Review Monday: Daughters of Empire: A Memoir of a Year in Britain and Beyond

Daughters of Empire: A Memoir of a Year in Britain and Beyond
by Jane Satterfield
Published in 2009
Demeter Press
ISBN: 1550145037


Reviewed by Shelle Stormoe

American culture is awash in stories about motherhood, especially stories about the particularly female conflict between work and family. In that sense, Satterfield's book covers familiar territory. Born in England but raised in the U.S., Satterfield goes back to Britain as a tag-a-long on her husband's Fulbright teaching fellowship. She plans to finish a poetry manuscript and teach at a local university, but instead finds herself pregnant for the first time. Often left alone in a country that is at the same moment "home" and entirely foreign, she must confront the realities of motherhood while she fights her fears of becoming consumed by her child's needs.

In the early essays in this volume, Satterfield explores this idea through meditations on the oppressive practicalities of the British healthcare system that make her feel as if she is her body, and erodes her American "sense of entitlement." She examines her own mother's nostalgic longing for England, and the lack of choices her mother faced as she grew into adulthood. Satterfield fears she will be forced into a similar restrictions, which plays out in life. A job offer is rescinded; her husband's incessant work effectively exempts him from domestic duties, which fall to Satterfield.

This lack of control over her own physicality and destiny, prompts her to meditate on the books and music that helped define her youth and her expectations for adulthood. She adopts a tone that is both scholarly and intimate while she examines the work of the Bronte's, the 90s British band Oasis, George Harrison, and a long list other poets and novelists. Over and over, she repeats the point that these old inspirations hold up poorly once she's crossed the threshold between hopeful young poet and married mother.

In memoir, it can be dangerously easy to force a life that is, as most lives are, messy and non-linear into a sentimental and familiar plot structure. Satterfield avoids this pitfall by refusing to wrap up her year in England into a tidy narrative. She arranges her essays into an order more driven by theme than by chronology. The pieces jump from England, to later experiences in the U.S., and then back to England. She shifts forward in time, so that the reader knows her marriage will end in divorce, and that she will marry again, before she tells the story about her daughter's birth and first husband's indifference. She interrupts her series of longer essays with a spare, poetic examination of starvation, a metaphor for her insatiable appetite while pregnant and the painful way her literary ambitions begin to starve in the face of motherhood.

Reading this collection is a bit like hearing all the stories of a new friend's life, but in a random order punctuated by days and weeks of silence, so that every story must begin again, must cover much of the same ground the previous story covered. This structure keeps the book from seeming too much like other motherhood memoirs, and more accurately reflects the reality of her experience.
***

Shelle Stormoe will begin work as a Visiting Lecturer of  Writing at the University of Central Arkansas this fall. Her essays and interviews have appeared in River Teeth, Divide, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, The Arkansas Times and elsewhere.  An essay is forthcoming from Muscadine Lines: A Southern Journal.  She lives in Little Rock, Arkansas.  

Review Monday: e.e. Cummings' Erotic Poems

Erotic Poems
by e.e. Cummings
Pub. Date: February 2010
Publisher: Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Paperback: 80 pages
ISBN-13: 978-0871406590

Reviewed By Will Grofic

Simultaneous orgasms don’t happen often, or maybe not often enough, and therefore sex becomes a match of wills. There is a power to pleasuring and a relinquishing of power to being pleasured that e.e. Cummings erotic poems taps into beautifully, and this power struggle is the spine of these poems.

Of course inside this book are all the hallmarks of e.e. Cummings poems: compound nonce words, cutting and enjambing words by syllables, comedy, and repetition. But the tension in his poems comes from the realization he’s helpless or the admission that he wants to be so. One of his most famous poems “16” is a he said/she said poem about an affair. The man starts out with the power, while the woman asks “is it love said she)/ if you’re willing said he/ (but you’re killing said she.” By and by, they start with the whoopee, and the last stanza illustrates the release (and catch) of power:




(come? Said he

ummm said she)

you’re divine! said he

(you are Mine said she)


Even when Cummings incorporates awe (“the sudden flower of complete amazement”) or primal violence (“my loveFist in her knuckling/ thighs”), the lines that sparkle are those that tense up at the thought of the sex being over, the relationship finishing, and eventually life ending. In “xxx.” the speaker asks his lover to ponder the decrepit statues and aqueducts of past civilizations, and his logic is that if these things are so ephemeral “let us make haste” with “constructive/Horizontal/ business” and to “consider well this ruined aqueduct/ lady,/ which used to lead something into somewhere).” Of course countless poets have made the same claim to their lovers, but his word choice and images of aqueducts and statues are fresh and compelling.

And then you have to think to yourself, he wrote these in the 1920s? When Harry Douglas and someone named Mary Pickford were the big silent movie stars? Contemporary poets still use poetic moves that he championed like the compound nonce words and humorous use of ecstatic “O”. Although his wordplay for that day and age holds up for the most part, Cummings does sometime combine words that aren’t necessary to the image or rhythm of the poem (“greenslim” and “smelloftheworld”), making the poem all that much clunkier, but then he follows those words up with highly innovative concoctions like “mancurious” and “pseudomind” and “gropeofstrength” that all but make sense to be put in next year’s Oxford English.

Overall though, Cummings’ images seemed less modern and contemporary than the famous poems recast him. The subjects of his usual erotic images were often staid nature references, not what we remember from his great poem included in this collection about driving a car “xix.”:

the

internalexpanding

&

externalcontracting

brakes Bothatonce and



brought allofher tremB

-ling

The other outdated factor of reading Cummings today was his staggering amount of adverbs that garble and jumble without a function or reason. With that said, it’s remarkable any of these poems are fresh almost a century later.

Back in 1920, these were considered controversial poems, and today they’d fit in with other contemporary erotic poems. In one of Cummings’ weirdest metaphors, he biological inverses the sexual insertion:

there is between my big legs a crisp city…

all the house terribly tighten

upon your coming; and they are glad

as you fill the streets of my city with children.

Cummings has become the waiting taker, while the woman fills him. It’s odd and off-putting, power is reversed, and Cummings asks for her to “murder (his) breasts, still and always// I will hug you solemnly into me.” Even when Cummings wants to be the victim, his pleasure comes from a violent relinquishing of power and the peace that comes afterward.
***

Will Grofic is Managing Editor of Potomac Review and a recent graduate from the Bennington Writing Seminars where he received an MFA in Writing. His poems appear or are forthcoming in No Tell Motel, Gargoyle, The Coachella Review, and Anti-. He also teaches at Montgomery College.

Review Monday: The Day the Falls Stood Still

The Day the Falls Stood Still
by Cathy Marie Buchanan
Hyperion. 301 pp. $24.99
ISBN: 9781401341367


Reviewed By Jared C. Clark

At first glance, The Days the Falls Stood Still reads like a work of historical chick lit set in a far-removed time. The main character and narrator, Bess, first meets us as a 17-year-old girl, torn between a vagrant love interest and the best interests of her family. But soon Cathy Marie Buchanan leaves these childish notions behind, transforming her novel into a compelling narrative that grapples with friendships forgotten, death, war, and a more mature, complicated notion of love and security.

"Standing there at the brink of the falls, I asked for a young man to be spared, a young man for me," thinks the early Bess. But before long, she's forced to face adulthood and becomes a character who later ruminates intelligently on more significant matters, thinking "it is then it seems that her life was inconsequential, that mine may be as well and everyone else's too. We all matter so little, not at all after a generation or two."

Buchanan's narrative stays with Bess, who finds unlikely love with the river man Tom Cole the same day her family's financial ruin forces her early departure from boarding school. Set against the backdrop of WWI in a rapidly changing Niagara Falls, Canada, Bess' narration comes across as serious and contemplative: she's a person trying to make sense of a world that becomes more chaotic with every passing day. Tom offers her salvation, but this salvation comes at a cost: the relationship will doom what little social standing Bess and her family have left.

Bess' narration paints an exceptional portrait of Niagara Falls between 1915 and 1923, providing intricate details of the town, people, and styles of the time. Buchanan supplements this narration with photographs, letters, and fabricated news clippings that immerse the reader in an era when daredevils shot the rapids above the falls, when power companies threatened the life of the river itself, and when thousands of Canadian men--including Bess' Tom--shipped out to fight a war across the Atlantic.

While Tom survives the war, everything threatens the happiness that he and Bess work so hard to achieve. The novel depicts this struggle without becoming sappy or melodramatic, and while these struggles occur a century before the present day, they remain reminiscent of more recent times with images of a young man haunted by war, of a woman who dreams of a house with "closets, those modern tiny rooms for housing linens and clothing and other bits best kept tucked away…an up-to-date bathroom," even at the risk of depleting her new family's savings.

And this is what makes The Day the Falls Stood Still so compelling--it provides a portrait of the past that won't alienate modern readers, and it keeps the pages turning and turning all the way to the novel's masterfully-constructed conclusion.

Review Monday: The Museum of Eterna's Novel (The First Good Novel)

Macedonio Fernández
The Museum of Eterna’s Novel (The First Good Novel)
(translated from the Spanish by Margaret Schwartz) with a foreword by Adam Thirwell.
Open Letter
Pub Date: February 23, 2010

Reviewed by Luis Alberto Ambroggio

In this extraordinary literary creation, Borges’ mentor, Macedonio Fernández, masters in the reader's playful engagement to games of the word and of the mind beyond literature and metaphysics. One of the great Argentine writers of the twentieth century, Macedonio (as he preferred to be called), wrote this novel (or anti-novel) with an originality and perversity second to none—way ahead of his time and beyond the avant-guard rupture with previous conventions. He redefined the genre and influenced the great literary geniuses among Hispanic-American writers, including Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Ricardo Piglia, and many others.

“Whoever preceded him might shine in history," Borges wrote, "but they were all rough drafts of Macedonio, imperfect previous versions. To not imitate this canon would have represented incredible negligence.”

The Museum of Eterna’s Novel (The First Good Novel) is structured as a challenge to realism, to logic, and to structure itself, as if the author intended to demolish the sense of fluidity of a normal novel and its aesthetic tendency towards realism and the solemnity of style. Instead, we (the readers) are forced (as well as intelectually seduced) to immerse ourselves in continual digressions and discussions on the roles of authors, readers, critics, characters, theories on genres, etc., as if these topics were objects which are acquired and kept in a Museum. This Museum is also, as Adam Thirlwell writes in the foreword, a “laboratory for investigating whether every philosophical question can be observed through the condition of falling in love.”

Museum starts by offering over 50 prologues with a wide range of themes: mortality and eternity; perspective and the viscitudes of the author (including authorial despair); critics; context; non-existence; and so on. Many of these themes have digressions containing dedications, salutations, and narratives on whether readers should accept or reject a chracter in an elaborate effort to playfully frustrate and challenge.

Following the prologues are twenty chapters concerning a group of characters (some borrowed from other texts) who live on an estancia called "la novella." Three sets of lovers (Eterna and the President; The lover—Deunamor—and his anonymous lover; and Maybegenius and Sweetheart) in different settings exemplify or put into practice or reason the so-called concept of “todoamor,"—“totallove"—which overcomes what the world calls death, merely “hiding/ocultación” in Macedonio’s vocabulary. He writes: “I do not believe in the death of those who love nor in the life of those who do not love.”

Thus the only death possible and present in this novel is the academic death of the characters. Critics have suggested that the long process of writing this novel from 1925 until his death in 1952 was Macedonio’s attempt to fight his pain and fear following the untimely death of his wife, Elena de Obieta, in 1920.

The translator, Margaret Schwartz, Assistant Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University, has done an outstanding job translating Macedonio’s baroque, convoluted prose, complicated language, and invented words, preserving his unique voice. The quality of her translation no doubt comes from her time spent in Argentina prior to and under a Fulbright fellowship in 2004, her first-hand familiarity with living in the literary circles of Buenos Aires, and her meticulous research on the life and work of Macedonio Fernández. This is more meritorious when, in her own words, she is translating “someone who deliberately tangles his words, uses antiquated language, and who writes at the speed of thought, without regard for syntax and punctuation.” But even more so, I might add, because Macedonio Fernández is a genius like Cervantes and Kafka—who not only created their own language but masterfully caused the unpredictable methamorphosis of the genre.


Luis Alberto Ambroggio, a member of the North-American Academy of the Spanish Language, is Writer's Center workshop leader and an internationally known Hispanic-American poet born in Argentina. He is the author of eleven collections of poetry. His poetry and essays have appeared in newspapers, magazines (including Passport, Scholastic, International Poetry Review, and Hispanic Culture Review), poetry anthologies (DC Poets Against the War, Cool Salsa), textbooks (Paisajes, Bridges to Literature, Voices: Breaking Down Barriers) and award-winning electronic collections of Latino Literature (Alexander Street Press). Recently, another Writer's Center workshop leader, Yvette Neisser Moreno, edited his Difficult Beauty: Selected Poems. You can read a review of that book here.

He can be reached at lambroggio@cox.net

Review Monday: Stitches

Stitches
by David Small
W.W. Norton
336 pages
ISBN: 978-0393068573


Reviewed by Chris Hobson




Graphic novels rarely interest me. The last one I enjoyed was Loeb and Sale’s The Long Halloween, but that’s mostly because I have a man-crush on Batman. I’ve tried reading the classics of the genre – Alan Moore’s Watchmen, Frank Miller’s 300 – each time finding the brilliant pictures and gravity-mocking action off-putting, their kinetic panels leaving little to the imagination. So when I picked up David Small’s Stitches, a critically acclaimed “autobiographic” novel about an abused boy who grows up to be a famous artist, I thought: well now, this might be interesting.


Then I read it.


Small’s childhood makes Dante’s descent into the inferno look like a mad lib.  The story unfolds in 1950s Detroit, a city on the knife’s edge of collapse.  Small’s father, a radiologist, floats through life in a haze of preoccupation and pipe smoke.  He seems more like a houseguest than a father, barely uttering more than a few words to his wife and sons.  Small’s mother, the more outgoing of the pair, bashes cupboard doors closed in a passive-aggressive attempt to be noticed and, hmmm…I feel like I’m forgetting something.  Oh yeah!  She turns out to be a closet lesbian who burns Small’s favorite books for no apparent reason. 

Not to be outdone, Small’s grandmother, a psychopath who applies a Midwestern work ethic to torturing her family, makes Dick Cheney look like Shirin Ebadi.  She eventually goes insane, locks her husband in the basement, tears off her clothes, and tries to burn down her own house.  Hoorah!  Small’s writing style is matter-of-fact, matching the desolation of his spare, black-and-white watercolor drawings; when his grandmother has her breakdown, he tells it like it is: “A neighbor saw the smoke.  Saw her dancing around and phoned for help.  Papa John was saved and Grandma was taken away to the state insane asylum.”  Mental illness does to Small’s family what the Hindenberg did for luxury blimping.

The coup de grace comes when young Small develops a lump on his neck.  At first his parents ignore it; they’re social climbers who’d rather take a spin on their rich doctor friend’s yacht (on which are raised flags festooned with pictures of martini glasses) than attend to their son’s health.  But they finally succumb to their friend’s pleas to cut out the offending cyst.  After a series of operations (assisted by a ghoulishly-named anesthesiologist, Dr. Blyss), the doctor succeeds in removing the growth, though he extracts a few of the boy’s vocal chords in the process.  You got it: the kid’s now a mute.

If this were fiction, even the casual reader would note the ham-handedness in the boy’s no longer having a voice in what happens to him.  After all, the only sound he can make after the surgery is the guttural “Ack!” of a Velociraptor.  But when clichés occur in reality, they take on a malevolence fiction could never muster.  Inasmuch as this book seems bent on depressing its audience, this plot point works splendidly.  Spoiler alert: it’s all downhill after the operation: eventually Small ends up an orphan living in a dilapidated drug den.  Like you didn’t see that one coming.  

Don’t let small children or optimistic grandmothers near this book: it’ll ruin their whole lives. 

But if there is a bright spot to the book, Small’s haunted drawings made an impression on this reader.  In one sequence, a fetus floating in a jar of alcohol comes alive and chases the boy through a hospital and, you know, that’s just cool.  But there is no heart here, just a web-laden chest cavity where a boy slowly rots.  Note to anyone who doesn’t want to die a little inside: leave this book off your Christmas list.

***

Born in the foothills of the Appalachians, at the headwaters of the Ohio River, and at the navel of the known universe, i.e. Columbus, Ohio, Chris Hobson has published nothing since he spent way too much money getting a fancy-sounding degree.  A late bloomer, none of this bothers him.  He has written several screenplays that went nowhere and a gigantic novel that collapsed on itself one night and died of asphyxiation.  When he’s not working hard at his public relations job, he enjoys watching movies, hangin’ with his wife, and writing.

Review Monday: Diane Ackerman's Dawn Light

Diane Ackerman,
Dawn Light: Dancing with Cranes and Other Ways to Start the Day
W.W. Norton & Company; 2009
240pp; $24.95

Reviewed by Nina Amato

It’s hard to imagine poetry intermingling with science. The two are not common bed fellows. Yet Diane Ackerman’s Dawn Light: Dancing with Cranes and Other Ways to Start the Day is a poetic celebration of nature and science. The book is so beautifully written, we may not even realize that we’re learning something. Did you know that bees sleep in on autumn mornings? Or that birds tailor their songs to their landscape? Were you aware that city lights increase breast cancer rates by 50 percent? Or that children in Norway develop slower, intellectually and physically, during the long winter due to reduced sunlight and subsequent vitamin D deficiency? Ackerman presents these and other facts about our world with delightfully engineered prose.

Dawn Light is a book about the world. The world at dawn. Ackerman wants us to appreciate everything about dawn; the beauty and the science.

The chapter, Water, Water Everywhere, is about, not surprisingly, water. Water in the oceans. Water in the clouds. Water at dawn. We are entranced by the topic with the chapter’s first stunning sentence, “In the sapphire hours before sunrise, ice floes on the lake crack the mirror reflection of trees.” Ackerman goes beyond this exquisite imagery, bringing our attention past water’s evident beauty to its imperative role in our existence. “Eccentric right down to our atoms, we’d be impossible without water’s weird bag of tricks. The litany of we’re only here because begins with this chilling one: We’re only here because ice floats.” This is science reported by a poet.

Ackerman’s gorgeous observations of the world at dawn are described with such splendor that reading the book is almost as uplifting as actually viewing a sunrise. “As the sun drives gold nails through the shadows, a dull red dawn, the color of deer and rust, soars up the sky.” Few could construct such a beautiful picture of dawn using only words. The whole book is lovely verbal photograph, full of history, science, and poetry.
Harried by deadlines, overcome with stress, it is easy to forget the world that surrounds us. Other creatures are busy too. Cranes are coupling up to raise their young together, just as people do. Early birds are catching their worms, possibly because drowsy half-asleep worms are easier to catch. Bees, farmers by occupation, are tending their crops in the summer based on the waking schedule of each flower.
Dawn Light is a beautiful reminder to pause and admire the world around us. The world is a marvelous place; especially at dawn.


Reviewer Nina Amato wishes she had a job to list in this bio. Sympathetic employers can view her work at writeNdesign.com.

Review Monday: This Side of Jordan

This Side of Jordan
Monte Schulz
Fantagraphics Books
Released Oct 20, 2009

Reviewed by Jason Rodriguez

Back in the summer of 2008 I set out on a cross-country road trip. Washington DC to San Diego, CA over nine days, by myself, with no real reason for taking to the road except for the fact that I just needed to get away for a while. It was a tough year on several fronts and the romanticized idea of open roads, hitch hikers, and misadventures I missed out on in my twenties were too attractive to turn down. I had fun on the trip, met up with old friends and made some new friends, stayed in hostels, run-down motels, and the occasional guest bedroom. By the time the trip was over I was tired, cranky, lonely, and a bit stressed out – and I still had all of the problems I left in DC to deal with. They never really left me, I guess – they rode along with me, constantly reminding me of commitments that I needed to eventually address.

This feeling of futility, of an unwanted passenger, of being unable to run from your commitments, has been captured in Monte Schulz’s This Side of Jordan. Alvin Pentegrast, our teenage protagonist, decides to take a job with a complete stranger provided it pulls him off his farm, where his current tuberculosis relapse is beginning to signal a trip back to the sanitarium. His new employer is Chester Burke, a good-looking swindler and loner gangster who quickly proves to be a violent sociopath. Fortunately for Alvin, the pair picks-up a third traveling companion along the way, the dwarf Rascal, who currently spends most of his time under his Auntie’s house and constantly tells stories of adventure seeking and Roosevelt dinner parties from a past life, back when his uncle was alive and would take him out into the world. Alvin and Rascal embark on this journey of escape, trying to leave their past lives behind, only to find themselves trapped in a Packard with a man who has no regard for human life and who would likely kill both of them if they prove to no longer be useful.

Schulz’s book is filled with magnificent characterization, rich environments, and a sharp humor (when a bank teller doesn’t take Alvin’s bomb threats serious, Alvin tells him, “I’m not feeling too good and I might be contagious, so give me the money, dumbbell”) that takes you off guard and makes the horrific moments a more effective punch to the gut. The book takes place in 1929, before the Great Crash and during the height of prohibition, and finds our characters driving across the Midwest, leaving a trail of carnage in their wake. Speakeasies, hip-flasks, churches, banks, dance derbies, loose men and women, and circuses provide a backdrop of a country living in excess with few legal options to unwind to. It’s a perfect setting for a man like Chester Burke to make his fortune, and a perfect opportunity for men like Alvin and Rascal to find their escapes.

Alvin is an odd sort of a protagonist. I found myself having nothing but disdain for him at times, his sense of entitlement and his tendency to take his disappointments and let-downs out on Rascal make him a hard character to love, such as when he interrupts Rascal while he’s talking with a preacher’s daughter, throws the girl’s bible on the floor, and tells her, “only dumbbells ever believed there was such a thing, and I don’t need no ugly little girl telling me nothing to the contrary!” But his naïveté, his impending death, and his occasional bit of humor make his relatable if not loveable, at times. Rascal quickly becomes the star of this book – he’s mysterious at first, a character you cheer for without ever knowing why. But as his story unfolds he becomes an increasingly sympathetic character, and you look forward to his stories and fear for his eventual fate. Chester is the perfect villain – only used when necessary and used for full effect every time. Alvin and Rascal are the ones who keep the safe-house safe, the car running, run a diversion while Chester carries out another plan designed to line their coffers. Chester always tends to show up at the end of these scenes like a force of nature, improvising on a botched plan, getting the money he’s after and leaving torn limbs and dead bodies in his wake. He never once comments on his actions, after every score he comments on the weather or his hunger as if murder is routine and necessary and fun. Whenever he enters the scene you know something cringe-worthy is about to happen, and you know that Alvin and Rascal are falling further down the rabbit hole and getting to a point where true escape is becoming impossible. Even if they physically escape this hell, their soles will never be complete again.

The book challenges the reader to think about faith and redemption, commitment and escape. It puts us in the passenger seat of Chester’s Packard and makes us ask what makes a person good, and whether or not we can truly escape our lives.

And, of course, I cannot write a review of this book without mentioning that its author, Monte Schulz, is the son of the late, great Charles Schulz – the creator of Peanuts. I didn’t want to lead with that fact, however, because the book stands on its own and shouldn’t be judged by the fact that the writer had a famous father. Monte has a voice of his own, and This Side of Jordan would still be a fantastic and moving novel even if Peanuts has never existed.

Jason Rodriguez is an Eisner and Harvey-nominated graphic novel editor that lives in Arlington, VA with his wife, two dogs, three cats, and hated bird. He recently reviewed Red Monkey Double Happiness Book on First Person Plural.

Positively Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan Revisited: 13 Graphic Interpretations of Bob Dylan's Songs
W.W. Norton, Inc.
Publication date: November 16, 2009
ISBN: 9780393076172
$24.95

Reviewed by Kyle Semmel

A fascinating new book hits bookstore shelves today: Bob Dylan Revisited: 13 Graphic Interpretations of Bob Dylan's Songs. It presents on the page what musicians, including Dylan, have long since done on the stage: reinvent the songs. In the book—which is, according to a press release, "fully authorized by Bob Dylan and SONY Records"— thirteen graphic novelists interpret Dylan's classic tunes by creating panels of original artwork based on the lyrics.

And it's cool, both as a tribute to Dylan and as a collection of graphic "stories" that can be enjoyed with or without knowledge of the man who wrote the songs. (As the press release succinctly puts it, "Fans will relish this chance to appreciate Dylan's work in a new context, while a new generation will be introduced to his lyrical genius with mesmerizing original art.")

Thierry Murat's vision of "Blowin' in the Wind" is a social-realistic interpretation quite in the spirit of Dylan; Murat even alters the lyrics to craft a new refrain (something I imagine Dylan himself might admire): "all that I know, the wind whispered to me." The panels make ample use of shading in dark charcoal; when they are coupled with snatches of Dylan's sharp lyrics—"how many deaths," "how many tears," "how many wars,"—the drawings become bold and stirring, even downright haunting.

There's an echo of this haunting spirit in Lorenzo Mattotti's mindtrip of "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," perhaps the most powerful interpretation in this collection. It's a colorful rendition: Edvard Munch meets Blue Man in a dark nightmare of our times. Unlike Murat, Mattotti sticks to Dylan's lyrics completely—and does so to great effect. This is a song where words come alive: "I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken" is accompanied by the image of a blindfolded man whose tongue is sheared in half by a bodyless hand (Here, it's impossible not to recall the line in Dylan's "Political World" from Oh, Mercy: "We're livin' in a time/ a man commits a crime/ the crime don't have a face.") In another panel, the horrendous "heard one person starve, I heard many people laughin'" depicts a faceless individual begging for food while two suited men enjoy a hearty laugh, unseeing the suffering. There's absolutely no safe place in this song—even the one bright space of "I met a young girl, she gave me a rainbow" is weighted down by what's wrapped so bleakly around it—and Mattotti uses the hard, brutal lyrics as a springboard to the rawest images. In doing so he creates a visual sense of menace. The colors reflect the mood.

Overall, the mood this book offers is a grim one. Fans of Dylan's music know that when he's at his best, his lyrics and his songs offer more darkness than light (light's in there, but you've got to look hard for it, it don't shine bright). And this collection spares no darkness. Nicolas Nemiri's "I Want You" is noirish; there's a lone shadow man—a classic Dylan image. François Avril's "Girl from the North Country" gives us another stoic man, this time one who leaves his girl to ride off into a snow-blanketed landscape on a horse. (And no, that's not part of the original song.)

The shortest interpretation is Jean Claude-Gőtting's "Lay Lady Lay," a starkly-imagined charcoal set of panels that, removed from the lyrics, would seem to be paintings of Depression-era America. It's a simple translation of the song: a hard-working man returns home to his loving wife. In Claude-Gőtting's hand it is a deeply moving portrait of a relationship, with zero trace of the Hallmark silliness—probably thanks to the duskiness of the panels—that could be associated with this kind of interpretation. The interpretation may be short, but it perfectly gets at what makes this book—and Dylan—so special: a deep and lasting, real and recognizable sense of humanity. Dylan's view of humanity may be dark—it may have, to quote a phrase, "gone down the drain"—but he knows what real people go through every day, and this knowledge of people is embedded into the core of all that he produces artistically.

And in this book the interpreters of his songs, no matter where they take them, understand this—from the surrealistic visions of "Desolation Row" and "Tombstone Blues" to the in-your-face realness of "Hurricane" and "Blind Willie McTell." You cannot listen to Dylan's music, or read this book, without seeing that above all these songs touch on what it means to be human. There's an urgent, though subtle call for empathy in Dylan's lyrics; and the visual images in Bob Dylan Revisited: 13 Graphic Interpretations of Bob Dylan's Songs make you feel exactly what that wonderful scratchy sung voice of Dylan's makes you feel: The world may be dark, but you are not alone.

Bob Dylan is one of the most significant American artists of our time. And his iconic songs will remain long after everyone reading this post today—Monday, November 16, 2009—is gone. Bob Dylan Revisited: 13 Graphic Interpretations of Bob Dylan's Songs is a brilliant picture book for grown-ups with grown-up concerns, hopes, and fears. The images pull you in, the lyrics knock you out. You can read the book in one sitting, maybe on one Metro ride to work, and the effort will be rewarded. You can open up to any song at any time of day. You can skip around at your leisure. You can read it however you want. But one thing you can't do, I assure you, is forget this book.


Kyle Semmel is the publications and communications manager of The Writer's Center. Follow his tweets at http://twitter.com/writerscenter.

To whet your appetite, here's the list of interpreted songs:
"Blowin' in the Wind" interpreted by Thierry Murat
"A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" interpreted by Lorenzo Mattotti
"I want You" interpreted by Nicolas Nemiri
"Girl From the North Country" interpreted by François Avril
"Lay Lady Lay" interpreted by Jean-Claude Gőtting
"Positively 4th Street" interpreted by Christopher
"Tombstone Blues" interpreted by Bézian
"Desolation Row" interpreted by Dave McKean
"Like a Rolling Stone" interpreted by Alfred
"Hurricane" interpreted by Gradimir Smudja
"Blind Willie McTell" interpreted by Benjamin Flao
"Knockin' on Heaven's Door" interpreted by Jean-Philippe Bramanti
"Not Dark Yet" interpreted by Zep

Monday Review: The Red Monkey Double Happiness Book

The Red Monkey Double Happiness Book
By Joe Daly
Fantagraphics Books
1606991639
Reviewed by Jason Rodriguez

In the grand tradition of Cheech & Chong, Harold & Kumar, and Pineapple Express’s Dale & Saul we have Dave & Paul, the stoner stars of Joe Daly’s pair of graphic novellas featured in The Red Monkey Double Happiness Book. On the surface we’ve seen the basic premise before, two loveable stoners find themselves in the middle of a conspiracy yet they manage to save the day, get the girl, and go back to their lives of munchies, too-clever conversations, and a relaxing life in their tiny, sun-baked town. Daly’s graphic novel is a bit different from other stories in the genre, however, as our protagonists are a bit more loveable, a bit cleverer, and a bit more proactive than the usual stoner fare. In fact, Daly’s characters aren’t motivated by drugs; they’re motivated by an internal sense of goodness. In that regard, the book is closer to The Big Lebowski than the movie’s referenced above.

They live in Cape Town, South Africa, in an apartment building that houses an eclectic array of personalities. Dave is a graphic designer who starts the book down on his luck, fed up with his current gig working for a brick catalog where his employer wants him to draw bricks that look the same as past bricks but with his own unique spin (and unique spin boils down to a wiggly line or something). He has monkey feet, a physical deformity that allows him to climb poles and scale walls - something he’s embarrassed of at first, but as the book progresses he begins to embrace his deformity as an advantageous tool in his daily life. Paul is Dave’s freeloading neighbor who never has a job and has likely taken entirely too many psychedelics. Together they make an unlikely crime-fighting team, taking down shady neighbors and sketchy real estate firms that not only inject an unbalanced bit of evil into Cape Town but who also cause irreversible damage to Cape Town’s ecosystem. Environmentally aware, crime-fighting stoners…and they’re funny, too.

There are two stories in this book. The first novella focuses on a Danny Trejo-styled tough-guy Mexican who carries a guitar case that leaks green ooze and who doesn’t have a lot of love for Dave, as evident by his proclamation, “I KEEEEL YOU! YOU BEEETNEEK SCUM!” The second novella takes our heroes out of their apartment building and starts with a hunt for an escaped capybara before spiraling into a Scooby-Doo like plot involving people with green, glowing eyes that are apparently draining the wetlands in the middle of the night. Both stories stand up well on their own, but the second (longer) story is what makes this book truly magnificent...

…which brings me to Daly’s artwork. Dense panels heightened by an incredible color palette that manages to bring the reader into Dave’s apartment building for the first story and then into the Cape Town wetlands and expansive mansions in the second story. In the second story Daly’s artwork really begins to shine, the set pieces are more robust and it feels as if Daly is no longer cramped by Dave’s small apartment; he really gets to let his work come through and show us the colors and environments that are Cape Town. This book is highly recommended for everyone, whether you’re fans of graphic novels or not, and could serve as a great introduction to the medium if you’re one of those folks who shy away from them.
***

Jason Rodriguez is a workshop leader at The Writer's Center. He is an Eisner and Harvey-nominated graphic novel editor. He lives in Arlington, VA with his wife, two dogs, three cats, and hated bird.

Review Monday: Dylan Landis' Normal People Don't Live Like This

by Dylan Landis
Persea Books
Released: September 28, 2009
ISBN: 978-0892553549
Reviewed by Caitlin Hill

Is Dylan Landis’ debut, Normal People Don’t Live Like This, a collection or a novel? It’s a fair question, and the book jacket refrains from answering, preferring the ambiguous “debut” where the label would usually be affixed. As this particular work blurs the lines between “novel” and “short story collection,” let’s call it a “novel-in-stories.” Each story can stand, unwavering, on its own two feet, and yet the collection as a whole tells a grander story; one that, when read cover-to-cover, still has a sense of movement, of working towards a greater understanding. What binds this work together is a cluster of women, most notably our main protagonist, Leah—in whose story and perspective we spend the most time—and her mother, Helen.

Leah is introduced in the second story in the book, “Fire.” She’s in middle school, and we are dropped into her world of fairly standard teenage fare. What Landis does well here is crafting individuals: Leah, tapping things thrice whenever she’s nervous; Helen, exhibiting her oppressive concern for her daughter’s well being by scaring her with specific stories of rape and murder: “He used a hammer,” leading Leah to wonder if the hammer was for the rape or the murder; Rainey, a beautiful bully who entrances Leah, even as she’s repelled by her cruelty. When Leah realizes that another bully, Chris, has flaws, Landis doesn’t simply state that Leah’s fear ebbs, she writes: “She thought about these things, and in thinking them she ran a tender finger along the edge of her fear.” It’s no general calming; it’s Leah’s specific experience described as only Landis can. And Leah progresses through the stories. Though she is never devoid of a hunger for connection, never abandons her triple-tap in times of crisis, she is still growing and changing, until the final piece “Delacroix,” in which she leaves us literally under Paris, in the sewers, taking in the world that Leah is still just beginning to understand, but with a promise that she has at least taken her first steps.

In one of the most touching segments, the title story “Normal People Don’t Live Like This,” we get our first section from Helen’s perspective. She confronts a fellow mother, Bonita, with a handful of clothes and sundries that their daughters have pilfered together. The disarray of Bonita’s place—the dirt, the grime, the haphazard arrangement—is a clear reflection of how this house is run: by a slew of teenage girls. Helen is simultaneously revolted and enchanted, and it is in this piece that we really begin to get into Helen as a character, to see her flaws and her yearning, so she is no longer merely a domineering, anorexic mother. She is beautiful and pitiable and perplexing. Each story reveals more about her, and she helps carry us through to her own final section, wherein we realize this book is as much about Helen as her daughter, and that she too has reached a turning point. Landis ends the collection before we fully dive over that edge and into a new life for Leah and Helen, but the promise is somehow enough.

Landis fulfills us. Each story builds off the previous, and builds to the next. Each story is a morsel in itself; it leaves you full, and there’s a whole tableful to gorge on. This is what Landis does, and does so well, and had she written us a standard novel, we might have become fed up and walked away. Instead, we have a contract from the start—we will be given small, digestible stories from multiple points of view, and we will want to come back and read them all—and we allow ourselves to sink into this world, to become immersed in these women, never quite sure where Landis will take us next, but trusting it will be beautiful and haunting. Read it one story at a time. Read it as a novel. Read it out of order. Read it upside-down. Just read it. You’ll see what I mean.


Caitlin Hill is the Managing Editor of Poet Lore and and MFA candidate at American University (fiction). Her fiction has appeared in So to Speak. She loves the Red Sox (even though all they ever do is break her heart).

Review Monday: Girl Genius

Today we're going to start a once-a-month feature with Writer's Center science fiction & fantasy workshop leader Brenda Clough: comic reviews! Today she reviews Girl Genius. This review originally appeard on the Book View Cafe blog.

Surely this web comic is one of the great pleasures of all time! It has everything you could possibly want in a comic — a deep back history (running back to 2001) that nevertheless is instantly accessible, a vast and energetic fan base (there are multiple Yahoo groups and a Wiki that goes on for miles!), a new episode three times a week. Step in, and weeks and weeks of happiness are yours. There are too few things in life like that; there are entire celebrity marriages on view in People magazine that don’t give joy for that long, at least to the participants — the divorce lawyers are happy, however.

GG

And the comic itself is masterfully done. The genius of the title, Agatha Heterodyne, begins young and a little passive but rapidly seizes the reins of her own destiny. Intelligent heroes are rare, female heroes famed and valued for their intelligence are very rare indeed. Agatha is even unusual in her relative heftiness — plump was beautiful in Victorian times and so it is historically accurate, but there are no zaftig heroines in the comics, where weightism is the standard operating procedure.

Agatha’s world, an alternate steampunk Europe, is deep and wide and full of complexity. The creators, Phil and Kaja Foglio, show a fine familiarity with SF, a consistent bent towards humor, and admirably demented imaginations. The romance and action-filled plots are paced with the kind of studied cruelty to readers that keeps everybody jonesing for the next episode and biting their nails. Any artist who enjoys drawing death rays and machines of pain and destruction with such vim and detail is destined for greatness. And indeed GG has been a fan favorite for years, and won the Hugo this year.

The comic is also an interesting case in alternative publishing and adapting to new media. Originally appearing in dead-tree format, GG moved to web-only publication several years later. This immediately boosted its popularity and lent wings to the sale of the book collections. Everybody here at BVC finds this profoundly inspiring.

The only real problem with GG is that there is not enough of it. No, nine hefty volumes are not enough; you can prove it yourself by reading them. Are you satisifed? No, of course not! You want more! And there you are, waiting grouchily for the next episode to go up, right along with all the rest of us.

Brenda Clough has written seven novels, including her most recent, Doors of Death and Life. Her short stories have been published in numerous magazines, including Analog SF Magazine and the anthology Starlight 3. Other work has appeared in SF Age, Aboriginal, Marion Zimmer Bradley Magazine, and many anthologies. She was a finalist for both the Hugo Award and Nebula Award in 2002. She can be found on the web here, and her new novel is up at Book View Cafe.

Review Monday: Is Life Like This? A Guide to Writing Your First Novel in Six Months

by John Dufresne
W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
320 pages, $26.95 (hardcover)
Forthcoming, February 2010

Reviewed by Bernadette Geyer

Having little formal training in writing prose, I came to John Dufresne’s Is Life Like This? A Guide to Writing Your First Novel in Six Months as an interested skeptic. Six months? Reading this guide, I realized how many erroneous preconceptions I had of the novel-writing process. The method Dufresne lays out jettisons the idea of sitting down, starting at page one and plowing through page after chronological page until you get to the end:

“Writing a novel does not proceed in a linear fashion even if the novel itself eventually does. Writing a novel is messy; it’s labyrinthine at times; it’s recursive and indirect; it sputters and lurches and frustrates and generates.”

In mapping out weekly assignments for the novelist, Dufresne advocates extensive up-front research and thinking to develop characters, their motivations, histories, backgrounds, influences and anything else that will help you understand what makes your character tick. It isn’t until Week 13 that Dufresne assigns the task of writing the first scene. But by this time, you know your novel’s characters, its setting, point of view, theme and, finally, some idea of a plot.

Early on, in the section “In the Beginning Were the Words,” Dufresne offers an extensive variety of examples of how one can start a novel. Some of the examples Dufresne provides tend to hyperexplain the process of how A can lead to B, followed by C, steering towards D, resulting in E, and so on. But I can see, specifically by way of the hyperexplanation, the usefulness of such tangential thinking towards the writer’s goal of a well-developed character or scene.

By providing examples from his own writing and quotes by other writers on the subject of novel-writing, Dufresne puts the first-time novelist more at ease with the process in an effort to help him/her see that any fear or stumbling block can be overcome: mainly by writing through it. “Doubt and uncertainty are not only a part of, but are fundamental to, the writing process. Not knowing is crucial to the making of a novel. It sets the wonder in motion.”

Once the first draft is complete – bedraggled though it may be – Dufresne says the writer must understand the real novel emerges from the editing process. Dufresne writes, “Revision is not a matter of choice. Now that you’ve got black on white, you’ve got something to work with. Now the real creative writing begins.”

What is clear, from Dufresne’s Is Life Like This?, is that the prospective novelist must first be in love with the process of discovery that comes with writing and revising. Dufresne cites Elie Wiesel, “Writing is … like sculpture, where you eliminate to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain. There is a difference between a book of two hundred pages from the very beginning and a book of two hundred pages which is the result of an original eight hundred pages. The six hundred pages are there. Only you don’t see them.”

Bernadette Geyer is a poet and freelance writer/editor in the Washington, DC, area. Her poetry chapbook, What Remains, was published in 2001 by Argonne House Press. Geyer's poetry has appeared in Hotel Amerika, The Marlboro Review, South Dakota Review, The Midwest Quarterly, 32 Poems, The Evansville Review, and other literary journals. Geyer's non-fiction has appeared in Elle.com, Sustainable Development International, The Montserrat Review, World Energy Review, and Marco Polo Magazine. Find her online here.