Top Headline for 2015. President Palin Resigns, States "Office No Longer Gives Me Opportunity to Use My Gifts of Tenacity, Dedication."

Top Headline: World Still Reels After Unexpected Death of Karl Malden, Dubbed "King of Televised Travelers' Check Ads."

Related headlines:

• Will Autopsies Reveal Pepto-Bismol Abuse was a Factor in Malden’s Death?
• Thousands of Mourners in London Chant: “Karl, Don’t Leave Home Without Us!”
• “I’ll Always Feel Karl’s Hand on my Shoulder” An Emotional Retrospective by Reese Witherspoon
• In Later Years, Malden’s Collagen Lip Injections and Accusations of Chia Pet Abuse Overshadowed Artistic Achievements
• Critics Agree: Malden’s Early Work with the Malden Five Helped Define How we Think About Traveler’s Check Advertisements
• A True Look Inside Never-Leave-Home-Without-It-Land
• Custody Battle Over Malden Chia Pet Collection Likely to Ensue
• “We Were All Shocked.” An Exclusive Interview with Germaine Malden
• “Why The Mainstream Media Wants You to Focus on the Death of Karl Malden Instead of the Shocking History of CIA Involvement in the Politics of Uruguay” An Emotional Retrospective by Noam Chomsky
• Why Was Malden Never Comfortable With His Natural Lips? Malden’s Cosmetologist Offers a New Perspective
• “Ten Most Sexually Explicit Jokes About Karl Malden and Chia Pets” An Emotional Retrospective by Tom Brokaw
• “He Paved the Way for Celebrities who Endorsed Traveler’s Checks.” An Emotional Retrospective by Drew Carey
• The Twenty Five Malden American Express Ads that You MUST see on YouTube
• “I’ll Always Feel Karl’s Hand on My Shoulder” An Emotional Retrospective by Ted Nugent
• The Ten Malden American Express Ads That You MUST Buy on iTunes
• “Too Soon to Say Good Bye?” An Emotional Retrospective by George Will
• “Malden and African American Popular Culture: Would There Have Been a Connection had Malden Been African American?” An Emotional Retrospective by Quincy Jones
• The Ten Karl Malden Commemorative Plates that you MUST Purchase By Dialing 1-900-BYE-KARL (And If You Act in the Next Five Minutes, We’ll Include this Free Set of Karl Malden Cheese Knives Plus the Karl Malden Chia Bust Made From Authentic Albanian Marbelite™ Immition Marble at No Extra Cost!)
• “Has Karl Malden’s Memory Been Over-Commericalised?” An Investigative Report by the staff of Yoga Journal
• “ExTEND Ur Love-Life Guaranteed: Generic.Viagra.Cialis.Cheap!” A blogosphere exclusive by aSexyRussianHookerGirl@spamnet.edu
• “He Was A Cultural Bridge Builder. He Shall Be Missed.” An Emotional Retrospective by Mahmud Ahmadinejad
• “Might Media Overexposure Detract from Malden’s True Human Legacy?” An Emotional Retrospective by Donnie Osmond
• “Dialectics and Dialogues: Deconstructing the Brechtian/Marxian Subtext of Karl Malden’s Neo-Post-Commercialist Period” An Emotional Retrospective by People Magazine.

Palestine—The Special Edition

Palestine—The Special Edition by Joe Sacco (originally serialized 1993-1995. This edition published 2007) Fantagraphic Books. 285 pages.

I can’t read poetry or fiction without trying to see it from the author’s perspective. I like the way that Joe Sacco puts himself into his comic book story about Palestine. He puts himself into the story in a wonderfully unselfish way. As an artist, he moves from gross caricatures at the start of the book to realistic portraiture at the end of the book, but all along the depiction of himself remains the same—a caricature of a bespectacled man who’s in way over his head, who’s busy gathering notes for an unorthodox comic book documentary about one of the grimmest political situations in the world. The caricature of Joe Sacco keeps falling into dreams of making it big, of winning Pulitzer Prizes and changing the world through comic books, only to be reminded moments later of his own weaknesses.
I remember recently overhearing a discussion. Someone I knew had recently returned from Israel and was holding forth about his own experiences. His story rambled a lot, but he kept coming back to the assertion that “the Israeli Arabs are smart.” As opposed to the Palestinians, who, presumably, he believes are stupid. It reminded me of a friend of my grandmothers, an old guy who used to run textile factories, and who would have conversations about how amazed he was at the intelligence and articulateness of “African blacks,” as opposed to African Americans. “You can have a conversation with the ones from Africa. The blacks in America, you can’t talk to them.” That was years ago, at a dinner party at my parents’ house, and I flew off the handle about it, castigated the guy for being a racist creep, and then in turn was scolded by the rest of my family for being rude to a guest. Not that the rest of my family really supported the guy; I don’t think that they were listening to him. Basically, there was just an unspoken rule that everyone else regarded him as an old, crotchety fool in these situations, and that he was to be allowed to drone on and on.
It’s an important memory in my life, so I’ll go into it a little bit more:
I told the old droner to “shut up.” Not a comment that I really premeditated at length, but it came from the heart.
And the old guy took offense, said that I was infringing on his right of free speech. He resumed the conversation with a change of subject: now he was talking not about race, but about his own personal history. Like my own family, he used to live in the Russian settlements in China that existed before the advent of Chinese communism and Chairman Mao. In retrospect, he felt that the Russian settlements had been a haven for liberties that had never existed in Russia either under Czarist or under Communist rule.
“We enjoyed free speech there,” he said, and then paused. “Unlike at this table.”
What did I learn in that conversation? I don’t want to draw a conclusion yet. Maybe not ever. Conclusions can be a wrecking ball to a story. I haven’t changed my opinion of the guy: he was a racist and a jerk, at least a lot of the time. But I also am very careful to avoid people to shut up. I become sphinx-like. I let people express their own views. Which sometimes means allowing them to give themselves enough rope to hang themselves.
The guy who was talking about his trip to Israel was a physician I sometimes work with. A little while later in the conversation someone asked him his opinions about torture. “Waterboarding’s not torture,” he said. “Waterboarding’s a walk in the park.”
There are a lot of testimonials in Palestine from the point of view of Palestinians who’ve been tortured. It’s easy to read (because it’s a comic) and hard to digest. I have a natural tendency to sympathize with the Palestinians, as with anyone who winds up the underdog. I also have a deep love for Judaic culture and history and even for a lot of the early Zionist thinkers, whose essays I studied in Bruce Thompson’s Jewish Studies course at UCSC.
Ten years ago I told a dinner guest to shut up about his racist views. He didn’t shut up, and my outrage has done little to curb racism on a global scale. My outrage about the oppression of the Palestinians is not going to make a decisive change in the course of history. There will be no Onion-like headline saying “Local man has strong opinion regarding Middle East.” Even if the situation in Israel were to resolve itself into a peaceful two-state solution by the end of 2009, it won’t mean an end to oppression and repression as a part of US history.
Read Palestine, is my recommendation. Read Palestine and come away conflicted. A state of internal conflict is a great condition for a creative mind.

A Note About the Blog

One thing I’ve learned is that writing straightforward book reviews is getting boring for me, and it’s distracting from my work as a writer. This summer I went to the Last Frontier Theater Conference in Valdez, AK. I presented a couple of my plays there, did some acting, and met a lot of incredible creative people. I thought a lot about the creative process. I discovered a couple of things about my own style and method. Improvisation seems to me an integral part of writing. A lot of my favorite books (Gravity’s Rainbow, Beautiful Losers) bear clear traces of having been improvised; other favorites of mine (Shipping News, for instance, or Mating) come off as much more polished, beautifully planned and researched books where the form seems well under control.
If there’s a grand unification theory of my own creative process, it’s that I have to overpower my own intellect in order to make good use of my own imagination. I’m at my best when there’s a level of uncertainty at play in my writing, when I’m not completely sure where I’m going, or I think I know, but there’s always the threat that the creative part of my mind is going to jump the tracks and go off in some odd direction.
I don’t think I have a lot more to contribute in the sense of traditional-style book reviews of the sort that you’d read in the New Yorker or hear from Maureen Corrigan on Fresh Air. I love this sort of review, where you get a beautiful, essential synopsis of the book and then the reviewer segues seamlessly into an op-ed about the book’s faults and merits. But I am more in love with reading itself, and with the odd and paradoxical ways in which it feeds my own creativity.
I’m not exactly sure where I’m going to go with this blog, but it’s going to veer more toward stream-of-consciousness. I’m still going to use the books I’m reading or have read as the backbone, the departure point, but the meat of the essays I write will have much more to do with my mental associations as I read the books or after I read them than it will summarizing the book and giving it a tumbs-up or thumbs-down. I’ll write with the assumption that my reader is already familiar with the book in question, or is resourceful enough to track down a summary of the book down and read it.
Basically, what I’m saying here is that I’m going to start doing something that may produce utter crap from now on, but it’s more interesting to me than what I’ve been doing. Enjoy.

Unaccustomed Earth

by Jhumpa Lahiri (2008) Published by Alfred A Knopf. 333 pages.

Reviewers of this book of short stories all seem to agree in praising Jhumpa Lahiri for her meticulous detail. To me the painstaking detail sometimes comes across as cold and angular, which is good insofar as it reflects the cold and angular thinking of many of the characters in the book. This is a cast made up largely of successful professionals: biochemists, cardiac physicians, freelance photographers, scholars of Tuscan history. But among these affluent characters there’s no sense of the sort of frivolous, jaded high living that you’d expect from, say, F. Scott Fitzgerald. A grim mindset pervades the book, that of people who come from a culture of Bengali immigrants that prizes ambition and achievement.
The most emotionally moving of these stories was Only Goodness, in which a promising young man, Rahul, succumbs to alcoholism while his loving sister begins to surpass him in achieving the sorts of successes he seemed destined for. The internal conflict faced by Rahul’s elder sister, Sudha, is genuine and worth studying—she has a sincere, childlike interest in helping him along, getting him past the worst of his addiction; and yet she also has a stake in his failure, because it’s made room for her.
Sometimes Lampiri goes too far out of her way to bring her plots to a resolution, as in the story Nobody’s Business, where the character Paul is secretly in love with his roommate Sang. Paul is a student of literature, unready for love, living too much in his head even to imagine how he might court the lovely Sang. But his constant attention to her do allow him to figure out that Sang’s boyfriend is a no-good two-timer. The reason the story doesn’t work, though, is that the boyfriend, Farouk, is such an obvious sleazeball that the story inspires pity rather than sympathy for the characters—pity for Sang that she’s so thick not to notice, and pity for Paul for going to such great lengths to prove what’s already more or less out in the open.
The stories Heaven-Hell and A Choice of Accommodations work the best of all the stories. Heaven-Hell is told from the point of view of a girl who witnesses her mother’s unrequited love for a young bachelor who needs help adapting to America. And A Choice of Accomodations is about a man who’s planned career as a doctor never worked out, and now he’s afraid that the passion in his marriage will fizzle in the same way.
The Bengali institution of arranged marriage weaves its way through the book, and comes to symbolize the systematic life that each of the families in the stories has to push aside, each in their own way. They’re entering a culture—(not American culture so much as a modern, globalized one)—that offers more freedom on the surface. But in Lampiri’s stories the freedom of choice itself seems like a demanding, unfamiliar and often hostile taskmaster to these characters who, while unflaggingly intelligent, seem to have a hard time getting to know themselves.

The Essence of Art Nouveau

by Paul Greenhalgh. (2000) Published by Harry N Abrams, Inc.

This is a straightforward, enjoyable little treatise about one of my favorite art movements. It wasn’t quite what I was looking for; a better title would be Art Nouveau and Its Sources. Greenhalgh gives a thumbnail overview of the history of Art Nouveau and then gives us glimpses into the various influences that came together to form the style. The images are lovely: my favorite is the plate from Ernst Haeckel’s 1898 biology text Kunstform der Natur showing delicate, curvilinear patterns in aquatic siphonophorae that are clearly reflected in the work of Art Nouveau designers.
This is a very good book for the reader who would rather spend more time looking at art than thinking too deeply about the theory behind it.

Barefoot Gen

Barefoot Gen by Nakazawa Keiji, translated by staff of Project Gen (1987) Published by New Society Publishers, 285 pages.

I like this book because it’s strange in so many ways. It’s a Japanese comic book that was written in the 1970s and translated at the end of the 1980s into various languages by a group of academics and antinuclear activists who saw in this story of a family living in Hiroshima at the end of World War II. The Japan of this autobiographical story has become exceedingly militant—Japanese civilians have been so entrained to believe American soldiers are marauding devils that they commit suicide en mass in Okinawa rather than face surrender; military cadets who can’t handle basic training are hounded to the point of committing suicide—and yet one father, a humble farmer and artisan, is convinced that the war is a stupid idea, and is not afraid to say so publicly, even though it means that his whole family—including the two youngest boys, Gen and Shinji—will be ostracized.
Even for someone well versed in both Western and Japanese comic books, the conventions of this story are unsettling and a little creepy. Any time the characters are upset, huge rivulets of tears stream from their eyes. When Gen and Shinji are happy they do the same weird dance. And whenever anyone is angry, they start slapping and punching each other. Parents punch children, children punch their teachers, the leaders of a work camp sticks at the children they look after. In the first part of the book, young Gen bites off part of the finger of a young boy who antagonizes him. For a book so prized by pacifists, this is immensely violent. Even the most heartwarming parts of the book (such as the story of Gen saving a poor glass merchant who can’t pay his debts) are punctuated by acts of sadism and brutality.
This story is filled with shadows cast by the light of the atomic bomb that’s dropped at the end of the book. It’s a story of childhood memories that can never be clearly recovered because they’ll always be seen through the filter of a mushroom cloud. Even the illustration style in which Nakazawa renders city scenes, wheat fields, train engines and bombing raids gives you a sense of unnaturally acute lighting, a world being recreated in painstaking detail only with the knowledge that at the end all of it will be ripped apart. The early scenes of flowing tears are weirdly conjured up again at the end of the story when we see the horrifying images of Hiroshima’s citizens wandering about zombie-like with the flesh melting from their faces. I’m not sure that any of this was intentional on the author’s part, but perhaps intention doesn’t matter that much, as he’s told a story about people in situations so extreme as to challenge even the strongest of human wills.