Month: October 2012

Bickering as Courting: The Native Star

This was another insomnia read, picked up in the dark hours when no one but me is awake. Pretty much with an insomnia read I’m just looking for readability, which is one of those terms that is probably not that helpful. Maybe I should go onto Karen’s Reader’s Advisory group and try to define this readable beast.

Tone: light to medium
Pace: fast
Setting: not contemporary, possibly with magic, aliens, gadgets or other neat ideas that are fun to watch play out
Romance: light
Narrator: inobtrusive

Admittedly, these are just my criteria, but this is my insomnia and I’m sticking to it.

The Native Star by M.K. Hobson, on the dust jacket, is likened to Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, which I think works insofar as they are both mild alt-histories with magic as the alternate part of history, but the tone and pacing are very, very different. I would not want to read anything with footnotes, as much fun as they are in Strange & Norrell, in the odd hours. And as much as I love Strange & Norrell , the pace is glaaaacial. (And not to be be bitch, I think Strange & Norrell is a better book, by whatever odd metric I have for judging writing and content, fwiw. Just not better in the middle of the night.)

But! The other thing I like about likening this to Strange & Norrell is that neither one is steampunk, a label I see applied to this one. Forsooth, arguing about genre is a losing business, but just because something is an alternate history set in the late 1800s, that isn’t enough to make it steampunk. Magic ain’t gadgets, and a certain kind of fetishized retro-technology porn is an inextricable part of the (sub)-genre. But! I’m willing to concede that this is in the odd dash-punk edge of alt-history. I noticed some similarities between the sanguimages from this book and the warlocks in Bitter Seeds – indeed, both are termed warlocks, a nice double entendre on their need for blood to perform magic, and their usefulness in wartime. Tregillis’s book also has magic and something like steampunk – though maybe it’s more gaspunk? Sorry, Ian, wherever you are. I don’t know how to class your book, or this.

It’s like there is a cluster of dash-punk genres – alternate histories that keep coding and recoding history with various magics and the magics of technologies, pushing the true history to reveal itself. Mike has noted that most alt-histories have alt-histories written within them, and Native Star is no different: here, it is a series of pulp novels that comment on the magic-working characters, which is not dissimilar to the pulp novels in Raising Stony Mayhall. I have said this a thousand times before, but I do not care about originality, so if it seems like my comparisons to other books are intended to cut this one down, that is not my intent. This is a genre exercise, whatever that genre may be, and the parameters of the world and characters are individual enough to put down any talk of being a poor copy. I mean, points for a giant oil-soaked killer raccoon alone, if novelty is your bag.

So far, this is the worst book report ever, me blathering about things only interesting to me. So, to the plot summary:

The Native Star starts with a small town witch, Emily, with money problems putting the whammy on the town babbitt, in an move that backfires into zombies and some irate townspeople. She ends up with a magical stone lodged in her hand – don’t ask – and then the story is off and tumbling in a post-Civil War Old West. Her compatriot through these tumbles is a man called Dreadnought Stanton, which is possibly the stupidest name ever, and I never did figure why Emily was the only character with a non-stupid name. The beginning rankled a bit, what with the silly names and the poor characterizations – yes, Emily is smart but uneducated; yes, Dreadnought (ugh) is a stuffed shirt patrician type, but with seeeekrits. But – and this so rarely seems to happen for me – the characterizations completely tighten up as the book progresses, the stock characters thawing into something resembling humans. The action is well-written, and the banter ranging from not-distracting to super fun. I was expecting certain inevitable twists that ended up being different enough from my expectations to be satisfying. I’ll just say: fuck yeah, hubris!

I even came to peace with the names, which end up being often Dickensian and sly. There’s a lot of really funny hat-tips in this book, like the bounty hunter with an Italian accent who seems to have walked off the set of a Spaghetti Western. I found this delightful, especially because it was underplayed. And – this is going to be huge tangent – but can someone please write on of these dash-punk action thrillers in the Reconstruction South? There seems to be a lot of fictions that center on the myth of the Old West in narrating our American discomfort with Manifest Destiny, the Civil War, and – you know – all that blood let to forge the melting pot in the first place. And how the culture wars still rage along lines set down at the time.

The bestest of these fictions, to me, is the HBO series Deadwood, but there’s plenty more stories in that well, from Eastwood’s Unforgiven to the sublime moody weirdness of Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man. This book opens with magical carpetbaggers slitting the throats of conciliatory but angry Southern merchants, and, hot damn, I really wish there had been more of that, as much fun as the Old West stuff was. But the dash-punk genre seems to encode these anxieties into magic or gasmasks or whatever, so I guess I can’t expect them to take on the Reconstruction South, when pretty much no one wants to touch that live wire, genre or not. Hobson does take on Grant’s presidency and the war obliquely, in a way I haven’t completely teased out yet, so that is something. (And I’m shit for history, really, so it would be cool if someones like Eric or Matt read this and gave me a book report. I’ll totally mail this to you. Kthxbai.)

So. There are things I could bitch about (not excited about the Native characters) and things I could praise (excited by the proto-feminist characters), but what it comes down to is that this was the right book at the right time. And not just to sound like I’m faint-praising this book for being a pretty midnight tumble, I spent the day thinking about the characters and the alt-history, unknotting some later plot developments and choices. There’s a lot of smart and funny here in all of the relentless action. Hot damn, that’s something, insomnia or not.

The Coldest War & The Long Con

I’m a late Cold War baby. I didn’t have my parents’ experience of growing up in a world of weapons escalation, the Iron Curtain* descending, the Korean War, the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile crisis, etc etc. The Cold War was decidedly hotter for the generation preceding mine. When I came on the scene, it was more about Sting songs suggesting Russians might not eat babies – though still with the conditional: if the Russians love their children too. By the time we saw the Berlin Wall come down, various ex-pats from Pink Floyd were invited to come and give a concert of songs from the Wall. I actually watched parts of this in West Germany, in the living room of my German cousins. I still find this whole concert both absolutely appalling and brutally perfect, historically speaking – kinda like Elton John repurposing a song about Marilyn Monroe for Lady Di. Just, yuck.

Anyway, point being, I’m a late Cold War baby, and my experience of the Cold War is almost completely pop cultural. I remember quite vividly watching The Day After on my grandparents’ somewhat filmy television – imdb informs me it aired in 1983, which would put me at 9 years old, just the age of my son now – and growing increasingly freaked out. Not so much the attacks, which are pretty standard disaster porn fare from the era, but the dread of the long denouement, one that ends, as much as it ends, in despair. My parents sent me to bed – they saw the freak out – long before The Day After was over. I only know the ending because I sought it out a couple of years back, suspecting that that was the film that sparked my life-long bone-crunching fear of zombies. Which, yep, that’s the genesis.

I dreamed of nuclear annihilation for years: the mushroom clouds blooming in the distance, the hot wind, the feel of my body in a painful disintegration. I never died in these dreams – I’m not sure about the folklore that says that if you die in dreams, you die in real life, because I have certainly died in dreams, just not these ones. (Of course, maybe I’m in some weird Gibsonian afterlife, typing on into the void. Seems unlikely though.) In these nuclear dreams I lived in agony, the world on fire. Dead but not, crawling.

However, I was seriously freaked out by Gretel in Bitter Seeds, as Gretel is a prescient sociopath created by Nazis, and undoubtedly the Big Bad in both books. I mean, just, eeek. Her brother, Klaus, is a little luggage-y in the first book – he’s mostly there to be eyes on Gretel, because you can’t give Gretel, the big prescient bad, her own pov without completely destroying narrative tension. In this book, Klaus really comes to life, becoming a character I just absolutely adored. Marsh is still a little iffy to me – I felt like his personality had been mothballed for 15 or whatever number of years in some respects, though the stuff with his wife had the ugly, brutal reality of love’s long, slow death.

All this blither blather, I assure you, has something to do with The Coldest War by Ian Tregillis . I’m trying desperately to avoid spoilers, because this is one of those books that hinges so very, very much on its ending. The Coldest War is the continuation of Bitter Seeds, an alternate history of WWII wherein the Nazis have developed steampunkish Übermench, and as a counter, the British have harnessed the chthonic power of Eidolons, Lovecraftian horrors par excellence.** There’s some lumpinesses to the first book that are worked out a bit here. Tregillis’s characterization is a little weak in the first book, especially when dealing with characters like Marsh’s wife and kid, which seem to pop into being with big bullseyes on their heads, redshirts just waiting for an away mission to die to prove the situation is serious.

So here we are, in the Cold War that is and isn’t like our own Cold War, monsters and ubermench, Soviets and race wars, oil and the firebombing of civilian targets, and what struck me was the inevitability of nuclear disaster. Why haven’t we blown ourselves to shit yet? I’m not dreaming of it anymore, my cells burning as I scream in dreaming living death, but it’s not like we’ve somehow precluded this eventuality. The warlock children who have been raised to speak the Lovecraftian language of the Eidolons at one point tie a push-pin into Sante Fe, NM, and I shuddered, shuddered.

Alternate history is, sometimes, our imagining the worst of all possible worlds, the difficult cultural superego who passes judgment and offers dubious salvations. We imagine monsters who can see what we do, and they can see what we’ve done. Holy shit. I mean, I was only 9, but I wonder a little about my cute little childhood nuclear terror and the fact that my country dropped The Bomb on civilians, on cities. I don’t want to get into a big thing about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the inevitability or the necessity of their destruction. When I saw a recreation of Big Boy in the Los Alamos museum, when I saw the recreation of the Enola Gay in the Imperial War museum in London, I burst into tears. History is an inevitability. I know it doesn’t do any good, but I’m so sorry.

What do you call survivor’s guilt, when your country, your people, perpetrated the attack? I’m sorry that history is shitty and sucks? I know, I’m at least a generation from the people who made these decisions, more like two, but I’m not exempt from my culture and my history. I’m an American, and proud of it in many, many ways. And in others I want to crawl into the basement and cry for a long, long time. I mean, I don’t want this to devolve into a bunch of typical liberal hand-wringing or whatnot, I just want to say that history is both personal and horribly impersonal, and our entrances and exits into that great narrative stream are punctuated by both easy upset and shocking convergences. So there.

I suspect I’m not making a ton of sense, because I’ve drinking since noon – vacation rules! Richard and I were talking about this book while I was reading, while the newest Captain America movie played in the background – which is super funny, because Ian totes looks like skinny Captain America, before the serum – and we posited that there are three ways a plot with a prescient sociopathic villain can go:

1.) Turns out, Gretel isn’t actually a psycho. (Or, lolsyke, nevermind everything I ever said about my characters.)
2.) Some random, unforeseeable event defeats Gretel. (Also called Making Shit Up so Things Can Turn Out Right.)
3.) Secret option 3, which means Ian is badass and awesome.

I’m happy to say this book is solidly in secret option 3 territory, and there was a moment there when several conceptual things came together that were so freaking awesome. I had the shit scared out of me by Gretel in book one, which was deepened here in many ways. There’s this thing really early on where Gretel needs a jar, and it turns out she engineered the death of Heike (which happens midway through the first book, and you kind of just think that sequence is there to how you what a badass Gretel is, like Darth Vader crushing some throats). But then it turns out she engineered this death so that Heike’s brain would be jarified and brought to the Soviet Union so that Gretel could dump the contents and use it for a very prosaic purpose. Just, holy shit. This whole series is a long con, the longest con. And as scared as I am of Gretel, I’m more terrified of what scares her. And what scares her is what scares me, and has scared me since I was 9. The inevitability of history is a godamn bitch.

*Just wiki’d the source of this term, because weirdly, we were just talking about Churchill at work, and my client piped up that Churchill was the origin of the term Iron Curtain. Which, turns out, not exactly. Fothermucking Goebbels used it during the War, and it has some roots in the bible or something. Holy god, reading that wiki page made my arms tingle, what with how this book deals with the War, the Cold War, and Everything. Sometimes life is freaky.

**Here, right before I’m about to be critical of Bitter Seeds is probably as good a time as any to announce that I’m friends with Mr. Tregillis, for full disclosure. I also know that Ian doesn’t read reviews, so I could probably be as big a bitch as I wanted here, not that I want to.

Bitter Seeds

In interests of full disclosure, I should say that I love Ian Tregillis with all my heart, even though that bastard awesome houseguest never sent me a galley or ARC or whatever they are called so I could read it before it came out for the general public. Okay, he send a digital copy to my husband, but I turned my nose up at it, because I hate reading serious stuff on computer screens because there is something unserious about them. So, you know, whatever. 

Still, though, Ian, the non-writer Ian, the friend I know, is fabulous and strange, and I can’t believe Tor got John Jude Palencar to do the art for his book, because that’s like wrapping some thing I love in another thing I love, and the whole idea makes me swoon. Go to the libraries, folks; queue this up on your Amazon. The minute this comes out I’m holing up and reading it all damn day.

—-

Okay, admittedly I didn’t hole up and read it all damn day, but I am excited to finally have this in my hot little hands. 

—-

Last Sunday, while I was gulping this down in a haze, I folded up this book and curled up for a nap. Then I fell hard into a nightmare featuring Gretel, who is the biggest bad in this book, which is saying something. I was in a bare room made of concrete block with a concrete floor, with windows near the ceiling, like I was in a basement. I have no idea why or how I was in this room, but I was alone, and then I wasn’t. She was there, her long black hair braided down with the ominous wires, giving me a half-smile. ARG OH GAWD WAKE UP. 

An alternate history, Bitter Seeds runs the second world war with steampunk (gaspunk?) Übermensch on the Axis side and warlocks on the Allied. There was a long conversation about the intersection between the various genres of historical fiction, alternate history, and science fiction on Mike’s review of this book, which really got me thinking about all the ways in which history is coded and turned into narrative. Some of the coding is literal – one of the more fascinating aspects of WWII for me is the shadow war that went on using cyphers and codes, all the way up to the Navajo code talkers who used their own language, albeit in a simplified, reworked way, to pass vital informations. It still manages to blow my mind when I think about this Native language, suppressed for years, overrun, the Navajo people limned into an America that is qualified as a Native America, and how this encoded people and language were hooked up to wires that then transmitted a vital imperial information. ZOMG. 

Of course, breaking a code is never good enough, which the Allies did early with Enigma, they had to then obfuscate where that information was coming from. If the Axis knew their correspondence was insecure, then they would have changed the codes. False information about the information gathering system has to be relayed and planted – false spies, false documents, false events then encode how knowledge is gathered. No, we haven’t broken your codes; we have some spy in place, or whatever. This lead to all manner of horrifying calculus: bombings allowed to do their damage to protect the source of information, people sent to sure death to protect the codes and broken codes. It’s the kind of thing that hurts to think about, even though we sit on the lee side of the war, and can figleaf the equations with the knowledge that ultimately, the Allies won, and the equations added up to something. 

(I’m not sure why I’m balking from using the pronoun “we” in this situation, even though that’s what I keep typing before I key back and write Allies. My family had some dogs in that fight: a grandfather in the South Pacific, great-uncles in France, a grandmother home with a war-baby unsure that her husband would ever come home. But as an American mongrel, I also had cousins removed in the German army and the Danish resistance, in-laws in the camps, a grandfather too old to be a soldier so instead a school teacher. I’ve always thought it would be fascinating to take a group of folk – anyone really – a world map, and a bunch of push pins and string, and chart the movements of our (grand)parents in the War – which still continues to be the war one means if one says “war” out of context – and watch the earth criss-cross. I’m not sure what this would accomplish, but the image of this this web is what stops my sense of “we”, I think. What did you do in the war, dada?)

As usual, I’m horribly off topic. Sort of. I believe that alternate histories are almost coded into the narrative of the War itself, into the narrative of history. When one hears the story of the British retreat at Dunkirk – the scrambling and madness on the beach as the British try to arrange transport – the sense of how close the German army was, how if they had just turned and looked, they would have been able to end the British capacity to mount the later counter-attacks – one sees how close history is, how intimately random. Gretel, the clairvoyant Nazi creation, sees the retreat at Dunkirk and the event does run to this terrible conclusion. 

Future sight – something that has always kind of bugged me in fiction – almost reads as our backwards retellings. The Nazis were evil – this is self-evident historically, so much so that even mention of them in argument has its own conversation ending term – one has Godwined the conversation. But during the war, the Holocaust was only understood in hints – it was coded – again, so much so, that when one views the horrifying footage of the camps being liberated, there are always these weird testimonials from Allied troops giving name, rank and serial number. I saw this – they say – I am real and so is this. Our understanding of their evil is backwards – not false – in some ways – it is something based on later knowledge. The evil of the Nazis was countered in many different ways, but if the center of that evil was not self-love and other-hate, but a cold, calculated personal self-interest of a single sociopath, what would the Allies have to do to counter that? Especially because they did not understand that that was what they were fighting? Ugh. Cue blood-bath. 

Anyway, massive digression notwithstanding, I think this book codes technology, and that ruptures the narrative of the War along lines I’d never considered. The British warlocks – which is a nice piece of nomenclature, non? – negotiate with large, chtonic powers so outside their grasp that it’s almost funny, beings who require blood in a real, non-metaphorical way: the tip of a finger, a pub full of folk, a train car full of people…where is this going to end? Nowhere good. The Nazis, famously less squeamish about taking a shovel to the back of child’s skull for the “greater” “good” – create a creature even they fear – a prescient sociopath – the Gretel of my dream – who has her own agenda. 

It’s easy to run the war many ways and have the Axis win, even provisionally – don’t attack Russia (didn’t Napoleon teach you anything?), don’t attack Pearl Harbor (would the US and its isolationism ever gotten involved otherwise?) – but here I think the question is about how the Germans ran off so many brilliant thinkers: Einstein, Freud, Benjamin (who killed himself days before the papers for him to leave came through), and well, a whole freaking passel of German scientists who bolstered American and British war technologies to the obvious detriment of the Reich’s plan. I don’t think it’s an accident that Gretel – and her brother, who is our pov proxy for Gretel – are gypsy children, war orphans from the previous war, and so insanely pivotal to the Nazi cause that their “bad blood” isn’t so much overlooked as feared to the point of being ignored. I almost need a chart here – one like my push-pinned map – that accounts for a Nazi sense of purity of blood with a purity of will, and how those concepts ultimately implode when in contact with one another. 

Gretel, her brother, and the other children who survive the heinous, thankfully only loosely sketched machinations of Van Westarp – mad scientist extraordinaire – to become the embodiment of will-to-power, are the coded terror of the oven, the camp, the cleansing, one that has its own agenda, an agenda that is to live in defiance, because living IS defiance. Gretel scares the shit out of me, partially because the thought of survival in the face of such institutional, casual hatred makes me want to lay down and die. We – we? – can honor survival, but it comes at a cost, one that can often be measured in pints, as in blood. Pints to quarts, quarts to gallons, and after the gallon, how do we even quantify anymore?

I’ve always liked “The Empire Strikes Back” most of the Star Wars trilogy – I live in an alternate history where the prequels don’t exist, and Lucas never mutilated my childhood – partially because it’s the darkest of the trilogy, laying out the Oedipal conflict without the hard, unsatisfying conclusion of synthesis. But part of my unfinished satisfaction draws from the fact of conclusion – without an ending, even an unsatisfying one, it would just hang, undone. I have some criticisms of Bitter Seeds, as a stand-alone work: my unlove of love triangles, my sense that sometimes the research of the history overtakes the thrust of the story, but my happiest of gripes is that I want to read more. This story is not done: the War has gone Cold – actually literally cold as the ice freezes Europe as the Soviets make their play – and the hot war reaches its chilly détente. Publish the next, now. Get to it, Ian. I wait.

Nox: Elegies

I’ve been tossing around like an insomniac deciding what to read next. I’ve been off fiction for grown-ups for a while, for various personal reasons. I had cause to push Autobiography of Red into someone’s hands this weekend, which gave me cause to pull this artifact out and consider it again. I know Nox by Anne Carson is  going to kill me; I know that. But it is winter, and the snow falls glittery and insulating over the back porch, and it may be the best kind of sarcophagus in which to consider Carson and her grief. I’ll have to read it at night, so the kids don’t wreck the accordion pages. There’s something funny about that – the way this object, this book, is bait for children – when I know the heart-break I will find in the less physical parts of its being. We shall see. I shall see.

I wrote a whole review, and it vanished with an ill-timed key-stoke. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Now I will have to recreate it from memory, like a life in retrospect.

—–

In the mayhem of the holidays, I dug through a box of old photographs, and found myself there, younger. It was a shock. The best photo I have from high school, with all of the players smiling out from under their bangs, has a weird stain in the middle that leaves rings on our faces. I can’t find the negative. Seeing the photo made me have the memory of s smell, something like carpet, and tobacco lingering on fingers after you smoke, and the carbon dioxide smell of soda as it fizzes.

——

This poem has struck me dumb. Our lives hinge in the double meaning of that word.

—–

I don’t like collage, or fragments, as a rule. Many years ago, some artistic jerk-off stacked up a bunch of water mines dredged out of the Atlantic as an art instillation at the local modern art museum. Above it, the words:

bits and pieces
put together to present
a semblance of a whole

Hipsters on the corner of 27th and Hennepin – Hennepin Ave cuts across the grid pattern of the streets, so the apartment sits at the end of a point of land, visible to the clog of rush hour traffic – hung a statement on white sheets on their porch:

bits and pieces
float in flatulence
in my bowl

The hipsters were right: sometimes fragments put together are just shit. But. To quote better poets than I:

A woman can be proud and stiff
When on love intent;
But Love has pitched his mansion in
The place of excrement;
For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent.

But sometimes fragments are all we have, and metonymy is as good as completeness. A memory of smell invoked by the damaged image of a damaged time.

——

But still, it moves.

——

Carson is a translator, which makes her a poet, or possibly the other way around. Causality is a tricky business. She gropes in a dark room for a light switch. Sometimes she finds it. Sometimes she doesn’t, and the thing that makes her a poet is that she can give the darkness shape.

——

I choke up when I talk about this poem. I don’t know why, because it is not confessional or manipulative. It is not meant to play me like an instrument. It plays itself, and the tears are in the silences between the notes.

——

I also don’t know why I’m calling this a poem. It’s too tactile for that. The accordion pages bear the marks of the staples, which have been recorded like music, a record. Remember when you could pronounce that two ways and have it mean something? Record the verb, and record the noun. On one page, there is the sketch of a shadow, and when you turn the page, you realize it is the shadow of the photographer, their mother, laid out in the grass. You realize, I said, distancing. I realize, I guess is closer to the truth of it.

——

This is almost voyeurism, but for the silence, the muteness. This is no confessional. There is no pat Freudian conclusion to the fragments, to the eulogy, just a bit here and there with odd tears between them. If I were speaking these words, you would know whether I meant tears, like from your eyes, or tears, like something rended. I’m not speaking them though, and the translation hangs. I didn’t know until I typed these words that there was any ambiguity.

——

I read this on the couch, wrapped in blankets because I’m cheap and the house is cold. My daughter came and wriggled next to me and watched the pages move, connected to one another the way they are, and also watched whatever dumb movie I put on to distract her. She was warm, and smelled like childhood.

Sappho: A Garland

In my current Carson inspired insanity, I’ve ordered her translation of Sappho’s fragments, entitled If Not, Winter. It is winging to my house now. I thought I’d reread this, my first and only meeting with Sappho, before I meet with Carson and her words. I have a really great anecdote about this translation, but I’ll wait to tell it later, because it is late and I’m tipsy.

——-

I’m just going to take a deep breath and review this, because it’s not going to get any easier letting it sit on currently-reading for the rest of the year. I love this book. I love Sappho. I can’t really remember why I picked this up many, many moons ago, but I did, and it was the most fragile, most glass-spun, earthy, moonlit poetry I’d ever encountered. Its fragility is really strange though, more a product of history than the thinness of the words themselves; Sappho is not thin. Like many of the writers from the ancient world, her work comes down in scraps and quotes. Out of volumes, 500 lines remain. Many or most of them are not contiguous. 

I spent a chunk of my matriculation reading poetry, because I fell in love with the Romantics and the early Modernists. I loved the transition between the almost-backward-looking period of Romanticism and how it turns, changes, molded by fire and mechanization and the Great War. How you can go from Wordsworth crying about how he can’t believe:

For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.–Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

To crispy old T. S. Eliot who writes:

I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

It’s the same: the narrator standing with his toes in the water, considering the awesome power of the Old Gods, but the tone is so much different. Disbelief as sorrow, or disbelief as murder, as suicide. 

Or take the sonnet. There’s lots of sonnets about The Muse of Poetry, and how she gets chained in verse – this is pun on lines usually, because poets are as immature as the rest of us. Take this, from the boy Keats, at the very, very beginning of the Romantic movement: 

If by dull rhymes our English must be chain’d,
And, like Andromeda, the Sonnet sweet
Fetter’d, in spite of pained loveliness;
Let us find out, if we must be constrain’d,
Sandals more interwoven and complete
To fit the naked foot of poesy;

Along comes Millay – who rocks so hard she burns the house down – and she twists this image of Andromeda’s foot into a Monty Python style smash in “Euclid Alone Has Looked on Beauty Bare”:

O blinding hour, O holy, terrible day,
When first the shaft into his vision shone
Of light anatomized! Euclid alone
Has looked on Beauty bare. Fortunate they
Who, though once only and then but far away,
Have heard her massive sandal set on stone.

Do you see how funny this is??? She is not unaware of the double meanings of the word “shaft”, is all I’m saying. The Muse puts her foot down. All this joking doesn’t negate the power of Keats, I would say, but it’s such a fascinating turn in world view. 

I am so avoiding talking about Sappho. 

I don’t feel like I can talk about the Classics, and Sappho is a hard woman to look in the face. I have no training, none. I can shit-talk a little bit about prosody, because I really earnestly love the dusty, pointless end of analyzing poetry. This is what I love so much about it: it’s so freaking outdated and imprecise. Prosody is still sitting around adjusting its spats, just waiting for someone to come along and blow it out of the water like Chomsky did with linguistics. (We can argue about Chomsky all day, but he really did a number on all that sentence-diagramming bullshit with his generative grammar, thank Proteus and his Horn.) The note on translation in this book is so far gone into talking about unbelievably arcane prosodic knowledge that I could not even pretend to keep up, which makes me want to hug the translator a bit. You go with your bad self!! You have clearly thought about this so much more than I!! 

So I’ll just tell the anecdote that I mentioned at the first, even though it isn’t anywhere as funny as I let on. I plead mild inebriation. 

I got married about a dozen years ago. Richard and I are atheists, but we didn’t want to give our grandmothers heart attacks or make a big thing about it, because weddings are already difficult enough. We had a heckuva time trying to find an officiant to our wedding. We first talked with a New Age woman whom I really respect, but her weddings are total hokum and verbal bloat. I’m not ragging on her – she’s a really wonderful person – but I had profound aesthetic differences in how I wanted the wedding to go. But I was young, and stupid, and I was all like, it will be fine! We will work it out! Thankfully, she fired us. She understood better than we that we were not well matched.

Then, in the scramble, we were referred to a man named Waldo Asp. I am not making this up. He was named Waldo because he was born on Walden Pond a la Thoreau, which I am also not making up. He was a minister and a philosophy professor, which I continue not to make up. And thank the Lord whom I don’t necessarily believe in, he was both lazy and incredibly well-versed in marriage ceremonies.

We wrote our own vows, mostly stripping out any reference to God from the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer that I was raised with. (My quip on the matter: I may not believe in God, but it’s a Episcopal God I do not believe in; the rest of you Gods I haven’t gotten around to disbelieving in.) I was exceedingly pleased with myself for adding in a line from Sappho – much of her poetic output was from marriage ceremonies, because she was an officiant of some kind herself – because I thought I was being all subversive, yo. Waldo took one look at the line, and was all casual, hey, did you know there is music for this section of poetry? Would you like me to sing it in plainsong? 

WOULD I??? ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME???

So he did. It was pretty great. 

I don’t really know what that has to do with this collection, and I’m sorry I’m so far off topic. These are amazing verses, amazing partially because they are not verses, but often just individual lines, just the word “chick-peas” and then the page is torn and then there is no more. It kills me that there isn’t more recorded, because Sappho’s verses spark and hiss like a downed power line. I’m looking forward to Carson’s take on Sappho, but I suspect that this will always be the collection in my heart. 

We Have Wings on Our Backs: Autobiography of Red

The semester I spent in London, I went to the British Museum at least three times, which is not nearly enough. Most of the collection of artefacts from ancient Egypt was undergoing some sort of rehab at the time – you know, all the fancy stuff and sarcophogi and things. But there was a small display of everyday items: make-up kits, kitchen tools, hand mirrors, bits of fabric. I, like many kids, went through a pretty serious Egypt phase, but it was mostly centered on the mythology, not the archeology. Ancient Egypt was a place where gods rose up out of lotus flowers and wore the heads of strange beasts, where rivers ran backwards, a person had two souls, not one, where the writing danced with the shapes of cranes and men, where the earth was a man and the sky was a woman. It was a land of unreality, of dream, of reversals.

In some ways, I never realized that the people of ancient Egypt were real, were people with human bodies like mine, until I looked at the tin of face powder with its neat row of brushes with little numbers by the handles. I saw her then, brush in hand, blacking her eyes, whitening her face, carefully outlining her mouth in red the way I do when I go out and want to look pretty. She had a husband, some kids, and they’d gotten a babysitter for the first time in what felt like ages. She saw a movie and her husband drove the sitter home. They stayed up too late drinking wine and talking. In the morning, the kids woke them up early, and then they sat sleepily on the porch and watched the kids play in the rushes and fight companionably.

I’m not sure where this is going. This book makes me incoherent. I kind of want to stop trying to get it across to you and just order you to read it. Go read it. I just finished reading and I want to sing and and cry and write some stories, and I want to go back and read it again, and then I started doing that. Then I thought maybe it would be better to cry and type a bunch of anecdotal rubbish that only makes sense to me so I did that. Now I think I’ll do that some more.

I don’t have a good classical education, but at some point I was given a copy of Sappho: A Garland, which is a translation/collection of all of Sappho‘s extant poetry. Very few full poems of hers come down intact – mostly because someone else quoted her – and the rest is just fragments, sometimes whole lines, but also sometimes just a few words with big tears between them. These few whole poems were augmented by the discovery of scraps and bits wrapped around things like mummified crocodiles (I make this up not) dug out of the Mediterranean sand by colonial archaeologists. These fragments kill me. They make me burn with hunger.

For me*

neither honey
nor the bee

*

The moon has set
and the Pleiades; it is the middle
of the night and the hours go by
and I lie here alone.

*

golden chickpeas grew along the shore

*

In one of the reviews on Goodreads, the reviewer wonders if this book was written just for him, which is what I wonder too. Sappho was my fragmentary poetic love; a poet named Stesichoros was Anne Carson’s. She says he “came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet.” I loved Sappho for empathizing with Helen, in the poem that begins:

“Some say thronging cavalry, some say foot soldiers
others call a fleet the most beautiful of
sights the dark earth offers, but I say it’s what-
ever you love best.”

The poem ends with the personal, with Sappho, the poet, dropping her little argument about Troy and Helen and the place of those things in the world and howling with the ache of her lost lover. Homer was many good things, but he was a not a poet of the personal. His seas are always wine-dark, his dawns rosy-fingered, the blood black. Mimesis makes demands; remember this one adjective and not all the others. Remember the story, the fleet, the thronging cavalry. Sappho broke Homer open for me; Stesichoros did for Carson. Stesichoros was struck blind by Helen for calling her a whore. He wrote a reversal, and Helen reversed his blindness. Makes one wonder about the blindness of Homer, right? I’ve recently derided free verse as for the lazy, and then this came along and struck me blind. I’ve been broken open again. Ah, and I leak while I reverse.

Genyon, whose name meant red, who lived on a red island and kept a herd of red cattle was killed by Hercules for his cattle for one of Hercules’ Tasks. Carson writes this story like a heap of scraps falling out of a box, with a piece of Steinian meat thrown into it for good measure. So often poets are wankers, even the ones I love, because they write for other poets or for themselves or god knows what. The obfuscate, they allude, they conceal. They put their appendixes at the back and not the front. Carson is generous. She reverses this, and then she tells a story of the personal about a boy named Genyon who falls in love with a drifter named Herakles. Genyon is a monster with red wings, but then he isn’t. This isn’t simple allegory; unlike a Homeric story the nouns have adjectives that change and when the adjectives change, so too the nouns. The modern story is rended, it is torn, it is told in fragments and images. But it is also specific and it moves, like Zeno’s Paradox in free verse.

Another thing I saw in the Egyptian room was a wall painting that had all of the Egyptian paint still on it. They would carve the relief, and then paint over it in wild colors, but history and sand and blood has rubbed those colors off. Classicism in art is mistaken: there is not anything subtle and sepia about the Ancient world. They took out their make-up brushes and went dancing. And now I’m wrong again, they probably had wings too, because we still have them tied down to our backs under our jackets. When we fly no photograph can capture us until it’s all reversed.

Slightly Irregular Steampunk

I snapped The Slightly Irregular Fire Engineup at a local used bookseller because I’m kind of obsessed with steampunk, and a weird-ass kid’s book from the 70s that seems to have a steampunk aesthetic is right up my alley. The idea of Victorian futurism imagined by contemporary writers makes me all hot and bothered, but I’m often disappointed and/or enraged by how stilted the writing is, how fawning the depictions of Victoriana, or just how dumb. The Difference Engine, by Bruce Sterling & William Gibson, one of the very first full-blown steampunk novels, is pretty emblematic of my problem. The ideas are straight-up OMFG brilliant, but wrapped up in some fish-paper of boring and going-nowhere. (It’s not a huge surprise I feel this way: I heart Gibson for all his failings, but pretty much everything Sterling does makes me cringe. This includes Burning Man, Bruce, you douche.)

One of the more fascinating things about steampunk, as a cultural movement thingee, is that there’s huge disconnect between the literary branch and the Maker movement. Maker types build things, raise chickens in Brooklyn, try to master archaic technologies, and generally keep RadioShack in business. The more cosplay end dresses up in top hats, corsets, and goggles. I still haven’t bridged the gap between the lit and the doings, partially because the lit hasn’t bridged the gap between the costume and the ideas. The worst of the genre fetishizes Victorian reserve (or our imaginings of that reserve), blathering about “a simpler time” while totally ignoring class/race/colonialism, blah blah, you know. 

Anyhoo, now that I’ve gone off on a random digression, this book is arguably not steampunk at all – it’s too early – but it definitely clarified a lot of my somewhat useless ditherings about the genre. Barthelme takes a series of (often bizarre) Victorian etchings, mixes them up like Tarot cards, and divines an odd little tale out of the mix. It feels like one of those patched-up stories that gets written in that little game where one person writes a section, covers up everything but the last line, and then passes it to the next person, who writes a section, and so on. (Do you know the game I mean? That was great fun at summer camp.) 

The art is cool, but it’s clunkily done, simply not altered enough, or done with enough visual style, to be interesting. They read like cut-outs, which is what they are, but they lay as still as a game of Solitaire. The language, however, whoo-boy, this is nice. More please. A girl, Mathilda, wakes up to find a pagoda growing in her yard. She enters, looking for a fire-engine. Djinns, pirates, and other wackiness ensues. It’s winking, post-modern (amusingly, almost archaically post-modern at this point, which is something of a trip), and clever without making you feel dumb. Like this:

“Would you like to have an escapade?” the djinn asked. “We can arrange that. Escapades come in two styles – fancy and more fancy.” 

“What is an escapade” Mathilda asked. 

“An escapade is something you didn’t expect,” the djinn said, “which surprises you, pleases you, and frightens you, all that once.” 

“Like a good dream,” Mathilda said. 

“Or you could be something,” the djinn suggested. “You could be a grown-up tennis-playing hat-wearing woman, or a one-man band–”  

“The one-man band doesn’t look too happy,” Mathilda observed. 

“He began as a piccolo player,” the djinn said.

Hahahaha! Phew. I had to google this Barthelme cat, and I was pretty much entraced by what I found. Writer of micro-fiction, inveterate post-modernist, regular contributor to this and that fancy (and extra fancy) periodical. The bastions of wiki said he wasn’t much for the whole narrative thing, but there is one here, even as it winks and smirks. 

Maybe I find steampunk so fascinating because it’s a post-modern attempt to leapfrog back to before Modernism even questioned, well, anything: the Nation, the Psyche, the Individual, the Narrative, back before when you could capitalize those things and not look like you were a Jerk-Face who was making A Point. ZOMG. What origami! Instead of taking the mismatched deck and building a house, steampunk folds and cuts the cards into something that casts the shadow of the house, but looks like an absolute mess straight-on. The ones I dislike tend to be really perfunctory narratives dressed up in high boots and cleavage, or anti-(post)-modernist claptrap that totally doesn’t get where it’s coming from. Fascinating pedigree, this steampunk stuff has. 

So, I would start my rating for this with three stars, because I liked it, take one off for the art, add one for the steampunk flavor, and then add another just because it blew my mind a little bit. Yes!

This is Not a…Actually, it is Totally a Test. Pencils Up

I read This Is Not a Testby Courtney Summers in a sitting, absolutely bolting it down to get to the end. Which is funny, in a way, because while the pacing fairly rips along, not a whole hell of a lot actually happens. The story more or less starts in medias res once our surviving principles have made it to the high school* during a zombie apocalypse. Six teenagers have blockaded the doors and worked out how they will live on a day to day basis. Phew! We’re safe-ish! The narrative keeps peeking back to the week it took to get there, the loss of two of the party, but much of the story recounts their boredom and bickering, six kids passing time while they consider their own imminent deaths and the deaths of everyone around them. They find booze in the teachers’ lounge; they enact dubiously considered make-outs; they play basketball. 

Which, put that way, sounds like something horrible to read. But two things make it compelling for me. First, the main character, Sloane, is suicidal. Which is an interesting thing to be in a world where walking cannibal corpses are hungering for your flesh. Not long ago I watched Lars von Trier’s “Meloncholia” which has a similar set-up: a depressive managing the last days before the complete end of the world. Von Trier wrote this movie after he had a depressive episode, and in his reading about his state, found that the depressed do better in crisis situations – they don’t panic, because they expected this all along. They move coolly through trauma, because trauma is what they know on a minute-by-minute basis. It’s a dark way to think about it, but Sloane’s lack of affect and emotional deadness were a compelling lens on the usual panic, boredom, panic, speech about life’s preciousness, panic sometimes found in zombie stories. Like, I want to punch that little butterfly tattoo and all of its obnoxious symbolism at the end of Will Smith’s “I Am Legend.” Don’t you dare go all Christ-symbolism on the corpses of everyone I know. That dime store redemption cheapens everything that came before, even if what came before was tedious and boring and juvenile and dumb. 

Second, I’m just into Lifeboat-ish situations where people sit around bickering, and in that bickering gesture towards the ways we think society and government should be structured. That’s why I was hook-line-and-sinker for the first two seasons of Lost, the way those characters embodied world-views which are necessarily in conflict: the nihilist, the Lockeian (I mean, it’s right there in John Locke’s name), the Rousseauian, the followers and the would-be heroes. The governmental stuff is dampened a bit here, but there are echoes of Lord of the Flies, with the lone freshman in This is Not a Test standing in for the chorus of unnamed younger boys who shift their allegiances according to who has the political power in Lord of the Flies. In a sequence with an interloping teacher, the concept of “good” society intrudes, putting the kids’ détente into crisis. That was awesome. 

And third, even though I realize now I didn’t mention a third thing, I liked how Sloane has her own arc with her abuse by her father and abandonment by her sister, a person arc in all of the societal. I’m not exactly easy with the conclusion, especially with the sister, but I respect Sloane’s first person conclusion. Here is as good as any to complain about one thing: I found it hard to differentiate some of these boys, which led to some weird reading from me where I was like, what? She’s doing what with whom? That can’t be right, but then it wasn’t right because I’d mixed them up. As good as Sloane’s characterization is, the others’ sometimes lacks. Which makes a weird sense in a way, but is still confounding as a reader.

So. I enjoyed this greatly. I’m not sure how to wrap up, other than to say that this is a perfect example of why I loves me some zombie stories: the personal wending with the societal in a locked room with bloody hands on the glass. It even made me forgive the fact that these zombies can run, because that, my friends, is not right. 

*And, a goofy thing I enjoyed about their school: it is exactly like mine. South High in Minneapolis was built in the 70s, this almost military bunker style building with few windows and lots of concrete – a perfect place to ride out the zombie apocalypse. Of course, it was built that way because all of the paranoia about student protests of the era – keep us in or keep us out. South’s lack of windows also served to drive us completely mad come February; the few, wan sunlit hours of Midwestern winter spend in a pedagogical bunker. I remember when we’d get our class assignments, my friends and I would compare how many classes we had with windows. Score! I got three!

The Ones Who Walk Away from Panem: Hunger Games

Before I start into this review, I would like to pose a question. Why is it so hard to talk about the books we love? I have been having just an unrelenting bitch of a time writing this review. I keep falling into holes and back-pedaling, not wanting to sound too squee or insincere and bring ruination on my real love for this book. Maybe it’s because it’s YA, about a plucky girl who surmounts incredible obstacles – but then, there, I’m doing it again – implying in my flip description that I’m somehow too adult and worldly to fall for this narrative. (And, I did it again.) I did fall for this narrative, hard, and I’m going to have to just suck it up and soldier on. 

I read this book in a swoon, compulsively. It was the kind of reading experience where I totally screwed myself by reading far into the the night, nervously checking the clock thinking “damn” as 1:15 flew by, then 2:45, knowing full well that kids would be up and jumping on me in six hours, five hours, just put the book down and sleep! If you could somehow concentrate and aerosolize this feeling, you would find me down by the railroad tracks, under a bridge, huffing powdered books out of bag, their glitter mixing with my drool and b.o. 

And here’s where the digression comes in. So, here, in my city, at some point in the last five years, it became a thing for the homeless to stand at the entrances of freeways and other major roads holding signs. They tend to say things like “wounded veteran” and “trying to get home” and “God bless.” In my driving about, I’ve seen that the cardboard signs lay folded in the shrubbery, waiting for the next person to come along, unfold, and stand on the edge of the frontage road. There’s one on 54th and Nicollet that reads “absolute desperation.” At first this set me giggling, because I’m an asshole, but then it got me thinking. This is a true statement, and terrifying all the more because the sentiment is interchangeable; something that can written on a piece of cardboard and reused by any person standing on that corner. Not that I need to justify this, necessarily, but I live in a pretty extreme climate, and the people standing on these corners are not doing this for kicks, but because it’s cold and they’re hungry or jonesing for something or whatever, and this seemed like the best option available. The best option. Yikes. 

I’ve had a long running joke with my husband about how we all live in bubbles of like-minded people, the kind of people with whom you argue vehemently about the nuances about how you all totally agree. We sort ourselves into the blindness of our own comfort, and I don’t mean this just in the happy, healthy, developed world sense of comfort that I was born into. We take it farther, drawing bright red lines down the political aisle and using those lines to determine whom we respect and where we live. It’s not a new thing, certainly, but in early new millennium America, I’m just floored by the widening gaps in our political discourse and how they are made manifest in the very real physical embodiment of the completeness of the gerrymander and the ease we all acquiesce to that reality. Taken as a whole, the country is awash in purple, but as you look from locality to locality, they flame bright blue or bright red as we sort ourselves into two Americas that exist in the comfort of local smugness balanced against that old, hoary American favorite, massive paranoia about what the other half is doing. This book takes the bubbles of our acquaintance and schematizes them into a distopian hell-hole. 

It’s a post-American America, with the center, the Capitol, ruling 12 districts that each supply their different products: electronics, coal, agricultural goods, etc. Maybe 75 years before, there had been a civil war, a rebellion by the districts ending in vigorous and complete quashing. As a reminder of the sin of rebellion, every year the Capitol chooses 2 children from each district, between the ages of 12 and 18, to fight in the Hunger Games. They fight to the death, until there is one kid standing. The whole event is, of course, televised. (I know that there has been some criticism that this plot has been used before, but this is sheer bone-headed stupidity. So what if Ice-T did it first?) This is not an economic/political system that makes a ton of sense, if you look at it too closely, but that’s not the point, or it is the point exactly. Collins takes our American disconnects and makes them manifest, relocates the people with cardboard signs reading “absolute desperation” from the arteries of our Interstate system and concentrates them into concrete ghettos of poverty and subjugation. 



And now for my love of the protagonist. I can see why this happens, because writers have to live with the people they create, but so often a writer’s love of the character strips them of moral ambiguity, even while that ambiguity nips at their heels. This may be even more true for YA lit, with things like Bella Swan’s clumsiness standing in for an actual character flaw, even while Bella herself wallows in self-centered satisfaction at her flattened aspect to everyone around her but Edward. (Yup, gotta get in the Twilight dig.) Katniss is competent and clueless and savage, a reminder to us old folks that sometimes the young have worlds of understanding that isn’t based on experience, but on character. Or it is based on experience, but simply because they have less of it, doesn’t make it something you can measure using the yardstick of duration. 

I was nailed to the floor when Katniss made her first kill in the arena and doesn’t have a what-have-I-done? melt-down, but is instead gratified by a horrible act that can never really compensate for the horrible acts enacted by the events preceding. We, as readers, are gratified, because it’s what we want, some good Old Testament justice that spills a little blood to try to even the odds in a seriously unjust system. The writerly propensity to fig-leaf this murderous satisfaction with an immediate “Oh no! I’m so bad for loving this” is absent. This is not to say that Collins sees these actions as having no moral, personal impact – Katniss’s mentor, who also survived the Hunger Games, is a constant, alcoholic reminder of how something like this might mess a brother up good. 

There are plenty of themes I hate with a passion – say, “crazy makes you deep” for example – but one that’s pretty high on the list is “you, reader, are a voyeur, and I, the author, will dish out a bunch of sick shit and blame it on you.” This is generally some lazy, lazy stuff; the kind of stuff used to plug the holes in the leaking boat of D-grade action films and misogynist bullpucky. This book could be that, easily, in less adept hands. But I’m still not through worrying about my intense reading pleasure in relation with a story that makes children fight to the death. No, of course the children aren’t real, but to mangle a quote, they are living in imaginary gardens with real toads in them. 

It makes me think of the short story by Ursula K. Le Guin called The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas In the story, Le Guin conjures a utopia whose perfection is tied, in some undefined yet concrete way, on treating on single child with the most unbelievable cruelty – never touched, never allowed to see the sun, nothing. Children, upon reaching the age of 16, are brought to see this child, as the basis for their adulthood. Most see and stay, but some simply walk away. I read this, and it felt kind of bloodless and psychomythic. Like, okay, whatever, fictional world. It felt like one of those indictments of people who are not abjectly impoverished that says, “No one should party while other people are suffering” I thought she was valorizing the walking away. Some time later, I freaked out, because I felt like I’d missed her point entirely. We all live in a society, in societies, where, right now, there are people living in the most shit-hole injustice, untouched, hungry, brutalized. I think probably the brutalized child is a fact of all societies, like it or not. Walking away doesn’t make you better, it just makes you end up in another society with a different kind of kid in the basement. And if you’re the child, walking away simply isn’t an option. 

Main Street: 100 Year Old Satire Still Makes Me Die

Wow. Main Streetkind of kicked the tar out of me, something that I did not expect even halfway through my read. I’ve been sputtering and wailing around the house since I finished a couple of days ago, trying to get my thoughts in order. I should have seen this coming for a thousand reasons, but probably the biggest reason is that this is a satire about my own people, and it’s gotten me where I live. It’s also gotten me, which is maybe the worst thing about it. Good satire doesn’t play nice. It eats babies and butchers the sacred cows, and this is some of the best satire I’ve ever had the discomfort to read. 

The narrative starts cheerfully, with Carol, or protagonist, marrying a small town doctor, a one Mr. Kennicott, and stumbling from St Paul into the inbred, gossipy community of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota. Lewis is quick-witted and dry, and every page seems to have some sort of wry observation about America and its people, about the sexes, about education. On Mrs. Bogart, the most virulent of the town gossips:

She was a widow, and a Prominent Baptist, and a Good Influence. She had so painfully reared three sons to be Christian gentlemen that one of them had become an Omaha bartender, one a professor of Greek, and one, Cyrus N. Bogart, a boy of fourteen who was still at home, the most brazen member of the toughest gang in Boytown.  


Mrs. Bogart was not the acid type of Good Influence. She was the soft, fat, sighing, indigestive, clinging, melancholy, depressingly hopeful kind. There are in any chicken yard a number of old hens who resemble Mrs. Bogart, and when they are served at Sunday noon dinner, as fricasseed chicken with thick dumplings, they keep up the resemblance.

Ha! I mean, calling gossips hens is maybe nothing new, but the way he takes it to this extreme conclusion, the capital letters – this is all funny to me. The beginning is thickly adjectival; some sections only long descriptions of place with bending semi-colons between them; a sort of Epic catalog of the armaments of small town. I laughed along with it, because he’s funny, just objectively, but then also because I was substituting the name Sauk Centre – where Lewis is from – for Gopher Prairie, pretending that what happens in Gopher Prairie stays in Gopher Prairie, willfully ignoring that this is not some grudge-match between Lewis and his home town, but a smarter, more encompassing indictment of whatever was passing for the “real America” of his day. 

I’m going to tell several hundred off-topic stories here, so gird your loins, folks. I hale from the proud state of Minnesota, and my folks were heavy into Sinclair Lewis when I was growing up. So much so that we visited Sauk Centre, Minnesota multiple times as a child, because Sauk Centre was Lewis’s hometown and the model for the satirical town of Gopher Prairie in Main Street. I’ve gone to his grave, walked through his house, and know all kinds of random trivia about him. Mum has the bed he owned when he lived in Duluth. (Duluth, MN being another town he took apart in his novel Babbitt. Also, hey, did you know that the name babbitt – from the eponymous character of Lewis’s book – became a common noun, meaning a self-satisfied middle-class materialist? Or babbittry, which may be an even better word, which refers to this kind of person’s actions? You didn’t? Philistine.) During the last half of my read, I was staying with my Grandma, who came from a town much like Gopher Prairie. “Oh, you’re reading that?” she said, with one of her enigmatic laughs. “I re-read Babbitt last year.” I asked her what she thought. “Yep, I knew a lot of people like him,” was her only reply. I tried to get more out of her, but she just shook her head. I don’t know if this kind of terseness means anything to other people, but coming from Grandma, it spoke volumes to me.

All this Lewis mania happened when I was very young though, and part of the fun of reading this book has been pestering my folks for stories about Lewis and Sauk Centre and all the weird stuff they know about him, and correcting my fuzzy drifting memories of that time. I remember standing in the museum – or maybe the hotel? – looking at the drawings local school children had done of his books, and feeling weird about the pictures for Arrowsmith that depicted an anvil and some arrows. That can’t be right. It amuses the crap out of me that these kids lauded the Famous Native Son of Sauk Centre, Minnesota with absolute ignorance. I think Lewis would be pleased, in a perverse way. When his brother went to bury the urn containing Red’s remains – Lewis was called Red by his friends – in an act of great satire if it were done by a character – his brother balked at burying the urn itself. Maybe you could use it again or something? Too nice to bury, anyhow. It was a calm, windless day, the kind of deep cold, high pressure system that sits still and echoing over Minnesota in the dead of winter. His brother decided to dump the ashes, and at the moment he did, the wind picked up out of nowhere and scattered Red all over the graveyard. It got so cold that night, that many of the windows up and down Main Street cracked. The Palmer House, where Lewis worked as a youth, is haunted, or so they say – though not by Lewis – and when I stayed there as a kid, it sparkled with drama and danger. 

I have no idea why I’m telling all these Middlewestern Gothic tales, because Main Street is not Gothic, but parts of it were scary as shit, for me. Published 90 years ago, this satire nails the ever-loving crap out of so much of American culture, culture that has remained disturbingly similar for nearly 100 years. So, yeah, the parts about semi-English speaking Scandinavian/German rurals maybe would only work for someone whose ancestors were exactly that, but Lewis’s portrait of emerging (sub)urban plutocrats and their petty, depressing babbittry (see what I did there?) was both gleefully accurate and, well, horrifyingly accurate. The satire is also deft because it’s aimed in two directions: at his main character, a somewhat flighty reform-minded housewife, and at the town she so ineffectually seeks to reform. 

Much of this book reminds me of Austen, but I don’t want to say that too loudly lest people misunderstand. Especially at the beginning, it is very domestic, and centers on the social lives of a very large cast of characters. Carol is an Emma Woodhouse of sorts, though more a middle-class version, if such a thing is possible (and I think it is.) There’s lots of social burlesque and cringe-inducing missteps both by Carol, and by everyone around her. Carol’s also not far from Catherine Moreland from Northanger Abbey (maybe my jump to Gothic wasn’t so far off) in that she says incredibly revolutionary things, really critical things, and no one much pays her mind because she’s just some girl. Lewis also has an incredibly touching sensitivity to women’s experience, one that I didn’t expect from a male writer of this era. An argument with her husband:

“Let me tell you a fable. Imagine a cavewoman complaining to her mate. She doesn’t like one single thing; she hates the damp cave, the rats running over her bare legs, the stiff, skin garments, the eating of half-raw meat, her husband’s bushy face, the constant battle, and the worship of spirits who will hoodoo her unless she gives the priests her best claw necklace. Her man protests, ‘But it can’t all be wrong!’ and he thinks he has reduced her to absurdity. Now you assume that a world that produces a Percy Breshnahan [a famous Son of Gopher Prairie] and a Velvet Motor Company must be civilized. I suggest Mrs. Bogart as a test. And we’ll continue in barbarism as people as nearly intelligent as you continue to defend things as they are because they are.” 


“You’re a fair spieler, child. But, by golly, I’d like to see you try to design a new manifold, or run a factory and keep a lot of your fellow reds from Czech-slovenski-magyar-godknowswheria on the job! You’d drop your theories so darn quick! I’m not any defender of things as they are. Sure. They’re rotten. Only I’m sensible.”  


He preached his gospel: love of outdoors, Playing the Game, loyalty to friends. She had a neophyte’s shock of discover that, outside of tracts, conservatives do not tremble and find no answers when an iconoclast turns on them, but retort with agility and confusing statistics.

This all goes down mid-book, and I was still rah-rah-ing and sighing along with Carol, even as Lewis skewered her as the parlor radical, the armchair revolutionary, comfortable, beholden to the system, part of the system, inextricable, hypocritical. Ha ha! Look at Carol make an ass of herself in front of a bunch of asses! Ha ha! Carol is treated badly, shunned, brought into line by the gossiping cruelty, but she’s insulated and made ineffectual by her money, her status. She’s the doctor’s wife. Her ideas are eccentricities and not threats. 

Then the hammer drops. There are two episodes in the middle half of the book – spoilers ahead, although I will try to be as non-specific as possible – that clove me in two, and dealt with how terrible this bourgeois decorum can be. One was about the town Socialist, a personable logger-tinkerer, who blows into and out of town through the first part of the book. (I know this guy; I work with him. Like Carol, I’ve always been fond of how outside society my colleague is, how modular his life. He can pick up and go, while the rest of us are bolted down.) The plutocrats like scoring points off of The Red Swede, but he’s cheerfully impervious. But then he settles down into a really wonderful marriage to Carol’s maid, and Carol defies the town in continuing to associate with the maid, and him, even though she mostly does it on the sly. Then, oh God….I kind of don’t want to talk about it. I’ll just say that however bad it gets, it can get logarithmically worse when people demand obeisances for kindnesses that should be a requirement if you want to call yourself human. And then punish you for calling them out. God help my friend if he ever has anything to lose. 

Then a girl goes to a dance with Cy Bogart, Widow Bogart’s son, narrowly avoids being raped, and is run out of town for her trouble. Cy brags and blames, and gets in good with the corner-chatting men of the town. Widow Bogart goes screaming to the school board. Carol tries her hardest to help the girl, and everyone knows that Widow Bogart is a sanctimonious bitch, and that Cy is trouble, but it doesn’t matter. The girl is ruined. She leaves under a cloud. 

Her letter to Carol, a little later:

…& of course my family did not really believe the story but as they were I must have done something wrong they just lectured me generally, in fact jawed me till I have gone to live at a boarding house. The teachers’ agencies must know the story, man at one almost slammed the door in my face when I went to ask about a job, & at another the woman in charge was beastly. Don’t know what I will do. Don’t seem to feel very well. May marry a fellow that’s in love with me but he’s so stupid that he makes me scream.”

It’s so awful it makes me die. It’s more awful because I identify with Carol, possibly in a way that Lewis never intended. I’m a Midwestern housewife type. I am comfortably Liberal, while languishing in a life that is incredibly conservative: marriage, monogamy, children, mortgage, &c &c. It’s real nice of me to espouse my little ideas over coffeecake, but it doesn’t actually get anything done, and it sure doesn’t undo all the damage done by the Widow Bogarts of the world, and their sons. Lewis’s portrait of Carol is affectionate, more affectionate than his portrait of the town of Gopher Prairie, but it’s still like hugging one of those wire mommies in that horrible experiment. 

I don’t know that I can go on with this review, because I don’t want to fall into a bunch of self-pity and hand-wringing. Lewis has already satirized that, so it would be mawkish and redundant. Satire is depressing, when it’s done well, because it’s true. It’s even more depressing when a satire from a century ago can feel fresh and current. I’m definitely going to read more Lewis, but not until I heal up a bit.

As side note: Sinclair Lewis, people, not Upton Sinclair. Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle, a socialist indictment of the treatment of labor in America, which has been somewhat mistakenly remembered as a gross-out about meat packing*; Sinclair Lewis was a satirist who was the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. I’ve had to make this distinction too many times when I told people I was reading this book.

*I mean, it is a gross out about meat-packing, but I think Upton was trying more to galvanize people about the treatment of people.