The Redwood Coast

Volume 13, Number 4 Review Fall 2011 A Publication of Friends of Coast Community Library in Cooperation with the Independent Coast Observer travels It didn’t take more than a year for David to become a well-known figure in whatever counter-culture strait-laced To- ronto could muster (and tolerate). He grew his brown-gray hair long and sometimes A State of wore a headband, he wrote columns for local weeklies and he was on the board of Rochdale College, an ill-fated attempt Liquid Gold to build a quasi-educational community that mixed hippies, students and others in a highrise building. He was also part Alexa Mergen of a network of people that in various ways helped Americans who had come to Canada rather than participate in the war ike all who go westering, my first in Vietnam. glimpse of California was from the I published a few of David’s short Least. As a child I stayed summers stories in WRIT. He told me he’d written a with my grandmother Helen in southern novel in Louisville some years before and Nevada. This was the 1970s and early asked me if I wanted to read the manu- 80s, before outdoor recreation brought so script. I said no, because it was finished; many to the deserts for hiking, rock climb- and because on one hand I had no way to ing and camping. There were fewer people help him get it published, and on the other everywhere: it was possible to drive from hand if I didn’t like it I would have to say Henderson to Reno, and through Reno, so, and that would be discouraging. without traffic, aside from occasional big I went off to spend a year in Norway rigs barreling along unflappable as buf- in 1972-73, and while I was away, David falo. sent me a copy of Awakenings, by Oliver My visits provided an excuse for my Sacks, which had just been published; grandmother’s companion, M. J. Miles, to having read Sacks’s columns in the New fire up his white Ford Mustang. I climbed England Journal of Medicine, David was in the back seat with a book, the black the first to alert me to the work of this sheepdog panting beside me. My grand- Vigelius Karl physician-writer, work that he greatly mother sat in the passenger seat wearing admired. And then he wrote to say The sunglasses that covered her cheeks as well Mending Man was being published by as her eyes, purse beside her on the floor. Coach House Press. He sent me a copy When I was 12 they took me to Reno so One of a Kind when it came out. The first thing I did I could see where my parents met and after I read it was read it again! Then I married. We drove the 440 miles straight David M. Collins and his singular novel wrote him and told him I thought it was through, stopping along Highway 95 in terrific and unlike anything I’d ever read. Tonopah for grilled cheese sandwiches, Here is how it starts: fries and ice water. We visited the Mizpah Roger Greenwald “It is six o’clock in the morning on the Hotel, newly refurbished in the glow of 366th day and now they have given me the city’s second boom as molybdenum avid M. Collins, who passed Jeanette, and their daughter, Elizabeth, paper and pencil and I can begin. They and silver and gold mines hummed again. away on 13 April 2009 at the who was then about four years old. (He say if I am good they will let me out in In Reno we drove under “The Big- age of 82, was the author of had two sons and a daughter from his eight more months, which is 243 more gest Little City in the World” sign to St. an extraordinary novel, The first marriage, which had ended in an days but I do not believe in ifs and I do Thomas Aquinas Church where my par- Mending Man, which was acrimonious divorce.) They lived simply not know what they mean by good so I ents exchanged vows. Aquinas believed Dwritten in Louisville, Kentucky, in the late in a one-bedroom apartment at the corner will assume that I must stay here seven beauty can be seen everywhere, if you 1960s, was published in Toronto, Canada, of St. George Street and Bernard Avenue, more years which is 2556 more days look, and would have appreciated how in 1972, and has long been out of print. in a neighborhood known as the Annex. including two extra days for leap years. light illuminated the stained-glass window I think it deserves to find a niche in the They maintained a sort of open house. Even so, that doesn’t matter because I will of Friar Ray F. Garces exploring the Colo- American canon, even if as what people I lived just down St. George and would only write for 99 days. I will write every rado River in a raft. Sunrays shine behind call a “minor classic” (often because the often go over there in the evening. I didn’t morning from six o’clock until seven the friar and mountains of water push him author lacks the large body of work that need to call ahead. o’clock which is when we go to breakfast forward as he navigates with a long pole. critics prefer). I’ve compared it to Na- We discovered some odd coincidences. and in 99 hours I will tell you everything. Helen, Miles and I walked though the thanael West’s The Day of the Locust—in David’s father had attended Cooper Union Everything I need to say. shady university campus. We stopped part because it is equally penetrating about around the same time as my paternal “First, I say I believe in Numbers. That for milkshakes at the Peppermill Casino the American psyche (especially on the grandfather had; it was possible, given is evident because I have only written for and paid homage to the trickling Truckee topic of “health,” which is still very much the very small student bodies back then, five minutes and already I have used 6 River. Just then it hosted plastic bags and with us), and in part because it seems to that they had known each other. David – 366 – 8 – 243 – 7 – 2556 – 2 – 99 – 6 a grocery cart. me a short novel of equally high quality. had grown up in northern Manhattan, – 7 – 99 – 5. Which totals 3404, which “We ought to go to California,” Miles But aside from that, the two books are not near Fort Tryon and Inwood Hill Parks. is a very nice number because it adds up said. similar; there are very few books that bear He had played as a boy on a high set of to eleven. As you can see, I believe in “All right,” Helen nodded. any similarity to The Mending Man. stone steps (of a kind common in New Numbers, the science being called Nu- We roared onto Interstate 80 west. I sat I first met David Collins in the fall of York, with iron pipes as banisters) that merology. That is one thing I do believe up in the deep seat to peer out the small 1969, when I was in graduate school at the I glimpsed each day decades later as the in. Numbers tell whether things are good pop-out side window at wagon-sized University of Toronto, had just started an Broadway local carried me past Dyckman or bad, and also teach you discipline, granite boulders. Through the curved rear open writers workshop, and was planning Street on my way from the Bronx to the because you have to learn how to handle window I watched the desert recede. With the first issue of a literary annual (WRIT City College of New York. I liked the idea them.” elevation gain, conifers grew thickly, Magazine). David showed up for the that, unknown to me, a ghost of the young and at the other side of Donner Summit workshop: 6-foot-4, with powerful arms, David had been on those steps as my train he Mending Man is thoroughly we dropped into forests of green. I knew a deep voice and a large laugh. He was passed them. TAmerican in its subjects, its settings green jungles of the Potomac watershed a physician, doing a Diploma in Public and characters, its speech patterns, yet is and forests of West Virginia. Here, wel- Health at the university, and would soon exceptional in its breadth of vision, its comed into California by a sign painted become the doctor (“Doctor Dave”) at Collins uses the transcendence of American myths and with an orange poppy, the topaz sky made a free street clinic. He would have been strange vision of his values, of American ways of seeing. It is a green glow brilliantly. I had seen Geor- about 42 then, the oldest person in the book that not only sees irony and tolerates gia O’Keeffe’s paintings: now I had an workshop and a little worried about how narrator to confront ambiguity, but embraces paradox. inkling of her inspiration. I leaned forward he might be seen on that account, but The Mending Man (the book’s nar- between the seats, mindful not to crowd I told him no one else paid his age any America and some rator) clearly suffers certain mental the driver. mind, and that was that. of its most basic limitations. He is aware of some of them, Miles stopped the car at an overlook David was from an Irish Catholic but they prevent him from taking account and we got out. Helen held the dog’s red family in New York, went to primary assumptions—about of all their possible consequences. He leather leash. We breathed air that tasted and secondary parochial schools, and as discovers that people are lonely, declares to me, even in the summer, of snow. a young man was devout—until he jet- health, science, edu- that “loneliness is the disease that makes Dashes of snow sat in the wrinkles of high tisoned religion completely. He served in cation, knowledge, all other diseases possible,” and sets up peaks. Lake Tahoe seemed to breathe. It the Navy in World War II and again in the a Health Enterprise to help people who looked alive as a heart beating. I was used Korean War. Along the way he earned a money, employment, have gotten no relief from doctors. Here to Lake Mead, in Henderson, where we BA in Psychology from Brown University he finds that the best thing he can do is sometimes went to watch catfish stirred (1947), an MA in English Literature from law and justice, touch people, that this improves both their into a feeding frenzy around bread chunks St. Louis University (1953), and then his truth, morality, Vibrations and his own. thrown by tourists. It was impossible to MD from the University of Louisville The reader has a hard time judging the talk over the snarling jet skis and power- (1960). caring, and sanity. narrator for two reasons. First, much of David had recently moved up to See GOLD page 3 Toronto, arriving with his second wife, See collins page 4 Page  The Redwood Coast Review Fall 2011 editor’s note Stein vs. Salomon: Showdown at the Jewish Museum Stephen Kessler

as it a subversive stroke of difficult existence. Under such depressing curatorial genius or just a circumstances this strikes me as a remark- perverse coincidence that ably courageous course of action. It does San Francisco’s Contem- Was it a subtle not, as the cliché has it, reveal “the triumph porary Jewish Museum curatorial comment of the human spirit”—quite the contrary, Wmounted concurrently this summer its Char- her spirit was brutally exterminated—but it lotte Salomon and Gertrude Stein exhibits? on the terrible con- does show that a human being can summon Stein of course is the Mother of All Modern- the gumption to go down fighting for life in ists, the Paris salonkeeper who not only tradictions of these the form of a deathless work of art. In such cultivated the budding geniuses of Picasso parallel exhibitions? disheartening conditions I wonder whether and Hemingway and Matisse among many I could have risen to the occasion with such others but was herself a formidable literary Or was it simply a creative aplomb. force, a daring experimenter with language Stein, in her way, also revealed her who—for better and for worse—has influ- sign of cluelessness character during the war. Her choice was to enced generations of writers. Salomon was to celebrate Stein preserve her privilege (unlike such non- a young German woman who had the bad Jewish intellectuals as Beckett and Camus luck to come of age just as the Nazis were the shameless self- who worked in support of the Resistance) coming to power and, despite fleeing to the in order not only to live in comfort but to south of France in 1938, was arrested there promoter and col- promote her esthetic program. A lifelong in 1943 and sent to her death at Auschwitz. laborator directly conservative Republican, she apparently had She was 26. no serious problem accommodating herself Salomon was an artist, writer and musi- upstairs from the to a fascist French government in the inter- cian who authored a single sustained work, est of staying alive and furthering her cause Life? or Theatre?, a series of several hun- desperate creation of literary and artistic experimentation. Her dred gouache paintings with text telling a of a victim of those commitment to her own genius and creative highly imaginative version of her life story, agenda overrode whatever moral qualms including a “soundtrack” of German popular she was collaborat- she may or may not have had about the Ho- and classical music—what today might be locaust in progress all around her. Perhaps called a mixed-media or multimedia piece, ing with? she was oblivious or willfully ignorant of or the book for a musical tragicomedy, or a the ambient atrocities—and who knows to graphic novel. Whatever it is, it was truly what lengths people will be driven in their experimental for its time, but with none Charlotte Salomon (self-portrait) instinct for self-preservation—but there is of the intellectual trappings or glamour of something exceedingly creepy about her Stein’s Parisian salons. Stein, much older beauty of the work and by the terrible sad- sarcastically, that Hitler deserved the Nobel cultivation of her own importance in a such and making her way assiduously up the cul- ness of her young death. You wonder what Peace Prize “because he is removing all a horrendous historical setting. tural hierarchy as an avant-garde tastemaker, she might have become as an artist, writer the elements of contest and struggle from That the Contemporary Jewish Museum, reputation-establisher and High Priestess of and/or musician had she had the chance, but Germany. By driving out the Jews and the of all places, should avoid these questions Modernism, was about as far from Salo- because she happened to be Jewish at a time democratic left element, he is driving out completely strikes me as nothing less than mon’s circumstances as can be imagined, in Europe when that was a death sentence, everything that conduces to activity. That obscene. but both were in France at the same time all we have of her is this one epic work. means peace.” Even if, as seems likely, she and both were Jewish. Yet they experienced The Stein show, just upstairs, was a com- was being sarcastic, in light of history this is ut such are the politics of cultural very different fates and fortunes. pletely different kind of exhibition—not of a rather lame idea of a joke. Bcelebrity—and of marketing. To raise The Salomon exhibit was a linear tour the writer’s writings nor of the art patron’s None of this is mentioned in the Jewish such questions in public (if indeed they through a substantial portion—about 300 collection, but a tour of her personage at Museum exhibition, certainly an odd omis- were privately discussed or debated among painted pages out of more than 700—of home in Paris of the 1920s and 30s—many sion in this context, and doubly disturbing the curators) would have utterly changed Life? or Theatre? To follow the tragic photos and portraits of Stein by her pet when considered alongside the story of the tone and poisoned the atmosphere of story of the artist’s family, including the artists (and portraits of her white French Charlotte Salomon, who, lacking Stein’s self-congratulation permeating the Stein ex- suicides of her mother and grandmother, her poodle), her home décor, her clothes, her connections and not sharing her political hibition, all the more so in light of Charlotte own coming of age and falling in love with jewelry, swatches of wallpaper, restaurant Salomon’s fate. her music teacher, her exile and ultimate menus, napkins, newspaper clippings, Equally revealing of the com- doom under France’s Vichy regime, is to magazine pages, editions of her books—an pound ironies embodied by these be moved both by the urgent energy and artifactual record of her cultural persona, simultaneous shows was the fact the things in her domestic and public life that, on the Friday afternoon when that defined her. I could feel as I strolled I saw them both, the galleries of through this elaborate collection of artifacts the Salomon exhibit were all but The Redwood Coast the storied force of Stein’s formidable empty—affording me the chance to personality, her tireless promotion of her contemplate the art with virtually favored artists and of herself, her mastery no distraction, pausing before the Review of the art of self-mythmaking. A genius artist’s pages long enough to absorb in her own mind, she aggressively cham- their unspeakably sad beauty— Stephen Kessler pioned that idea in the minds of others, while upstairs the Stein show was Editor and through a shrewd combination of true swarming with voyeurs, just as accomplishment and skillful public relations Gertrude would have wished. She Daniel Barth established a permanent place for herself in self-fulfillingly prophesied her own Daniela Hurezanu 20th-century cultural history. immortality, and indeed in this Jonah Raskin exhibition her particular brand of Contributing Editors zra Pound, her chief American expatri- highbrow exhibitionism reached Linda Bennett Eate rival for the throne of modernist its apotheosis. She herself, or her enduring afterimage, had become Production Director pope, referred to Stein as “that old tub of guts,” according to poet and publisher the indestructible artifact. Her James Laughlin, who worked for both of writings, patronage and collecting, The Redwood Coast Review is published them one summer as a Harvard student in it seems, were merely means to an quarterly (January, April, July and October) Europe. Stein in turn dismissed Pound as “a end: the creation of her own tower- by Friends of Coast Community Library in village explainer.” These two monumental ing legend. cooperation with the Independent Coast Stein died at age 72 in 1946, egos, like King Kong and Godzilla, fought Gertrude Stein by Francis Picabia Observer. The opinions expressed in these it out between the wars to determine who and so did not live to witness our pages are those of the individual writers and could be the bigger blowhard, know-it-all sympathies, was left to a less distinguished current culture of competitive celebrity, but do not necessarily reflect the views of FoCCL, destiny. How the museum could have I expect she would have felt fully at home in the ICO or the advertisers. Contents copyright and scoutmaster of up-and-coming liter- mounted both shows without acknowledg- our multimedia spectacle of personality and © 2011 The Redwood Coast Review. All rights ary talent. One thing they had in common revert to authors and artists on publication. was a fondness for fascists: Stein publicly ing this grim irony is something I’m still taken advantage of every chance to advance We welcome your submissions. Please endorsed Franco during the Spanish Civil trying to figure out. Was it, as noted above, her personal fame. Charlotte Salomon, like send essays, reviews, fiction, poetry and letters War and translated for American readers the a subtle and profound curatorial comment some geeky graphic novelist or librettist or to the Editor, The Redwood Coast Review, c/o ICO, speeches of Vichy leader Maréchal Pétain on the terrible contradictions of these paral- mixed-media artist, would likely also have PO Box 1200, Gualala, CA 95445. Manuscripts (whom she compared to George Washing- lel exhibitions? Or was it simply a sign of made some modest mark in our cultural should be typed, double-spaced, with the ton) during the Nazi occupation of France, cluelessness to celebrate Stein the shameless landscape. But the contrast between these author’s name, address, phone and email at while Pound in Italy affiliated himself with self-promoter and collaborator directly up- artists’ destinies, the triumph of one’s the top of the first page. Postal mail only. A stairs from the desperate creation of a victim indomitable will in the afterlife and the self-addressed, stamped envelope is required Mussolini and famously ranted on the radio for our reply. during World War II about the sinister con- of those she was collaborating with? relative obscurity of the other—even though On the Web: stephenkessler.com/rcr.html spiracies of Jewish bankers. Crisis, experience teaches, tends to bring her snuffed-out gifts showed enormous ac- Subscription information: See page 9. Despite her Jewish background, Stein out people’s true character. Knowing her complishment and promise—is something I Friends of Coast Community Library is a breezed through the war unscathed, protect- days were likely numbered, from 1941 to 43 find very hard to accept. nonprofit, tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization. ed by her alliance with Bernard Fay, director Charlotte Salomon threw herself feverishly Tax-deductible donations may be sent to of France’s Bibliotheque Nationale.` (This into painting and writing an artistic record Coast Community Library, PO Box 808, Point relationship is explored by Stein scholar of her life. As a Jewish woman she under- Stephen Kessler presents his new book, The Arena, CA 95468. The library is located at Barbara Will in her book Unlikely Collabo- stood her prospects were bleak, yet rather Tolstoy of the Zulus: On Culture, Arts & 225 Main Street in Point Arena. Telephone than despair and follow her mother and Letters (El León Literary Arts), at Gallery 707.882.3114. ration.) In other words, Stein was a col- Thank you for your support! laborator with the Vichy government and, grandmother into self-destruction, she em- Books in Mendocino Friday, October 14, by association, with the Nazis. She told The barked on the path of creation and managed 6:30pm, and at Four-eyed Frog Books in New York Times Magazine in 1934, perhaps to leave an extraordinary testimony of her Gualala Saturday, October 15, 4pm. Fall 2011 The Redwood Coast Review Page  gold from page 1 books Haunted Streets Jonah Raskin

ow can you keep on movin’ unless you migrate “ too,” Ry Cooder wailed on the first song of his Hbreakthrough album, Into the Purple Valley, which once seemed retro and now sounds as timely as the nightly news. A total of 13 albums later, Cooder is as legendary as the legendary outlaws he sings about in ballads such as “Billy the Kid.” At the age of 64, he’s no longer the young guitarist in the studio who riffed with Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones. He probably shouldn’t be starting a new career, but that’s exactly what he’s done. Los Angeles Stories (City Lights Books) is a nifty collection of his finely tuned fiction in which he pays homage to the city he loves and hates in nearly equal proportions, and that he knows neighborhood by neighborhood and street by street. As Los Angeles Stories shows, he’s a bard of hardboiled LA and a master of the compact murder mystery. “All the places and many of the people in the book are real, though I’ve changed some of the names,” Cooder tells me at 8am in his home in Santa Monica, before his band ar- Lake Tahoe, westshore rives for rehearsal. They’re going on the road and Cooder is boats. Lake Mead was dammed for property development California has 58 reservoirs capable of storing more than still a perfectionist on stage and in his writing, too. Writing and sport. Dry wind whips the lake and the water does not 10,000 acre feet of water and more large dams than any lyrics to songs has been good preparation for writing fiction. invite. When Lake Mead recedes, it leaves a white ring of other state. New Melones Reservoir, which drowned the “I should tell you that these LA stories of mine weren’t minerals, like the stain a damp glass leaves on a wooden Lower Stanislaus, is owned by the US Bureau of Reclama- meant to be published,” he says. “I only thought about put- table. tion. I did not understand the colossal amount of water ting them in a book after Bob Dylan told me I had to have Lake Tahoe begged to be tickled by a toe. The lake moving throughout the state until I flew in a 1957 Bonanza something to sell when I went on tour.” seemed aware of her beauty and a little shy, too, like Beechcraft from Hesperia, near Crestline, where Lisa was Born in 1947 and raised in Los Angeles, Cooder has lived Daphne. Perhaps the lake once was a maiden who had no working as a park ranger at Silverwood Lake (owned by there all his life, though he has traveled widely—to Cuba, peace until transformed from human to other-than-human. the Department of Water Resources) to Concord in Contra “Tahoe” sounds gentle on the ear and is said to mean “deep Costa County (which has 28 small reservoirs). Seeing the No matter how much music he water,” “blue water,” “lake’s edge” and “sea” in the Washoe entire state from the sky, puttering through scant clouds, made or how much moving he language. Blue overwhelms the eye looking down on Tahoe: conjured the same awe of an arrival in California 10 years the lake’s extraordinary depth—1,645 feet—and clarity earlier, when the commercial jet skimmed San Francisco did, Cooder couldn’t escape from conjure the ocean. Bay. From the two-seater Bonanza I saw the Sierra—still snow covered in July—and squares and rectangles of Cen- the ghosts of old LA that haunted ake Tahoe sits in a granite basin shared by two states, tral Valley farmland. him year after year. He decided Lfed from dozens of streams all around, yet has only one We traced the California Aqueduct like an arrow in the outlet: the Truckee River flowing back to Reno. It’s as if the sky firing north. The concrete network of canals, tunnels, to exorcise them by writing a kind lake turns her face from the Pacific to feed the Great Basin. pumps and power lines appeared vulgar and benign, as if a If we had come out of the desert with Lake Bonpland or giant orthodontist had imposed corrective headgear on the of ghost story about the city that Lake Bigler below us—earlier mapped names for the lake state, realigning waterways. Sun reflected so brightly off the —would the beauty have struck so deep? The first emissaries open canals and pipelines—more than 700 miles of veins in once was. from the Army Topographical Corps to come upon the lake the state water project system—I squinted behind sunglass- were John Charles Frémont and Charles Preuss in February es. The artificial arteries brought to mind the old legal term, for example, and to West Africa—as a performer and as a 1844. It was Valentine’s Day, and Frémont’s wife of three “the duty of water,” indicating the total volume of water per student of world music. He always comes back to LA. It years, Jessie Benton Frémont, waited 3,000 miles east in year that may be diverted under a vested water right. Water feels like home, but there’s a lot about home that he dislikes, Washington, DC. works for us, pulled down mountains and through faucets, and he doesn’t mind complaining to the world. Still, the city When Jessie joined Lieutenant Frémont in California four measured, boiled, frozen, splashed, sprayed, imbibed and has also inspired him to write songs such as “Down in Hol- years later, at a ranch in what is now part of the Stanislaus spilled. lywood,” and now to create gritty stories about the glorious National Forest, she commented on the state’s rivers in the I live now at the edge of the Sacramento-San Joaquin 1950s when LA was the noir capital of the world. range southeast of Tahoe as she looked north through pierc- River Delta, where the Governor Edmund G. Brown Cali- “Today, everything in Los Angeles is franchised, over- ing mountain air: “From the summit we could see eighty fornia Aqueduct begins. The water in the state water project subscribed and homogenized,” he says. “Every surface is for miles off the line of the San Joaquin River, defined by its keeps alive more than 20 million Californians, and many sale. Most of the old neighborhoods don’t exist anymore and broad belt of trees, running north and south parallel to our more people if you include the 660,000 acres of irrigated that’s really sad. I miss the regional speech, the distinctive mountains; connecting the two were many mountain rivers farmland, producing food, with snowmelt and ground water music, the clothes, and the unique car cultures that vanished crossing the broad plain and glistening like steel ribbons in drained from mountain and valleys. Electricity boosts the when the freeways came in and carved up the whole city. the afternoon sun—the Merced, the Stanislaus, the Tu- southward flow when gravity is not enough. The whole state That was the end of the LA I knew and loved.” olumne and others; a turn of the head showed the peaks of is rigged. To write Los Angeles Stories Cooder became an oral Yosemite thirty miles off, and lines of blue mountains back historian, a family genealogist, and a serious scholar, though to the everlasting snow of Carson’s Peak—a stretch of a o love California requires a fearlessness that, in more he never studied history or learned to write a research paper hundred and fifty miles.” Tthan two decades, I muster only in spurts. The land in college. “I just couldn’t sit in a classroom,” he says. “I’m Beauty and utility are twin lenses with which people view demands the viewer hold contradictions that stretch the mind a good student if someone shows me how to do something.” landscape. The dried-up Kern River brought that home for like a bolt of cloth being measured. The magnetism of the me when I lived in Bakersfield in 2002. Historical accounts state’s Pacific edge draws people indiscriminately, like metal ooder dropped out describe millions of birds resting and nesting in the Great filings: there are many people tromping across the land- Cof Reed College Valley Grassland: the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley scape, sucking from wells and reservoirs. The history here in Portland after a once contained the largest freshwater marsh and lake system is violent to land and people, and lives cogently only in the year, went back to Los west of the Mississippi. When water was released into the minds of museum docents and middle-school teachers. Angeles, picked up a river, I took the dogs and my rollerblades to Bakersfield’s In 1864, disappointed by the Golden State, Ada Clare guitar and started to Kern River Parkway, where it ends by Interstate 5. Trucks wrote in “Taking Leave,” “No wonder people are anxious play music—some- and cars whooshed past a few hundred yards to the west and to get away from California, for they feel that they cannot thing he’d wanted to we headed away on the paved trail. Overnight, it seemed, by any amount of mental tip-toeing rise up to her standard.” do ever since boyhood. toads and frogs sprang up from dust turned to mud along the Her pen levels irony at the turnaround nature of the state: He recorded his first banks. Geese, ducks, herons and egrets, the softly beauti- “California is pledged to prosperity, is bound over to keep album in 1970, played ful cinnamon teal, sailed in from fields of corn and mucky success, and the more people that come here and go away, with almost all of the mountains of manure in the nearby dairies. Turtles sat on the more profitable will be the steam navigation of the innovative musicians logs. Pacific, and navigation is the thief of time. Moral: Rolling of the era, including Water’s transformation is magical. One summer my 11- mosses gather no stones.” As Clare hints, the social, political Van Morrison, Neil Young, Little Feat, year-old niece and I swam in the Kern where it runs through and environmental truth of California remains available to Ry Cooder town. An abandoned oil refinery and business parks gird anyone willing to look behind the stage sets of blue lakes, Captain Beefheart, the river. Emily and I never saw other swimmers there, as beaches and sunshine. Freddy Fender and more, and won Grammy Awards in 1988, we pretended to be explorers sliding over newly mossed Years ago, near the Tuolumne River, I picked up a hitch- 1993, 1995 and 1998. rocks. Due to the instability of an upstream dam, more of hiker named Art. He wore a tunic made from a feed sack tied No matter how much music he made or how much mov- the Kern’s flow must be released. The US Army Corps of with rope. He carried a fully laden backpack and insisted on ing he did, he couldn’t escape from the ghosts of old LA that Engineers won’t let Lake Isabella exceed 60 percent capac- sitting in the back of my Nissan beside his gear. He grew up haunted him year after year. With encouragement from his ity. The dam also bisects an active fault. Its hold on the river in nearby Angels Camp and had, he told me, been in Brit- wife, he decided to exorcise them by writing a kind of ghost is tenuous. ish Columbia where he saw Bigfoot. After buying infrared story about the city that once was. To gather the information In 1990, drought dropped the level in New Melones Res- binoculars in Sonora, he said, he was going back. “You can he needed to flesh out his ideas and expand on his color- ervoir in the foothills, and brought back the Camp Nine run laugh,” he said. I didn’t. When I’m in California I need to ful characters, he went to the LA Public Library, walked to the Stanislaus River. I had returned to California from the believe possibilities, even the existence of a wild man of the streets, talked to relatives and sifted through his own East Coast, and lived in Sonora with my friend Lisa. Rafters northern forests. For the Golden State herself is the nation’s memories. and hippies gathered below the bridge where people dangled Bigfoot: mythical, monstrous, scary and wondrous, elusive. “I smuggled a 1941 map of LA out of the library and on bungee cords. September’s blue moonlight showed the made a copy before I returned it,” he says. “I also found an old water line: campfires burned where water had been. The old City Directory that listed my own family history. The river rushed past the limestone cliffs. People swirled like deeper I dug into LA the more I remembered family stuff, sparks shooting into the sky mad under the stars for water, Alexa Mergen is a poet living in Sacramento and a frequent including a spinster aunt who drank gin and smoked Pall fire, earth and air, breathing and being. Kegs of beer chilled contributor of essays to the RCR. in bundles of hay and dogs lingered around the barrel of a barbeque. See Cooder page 9 Page  The Redwood Coast Review Fall 2011 collins from page 1 Physics what he says concerns our own unexam- Saul Bellow, echoing William Blake, ined assumptions, whether about the nature At times we must liked to say that “opposition is friendship.” My Isaac Newton of health or about what constitutes a lie. David wasn’t a debater in that tradition. Second, his ingenuousness is complete: grant that both the But he looked everything in the face and Hilda Johnston whatever he says at a given moment, no narrator and the said what he thought, unvarnished. I once matter how transparently self-serving, is pointed out to him that he was different saw the goldfinch in my garden this true for him, so that he neither rationalizes from most people in this regard, insofar as world are strange and morning eating cosmos seeds. And I nor lies. He is untroubled by what we regard he didn’t grant any extra leeway because thought of their small digestive tracts, —if we notice them—as direct contradic- that neither strange- someone was a close friend or had known I and of how much is happening so the tions or outright flaws in logic, and that he him a long time. He agreed and said, “That’s ness mitigates the goldfinch can migrate or survive the winter, is untroubled makes it more difficult for us a pretty desperate way to live, isn’t it.” I so much that is beyond the goldfinch, just to notice. said perhaps it was; but it was also very other. This does not as the eye patterns on the butterfly that To say that Collins’s narrator is “unreli- valuable to anyone who wanted never to be confuse or frighten predators are beyond able” would be to oversimplify, to miss leave us much ground jollied along. One was always free, after all, the butterfly. We are the only animal with the unique dimension he operates in. It is to decide that David was wrong. He was fal- to stand on. time to contemplate what is going on, and the dimension of paradox. In practice, the lible, of course. But at least you knew you we aren’t all as successful as Isaac Newton. Mending Man spots the connection between were getting an honest opinion. I’ve been reading a book by James Gleick people’s lives and their illnesses, and sees I’ve made David sound very serious, neously, two frames of reference....” The about Newton’s life, and I like Newton that doctors do not spot it. “You have to be but in his years in Toronto he was almost Mending Man employs a vivid and exact better now that I know he wasn’t an aris- always thinking, in other words,” he says, always upbeat; you might say he believed figurative language which demands that we tocrat but only called Sir because of his “to fit the pieces together, and understand in being cheerful as matter of policy, in ap- attend to the pain of the narrator’s strange- accomplishments. His father was a farmer what is happening with this particular per- proaching life “with a high heart,” as Jane ness by abandoning the strangeness of our who died a few months before Isaac was son and not just have pat answers that would Jacobs (another American expat in Toronto) own mechanical thinking. It is an achieve- born, and Newton’s mother wanted him to fit everybody.” His Theory of Vibrations used to say. David’s combination of serious ment of profound intelligence and compas- become a farmer but was persuaded to let and Harmony hints at a metaphysical system insight with a sense of humor was evident sion, in which the author’s craft matches the him go to the University at Cambridge on a that would make real sense of health and whenever he came up with a formulation off tremendous reach of his vision. working scholarship. disease as aspects of people in their world, the cuff that pleased him; he would laugh What sort of man could write a novel In 1665, because of the plague, he at the same time as it is in fact a sham and in surprised delight. “If totally asleep is the like The Mending Man? It makes sense, of returned to his home in the country, and offers precisely a pat answer in all cases. ground floor and fully conscious is the first course, that this book should have emerged there, in his early twenties, reading Euclid The narrator cannot really think or fit pieces floor, then the people in the helping profes- from a doctor’s deep reflections on health, and Descartes, he invented calculus and together, and the Theory of Vibrations ap- sions are shopping on the Mezzanine! Ha illness and the art of healing. As someone formulated the laws of motion he published peals to a scientificness of the same sort it ha ha!” I’m sure he included himself among who knew David Collins, I can also see many years later in his Principia. claims to be discrediting. the helpers, and that was part of the joke. behind the book the habits of mind that I Now Newton’s ideas seem like com- The Mending Man is someone who by (Indeed, one can even think of the narrator was able to observe in person. The main mon sense, but in his day gravity was just virtue of his terrible incapacities participates of The Mending Man as a version of its au- attraction at the Collinses’ open house was a word meaning heaviness, the opposite of in an illusion of wholeness, administer- thor. The Norwegian novelist Tarjei Vesaas, conversation, which was engaging largely levity. What a leap of imagination it took ing to others who sense that something is speaking of the mentally handicapped pro- because of David’s special qualities. He to realize that the same force that keeps the profoundly wrong with their lives but are tagonist of his novel The Birds, once called had things to say, and aside from Jeanette, moon in orbit draws a falling body. We unable to transcend the ordinary categories him “a self-portrait, with reservations”!) he hadn’t often known people who were have seen that of perception in order to see what the mat- interested in hearing them, so he enjoyed astronauts are al- ter is. His unrecognized gift answers their avid was a man who moved a great having listeners. On occasion he would hold most weightless unrecognized need. “Health” is a mystical, many times in his life. That pattern forth, but he was also very good at listening. D in space, but he undefined quality for both him and them didn’t stop in Toronto. While I was still He was a questioning person who wondered had demonstrat- precisely because it does involve harmony away in Norway in 1972-73, the Free Clinic about things and liked to turn them over this ed that gravity in a world which cannot conceive of that. closed, and by the time I came back David way and that and see how they looked from diminishes with This narrator is at once trenchant and and Jeanette and Elizabeth had moved to unexpected angles. He was fascinated by the square of the loopy, and his style of speech, complete New Brunswick, New Jersey, where he people’s thought processes, including his distance. And with unconventional syntax, renders perfect- had managed to land a job with Schering own, and especially the less rational aspects although Newton ly his strange trains of thought. He reveals Plough, working on new-drug applications —the secret beliefs and fears, the magical didn’t use the himself to us without realizing what he is to the FDA. He’d sent out his résumé to thinking. One of the qualities that made him world inertia, he expressed the concept in revealing. Collins uses the strange vision of scores of places and was almost broke when highly valued by others was that he was his first law of motion. his narrator to confront America and some Schering hired him and paid his moving adept at asking questions that forced you The first law states: Every body perse- of its most basic assumptions—about health, expenses. After a few years he moved on to reconsider what you’d said or thought veres in its state of being at rest or moving science, education, knowledge, money, to San Francisco, where he freelanced for (“Are you sure?”)—at the same time as he uniformly straight forever, except in so far employment, law and justice, truth, moral- a while. Then he landed a position at the was completely nonjudgmental. It was easy as it is forced to change its state by forces ity, caring, and sanity. This confrontation FDA in Washington, DC, evaluating the sort to trust that you could tell him absolutely impressed. is uncomfortable for us as readers because of new-drug applications that he had earlier anything. The second law: A change in motion is it undermines many of our own views: not written. It is safe to say that he didn’t really You could also be in any mood you proportional to the force impressed. just our opinions on certain subjects, but our fit in at Schering-Plough or the FDA, and liked in his house, provided you took The third law: For any action, there is whole unexamined frame of reference. that he never found a workplace niche that responsibility for it. I learned from this an and opposite and equal reaction. Our discomfort is clearest at the mo- suited him as well as the Free Clinic in To- important lesson about clarity, generosity In other worlds, as Gleick explains the ments when he says something hilarious. ronto had. After he retired, he and Jeanette and tolerance. If a person felt blue but got third law, every action is an interaction. For we must laugh to affirm our own sanity, moved to Albuquerque. some comfort from being in company, he The earth holds the moon in orbit and the but we find ourselves stared at, as we laugh, Once we were living in different cities, was welcome to sit there and be blue – as moon causes high and low tides on earth. by a human being who would be hurt by David and I exchanged letters frequently. long as he didn’t expect others to join in When a horse pulls a stone, the stone pulls that laughter, a person whose zany state- He was an inveterate letter writer. He was a the mood or consider it their job to pull the horse. ments show him to be like us at the same very fast typist—in Toronto on his sharp- him out of it. He wasn’t expected to put It is Newton’s mathematical expression time as he is different and therefore wrench edged Olivetti electric and later on an IBM on a happy face or absent himself lest he of these laws that made possible the mecha- us free of the comfortable assumptions that Selectric—and he perfected the one-page rain on the picnic; the others showed their nization that so depressed the poet Blake enable us to laugh. single-spaced letter as an art form. Each concern by acknowledging his presence and and all the progress of the next centuries. Collins never allows us to retreat into letter had a shape, some sort of arc, and accepting him in the mood he was in. (This It is the math still used to build trains and assigning special virtue to the narrator’s arrived at a wind-up near the bottom edge. made a strong contrast with the etiquette of planes and even space ships. After New- strangeness, nor does he allow us to use the There were rarely any changes or correc- conformity that I would soon encounter in ton, people had faith that the universe could truth of some of the narrator’s pronounce- tions made by hand. This exchange of letters Norway.) be understood and measured. ments as evidence that he is not “really” continued for a long time, then petered out, Newton believed in God; he just re- strange but is only labeled so by a per- but after a relative silence of perhaps a de- moved him from the immediate action. In versely conformist world. At times we must cade, punctuated by occasional phone calls, his Principia, he states: “In Him all things grant that both the narrator and the world it picked up again and continued until late are contained and move . . . but He does are strange and that neither strangeness in David’s life. I don’t think he wrote more not act on them or they on Him.” Thus it mitigates the other. This does not leave us Blue Rider fiction; rather, he put an enormous amount would be no use, as my grandmother used much ground to stand on. of effort into an unconventional manuscript, to do, to pray that the water pipes stop Writing from inside the very symbol Cape flutter. TRAVLMAN, an autobiography laid out as dripping. And it would be no use praying of the alienating modern world (a prison), Inaudible hoof clatter. a sort of ledger of his whole life—all the before taking a shot in a basketball game the narrator presents us with an impossible A crow or two places, people, books, films, music and so unless it steadied your hand. vision of oneness with the world, a vision To punctuate the trees. on that had been important to him. Newton also guessed that matter and achieved because he has profoundly defi- Red reins Through the years I made many efforts energy might he interchangeable, as cient contact with that world. In the marvel- Biting his hands. to find a US publisher for The Mending Einstein later expressed in his formula ous final chapter he returns to numbers, and Red boots with Man. I sent a copy to Walker Percy (another Energy equals mass times the speed of light in their medium space and time, the body Invisible spurs. physician-writer), who read it, liked it, and squared. What Newton wrote is: “Are not and its world, flow together. Everything Two cloudy rocks. phoned me up. But nothing came of that. I gross bodies and light convertible into one is suspended in the flux of numbers like Two rocky clouds. sent the book or photocopies of it to many another?” And he guessed at the great en- particles in a colloid. To the Mending Man And copperplated small presses through the years. But I didn’t ergy that is released in nuclear explosions. it is all one. Autumn in the woods. tell David about my efforts, because I didn’t “Particles,” he said, “attract one another by The swollen field want to get his hopes up. Near the end of some force which is in immediate contact liver Sacks writes, in Awakenings, of Still green. his life I told him I had tried my best, to exceeding strong.” Physicists today con- “the pressure on the heart from the The figurine engrossed, no avail. I have still not given up. The year O sider gravity much weaker than the force incommunicable” (de Quincey’s phrase) in Engulfed in blue 2012 will mark 40 years since the novel’s that binds the nucleus of an atom. patients “whose sufferings are not only in- Riding over and under first publication. That would be a good time I think it is fitting to start the school year tense, but so strange as to seem, at first, be- The egg of the earth to get it out in the US at long last. with Newton’s laws. We always plan to go yond the possibilities of communication....” Forever. in a straight line, and we are always thrown The doctor must discover with his patients off course, but thanks to Newton we can a “vivid, exact, and figurative language Roger Greenwald is a poet and translator understand why we swerve and why we are which will reach out toward the incommu- —Walter Martin living in Toronto. His latest book, a transla- ellipsed. nicable.... He must feel (or imagine) how tion, is Picture World by Niels Frank. his patient is feeling, without ever losing the sense of himself; he must inhabit, simulta- Fall 2011 The Redwood Coast Review Page  poets & poetry Echoes of the Promised Land Yehuda Amichai and Mahmoud Darwish Roberta Werdinger

s a Jewish-American writer whose father sur- world, one where the simple vived the Holocaust, I have watched the Israeli- mysteries of bodies replac- Palestinian conflict with a dismayed recogni- ing bodies, of sons becoming tion. A high-school year spent in Israel opened fathers, is endlessly rehearsed my eyes to a two-tiered society that placed the but never completely under- AArab (I never heard the word “Palestinian” used) firmly on stood. the bottom. I rejected Zionism as an ideology that sought to own and dominate my mind, building walls in which King Saul fell upon his sword a glorious “us” fought a noble battle against a murderous in the last battle on Mount other. Ignoring warnings from well-meaning relatives and Gilboa friends, I wandered alone through Jerusalem’s Arab Quar- and died at once. So too we ter, encountering a rich and complex culture, a discovery fall upon enriched later by studies in history and Sufism. Later, when our sharp-edged souls when the first Palestinian intifada occurred, my spontaneous reac- tion was, “It’s about time.” Yet I came to feel increasingly we are born, uncomfortable around large sections of the pro-Palestinian but we die only seventy or and anti-Zionist movement, who simply substituted one kind eighty years later… of non-negotiable dogma for another. Zionist shrillness was The soul that quickens us kills simply answered by vehemently anti-Zionist, and sometimes us in the end anti-Semitic, shrillness. The result in my mind was simply and lodges there, like the a poverty of imagination, a denuding of the inner landscape sword. by which I could form an empathetic link to whoever my current society told me was my enemy. For that, I turned to Mahmoud Darwish In “In My Life, On My the poets. Life” the poet careens from a Yehuda Amichai and Mahmoud Darwish are two great metaphysical despair to bemused optimism: world poets whose circumstances in life placed them on opposing sides of a seemingly irreconcilable and tragic Darwish underwent exile, impris- …sometimes it seems to me my life isn’t worth conflict. Amichai fought in several Israeli wars before and onment, and siege imposed by the skin of my body that wraps around it, not even after independence. Darwish underwent exile, imprisonment these fingernails with which I hang on to my life… and siege imposed by the state Amichai fought for. Yet both the state Amichai fought for. Yet And sometimes the gurgling of the last waters share a kinship in asserting a tremendous humanity in their draining from the bathtub poems, a humanity that first reclaims the subjectivity denied both share a kinship in assert- is a nightingale’s song to my ear. them by geopolitics, and then gestures toward the other. ing a humanity that reclaims the Amichai and Darwish move through their respective The movement from general to specific, from cosmic cultures as through a forcefield, drawing on them at will subjectivity denied them by geo- reflection on “my life” to the mundane moment of hearing yet never imprisoned by them. Amichai especially is often water drain from the bathtub, is essential Amichai. He de- shockingly irreverent, yet this irreverence itself is part of an politics, and then gestures toward lights in a conflation of disparate realms of existence which ongoing dialogue which is deeply Jewish. Darwish’s dia- the other. can be dizzying at times. Attempts to illuminate the human logue weaves the ancient and the modern of Arabic culture realm, to write “a psalm on the day / a building contractor together. He is only irreverent toward those who would deny cheated me,” are equaled by those to humanize the biblical questioning and doubt. “Everyone wants to catch Him in an him the full range of this intensely rich heritage. God, to bring humus, the dust that Adam is composed of, off moment / and discover how He does it,” Amichai writes Both poets, by rooting themselves in the particular, ex- into a divine order. in “Gods change, Prayers Are Here To Stay,” comparing God tend themselves to the universal. Both see this as, in essence, to a magician. Then, in a typical move, the poet subverts his an erotic act. The motion of exchanging one’s body for osmic” is an overused word, but there is no other way previous meaning in order to uncover a deeper, rapidly shift- another is extended further to a continuous, often rapturous “ to describe Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry. Drawing on ing one: “And everyone wants not to know, not to discover C discovery that expresses and includes horses, pear trees, the Sufi tradition of song and verse to achieve union with a / how He does it, they would like to believe, / each against stars, one’s people, all people. Both are haunted by the early Beloved who is at once earthly and divine, Darwish’s verses each.” He concludes by not allowing any fixed conclusion: loss of a girl/woman who resides in the poet’s memory and are soaked in gorgeous and often surreal images, yet they are “But it could also be the other way around.” informs the poem: Amichai’s muse was a German Jewish also philosophically and intellectually coherent and focused. In “The Precision of Pain and the Blurriness of Joy: The girl he knew as a child who lost her life in a death camp; Mahmoud Darwish was born in 1941 in a village in the Touch of Longing Is Everywhere,” the poet points out that Darwish’s was an Israeli Jewish woman, his first lover, long Galilee. The formation of the Israeli Jewish state, a mo- we are very good at describing forms of suffering, such as separated by the exigencies of place and politics. mentous and long-awaited day for Yehuda Amichai and his when we have a toothache and tell the dentist, “It hurts here ilk, was known to Palestinians as nakba, or “catastrophe”; but not here,” but not so good at describing joy, which can ehuda Amichai (1924-2000) arrived in then-Palestine Darwish and his family fled for Lebanon. They returned leave us speechless. The poet’s job, then, is to bring preci- from Germany in 1935 with his Orthodox Jewish family, shortly after and were accorded the status of “present-absent Y sion of language into those silent, glowing moments—to one of thousands of refugees from Hitler’s mounting terror. aliens,” a moniker (worthy of the most ironic postmodernist) utter praise for what we tend to take for granted. He worked as a teacher in between serving as a soldier in that denied the family even the second-class status of Israeli Language doesn’t beckon Amichai into an occulted several wars, including the 1948 one that resulted in Israel’s Arabs. Darwish spent subsequent decades roaming through world, however, but calls him into a grand one of play in birth as a state. His first book of poems was published in Middle Eastern, European and Soviet capitals. He survived which the biblical characters and commands of his tradition 1955. Many more followed: chronicles of his marriage, the Israeli invasion of Beirut in 1982, producing a long are engaged and enlivened by his own presence. It’s a social loves, children; epic, philosophical poems as well as brief poem, “From Beirut,” and a prose memoir, “Memory for lyrical works. This range of subject matter and styles along Forgetfulness,” about the experience. Darwish was invited with a Neruda-like ability to state universal truths in simple to draft a charter for peace for the PLO (Palestine Liberation terms established him as Israel’s most beloved and widely- Organization) in 1988, a position he accepted with trepida- recognized poet. Amichai read at the awards ceremony in tion. “What does a poet do in the executive council?” he Oslo in 1994 when Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres and Yasir wondered. “Will I be able to write a book of love when color Arafat were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. falls on the ground in autumn?” The first book he produced, Amichai engages in a raucous, profane, humorous dia- when he finally returned to live in the West Bank, was logue with Jewish tradition and the plethora of Biblical sto- indeed a book of love poems, “The Stranger’s Bed.” While ries that forms its basis. He wrestles with its legends, poking Palestinians at first wondered at its lack of public address fun at solemn pronouncements and teasing out unseen impli- of their urgent issues, they came to see and respect that the cations, just as Jacob encountered and wrestled with his an- project of his later poems was to reclaim the inner world in gel. In “The Real Hero,” he declares, “The real hero of the order to ennoble and inhabit the outer. Darwish died in 2008. Binding of Isaac was the ram,” innocent mediator between While Darwish always asserts a certain sublimity of God’s inhuman demands and Abraham’s lessons in obedi- existence, his earlier poems were also responses to the stark ence. In “The Bible and You, the Bible and You, and Other reality of war, violence and disenfranchisement. “Throw Midrashim,” he takes the entire biblical canon to bed with your gun in the river!” he implores an Israeli soldier in “He him and makes it unapologetically into an object of amorous Embraces His Murderer.” Another poem, “I Belong There,” play. While this at first seems sacrilegious, it is actually its concludes: “I have learned and dismantled all the words in opposite. In engaging with his tradition in a personal way, order to draw from them a single word: Home.” Palestine is Amichai is reinvigorating ancient tropes with new life. It for him both actuality and metaphor, “mother of all begin- becomes an act, finally, of furious procreation—an answer to nings and ends.” the mass death that haunts the poems as well. Darwish’s poems are full of the pain of exile, but they The great stories of Genesis, with their constant refer- never harangue. Instead, they make a more radical lateral ral to the primal act of creation, perhaps explain Amichai’s move into the deep space of consciousness. The poet will preoccupation with the origin of things. The reeds of the create a new homeland through letters. He will assert his chair he sits on could have been a flute. Seeds drying in the full humanity through his exquisitely calibrated plumbing sun make him long to reconstruct the fruits they came from. of inner worlds. He does this not to avoid taking a stand, but “I insist that the sand / remember the stone, that the stone as a stand. “…[T]he imagination opens up / to its sources, remember the great rock / and the rock—the lava and the and becomes place, the only / real one.” Darwish frequently fire.” The poet starts with the small stuff of life and traces it speaks in a woman’s voice or a man’s in the act of lovemak- slowly back until its divine origins appear. ing. The moment of union, of merging, is at once mystical Amichai invokes the Jewish tradition’s playful, irrever- and physical for him. “…and I moved into you / as a name ent, intimate dialogue with God. It is in and through that dia- lectic itself that understanding emerges—through struggle, Yehuda Amichai See land page 6 Page 6 The Redwood Coast Review Fall 2011 land from page 5 moves from one creature to another,” a his longing, both the homeland itself and the is a liberation zone where he can exist com- rom the esert woman on her wedding night declares in shadow behind the homeland’s image. The pletely in all dimensions: F D “Wedding Song.” The fluency with which intense longing for a homeland that exiled bodies melt into one another in lovemaking Palestinians express is ironically echoed in If I were another I would have belonged to from the desert and lose their identity is identical with the the millennia-long culture of diasporic Juda- the road, from the ungrowing flowers fluency of language, that other procreative ism, whose adherents end their Passover neither you nor I would return…. I am only where the light's sign slips by act that both celebrates things by naming meal by assuring each other they will meet my steps, and you are both my compass and between salty grasses them and undermines their separateness by “next year in Jerusalem.” my chasm. and swimming skeletons the poetical act of transformation. These late poems find Darwish acknowl- If I were another on the road, I would have Perhaps due to his long years of exile, edging suffering and its circumstances hidden my emotions in the suitcase, so my from the desert the consciousness of these poems is free without accepting its categories. To do so is poem would be of water, diaphanous, white, reaching for the horizons to wander through the entire Arab world. to shrink one’s mind, to entrench oneself in abstract, and lightweight… stronger than thirty thousand horizons It is one that, not surprisingly, participates the very limitations of identity that produce memory, thirty thousand watering holes in and borders on our own. References to stereotypes and sterile solutions. War, first and weaker than dewdrops, and I would the Sufi past and to the great civilization of and foremost, is a failure of the imagina- have said: from the desert Andalusia, the Muslim empire in Southern tion. The fertile mind is capable of break- My identity is this expanse! the caravan moves slowly Spain where Muslim, Jew and Christian ing down barriers and finding solutions to to the right to the left harmoniously co-existed, are common. The seemingly unsolvable problems. The poem Darwish asks, “Can poetry fix / What poet is searching for what lies at the end of the ages broke in us?” Yet we know by everything comes at once now that poetry is not in itself a means to nothing behind the dunes peace, may not be a means to anything but its own enjoyment. Some of the most highly from the desert the transforming Further Reading developed civilizations of our time have fire quickly reverted to the farther reaches of variousness of the last oasis thirty thousand palms Yehuda Amichai. Love Poems. Trans. Yehuda Amichai, Ted Hughes and others. barbarity, as Germany’s embrace of Nazism thirty thousand watering holes Schocken, 2010. or China’s Cultural Revolution shows. Yet it is also equally compelling to consider from the desert Yehuda Amichai. Open Closed Open. Trans. Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld. that the ability to empathize with another, we take its road Mariner Books, 2006. the willingness to both see and set aside one’s point of view—in other words, the from various oases toward the oneness of thirty Yehuda Amichai. The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai. Trans. Chana Bloch and transcendent intelligence necessary to truly thousand horizons Stephen Mitchell. California, 1996. make peace in this world—begins as an act of imagination. Poets develop and explore toward the fire transforming the sky Mahmoud Darwish. The Butterfly’s Burden. Trans. Fady Joudah. Copper Canyon Press, that capacity: they create a luminous space the earth 2007. lit by language that describes an experience both particular and universal. Amichai and —Raymond Queneau Mahmoud Darwish. From Beirut. Trans. Stephen Kessler. Pygmy Forest Press, 1992. Darwish create and extend that language to reach unsurpassed forms of expression, as- Mahmoud Darwish. If I Were Another. Trans. Fady Joudah. Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, serting and yet passing through nationalism, 2011. crossing borders of incomprehension. Raymond Queneau (1903-1976) was a French poet associated with the Mahmoud Darwish. Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems. Trans. Munir Surrealist and Oulipo movements in Paris. This poem, translated by Akash, Carolyn Forché and others. California, 2003. Roberta Werdinger is writer and editor liv- Daniela Hurezanu & Stephen Kes- ing in Ukiah. She wishes to thank Mushim sler, is from Eyeseas (Black Widow Mahmoud Darwish. Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone? Trans. Jeffrey Sacks. Ikeda-Nash for crucial help with this piece, Press). Reprinted by permission of Archipelago Books, 2006. as well as the Mendocino and Sonoma the translators. County library systems. Fall 2011 The Redwood Coast Review Page 7 B i b l i o t e c a News, Views, Notes, Reviews, Reports and Exhortations from Friends of Coast Community Library

President’s Desk library lines Vote Yes...... On A Alix Levine Pearl Watts

or all our readers who are voters in he award-winning Redwood Coast Mendocino County I have just one vi- Review is the newsletter of the Ftal message. Vote YES On Libraries, TFriends of Coast Community Measure A on November’s ballot. Library. It is one of the proud services the This is a make-or-break initiative which Friends provide in our rather remote area requires a two-thirds majority to pass. Your and beyond. We who live in this lovely vote, your friends’ votes, your families’ but isolated region of the county know the votes are all needed to save our libraries particularly unique importance of our local from even more cutbacks in hours and ser- library. It serves as an Internet café, a video vices due to diminishing funding. shop, a town hall meeting space and, by The 1/8 percent sales tax proposed is Carolyn Cooke James Warner way of our summer reading program, a kind dedicated solely to our county libraries, of day camp for kids. Our library branch written according to state code so that has contributed to the library district rise of the money cannot be used for any other 13.6 percent in book circulation in the past purpose. A tax that comes to 12½ cents on Zeitgeist Busters year. And 54 percent of Mendocino County every $100 sale is so minuscule as to be residents have library cards, about 48,000 painless. It’s hard to see how anyone could Pamela Malone people. object to such a small price for such a valu- Many people in an off-year election able purpose. like this one just opt out and don’t bother Daughters of the Revolution transmitters you could drop from an aircraft, I’ve written before about the upsurge in by Carolyn Cooke to home in on a target and automatically to get to the polls or send in their ballot. the use of libraries in hard economic times, This year is, however, possibly one of the Knopf (201l), 173 pages set up a private wireless network, run- when the computers are a necessity for job ning point-to-point Ethernet and sending most important years in a long time when seekers and families turn to libraries for free real-time or encrypted signals. If we’d it comes to local control over the quality DVDs of movies and television series in All Her Father’s Guns of our communities and the richness of our by James Warner had suckers like those in Southeast Asia, large numbers, among other things. It is un- maybe we could have held the Robert lives. This year we have the opportunity to Numina Press (2010), 190 pages fortunate that as the need for library services Strange McNamara Line.” Cal’s condo is vote on a measure that will provide funding has gone way up, the government funding a bunker with an “anti-grenade screen.” for the kind of library district that enriches has gone way down. In Mendocino County, oth of these novels attempt to Nor does Warner leave out the other side. us all, one way or another. And it will be since the economic meltdown of 2008, the capture the zeitgeist of a par- The academic Department of Theory at the virtually painless to do. Even our tourists cutbacks in staff, hours of operation and ser- ticular time and place. In the University of California Berkeley campus is will help support our libraries. vices offered keep getting worse. Now the case of All Her Father’s Guns, the subject of satire, much of it infused with The Libraries Initiative (Measure A), three largest branches are open only three the time is now, contrasting the deconstructionist jargon. There are so many approved unanimously by the Mendocino days a week. Without the financial contri- BBerkeley of radical theory and left-wing rival theories they have to just call it “the County Board of Supervisors for the butions and volunteer hours of the Friends politics with the Arizona of right-wing poli- November ballot, would raise the sales Department.” “On one wall of the Depart- tics and guns. Daughters of the Revolution ment of Theory, somebody had written tax throughout the county by 1/8 percent dedicated solely for the library district. This The tax bite is so small tackles issues of class, gender and race as it with a fluorescent marker, Fuck your laws, hops through the 1960s, 70s, 80s and ends white man! Did you follow the indigenous means for every $100 spent, the library that no one will suffer. in 2004, situating most of the action in the people’s laws before you?” would benefit by 12½ cents. Yet, it is esti- Yet it will make a huge environs of a Boston prep school. Cooke’s satire has to do with class, mated to raise $1.3 million a year, enough Both novels are dominated by alpha gender and race. God feels at home in his to bring the library district to the 2006 level difference in saving our males: Cal, the obsessive possessor of Boston enclave: “It is divided and antago- of service—and then beyond for the next guns, who has made his millions through nistic, filled with human hatreds bred by 16 years. It will allow all five branches to libraries. investments in CIA plots and Silicon Valley, race, religion and economics; he loves it remain open at least five days a week. Coast in Warner’s novel, and God (appropriately anyway.” “He has been something of a radi- Community will return to being open six named), the school headmaster, in Cooke’s. cal himself, the first Head to find promis- days a week. It will assure that the Book- of the Library groups in each branch, the Cal is described thus: “Even comatose, he ing colored boys in Roxbury, take them to mobile continues to roll. Children’s reading situation would be even more dire. looked in charge of his surroundings—be- the Goode School, wake them up and arm programs will be restored and expanded. If the sales tax measure is passed, we atific, yet almost calculating.” And God, them against poverty, drugs and crime with Hundreds of new books, DVDs, CDs, will see a return to regular five-days-a-week whose name says it all, is “a virile, uncir- Thomas Hardy and Shakespeare.” hours, restoration of children’s programs, cumcised male of his class, upbringing and Just how humorous you’ll find all of this With spending cuts, the bookmobile back to two days a week, era…. An animal? He would be a tiger!” may depend on your own proclivities. I and have the funds to pay for the sup- These men do as they choose, break- found the Berkeley-bashing funny, perhaps we will just have to do plies and materials that have been paid for ing rules, satisfying carnal desires easily, because I was once enmeshed in that envi- it ourselves. We must by Friends groups, and new books, CDs, dominating everyone and everything else in ronment, but most of the right-wing stuff DVDs, eBooks and music CDs will be the room. Having just read Jon Ronson’s seemed too true to be funny, nor did I get vote for the Libraries purchased and professional staff positions The Psychopath Test, I’d have to say both a lot of chuckles from Cooke’s rather stiff restored. characters handily pass the test. shots at the white establishment and the Initiative. I recently visited a museum in an old The women in both novels, while ap- black backlash. library building. Above the door were the pearing liberated and holding important eBooks and music will be added and will words A Free Public Library, and on the positions, tend to be either subservient to ll Her Father’s Guns involves two continue to be made available throughout entry floor the wordsA ll Are Welcome. these alphas or else ugly portraits of scary Aprotagonists: Cal and Reid. Each has the county with interbranch lending. These words epitomize for me the value women of power. his own chapters, written in the first person. The Friends of Coast Community Li- of the most democratic institution in our Another thing these novels have in com- Reid, Cal’s prospective son-in-law, is a grad brary now pay for most of the library’s new society offering free education and enter- mon is satirical humor. Warner is adept at student in the Department of Theory who books, materials and supplies. They also tainment to all who pass through its doors. parody through jargon. On Silicon Valley: is let go and flounders after that. He is too put on many of the popular library pro- These days the free part of free public “‘We’re using expert systems, data mining much of a blank slate, merely reacting to grams. The volunteers manning the desk, library is particularly important. But if techniques, artificial neural networks, and Cal and his daughter, Lyllyann. In fact, I working in the back room or maintaining libraries are free to users, they still need to intelligent storage systems.’ I nodded as if had to keep reorienting myself as to which our building come from the Friends’ mem- be paid for. To save our libraries from di- I knew what any of this meant.” On CIA character was talking, as both points of view bership roll. Our library in Point Area could minishing away to nothing, to avoid closing technology: “Now Syonyxx manufactured are written in an identical voice. It was not function without the Friends. any branch, it is absolutely vital that funds not until I got to the end of the novel, that I The can-do attitude here on the coast be raised. They are not coming from the learned Reid was also writing Cal’s section made possible the institutions we value: county’s general fund, and state funding will The strong point for him. Gualala Arts Center, the Arena Theater, be only 20 percent of what has been avail- Reid, an Englishman like the author, is Coast Community Library. With the state able in the past. The sales tax measure com- of both novels is the more sympathetic character, and the first cutting library spending by 80 percent and ing up on November’s ballot is the solution the way the writ- 30 or so pages, written from his point of the county unable to budget anything toward offered. A sales tax will bring in money not view, are the most amusing. He has a some- the library, we will again just have to do it just from residents but also tourists. The tax ers home in on what Tocquevillean view of America. “I’d ourselves. We must vote for the Libraries bite is so small that no one will suffer from read recently that ninety percent of Ameri- Initiative. Join us in this important effort paying it. Yet it will make a huge difference America in its vari- cans believed they had a guardian angel, but for, not just the children, but our whole in saving our libraries. ous sociopolitical if you believed all the statistics you heard, community. Our libraries need this source of fund- you’d never be able to live in this country. It will take a two-thirds majority to pass, ing to ensure a secure future as well as to evolutions. There Eighty percent of Americans believed in so every vote is important. It is not enough restore us to 2006 levels of service. With alien abductions. Forty percent believed in to send in your ballot or get yourself to the a two-thirds majority needed to pass, don’t is wit in both, and demonic possession. Another forty percent, polls. Please, please be responsible for urg- neglect to cast your Yes vote. Every vote is some fine lines and or perhaps the same forty percent, believed ing at least one other person to vote YES on important, so urge your friends and family the government should prevent professors the Libraries Initiative. Visit the website at to cast a positive Yes On Libraries vote as metaphors. www.voteyesonlibraries.org. Your support well. The health of your community needs quite literally may mean life or death for our libraries and libraries need your vote. See Zeitgeist page 9 library as we know it and as we love it. Page  The Redwood Coast Review Fall 2011 Books Dark Box of Life Marc Elihu Hofstadter

Death-in-a-Box elongated and of an intense dark blue with a by Alta Ifland This book paints, metallic coldness in them.” “No, she had no Subito Press (2011), 95 pages pride and no revolutionary consciousness, probes, dreams, criti- and, as she found out in the New World, she had no…what do they call that? That funny n what ways does literary writing pres- cizes and exalts, all at thing everyone works so hard to have here? ent the world? It can be realistic (paint Yes, ‘self-esteem.’” a portrait of everyday life), psychologi- the same time. It is a I A curious and impressive thing about cally realistic (depict the workings of the celebration of writing this book is the way it fuses European and mind), fantastic (imagine things different American sensibilities. A lot of the stories from what we’re accustomed to), satirical itself: insightful, play- clearly take place in Eastern Europe and the (present a biting social commentary), poetic style is reminiscent of European writing, (compress language in such a way that it ful, serious, lyrical yet it is at the same time obviously Ameri- transmutes fact into beauty). Usually a book and funny. can. (In this it’s similar to W. S. Merwin’s of prose embodies one of these perspectives volumes of short prose pieces like The on the world. Madame Bovary is realistic, the protagonist. As the story progresses the Miner’s Pale Children.) It never sounds like The Brothers Karamazov psychological, The character returns to this restaurant day after a translation. The narrators are certainly Trial fantastic, Gulliver’s Travels satirical, day, always ordering its one dish, constantly European, and yet at times are naturalized To the Lighthouse poetic. The remarkable watched by Gigi, till one day the waiter Americans who look back at Europe with a thing about this new book of prose pieces by tells him that it is out of fried brains, too. mixture of nostalgia and disdain. Ifland her- Alta Ifland is that it combines all these tech- Then the fantastic takes over: the character self is a naturalized American who is fluent niques in a seamless unit that paints, probes, smashes a vase over his head making a hole in Romanian, English and French. (Her bril- dreams, criticizes and exalts, all at once. in his skull and pulls his own brains out and liant first book Voice of Ice/Voix de Glace Death-in-a-Box is an example and a celebra- fries them. To Gigi’s protest the protago- consists of prose poems in both English and tion of writing itself: the very insightful, nist replies that of course he wants to eat French presented on facing pages.) She playful, serious, lyrical, funny process that his own brains, those of Gigi would be too writes in a compressed, polished, vivid style literary writing can be. stupid to taste good! that is always assured, in command. The book consists of short prose pieces So here we have a satirical portrait of a shocked. “When scientists discovered a way What a remarkable book this is! I do of between two and 12 pages. Often, they society in which shortages are the norm and of erasing memory, people whose pasts were not know how to categorize it. It shares begin as conventional prose narratives citizens spy on one another, but also a hu- tainted by various traumas flocked to hospi- qualities with the “magic realism” of some only to be hijacked, before too long, by the morous and surrealistic flight of fancy that tals so that they could be reborn, free of the Latin American novelists, with the French author’s fantastical imagination. Thus, the reminds one of the paintings of Magritte or painful knots that gripped their souls.” “She Surrealists, above all with Merwin, but it is piece “Fried Brains” begins in a city in the the prose of Kafka, all presented in a mock- becomes the second woman and her body utterly unique. How exciting that this Amer- 1980s where there is a shortage of food, conventional narrative style whose deadpan lets out a scream that breaks all the screens ican, European, beautifully poetic, devastat- water and power. (This city, as so many in tone serves to underline the social criticism in the house, and the windows, and, in the ingly funny, deeply incisive writer is in our these pages, reminds one of Ifland’s native and imaginative dream in play. end, the hourglass, and time gets out of midst! I eagerly await the next direction her Romania.) The customer enters a restaurant A remarkable thing about this book is bounds, and the hours spill out and shatter exciting, original imagination will take. and orders the only item left on the menu: how different each tale is from the others. like glass, and their pieces fly in the air like fried brains. (Here, already, we are present- It includes frequent political satire, many broken vessels, and her scream covers the ed with a nearly fantastic, or at least humor- incarnations of fantasy, a host of narra- city, then the country, and at the end of the ous, fact.) Soon a political reality manifests tives, and a number of beautiful pieces of night the entire country has drowned in her Marc Hofstadter’s new book is Healing the itself: the character Gigi has been hired by poetic writing, yet these are fused together scream.” “She measured me with restrained Split (Dog Ear Publishing), his collected the government (that of Ceausescu, one in so many different ways that the reader is curiosity, and I could see, when she laid essays. He lives in Walnut Creek. assumes) to spy on fellow citizens such as constantly amused, surprised, pleased, even her eyes on me, that they were unusually

Some Recent Arrivals @ Coast Community Library

FICTION big tent wedding party Welty, Eudora. One writer’s beginnings Kagawa, Julie. The iron queen Andrews, Donna. The real macaw Patterson, James. Now you see her Lore, Pitticus. I am number four Auel, Jean M. The land of painted caves Penny, Louise. A trick of the light Ness, Patrick. The ask and answer Block, Lawrence. A drop of the hard Robb, J. D. Treachery in death BOOKS ON CD Shepard, Sara. Flawless: a pretty little stuff: a Matthew Scudder novel Stabenow, Dana. A night too dark Evanovich, Janet. Naughty neighbor liars novel Box, C. J. Back of beyond Tepper, Sheri. The waters rising Grisham, John. The summons Westerfield, Scott. Uglies Bradley, Alan. A red herring without Watson, S. J. Before I go to sleep Johansen, Iris. On the run mustard Williams, Tad. Shadowheart Keillor, Garrison. The adventures of Guy JUVENILE ITEMS Butcher, Jim. Ghost story: a novel of Winslow, Don. The gentlemen’s hour Noir • EASY BOOKS the Dresden files Leonard, Elmore. Mr. Paradise Capucilli, Alyssa S. Biscuit and the lost Campion, Alexander. Crime fraiche NonFiction Verghese, A. Cutting for stone teddy bear Castillo, Linda. Breaking silence Casey, Susan. The wave: in pursuit of the Westerfeld, Scott. Leviathan Craig, Lindsey. Farmyard beat Clark, Mary Higgins. I’ll walk alone rogues, freaks and giants of the ocean Galdone, Paul. The little red hen: a folk Coben, Harlan. Live wire Eiseley, Loren. The lost notebooks of Loren DVDs tale classic Connelly, Michael. The fifth witness- Eiseley El laberinto del fauno (Pan’s labyrinth) Gardner, Charlie. Flaptastic farm Fossum, Karin. Bad intentions Hawkes, Jacquetta. The atlas of early man Juno Hapka, Catherine. Back in the saddle Hamill, Pete. Tabloid city Howard, Arthur D. Geologic history of Le divorce Litwin, Eric. Pete the cat: rocking in my Harkness, Deborah. A discovery of middle California Nosferatu school shoes witches Parker, Derek. The new compleat astrolo- Paris, Texas Neubecker, Robert. Wow! Ocean! Hoag, Tami. Secrets to the grave ger Planes, trains and automobiles Pierce, Lincoln. Big Nate out loud Hoffman, Alice. The red garden Parker, Reny. Wildflowers of northern Sansho the bailiff Rinker, Sherri. Goodnight, goodnight, Laplante, Alice. Turn of mind California’s wine country and North Seabiscuit construction site Levithan, David. The lover’s dictionary Coast ranges Swamp tigers Willems, Mo. I broke my trunk! Makkai, Rebecca. The borrower Tzemach Lemmon, Gayle. The dressmaker The bounty hunter Mankell, Henning. The troubled man of Khair Khana The heart of me • JUVENILE NONFICTION McCall Smith, Alexander. The Saturday Webb, James. Harmonious circle: the lives The secret Barner, Bob. Dinosaurs roar, butterflies and works of G. I. Gurdjieff, P.D. Ous- This is Spinal Tap soar! pensky and their followers Waking life Bloom, Steve. Elephants: a book for children with 80 color photographs Library Hours BIOGRAPHY CDs Daly, Niki. Why the sun & moon live in Dalby, Liza. East wind melts the ice: a Coltrane, John. Blue train the sky Monday 12 noon - 6 pm memoir through the seasons Enya. The memory of trees Heinrich, Bernd. An owl in the house: a Dugard, Martin. Farther than any man: the Kabat-Zinn, Jon. Mindfulness meditation naturalist’s diary Tuesday 10am - 6 pm rise and fall of Captain James Cook for pain relief Johnson, Rebecca L. Journey into the Wednesday 10am - 8 pm Kurosawa, Akira. Something like a biog- Raitt, Bonnie. Nick of time deep: discovering new ocean creatures Thursday 12 noon - 8 pm raphy Rolling Stones. Exile on Main St. Larrick, Nancy (compiler). Cats are Friday closed Loving, Jerome. Mark Twain: the adven- Sting. Sacred love cats: poems Saturday 12 noon - 3 pm tures of Samuel Clemens Taylor, James. James Taylor at Christmas McGown, Chris. Dinosaur discovery McMurtry, Larry. Crazy Horse Paulsen, Gary. My life in dog years Coast Community Library See, Carolyn. Hard luck and good times in YOUNG ADULT FICTION Ripley’s believe it or not! Special edition is located at America Dessen, Sarah. Along for the ride 2011 225 Main Street Toye, Richard. Churchill’s empire: the Eulberg, Elizabeth. The lonely hearts club Point Arena world that made him and the world he John, Antony. Five flavors of dumb (707) 882-3114 made Fall 2011 The Redwood Coast Review Page  My Dream Book Cooder from page 3 Malls. I have used her speech in the book. Thomas Fuchs I also remembered more about my dad, who was a detective and solved real crimes. s a child, I was entranced by a book —not 20—before the So- Probably the memories I treasure the most with an unwieldy title: ROCKETS, viets put their Sputnik into are those of a friend of my parents who gave JETS, Guided Missiles and Space orbit. Four years after that, me a guitar when I was four, and later intro- A duced me to Woody Guthrie’s music and the Ships by Jack Coggins and Fletcher Pratt. in 1961, they sent the first Even now, pulling books down from a shelf man into space. And then, Depression-era photos of Dorothea Lange.” where they have sat for 30 years, packing in 1969, less that twenty All those memories and all that history for a move, a thrill goes through me when years after the appear- bounce off the pages of Los Angeles Stories. I see the cover. The first words, ROCK- ance of ROCKETS, JETS, Indeed, page after page, Cooder’s Los An- ETS, JETS are all caps and in red against Guided Missiles and Space geles seems more real than the LA of today. a yellow field, followed by the black, more Ships, it was done, a key You expect to meet his “taco-benders,” demure, Guided Missiles and Space Ships. component of the dream “pachucopunks,” and “bolero-jockeys” The rest of the laminated cardboard cover fulfilled. Neil Armstrong around the next street corner. is given over to a vivid scene of outer space walked on the Moon. Cooder never was a Beatnik or a loyal commerce as a rocket looking like a thin There is one glaring fan of Kerouac and Ginsberg, but he ad- version of the space shuttles zooms by the omission in the book’s mires the work of City Lights founder poet Earth while another ship, on a nearby orbital predictions—no mention Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and he’s delighted to station, is being fueled. whatsoever of comput- be published by City Lights. ROCKETS, JETS... was published in ers. Because of the need Editor Elaine Katzenberger at City 1951, so I must have been given it when I to process an enormous Lights worked closely with Cooder to revise was nine or 10 years old. It is only 60 pages stream of data very quickly, the manuscript he sent her, and to make the long, but I spent endless hours reading it, space travel and the Moon stories more focused. studying it, on my bed and in the shade of landings would have been “Ry’s political sensibility and his sense the weeping willow tree in our backyard. impossible without com- of engaged arts are absolutely akin to City At my little desk, I traced the diagrams of puters. And although the Lights’ mission,” Katzenberger says. “The rocket motors and ship designs. space program has given us fiction we acquire has to offer something Without opening it, more than half a immensely valuable spinoff that’s unique, special and important to century later, I can envision just about all technology (including de- publish. Ry’s work does all of that.” Indeed, of its often dramatic illustrations. The one velopments which, in turn, he’s living proof that everything and ev- heading the first chapter depicts terrified vastly improved the com- eryone in LA isn’t homogenized, over-sub- Mongol horseman fleeing toward the reader puter), it is computers, not scribed and on the chopping block. as defensive rockets whiz past them, fired space travel, which have Cooder identifies with the hipsters—the from the Great Wall of China. most obviously shaped the cultural ancestors of the Beats—who loved The book’s opening pages trace the his- way we live today. bebop, hated TV and fled from the confor- tory of rocketry but, not surprisingly given Which brings me back mity of the 1950s. when it was written, much of it is about pict astronauts working on one of the moons to that little boy dreaming of a trip to the “TV ruined the thriving cultures that World War II. Indeed, this first chapter, of Mars with the great red planet hovering Moon. In 1951, radio was an established once existed in LA,” Cooder says. “Of despite the illustration of Mongol horsemen, huge above them. feature of everyday life and television was course, I love those old noir movies such as begins baldly with, “The best known meth- The obstacles to be overcome, and the just beginning to penetrate. The coming Kiss Me Deadly, Crime Wave, and Cry Dan- od of stopping an enemy tank is by means ways this might be done, are laid out with impact of the computer—including video ger in which LA is as beautiful now as it of rockets.” This is the stuff that kids, boys the same respect for a child’s intelligence as games and the Internet—was far distant. was then, and a wonderful city of dreams.” at least, of that age in that era devoured. the earlier pages on warfare, but, particular- Kids then had more time for dreaming than The use of rockets on land, sea and in the air ly in the illustrations, there is also acknowl- they seem to have today. Do they still lose in that great conflict takes up pages, includ- edgement of a child’s capacity for wonder. themselves in books through long summer Jonah Raskin is the author of Marijuana- ing fairly detailed sketches of the innards of Just when would all this happen, when afternoons and muse on great adventures land: Dispatches from an American War devices ranging from the hand-held bazooka would humans manage to get off the planet? awaiting them? Do they still look forward to (High Times), among other books, and a to the formidable V-2, the prototype ICBM For all its flamboyance, ROCKETS, JETS, the future? If there is a current equivalent contributing editor of the RCR. developed by the Nazis. Guided Missiles and Space Ships makes no to ROCKETS, JETS, Guided Missiles and But what really anchored the book was promises. “What are the next twenty years Space Ships, I’d really love to be directed something that had not happened, a dream going to bring?” it asks rhetorically, and an- to it. —that some day humans would travel swers by suggesting the possibility of small, WRITE TO US through space, land on the Moon, then push unmanned orbital rockets as something that on to Mars. There is that cover with rockets might be reality by then. Remember, this Thomas Fuchs lives in West Hollywood and The RCR welcomes your letters. coming and going, and endpapers which de- was in 1951. In fact, only six years passed has contributed fiction to these pages. Write to the Editor, RCR c/o ICO, P.O. Box 1200, Gualala, CA 95445 or by email to Zeitgeist from page 7 [email protected]. from criticizing its policy during wartime.” anything else, is a little jewel, reminiscent If the novel had stayed with Reid, we would of Jane Bowles. Ultimately, the novel is have had a much more enjoyable read (pun too much of a mosaic of little pieces, with intended). Instead the book is taken over by a rather dim look at any gains women may Cal and is mired in CIA, vigilante and right- have made through the Feminist Movement; wing political plots that go nowhere. The thus the title’s irony, and allusion to the book basically is one big paranoid night- Daughters of the American Revolution. S U B S C R I B E mare—which one assumes is Warner’s take on the current zeitgeist. he strong point of both novels is the If you live beyond the Redwood Coast and don’t get the Independent Coast Cooke’s novel centers on the Goode Tway the writers home in on America in School in Boston, where rich white boys its various sociopolitical evolutions. There Observer, now you can subscribe to The Redwood Coast Review and not miss had “been chosen to run the world, but first is wit in both, and some fine lines and an issue of our award-winning mix of essays, reviews, poetry, fiction and they had to read King Lear and The Heart of metaphors. Warner: “Do Americans talk graphic art. For $24 a year you will be guaranteed quarterly first-class de- Darkness, pass trigonometry, write an argu- so loudly because they’re afraid God can’t mentative essay in six paragraphs, translate hear them?” “The silence of women is like livery of the RCR and at the same time support Coast Community Library a hundred lines of Virgil and dissect a fetal a hurricane against which no headway is in its ongoing operating expenses. Please use this coupon to subscribe pig.” It is this world which is ruled by God, possible.” And Cooke: “Her hands attached or renew now. You won’t be disappointed. the headmaster, until, due to a clerical error, to his face like suction cups.” “It is easy to the first female, a poor black girl, is admit- be drawn to money, as if it were a quality of ted to the school in 1969. Carole “appeared character.” he edwood oast eview as a synecdoche, embodying blackness Both novels lack three-dimensional Yes, I want to subscribe to T R C R . I am exponentially intensified by gender.” And characters. Cooke’s EV has potential but enclosing a check for $24 to Coast Community Library. she turns out to be someone who will fight her depth is lost in the shifts of focus. Reid back and define herself by her difference would have been interesting but is swal- I am making an additional donation to the library in the and otherness. She will not graduate, but lowed up early by Cal. Both books are will return victorious as a famous painter dominated by the unsympathetic behemoths amount of $______. and graduation speaker, who will recount, Cal and God. And there is no storyline one “What I remember is boys everywhere, like could care about or follow in either novel, big white mice.” both written with the flattened affect that Total enclosed $______However, Daughters of the Revolution is almost de rigueur these days, the writers does not sustain its initial premise. Instead, spitting out words, in the choppy, blogo- Name ______the chapters jump in time, each a separate sphere fashion, indicative of our age. As vignette held together by a slim thread. The someone who likes an introspective novel, two dominant characters are God and EV, one that lingers on telling detail as it builds Address ______the daughter of a likeable character, Heck, its case for a character from within, neither who is unfortunately killed off in the first of these books was my cup of tea. But if City, State, ZiP ______chapter. Only EV’s chapters are in the first you like Red Bull, they may be yours. person, and as with Reid, the book would be better if the whole thing were told from EV’s point of view. Each vignette stands Pamela Malone lives in New Jersey and is a Copy or clip this coupon and send, with check or money order, to Coast alone, and is stronger than the sum of the frequent RCR contributor. Community Library, PO Box 808, Point Arena, CA 95468. Thank You! novel’s parts. EV’s adventure in the Carib- bean (circa 1980s), which doesn’t relate to Page 10 The Redwood Coast Review Fall 2011 fiction Ghost Girl By Morgen Pack ’m not much of a storyteller. I don’t know how to make people listen very well. They always end up talking over me, and then I end up listening to them. But David said I had a story to tell, that, “it was a damn good one.” So, I’m writing it down. IIHere’s the thing: I’m sort of invisible, or maybe trans- lucent. All I really know is that you can’t see me very well unless you get a big spotlight, and shine it straight at me. I wasn’t born this way. For the first ten years of my life I was a normal kid, playing in the dirt and laughing. But then I started to get older, and more invisible. My parents didn’t

know what to do, so they Googled it. Then they sent me to y bradner

a specialists, and doctors, and finally here. k I don’t like it here much. They have watery orange juice and the others kids are weird. They have spikes and they spit up blood and laugh. I think the word for them is disconcert- Haircut ing. I was told by the staff to make friends; the big blond woman said that it would make me happier to have others “You’ve come to the right place who share my interests. She didn’t look at my eyes when she By Cheri Ause said this. Her gaze kept traveling across my chin, and then honey.” Maxine rests her hands up to my eyebrows, never stopping on my face. I should be ou’re eight. You sit on the edge of the chair, your on your shoulders and presses her used to this but I’m not. She just can’t see me. feet barely touching the floor, swiveling back and I’m lonely. I mean sure, I have David, but he’s not here forth and scanning the hodgepodge of objects on dark red fingernails into your much, because they want to try new tests and procedures out the pink Formica counter—bottles of honey-colored collarbones. on him. He’s their experiment. shampoos and pearly crème rinses, wood-handled Mom and Dad visited once. They brought me flowers YYbrushes, wire curlers, bobby pins, and in a tall glass jar, combs of all shapes and sizes soaking in a pale green liquid. She lifts one of your braids and lets it slip, again and and a box of donuts to share with my “friends.” We went to again, through her soft grip. “She’d been growing it her the off-limits room, where we only go when parents come. “Can you slide back a bit, sweetie?” Her name’s Maxine and even though she talks like your whole life. All thirty-three years. It was so long, she could It was bright, and the carpet looked spongy. They talked at sit on it.” She drops the braid. “No kidding. It came all me, and didn’t try to understand. Dad’s face was red, and his mother’s friends, she doesn’t look much older than the teen- age girl who babysits when your parents go out. You wiggle the way down here.” She turns her back to the mirror and eyes were bloodshot and watering. Mom kept rubbing her makes a motion with her hand somewhere beneath the edge hands, up, down, up, and down again. backwards, but the rolled edge of the upholstery cuts into your calves. Maxine scoots you forward a bit and shoves a of the reflection. She turns back. “She comes in one day They left early. and says Maxine, I’m sick of this mess. Cut it all off.” I tried to pretend like I didn’t care as they gave me small small cushion behind your back. “That should help.” She jacks up the chair with a foot “I hope you like this haircut,” your mother interrupts. hugs, hands searching for my waist. I said, it’s fine, really, She stands and stubs her cigarette out in a black metal ash- and smiled, big and toothy just to show them how fine it pedal. “Got to make my new customer comfortable, you know.” Her reflection winks at you in the mirror. tray. “You know how you are.” You avoid her eyes in the was. Dad smiled big and toothy back, and I wondered if he mirror. You want to hear about the money. was going to cry. Mom imitated him, and I thought of how “She says she wants a pixie cut.” It’s your mother. She’s sitting behind you on a pink-and-black leatherette chair, “What happened to her hair?” strange we all looked in the bright room, grinning at each “She sold it to some mail-order wig outfit. Got seventy- other like alligators. leaning her elbow on the chrome armrest and holding a lit Pall Mall in her raised hand. “It started when she saw Mary five bucks.” David wakes me up early, his hands fluttering above my “I don’t want to hear any whining about you not liking sheet. Martin playing Peter Pan on TV. She says she won’t be happy until she has one too.” She drags on her cigarette. it next week.” It’s your mother again. “Roof! Roof!” he says in his high-pitched voice. It rever- “Mom!” berates around my room, scratching the walls with just how “You’ve come to the right place, honey.” Maxine rests her hands on your shoulders and presses her dark red finger- What you really want to know is how to get a hold of the wig company. You’re just about to ask when you hear I don’t like it here much. They nails into your collarbones. As she leans in close, her curly blonde hair tickles your ear. “I’m a pixie expert, you know,” it—that sandy, rasping hum that vibrates against your skull have watery orange juice and the making pixie expert sound like some kind of title. “No blue- just behind your right ear. It happens again on the other side. “Ta da!” Maxine sings. others kids are weird. They have hair specials for you,” she whispers, nodding toward the far end of the shop where a woman who looks older than your spikes and they spit up blood grandma sits reading under a dryer. Maxine snorts softly here they were—dangling from her pale fingers, right in and laugh. I think the word for and releases your shoulders. Tfront of your face—two perfect fourteen-inch braids, each You relax your back into the cushion. The black plastic bound at the top with a brown rubber band, forever severed, them is disconcerting. cape flutters as Maxine twirls it around you and fastens never again to be part of you. You turn your head from it behind your neck. In the mirror, your head looks like side to side. It feels strange and light. You reach for the phantom lengths that only seconds before flopped over your soprano it is. I comply, pulling on my jacket and bringing the pointy top of a giant plastic mountain. Making a face, you puff out your cheeks. shoulders and down your back, braids your mother fixed a flashlight. Not for me, but for him. He might not have his every day, sometimes whacking your head with the bristle eyes in. Maxine fishes your braids out from under the neckband. “Some people would pay a lot for hair like this. Wigs and end of the brush when you squirmed too much. The hair you He runs up the stairs quickly, feet flying in all directions would never sit on unless you grew it for another lifetime, or yet somehow managing to keep him stable. Throwing open hairpieces, you know?” She grips the end of one braid and drags the rubber band up its length and then twists the more. Your throat aches, you try to swallow, but your mouth the door, he breathes big gulps of stale air as he jogs around is dry. the small perimeter of the roof. elastic—once, twice, three times—into place at the top. The small hairs at the back of your neck pull tight. Your nose Maxine tosses the braids on the counter and takes you “Stella! Look at the lights! Look at them!” he shrieks. His by the hand to a different chair, one backed up against a eyes, blue this time, roll wildly around, and I smile. He’s too tingles and your eyes sting. She does the same with the other braid. black sink. She pushes your head back. The curved edge of busy crawling up onto the roof to see me. Not that he would the porcelain is cold against your neck and you think about anyway. You blink back the tears and try to keep your voice steady. “How much?” a picture of a guillotine you once saw in the World Book I first met David about a month ago. He was in the caf- Encyclopedia. eteria, at the last table, eating a small piece of cornbread. He “Just a little below the ears.” “No, for the hair. How much money can you get?” You Your mother’s voice floats above the sound of water rush- wore sunglasses, big aviator ones that looked out of place on ing from the spray nozzle. She’s telling Maxine about the his sharp, mouse-like face. I didn’t know it at the time, but it hadn’t considered this before now. “Depends. Sometimes a lot.” She’s holding a pair of cab driver that brought you here, about how his pet monkey was the nurse’s idea. They didn’t want the other patients to bit his girlfriend and he had to find a new home for it, as get scared by the dark holes that were David’s eyes. long, thin, silver scissors. She snips the air three times, the sharp metal legs clicking against each other. “You know, I though any of that mattered now. He didn’t notice when I sat down and unwrapped my “All I know is they’re vicious little beasts,” Maxine says. granola bar. I didn’t say hi, but he looked up quickly when I knew this woman once.” Her hands settle on your shoulders again; the scissors lie cold against the side of your neck. The warm water soaks your head but it runs away too accidentally hit the edge of the table. quickly from what hair you have left. You want to reach up “Wanna be my friend?” he said. I nodded. His brow fur- “Had this long red hair with gold highlights, all totally natu- ral, you know. Just gorgeous.” and touch it, or what is no longer there, but your hands stay rowed, and he asked again, “Wanna be my friend?” quiet beneath the black plastic. I said yes this time, and he ate his cornbread faster, “My sister had one—spider monkey.” Maxine pumps crumbs falling onto his starchy shirt. shampoo into her hand and smoothes it over your head, “To be my friend you need to like me, and not laugh at “I wanna get out of here Stella. I wanna find my sister working it into lather, her fingers massaging your scalp as me. Okay? Because if you laugh at me I’ll mess you up. I and go to the beach.” she speaks. “That dang thing bit her. Just like that. No swear I will.” He talks about his sister a lot, and how pretty she is, and reason. Well, that was all she needed. Goodbye, Bonzo!” He said this so kindly, his little pink mouth curling into how smart she is, and how she’s going to come and get him She turns the spray on again. Warm water pours down a sweet smile. I understood perfectly. He wasn’t threaten- and they’ll go to the ocean. and around your insubstantial scalp and you have the feeling ing me, just reminding me. People here were cruel, and you “Me too, David, but I think we need to get better first,” I that you forgot something important, a sense that you left needed to know in advance what they might do. say, and then wince at how much I sound like the nurses, al- something somewhere but can’t remember what or when. “Okay. Same.” I said, biting into the stale granola. ways talking about getting better, as if being a freak is some- You strain to see out the corner of your eye, and there, I gave him all the donuts my parents brought me, and he thing you can cure with some group therapy and coloring. right there at the edge of your vision, you see them—lifeless, ate them all, even if they were stale. Then he pulled out his “But Stella!” he says, “You’re not sick! You’re just invis- abandoned, so far away. Water gushes across your forehead pinky, and groped for mine, his bony fingers sliding in the ible!” and down over your temples, flooding your ears. You take a air. I held it out, and he said that we could be best friends I nod, and look up at the sky. It’s so bright, and I think deep breath, clench your teeth, and close your eyes against now. that maybe David is right; maybe I can feel the stars. the rising tide. “Stella! I can feel the stars!” he says excitedly. I walk over to where he is, perched on the roof. “Think I could touch them?” he asks as he leans farther over. Morgen Pack lives in Gualala and is a senior at Pacific Cheri Ause lives in Gualala. “Haircut,” her first appear- “Maybe,” I say. “But, not tonight because they want to Community Charter High School in Point Arena. This is the ance in print, is the winner of the 2011 Gualala Arts sleep.” I pull him back to the ground of the roof, and kiss second time she has taken first place in the youth division of Creative Writing Contest, adult division. him on the forehead. He giggles, and steals my jacket, wrap- the Gualala Arts Creative Writing contest. ping it around his skinny frame.