that expressed its anarchy in water." (24) Suddenly, turf warfare and racial tension are washed away, and Perry is cleansed and redeemed. The city is full of surprises, and as Dybek summons up the wonder of the unexpected and the improbable, he achieves a low-key form of magical realism that places him in a constellation of writers that includes Joyce in The Dubliners, Italo Calvino, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Chicago's own Leon Forrest.
Water is one of the collection's reigning metaphors, along with music, birds, and flowers (especially morning glory-festooned alley fences). In the sweetly dreamy story "Undertow," immersion in Lake Michigan reveals a secret dimension of the cosmos we call Chicago, while in "We Didn't," the lake delivers a haunting icon. Early on in the book, young Perry and Mick are supposed to be sleeping, but instead they're listening to the gruff entreaties of their beefy neighbors across the gangway. Once coitus ensues, Perry thinks that the house is creaking "as if a galleon was anchored beside our window," (27) a curious image for a young boy to concoct, but it turns out the Katzek brothers are obsessed with the stories of explorers. Mick has even made up a rambling, dirgelike song about the trials and tribulations of those who first circumnavigated the globe, an epic poem that begins, "I sailed with Magellan, . . .) (38) The brothers themselves become intrepid explorers as they embark on the arduous journey into adulthood and roam the urban wilderness, encountering new and mysterious people and places wherever they land.
Sometimes Perry is at the center of a story, sometimes he's off to the side as a sympathetic observer, a narrative fluidity that grants Dybek the liberty to invent and orchestrate a compelling cast of intriguing characters. There's Zip, the one-armed World War II vet and proprietor of the Zip Inn, who, dismayed by the "crazy, private war" in which the neighborhood gangbangers are embroiled, and angered by the intrusion of "goombahs" demanding protection money, dreams of a Wisconsin refuge in the "land of the sky blue waters," (62) just as the slogan for Hamm's beer (then the official beer of the Chicago Cubs) promises. A regular at the Zip Inn, Teo, ruined his career as a professional wrestler in Mexico for love. Joey Ditto is the feckless hit man in "Breasts," a long, sardonic, surreal, and deeply unnerving tale in which eroticism and death are inexorably entwined, an endlessly compelling paradox that Dybek frequently improvises on to profound affect.
Mick turns out to be an enigmatic and compelling character. And no one will be able to forget young, doomed Ralphie Poskozim and brainy and budding Camille Estrada, who tries to make sense of Ralphie's life in a school composition, the stars of "Blue Boy," a stealthily powerful, many faceted story about faith, the vagaries of memory, and the need to transmute life into story. The misadventures and revelations of Dybek's get-under-your-skin characters yield bittersweet tales brilliantly attuned to the confluence of inevitability and chance, natural forces and human folly.
Anger, deprivation, and the unrelenting threat of violence drive Dybek's incandescent stories, as does a rogue eroticism. The women Dybek portrays are at once tough and vulnerable, lusty and pragmatic, witty and elusive. Given the chaos and bloodshed that punctuate the lives of the men in their world, these capricious, ambivalent, and evanescent women are wise to avoid entanglement. They call the shots whenever possible, and men wait helplessly for them to bestow their favors. Joey pines for Capri, a woman he adores for her unpredictability. And Perry, a hard-knocks romantic who has witnessed more fistfights than kisses, is repeatedly thwarted in his pursuit of smart, skeptical, and independent women.
Dybek's entrancing stories replicate with piquant accuracy the social, cultural, and ethnic dynamics of one quintessential Chicago neighborhood at one particular time, and this is a tremendous achievement. But Dybek is also looking beyond the specifics of the world he so vividly evokes in an attempt to illuminate the fundamental connection between people and place, and between humankind and the earth. The word ecotone comes to mind, a term used to denote a place of transition where opposites meet, such as land and water, grasslands and forest, city and country, the border between two ethnic neighborhoods, even the plexus of reality and dream. These are zones of intense activity, conflict, and synergy, and as Perry and company avidly explore their native terrain from the industrial South Side to the bucolic North Side, Dybek homes in on just this sort of fertile ground.
In "Orchids," for instance, a dazzling story of fantasy and resilience, Perry revels in "a strip of wilderness" (176) along railroad tracks where wildlife, including a blue heron, thrive in the midst of urban clamor. Perry's favorite place is the fire truck graveyard along the Sanitary (he calls it Insanitary) Canal, a forgotten outdoor museum of city history, a place of rusted grace that inspires "a kind of reverence--not a feeling frequently encountered in Chicago." (180) And not a feeling shared by all, as Perry finds out so comically on a prom night from hell. But Perry is on to something important in his peculiar regard for this oddly hallowed place.
Perry, his brother, and his friends all possess poetic temperaments and questing souls (as well as caustic senses of humor), and are, therefore, drawn to the arts as they struggle into manhood. This creative impulse is a significant one, a potential path to a life more fulfilling than their parents', but also a way of understanding and valuing what they're so eager to leave behind. Dybek fills his painterly stories with ravishing descriptions of the hodgepodge of Chicago's streets and their quirky neighborhood characters, the chimerical lake, the white-cap-raising and trash-spinning wind, drastic weather, and dramatically slanting light to celebrate our ability to discern and be transformed by beauty however unlikely its manifestations and harsh its settings.
This receptivity to beguilement--this transcending of everyday cares and sorrows while watching frolicking children through a painted-open window in a Rogers Park apartment, or raising one's face to the pearly full moon floating above a puddled alley, or succumbing to music's dizzying embrace while driving too fast in an unreliable old car on Lake Shore Drive¬--this openness to out-of-the-blue beauty rekindles hope, inspires us to cherish memories of the dead, and induces us to seek and nurture love in spite of all the terrors that shadow our lives. This is what it is to be a human being. And this is Dybek's subject as he extracts a grand spectrum of experiences, emotions, and epiphanies from the potholed, broken glass-strewn byways of a sprawling city on a vast heartland lake in spellbinding stories that are, by turns, hilarious, stunning, and tragic, but always deeply moving, genuine, and compassionate.
A young man and a young woman squeeze into the conductor's compartment in the first car of an express El train and kiss passionately as they rock past crowded station platforms. This is a much loved scene from "Pet Milk," a short story in Stuart Dybek's The Coast of Chicago, and a moment exquisitely emblematic of Dybek's stereoscopic vision of the city's steely reality and penchant for risk-all romance. Published in 1990, The Coast of Chicago followed Dybek's first collection, Childhood and Other Neighborhoods, by a decade. A book as essential to understanding life in the prairie metropolis as works by Algren, Brooks, Bellow, and Cisneros, The Coast of Chicago was resoundingly praised by critics, treasured by readers, yet woefully neglected by publishers. Meanwhile, Dybek, a true artist, continued to work slowly and intensely for another dozen years until his third cycle of interconnected short stories took shape, making publication of I Sailed with Magellan, an eleven-part saga about the evolution of a young man's sense and sensibility within the bricked grip of a big city on a great lake, a true literary event.
The meshed short stories in I Sailed with Magellan spotlight transformational moments in the lives of Perry Katzek and his family, friends, and neighbors over the course of his rough-and-ready boyhood on through and beyond high school. Perry, his younger brother Mick, their good-deal-loving, junk-collecting, Harvester plant-worker father, called Sir, and their nervous mother, called Moms, live in Chicago's Little Village neighborhood during the 1950s and 1960s. An amalgam of Polish and Mexican communities, it, like all of Chicago's ethnically defined neighborhoods, truly is a village in that everyone knows everyone else and considers everyone's business their own. Not only does Dybek masterfully evoke the intricate, singing web of urban life--the crossing paths and tangled destinies of intimates and strangers; the percussive energy generated by people at work and play; the contrapuntal mix of street action, classroom exchanges, bar talk, domestic banter and confrontation, the confessions of friends, and lovers' duets--he also aligns the longings and aspirations of his empathically rendered characters with Chicago's often forbidding, sometimes radiantly beautiful cityscape.
The ability to elucidate the complex symbiotic relationship between people and place is part of what makes the fiction of select writers so rich and resonant, so authentic and true. Dybek accomplishes this crucial feat by using music as the connecting tissue between the inner and outer lives of his characters. Music is built into the Katzek DNA and consequently plays a role in each story, whether the focus is on Perry's beloved Uncle Lefty, a derailed musician, or on Perry's brother when he falls in love with a Puerto Rican exotic dancer who performs to John Coltrane's masterpiece, "A Love Supreme."
Saxophonist Lefty, bedeviled by his combat experiences in Korea, is the book's touchstone and tragic hero. He loves to bet on the ponies at Sportsman's Park and take his young nephew around to the neighborhood taverns, of which there are way too many to get to in a day, where plucky Perry, a real ham, sings for their drinks (the boy gets root beer). Lefty also likes to play his sax on the roof of his Blue Island Avenue apartment building. When he takes his nephew up through the trap door to see the view and his neighbor's rooftop pigeon coop, he says, "Welcome to Dreamsville," and Dreamsville is, indeed, the perfect name for the city of unrequited desires Dybek so tenderly and knowingly conjures. Lefty, an artist and gambler who plays with all his heart even though he's been dealt a losing hand, initiates Perry into the holy realm of music, and, inadvertently, teaches him about the abyss into which sensitive souls can so easily fall.
In "Song," the opening story--a tale frank and edgy in its revelations of the grittiness of Chicago life, and funny and charming in its delight in our capacity for casting caution to the wind and giving in to sheer pleasure--a ragtag school marching band is so caught up in pounding out their kick-ass version of "Rock Around the Clock," they blissfully follow their unsavory, boozy, but well-connected band leader out of their Little Village enclave into forbidden territory, Douglas Park, a primarily African American neighborhood. "The El station was the kind of boundary that doesn't show up on street maps," (20) muses Perry, and sure enough he and his fellow band members are rudely awakened from their trance. Clutching his clarinet, Perry runs like crazy until he finds himself on a block where every hydrant has been opened. As great torrents of water pour into the street, a "prismatic mist of phantom rainbows" hovers in this "strange neighborhood that expressed its anarchy in water." (24) Suddenly, turf warfare and racial tension are washed away, and Perry is cleansed and redeemed. The city is full of surprises, and as Dybek summons up the wonder of the unexpected and the improbable, he achieves a low-key form of magical realism that places him in a constellation of writers that includes Joyce in The Dubliners, Italo Calvino, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Chicago's own Leon Forrest.
Water is one of the collection's reigning metaphors, along with music, birds, and flowers (especially morning glory-festooned alley fences). In the sweetly dreamy story "Undertow," immersion in Lake Michigan reveals a secret dimension of the cosmos we call Chicago, while in "We Didn't," the lake delivers a haunting icon. Early on in the book, young Perry and Mick are supposed to be sleeping, but instead they're listening to the gruff entreaties of their beefy neighbors across the gangway. Once coitus ensues, Perry thinks that the house is creaking "as if a galleon was anchored beside our window," (27) a curious image for a young boy to concoct, but it turns out the Katzek brothers are obsessed with the stories of explorers. Mick has even made up a rambling, dirgelike song about the trials and tribulations of those who first circumnavigated the globe, an epic poem that begins, "I sailed with Magellan, . . .) (38) The brothers themselves become intrepid explorers as they embark on the arduous journey into adulthood and roam the urban wilderness, encountering new and mysterious people and places wherever they land.
Sometimes Perry is at the center of a story, sometimes he's off to the side as a sympathetic observer, a narrative fluidity that grants Dybek the liberty to invent and orchestrate a compelling cast of intriguing characters. There's Zip, the one-armed World War II vet and proprietor of the Zip Inn, who, dismayed by the "crazy, private war" in which the neighborhood gangbangers are embroiled, and angered by the intrusion of "goombahs" demanding protection money, dreams of a Wisconsin refuge in the "land of the sky blue waters," (62) just as the slogan for Hamm's beer (then the official beer of the Chicago Cubs) promises. A regular at the Zip Inn, Teo, ruined his career as a professional wrestler in Mexico for love. Joey Ditto is the feckless hit man in "Breasts," a long, sardonic, surreal, and deeply unnerving tale in which eroticism and death are inexorably entwined, an endlessly compelling paradox that Dybek frequently improvises on to profound affect.
Mick turns out to be an enigmatic and compelling character. And no one will be able to forget young, doomed Ralphie Poskozim and brainy and budding Camille Estrada, who tries to make sense of Ralphie's life in a school composition, the stars of "Blue Boy," a stealthily powerful, many faceted story about faith, the vagaries of memory, and the need to transmute life into story. The misadventures and revelations of Dybek's get-under-your-skin characters yield bittersweet tales brilliantly attuned to the confluence of inevitability and chance, natural forces and human folly.
Anger, deprivation, and the unrelenting threat of violence drive Dybek's incandescent stories, as does a rogue eroticism. The women Dybek portrays are at once tough and vulnerable, lusty and pragmatic, witty and elusive. Given the chaos and bloodshed that punctuate the lives of the men in their world, these capricious, ambivalent, and evanescent women are wise to avoid entanglement. They call the shots whenever possible, and men wait helplessly for them to bestow their favors. Joey pines for Capri, a woman he adores for her unpredictability. And Perry, a hard-knocks romantic who has witnessed more fistfights than kisses, is repeatedly thwarted in his pursuit of smart, skeptical, and independent women.
Dybek's entrancing stories replicate with piquant accuracy the social, cultural, and ethnic dynamics of one quintessential Chicago neighborhood at one particular time, and this is a tremendous achievement. But Dybek is also looking beyond the specifics of the world he so vividly evokes in an attempt to illuminate the fundamental connection between people and place, and between humankind and the earth. The word ecotone comes to mind, a term used to denote a place of transition where opposites meet, such as land and water, grasslands and forest, city and country, the border between two ethnic neighborhoods, even the plexus of reality and dream. These are zones of intense activity, conflict, and synergy, and as Perry and company avidly explore their native terrain from the industrial South Side to the bucolic North Side, Dybek homes in on just this sort of fertile ground.
In "Orchids," for instance, a dazzling story of fantasy and resilience, Perry revels in "a strip of wilderness" (176) along railroad tracks where wildlife, including a blue heron, thrive in the midst of urban clamor. Perry's favorite place is the fire truck graveyard along the Sanitary (he calls it Insanitary) Canal, a forgotten outdoor museum of city history, a place of rusted grace that inspires "a kind of reverence--not a feeling frequently encountered in Chicago." (180) And not a feeling shared by all, as Perry finds out so comically on a prom night from hell. But Perry is on to something important in his peculiar regard for this oddly hallowed place.
Perry, his brother, and his friends all possess poetic temperaments and questing souls (as well as caustic senses of humor), and are, therefore, drawn to the arts as they struggle into manhood. This creative impulse is a significant one, a potential path to a life more fulfilling than their parents', but also a way of understanding and valuing what they're so eager to leave behind. Dybek fills his painterly stories with ravishing descriptions of the hodgepodge of Chicago's streets and their quirky neighborhood characters, the chimerical lake, the white-cap-raising and trash-spinning wind, drastic weather, and dramatically slanting light to celebrate our ability to discern and be transformed by beauty however unlikely its manifestations and harsh its settings.
This receptivity to beguilement--this transcending of everyday cares and sorrows while watching frolicking children through a painted-open window in a Rogers Park apartment, or raising one's face to the pearly full moon floating above a puddled alley, or succumbing to music's dizzying embrace while driving too fast in an unreliable old car on Lake Shore Drive¬--this openness to out-of-the-blue beauty rekindles hope, inspires us to cherish memories of the dead, and induces us to seek and nurture love in spite of all the terrors that shadow our lives. This is what it is to be a human being. And this is Dybek's subject as he extracts a grand spectrum of experiences, emotions, and epiphanies from the potholed, broken glass-strewn byways of a sprawling city on a vast heartland lake in spellbinding stories that are, by turns, hilarious, stunning, and tragic, but always deeply moving, genuine, and compassionate.
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Radio Review
Here's my Chicago Public Radio review of a powerful first novel, Miles from Nowhere, by Nami Mun:
http://www.chicagopublicradio.org/Content.aspx?audioID=31783
http://www.chicagopublicradio.org/Content.aspx?audioID=31783
Sunday, January 25, 2009
We Persist
With rumors flying about the demise of the Washington Post Book World, one of the last of an endangered species, the stand-alone Sunday newspaper book review section, the National Book Critics Circle has recognized the good and fine work of a Book World editor, Ron Charles, with the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. Congratulations to Ron and to the NBCC Board.
I'm also happy to report that I have a review in today's Los Angeles Times book section:
http://www.latimes.com/features/books/la-ca-stacey-derasmo25-2009jan25,0,2128307.story
I'm also happy to report that I have a review in today's Los Angeles Times book section:
http://www.latimes.com/features/books/la-ca-stacey-derasmo25-2009jan25,0,2128307.story
Saturday, January 24, 2009
Radio review
Chicago Public Radio broadcast my review of Tony Romano's ravishing story collection, If You Eat, You Never Die: Chicago Tales, on January 21, 2009 on Eight-Forty Eight. They have a great Web site: www.chicagopublicradio.org.
And here's a link for the archived review:
http://www.chicagopublicradio.org/Content.aspx?audioID=31618
And here's a link for the archived review:
http://www.chicagopublicradio.org/Content.aspx?audioID=31618
Sunday, January 18, 2009
Thank you, Arne Naess
Arne Naess.
Arne Naess, the Norwegian philosopher and mountaineer who articulated the concept “deep ecology,” died on January 12, 2009 at the age of 96. Deep ecology is the essential perception that all living beings have intrinsic value, and, as Naess has said, “a right to live and blossom.” Naess also stated, “The earth does not belong to humans,” even though he understood that because we’re human, we look to our own first. Profoundly influenced by Spinoza and Gandhi (he wrote books about each), Naess was fascinated by the complexity of our relationship with the rest of life.
David Rothenberg, a philosopher, musician, and writer I greatly admire and learn from with great pleasure, studied with Arne Naess and worked on the translation of one of the prolific philosopher and ecologist’s major works, Ecology, Community, and Lifestyle (1989). Rothenberg is the author of Why Birds Sing and Thousand Mile Song: Whale Music in a Sea of Sound, and you can listen to Rothenberg talk about his music and writing right here on this site in Nonfiction interviews.
Rothenberg is currently working on a novel based on his experiences in Norway with Naess, an excerpt of which will appear in a forthcoming issue of TriQuarterly. In 1991, Rothenberg completed his Conversations with Arne Naess: Is it Painful to Think? (University of Minnesota Press). This is an excerpt from his introduction:
“Arne speaks of the small self and the “Self” with a capital s. The latter is the great Self, which is as near as he will come to the mention of God. It is the unity of the natural world, a singular thing with which we are meant to identify, as when we suddenly feel the suffering of the earth as a whole, under the vast weight of human transformation. And Self-realization is a way to link this intuition of the unity of life with our own individual lives and pursuits. . . .One approaches fulfillment through empathy with the world beyond the ego. This expansion of concern does not diminish humanity, but enriches us by pushing the meaning of humanity further and further away from any one person’s interest. As Spinoza says, we approach perfection with the more connections we apprehend of the innumerable links and branches that hold the world together as one.”
Arne Naess’ long list of books includes Life’s Philosophy: Reason and Feeling in a Deeper World (2002), and Harold Glasser has edited The Selected Works of Arne Naess (2005). When asked how he viewed the future in terms of humankind’s environmental impact, Arne Naess described himself as a “short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist.” What optimism we do feel is due in large part to Naess’ deep vision.
Arne Naess, the Norwegian philosopher and mountaineer who articulated the concept “deep ecology,” died on January 12, 2009 at the age of 96. Deep ecology is the essential perception that all living beings have intrinsic value, and, as Naess has said, “a right to live and blossom.” Naess also stated, “The earth does not belong to humans,” even though he understood that because we’re human, we look to our own first. Profoundly influenced by Spinoza and Gandhi (he wrote books about each), Naess was fascinated by the complexity of our relationship with the rest of life.
David Rothenberg, a philosopher, musician, and writer I greatly admire and learn from with great pleasure, studied with Arne Naess and worked on the translation of one of the prolific philosopher and ecologist’s major works, Ecology, Community, and Lifestyle (1989). Rothenberg is the author of Why Birds Sing and Thousand Mile Song: Whale Music in a Sea of Sound, and you can listen to Rothenberg talk about his music and writing right here on this site in Nonfiction interviews.
Rothenberg is currently working on a novel based on his experiences in Norway with Naess, an excerpt of which will appear in a forthcoming issue of TriQuarterly. In 1991, Rothenberg completed his Conversations with Arne Naess: Is it Painful to Think? (University of Minnesota Press). This is an excerpt from his introduction:
“Arne speaks of the small self and the “Self” with a capital s. The latter is the great Self, which is as near as he will come to the mention of God. It is the unity of the natural world, a singular thing with which we are meant to identify, as when we suddenly feel the suffering of the earth as a whole, under the vast weight of human transformation. And Self-realization is a way to link this intuition of the unity of life with our own individual lives and pursuits. . . .One approaches fulfillment through empathy with the world beyond the ego. This expansion of concern does not diminish humanity, but enriches us by pushing the meaning of humanity further and further away from any one person’s interest. As Spinoza says, we approach perfection with the more connections we apprehend of the innumerable links and branches that hold the world together as one.”
Arne Naess’ long list of books includes Life’s Philosophy: Reason and Feeling in a Deeper World (2002), and Harold Glasser has edited The Selected Works of Arne Naess (2005). When asked how he viewed the future in terms of humankind’s environmental impact, Arne Naess described himself as a “short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist.” What optimism we do feel is due in large part to Naess’ deep vision.
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Meet Mary Austin
One of the January books I read that fascinated me on many fronts is a biography of Mary Austin, author of The Land of Little Rain, a seminal book about the West, and about nature and humankind. I sink into biographies about writers and artists, hoping to learn about creativity, and morbidly intrigued by the inevitable suffering. Here's my response to this tale of a spirited woman and writer with a sharp sense of life's inclusiveness.
Mary Austin and the American West.
By Susan Goodman and Carl Dawson.
2009. 352p. illus. Univ. of California, $29.95 (9780520246355).
Goodman and Dawson paired up to write William Dean Howells: A Writer’s Life (2005), and now continue their inquiry into the lives of seminal yet glossed-over American writers with a much needed reconsideration of the vagabond life and influential achievements of Mary Austin (1868–1934). Austin and her best-known book, The Land of Little Rain (1903) are often namedropped in books about the ecology of the West and the battles over water use, but Austin herself remains a cloaked figure. Goodman and Dawson convey all the trauma, originality, audacity, and courage of this against-type Illinois-raised woman’s adventures, from her college studies in psychology and botany, to her move to California with her widowed mother and siblings to her discovery of her great affinity for the “frightening beauty” of the desert and fascination with the culture of the Native Americans who truly called it home. Austin harbored an “anxiety to know,” and explored with world with a “double perspective of a poet and scientist.”
For all her brilliance, instinct for tolerance and justice, and mystical sensibility, she quarreled with her family, married a man she couldn’t live happily with, and had a mentally handicapped daughter she had no help caring for as she had to teach to earn a living. By sheer dint of her curiosity, empathy, and habit of chronicling her thoughts, Austin propelled herself out of the most isolating and depressing situations and wrote many works of nonfiction, nine novels, two hundred articles and essays, poems, plays, and short stories while traveling from coast to coast, sending herself to Rome when she believed at 39 that she was dying of breast cancer, effected a remarkable recovery, and befriended cowboys and shepherds as well as William James, Jack London, H. G. Wells, Lou and Herbert Hoover, W. E. B. Du Bois, Mabel Dodge, Robinson Jeffers, Ansel Adams, and many more.
We learn that Austin was an anthropologist by nature, a realistic advocate for Native Americans, women, and African Americans, a woman who excelled at friendship, worked under impossible conditions, supported herself with grueling lecture tours, speaking about an astonishing array of subjects, and became a member of the art scenes in Carmel, San Francisco, Greenwich Village, and Santa Fe. Unconventional, dynamic, prophetic in her environmental concerns and awareness of the dangers of big business infilitrating government, and an early practitioner of multicultural studies, Austin wrote “exalted,” outspoken, independence, and intrepid works. She was an “eclectic thinker and an intellectual magpie,” a phoenix, and, for all her posturing and infuriating assertiveness, she was fiercely private and deeply self-critical.
In their compelling biography, Goodman and Dawson achieve the perfect balance between fact and analysis, creating a deeply dimensional and genuinely illuminating portrait of a woman struggling to free herself to be an artist, while being pulled in different directions by money and health woes, good causes, and loneliness. Mary Austin is an important figure to bring forward in the pantheon of American writers and Western seers, and Goodman and Dawson have done so with empathy, drama, and clarity.
Mary Austin and the American West.
By Susan Goodman and Carl Dawson.
2009. 352p. illus. Univ. of California, $29.95 (9780520246355).
Goodman and Dawson paired up to write William Dean Howells: A Writer’s Life (2005), and now continue their inquiry into the lives of seminal yet glossed-over American writers with a much needed reconsideration of the vagabond life and influential achievements of Mary Austin (1868–1934). Austin and her best-known book, The Land of Little Rain (1903) are often namedropped in books about the ecology of the West and the battles over water use, but Austin herself remains a cloaked figure. Goodman and Dawson convey all the trauma, originality, audacity, and courage of this against-type Illinois-raised woman’s adventures, from her college studies in psychology and botany, to her move to California with her widowed mother and siblings to her discovery of her great affinity for the “frightening beauty” of the desert and fascination with the culture of the Native Americans who truly called it home. Austin harbored an “anxiety to know,” and explored with world with a “double perspective of a poet and scientist.”
For all her brilliance, instinct for tolerance and justice, and mystical sensibility, she quarreled with her family, married a man she couldn’t live happily with, and had a mentally handicapped daughter she had no help caring for as she had to teach to earn a living. By sheer dint of her curiosity, empathy, and habit of chronicling her thoughts, Austin propelled herself out of the most isolating and depressing situations and wrote many works of nonfiction, nine novels, two hundred articles and essays, poems, plays, and short stories while traveling from coast to coast, sending herself to Rome when she believed at 39 that she was dying of breast cancer, effected a remarkable recovery, and befriended cowboys and shepherds as well as William James, Jack London, H. G. Wells, Lou and Herbert Hoover, W. E. B. Du Bois, Mabel Dodge, Robinson Jeffers, Ansel Adams, and many more.
We learn that Austin was an anthropologist by nature, a realistic advocate for Native Americans, women, and African Americans, a woman who excelled at friendship, worked under impossible conditions, supported herself with grueling lecture tours, speaking about an astonishing array of subjects, and became a member of the art scenes in Carmel, San Francisco, Greenwich Village, and Santa Fe. Unconventional, dynamic, prophetic in her environmental concerns and awareness of the dangers of big business infilitrating government, and an early practitioner of multicultural studies, Austin wrote “exalted,” outspoken, independence, and intrepid works. She was an “eclectic thinker and an intellectual magpie,” a phoenix, and, for all her posturing and infuriating assertiveness, she was fiercely private and deeply self-critical.
In their compelling biography, Goodman and Dawson achieve the perfect balance between fact and analysis, creating a deeply dimensional and genuinely illuminating portrait of a woman struggling to free herself to be an artist, while being pulled in different directions by money and health woes, good causes, and loneliness. Mary Austin is an important figure to bring forward in the pantheon of American writers and Western seers, and Goodman and Dawson have done so with empathy, drama, and clarity.
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