The Redwood Coast

Volume 13, Number 3 Review Summer 2011 A Publication of Friends of Coast Community Library in Cooperation with the Independent Coast Observer memoir Cherry Blossoms

Pamela Malone

or more than 20 years I taught English as a Second Language. The Fmajority of my students were adult Japanese women, wives of “salary men,” who came here for three or four years before returning to Japan. While I had started in a language school, I soon became a private teacher, teaching one on one, either at my house, or more frequently, in their houses, as most of my young students, some recently married, could not drive. There had been so many students. Just counting from memory, I thought of Luong QT around 60. Where were they now? What had happened? Could they all be alive and well, or was one of my lovely, young students swept out to sea on a great Hiro- Too Big for Its Bridges? shige monster wave? When a student returned to Japan and ended the lessons, I always said, if you Rebecca Solnit’s San Francisco swagger write me, I will write back. Many did. Most of them would just send a Christmas Jonah Raskin card the year after they got back, oth- ers would continue to write for years. I Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas and cultures meet, mix, merge, and go Not surprisingly, Solnit doesn’t see kept these cards in several large manila by Rebecca Solnit their separate ways. The Indians who herself as a chauvinist or as a public rela- envelopes. Like everything Japanese, the California (2010), 167 pages, illustrated lived around the Bay for eons thought of tions agent for the city that Herb Caen, cards had a unique style. They were made themselves as “dancing on the brink of the Chronicle’s famed columnist, dubbed from special papers, painted artfully with oes the world have a center? the world,” and that’s the way I often feel “Baghdad by the Bay”—a moniker that delicate, sometimes pop-out landscapes, The innovative French in SF: I’m on the edge and ecstatic. At everyone wants to forget, including Solnit, that perfectly portrayed the rivers and sociologist Jean Baudrillard the same time, I hate The City’s incessant who is one of the city’s foremost intel- mountains of Japan. Some were like col- believes it does. “It has to be need to advertise and promote itself as lectuals. Chauvinists usually aren’t aware lage made from silk and lace. said,” he writes in his meta- the best and the first in a very competi- of their chauvinism, even intellectuals like In simple English, they would tell me Dphysical travelogue, America, “that New tive American way. Sadly, Solnit shares in Solnit and Baudrillard, who share com- how they were doing. But there were too York and Los Angeles are at the center of the regional chauvinism. She puffs up the mon ground. many cards and over the years the manila the world.” San Francisco doesn’t even place in the manner of a one-woman PR Indeed, one might think of Solnit as a envelopes threatened to consume my desk. appear as a dot on Baudrillard’s cultural agency. Jean Baudrillard of San Francisco. Like So, in 2008, when I painted my office, map, but perhaps that’s because, as he also Her brand of chest-beating isn’t, of him, she’s preoccupied with the politics, a lot of boxes of paper, going back to explains, he’s not interested “in the deep course, the only one available to authors the philosophy and the esthetic of land- 1973, were recycled. Somehow, I fear America of mores and mentalities” but writing about San Francisco. The Works scape. In her books, she comes back again the manila envelopes, with all the cards only “surfaces.” Progress Administration (WPA) Guide to and again to San Francisco as a place with and letters from Japan, had fallen willfully Perhaps San Francisco only has depth San Francisco in the 1930s, first pub- multiple personalities, and sees it from into the recycling pile. and no surface and, perhaps, as a French lished in 1940 and just reissued with an multiple points of view. For Solnit, The When I heard about the earthquake, I intellectual Baudrillard can’t bear to introduction by David Kipen, shows that a City is an archeological site, a labyrinth, a ran to find these envelopes, but could not. admit that America boasts a city that guidebook can exude local pride without movie set, a kind of space ship, and a state All I had was one manila envelope dated at times —as Jack Kerouac and others patriotic flag-waving. Elements of the of mind. No contemporary America author from 2009. It contained only four ad- have noted—rivals Paris. Then, too, San WPA book are obviously outdated; the and intellectual has written about San dresses. I frantically wrote those students, Francisco may not appear to be a central waterfront isn’t the bustling port it once Francisco with more enduring passion and with my email address, asking if they American place because it sits on the east- was. But the WPA guidebook’s two-dozen focused energy than she has, and no one were all right. ern edge of the Pacific Ocean and looks to authors—including literary luminar- has more exhaustively mined its hidden I fell in love with Japanese culture East Coasters as though it’s at the end of ies such as Kenneth Rexroth, Madeline treasures, and showcased its exemplary through literature. One Japanese novel, the continent and is a kind of island unto Gleason and Dorothy Van Ghent—aim exiles and natives for all the world to see. more than any other, made an impres- itself with its own gestalt. Of course, to to explore The City’s “elusive identity” sion on me. It was The Makioka Sisters Latin Americans, San Francisco isn’t the rather than nail it down, and they never ver since she began to write and to by Junichiro Tanizaki. It is about the West but El Norte, much as Japanese and descend into regional drum beating. The Epublish books, beginning in 1990, struggles of four aristocratic sisters, two Chinese immigrants regard it as a front book’s many maps and illustrations also Solnit has been writing extended love in Tokyo and two in the more traditional door to the America continent. explore San Francisco’s elusiveness. letters to San Francisco and the whole Bay and old- fashioned Osaka. I no longer The view of San Francisco as the Area. Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas remember the plot or the sisters. What I quintessential anti-America city is perhaps The City seems to is her most ardent and unabashed paean to remember were Tanizaki’s poetic descrip- the most striking notion advanced by San the city in which she resides. In fact, she tion (in Edward Seidensticker’s transla- Francisco’s Rebecca Solnit. In Infinite need to promote calls it “a valentine of sorts to a complex tion) of the seasons, as reflected through City: A San Francisco Atlas, her most place.” Her previously published books traditional Japanese culture: the food, the recent book, she calls San Francisco “the itself as the best and have won awards, but Infinite City might tea, the Ikebana (floral arrangements), the un-American place.” Then, with character- the first in a very well be her signature San Francisco work. songs chosen by one sister to be played on istic aplomb, she adds that San Francisco Granted, the ideas in her new book aren’t the koto. And more than this, the silken is also the “place where America invents competitive Ameri- exactly new, but the tone and attitude kimonos, which changed with the seasons, itself”—a view that San Franciscans have are. Over time, Solnit has mellowed; reflecting the landscape as it melted from for the most part embraced and broadcast can way. Sadly, a sense of nostalgia for a lost world of spring to fall. gleefully and globally. Or so it seems to Solnit shares in the hippies in Golden Gate Park and African The Japanese treat the seasons and na- me after listening to them for more than American jazz artists in the Fillmore have ture in a sacramental way. They celebrate three decades, and also after carrying on regional chauvin- replaced anger and even bitterness about the cherry blossom season, Ohanami, a long love-hate relationship with “The an ominous capitalist future that she once “watching cherry blossoms.” They sit City,” as Northern Californians are wont ism. She puffs up the insisted was hatched in San Francisco. under the trees, picnic, play music and to call it. place in the manner The basic arguments in Infinite City watch the blossoms flutter and fall. The I love San Francisco because it strikes are reiterations and refinements that are life of the cherry blossom is brief. In the me as an outpost on the Pacific, and of a one-woman PR almost all expressed in previous books, Japanese film Afterlife, each recently de- because it’s at a crossroads where Asian, such as Wanderlust: A History of Walk- ceased person arrives at an office building European and Latin American languages agency. ing (2000), Hollow City: The Siege of

See BLOSSOMS page 4 See SOLNIT page 9 Page  The Redwood Coast Review Summer 2011 editor’s note books A Big Man Into the Wild Alexa Mergen n the early years of the RCR, Richard Perkins once complained to me that Breaking into the Backcountry it was cold and empty, Iwe weren’t publishing enough “local” by Steve Edwards and boundless like writers—by which I guess he meant scribes Nebraska/Bison Books (2010), 178 pages death.” residing somewhere between Timber Cove Back with his and the Navarro River. I assured him that Turned Round in My Boots friends in Sonoma I’d already made a nuisance of myself ha- by Bruce Patterson County, Patterson rassing every writer I knew on the Sonoma- Heyday (2010), 249 pages meets Trisha and takes Mendocino Coast with requests for their her to his “usual sitting work, but the population base of these parts spot,” “ a small shale was simply not great enough to generate have a friend who fears the quiet outcrop with a flat what we needed to fill our pages. inside herself. She knows this and it top” by the “wide and Richard’s desire to encourage and makes her unhappy. For one thing, muddy Russian River.” cultivate local talent was just an extension as her eighth year of marriage seeps Patterson feels im- of his other investments in the cultural life into the ninth, as the habits of con- mediate intimacy with of the communities of Gualala and Point Itented matrimony dry like indelible ink, she Trisha and confesses Arena and points between and beyond. As recognizes herself less and less. This friend, to her he’s a “messed an architect he designed some 150 build- Angela, committed over lettuce rolls at Star up” person. Speaking ings, including in addition to private homes Ginger to be left by her husband, Brian, for soldiers, he tells her the renovation of the Arena Theater and, his in their trailer in the Sierra for a weekend. as they rest in sunlight, pride and joy, the creation of Coast Commu- Angela is not fainthearted. She moved out “We’re all messed up. nity Library in the Point Arena Mercantile of her parents’ house as a teen, support- But at least we ain’t building, also known as Gillmore’s General ing herself as a hostess as she crashed on a dead. Survivor’s guilt Store. [See Pearl Watts’s remembrance, classmate’s floor and completed school. But is part of it. Like if page 7.] He and his wife, the indefatigable there comes a time in some lives when the you survive an ambush Fionna, Point Arena poet laureate for life, action of youth shifts to the contemplation but your partner gets were instrumental in founding the library, as of middle age and we ask with the curiosity Steve Edwards zapped, the first thing well as Mendocino Art Center, Gualala Arts of a baby examining her own hand: Who you think of is better him than me. But and assorted other cultural institutions on am I? there’s so much bullshit built up around war. this once “remote” coast. Mostly responses come as sparklets, Solitude, literal and Like the notion that there ain’t no atheists in Richard’s vehemently progressive poli- lightning beetles flashing in the night—if foxholes. That’s so much bullshit. I was an tics, his interest in everything, his creativity we catch them and seal them in a jar they figurative, plays a atheist and so were plenty of my partners. (he was also a painter), his deep resonant will die—so we carry on without trying to We knew the shit we were going through voice, his toughness and his gentleness—a hold on too tight. These are seekers I am role in insight, and was manmade. And if by some chance there sweet, kind temperament one might not at talking about, people compelled to ask the in transformation. was some supernatural force hiding in the first expect in someone his size—are quali- big questions. I read, in Silence by Chris- bushes and the swarms of bugs, it was the ties everyone who knew him will remember, tina Feldman, that the stories of saints are The culmination is Devil and not God.” including friends who did not share his not for us to emulate: the saints’ lives are Trisha and Patterson fall for each other. liberal convictions. His social embrace was fingers pointing at the moon. But from their the discovery of some Love giddy, the writer thinks of Grandma inclusive despite such differences. stories we look for clues to the essence of version of peace— Patterson “who believed in charms and The library he made possible, both existence. Memoirs that are genuine and charmers” and who would “have been so conceptually and physically, stands as a sincere fill a similar need in our secular transcendence for the proud of me for doing so well for myself.” monument to his big heart, his generous world. We want to know about others who The couple makes plans “like two little character, and his understanding that books start ordinary and, through perseverance, saints, self-knowledge kids who’d caught a dollar blowing across and human communication—though he gain insight. Solitude, literal and figurative, for the earthbound. the playground.” Then, one moonlit night, resisted computers and the Internet to the plays a role in this, and in transformation. Trisha has an epileptic seizure. Patterson end, much preferring conversation over a The culmination is the discovery of some watches “helplessly while pleading to the meal and a bottle of wine—are absolutely version of peace—transcendence for the ing moon comforts Edwards that he is not fates to make it stop.” But scared though he vital to intellectual health and a tolerable saints, self-knowledge for the earthbound. completely alone. is by her illness, Patterson avows devo- quality of life. Steve Edwards shares Angela’s trepida- Have you seen preschool children on a tion to Trisha, both of them, as they are, So long, Richard; thanks for everything. tion of solitude in his story Breaking into walking field trip? The teachers have the lit- “damaged goods.” He recalls a schoolgirl We’ll miss you. the Backcountry. Edwards wins through a tle ones hold ropes, parallel like reins. Life who had an epileptic fit and how he laughed —Stephen Kessler writing contest “unparalleled solitude” in stories are ropes leading readers on an ex- then with his classmates. At the memory, “I the Klamath Mountains of southwestern cursion. While Edwards examines his own cringed in shame. What a little prick I was Oregon tending a backcountry homestead values—poison the mice? apply herbicide . . . What a snot-nosed little coward I was.” of 92 acres along the Rogue National Wild to the weeds? yes and yes in his case—and Patterson faces further humiliation when, The Redwood Coast and Scenic River. He’s 26 years old when states his judgments (he attends a writing alone, he loses a dump truck in the rain- he starts off in 2001, recently divorced, an conference in Ashland where he’s disgusted swollen river. He pictures Trisha waiting for English teacher in Indiana. Edwards drives by the middle-aged wannabes), the reader’s him back at the barn and how he’ll have to west with his dad. He listens hard as the head nods or shakes in response. Edwards explain to her that “I was born, you see— Review homestead’s owner, Bradley, assures him how should I put this?—a fucking fuck-up!” zips out of town feeling “like a lover who’s Stephen Kessler the place itself will teach him what he needs strayed and now wants to be taken back: Forlorn as he is, he resolves to make it back Editor to know. He admits to wanting to “turn tail I’m sorry, baby. I’ll never leave again.” He’s to her through eight miles of mud. His boots for home” but doesn’t want to fail. He calls fallen in love with quiet. call out a “squish, squash” cadence and he is Barbara L. Baer his mom and learns he will miss his dying thankful to march with the wind at his back. Daniel Barth grandmother’s funeral, half a continent ruce Patterson’s memoir Turned Round He concludes Turned Round in My Boots Daniela Hurezanu away. He realizes missing family “—to in My Boots begins in 1973 when he is with, “If it made me feel like a GI. So be it. Jonah Raskin grieve with them, to tell stories, to laugh B Ready or not, sweet Trisha, for better or for Contributing Editors a 23-year-old Vietnam veteran. Patterson’s and cry—is the first real sacrifice I have to life is the photo negative of Edwards’s: his worse, here I come.” Patterson’s final words make for this excursion into solitude.” Sad- dad walks out on the family and his mom’s echo Edwards, who wraps up Breaking Into Linda Bennett dened, he turns to the cabin’s deck and spots the Backcountry with, “What a gift. This Production Director mind is “disordered.” He lets the reader “one tree on the ridge that stands apart from know early on, “All my life I’d experienced day and the next.” By living then reflect- the rest . . . the wind has ripped a swatch ing on, through their accounts, doubts and The Redwood Coast Review is published the earth as an art gallery with rooms lead- quarterly (January, April, July and October) from its midsection.” ing to rooms and more rooms . . . I’d always struggles, each memoirist discovers a peace by Friends of Coast Community Library in After his father departs, Edwards scours gravitated toward the wild . . . Maybe my that completes him. Each can inhabit his cooperation with the Independent Coast the caretaker’s chore manual. We sense love of raw earth was compensation for the life. Feldman offers in Silence, “The lessons Observer. The opinions expressed in these Bradley is a wise guide who understands estrangement I felt from people.” Patter- we learn in the territory of our own hearts pages are those of the individual writers and that manual labor precedes insight. Edwards son’s solitude stems from poverty; he’s and minds are life lessons that apply to do not necessarily reflect the views of FoCCL, shores up his physical confidence as he transient. He’s familiar with physical labor every living being.” the ICO or the advertisers. Contents copyright builds fires and masters basic mechanics. and seeks work where he can, working side After Angela completes her sojourn I’ll © 2011 The Redwood Coast Review. All rights Feeling safer, he leans into solitude until by side with others earning their keep. ask her about what happened—within and revert to authors and artists on publication. his mind falls into the puzzling limbo of without—as we walk along the river in the We welcome your submissions. Please Patterson starts out loving silence so send essays, reviews, fiction, poetry and letters change. A writer, he looks to words for much that the worst aspect for him of get- sun. But before she goes, for her, and for understanding, as he did as a child read- to the Editor, The Redwood Coast Review, c/o ICO, ting thrown in the “tank” is not the “delib- Edwards and Patterson and for all who share PO Box 1200, Gualala, CA 95445. Manuscripts ing excerpts from his grandmother’s diary. erately awful” food, constant hunger and stories, these lines from Vikram Seth: should be typed, double-spaced, with the In the homestead library Edwards finds fistfights but the noise of “clanking bars, author’s name, address, phone and email at Thomas Merton and memorizes passages squeaking bunks, explosively flushing toi- All you who sleep tonight the top of the first page. Postal mail only. A like this one: “Vocation to Solitude—to lets, crackling, indecipherable PA announce- Far from the ones you love, self-addressed, stamped envelope is required deliver oneself up, to hand oneself over, No hand to left or right for our reply. ments, barked orders, arguments, laughter, entrust oneself completely to the silence tirades, snoring, snorting, moaning and And emptiness above— On the Web: stephenkessler.com/rcr.html of a wide landscape of woods and hills, Know that you aren’t alone Subscription information: See page 9. groaning, all combined into the buzz of bees Friends of Coast Community Library is a or sea, or desert; to sit still while the sun locked in a box.” He considers committing The whole world shares your tears, nonprofit, tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization. comes up over that land and fills its silences an infraction for the punishment of solitary Some for two nights or one, Tax-deductible donations may be sent to with light. There are few who are willing to confinement and what he assumes will be And some for all their years. Coast Community Library, PO Box 808, Point belong completely to such silence, to let it more “peace and quiet.” But, he says, the Arena, CA 95468. The library is located at soak into their bones, to breathe nothing but “real cons” warned him “down there in the 225 Main Street in Point Arena. Telephone silence, to feed on silence, and to turn the hole from the airless crypts came ghostly, Alexa Mergen is a poet living in Sacramento 707.882.3114. very substance of their life into a living and Thank you for your support! ghoulish howls like you’d hear in a haunted whose writings appear often in the RCR. vigilant silence.” As for many, the shin- house or an insane asylum. When silence did take a hold of the hole, the cons warned, Summer 2011 The Redwood Coast Review Page  poets & poetry Two Magicians and a Pyromaniac Zara Raab

ontemporary poets, often local or regional, its taut dense-bodied surge, heft rying us along as a quick-changing chaos is figured. Often can seem like journalists, reporting the news, and heave of oiled writhe. on the verge of slipping his moorings, Flynn seems to see his whether banal or heartrending. But of course writer’s job much as the poet Paul Muldoon does––“to be a poems are not news, they are made things, art. I knew about the upstream mine, free agent, within the state of oneself, or roaming through Constructed of language, syntax and grammar, uncapped and seeping mercury, so I the different states of oneself.” Flynn’s colloquialisms and Cpoems make their magic in myriad ways. Nick Flynn’s short, wore gloves to hold the fish no fool slang are quixotic, yet the self that emerges in story and freely moving lines, for example, keep us racing forward, would eat and waited for the mystery dialogue with the mysterious Captain––clearly a stand-in for as if following a high-wire act or a video camera, while his absent father––is fully engaged. Rebecca Foust’s rhythms and music, her magic flute, coax and passion. There was no rainbow, the dark out of the coal mines of childhood. In contrast to rainbow, rainbow, no communion oray’s mode is rooted in the natural landscape, Nick both, Anne Coray’s Violet Transparent (Future Cycle Press, with Christ’s flesh. Just this prism CFlynn’s is dramatic and cinematic. Coray conserves 2010) creates a muted, somber world of archetypal land- flash gone gray and my sick wish energy, as if making a small footprint on the page, Flynn scape and wounded creatures. brings the energy of constant, restless movement to poems Coray precisely frames her subject in “Eulogy for the not to have caught it; I wished I’d cut swirling with metaphors. The title and one long sequence in Galapagos Tortoise”: the line before the glitter got away. the book refers to Walt Whitman’s “O Captain, My Captain,” but Flynn’s tone and techniques, and a kind of spiritual or Like Hector, their armor Short-listed for the religious fervor, share more with the poet Franz Wright. did them no good, Foreword Review’s Book Flynn’s “haiku (failed)” imagines the threads that connect, though they weren’t speared, of the Year and listed as a or just as surely, fail to connect us: merely flipped by whalers, “Must Read of 2011” by then pinned with a rock . . . the Massachusetts Center The thin thread that hold us here, tethered for the Book, God, Seed or maybe tied, together, what Their legs were thronged, is a feast for the eye, with do you call it––telephone? horizon? song? their eighty-pound bodies its wide format and color strapped to a human back. illustrations. In a nice “[W]e pray in our minds, we clasp our hands // our hands The men must have cursed added touch, fully half the look tied before us,” Flynn writes, drawing us into an inde- that weight in the sweltering heat book’s royalties will go to terminate world, a world in flux, where the juxtapositions as they struggled to the ship. the David Brower Center are curious but gentle, not jagged in the mode of surreal- in Berkeley, described as ism. In a long sequence in 12 parts called simply “fire,” the Tortoise slaughter is not news here, a passing event; “home to organizations narrator tells one of his many stories: “[. . .] I was hiding rather, it is as timeless and epic as Hector on the battlefields Rebecca Foust working for environmen- out on // damon rock, lighting / matches & letting them drop of ancient Greece. By simplifying details, and neatly ending tal and social justice.” to the leaves // below—little flare- // ups, flash fires––a girl each line, Coray gives her subject an appropriately formal, “Raystown River Trout” is taken from Foust’s first book, wandered / down the path, she just // stood there, watching honorific quality. By presenting a single line of melody over All That Gorgeous Pitiless Song (Many Mountains Mov- the matches / fall from my hand––” a few bars, Coray holds the world partly at bay, her stanza ing Press, 2010), winner of that press’s poetry competition. Anyone familiar with Flynn’s work knows his troubled unfolding with chaste decorum. Pitiless Song represents, as do all poems, a kind of order, childhood, with its themes of abandonment, helpless rage The poet’s attitude to her subjects is deferential, declining beneath whose surface lies mayhem, the disorder of what and chaos. More stories, straight from the tabloids: to compete with the tortoise, which steps forward, out of the Foust calls her “hardscrabble roots” in an Allegheny min- poem. Much as the Cathar people of Coray’s poem “Doom” ing town, where mountains––“Blue Knob, Wopsononoch, / everyday, capt’n, sir, captain, I was find paradise in rejecting meat and slaughter, the narrator/ Brush, Davis and Lock [ . . . ] usurp the sky / and conjure the left, a child, after school, alone, I found poet seems to find satisfaction in refusing the bloody meat of seasons,” snow piling in winter “drift upon drift / the air a her story. Coray’s deference, her desire to comment and even thin gruel the men sip, waiting.” a match, under the sink I found a can, a spray exhort, but not intrude or supplant, gives a root esthetic, and can, ly-sol dis-infectant, it made a an ascetic moral view, to this contemporary poet working [T]heir coats exhale wet wool outside the experimental vein. and wood smoke, their feet beat a work boot tattoo: torch, I was careful the flame didn’t enter the can, I knew The high, northern world of Qizhjeh Vena (the Denai’na laid off, laid off, laid off––the mines mined out it Athabascan name for Lake Clark) in southwest Alaska is and the Railroad dead, engines rusted to tracks. Anne Coray’s birthplace. For Coray it seems to be what an- would explode, somehow I knew, I’m cient scrolls are for rabbis and Nature was for Wordsworth: These lines might be prose reminiscence, were it not for trying to be clear, sir—the flame a serious object of study. In Violet Transparent, her second the music of “laid off, laid off, laid off,” echoing the sound book, community with fellow humans––so present in her of an old engine disappearing down the track. The poem shot across the room, then it was gone first book Bone Strings––drops away, along with a more might be mere reportage were it not for the cadence and personal, dramatic involvement in her animal stories. Living sounds of Flynn is clever with with husband and dog, Coray’s nearest year-round neighbor voices. His poet persona is five miles to the west. Port Alsworth (population 100) is Cinders and salt and snow turned black seems often to live much the nearest community, 13 miles southwest, on the other side and always the need to make rent. But have you seen of the time “in the air,” so of the lake. Coray’s closest neighbors and confidants are the trees’ fierce diadems after the ice storms? And doesn’t naturally a second long then the landscape and wildlife of the family’s five acres. spring sequence of nine parts is finally come [ . . . ] devoted to “air” (and a Often I’ve left this place, third, later, to earth). These and when I come back I know the reason I’ve corresponded briefly with Anne Coray; I’ve never poems tell of imprisonment I live where I was born: it’s the way met Nick Flynn, but I should note that I have met Rebecca “in a room made com- the mountains meet the lake, their constant affirmation Foust, as I belong to the poetry center where Foust is an ac- pletely of air” and torture, that what’s most heartening evinces little change. tive leader. Apart from a few quick exchanges, we’ve never strangely as if these were had a lengthy conversation, and I have no idea why Foust, children’s games: instead An environmental activist and coeditor of Crosscurrents an attorney at law, writes poetry, but her work’s power de- of “Tinker Tailor Soldier North: Alaskans on the Environment, Coray’s commitment rives from a sense that she is driven to write it, that through Sailor,” we get “oblivion to an idea of consciousness (environmentalism) and asser- this work she is, like Mary Karr or Abraham Lincoln, nothing emptiness night”: tive action is all-American, as is her occasionally chasten- bootstrapping “the life she dreams on.” Evidently tuned in to Nick Flynn “often I am permitted to ing tone, as the permanence of rock and continental shelf the artistic and emotional deceptions of finality and closure, bleed // then someone is countered by the destruction threatening the habitats that Foust’s poet-persona notes in “Altoona to Anywhere” that hands me their darkness in rags / then someone sits on my most fulfill the poet’s own dreams of individual expression “[…] when you’ve left it behind, you / may find it still there, chest // . . . it helps to think it’s a game // play let-your-mind- beyond societal constraints. in your dreams, / in your syntax, the smell of your hair, / its wander, play stoned-porno-drift.” The dangers for Flynn Hers are by no means the real smell under the shampoo.” While reserving a certain and other storytellers in this vein are those of journalism: lamentations of unskilled cool irony for those on life’s up side, Foust conjures vivid sensationalism and inconsequence, though in Flynn’s case, poets pouring out their there’s an added danger of sheer incoherence. anger. Coray, who also has American painter Grant Wood once reflected, “everything a new book, A Measure’s The worlds of Coray and Foust we experience . . . is tied up in . . . [our first] twelve years.” Hush, just out from Boreal Some poets may be galvanized to write by a moment in Books, is an artist, a shaper, are constituted by fixed ele- time, a landscape, memory: Coray in her father’s small- a thinker whose new book is ments, a firm sense of identity. plane crash, the event tying her to a landscape of the frozen part of a long argument with north; Foust by the ravaged coal-mining town that birthed those who fail to appreciate Flynn is anything but settled. He her; Flynn by the chaos of the fatherless childhood he’s viv- the impact we humans are idly brought to life in his memoirs. For a century now, the having on our environment. is the trapeze artist in the Big so-called narrative arc of the traditional story with its hero She stirs the intellect, even if Tent I have conjured. and villain has not been adequate to our long lives or our she does not always move us. experiences of many loves and marriages, our frequent dis- Anne Coray locations and migrations, our political and social upheavals, figures of the unlucky ones––the village idiot, the wrongly our complex, layered cultures. Flynn, Foust and Coray may he poems in Rebecca’s Foust’s God, Seed: Poetry & accused Wilton Dodge, and most movingly her own child, never be our cultural icons—that role is mainly reserved for TArt About the Natural World (Tebot Bach, 2010), a who has autism. movie and rock stars—but they are magicians each in their collaboration with artist Lorna Stevens, share with Coray’s The worlds of Coray and Foust are constituted by fixed own way, surprising us, charming us, making us think and poems a decorum of stanza and poetic line appropriate to elements; each seems to project a firm sense of identity, wonder. Lorna Stevens’s delicate, evocative illustrations of persim- whether persona or not. Nick Flynn, author of several prize- mon, poppies, fern and trout. In “Raystown River Trout,” winning books and the memoir Another Bullshit Night in Foust’s tone is more personal, more felt, than Coray’s. Suck City, is anything but settled. He is the trapeze artist in the Big Tent I have conjured for this review. His new poems, Zara Raab is the author of The Book of Gretel. Her new It took my hook like kite-caught wind. The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands (Graywolf Press, book of poems, Swimming the Eel, is due out this fall. She I had to fight to reel it in, to net 2011), use a quasi-confessional voice, with quick lines hur- lives in Berkeley. Page  The Redwood Coast Review Summer 2011 memoir with the seasons. A gold fan delicately splayed with blossoms. This reverence for nature and the seasons was almost holy. And when a young Japa- Bucolic nese student poured my tea, it was as if I had entered Yasunari Kawabata’s Thousand Dion OReilly Cranes, where the tea ceremony is infused with mystical power. As I entered each home, I would take off my shoes and slip into silk guest slippers, hen people think of California, walk across a polished wood floor, and sit they think of Los Angeles, Holly- down to a simple, uncluttered table. There Wwood or the Golden Gate Bridge. would be a tray, with a design appropri- They don’t know the bucolic California I ate to the season. Before me, a flower in a knew. Santa Cruz was such a remote town vase, perhaps an orchid, and in my hand, a that I even felt safe during the Cuban Mis- ceramic cup filled with green tea. I would sile Crisis. The Russians would never find breathe in its scent, and feel a calm descend Santa Cruz, I thought; this is the middle of as we began the English lesson. nowhere. My student would bow her head slightly. As the Cold War posturing escalated, my She would make sure I was absolutely parents considered buying a bomb shelter; comfortable; she would offer me rice balls we looked at some neat, attractively ap- and other delicacies. She would try to pointed underground homes, like darkened pronounce the difficult r’s and l’s, and we doll houses with canary yellow Formica would talk. Both of us women, wives and tables and matching wallpaper, but my par- mothers. We had a lot in common. And ents decided a post-apocalypse retreat was because I was older, I had wisdom to share unnecessary. We were not, after all, in New from my years learning to raise a family York City or the state capital. I found this in a distant place (I had moved as a young a great relief. Despite the nearness of Ford blossoms from page 1 woman from California to New York— Ord military base, just 50 miles away in which from my perspective could have been Monterey, and Lockheed military contrac- where they fill out a form. This will deter- I would sit down to a foreign land). tors hidden away in the mountains around mine what the afterlife will be for each of I could sympathize, give advice and lis- Santa Cruz, my parents deemed that, for them. One plump old lady with the heart of a simple, uncluttered ten, while correcting grammatical mistakes now anyway, we were safe in our bucolic a young girl will eternally skip and laugh in and building vocabulary. backwater. the breeze, reaching out her hands to gather table. There would be My grandparents, before they retired to the many cherry blossoms as they fall. a tray, with a design heard from three of my students by email. a ranch, owned a nursery by Pleasure Point Cherry blossoms are on teacups. They I Not to worry, each wrote, they were not in Live Oak, now an area full of surfers, pot are in art. They decorate ceramic bowls that appropriate to the near the epicenter of the earthquake, their smokers and young families living in quaint, will hold fruit from the season. And there homes were intact and they were safe. But uninsulated cottages. The neighborhood is the mirror opposite, Momijigari, “watch- season. Before me, a I did not hear from one of them. The one meanders along severely eroding cliffs, the ing the leaves turn red.” There is nothing flower in a vase, per- who lived way atop a condominium in small blocks tight and jammed with homes more striking than a Japanese maple with Edgewater, New Jersey, where I taught her on tiny plots and the occasional gentrified scarlet leaves fanning outward. In the short haps an orchid, and three times a week for two years. She was a remodel towering over the cottages for a story “A Row of Trees” by Yasunari Kawa- tiny woman with no children. Her husband glimpse of the sea, but at the time, it was bata, a father worries as he watches the in my hand, a ceramic worked in the city. She spent her long days all brown California fields. I watched quail giant ginkgo tree on his street. Something cup filled with green sketching the birds on the Hudson River, cross the quiet street in front of the nursery. doesn’t seem right. Are the leaves falling which she could see out her window. Or she We kept our horses in pastures we rented too fast from the bottom? Did the tree turn tea. I would breathe would take the ferry into the city. She loved down 41st Avenue, a long narrow thorough- too soon? This preoccupation occurs as his to go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. fare that led to the nursery, bordered by daughter prepares to leave home and go out in its scent, and feel a She loved art. She loved the water lilies of ancient eucalyptus trees with rowdy scarlet into the world. A new world, far away from calm descend as we be- Monet. begonia crops sprawling on either side. We her father and mother. I would go up in the elevator of her galloped our horses the mile or so to the gan the English lesson. building, all the way to the 17th floor. I beach from there. y students were not literary scholars. enjoyed looking out the window at her view. My grandparents sold the nursery in They were simple housewives, their M many confidences. One had a domineering, Sometimes the skies over Manhattan were 1960 and retreated from Live Oak onto roles not that dissimilar from the American unkind mother-in-law. One felt insecure as cloudy. I would sip green tea from a deli- a 20-acre farm in the Soquel Valley, less wives of executives back in the 1950s. As a mother, her child was becoming too ag- cate cup, adorned with a fuchsia primrose. than 10 miles away. My parents decided a feminist, I could feel disheartened by gressive in nursery school; one actually had We would talk of many things; her English we would move there too. “Why are you the fact that these students immediately a sibling who had a nervous breakdown. So was actually very good. moving way out there?” people skeptically gave up whatever job they had when they everyone was not living a life of happy con- She kept writing when she returned to inquired. “That’s really out in the sticks.” married, and that they all conformed to a formity. One student, who had been unable Japan. She lived somewhere remote that I Defying the general opinion of their ec- similar pattern, set by their society. They to get pregnant after 11 years of marriage, had never heard of. She had a son and then centric decision, my parents determinedly kept a perfect home, played golf and tennis, felt free to study Ikebana, and planned to re- another. She devoted all of her time and settled into the 100-year-old farmhouse, and and studied crafts such as tole painting, turn to Japan and open her own floral design energy to them, and wrote that she often felt my grandparents soon followed, retiring at découpage, and shadowbox. There was business. She was very excited about this. tired. last in a house they built on the property. A very little variation. Even the gifted and But she became pregnant, and immediately I do not know where that place is in new, even more bucolic existence ensued. talented Princess Masako, who was once a those plans were dashed to the ground. Japan, though it has not been named when And this ranch is where I live today, and diplomat, fluent in several languages, gave I’m for freedom of the individual. But they give accounts of the tragedy in differ- if one didn’t leave the boundaries of Love it all up when she married the prince, and Japanese culture is different. And for the ent locales. But I do not know if she is okay. Creek Ranch, my hometown would seem as my students thought that was the right and most part, my students did relish their roles. Nor do I know anything about the others, bucolic as ever; but the world has changed, good thing to do. They got psychological rewards for keeping the ones whose cards were in the manila and Santa Cruz is as traffic-bound as the But for the most part, they seemed secure an esthetically pleasing home that created envelopes I no longer have. rest of the Bay Area. The quail are gone, and even fulfilled by their roles as wives family harmony. I pray that they are all right, and that and the begonia and barley fields in Live and mothers. I do not want to idealize. And what I saw when I entered their my beautiful students, those lovely women, Oak are packed with low-income housing. People are people. These women were homes was the traditional culture in the have not fallen like cherry blossoms, whose Today, 41st Avenue is a six-lane expressway like any others. Each had her own story, Japanese stories I had read come to life. lives are all too brief. lined with malls, Whole Foods, Sears and and because they were in America, and I Beautiful Utamuro faces, pale and lovely, McDonalds. The traffic is bunched-up and was teaching them English, and sometimes too shy at first to make eye contact, tiered blaring from freeway to beach. Folks walk the only non-Japanese person they had a displays of Hina dolls, décor that changed Pamela Malone lives in Leonia, New Jersey. long extended conversation with, I heard See bucolic page 6

Readers’ Letters Doubiago’s passionate commitment The Sundarbans Tiger Preserve

I always look forward to The Redwood has erotic feelings for her father; it is the Coast Review, but I was very disappointed father’s responsibility to tenderly receive Here, whenever a mangrove forest dies, by the review of Sharon Doubiago’s My these feelings without capitalizing upon the doors of the earth slam shut Father’s Love, Volume 1 [“Fathers and them by imposing adult sexual energy. To taking the Smooth Indian otter, Lovers,” Spring 2011]. It almost seems as characterize the young girl and later the the Irrawaddy and Gangetic dolphins, if the reviewer didn’t really read the book woman as a diva caught up in the power of the cheetah-spotted fishing cat very deeply while superimposing an ill-fit- her desirability without connection to com- and the Royal Bengal tiger, holding ting Freudian interpretation on the narrative. munity is just wrong. it all in his eyes’ vigilance, Freud is hardly the one to deal honestly with Yes, Sharon Doubiago is a beautiful ruling the intricate web the real wounds of incest given his record woman and she has had to live with both the like Vishnu the Preserver and Destroyer— on the subject. benefits and negatives of such a gift from leaving the villages prey The reviewer grossly underestimates the an early age. What is truly beautiful about to the power of cyclones. soul-shattering power of rape and its after- the writer is her passionate commitment to math, and the violence done to Doubiago’s speaking her truth. —Marguerite Bouvard seven-year-old self, not to mention the ongoing fondling, viewing and exhibition- Susan Kennedy ism by her father. Of course a daughter Jenner Summer 2011 The Redwood Coast Review Page  personal history White Water Laura Schatzberg

uly was inordinately cold and foggy last year up and ably told me many times. “What do you mean,” she said, down the coast and inland to where the fog is usually I was afraid of what state I “I have a great appetite. See, I’m eating!” and of course, a part-time visitor. On one of the very few warm and would find her in. I was afraid I should have just been happy she was eating. What did it sunny days, I had the good fortune to go walking and matter what? She loved sweets. I knew, when she no longer J swimming in the river with two good friends. Though I would not know what to do or would eat ice cream, her time was near. She was always ap- I am close to home in the river, I feel as if I have stepped preciative of the care she received and thanked her caregiv- into the farthest reaches of untamed wilderness. The water is how to do it. My mother and I ers often. She was a gracious patient. clear and cold but not frigid as long as you are moving. The had not been close. How would tadpoles scoot away as we step on the rocks. The willows don’t whitewash this time and say that I was given a bless- rustle in the breeze and the occasional kingfisher squawks. I be compassionate and giving I ing to have this opportunity to give back to my mother. I There is no sound other than the river, the birds and the never felt blessed and often felt inconvenienced, put upon wind. There are no other people. when I didn’t love her enough? and frustrated that I could not “get on with my life.” But We carried light packs with towels, sunscreen, drinking I have realized that it was my life. water and something to munch on. At one narrow we heard Caregiving is part of life, a very the water rushing and saw a hint of white water. The Garcia important part, a part that I had not has no rapids in the summer in this part but we decided to had to do much of, and its humbling skirt around and go through the brush. We found a not so di- effects were essential in my process rect route and ended up a little past the narrows in the open of developing compassion, under- river again. The swimming hole was not far. After warming standing and kindness. Meeting my in the sun I eased into the cold water, screaming just a bit as mother’s caregivers and experiencing I adjusted to the chill and swam around as long as my body how they worked, without judgment, could take it. Pure bliss. Dips in the river make my summer taught me what true dedication and a joy. selflessness are. I had to do this to As the air was becoming chilly we headed down the way move on. I had to see my mother we came. We walked through the river and at one point the approach death to get a perspective river narrowed with willows close on either side. I poked as I near my own death. My peers my head around some of the branches and saw that it was are going through this now or have not impassable. We easily came through and when we did already or will in the near future. I looked back and realized that this was the place where To be present as our parents age is a we had gone through the brush thinking that there was no natural part of the process of aging. way to get by walking in the river. What had seemed like an We have, for the most part, not lived obstacle from one side was an opening from the other, albeit near them but we are called back a small one. when their time for transition comes. Meeting perceived obstacles and dealing with them is a Being present at my mother’s constant of living. Often, it is seeing the situation from a transition was a final gift from her. new angle or when the passage of time gives us the benefit It gave me a perspective on living, of hindsight and reflection, which can transform an obstacle aging and dying I would not have into an opportunity. otherwise received. I have no idea I was about to complete my Peace Corps service in Na- what that transition was like for her. mibia when my sister told me that our mother was no longer I know she was grateful to have able to handle her affairs. She lived alone in New York City remained in her home, but what her and had been taking very good care of herself since my spirit experienced I do not know. For father died 18 years before. She had friends and did things y eisman my part, I shall continue to walk in

with them such as attending concerts, plays and exhibits. mind cold water, come upon rapids and She kept in touch with my sister and myself and many fam- imagine that I have reached an im- ily members. She had even been contacting me by phone in passe only to find, after reflection two years ago before I left for Africa? I later found out from Namibia, which was not an easy task. Often she would need and negotiation, a new way on. her doctor that she had been losing weight for 10 years. Now to dial the long number of my cell phone many times before I was really afraid. Fortunately, my sister and I could talk we could actually connect. When we did there was often a things through. I was alone physically but I had her support. delay so that our conversation would overlap and soon end Also, fortunately, my mother had hardly spent any money Laura Schatzberg lives in Point Arena and is a volunteer at from lack of patience. What she told me repeatedly was, since my father’s death and there were funds to carry us for Coast Community Library. “Everyone is proud of you.” I am not sure who everyone a while depending on what needed to be done and how long was but it was really she they should have been proud of. she would live. Though she knew she needed help, she was She was in a struggle to retain control of her life as her not quite aware of her exact situation. When I was having a memory was slowly slipping away. She would tell me that meltdown about finding a caregiver for her, she declared she she was “hanging on” and I began to think that she was ill didn’t need anyone to help her. Dementia is a very interest- Her Last Summer and she would die when I got home. But she was just hang- ing condition. She would have moments of total clarity and ing on until help arrived so that she could relax a bit and not sharp perception, and then moments of being totally out of The old mare knows worry that she would get lost or forget to pay a bill. touch. She always knew who I was, sometimes too well, but this is her last summer My Peace Corps service was a pivotal experience, even the date was a constant unknown. We continued to get daily and spends her days at the ripe age of 55. I did not feel fulfilled every day, but delivery of The New York Times because though she could in the pasture as I jumped the hurdle of one challenge, I saw the value of no longer do the puzzle or read much of it, she would look at with the two fillies the one I had jumped the day or week before. The obstacles the date several times a day. She could win a Scrabble game who like each other came fast and furious and maybe that is why it was so but not be able to follow Jeopardy on television. and doze satisfying in retrospect. As the time was drawing near for me What she knew she wanted was to be able to remain in standing side-by-side to leave, I began to think that I would sign up to continue her home. She said repeatedly that she did not want me to in opposite directions to serve. I felt that I would probably not apply again once I give up my life, did not want to be a burden, so I felt that if I with their heads returned and why not just continue. At the least I was set to did stay, neither of us would be pleased. As long as we could on each other’s rumps. travel in Africa and to the Mideast and Europe on my way find reliable care and have the help of my cousin to take care back to the States. Then the realization that my road would of the finances, which allowed me to return to California, have to go direct to New York set in with the news from my —Antler she could have her wish and we were happy to leave her sister. Mom had gotten lost though she knew how to get back where she was comfortable and still had a few friends and home. She had made some serious errors with her finances. family who would come by to say hi even though they knew My sister does not leave her home. It was up to me. As this d that as soon as they left she wouldn’t know they had been reality set in I went through many emotions. I was deeply there. disappointed and resentful that I would have to give up what What really made it possible for me to leave her and Old I wanted to do. I was afraid of what state I would find her in. not have horrible pangs of conscience was that we found I was angry that I had to cancel my agenda and step up to be a caregiver who was amazing. I felt totally comfortable caretaker. I was afraid I would not know what to do or how Part of the fun of being a geezer trusting my mother in her care and never had cause to think to do it. My mother and I had not been close. How would I is you have nothing to lose. otherwise. I don’t usually call people angels but if ever that be compassionate and giving when I didn’t love her enough? No one expects you to write a book, was an apt description of someone who had touched my life, How could I be in New York, a city I happily left when I was crack a joke, or steal a kiss. this was it. At first, she was with my mother six hours a day, 18 and had not regretted it ever? Would I have to live with You can walk down the street six days a week. When my mother needed 24-hour care, we my mother and abandon a life in California I was returning invisible to others except your own kind, found another person to do evenings and extended the day- to though I had not a clue what that was? with whom you exchange a complicit grin. time hours. This period fortunately lasted only six months, You can declaim a line of poetry and my mother was ready to depart this life after over 90 ll these thoughts collided in my mind as I flew from and people will think you’re merely nuts. years of a mostly good stay on the planet. Windhoek to New York on Christmas Day 2005. Fresh No woman will recoil A Initially, I was in New York for almost six months. It was from the biggest high in my life to what I thought would be if you gently pat her downy arm. the most time I had spent with my mother since I was 17. I the lowest low point. Ah, being old is a fool’s game wasn’t there when she died, but during those six months and Any other time I visited New York my mother would for which the reward is certain death. on the many occasions that I returned to see her and deal have bagels and lox and cream cheese waiting for me. She’d But games are fun, with her care issues we had many poignant moments. I got want to hear about my life and if I had seen my sister recent- and for some of us to tell her that I loved her and I meant it. After one of these ly and how she was doing. This time she gave me a nice hug this is the only one in town. little love fests, she said, “Now that that’s all over, what are and went right back to her room and left me alone to settle we going to do?” She never lost her sense of humor. I would in. The fridge was pretty empty. It was obvious that this was sometimes do the role reversal to her great chagrin. Once not the mother I knew. Her condition was a lot worse than I I baked cookies because we were having guests. We were —Marc Elihu Hofstadter had imagined. It could not have been so sudden. She was rail going to have dinner but she began to scarf down cookies. I thin. Could I have missed signs of decline when I visited her told her she would spoil her appetite, just as she had prob- Page 6 The Redwood Coast Review Summer 2011 bucolic from page 4 and torquoise sky pass overhead. Beverly I still can breathe in would occasionally stop and eat, while I lay to 41st Avenue to do their shopping, bring- the quiet rhythm of a back and listened to the satisfying crunch ing their grocery carts home with them and of grass cut and chewed by huge teeth; then abandoning them on the roads. horse in the forest on she would move on of her own accord. I still can breathe in, if I sit quietly, the quiet fter moving to our little ranch, my a warm summer day, rhythm of a horse in the forest on a warm Amother bought several cows, 20 sheep, when I was a child summer day, when I was a child and really a couple of hogs, and a hundred chickens. had nowhere to go, and no one was watch- Furthermore, it was time for my sister and and had nowhere to ing. Beverly was warm and smelled sweet me to learn how to be real equestrians. Lil- and musky. Her steps were perhaps a bit like ith was bought a thoroughbred, an ex–polo go, and no one was a heartbeat. pony. Upon me was bestowed an adorable, watching. We would make our way down to horrible Welsh Mountain Pony named Blue. Soquel, about three miles as the crow flies, We installed what Mummy called a riding but it would take hours at our leisurely ring, which in this country is called an mother insisted I jump a five-foot wall, Bev- pace, stopping to eat blackberries or cool arena. erly willingly and smoothly galloped toward our feet in the creek. We would finally hit My English equestrian training began. it and scaled it serenely for me. civilization. But this was the early 60s, and Blue was diabolical, and I learned many Lilith and my mother continued to play what is today a junction of packed commut- varieties of pain from him: the pain of gasp- out the drama with Kate, the mare who ers racing and stopping through a series of ing for breath from a stomach flop following refused to be ridden, until Kate died of a intersections, was then a sleepy town with a vertiginous flip through the air; the 800- The author at age four twisted intestine, a horrible and protracted all the necessary small shops: two grocery pound pony roll onto the arm or leg trapped display that had no effect on Lilith, except stores, a five-and-dime, two jewelers, a in a position beyond normal range of and swallowing her tongue, my mother dis- that it seemed to coincide with the end of couple of bars, a post office, a horse supply motion; the direct smash to the head while tractedly waved me away to do as I pleased. her interest in horses, and she moved on to store, and in the center of town, one blink- being run under an apple tree, all while my And I could do as I pleased on a horse boys. Our days of horse shows and daily ing light suspended by wires. The sight of mother yelled directives at me. who did not wish to kill me. Beverly was a drills in the ring were over and replaced a seven-year-old in overalls bareback on a “Pull UPPPP on the BITTTTT!!” or towering, powerful thoroughbred with the by Lilith’s string of wayward boyfriends. horse with no bridle was not a strange sight “Heels DOOOWWWN.” conformation of an athlete, and I perched Lilith’s proudly displayed first-place dres- in those days. In front of Finta’s Pharmacy, Her voice would distort while I turned on her high withers quite precariously. She sage ribbons and trophies were boxed up. which had a soda fountain where they in the air in slow-motion flight; I followed possessed what my mother referred to as Our English saddles, the best money could mixed up Coca-Colas and prepared banana the laws of physics over Blue’s head as he “heart room.” She was “deep through the buy, were covered and left to dry out in the splits, I slid off Bev’s warm, sweaty back refused a jump, and I would crunch to the heart,” meaning she had a racehorse’s depth tack room. And Beverly and I were more and tied her with a quick slipknot. I spent ground, feeling my knee caps chip, while and girth to her chest that my legs could not and more alone together in a very peaceful my quarters on some sweet concoction, re- Blue twisted and bucked away, vigorously span, and they stuck out like sticks in stir- world. mounted Beverly, and rode home on the Old attempting to dislodge the saddle. rups over her barrel chest. To me, however, San Jose Road seeing barely a car the entire Soon, my sister tired of her polo pony “deep through the heart” meant something everly and I explored the Santa Cruz way. Now that road is a major commuter and yearned for greater thrills and chal- completely different as she gazed at me BMountains. I abandoned the saddle connection between San Jose and Santa lenges, so my mother purchased an entirely softly with doleful eyes and decided to love altogether and eventually the bridle too and Cruz. Some people unadvisedly dare ride insane, wildly untrainable mare. As usual, me. She was nearly 20, and I was her golden rode with a halter and rope. We crossed their bikes on it, but I haven’t seen a horse I got Lilith’s leftovers, her wonderful polo years project, like a gangster who decides to Soquel Creek and found trails leading into on Old San José Road for 30 years. pony, Beverly. My sister’s new, whacked- settle down and spend time with his grand- the quiet and empty hills between Aptos Today, I brave the hassle of the traffic. I out mare had a further benefit: not only did children. She had a swinging elongated trot, and Soquel. The mountains were a com- walk the trampled beaches, and watch the I no longer have to ride Blue, who longed which my mother and sister viewed as prob- pletely unpeopled wilderness for most of the still-beautiful sunsets of Santa Cruz. But in only to kick me when I wasn’t looking, lematic, but for me, it was soft as waves. year, full of the dampened, cool silence of my mind, a parallel Santa Cruz lingers: the but Lilith and Mummy were so focused on But most important, and this was a revela- redwood cathedral groves; alien, enormous bucolic town of my childhood. training the impossible mare, Kate, that I tion to me, Beverly did anything I wanted, banana slugs; and skittish deer. We walked was left alone, and when I begged to leave and I asked in only the subtlest signals: a very slowly through the silence. I would sit the riding ring, with Kate bucking, rearing, nudge of the bit, a gentle squeeze with my on her back, or sometimes I would lie back Dion OReilly lives in Soquel. This is her knee. Beverly was finely tuned. When my and watch the translucent, emerald leaves first appearance in the RCR. Summer 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 Book Expo America Shelf Life bks wr us ;-) Alix Levine Daniela Hurezanu

ot off the presses—brand new books very year at the end of May, profes- are coming to Coast Community sionals of the publishing industry HLibrary. Our regular patrons are Emeet for three days at the Jacob familiar with the separate set of shelves up Javits Center in New York for the biggest front labeled “New to Coast Community Li- book trade event in North America. I had brary.” Looking closely you will find that attended Book Expo America several years new to the library isn’t necessarily a new ago, but this year’s event (May 23-26) book, but one that has recently been added signaled a deep change. About a third of the to our collection from recent donations. exhibit was dedicated to various electronic Funds for the purchase of new books are devices that are replacing print, and another no longer available from the county library third was children’s books. I have nothing system. At the various branches the Friends against children’s books, on the contrary, of the Library have stepped up to fund pur- but when all of them seem to participate in a chases, subscriptions and supplies no longer contest of garishness for the most outra- included in the Mendocino County Library geous combination of colors, the esthetic budget. One method of getting brand-new Richard Perkins, 1925-2011 model that is being set up is guilty for the books onto library shelves without spending bad taste of generations. full price is a lease-buy system, McNaugh- This year’s BEA confirmed what most ton Subscription Service, which is being writers and book reviewers already knew: used at other branches in our county’s that the publication of serious literature, system. The House Richard Built and particularly of literary fiction, has been McNaughtons, as they are popularly abandoned by the big publishers to the small called, are chosen from a monthly list of Pearl Watts or medium-size independent presses. The books just coming into bookstores. It is few presses on whose tables one could see books with literary appeal were New Direc- possible for a library to order from backlists t was early spring, 2001, and the asking price.” With no one needing or tions, New York Review Books, Overlook if a desired title is not in the current month’s darkness was falling at the library wanting to discuss it further, I asked for a Press, Other Press, Europa Editions—all in offerings. The number of books you get is where I, a fairly new volunteer, was vote and it was passed unanimously. The all about 10 out of hundreds of publishers. determined by what you are able to spend. just starting the process of closing deal was soon accomplished and the build- The first day was devoted to this year’s The library subscribes for a year and gets for the day. A very tall, large man ing was ours. Now to find the magic to turn guest, Italy. Almost all the panelists agreed a certain allowance for the year, of which Istepped into the library, making the already this big old pile of dust and dirt into a real that publishing books in translation (Italian, 20 percent can be kept at no further charge. tiny library seem even smaller. He asked if library. Purchasing the building had all in this case) in the States is a heroic enter- The others must be returned, or purchased I was Pearl Watts and when I said I was, he but wiped out our bank account and raising prise. American publishers don’t buy for- at an additional cost if the library wishes to introduced himself as Richard Perkins and the money to rehabilitate the old building eign titles for many reasons, one being that retain them. started telling me his story. seemed daunting. they don’t have the governmental aid many Friends of Coast Community Library’s He said he and his wife, Fionna, had Richard never appeared discouraged foreign publishers have. Several years ago, board has decided to try McNaughtons for a helped found Friends of Coast Community by the challenge. He told us often that as an NEA study found that, of all published year to see if it boosts circulation by making Library in 1989 and it was their dream to soon as the public saw we had purchased a books in the States, less than 3 percent are the latest, critically acclaimed, or bestseller see a library built here before he and Fionna building in the most perfect place in town books in translation, and of these, less than hot lists available to our patrons when they died. They dreamed of a place that would and saw how work was going on, the money 1 percent is literature. An Italian publicist are brand new. We will have a 100-books-a- fill many of the needs in the community: to complete the project would come. And confessed that if she tries to sell a book to year (usually 10 books per month) subscrip- a depository for a wide range of reading it did. a Chinese publisher, her chances of suc- tion. Just like our own regular collection, materials, a learning center, maybe a meet- In the long months of preparations, cess are about 80 percent; in the case of an these will be weeded out if no longer being ing space where people could gather for planning, demolition and building, all too American publisher, her chances drop to checked out, kept longer if very popular, meetings of various kinds. In the 10 years frequently punctuated by fundraising for about two in a thousand! But even under and retained as part of our “keeper” allow- of the Friends’ existence, they had been able the project, Richard was a constant pres- these circumstances, foreign publishers try ance if determined as desired by the col- to purchase a lot a bit north of the center ence, every day visiting the job, adding his to penetrate the American market because lections committee. At the end of the year of town for this purpose. But progress was expertise, guiding the efforts of our mostly when a title is successful the success can we will decide if the subscription service is slow and, at the rate it was going, Rich- volunteer work force. The urgency seemed translate into huge profits. worth continuing. ard feared it would not happen in his and to have left him now and he appeared BEA is a major event for the publishing As part of our desire to make newer Fionna’s lifetime. He was not using hard- content to wallow in the sure but measure- industry also because there are many other books and audiovisual items available, sell techniques and I am not an easy sell able progress, enjoying every minute while concurrent events that are organized around Friends of Coast Community Library has but I loved the memories of my childhood anticipating the next. Now he had all the it. Such an event was the Book Blogger purchased new DVDs, gotten a good deal years spent in an old Carnegie Library in time in the world. Richard was not a de- Convention, which took place the day after on large-print books and so forth. We up- Anaheim, California. Slowly, slowly he was monstrative person. His quiet observations BEA ended. Book blogging has become dated our legal self-help tomes with a deal reeling me in. Finally, he asked if I would kept us on target. His respect for even the a subculture whose members are mostly offered by Nolo Press, added new natural be willing to run for President of the Friends most unskilled but hardworking and eager women between 20 and 50 years old, often history titles of interest to our local folks, and take on this project. I was a little ap- volunteers kept everyone committed. known as “mommy bloggers” because they and taken advantage of a great sale at Four- prehensive but I was firmly hooked. are housewives who blog about romance Eyed Frog Books to add a couple of dozen The Perkins’ dream looked like some- inally, on November 5, 2004, the library novels, horror/vampire stories and paranor- brand new books to our collection, soon to thing I could throw myself into. I don’t was ready for our Grand Opening event. F mal novels. Many of them have hundreds appear on our shelves. It is one of the plea- know how Richard got my name or what There was speechifying by local politicians of followers on Twitter, and the result is that sures of our community to be able to sup- made him believe I could do this job but I and when it came to Richard’s place on the they have the power to establish new trends. port our local independent bookseller, who agreed to go for it and go for it I did. agenda, he began with a quick, firm state- And the publishing industry has started to has also done much to support the library. There followed a couple years of fre- ment. take them seriously. They receive review We are all trying to get good books into quent fundraising events, pleas to the public “I hate committees,” he said, loud and copies from publicists, and authors court the hands of our community. As a former for financial support, talks and presentations clear. There was a silence. “But never,” he them assiduously. bookstore owner myself, I feel that just as to various local service clubs, and grant continued, “have I worked with a committee At the Book Bloggers reception I met having a library is a basis of civilization, a applications, grant applications, grant ap- that was more totally collegial, congenial, many girls in their early twenties who local bookstore with folks who are in touch plications. At a certain point our fundrais- or effective as the committee that has led to already have hundreds of followers on with their community makes a community ing efforts had brought us to a dollar amount this completed project.” Twitter. As far as I could tell, I was the more livable. that matched, coincidentally, the price tag From Fionna I have learned that, even only person at the convention who doesn’t In the next month we will be putting out on the old Gillmore store. Again, Rich- though Richard had designed many build- tweet. All these 20-year-old bloggers form a display of new books, which will be added ard, pushed and prodded from the rear by ings and houses in our area, the library was a community that is replacing traditional to each month. You are invited to “check Fionna, mentioned that we might consider the one project of which he was most fond. book reviewers; they know each other, out” our new books, and to let us know buying the store. The idea was electric. One might call it a modest little library read each other’s blogs, and blog about the what you like and would like to see on our The location was perfect; the size was be- but, when measured against its need in the same books. So, in a paradoxical way, this shelves. yond what we could have built. The Friends community, its importance to the people of subculture is even more limited in its inter- board members were called to meet at the the community, it’s potential to be what any ests than the mainstream media. Though, building. Each of us wandered through, library needs to be for its patrons, this one in theory, the Internet is a space of infinite asking Richard a question here, making an soars. Thank you, Richard Perkins. Thank diversity, in practice many communities WRITE TO US observation there. We gathered at the front you for giving us a library we can all love reproduce the patterns that exist outside of the store and Stephen Kessler asked, now and into the future. cyberspace. The main difference between The RCR welcomes your letters. “What do we do now?” the new book bloggers and the old book Write to the Editor, RCR c/o I said that if we wanted to consider this reviewers is that the former don’t have any idea, I should call the meeting to order Pearl Watts served as president of Friends ICO, P.O. Box 1200, Gualala, literary “prejudices.” They are children of and open a discussion on it. I opened the of Coast Community Library from 2001 to CA 95445 or by email to pop culture and the mass media, and have meeting and Stephen immediately said, “I 2005. transferred their interests into the realm of [email protected]. move we purchase this building and offer books. Their electronic chatter will soon cover whatever is left of book reviewing. Page  The Redwood Coast Review Summer 2011 Books Adam & Eve & Ted & Alice Becky Button

Sex At Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of vested grains. Everything changed with the iting everyone from Darwin to Desmond Modern Sexuality dawn of agriculture, roughly 10,000 years Did you know that Morris and Jane Goodall, and deconstruct- by Christopher Ryan and Calcida Jethá ago, forever altering the landscape, society, ing the traditional perspective requires a Harper Collins (2010), 400 pages sex and relationships. As we shifted from among the matrilineal few too many chapters. The basic premise small bands of foragers, sharing communal is summed up early and then frequently resources and relying on “fierce egalitarian- Mosuo of Southwestern revisited throughout the next 300 pages; hat if everything you thought ism” as a means of survival, women’s roles China, the word Awu however, the writing is clever and entertain- you knew about sex was wrong? diminished and paternity became a prior- ing, and with chapter titles like “Who’s Your WWhile the mechanics haven’t ity. How else would a landowner pass on means both father and Daddies?” and “The Pervert’s Lament,” changed, according to Sex at Dawn: The his fields, his livestock and his livelihood? you can easily keep reading even when the Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality, Out come the chastity belts and the scarlet uncle? How about the content gets a bit redundant. Ryan and Jethá the evolutionary psychology behind our letters. fact that the human explore the animal kingdom and modern choices, our drives and our desires are in Ryan and Jethá emphasize, “To see tribal societies in great detail, so you may desperate need of a rewrite. If we are truly ourselves as we are, we must begin by penis is the longest find yourself full of sexual trivia that is sure designed as a monogamous species, why acknowledging that of all Earth’s creatures, to make you a hit at parties. Did you know do so many marriages end in divorce on the none is as urgently, creatively and constant- and thickest of any that among the matrilineal Mosuo of South- grounds of infidelity and why does the por- ly sexual as Homo sapiens.” They criticize primate’s? Fun stuff. western China, the word Awu means both nography industry rake in more money than most modern evolutionary psychologists father and uncle? How about the fact that all football, baseball and basketball fran- for “Flintstonizing” the past, projecting the human penis is the longest and thickest chises combined? If an exclusive lifelong modern values onto the peoples of prehis- of the need for sperm competition. Larger of any primate’s? Fun stuff. pair bond is the true path to fulfillment, why tory. The traditionally accepted view of the testicles produce more sperm, which makes While Sex at Dawn certainly gives the do so many people find it such a struggle to sexes portrays women as coy and reluc- all the difference when females are free reader a lot to think about, the book lacks a stay committed? tant sexual partners while men, having a with their favors and have the potential to definitive conclusion. Now that we’ve been Christopher Ryan and Calcida Jethá, a biological drive to spread their seed far and be inseminated by multiple males. Silver- told we aren’t designed for a lifetime of mo- psychologist and psychiatrist team, take on wide, should be forgiven their indiscretions. back gorillas, with their enormous body nogamy, what do we do about it? I wasn’t the standard narrative of human sexuality This theory fit perfectly with the Victorian- size and cloistered harem of females, have even sure I wanted to share the book with and turn the tables on the paradigm of boy era mentality that allowed gentlemen to puny testicles compared with the promiscu- my husband, lest he think I’m suggesting we meets girl, boy assesses girl’s reproduc- frequent whorehouses while proper ladies ous bonobos who frequently reenact scenes start trolling Craigslist for casual encoun- tive capacity while she rates his paternal were expected to “close their eyes and think from Behind the Green Door. Monogamous ters. Ultimately, Ryan and Jethá suggest resources, boy inseminates girl (and girl’s of England” when it came time to perform gibbons also come up lacking in the meat that the goal of their book is to open minds cousin, sister and roommate, if possible) their wifely duties. The common theories and potatoes department, as the males don’t and create dialogue, encouraging individual while girl faithfully raises the children from of evolutionary psychology have long have to worry about sperm competition. As couples to consider possibilities outside the their union with help from boy. Rather, the served to reinforce this double standard that humans, we fall securely onto the big-balled neat and tidy pair-bond box. Sometimes authors suggest that our ancestors were has plagued women for centuries, chafing end of the spectrum, slightly eclipsed by we can feel like square pegs awkwardly decidedly promiscuous and mate sharing female sexuality and offering a biological chimps and bonobos; but human testicles crammed into the perfectly round holes of was as common as sharing the meat from a pardon for men. The authors assert that in are more than mere groin ornaments, they monogamy, and that’s okay, we’re fighting mammoth hunt or the berries gathered in the cultures that accept the female sex drive tell a tale about how we mate. The con- an uphill battle against millennia of promis- forest. to be on par with the male’s, women often clusion the authors draw about our own cuous ancestors when we take our wedding Since the first humans foraged their way have as many if not more sexual partners promiscuous past is evident every time a vows. across the African landscape, less than 5 than their male counterparts. man takes a shower; our ancestors experi- percent of our existence has occurred in This brings us to testicles. Not just enced sperm competition and our bodies tell post-agricultural constraints; Sex at Dawn human testicles but Sex at Dawn sizes up the tale. Becky Button lives in Willits and appears in focuses on the 95 percent of human history gorilla gonads, bonobo balls and chimp Sex at Dawn is not without its shortcom- these pages for the first time. that came before we built fences and har- cojones as they offer a biological snapshot ings. Too much time is devoted to discred-

Some Recent Arrivals @ Coast Community Library

FICTION NONFICTION Ferguson, Niall. The house of Rothschild: YOUNG ADULT Barclay, Robert. If wishes were horses Borysenko, Joan. Fried: why you burn out the world’s banker, 1849-1999 • Fiction Bender, Aimee. The particular sadness and how to revive Goldsmith, Barbara. Obsessive genius: the Dessen, Sarah. What happened to goodbye of lemon cake Bourdain, Anthony. Medium raw: a bloody inner world of Marie Curie Forman, Gayle. Where she went Berg, Elizabeth. Once upon a time, there valentine to the world of food and the Hillerman, Tony. Seldom disappointed: a Goodman, Alison. Eona: the last Dragoneye was you people who cook memoir Houck, Colleen. Tiger’s curse Bradd, William. Notes from the emerald Breyer, Stephen G. Making our democracy Howell, Georgina. Gertrude Bell: queen of Revis, Beth. Across the universe triangle work: a judge’s view the desert, shaper of nations Rorby, Ginny. Lost in the river of grass Brown, Eleanor. The weird sisters Carver, Norman F. Japanese folkhouses Loving, Jerome. Marl Twain: the adven- Sepetys, Ruta. Between shades of gray Byers, Michael. Percival’s planet Challem, Jack. The food-mood solution: tures of Samuel L. Clemens Tanigawa, Nagaru. The melancholy of Egan, Jennifer. A visit from the goon all-natural ways to banish anxiety, Novak, Robert D. The prince of darkness: Haruhi Suzumiya squad depression, anger, stress, overeating, and 50 years reporting in Washington Franklin, Ariana. A murderous proces- alcohol and drug problems JUVENILE ITEMS sion Elster, Charles H. The big book of beastly BOOKS ON CD • Easy Books Frayn, Rebecca. Deceptions mispronunciations Cussler, Clive & Justin Scott. The spy Bardhan-Quallen, Sudipta. Chicks run Johansen, Iris. Eve Foer, Jonathan S. Eating animals Parker, Robert B. Painted ladies wild Kellerman, Jonathan. Mystery Gross, John, ed. Oxford book of parodies Patterson, James & Howard Roughan. Beaumont, Karen. No sleep for the Leon, Donna. A question of belief Heller, Peter. Kook: what surfing taught me Don’t blink sheep! Mankell, Henning. The man from about love, life, and catching the perfect Berg, Elizabeth. Once upon a time, there Kann, Victoria. Silverlicious Beijing wave was you London, Jonathan. I’m a truck driver Mitchell, David. The thousand autumns Hillenbrand, Laura. Unbroken: a World Sayre, April P. If you’re hoppy of Jacob De Zoet War II story of survival, resilience, and LARGE PRINT Willems, Mo. Hooray for Amanda & her Obreht, Téa. The tiger’s wife redemption Adams, Scott. The fluorescent light glistens alligator Shteyngart, Gary. Super sad true love Hoffman, David E. The dead hand: the off your head • Juvenile Fiction story untold story of the Cold War arms race Baldacci, David. The sixth man Angleberger, Tom. The strange case of Skibell, Joseph. A curable romantic and its dangerous legacy Connelly, Michael. The brass verdict Origami Yoda Silva, Daniel. The Rembrandt affair Jones, Robert T. Authentic small houses of Edgerton, Clyde. Lunch at the Piccadilly Beard, George. The adventures of Ook and White-Parks, Annette. Bridge work the twenties: illustrations and floor plans Gabaldon, Diana. Lord John and the pri- Gluk: Kung-fu cavemen from the future Katzinger, Jennifer. Flying apron’s gluten- vate matter Grisham, John. Theodore Boone, kid free & vegan baking book lawyer Klam, Julie. You had me at woof: how dogs DVDs Kinney, Jeff. Dairy of a wimpy kid: the taught me the secrets of happiness Capitalism: a love story ugly truth Library Hours Leland, John. Hip: the history Coast Poetry in the 70s & 80s: with Stephens, John. Emerald atlas Parker, Reny. Wildflowers of northern Devreaux Baker, Gordon Black, Sharon Wood, Don. Into the volcano: a graphic Monday 12 noon - 6 pm California’s wine country & North Coast Doubiago, & William Bradd novel Tuesday 10am - 6 pm ranges A history of European art: parts 1-5 • Juvenile Nonfiction Wednesday 10am - 8 pm Sandbeck, Ellen. Eat more dirt: diverting Jane Fonda prime time: Fit & strong Hines, Anna G. Peaceful pieces: poems Thursday 10am - 8 pm and instructive tips for growing and Pan’s labyrinth: El laberinto del fauno and quilts about peace Tupac: resurrection Lessem, Don. National Geographic kids Friday Closed tending an organic garden Shields, David. Reality hunger: a manifesto ultimate dinopedia Saturday 12 noon - 3 pm Viesturs, Ed. K2: life and death on the CDs Mack, Lorrie. Big babies, little babies world’s most dangerous mountain Celtic bagpipes Singer, Marilyn. Mirror mirror: a book Coast Community Library Genesis. Turn it on again: the hits of reversible verse is located at BIOGRAPHY McLachlan, Sarah. Surfacing 225 Main Street Ackerley, J.R. Hindoo holiday: an Indian Point Arena journal (707) 882-3114 Summer 2011 The Redwood Coast Review Page  solnit from page 1 out and make some of your own.” Each map of their two cities. But perhaps New York is burritos at least as mouthwatering as those in Infinite City focuses on a different aspect beyond her ken. in San Francisco. San Francisco and the Crisis of American of San Francisco and the Bay Area. The first To her credit, Solnit perceives her Page after page, trivia piles up. Herman Urbanism (2000), and River of Shadows: one provides the Indian names for geo- beloved San Francisco as a city of dualities Melville appears here, though he only spent Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological graphical locations such as “Olompali” and and contradictions—a Janus-faced metropo- a brief amount of time in SF. Lists of names Wild West (2003), which won the National “Olema.” The second map honors women lis that generates bipolar responses from de- go on and on—the names of jazz clubs on Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. For who have fought to protect the environ- spair to hope. In Hollow City she describes Fillmore Street, for example, as though more than a decade, she has massaged SF’s ment, such as Ellen Straus, the cofounder San Francisco as “the capital of the 21st the names themselves tell the story. (They history, culture and identity, and worked of the Marin Agricultural Trust. The third century,” and doesn’t mean the phrase to be don’t.) Then, too, overarching statements out most of the knots in her cosmology. map shows key San Francisco places in laudatory. Indeed, Solnit argues in Hollow can leave one feeling flabbergasted. “No Sometimes, too, she has even turned her Alfred Hitchcock’s 1957 film Vertigo, along City that San Francisco offers a preview two people live in the same city,” Solnit ideas inside out. with landmarks in the life of Eadweard of the ugly, corporate, capitalist future that writes of San Francisco. None? Moreover, Solnit has often been at her best as a Muybridge, the British-born photographer faces the nation. she insists that maps are superior to novels. writer when she’s not spewing facts but and one of the fathers of the cinema, who “A decade ago Los Angeles looked like “A map is a ticket to actual territory, while a rather waxing metaphorical, poetical and bounded in and out of The City from 1855 the future—urban decay, open warfare, seg- novel is only a ticket to emotion and imagi- lyrical, as for example in Hollow City to 1881. The maps themselves borrow regation, despair, injustice, and corruption,” nation,” she explains. If that’s the case, where she observes about herself and about from cinematic montage and bring together she writes. “But the new future looks like many of us will take War and Peace, Alice citizens of cities the world over: “For those things and people not frequently linked. in Wonderland or To the Lighthouse rather who spend years in a place, their own So, map 16, entitled “Death and Beauty,” than a map of San Francisco’s streets. autobiography becomes embedded so that shows where some of The City’s Monterey the place becomes a text they can read to Cypresses live and where 99 people died in ebecca Solnit has traveled a long remember themselves.” Infinite City takes 2009. Life and death, good and evil, dysto- Rway on the back of San Francisco’s the poetry and lyricism of Hollow City to pia and utopia—these stark contrasts are at fabulous hills and radiant valleys. She has new dimensions. Its 22 maps make SF more the heart of the book. also retained much of the youthful exuber- tangible and more real than it is in Hollow In Infinite City Solnit mostly tells the ance she brought with her to The City when City, and also more whimsical and play- truth about San Francisco, or more precisely she arrived there as a young woman from ful, as befits a city that from 1928 to 1972 its truths—plural—though she doesn’t provincial Marin. It’s understandable and boasted a huge amusement park on the always tell the whole truth and nothing but laudable that she would want to defend the Pacific known as Playland, which provides the truth. In her eagerness to define San place. For decades, New Yorkers arrogantly the final backdrop for Orson Welles’s 1947 Francisco as the quintessential American kicked sand in the face of San Franciscans. film noir classic, Lady from Shanghai. place she sometimes blows up certain Solnit arrived on the scene in the nick of Solnit’s new book has more maps by far aspects of the city and tones down others, time to rescue The City and show the world than any other book she’s written, though which means that her writing is provocative on that it’s far more than a crazy place on the it’s not the first to feature maps. It isn’t if not always truly convincing when one brink of a continent where crazy people live

the first work, either, that she’s written in stops to think about it. So, for example, she on an existential edge. In fact, as she has

t ng i rr He im collaboration with others, though it has insists that SF was “the center of global hip- J clearly shown in her work, it’s inhabited by more artists, photographers, researchers piedom.” All too conveniently she ignores Rebecca Solnit pioneering bohemians, idealistic working- and cartographers than any other book she’s New York’s Lower East Side, home to Allen class organizers and ardent environmental- published. At a recent literary event in San Ginsberg, Abbie Hoffman, John Lennon, San Francisco: a frenzy of financial specula- ists. Two cheers for San Francisco!! Francisco she told the audience, “I have a Yoko Ono and tens of thousands of runaway tions, covert coercions, overt erasures . . . Of course, San Francisco isn’t the only confession. This is not my book.” And in kids—and grownups too—who poured into the despair of unemployment replaced by place that Solnit has written about. Ice- many ways that’s true. The book’s designer, the ranks of the counterculture, swelled the numbness of incessant work hours and land, New Orleans and Detroit are also Lia Tjandra, deserves an award for the ar- communes, launched rock bands like the the anxiety of destabilized jobs, homes and significant places in her world, but San rangement of words and images, and for the Fugs, and wiled into existence anarchist neighborhoods.” Sounds like hell, and it Francisco has occupied an immense space look and feel of Infinite City. groups like the “Motherfuckers.” makes sense that Solnit wouldn’t want to in her memory and her imagination, and Thirty collaborators worked on the book linger there. her work has begun to sound like an echo with Tjandra and Solnit. Tall and slim —12 ther American cities shrink when Solnit Infinite City is more hopeful than Hollow chamber. Surely it’s time to move on; surely by 7 inches—it’s the most eye-catching Ocompares them to SF, while her own City and more delightful and delicious, she knows that Infinite City is not only her and visually seductive of all her works, and home territory grows bigger and increas- too, and The City is a more mouthwatering Valentine, but also her swan song to San a reflection of the reality that more than ingly important. New York is merely a place. Still, Solnit doesn’t allow herself to Francisco. When she decides to write about ever before readers, editors and publishers tiny dot somewhere in the distance on her take delight in San Francisco’s “exquisite Los Angeles, New York, Cairo or Paris—a cry out for books with colorful images and invisible map of the USA. Granted, Solnit upscale food” and “gourmet markets.” city she’s always adored—or elsewhere, she bold pictures, not just text. Infinite City is offers a telling quotation from The New She lauds the city’s “popular and radical might put a copy of Baudrillard’s work in a beautifully rendered version of one of York Times about the demographics of San foodscape,” and claims that “the burrito her backpack, and then wander off the map, the ways that the book as a work of art and Franciscans; the youth population is appar- has flourished in San Francisco as nowhere which is precisely what she suggests readers as an artifact will probably be reinvented ently decreasing. She also describes New else,” and repeats the legend that the Pop- do in her lyrical 2005 book A Field Guide to and repackaged in the future: as a visually Yorkers as urbanites blind to the world of sicle was said to have been invented across Getting Lost. stunning collaboration between makers of nature around them. But she never casts her the Bay. There’s no food map here, though words, images, symbols and signs. eye directly on New York itself, and so New food has put SF on the map of the world. It’s the 22 color maps that really make York feels like the elephant in her book of The City’s food was too “boring” to include, this book distinctive. “If you like maps, go maps. Not to mention it, not even as a foil, she explains. She can be a snob of the Left Jonah Raskin is the author, most recently, of out and make some of your own,” Solnit seems perverse because San Franciscans and a prig of the urban underground. El Marijuanaland: Dispatches from an Ameri- tells audiences, in a parody of Wes Nisker’s and New Yorkers habitually tell rival tales Paso, Ciudad Juárez, and Los Angeles offer can War, and an RCR contributing editor. famous line, “If you don’t like the news, go Postmodern Romantic S U B S C R I B E Anna R. Mills If you live beyond the Redwood Coast and don’t get the Independent Coast

A Field Guide to Getting Lost the Seattle protests, global warming and Observer, now you can subscribe to The Redwood Coast Review and not miss by Rebecca Solnit nuclear power in Harper’s, Orion Magazine an issue of our award-winning mix of essays, reviews, poetry, fiction and Viking (2005), 206 pages and TomDispatch.com, and been arrested for graphic art. For $24 a year you will be guaranteed quarterly first-class de- civil disobedience against nuclear testing. irst, isn’t a field guide to getting lost Since A Field Guide to Getting Lost, she has livery of the RCR and at the same time support Coast Community Library a contradiction in terms? Field guides come out with an exploration of progres- in its ongoing operating expenses. Please use this coupon to subscribe Fhelp us with finding, not losing. sive power called Hope in the Dark: Untold or renew now. You won’t be disappointed. We use them to classify the unfamiliar, to Histories, Wild Possibilities, and after that, name a bush with leaves like giant hands, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary a long-legged beetle that strolls across Communities That Arise in Disaster, which the trail, a bird with a rattling call. They offers semi-utopian visions of cooperation Yes, I want to subscribe to The Redwood Coast Review. I am reassure us that the bewildering array of after crises like Hurricane Katrina. enclosing a check for $24 to Coast Community Library. natural phenomena has an underlying order. Solnit’s desire to speak truth to power Rebecca Solnit’s title, however, suggests we informs Field Guide in a broad sense: she might also need some guidance dissolving sees getting lost as a way to move away I am making an additional donation to the library in the these mental schemas. Can we catalogue from the frontier mythologies of white amount of $______. the various ways of getting lost as we might American history toward a more open catalogue songbirds? The paradox feels encounter with landscape. Yet Field Guide whimsical, mocking, alluring. Clearly, the is certainly a break from activism, a book Total enclosed $______book will hover between the urge to know not tethered to current events or defined by and the urge not to know, between rational- a political agenda. Solnit observes that the Name ______ity and mystery. word “lost” comes from “los,” “meaning the Who is Solnit to guide us, and what does disbanding of an army.” As a literary work, she mean by “lost”? An art critic and public this book is poised to last; it is stylistically Address ______intellectual, she made a name for herself exquisite and emotionally and intellectu- through an award-winning book about ally engrossing—a meandering journey that City, State, ZiP ______19th-century technologies and the experi- is at once personal and lyrically abstract, ence of time, River of Shadows: Eadweard a mosaic of American history, art and film Muybridge and the Technological Wild criticism, philosophy, natural history and West. Yet unlike many critics who gravitate Greek mythology. Copy or clip this coupon and send, with check or money order, to Coast toward esthetics and abstraction, she is also Community Library, PO Box 808, Point Arena, CA 95468. Thank You! a grassroots activist, as Google Images will testify many times over. She has covered See LOST page 10 Page 10 The Redwood Coast Review Summer 2011

ou might say that Solnit offers an Yoptimistic way to confront the global- ized, alienated world of the 21st century, a sort of “If God gives you lemons, make lemonade,” or “If the 21st century gets you lost, revel in it.” She may look down on self-indulgence and self-help, but she is interested in finding a way forward for the soul, and I, for one, am glad because mine is often bewildered. Solnit’s faith in mystery, renewal and transformation echoes Chris- tianity, Judaism, Buddhism and paganism. She was raised Jewish and sees some of the roots of her nomadism in the diaspora, in the tradition of the wandering Jew. The idea that desire cannot be satisfied and we must induce ourselves to return to the present mo- ment echoes Buddhism. She draws the story of “Turtle Man” from a talk she attended at the San Francisco Zen center. On a Christian note, she imagines that to get lost is also to be able to become someone else, to unfold like a butterfly. You have to be lost to be found, you have to give everything up to be

ye brought into the bosom of the world. Her a version of salvation often sounds distinctly

ry F Gary pagan. She quotes Jaime De Angulo, the “wild Spanish storyteller-anthropologist” who wrote about the Pit River Indians’ lost from page 9 tradition of wandering under “certain conditions of mental stress.” De Angulo concludes, “’When you have become In the middle of the first chapter, Solnit presents a mani- quite wild, then perhaps some of the wild things will come festo: “Never to get lost is not to live.” Getting lost is a kind Bodily hunger and hunger for to take a look at you, and one of them may perhaps take a of Zen rebirth: “to be lost is to be fully present, and to be beauty and a sense of home fancy to you . . . When this happens, the wandering is over fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty.” Solnit and the Indian becomes a shaman.” does not shy away from romanticizing this. She titles every inform this book as much as Solnit seems to share the sense that when you get lost, other chapter “The Blue of Distance,” and explains that you make yourself available to some power in the landscape blue “represents the spirit, the sky, and water, the immate- intellectual hunger. For Solnit, or the imagination. This power, embedded in the energy of rial and the remote, so that however tactile and close-up it it seems, these kinds of longing the physical world, can possess and transform. In her ac- is, it is always about distance and disembodiment.” This is count of the history of the Spaniard Cabeza de Vaca in the the tone of the book—grand, abstract, sensual, yearning and are inseparable. New World, Cabeza de Vaca and his companions wander inexorably aloof. around the continent and “seem to have become sacred be- Field Guide has no overarching plot, and we get pleas- This kind of engagement with the natural world remains a ings, these naked, relentless survivors whose journey had be- antly disoriented as we flit from one anecdote to the next. touchstone throughout. Solnit can appreciate the spectacle come a triumphal procession accompanied by three or four In one chapter, “Two Arrowheads,” we go from love of of a ruined hospital too, but her bread and butter consists of thousand locals.” By the time he met white people again, the desert to a love affair in the desert to desert animals to light, sky, water, ravens. She integrates lyric sensuality and Cabeza da Vaca “had gone about naked, shed his skin like the loneliness of writing, to serendipity, to a breakup, to philosophizing as if these modes belong together, as if West- a snake, had lost his greed, his fear, been stripped of almost Hitchcock’s film Vertigo, to hermit crabs’ vulnerability, to ern civilization had never tried to separate mind and body. everything a human being could lose and live, but he had nostalgia for San Francisco, to a story Solnit composed in Part of the joy of the book is in the vividness and learned several languages, he had become a healer, he had her head about a character from Vertigo who ascends Mount intimacy of the bits of memoir, but Solnit mistrusts the come to admire and identify with the Native nations among Whitney. The effect is kaleidoscopic. The ideas are dazzling- personal and cuts these short. She flirts with confession but whom he lived; he was not who he had been.” Solnit implies ly varied and yet curiously the same as if generated by one strenuously resists it. Of her affair with a desert hermit, she that the New World can still save us if we surrender. brilliant machine. They bubble up much like characters and says, “For a while it was forever, and then things started to As stark and lovely as I find Solnit’s creed of lostness, plot twists in One Hundred Years of Solitude. We might call fall apart. There isn’t a story to tell, because a relationship I have not adopted it as my own. The trouble is that I still this magical realism for the essay, but maybe there’s no need is a story you construct together and take up residence in, want to be found, or to find myself, or to find a home. for a fancy neologism. It was Montaigne who first skipped a story as sheltering as a house.” Yes, yes. I will squirrel Maybe I’m not mature enough to accept the modern condi- around like this in personal narrative, just as it was Mon- away this insight. Still, cause and effect were not suspended tion. I love to imagine Solnit driving around the Great Basin, taigne who bundled personal narrative with history, literature when things with the hermit went awry. She could explain a out in the desert, spreading her arms, then driving on. Every and philosophy. Montaigne wrote that the essay should move smidgen if she wanted. In the final chapter, she declares of summer I, too, head east from the Bay Area, over the Sierra, like a poem, by free association. Often, it is not logic that her childhood home, “Terrible things happened in that house and into the desert. Unlike her, when I get down into the guides each leap in A Field Guide, but something like the though not particularly unusual or interesting ones; suffice to desert at Mono Lake, I stop and turn back and wander within book’s unconscious, an obscure coherence that makes the say there’s a reason why therapists receive large hourly sums a small radius between desert and mountain, between the book whole as a poem can be whole. to listen to that kind of story.” Getting lost, for her, offers “a Yosemite peaks and the sagebrush plains. I aspire to belong reprieve from my own biography,” a vacation from the self to that area. ith a topic like the beauty of longing and loss, it is and its social relations. I like to be lost and found at once, to walk the line Wsurprising how rarely Solnit lapses into cliché. In She may be tired of her trauma narratives, but she has between the familiar and the unfamiliar. Last summer, I set one indulgence, she describes the artist Yves Klein’s death: piqued our curiosity. For my part, I admire her nerve as she off to take a cross-country shortcut between Highway 120 “Though he was tragically young, his life looks like a me- turns her back on the victim’s tell-all. Still, I feel a certain just outside Yosemite and the remains of the mining town teor, a shooting star, a complete trajectory across the sky, a disappointment, and not just because I’m curious. I also of Bennettville. I’d hiked the area for years and figured finished work of art.” Elsewhere, she avoids this kind of the- miss the intimacy of confession. Solnit doesn’t speak with it was impossible to lose sight of the mountains on either atrics. Her prose is as smooth and bare as polished stone. It warmth and frankness as if to a close friend. Even her pho- side. I didn’t bring a map. I skirted the side of a ridge past creates the feeling of waking from a dream and encountering tograph seems to look past us. I wonder how much Solnit’s some murky glacial tarns frequented by dragonflies. The the world, dazed and receptive. As Solnit walks by the Great authority as a cultural critic depends on this reserve. She ac- forest went on and on without a sign of the connecting trail. Salt Lake, she comes upon “a series of shallow indentations cepts that the personal can be philosophical, not to mention I hiked over the pine needles under the lodgepoles among where water had dried into salt crystals. One was a carpet political, and she uses examples from her own life. Still, she gooseberry bushes and an abandoned firepit or two. The for- of roses, one a heap of straws, one a field of snowflakes, all clearly doesn’t want to get mired or be dismissed as self-in- est opened, and I gasped. A pale green pond appeared. Five made of muddy salt, though when I tried to cut away a small dulgent. Virginia Woolf dealt with this problem in A Room of female ducks sailed over it, absurdly large on this tiniest cluster of the pale brown roses to take with me, they imme- One’s Own by fictionalizing her experiences within an essay. of lakes. I hadn’t thought there could be a body of water I diately became less beautiful.” What more familiar lyric im- Solnit deals with it by continuing to gaze past us, directing didn’t know in this forest. I felt blessed, wondering, nervous. age could you find than ephemeral roses? Precise, mundane our attention, too, away from the reader-writer relationship Right away, I loved the pond because it belonged to my land. words like “muddy,” “salt,” “brown,” “straw” show us the toward landscape, culture, existential quandaries. I loved it more because it was beyond what I had imagined. reality and the concreteness she holds dear. Much of the memoir in the book centers on road trips I think Solnit, too, dances between lostness and found- If Thoreau is the most cerebral of the philosopher-poets around the West, where she finds herself both “possessor of ness. She observes that “nomads have fixed circuits and and Whitman the most sensual, Rebecca Solnit belongs at an enchanted vastness and profoundly alienated.” Now there stable relationships to places,” and her own wandering the midpoint. She does not allow herself academic verbal is the sort of phrase that evokes something like the “mod- through the West is ritualized, repetitive. She doesn’t need tics, or excess verbiage, but neither does she shy away ern condition,” that summarizes modernism’s angst about to go to Antarctica; she gets lost in an America that she is from the syntactical complexity of acadmic writing. One the decline of traditional social structures, the alienation of coming increasingly to know but can never fully know. Her moment she can reflect, referring to the nature writer Gary industrialization, the demise of stable relationships to place. home territory, it seems, is simply vaster and more ambitious Nabhan, that “If sorrow and beauty are all tied up together, Solnit’s desire to get lost reminds us in its wistful, elegiac than mine, her spirals broader. Still, in order to lose herself then perhaps maturity brings with it not what Nabhan calls tone of Proust’s search for “lost time,” Virginia Woolf’s fas- time after time, she has to find herself in between. abstraction, but an aesthetic sense that partially redeems cination with wandering consciousness, or of Baudelaire’s The book culminates in the story of “Turtle Man,” a blind the losses time brings and finds beauty in the faraway.” It is idle flaneur strolling through Paris. Baudelaire says, “Get man who stops at each street corner and “just say[s] help un- no accident that the quote she falls in love with in the first drunk: on wine, poetry, or virtue, as you please, but get til someone [comes] along and [helps] him across the street.” chapter is from Plato: she shares his earnest seeker style of drunk!” Solnit might cry, “Get lost—in landscape, memory, Solnit implies that we too must keep moving, believe in the philosophizing, his orientation toward ultimate abstractions. history, or art, as you please, but get lost!” At the same time, abundance and generosity of the world because “only the Curiously, though, bodily hunger and hunger for beauty the book shares postmodernism’s obsession with unfulfilled continuation of abundance makes loss sustainable, makes it and a sense of home inform this book as much as intellec- desire, with signs that refer to signs and cannot connect us to natural.” This is not the hopefulness of an activist who sees tual hunger. For Solnit, it seems, these kinds of longing are real objects or to a God, with Derrida’s “difference.” Solnit, a way out of looming ecological and humanitarian disasters. inseparable. In the next paragraph after the sentence about however, sees getting lost not so much as the tragedy of our Yet it is a vision that I find deeply reassuring. As the title Nabhan, she jolts us into physicality. She returns to the walk existence but as a goal. Her tone reminds me of the oft-an- promised, Solnit has emerged as a guide, even if she offers on the shore of the Great Salt Lake and says of her decision thologized Romantic poems I read and reread as a teenager, only a serene confidence in the interdependence of lost and not to wade out to Antelope Island, “I can imagine another of the rapt mystery of Water de la Mare’s “The Listeners” found, the inevitability and beauty of their dance. version of that journey in which I stripped and swam, burn- or the epic promise of Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” which ing my back and bobbing like a cork, to the island, but I do dissolves into confusion and obscurity after just two stanzas. not know what I would have done upon arrival. And I’m She seems to share the Romantic belief that in surrender to not sure the island was meant to be arrived at, for up close mystery, we sense that the world is haunted by beauty and Anna Mills lives on the San Francisco Peninsula. its glowing gold would have dissolved into scrub and soil.” coherence.