The Redwood Coast

Volume 13, Number 2 Review Spring 2011 A Publication of Friends of Coast Community Library in Cooperation with the Independent Coast Observer

Pop Culture me for college. He believed in my talent somehow and understood, perhaps, why I might want to get away, although he couldn’t understand why I didn’t wait until after I’d graduated. Coming of age About that during the Depression, from a poor family, he hadn’t been able to go to college and to him a degree seemed almost like some Sexy Girl kind of Holy Grail. The evening before I left, my mother and I had supper together. We were sip- Jonah Raskin ping white wine I’d brought home for the occasion, and Mother was beginning to get wound up in her old stories, which un-of-the-mill novels—say, she did almost inevitably when she drank Charles Jackson’s Lost Weekend, wine. And almost inevitably she would RMickey Spillane’s Kiss Me Deadly somehow manage to segue into the story —make for more riveting movies than of my birth. First of all how—for the classic novels such as Moby-Dick and entire nine months—she wanted nothing Swann’s Way. Great novels have style, and to eat but bacon and watermelon. Then style gets in the way of directors cutting to the part about my actual birthing, how the cliffhanger and the big cinematic kiss. my oversized head had almost killed her. Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy “And at the worst part of the pain, when —The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2005) I just knew I was going to die and was The Girl Who Played With Fire (2006) almost afraid I wouldn’t, I felt a presence and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s above me and the entire room lit up with a Nest (2007)—is better on screen than golden light. And standing there over me on the page, though the hit movie hasn’t was the figure of a man, an Indian warrior. stopped readers from buying the book ‘Hold on, Christine, he’s coming,’ he told and reading it. The first two books are me. ‘It’s going to be all right. Sometimes in paperback now and on bestseller lists the great ones are hard to birth.’” around the country, though not currently I sat and squirmed and patiently in parts of the Bay Area. (At City Lights listened to this story for perhaps the Bookstore, Peter Maravelis said, “We’d twentieth time, somewhat less pained on rather turn over our real estate to Rebecca this occasion than on most of the others, Solnit’s new book than a pop thing.”) The when she told it in the presence of family third Larsson book won’t be a bestseller or friends. It seemed right, in a way, that I at City Lights, either, but it will soon be should have to be subjected to it one more available in paperback in all the chains time before I left. and in many libraries, too When she’d finished, she stubbed out The books sell the movies and the her cigarette without lighting up another, movies sell the books. Knopf recently Lepkoff Rebecca which was unusual for her, and looked published, after all the movies were out, through my eyes straight into my heart. a boxed set of all three novels along with Reaching across the table, she put her a third volume entitled On Stieg Larsson hand on mine. that includes emails between him and his The Physics of Walking “Please, Mikie, don’t go, “ she said, editors, but no revelations about his pri- using the name she’d called me all vate life. Of course, for the novels to sell through my childhood. “We need you well, and to go on selling, and for Larsson How I became a writer in New York here. You . . . just aren’t ready to go off to become a kind of cultural avatar, the like this.” Her great, hazely brown eyes movies had to be entertaining. Mike Tuggle were brimming with tears now and it The success of the films is due to was all I could do to keep from crying. the Swedish producers who slashed and With just that look and those few words it burned the novels to make them box-of- t was late September 1960 when gling to hold down a job for the first time seemed to me that she managed to express fice hits. In the first film, The Girl With I arrived in New York City on the in her life. My younger brother and sister all the sorrow and disappointment and the Dragon Tattoo, the two main charac- Greyhound, my portable Olivetti were still in high school. My mother, I hardship she had felt her entire life. But ters have sex on movie-time, and not on in one hand, raggedy suitcase in felt, was beginning to depend upon me if my resolve to leave had been wavering Larsson’s book-time. The movies are also the other, ready to take the city by to replace my dad as head of the house- at all, the sound of her calling me ‘Mikie’ more suspenseful, more action-packed, Istorm. Longing for the life of the writer hold, which was scary in several ways. I had settled it. and with clearer development of the major and desperate to get away from home, I’d wasn’t ready for this, to work full time, “I’m sorry, Mother, but I have to, I characters. Critics agree on those points, decided not to go back for my senior year which I had done all summer and which I can’t explain exactly why, just that I have though not on others. at Texas Christian University, where I’d feared was expected of me. I was a writer to find myself, in my own way.” Had I From England to the USA, they’ve held the undergraduate creative writing now and needed solitude and experience. been conscious enough and brave enough observed that no one reads Larsson’s scholarship and been the recipient of My dad had given me his blessing and and brutal enough to put it into words, I fiction for exactly the same reasons, and several little English department awards. promised to send me 35 dollars a week, might have told her that her terrific loneli- certainly not for exquisite style or estheti- It was time, I felt, to venture out on my which was what he’d intended to give ness and need at this time were suffocat- cally pleasing literary form in the way own. Getting experience in the world ing me. There was something I couldn’t of Henry James. Written in Swedish, the seemed far more important than a degree, quite articulate that was threatening to me Trilogy was translated into sturdy English which I could always pick up later on, I honestly believed in a personal way, besides my obvious by one “Reg Keeland” who turns out to if necessary. I wanted to be a writer in that my mother was fear of getting trapped into working full be a pseudonym of Steven Murray, an the larger, professional sense and live time and becoming the main support of award-winning translator born in Berkeley in the literary center where all the wires wrong. In my more our family. and a graduate of Cal State Hayward, and connected and reputations were made. And I honestly believed that my also known for his translation of Martin So I had quit my job at A. J. confidently deranged mother was wrong, that I was ready. In Andersen Nexo’s Danish classic, Pelle the Anderson’s Sporting Goods and moments I believed in my more confidently deranged moments Conqueror. Hardware, abandoned what I genuinely I believed in my talents completely, that I “Once a book translation is finally felt to be my responsibility at home, my talents completely, was destined to become a great writer, or printed, I sometimes can barely remember packed my suitcase with what I believed great something, as the Indian warrior had doing it,” Murray says. “But occasionally was absolutely necessary—two pair of that I was destined to suggested to her in her vision. I was ready a really good book will stay with me, like Levis, three shirts, one wool sweater, a to cross swords with Styron and Mailer, Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy.” corduroy sport coat, some underwear and become a great writer, and sometimes sacrifices had to be made Murray calls Larsson “a brilliant socks, one small edition of Webster’s or great something. in the name of Art. writer.” If so, he deserves credit for com- Unabridged, two black, lined notebooks, municating the brilliance. Larsson is, a folder of poems and another folder I was ready to cross y family could get along fine without indeed, brilliant, though it’s heady, not containing the beginning of my novel, a Mme. I’d come back someday a suc- heartfelt, a matter of thinking big thoughts few photos of my family, a copy of James swords with Styron cessful author and make it all up to them. about big ideas and translating them into Baldwin’s Another Country, toothbrush, and Mailer, and some- There wasn’t a doubt in my head that this big bestsellers. For all his artistic genius, safety razor, a bar of Palmolive soap was going to happen. I even had an inside however, Larsson never learned the art of and plenty of guilt—and caught the times sacrifices had to connection—the name and address of a structuring a book gracefully, and so the Greyhound going east. fairly well-known literary figure, Martha Millennium Trilogy sprawls everywhere. The need to get away from home had be made in the name Foley, who taught at Columbia and had But he did learn to shape his characters. been urgent. My dad had moved out two of Art. been a friend and teacher of John Graves, years before and my mother was strug-

See LARSSON page 4 See WALKING page 8 Page  The Redwood Coast Review Spring 2011 editor’s note F. A. Nettelbeck, Outlaw Poet Stephen Kessler

. A. Nettelbeck, who died Janu- a half-dozen or so texts by distinguished Like the music of Howlin’ Wolf or Albert ary 20 in Bend, Oregon, at age renegades like William S. Burroughs, Tom Ayler, the novels of Louis-Ferdinand Céline 60, is probably the most impor- Clark and Wanda Coleman, among others. or Hubert Selby Jr., the funky assemblages tant avant-garde poet you’ve Fred would photocopy a few hundred of of Ed Kienholz or Robert Rauschenberg, never heard of. Through his 23 these little poem-bombs and place them like Nettelbeck’s verse might at first puzzle or Fbooks and chapbooks, countless magazine evangelical propaganda in unlikely places repel, but you could, if you paid attention, (and more recently online) publications, like Laundromats and public rest rooms—a feel its soul and its peculiar beauty. Unsen- quite a few infamous readings, and for me guerrilla assault on a-literate complacency. timental yet sensitive as hell, his lines were personally a friendship and correspondence For nearly 40 years he published a steady a conduit for an unruly current of discontent spanning nearly four decades, Nettelbeck series of his own books from very small and chaos barely contained beneath the since 1970 established himself more than presses—books with titles like No Place surface of civil society. His alienation was anyone else I’ve known as a truly outside- Fast, Americruiser (remarkable notebook both intelligent and visceral, and his ear for the-law literatus, a man who, if not for of a cross-country journey by Greyhound), the tones of contemporary American speech poetry, very likely would have ended up in Hands on a Mirror, Bar Napkin Poems, Ev- impeccable. prison. His genius as a writer was to echo erything Written Exists, Drinking & Think- Because of his solid reputation and long or reflect back through a fractured idiom ing, Pesticide Drift, The Used Future, Don’t history in the avant-garde, Nettelbeck’s some of the deepest pathologies of our F. A. Nettelbeck, 1950-2011 Say a Word, Ecosystems Collapsing and papers have been collected for several years culture, and through anger and outrage and Happy Hour, handsome books in editions of now by the Ohio State University Library an irrepressible need to offer some cry of a few hundred epitomizing the best of low- in its archive of experimental literature. It’s defiance, to create a formally meticulous, Nettelbeck’s writings budget independent publishing. As some a relief to know that, disreputable though visually musical, highly personal yet anti- are a vivid if not a of these titles suggest, Fred was a serious he may have been to the tastemakers, his lyrical poetry. drinker—a habit or genetic disorder inher- documents will be saved for any future Aggressively urban, angular as the very pretty picture of ited from his abusive alcoholic father—and scholars or publishers who may eventually cacophonous media din we live in, often while he was sometimes violence-prone wish to unearth and possibly reissue his obscene, occasionally sexy and tender, ruth- our world, and testi- (fueled by the rage he felt at the way things works. More than an intensely personal lessly perceptive, precise in its indictments, mony to the toughness are and the hand he’d been dealt), he record of a life lived on the edge and in full of combative energy like the bar-fighter managed to channel much of his urge for service of the word, Nettelbeck’s writings he was, Nettelbeck’s poetry is not fit for and wit of a human destruction into verbally devastating works are a vivid if not a very pretty picture of our most mainstream tastes, and that was fine of literature. His formal experimentation world, and testimony to the toughness and with him. But for those readers to whom being determined to sometimes extended to readings, like the wit of a human being determined to survive it spoke with electrifying vividness—co- survive and even thrive one I witnessed at a Santa Cruz restaurant and even thrive under the most unforgiving gnoscenti of the poetry underground and where he set up a half dozen tape recorders conditions. more lately many of the younger rebels of under the most unfor- with his and other voices and cranked up the the Internet—his voice resonates with great giving conditions. volume until the scandalized host, respond- t the end he was brought down not by authority and authenticity and is a bracing ing to complaints from the adjacent dining Ahis liver, as I’d expected, but by a spinal antidote to the “well-crafted” workshop room, literally pulled the plugs. infection that surgery could not repair. He poem and to the cerebral obscurities of Oregon, he was organizing swap meets and When we read together in Palo Alto a was left paralyzed but clearheaded enough some of the more refined postmodernists. supporting a family of five on virtually no few years ago, he was so pornographically to ask to be taken off life support, a decision I first discovered Nettelbeck in Santa visible income. aggressive toward the audience—not my that seemed to me both reasonable and cou- Cruz in the mid-1970s when he was Though Nettelbeck was nothing like preferred strategy for winning readers—that rageous. He died on the 50th anniversary of publishing poems in little magazines and me—quite the opposite in most ways—and we lost a few customers before my turn at JFK’s inaugural address. Fred never asked working as a janitor at San Lorenzo Val- his poetics miles from my own, I recognized the mike. Last time I saw him, at a reading what he could do for his country, but he ley High. I’m pretty sure he had himself something real and forceful and highly a couple of years ago in Santa Cruz, he was sometimes wondered aloud what his country finished high school, but he had no use skilled and inspired in his writing, and so drunk and so obnoxiously uncool and had done to him and other similar hard-luck, for higher education and had lived by his by 1979 I had the privilege of publishing, out of control that I fled the scene as soon sub-working-class, godforsaken, seemingly wits since leaving LA not long before. He under my Alcatraz Editions imprint, what as possible. I couldn’t abide that kind of good-for-nothing citizens—the kind one was the kind of hustling entrepreneur who many still consider his magnum opus, the behavior—by now it is so passé and cliché, sees on the streets of any American city, and would dive into Goodwill boxes, appropri- epic poem Bug Death. Only 500 copies of no longer amusing nor the sign of some Bu- in poverty-stricken parts of the countryside, ate whatever merchandise he could use and Bug Death were ever printed (up to now, kowskioid or Kerouackian genius. Alcohol- too. sell it that weekend at the flea market. It’s anyway) but I and some others remain ism may be an illness, but so what. “Not much news here, kind of hitting the hard to figure out how he made that kind convinced that it’s one of the key poetic Yet within a matter of weeks our cor- wall,” he wrote to me in a fairly typical let- of improvisational lifestyle work for some documents of our time, a Waste Land or respondence resumed as if nothing had hap- ter dated June 4, 2008, shortly after Obama 40 years, but even recently, out in central Watts Towers that collects and recombines pened. He would report with dry stoicism had clinched the Democratic presidential fragments of ruins into a soaring testimony on the struggle to get through the winter in nomination. “The flea market is dead, no of societal breakdown and human suffering his trailer in the boondocks with his fam- one has money, gas is $4.50 a gal. Blah and creative transformation. ily, and I would send whatever news I had blah, everything is fucked up. I’m too old The Redwood Coast along with selected clips from The New York to get a job, if there was any. Can’t even red, as Nettelbeck was known to his Times, and we would exchange whatever sell weed anymore. Too many of these Ffriends, was a loyal comrade and a no- new books we were bringing out. It was a ‘medical marijuana’ growers now. So I sit Review nonsense partner in conversation, but I can’t strange friendship, in some way purely “lit- waiting for ‘change’ and ‘hope’ to set us all say he was easy to get along with. Born erary” except that Fred was among the least free. It’s not even summer-like here yet, I Stephen Kessler in Chicago in 1950, he came to LA with literary—though most accomplished—of got a fire going this morning! A long, long Editor his family as a boy and grew up in Ingle- my writer friends. Between our common winter. And that’s about it. Kids are doing wood, gravitating to the bohemian shores Southern California backgrounds (though good. So that’s all that matters. I don’t hear Barbara L. Baer of Hermosa Beach and to the sun-baked from very different parts of the LA basin), from anyone in the poetry world…. Maybe Daniel Barth streets of Watts for his cultural education. our respective efforts as small publishers I’ll get picked for the vice president spot, Daniela Hurezanu At 20, during what’s now called “the mimeo and our highly distinct yet parallel paths as I’ll keep the phone lines open…. I ain’t Jonah Raskin revolution,” when hundreds of little jour- poets, somehow we sustained a strong con- quite beaten yet.” Contributing Editors nals were springing up across the United nection across the years. I’ll miss those letters. States, he started his own magazine, Throb, Linda Bennett What I saw in him, beyond the belliger- which featured writings by and interviews Production Director ent drunk, was an artistic brilliance and with such then low-on-the-totem-pole and drive to create that nothing could stop. I Stephen Kessler’s most recent book (as edi- under-the-radar bards as Charles Bukowski, The Redwood Coast Review is published found a lot of his writing to be too harsh tor and principal translator) is The Sonnets quarterly (January, April, July and October) Gerald Locklin and Susan Fromberg Schaef- and hardboiled and vulgar for my taste, but by Jorge Luis Borges. A slightly different by Friends of Coast Community Library in fer. In the later years of his career as a it was also powerful, unique and honest, version of this essay first appeared online at cooperation with the Independent Coast publisher he put out a series of tiny folded formally inventive and tight and true to his news.santacruz.com. For more about F. A. Observer. The opinions expressed in these pamphlets called This Is Important with experience, so I couldn’t escape its integrity. Nettelbeck, visit www.fanettelbeck.com. pages are those of the individual writers and do not necessarily reflect the views ofF oCCL, the ICO or the advertisers. Contents copyright © 2011 The Redwood Coast Review. All rights readers’ letters revert to authors and artists on publication. We welcome your submissions. Please Art is alive and so is the RCR (but gray is not a color) send essays, reviews, fiction, poetry and letters to the Editor, The Redwood Coast Review, c/o ICO, I wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed like turquoise and forest green. But what piece on art. I wanted to be a curator when PO Box 1200, Gualala, CA 95445. Manuscripts the latest RCR [Winter 2011]—one of my a lovely, sensual piece! What a delight to I was a young college student but knew it should be typed, double-spaced, with the favorite issues . . . I particularly enjoyed read! What gorgeous richness of descrip- wouldn’t be possible. I have a vast collec- author’s name, address, phone and email at the top of the first page. Postal mail only. A your editorial [“Museum Mysteries”] and tion! And then, of course, dear Herbert tion of art books and three volumes of van self-addressed, stamped envelope is required Rebecca Taksel’s essay [“Scheming in Kohl’s theme-rhyming “My Blue Heron.” Gogh’s letters. And I just returned from for our reply. Color”], even though I disagreed with ele- Really a lovely issue. Like Rain itself, on an exhibit of Treasures from the Forbid- On the Web: stephenkessler.com/rcr.html ments of both. How provocative of you the January day I received it, it brought den City, the first time in 300 years it was Subscription information: See page 9. to call museums “graveyards” in your first color alive where there had only been gray. allowed to be seen, and outside of China. It Friends of Coast Community Library is a sentence! They aren’t! Art is alive! They made me reflect on what the Emperor Quin- nonprofit, tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization. are houses of living art. Clearly, Rain is Carolyn Tipton long wrote about harmony and longevity. Tax-deductible donations may be sent to living art if it can move you as you describe. Berkeley One of the pieces was made of wood from a Coast Community Library, PO Box 808, Point How could we feel so alive and touched and thousand-year-old plum tree and the flowers Arena, CA 95468. The library is located at inspired if museums were graveyards, and 225 Main Street in Point Arena. Telephone Art is our eternity made of jade. That is our eternity. 707.882.3114. paintings tombstones? We would not; we Thank you for your support! would be left cold. And Taksel raved about Thank you for sending me a copy of The Marguerite Bouvard colors I dislike, like gray (a non-color in my Redwood Coast Review. I loved reading Wellesley, Massachusetts book) and gave short shrift to colors I love, it, especially “My Blue Heron,” and your Spring 2011 The Redwood Coast Review Page  books The Collector Daniel Barth

Alan Lomax: The Man Who Recorded the World For the most part Szwed employs a straight chronologi- Zwed’s sympathy for his subject is obvious. He knew by John Szwed cal method. This helps the narrative maintain its momen- Lomax and worked with him at times. But his flaws are Viking (2010), 438 pages tum. The sections on the 1930s and 1940s are especially presented along with his achievements. By the 1960s he fascinating, the heady cultural and political brew of those probably knew more about folk music than anyone else times convincingly evoked. Lomax’s politics were progres- alive, but could be intolerant and dismissive of those who n early scene in the movie Cadillac Records is sive and he lived primarily in New York and Washington, did not bow to his expertise. He might well have been the set in rural Mississippi. A white man with re- DC. This brought him into contact with many like-minded model for Professor Irwin Corey’s World’s Foremost Au- cording equipment in the trunk of his car backs people in the arts, show business and politics. His friends thority or Bullwinkle’s Mr. Know-It-All. His single-minded up to a sharecropper’s shack and records a black and colleagues included filmmaker Nick Ray, anthropolo- and self-assured ways inevitably made him enemies. Szwed man singing and playing guitar. The singer is gist Margaret Mead and writers Archibald MacLeish, Arthur writes: “Alan knew too much, had done too much, had been Anamed McKinley Morganfield. He came to be known as Miller and Langston Hughes. His activities also brought there before anyone else, and was too hot for the cool eight- Muddy Waters. The man doing the recording is Alan Lomax. him to the attention of the FBI, which kept a file on him for ies. At one of the annual folklore meetings, someone printed The year was 1941 and Lomax, in his capacity as assis- almost thirty years, to no great purpose, other than to record up buttons that showed his picture with a bar across it, the tant in charge of the Archives of American Folk Song for the observations like: “ornery”; “Bohemian”; “single-mind- universal sign of ‘no’.” Library of Congress, was on a collecting trip. Born in Aus- edly devoted to folk music”; and “known to associate with a Some of this animosity resulted in misperceptions and tin, Texas in 1915, Lomax had been doing this kind of work Negro by the name of Lead Belly.” outright lies, which Szwed does his best to dispel: that since 1932, when he began accompanying his father, John Like a lot of creative people, Lomax lived a life filled Lomax was patronizing and racist; that he cheated Ledbetter Lomax, into prisons, work camps and other out-of-the-way with contradictions. He disdained an advanced academic and others in music contracts; that he was intolerant of rock places in the rural South. Prior to discovering Waters, he had and roll and other modern musical been instrumental in recording and promoting Huddie Led- trends. The evidence suggests that better (Lead Belly), Woody Guthrie, Burl Ives, Pete Seeger, Lomax was not racist, that he pio- Jelly Roll Morton and many others. He had collaborated with Carl Sandburg, traveled and collected folklore with Zora Neale Hurston, and performed songs for the Roosevelts Lomax’s relentless at the White House. energy and ambi- Lomax’s long and varied career is chronicled by John Szwed in his new biography, Alan Lomax: The Man Who tious plans drew Recorded the World. “His enthusiasm was boundless and seemed to grow with age,” writes Zwed. “His drive to cel- some people in and ebrate life in all its diversity and see, hear and taste every- drove others crazy. thing was astonishing.” Zwed, a professor of music and jazz studies at Columbia Yet his ambition University, and author of biographies of Sun Ra and Miles Davis, does a very capable job of capturing Lomax’s enthu- was not for person- siasms and appetites. In telling the story of Lomax’s long al fame or fortune. career, from the 1930s into the 1990s, this book serves as a pretty fair social history of the 20th century. Szwed believes His desire was to that Lomax had a good deal to do with shaping the culture of that century: “He was arguably one of the most influential fulfill a very high Americans of the twentieth century, a man who changed standard of profes- not only how everyone listened to music but even how they viewed America.” sional and artistic achievement.

neered in making sure that folk artists received payment, and that he had an Happy Hour appreciation for almost all genres of the broken neon music.

sentence by its Bernard Hoffman Lomax was determined to develop power of suggestion Alan Lomax (left) with Jerome Weisner outside the Library of Congress, 1941 a unified theory of music, dance and makes those bald culture, for which he used terms like tires screech before degree, yet associated with Mead, Claude Levi-Strauss and “cantometrics” and “choreometrics.” Szwed devotes some the heart does for other prominent academics. He criticized American folklor- space to these theories, which may have been better as- every son of Hank ists and ethnomusicologists, yet attended their conferences signed to an appendix. The book loses some of its focus and when there is all that and sought acceptance as a colleague. A patriotic American chronological flow. Happily, this doesn’t go on too long and waitress ass inside who worked for the Library of Congress and the Office of we’re soon back to the good stuff—Bob Dylan at the 1965 where this bulbous War Information, he left the country for most of the 1950s, Newport Folk Festival, where Lomax did not try to unplug nosed Indian is at least partly because of concern at being branded a com- him, but did object to the volume. According to Szwed, early endlessly talking munist. He devoted himself to developing a scholarly theory on, “. . . he admired Dylan’s work, and even had no objec- about how it was of music and culture, yet at the same time hired an agent tions to his becoming a rock singer. In fact, he said that he before you quit to help him place radio, tv, recording and film projects. saw in Dylan’s music what he saw in the best rock and roll: buying him drinks The one constant was his fascination with the music of all a conscience. . . Later Alan would say that Dylan wanted to in a storied world peoples and places, and his desire to record and catalog as create a folk music for the urban middle class, which wasn’t of the guitar strings much of it as possible. a bad idea, but just seemed boring to him.” strung tight within In areas that have come to be known as multiculturalism The book includes an index, which is useful, and plentiful his broken radio and world music, Lomax was way ahead of his time. Besides notes for the more ethnomusicologically inclined. Unfortu- that he still carries the Mississippi delta country, he traveled and recorded in nately it lacks photographs, other than one front piece photo around like the name the mountains of Kentucky, the sea islands of Georgia, and of Lomax, and though many books and recordings are noted, of a woman that has the woods of Maine and Michigan. During his years away there is no bibliography, discography or filmography, an long since lost any from the States he was based primarily in London, but took oversight that is hard to comprehend. Readers are referred correlating face recording trips to Ireland, Scotland, Spain, France and Italy. instead to a web page. Maybe this is the publisher’s way He also produced radio shows for the BBC and formed a of cutting costs, or a simple admission of the dominance of skiffle group. electronic media, but for my money—$30 hardcover—the And in Closing book should have included all of the above. omax’s relentless energy and ambitious plans drew some Throughout his long and remarkable career Lomax I remember 1959 walking down Pier Lpeople in and drove others crazy. Yet his ambition does mostly lived a hand-to-mouth existence, surviving on grants, Avenue in Hermosa Beach hand in not seem to have been for personal fame or fortune. He was advances and royalties, his reach always exceeding his hand with my mother passing a coffee driven, no doubt, but his desire was to fulfill a very high grasp, his brain always overflowing with projects and plans, house with this huge sign that said personal standard of professional and artistic achievement. and his living space overflowing with books, records, tapes The Insomniac on it in jagged letters Szwed describes a typical scenario: and manuscripts. He remained active until 1995, and died with abstract art on the sidewalk and “The fieldwork and filming for The American Patchwork in 2002, leaving a mountainous archive. Among his lasting how mesmeric all these people sitting out films funded by the National Endowment for the Arts would contributions are the 30-album Columbia World Library of front were but then I can also remember preoccupy him for the next few years. In 1983 alone he was Folk and Primitive Music, the collections Folk Song USA much later almost ten years just one shooting film in Tucson, rural Georgia, Kentucky, Louisi- and Folksongs of North America, the book The Land Where block up the same street I was there ana, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, Williamsburg in the Blues Began, the film Devil Got My Woman, the Rounder in the Either/Or Bookstore and lost it Brooklyn, and the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washing- Records Alan Lomax collection, the American Folklife high on the poems that were all inside ton. Alan had enough money for the five one-hour films he Center Alan Lomax Collection at the Library of Congress, these what are nowadays quite rare had planned, but he had shot enough footage in a number of and the Association for Cultural Equity, which he founded and expensive small press collectibles places that he also hoped to make several more: The Harp in 1983 and which is currently administered by his daughter, but at the time just publications I held of a Thousand Strings, on shape-note singers in Georgia and Anna Lomax Wood. in my hands in the purest of light Alabama, with comparisons to black Sacred Harp singers in It may be going a bit far to say that Szwed has rescued the Carolinas, long-meter singing among Baptists in Ken- Alan Lomax from obscurity. But certainly this book docu- —F. A. Nettelbeck tucky, psalm singing in the Hebrides, and Holiness spirituals ments and brings to a wider audience a life and a body of in the Tennessee mountains; the stories and songs of the work deserving of continued attention. Papago, Mountain Apache, and Yaqui Indians and Mexican Poems in this issue by F. A. Nettelbeck are from Americans in Desert Folk: The Most Civilized Americans; Happy Hour (Four Minutes to Midnight), reprinted and Festa Italiana, a comparative study of the Giglio festi- Daniel Barth is a poet, critic, cultural organizer, teacher with permission of the publisher. val, the feast of Saint Paulinus, in Neopolitan communities and RCR contributing editor residing in greater Ukiah. in Italy and the United States.” Page  The Redwood Coast Review Spring 2011 larsson from page 1

Mikael Blomkvist is the slender investi- new. If you also want to read the novels, of gative reporter at Millennium, a muckrak- course, read them, but don’t expect Herman ing magazine, who is separated from wife Melville, Marcel Proust or Charles Dickens. and daughter. Lisbeth Salander is the queer A Proustian or Dickensian experience Redlining the Fossil computer hacker spawned of a murderous probably isn’t what readers all over the father and an abused mother. For a long world seek when they hunker down with the Three million time, she and Mikael move along paral- Millennium Trilogy. Perhaps what they want different varieties lel tracks that don’t seem like they’ll ever is a quick read. Perhaps they’re not looking of seeds from meet. Both characters sit at computers, send for real depth of feeling or for memorable around the world email, and do research, which doesn’t make phrases like Melville’s “Call me Ishmael” or are locked away in a for companionship or riveting drama. Still, Proust’s “For a long time I used to go to bed doomsday vault and the novel’s explosive moments don’t work early.” Instead of poetic prose, readers get you don’t have the key. effectively without the drabber moments. a kind of tabloid sexual charge. The trilogy The tempo of the book picks up precisely offers the pleasures and pains of pulp fiction when the characters log off their comput- with an aristocratic underpinning; Raymond lood lcohol ers. Then, bullets fly, blood flows, the body Chandler’s Los Angeles angels and devils B A count rises, and human bodies become from The Big Sleep, and Roman Polanski’s the thread of these weapons and toys. insidiously corrupt characters from China- drunken cities I wish Larsson had cut passages, and had town, all shipped off to Sweden. towns where the streamlined his story. I know I don’t feel the Of course, its more than just sexy char- dream is over same about Melville, who took chapters to acters that make the books popular. The and another has bring the white whale, the main character, Millennium Trilogy tells us what we want just begun in on the stage of Moby-Dick, and then piled to hear and yet are afraid of hearing: that the brotherhood Stieg Larsson up lore about the whaling industry. In the we live in ominously anxious times and of the insane age of instant text messaging, I’m more that the future seems continually shifting. in a handful of impatient with plots that meander. Larsson Lisbeth is tomorrow’s Larsson’s novels are products of an age in change under gets away with meandering because he’s an which governments come and go, politicians an oblique sun amateur and, like all amateurs, he loves to headline about rape, are shot, and the media devours it all and down the tracks do what he does, whether it’s meandering or violence, and the psy- spits it out in movies and books such as the of chromium where revving up the reader’s adrenaline. His love Millennium Trilogy. my grandfather’s of writing is obvious, even in the quirky chological and physical I found it fitting that Wikileaks founder brains are splattered Prologue to The Girl With the Dragon Julian Assange was arrested and jailed dreaming of lost Tattoo, in which he writes delicately about abuse against women. in Sweden on charges of rape, or at least Chicago because flowers, without once introducing a corpse unprotected sex, which is Lisbeth’s and the suburbs are or a sleuth—the essentials of crime fiction. sex with almost every woman he’s attracted Mikael’s kind of sex. When she tells him, crumbling next to By the time the trilogy wraps up the to, including Lisbeth. In fact, it’s Lisbeth “I want to have sex with you,” he says, “I the yellow dandelion loose ends in volume three, it has re-created who initiates sex between them, and, when don’t have any condoms.” She fires back, with our hearts in the noir novel, the political thriller and the they do go to bed, she’s on top and clearly “Screw it.” a boxcar while I detective story. Like Mikael, who reads Sara in control. It’s a near-perfect heterosexual That sense of screwing a lover, getting shatter this empty Paretsky and Sue Grafton, Larsson read and male fantasy. screwed by the system, and, at the same bottle against the sky studied detective fiction. From it, he learned Sexy, sexual and yet not sexist, Mikael is time, trying to screw it, is at the heart of the buttons to push to hook readers. In the perhaps the only redeemable male charac- Larsson’s sexual politics. The Millennium trilogy, he pushes all the buttons simulta- ter in a book in which most of the men are Trilogy captures the feelings of our skewed, neously—sex, love, violence, crime and drug-dealing bikers, sinister cops, corrupt screwed, unsentimental world. Larsson oem on y power—and created a perfect publishing politicians, unethical bankers and ex-Nazis. shakes us and wakes us to the horrid and P M storm. It’s a feminist’s all-star lineup of patriarchal very human things that human beings do to aughter s th Paretsky and Grafton would probably villains. Larsson certainly created loathsome one another. In that sense, his characters are D ’ 9 applaud what he’s done, though they might characters. I grew to loathe them, and to reminiscent of the characters in Dickens, irthday also scold him. A maximalist and not a feel gratified when Mikael and Lisbeth take and at times even reminiscent of Dickens’s B minimalist, he digresses. But there is much sense of the grotesque. The Millennium Tril- up the pen and the sword, and the gun and barbecuing in the snow to like in digressions that offer news and the knife, to wreak a little havoc of their ogy isn’t Dickens, or Dickensian, of course, information about a variety of topics, from but it offers readers the kind of emotional with Hannah Montana own. blasting out the open journalism and meth smuggling in Europe to I saw the movie version of The Girl With satisfaction once provided by Dickens’s the appeal of fascism in the upper classes. books, and the classics of 19th-century front door this is the life the Dragon Tattoo, and was told that the baby girl make no mistake novel was better—and that it was “Dick- literature. or years, critics and reviewers have Come to think of it, maybe the tril- it doesn’t get any better ensian.” Was there really a contemporary than this with hope making Fpuzzled over Larsson’s colorful life. Charles Dickens, I wondered, and could the ogy does have an immortal line, after all: After all, he was a Swedish communist and “Screw it.” a comeback and the root novel be superior to the movie? From my beer ice cold your smile a working journalist with a longtime lover perspective, there’s little room for argument. to whom he was not married. In 2004 at is all I need to obliterate If you have a choice between reading and time yet to come the age of 50, he died of a heart attack in watching, watch the movie. The acting is Jonah Raskin is an RCR contributing editor Stockholm. Mysteries about the man and his spare and yet explosive. A sense of paranoia and the author of The Mythology of Impe- books continue, now, years after his death: and claustrophobia takes over and there’s rialism: A Revolutionary Critique of British whether or not he had help writing them; enough detail on the screen to see the Literature and Society in the Modern Age, —F. A. Nettelbeck whether he wrote more novels that are still movies more than once, and see something among other books. on his computer; and whether we can look forward to more Stieg Larsson, and more Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist. Mikael is appealing as the underdog On Fairy tales & antimatter reporter trying to clear his name, and also because he genuinely cares about Lisbeth. But as a character, he can’t really compete Once there was and was not with her tattoos, bisexuality and identity as a daughter of truly dark machinations that make her a fictional character worthy of t’s April and yet I’m still making a antimatter is not a looking-glass world, but woods with a bed, a teakettle and a table, to the 21st-century. Steely and yet romantic, fire to keep warm. I’ve been read- an antiworld with no presence unless we put our house in order and live happily ever she’s an innocent with wisdom beyond her Iing fairy tales by a Russian woman disturb its unearthly calm. after. 24 years. At last, we have a woman with a named Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, whose This antiworld has no trees or birds or Last night I dreamed of a friend who powerful libido and not the girlish, asexual very name suggests a house in the forest on scientists looking for elusive particles be- died. I was visiting her at the hospital and characters in the bestselling Harry Potter chicken legs. In these tales, a woman finds cause it has no atoms. Most of the atoms of she had a fluttering cloth around her arms, series. a dew-drop baby and makes a cradle from a our world were formed in the stars billions which I tried to remove, but she explained Larsson must have realized, about hollowed-out bean; a father eats a live heart of years ago when negatively charged elec- it was to restrain her. We went to the mid-way through the first book, that he to bring his daughter back to life, a young trons were trapped by positively charged cafeteria to sit down. “This is really very had created a memorable character in “The girl goes to the countryside in spring with a nuclei, but it is quite possible, says Close, nice,” I said. “See, you could have come Girl,” and that he couldn’t let go of her, or married man who reads her his homemade that no antimatter atom even existed in here before if you were willing to go out her strange vulnerability and force. Lisbeth poems. The people in these stories suffer the universe until l995 when scientists put to lunch,” she teased. Then you are really gets stronger as the books go along. Indeed, terrible fates, but the author, a motherly together a handful of antihydrogen atoms, here, I thought, without thinking where here by the end of the first “Girl,” she’s a woman witch, always holds out hope like the palm made of antiprotons, antineutrons and con- might be, and we stood up and hugged each and the hero of the book, not he. In volume reader my friend consulted who predicted fined positrons. These atoms lived for only other. “Let’s spring this joint,” I said, and two, she’s front and center from the start. misfortune, and then said, “But don’t let it a fraction of a second. we were both running as fast as we could “Lisbeth Salander pulled her sunglasses happen to you, dearie.” Why, after the big bang, when energy when I woke up. down to the tip of her nose and squinted I’ve also been reading a book by the congealed into opposing electrons and posi- Perhaps it was the heady brew of fairy from beneath the brim of her sun hat,” Lars- British physicist Frank Close, who says trons, was the universe left with anything at tales and antimatter, for now I’m confusing son writes in that first, alluring sentence. that our world rests on a sea of antimatter all? Why did matter edge out antimatter to the dew-drop baby, the positron with such a Lisbeth is tomorrow’s headline about that only occasionally, in the absence of a flourish in the light provided by positrons brief life in our world, and my dream friend rape, violence, and the psychological and negatively charged electron, appears as a and electrons annihilating each other, creat- who embraced me so warmly although we physical abuse against women. She’s the positively charged particle called a positron. ing gamma rays which after centuries of tu- seldom hugged until she was dying, and daughter of feminism, and her feminism As earth is filled with electrons, any visiting mult in the heat of the sun emerge as visible then only awkwardly. gallops across the pages of the trilogy—in positron is immediately annihilated in a sunlight in the spectrum we enjoy? It seems —Hilda Johnston the statistics about sexual assaults, and flash of light, a gamma ray invisible to our broken symmetry is what allowed us to be in the fiber of the novel itself. Still, it naked eyes. here, more electrons spinning in one direc- isn’t purely feminist. Larsson didn’t and “That positron,” Close says, “did not tion than positrons spinning in the other. obviously couldn’t jettison his own sexual pre-exist anymore than a bark exists inside The sunlight that falls through the trees identity when he wrote the novel and so, a dog. It was the energy release that cre- in the forest is born in explosive conflict Hilda Johnston lives in Berkeley and at times, it’s an unabashed male sexual ated it.” I gather from these remarks that and yet we still hope to find a cottage in the teaches in Oakland. fantasy. Larsson’s Don Juan gets to have Spring 2011 The Redwood Coast Review Page  writers & writing In Her Own Corner What I owe to Sylvia Townsend Warner

Rebecca Taksel but always measured, always observing, with a saving dash first encountered Sylvia Townsend Warner as I was of tart self-awareness. Such self-awareness, in Sylvia’s browsing the fiction shelves of a public library. It was case, did not translate into a lack of engagement. She was a meeting that would change my life, the beginning of at times an activist, even briefly a Communist, and always a an adventure. supporter of causes she believed in. Summer Will Show, her I 1936 novel about two women, wife and mistress to the same I chose the book from the library shelf simply because it looked nice. It was an excellent book of a kind that has man, who are involved in the 1848 revolution in Paris, is her since disappeared, one whose sewn binding allows you to most overtly political novel, but it is free of any breath of keep it open at any page. A good book, then, of a group I’d the doctrinaire or the self-righteous. learned to recognize, the middle list titles of the prestigious She was my literary guide in another sense, too. Through American and British publishing houses. In this case it was her books I found the Virago Press, which had published Viking, and the title was Lolly Willowes. I wondered who trade paperbacks of some of her work as part of their Mod- Mrs. Townsend Warner might be. ern Classics series. Virago was founded in England in 1973 I checked the publication date: 1926. What I had was a in the full spate of the women’s liberation movement; and reprint, then. This Mrs. Warner must have been someone the Modern Classics imprint was created in 1978, inspired of note, to be reprinted in such a good edition. I took the by the publication of A Literature of Their Own by the book home and began to read, my astonishment growing by American scholar Elaine Showalter. the page. I’d never read anything like it, though it was not It is impossible to exaggerate the pleasures of discovering avant-garde in style, tone or subject. It was writing that was each of the Virago writers in that series, most of them from respectful of its reader, speaking clearly, in lilting sentences the late 19th century through the first decades of the 20th. etched in acid, telling a story about a spinster woman who All I knew was that each was particular, each was writing in discovers happily in middle age that she is a witch. her own “corner,” and each caught at least one brilliant ray When I’d finished reading, I did a little research on the of universality as she looked out from it. book and its author. Miss Townsend Warner (1893-1978) Who were these women? They were various, but one was the daughter of a highly respected teacher at Harrow, the favorite, Molly Panter Downes, whose novel One Fine Day venerable English boys’ secondary school. Lolly Willowes is an exquisite telling in miniature of the social upheav- was her first book, and it enjoyed a great success; in fact, it als caused by World War II, turned out to be the writer of was chosen as the very first Book-of-the-Month Club selec- the “Letter from London” feature in The New Yorker for so tion. I had been pleasantly shocked by its sharp feminist many years, beginning in 1939. This was the sort of voice tone and was even more shocked to imagine a large audience I’d learned to recognize from Sylvia: modulated but sharp, for Lolly Willowes in the 1920s. Amid the din of women’s intelligent, astute—to be relied upon. I needed that chorus of voices, as it was being more and liberationist rhetoric of the 1970s, too many of us forgot that Sylvia Townsend Warner in her study . . . earlier generations of women had been just as brave, just as more drowned out during the last couple of decades of the outspoken, and just as outrageous as we fancied ourselves. 20th century. That was when I began to notice the prefaces. After all, 1926 was the age of the New Woman and the flapper. I realized that she had become Paperback reprints of eminent authors from larger but less In any event, the more thoughtful and scholarly among my guide to reading. I had careful publishers than Virago were entrusting some of my the latter-day feminists had rediscovered Laura Willowes. favorite writers to a new breed of academic critic who had Thus the reprints. learned to look for voices like no interest in particularity, who had, instead, an agenda. Trivialized as “Aunt Lolly” by her conventional family, Their prefaces did not bother with scholarship: that was the Laura Willowes is the examplar of a type who was presumed hers, civilized voices, not super- outmoded “historical” criticism. They did not approach the not even to exist through the antifeminist mid-century cilious, but always measured, work as the expression of a talented and highly individual decades, the woman who chooses not to marry. As a young artist: that was the outmoded “new criticism” of mid-cen- woman Laura refuses her season as a débutante, noting that always observing, with a saving tury. Such reverence for individualism in any form was, I “coming out” is really all about “going in,” relinquishing began to understand, suspiciously bourgeois. Instead, works one’s autonomy and individuality. dash of tart self-awareness. were texts to be walked over again and again, and each At the time I found Lolly and her creator, I had already reading was as good as the next. Well, not exactly. Some read Adrienne Rich, who sought to re-fashion“old maids” readings were more equal than others, especially those that He speaks of the “ . . . running report of her life—on the exposed the real “project” of the writer to have been one of like Laura into “resisters” in their refusal of the tyranny of weather, the annual arrival of the gypsies, flowers bloom- what Rich termed compulsory heterosexuality. Rich rep- the catalogue of bourgeois sins, like misogyny, or eurocen- ing in the garden, Rembrandts at the National Gallery, The trism, or classism, or—individualism. resented the sensibility of lesbian feminism of the era, and, Turn of the Screw as an opera, a drinking old lady, Proust’s as it happens, there is an identifiable, if subtle, homoerotic shortcomings as a literary critic, the fountains of the Villa strain in Lolly Willowes, evident especially in a lively scene uch readings, when they are untempered by consider- d’Este, the creatures of the river, often in flood, that flowed ations of form and style are, simply, extra-literary. They of a witches’ celebration led by a sensuous village girl. I past her house . . .” S thought of that scene when I read about Sylvia’s meeting reduce a work of art to a sociological or political artifact. I was even rewarded with confirmation that Sylvia, too, Yes, it is interesting to consider Lolly Willowes as a between- with the beautiful and rebellious Valentine Ackland, who be- had been a browser of library shelves. She relates how she came her companion in the same year Lolly was published. the-wars expression of bourgeois feminist resistance, and I discovered the inspiration for Mister Fortune’s Maggot, the did. But applying the labels is only the beginning of what The two lived together until Valentine’s death in 1969. novel that many consider to be her finest. Set on a fictional In the years that followed my discovery of Lolly Wil- I understood, and still understand, a genuine reading of a South Seas island, it was published a year after Lolly Wil- novel to be about. lowes, I believe I read almost everything Sylvia Townsend lowes: “When I first went to live in London, in 1917. . . I Warner wrote: seven novels, each one different from the I do not like being told how to read. We learn to read was poor and could not afford a lending library subscription (and to write) first and last by reading. After a while, we other except for an unfailing excellence of style; many, . . . Then I found the Westbourne Grove branch of the Pad- many short stories, over 150 of which were published in The acquire a basis to form tentative expectations. We enter the dington Public Library. It was a very snuffy establishment unexplored forest of a new book by a familiar writer, or one New Yorker; a few volumes of poetry; and her biography of with a great many biographies of unimportant people and all T. H. White, which is considered definitive. by a new writer who is said to have some sort of relationship the books had the same smell (I suppose it was some public to a familiar one, and we say, “I think I recognize some- My adventure broadened and deepened. In addition to disinfectant). One of the books I took out was a volume of her work for publication, Sylvia left a more than usually thing just ahead,” or “I wonder if that is waiting in the next letters by a woman missionary in Polynesia. I can’t remem- chapter?” It is the same process the botanist goes through complete record of a life lived in and for writing, and yet ber the title, or her name, but the book pleased me. It had lived. Her letters (in two volumes edited by the superb nov- in entering an actual forest: If the climate and the elevation only the minimum of religion, only elementary scenery and are similar, will I find similar developments of plant life? Or elist William Maxwell, who was her editor for many years a mass of details of every-day life. The woman wrote out at The New Yorker) and even her diaries, are often as good will there have been one of those odd evolutionary turns that of her own heart—for instance, describing an earthquake she dictated another path of development for these organisms? as what she wrote for publication. Her correspondence with said that the ground trembled like the lid of a boiling kettle.” Valentine Ackland tells one of the greatest, and at times most To come to a book already knowing what answers you There was yet another library in my long adventure will find is not really reading at all. No wonder academic painful, love stories I have ever read. with Sylvia Townsend Warner. Many years after her death, Through those letters and diaries I came to feel that I critics and their hapless students began to read more criti- I made a pilgrimage to the house in a tiny Dorset village cism and less fiction, poetry and essays. Why not cut out the knew the people around Sylvia, too: Maxwell, certainly, whose river and gardens and objects and animals Sylvia and the writer David Garnett; Charles Prentice at Chatto & middleman, if every “text” is up for grabs, if it can be clear- had described in the marvelous detail that had so enchanted cut by a tractor hauling the blade of one or another “ism”? Windus, her British publishers; the marvelously eccentric Maxwell. There was no plaque or marker, and the house writer Theodore Powys and his family; Valentine, who wrote Iris Murdoch commented that this was her great fear about was occupied, but I recognized it from pictures. I went into the emphasis on literary criticism, that it would prevent a memoir about her life with Sylvia; and the several women nearby Dorchester and found the public library I knew to friends who knew Sylvia, admired her, and served variously university students from reading enough good literature. In be there. It was filled to bursting with books and memora- an age when students arrive at universities not having read as biographers, editors, caregivers, executors. bilia of Thomas Hardy—this was Wessex, and I hadn’t even Eventually, having listened to Sylvia Townsend Warner’s anything like the number of books they would have read in thought about it. I was rewarded, however, if meagerly. Murdoch’s days at Oxford, this is indeed troubling. voice for so long and having heard its echoes in the voices of There were a few shelves devoted to Sylvia, a corner. I was her circle of friends, I realized that I had come rather a long As the prefaces went, so, increasingly, did the reviews. reminded of the title of one of her novels, The Corner That Sure enough, in the 1990s a review of Sylvia’s Diaries ap- way towards finding my own voice. Sometimes she spoke Held Them, about an English convent in the 12th to 14th directly for me. When a dear friend of mine lost his lifelong peared in The New York Times Book Review (2/18/96), and centuries. Once again, the book had been singular, unlike I found it painful to read. So much of it was dismissive of companion, I sent one of Sylvia’s exquisite diary entries anything else I’d read. Despite its ribald and anticlerical about Valentine’s lingering presence after her death. a life I had found so full of meaning, even enchantment. themes, it had an easy sort of scholarly authority. Not sur- The reviewer, Claire Tomalin, began, “On the surface, she prising. Before Sylvia began her long and prolific writing ore often, though, Sylvia served as a guide to choosing must have seemed a quiet, eccentric, highbrow, animal-lov- career, she was part of a group of musicologists who were ing, country-dwelling English lady.” But, we are assured, Mmy own words, reminding me always to look around entrusted with the massive job of compiling and editing the me, always to be interested, always to take the measure of something far more “passionate, intense, and sensual boiled complete Tudor church music. She was meticulous in every- out of sight.” things and render them as clearly as I could, and above all thing; she would not have cheated her facts. not to take my own place in life’s profusion too seriously. I realized, standing in that library, that Sylvia Townsend In his preface to the selected letters, Maxwell comments Warner had become my guide to reading. I had learned to with obvious delight on Sylvia’s rendering of that profusion. look for voices like hers, civilized voices, not supercilious, See warner page 6 Page 6 The Redwood Coast Review Spring 2011 warner from page 5

Tomalin was certainly interested in to a stereotype of an eccentric old maid, in Sylvia’s leftist politics, and she praised both Eventually, having fact to “Aunt Lolly”? Lolly Willowes and Mr. Fortune’s Maggot Claire Harman, Sylvia’s biographer, had for their “spirited and imaginative attacks listened to her voice foreseen just the sort of misreading that on the respectable, churchgoing English for so long and hav- Maxwell had to correct. In her introduction middle-class way of life.” She appreci- to the Diaries, she comments: Sylvia’s “pe- ated that Sylvia was a feminist, but she ing heard its echoes culiarly English wit and her highly literate confidently asserted that Sylvia’s beliefs (and totally nonacademic) intelligence have arose from her sense of exclusion from the in the voices of her endeared her whole body of work to me. all-boys’ classes her father taught when she circle of friends, I Her ghost, with gleeful malice, is refusing to was a girl, so that Sylvia had “no formal let any of it be put through the PhD machine education.” On another fashionable theme, realized that I had without a fight.” Tomalin devoted two paragraphs to Sylvia I found William Maxwell’s address in as a lesbian; but, commenting on just the come rather a long the New York phonebook, and I wrote him sort of passage I had copied out for my way towards finding a letter of appreciation. I certainly did not friend in his bereavement, she was aston- expect to have a reply, but, although he ished that “a woman in her late 70’s could my own voice. was of a great age by then, he answered me still burn with such a flame” for her lost promptly with a note written on a manual love. She was young, then, this confident, typewriter. In his letter to the Times, and in dismissive critic, who next took aim at “the As for the style of life that Sylvia and that note to me, William Maxwell gave me way of life practiced by many high-think- Valentine led, Maxwell, who had visited a certainty that I have never lost and never ing and low-earning English intellectuals them in their house at Frome Vauchurch, re- will, about the worth of reading as Sylvia between the wars.” They “settled in damp members that Sylvia “was a very fine cook Townsend Warner helped me to read, just as and comfortless country cottages, often at and a learned gardener.” The house, “being long as there are writers still writing, each loggerheads with the locals, pursuing their beside a little river, could hardly escape in those corners that hold them. art under conditions that might be idyllic for being a little damp, but there was no smell of mildew and it was not comfortless. Like a month in summer but were mostly hellish. . . . and in her garden nd still the story of my adventure, of my Cooking, washing and cleaning were all a great many if not most English houses, Adiscovery of the companionship given arduous.” it had no central heating, but my wife and to readers by authors, does not end. Once I was angry at that review, but, worse, I ally, Miss Warner was not a type; there was I were made comfortable with heaters and again I was browsing, this time in a used- felt defeated by it. Was this where left- no one even remotely like her.” Nor was grate fires. Wherever we looked, our eyes book store. John Updike had recently died, wing, feminist, gay-rights advocacy, with all she a “lady,” if by that term Tomalin meant fell on beautiful old furniture, wonderful and there on the shelf was a collection of of which I was in sympathy, inevitably led, anything in the least derogatory. She was, pictures and books, and charming Victorian his essays and criticism, Hugging the Shore. to this smug disregard? And was this trea- rather, “totally unconventional, her beliefs porcelain objets. Except for those rare I remembered how often Updike’s poems sured reading habit of mine an anachronistic and opinions were passionately held, her times when the river overflowed its banks, I and criticism had delighted me in The New frivolity? Was Sylvia Townsend Warner as humor was delightful, her casual remarks would not have considered it a hardship to Yorker, just as Sylvia’s stories had. I opened I thought I’d known her a manifestation of pyrotechnic.” live there.” the book, skimmed the table of contents, some sickly nostalgia for a way of life I’d On the subject of Sylvia’s education, I quote Maxwell here at some length and came upon the name Lolly. There it only imagined? Maxwell reminded Tomalin that Sylvia because every word he wrote seemed to me was, Updike’s review of Sylvia’s first novel Then, a month later, I was astonished received lessons each day from her mother, to carry a small dagger in it. How, I heard upon its almost simultaneous reissue from to open the Book Review and see a let- had the run of her father’s library, was Maxwell asking beneath his gentle, tactful two feminist presses. It was glowing, and ter from William Maxwell (3/24/96). He steeped in poetry and music, was only pre- tone, could Tomalin be so high-handedly full of understanding for her unique talent. had articulated, with all the authority of vented from carrying out her plan to study superior when she obviously knew so little someone who had known Sylvia for forty composition with Arnold Schoenberg in about Sylvia and about the society from years and was himself a superb writer, all Vienna by the outbreak of World War I, and which she had come? Who was this Ameri- that I had felt when I’d read Tomalin’s might well have gone on to university if she can who could not imagine a life without RCR regular Rebecca Taksel lives in Pitts- piece. About Sylvia’s having been a typical had wanted to. central heating, who could, rather more seri- burgh and is working on a novel. country-dwelling lady, he answered, “Actu- ously, reduce a very good if not great writer Spring 2011 The Redwood Coast Review Page 7 B i b l i o t e c a News, Views, Notes, Reviews, Reports and Exhortations from Friends of Coast Community Library

President’s Desk Library lines roles, nipping in the bud a consciousness of communal effort, the sacrifices community requires and the benefits it bestows. The child will play out her role as diva well Keeping It into adulthood, with encouragement and Freedom applause blinding her to what it is––one of life’s many roles, a costume often to be Physical masked or put in a drawer. Isn’t Free The little girl’s mother, too, is caught up in the ethos of seductive beauty, as each Alix Levine afternoon she retires to her bath, where she Julia Larke lies among the bubbles, preparing for her husband’s return from work, lecturing her ural life presents challenges to those hen I hear or see the phrase “free daughter, who listens in the doorway, on of us who have chosen to live in the public library” it always pleases What Men Want. One day, during one of sparsely settled, more remote parts me. I remember the sense of free- R these sessions, just as she is about to gradu- W of the county. dom and adventure that I felt when entering ate from middle school, the little girl tells When I moved to the south coast of my local branch library as a child. Such a her mother all, and then skips away, relieved Mendocino County 40 years ago the rural wealth of choice, so many happy hours, so and happy at last that someone will now life was geared toward self-sufficiency. You many books lugged home. My parents were will protect her. could meet a great many needs just with a readers and it was in the local library that But the mother takes the father’s side, trip to Point Arena. For a wider choice, we they allowed their daughters the freedom to and the little girl, on the brink of woman- might drive the hour to Fort Bragg, practi- Sharon Doubiago roam. hood, is cast out. cally a city compared to Point Arena. Fort I believe this freedom to roam, in a Bragg also had the closest library for us library among shelves of books or within a he prose is loose, and the narrative is South Coasters. single book, is a great gift. The cost of this interwoven with snippets of news about A lot has changed. Our community creat- Fathers T freedom, this gift, is one that our society no the Korean War, the McCarthy hearings, and ed Coast Community Library over 20 years longer seems able to afford. And, free public celebrities like Marilyn Monroe. Doubiago ago, starting with a few shelves of books libraries, of course, never have been com- includes excerpts from her grandmother’s and culminating in its current spacious and pletely free. This fact is especially evident and Lovers diary of the time, but they are dry, factual, attractive building in the heart of downtown in the current budget crisis confronting state unrevealing. The characters are realistically Point Arena, serving folks from Manchester and county governments. Free to use does drawn, despite the fairy-tale quality of the to The Sea Ranch. Zara Raab not mean free from cost. events. Snapshots and photographs show The role of public libraries has always The problem is widespread. A Scottish included free access to information. In this My Father’s Love: librarian speaks his mind in a recent article, century electronic resources have played a Portrait of the Poet as a Young Girl The little girl’s moth- “Public Libraries aren’t free”: “Public vital role in connecting people and infor- A Memoir, Volume 1 libraries are not free, librarians and library mation. We see travelers from all over the by Sharon Doubiago er, too, is caught assistants have wages to draw, books need world stopping in to check their email in Wild Ocean Press (2009), 448 pages to be purchased, periodicals subscribed the library, because libraries are the public up in the ethos of to, Internet access bought, buildings to access point in our society. be maintained, electricity, heating, water In order to provide access to those who y Father’s Love is a childhood seductive beauty, as to be supplied. These all cost—and that either do not have a computer or do not memoir set in the 1940s and 50s, each afternoon she cost comes from taxes.” (And Friends of have Internet connection the library with its Mthe story of a little girl and her Libraries!) Some people don’t want to public access computers and wi-fi has been lower-middle-class family in Southern retires to her bath, pay the price: “Why should the guy down the go-to place. California, the father a factory worker in an the street, who doesn’t enjoy reading and However, we have recently been made aerospace plant, who eventually becomes where she lies among makes the deliberate choice not to read, strikingly aware of how fragile our access to a floor manager, the mother a housewife the bubbles, prepar- who doesn’t have need for or recourse to the Internet is when the provider for most of with three children, two girls and a boy. regular reference requests, who is happy Point Arena closed down, leaving the library My Father’s Love, with its strong elements ing for her husband’s paying commercial prices for his Internet, with no Internet connection. We see the dis- of both fairy tale and Greek tragedy, is the who is, in short, in no need of the services appointment when patrons learn the library story of the oldest child, who will grow up return from work, of a librarian, why should he be forced to no longer has Internet available. Greg Jirak, to become the well-published poet Sharon lecturing her daugh- subsidize my enjoyment, desires, choices?” the Friends of Coast Community Library Doubiago. [http://audesapere-librarian.blogspot.com/] vice-president, and resident computer ma- The little girl of the story is of noble ter, who listens in the Why pay the price? Oliver Wendell ven is working virtually full time to restore birth, or as noble as birth comes in America. Holmes said it well: “Taxes are what we pay Internet to Coast Community Library. By Her ancestors, one a signer of the Declara- doorway, on What for civilized society.” We ask of our citizens the time you read this, Coast Community tion of Independence, were among the first Men Want. that they support funding of public schools Library may once again be offering free to arrive from Europe, and later became and libraries because it is recognized (appar- public access to the Internet. Southern landholders, intermingling with ently not universally) that these institutions It has been suggested that downloadable Indians. Despite her Indian blood, the are essential to a free democratic civilized clearly the tentative mother who suffered audiobooks and data bases, emagazines little girl is as fair as a princess from Hans society. One of the most important rea- tuberculosis when Doubiago was young and various forms of electronic publishing Christian Andersen, with blond curly hair, sons to support libraries is that they freely and had to be sent away to an asylum. We are the future of libraries. You won’t be wide-set eyes and perfectly formed mouth. provide information that allows citizens to clearly see the striking young man who feels needing those big old rooms full of books One day, when the girl is six or seven, make informed decisions. trapped under the weight of too much re- and DVDs and stuff. As so often seems the mother disappears, and the children are I didn’t intend to write along these lines sponsibility as a father. Doubiago admirably the case, such ideas are based on a more left alone with the father, with occasional but there is so much worry these days about stays close to her actual memories, but she urban model, which doesn’t have big blank visits from an old, remote grandmother. At the future of libraries. Rising costs! What sometimes loses the drama of events and areas of lack of access that we experience in night the father goes to the little girl’s room, role will libraries and librarians play in the their power to move us. I was sometimes the country. Also apparently in this vision but her cries do not wake her siblings. At digital future? And, what about the carbon left with a “So what?” feeling reading this everybody owns a computer or smart phone dawn, before the father gets up, the little footprint of books vs. ebooks? One thing text. Part of the problem is that the story is to download easily at home. girl hides her bloody nightgown under the left to do is to Keep Calm and Carry On. told almost entirely from within the frame- Here in our rural fastness we still need house to protect her father. After a time, the As an advocate of the Slow Movement, I’ve work of the child’s life, with little probing our library materials to be available in mother returns, though now, she, too, seems always enjoyed the sense of safe haven in a of events’ deeper meaning. Hints are given, physical as well as electronic form, much remote, an interloper in the new relationship busy world that a library can provide. but we see little of the effects of incest on as we have come to value the benefits of the between father and daughter. Like Electra, On a positive note, for Valentines Day, the adult poet. Internet. And in a rural area our library is a the little girl usurps the mother’s position. Coast Community Library patrons created a As a culture we have only touched the place to join with your community, browse The daughter is tall for her age and lovely display of valentine messages. Here surface of our understanding of incest. the bookshelves for a serendipitous find, well-developed even at nine, with small, are just a few: “Libraries are the heartbeat Only a handful of scientists and artists attend a class or meeting in the community budding breasts, which the father fondles of the community,” “We love our library!” have dared, or cared enough, to look at the room, encounter friends, hang out on a rainy as he praises their beauty and works on his and “Remember: Libraries are a pillar of ramifications of incest in our lives and our day and read, get research help from a real lathe in the garage. In odd moments, she democracy.” From younger patrons: “I love communities. Sharon Doubiago has had the live person and so much more. Although sees him, as well, in all his manly glory. to read,” “I love books,” “I wouldn’t read if courage to explore a subject still largely offering free access to information may be Carefully guarding her secret, she continues there wasn’t a library.” “I don’t like the qui- taboo, and to explore it with dignity and re- the main mission of a library, the creating of to go to school and make friends there, but etness…it could be funner…but it’s OK.” spect, without exploiting its potential eroti- community connection and cooperation has lustful men are everywhere, lurking on al- The library currently offers free classes cism, as Anais Nin did. I closed My Father’s been a very important part of the benefit of leyways near the school or sitting in wait in in Comparative Religion and Understand- Love with appreciation for Doubiago’s having a library you can go to physically. cars. When the family visits an uncle in the ing Opera. Storytime is every Tuesday at struggles and admiration for her willing- So for the foreseeable future, we will be East, he, too, gropes her. Her sister resents 11am. Join the free Tai Chi class Tuesdays ness to document a layer of American life needing our big rooms full of books here in her star presence within the family and her at 9:30am. Federal tax forms and book- in mid-century and a timeless aspect of the the country. best friend moves away with her family to a lets are available. And, we have BPA-free human psyche. nudist colony. date due receipts! Encourage your friends So very early in her life the child’s secret and neighbors to drop in and get a library self, her sexual feelings, become prominent: card; they may be surprised at the wealth she’s a little diva, dominating the family Zara Raab is the author of The Book of of books and other items that are available Volunteer tableau, as is evident in Doubiago’s family Gretel (Finishing Line Press) and Swim- “free.” Statistics count when budget cuts are photographs. This is her primary role in ming the Eel, due out this fall. She lives in threatened. Come one, come all, and enjoy Call 707.882.3114 the family, depriving her of the masks and Berkeley. your library! costumes, the artifice, required for other Page  The Redwood Coast Review Spring 2011 walking from page 1 my creative writing teacher at TCU. She slacken, feeling a little sorry for myself. look upon another human face. She was She smiled indulgently. “Don’t believe had co-edited, along with her husband at the Things weren’t going so well. My savings wearing a baggy man’s raincoat and rubber it for a moment. The stories are better, but time, Whit Burnette, the original Story mag- were gone and I could barely make it on boots, and carried an umbrella and a cane. do yourself the favor of reading all of him azine, which had published some of the ear- the weekly money order my dad faithfully My initial impression was that she was the and make up your own mind. Everyone ly work of several famous American writers, sent. Thinking about looking for work was cleaning woman or a servant of some kind. talks about him being such a stylist, but I’ll Hemingway and Salinger among them. She depressing but it was either that or hightail “I’m looking for Martha Foley,” I said. let you in on a little secret. He told me once lived on Bank Street in the Village and my it back to Fort Worth and try to get back in “Would you happen to know her?” that he seldom thought about style at all, first impulse as I wandered out of the tiled school the second semester. I’d been spend- “Who might be asking?” she asked, that he wrote the only way he knew how.” bowels of the Port Authority into the glare ing too much time in my tiny room reading guarded. I sat there and listened in a state of awe, and noise and confusion of the street, was and pecking away at my typewriter, laboring “My name is Mike Tuggle and I’m a wondering once or twice if this was really to take a cab directly to her place, ring her over my novel. The protagonists of both the friend of a friend of hers from Texas,” I happening, if I was really sitting here in the doorbell and throw myself upon her mercy books I was reading—Ellison’s Invisible stammered. company of this woman who had known for refuge and instruction. Where should I Man and Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young She looked into my eyes for a moment my writing gods and was telling me secrets stay? What should I do? How do I begin to and saw I meant no harm, then broke into a about them. I was glad I didn’t have to say achieve the life of a writer? I sat there and lis- grin. “Would that be John Graves, perhaps?” much, and ate my fettucini and mussels But the phenomenon of being where I “He gave me your address and said I hungrily while she pecked at her food and was, having 150 dollars in my pocket and tened in a state of should look you up. I . . . I’m a writer.” talked almost nonstop, as if unburdening a burning urge to see and feel everything at awe, wondering if this She smiled kindly and unfurled her herself. once, overpowered my desire to find refuge. umbrella. “Well, Mike Tuggle, if you’ll help After several drinks the stories grew I was on my own after all, cut loose from was really happening, me down these steps I’ll treat you to dinner. sadder: her breakup with Whit Burnette, my parents, teachers, authority figures, and I’m an old woman and already I’ve fallen her bitterness over him restarting Story there was plenty of time. So I backtracked if I was really sitting down them once and broken my hip.” She magazine with his present wife, Hallie, as to the station, stashed my suitcase and here with this woman handed me her umbrella, I gave her my arm co-editor. typewriter in a locker and set out on foot to and we stepped into the rain, making our And there was something tragic about devour the Big Apple. who had known my way carefully down the long flight of stairs her son that she referred to once or twice, It wasn’t until a couple of weeks to the street. On the slow, two-block walk evidently presuming I knew of him. Oc- later that I met Martha Foley. I’d taken the writing gods and was to the Italian restaurant, she talked nonstop casionally she would pause and ask me subway downtown from Jackson Heights, telling me secrets about John Graves, who had been the clos- something about myself. I answered as well where I was renting a room in a private est thing to a mentor for me while I was in as I could but directed the talk back to her at home, and walked around the Village in a about them. college, and whom she seemed to think of every opportunity. One entirely scandalous state of rainy-day euphoria, hoping to meet as a writer just starting out. From our vastly story, which was difficult to take seriously a woman, enjoying the effects of a couple of Werther—seemed to be myself in so many different perspectives, we didn’t seem to be except that she seemed to completely be- beers and the feeling of being homesick and ways that it was no small wonder I became talking about the same person. lieve it, was how John Steinbeck had stolen almost broke. Wasn’t this what a writer was even more withdrawn than usual. I’d always The waiters at the restaurant knew her the idea for The Grapes of Wrath from a supposed to feel? An hour-and-a-half later, had a difficult time meeting people, but now and seated us at a quiet table. We sipped gin young woman who had sent him a manu- however, sitting on a bench in Washington there were moments when it seemed down- and tonics while she dazzled me with stories script and asked for his help. Square, overwhelmed by the ache of loneli- right impossible, moments when I seemed of the literary life in Paris before the war, By the time we’d finished our meal and ness, my stomach growling, I decided to so cut off from humanity that I felt I would the characters she knew, how, whenever were sipping coffee, my new acquaintance look up Martha Foley then and there. expire from pure loneliness. she ran into Hemingway at a party or in had broken into tears several times and I had Her address, a dignified old brownstone the street, he would always pick her up and become uncomfortably aware of her eyes, on Bank Street, was easy to find. There was was about to pull my sport coat up over swing her around and around, as if she were which, when teary, reminded me of my no answer when I rang the doorbell so I I my head and bolt, when the door opened a child. “I was lighter then. But it’s true mother’s eyes that evening at supper before rang a second time, and a third, and waited. behind me and a short, rather scruffily what they say, he was very strong. I heard I left. When we were ready to go, however, The rain came down again, sweeping over dressed woman in her late sixties or early Gertrude Stein once call him her ‘beautiful, she seemed to be feeling better, wearing the streets in waves. Pulling my collar up seventies came out, looking at me sus- broody teddy-bear ’!” a soft little satisfied smile as she took my around my neck, I sat down on the top step piciously. I nodded politely and smiled, “An English teacher I had claimed he arm and we walked slowly, without saying under the roof and waited for the rain to feeling blessed, at that moment, just to was all style and puffery,” I ventured. much, back to her flat.

Some Recent Arrivals @ Coast Community Library

Fiction Nonfiction Lady: the story of Edith Holden, author Haddon, Mark. The curious incident of of The Country Diary of an Edwardian Cameron, W. Bruce. A dog’s purpose Ablom, Mitch. Have a little faith: a true the dog in the night-time Lady Cornwell, Patricia. Port mortuary story Reedy, Trent. Words in the dust Shah, Tahir. The Caliph’s house Crichton, Michael. Pirate latitudes Alter, Jonathan. The promise: President Stork, Francisco. The last summer of the Terkel, Studs. Touch and go: a memoir Cunningham, Michael. By nightfall Obama, year one death warriors Wallach, Janet. Desert Queen: the extraor- Deaver, Jeffery. The burning wire: a Bessel, Richard. Germany 1945: from war dinary life of Gertrude Bell Lincoln Rhyme novel to peace Nonfiction Glass, Julia. The widower’s tale Bennett, Hal Z. Write starts: prompts, Angel, Ann. Janis Joplin: rise up sing- Higgins, Jack. The wolf at the door quotes, and exercises to jumpstart your Books on CD ing Jance, Judith. Fire and ice: a Beaumont creativity Janeczko, Paul. The dark game: true spy Martini, Steve. The rule of nine and Brady novel Campbell, Stu. Let it rot!: a gardener’s stories Solomon, Robert C. No excuses, existen- Kingsolver, Barbara. The lacuna guide to composting tialism and the meaning of life. Parts 1 Kittle, Katrina. The blessings of the Crowley, Ann. Favorite recipes from North- & 2 Juvenile animals ern California inns Trigiani, Adriana. Brava, Valentine Easy books Lippman, Laura. I’d know you anywhere Durston, Tammy. Annapolis and the Adler, Victoria. All of baby nose to toes Machart, Bruce. The wake of forgiveness Gualala River Beaumont, Karen. Shoe-la-la! Mapson, Jo-ann. Solomon’s oak Gell-Mann, Murray. The quark and the Large Print Burningham, John. There’s going to be Martel, Yann. Beatrice and Virgil jaguar: adventures in the simple and the Connelly, Michael. The Scarecrow a baby Martini, Steve. The rule of nine: a Paul complex Heyer, Georgette. The toll-gate Fox, Mem. Hello, Baby! Madriani novel Los hilos de la vida (The treads of life): a Philbrick, Nathaniel. In the heart of the Hacohen, Dean. Tuck me in Nesbø, Jo. Nemesis collection of quilts and stories by Ander- sea: the tragedy of the whaleship Essex McFadden, Roni. Josephine Parker, Robert B. Blue-eyed devil son Valley artists - book & DVD Picoult, Jodi. Harvesting the heart Ryan, Pam M. Tony Baloney Woods, Stuart. Strategic moves McNiff, Shaun. Art as medicine: creating a Plain, Belva. Her father’s house Stead, Philip C. A sick day for Amos therapy of the imagination McGee Pollack, H. N. A world without ice Thompson Lauren. Wee little bunny Stenberg, Denise S. Glen Blair: the end of DVDs Wiesner, David. Art & Max the line An unfinished life Kohuth, Jane. Ducks go vroom Stone, Curtis. Relaxed cooking with Curtis Appaloosa Lucas, Sally. Dancing dinos at the Stone The counterfeiters (Die Falscher) beach Wulf, Andrea. The brother gardeners: The men who stare at goats botany, empire, and the birth of an Remember me Juvenile fiction Library Hours obsession Waking life Barnhouse, Rebecca. The coming of the dragon Monday 12 noon - 6 pm Biography Hunter, Erin. Fading echoes Tuesday 10am - 6 pm CDs Hunter, Erin. Fourth apprentice Wednesday 10am - 8 pm Allende, Isabel. The sum of our days Armstrong, Louis. On the road Kelly, Jacqueline. The evolution of Thursday 12 noon - 8 pm Hoagland, Edward. Compass Points: how Jackson, Michael. Thriller 25 Calpurnia Tate Friday 12 noon - 6 pm I lived U2. War Vanderpool, Clare. Moon over Manifest Janzen, Rhoda. Mennonite in a little black Saturday 12 noon - 3 pm dress: a memoir of going home Young Adult Juvenile nonfiction Kashiwagi, Hiroshi. Swimming in the Brandenburg, Jim. Scruffy: a wolf finds Coast Community Library American: a memoir Fiction his place in the pack is located at Kelley, Kitty. His way: the unauthorized Chandler, Elizabeth. Dark secrets. 1, Choi, Yangsook. The sun girl and the 225 Main Street biography of Frank Sinatra Legacy of lies; Don’t tell moon boy Point Arena Taylor, Ina (compiler). The Edwardian Dashner, James. The Scorch trials The dancing fox: Arctic folktales (707) 882-3114 Spring 2011 The Redwood Coast Review Page 

the surrounding space thick with paint and back home, move back in with my mother atmosphere. These ghostly figures struck and brother and sister, into the same situ- a deep chord. They were, like me, gather- ation I’d run away from. No wonder I got ing forces to break out into the real, fleshly drunk. The wonder was that I caught the world, still shackled somehow, but able to right train and survived the short ride back vibrate profoundly at the edge of being. to Jackson Heights. When I surfaced, the world outside seemed to be spinning in one ne morning I woke up determined that direction and the world inside me seemed to Othis would be the day I would read be spinning in the other. My head was burst- my poetry at one of the open readings at a ing. Every step I took threatened to pitch coffee house I’d seen near the Village. I’d me forward on my face. I remembered my wanted to do this since coming to the city ninth-grade science teacher explaining the but lacked the courage. It was now or never, physics of walking as the process of falling I felt, as I’d had a small presentiment or two forward and catching yourself by reaching that I might not have any more chances. My out with your legs, over and over again, and 35 dollars a week didn’t stretch very far and concentrating on this process helped to get I was hungry a lot of the time. It was rapidly me as far as the front sidewalk of the small, coming right down to it—I was going to two-story stucco house where I roomed. Un- have to find a job of some kind and settle in, able to reach out a leg and catch myself one or give up and go home. more time, I pitched forward onto the wet, I spent all that morning on my poems, dead lawn. It felt good lying there, so very making slight changes, reading them aloud peaceful and warm as I passed out. over and over there in my tiny room to the My landlord, a small, sweet-faced Italian plaster cast of a naked girl-woman on a man who worked the early shift somewhere, shelf in the corner that looked like a three- found me lying there early in the morning, dimensional Maxfield Parrish. And the more woke me up and helped me inside. That I read the poems the worse they sounded afternoon when I got out of bed I discovered until finally they made no sense at all. Still, that my folder of poems was missing. My I was determined. It was one of the things I life’s work, for God’s sake! had come to the city to do. I painfully retraced my steps of the

Late that afternoon I had my main meal previous night all the way to the subway

r ne d

a of the day of franks and beans at a lo- entrance, knowing I wouldn’t find my

Br

y cal café, and got on the subway heading manuscript but hoping anyway, despairing a K downtown. When I arrived at the coffee over the loss of what I hadn’t even been house, I sipped a cappuccino and dug the able to connect to that morning. I remem- She thanked me for escorting her to din- jazz blaring out of the speakers hung high bered having them rolled up in my hand ner and invited me to one of her classes that By the time we’d fin- in the corners. The walls were painted and clutched like a club when I got on the next week, a graduate seminar on the short black with patches of wildly decorative art subway the night before, so they must have story. I accepted, thanking her profusely. “It ished, she had broken and attempts at murals. I was the only one stayed on the subway. I made several calls will be good to have someone fresh and new there except for the waitress—a woman in to the appropriate offices of the transit in the class for a change,” she said, writing into tears several times tights and a long black sweater, who stayed company, to no avail. So all twenty-eight down an address in a small notebook, then and I was uncomfort- mostly in the kitchen out of sight—and felt pages of my poetry were gone for good, tearing out the page. She folded it up and more alone than I had back in my room. I since I’d never bothered to make copies. put it in the breast pocket of my coat. “We’ll ably aware of her eyes, finished my cappuccino in a hurry and went Not only had I failed to read my poems to a be looking forward to hearing you read. And out into the cool evening air, glad, anyway, New York audience, but they had been taken thanks for listening to this old woman rattle which reminded me of that I had scoped the place out. It was too away from me, swallowed by the city. In a on.” my mother’s that eve- early for anything to be happening. I found way, they had been unwritten. “It was my pleasure,” I assured her. We the nearest bar where there were people, On the long ride back to Texas, I had hugged, I kissed her cheek. Halfway down ning before I left. and sat down and ordered a hot brandy. plenty of time to put things in some kind of the stairs I turned to wave without holding When I returned to the coffee house a perspective. My little sojourn to New York onto the banister and almost fell. couple of hours later, there was a trio of jazz City had been a defeat, I realized, but a “Are you sure you can make it home?” develop my story. “A good beginning,” was musicians playing. I learned from a flyer necessary one and not without its moments. Martha Foley asked from her doorway, the consensus. tacked near a door that poetry night was My evening with Martha Foley primarily, concerned. I was invited back for their gathering the tomorrow night. that gracious, heartbroken lady who had “I’m fine!” I answered, embarrassed, following week, but when the time came I’d By the time I caught the subway back been so kindly receptive. Who had made the grinning stupidly. written nothing else and had done nothing to Jackson Heights, I was seriously drunk trip seem real somehow. Who had bought a “Take care, Mike Tuggle,” she said, then more on my story, so I didn’t go. But I con- for the first time in my life. I also decided, hungry young man a delicious meal and told closed the door behind her. tinued laboriously writing on a long novel, somewhere in the quick of my being, that me her story. Who had given me a chance to ostensibly about two brothers around my I would give up on the big city for now. It be heard. y brain awash with her stories and age, Donald Brooks Stallings and Charles was too much for me. I simply wasn’t ready, And I hadn’t even told her goodbye. Mthe gin, I fantasized all the way back Brooks Stallings, twins of course, one of my mother had been right after all. She’d to Jackson Heights. Maybe this was it, the whom—I’ve forgotten now which—runs off sent me a job listing the week before for little push that I needed. The golden oppor- to seek his fortune in New York City. The part-time, seasonal work at the Post Office. Mike Tuggle, Sonoma County’s 2008-09 tunity. I was going to have a chance to be other stays home and remains in school, I would get on the bus in a few days and go poet laureate, lives in Cazadero. heard. I was on my way! engaged to their mutual true love, Mickie. I brought my best story to the seminar, A more painfully melodramatic and fatally which was held in someone’s highrise apart- self-conscious beginning to a novel is hard ment near the United Nations building. The to imagine. Enough to say that Part One writers in the room were mostly middle- ended with Donald (or was it Charlie?) aged and very sophisticated. One woman leaping off the top of a circular walkway at was talking to another about a story of hers the Guggenheim and impaling himself on The New Yorker had recently accepted. It Brancusi’s White Seal. It was shockingly S U B S C R I B E took me about a minute to realize that I was unbelievable and melodramatic, but it still in way over my head, but I would go on and seems to me a fitting end for that character. If you live beyond the Redwood Coast and don’t get the Independent Coast Part Two took up with Charlie (or was it read my story anyway, despite the sudden Observer, now you can subscribe to The Redwood Coast Review and not miss Donald?) and Mickie attempting to live sureness I felt that it was so terribly insuffi- an issue of our award-winning mix of essays, reviews, poetry, fiction and cient. The writers were very kind, however, down the other’s suicide, venturing forth offering suggestions, encouraging me to into the world from Dallas to California. graphic art. For $24 a year you will be guaranteed quarterly first-class de- My poetry at the time was somewhat livery of the RCR and at the same time support Coast Community Library more bearable, if simply because it was shorter. It too was loaded with phony angst in its ongoing operating expenses. Please use this coupon to subscribe and a bathetic self-consciousness that made or renew now. You won’t be disappointed. Join our team the poems painful to read, even for me. Coast Community Library Landlady knocking Yes, I want to subscribe to The Redwood Coast Review. I am at the door, wants you. Volunteer. damned old whore, enclosing a check for $24 to Coast Community Library. wants more money. Come to 225 Main Street. Perhaps she’ll go away, I am making an additional donation to the library in the Call 882.3114. die someday, amount of $______. love me say, Write to CCL, PO Box 808, Honey Point Arena, CA 95468. Total enclosed $______This is a good example of my badness, born out of association with the works of my latest influence, Kenneth Patchen, Name ______the only poem from that time I am able to remember. Address ______WRITE TO US I also continued to haunt the art gal- The RCR welcomes your letters. leries and museums, looking at paintings and drawings and sculptures obsessively, City, State, ZiP ______Write to the Editor, RCR c/o as if I could find myself in them somehow. ICO, P.O. Box 1200, Gualala, When I encountered the paintings of Nathan CA 95445 or by email to Olivera at the Martha Jackson Gallery one afternoon, I felt I had done exactly that. Copy or clip this coupon and send, with check or money order, to Coast [email protected]. They were paintings of single individuals Community Library, PO Box 808, Point Arena, CA 95468. Thank You! mostly, standing beautifully, terribly alone, Page 10 The Redwood Coast Review Spring 2011 fiction Dying in San Diego By Alta Ifland And if you write something down, is it then lost, does it have animal delight, reveling in their primal weekend nakedness nothing to do with you any more, is there only a memory, an until Office Day. ache, left behind, as if you had been found guilty of some- For a brief moment I considered joining the horde of thing for which, sooner or later, you would have to answer? He must have liked this crisp, south- tourists, and if I didn’t, it was less out of a sense of urban —Sándor Márai, The Rebels ern light, inexistent in gray Eastern individualism that kept me from melting into the naked wilderness, and more from a reluctance to open my purse f you’ve never been to San Diego and are looking Europe, the liquid space opening for the rather exorbitant entrance fee. I kept on through the for a place to stay, I recommend the Balboa Park park, as if through a domesticated jungle, passed by three Inn at the edge of the enormous park of the same before him, soaked in solar perplex- or four museums, cafés, a fountain in a little plaza posing as name—a name vaguely reminiscent of Balbec, a city square, the El Prado restaurant, the Japanese garden though the boa is definitely less enchanting for ity; he must have felt as I have so with its enormous organ, and arrived at the International someone terrified of such crawling, earthbound many times that here time doesn’t Cottages. creatures, or, for those of us from the Oriental side of Here, trembling with anticipated delight, I opened my Europe, of Balaton. Both Balbec and Balaton are, by the move, that its wheel has morphed eyes wide so as not to miss any of the little marvels before way, famous, idyllic tourist resorts, though the first may be them—the houses in light colors with bright blue trim, made entirely of paper. I cannot guarantee you’ll stay in into still, transparent liquidity, or to reminiscent in their miniature sizes of the dwarves’ houses Ithe Orient Express studio, since there is only one, but if you in Snow White: the House of Hungary, the House of Israel, use a formidable English expression, can’t, ask the manager to let you take a peek at it: it’s worth . the House of Germany, the House of France (which, for it. With its walls covered in dark red lacquer crisscrossed that time was being killed some reason, shares the same building with the House of by black motifs, the high bed with its crimson sheets and a the Philippines), and so on. Every Sunday between noon white-red-orangey coverlet, the four pillars at the corners of and four all the houses open their doors to visitors, offering the bed holding the heavy burgundy curtains, and the ceiling little “local treats”—or so they claim, for in my tour, which mirror above it—which was probably designed for more included every one of them, I made sure to examine these adventurous travelers than myself—the black lacquered treats and verify the claim’s veracity, and I regret to say that, wood window-screen shutters, the hand-painted milieus, as often happens when “cultures” are celebrated in this great the ornate porcelain statuettes decorating the coffee tables, country of ours, most of the treats consisted of the same dry some of them Chinese, others Japanese, others something in cookies and lemonade. Whether at Disney World, Las Vegas between, the Orient Express studio is more than a dwelling: or on a campus with ivy-covered façades, whenever people it is a state of mind. Whose mind, I don’t know, but it most feel emboldened—and they often do, for nothing is more certainly puts one in the mood for an opium pipe or at least appealing to an American than the exotic fairydust exuded some hashish, none of which I had, so I contented myself when otherness flutters its wings like a butterfly in a jar—to with the Moo-Shu pork and rice from a nearby Chinese celebrate “other cultures,” one always ends up roaming in a restaurant. circle of interchangeable dry cookies. I first set foot in San Diego on February 22, 1989. It was It was Hungary Day. A big stand offered sausages with for an interview with the chair of the Literature Depart- sauerkraut, crepes and fried bread (“gogoasa” in Romanian). ment, as part of my application for their Masters program. One of the Hungarian ladies serving the food explained to a The Literature Department at UC San Diego was more young American woman with a stroller that the Hungarian eclectic than other similar departments in the country or name for it was “palacsinta”—which, if memory serves me in the California university system, and it accepted a less right, is the equivalent of “pie,” but I wasn’t going to argue specialized program of study. By then I already knew that over such a minor linguistic detail, so I bit my tongue, took I wanted to write my thesis on European writers who had my sausage with sauerkraut and looked for a place to sit. emigrated to the United States. I had only a few names in As expected, the sausage and sauerkraut didn’t taste mind, but I already knew the title: Longing for the Promised “Hungarian.” If there is something certain to rub me the Land. I didn’t know at the time that, while I was having my wrong way, it’s lack of authenticity, so I grumbled some- interview, an eighty-nine-year old man born in a small Aus- thing under my breath and, being done with the s & s, I tro-Hungarian town that now belongs to Slovakia, who had went back to the stand for a fried bread. There I watched come to this city long before me, was ending his life with a in incredulous shock how a middle-aged woman who might bullet. He was a man once famous in his country of birth, have been of Hungarian descent poured on a beautiful, who, like many other writers who left their language—two puffy, honey-colored gogoasa, a helping of cheddar-cheese. languages in his case, Hungarian and German—had slowly I don’t know if you’ve ever met a Hungarian—or any sunk into the dead waters of anonymity, and from there drift- Transylvanian, for that matter—but I can assure you that no ed away on Wednesday’s death waters—it was a Wednesday. Sándor Márai Hungarian would put cheddar cheese on his or her palac- His name was Sándor Márai. sinta, gogoasa or fried bread. The cheese was melting on That Sándor Márai would kill himself on exactly the the hot fried bread under the August sun, and I decided that I as above the multitudes, am, like everyone else, a pathetic same date, February 22, as Stefan Zweig, is both a stun- wouldn’t have one, after all. creature in need of a reassuring pat on the back. ning coincidence and an insignificant occurrence. If one If you write something down it is forever lost. I can now thinks that the odds are one in 365, the mystery surround- began to walk toward the edge of the park in the direc- see that writing does not mean preserving, as the gods of ing this event and the hidden meaning that one suspects lies tion of Márai’s apartment complex, imagining his foot- technology, busy as they are with storing all the mundane behind apparently random acts in the fabric of the universe steps on the grass and an elegant walking stick accom- words and images we exchange daily through our comput- turn into a mathematical probability that, although limited, panying him. Standing on the stairs in front of the building, ers, are trying to persuade us. Writing does not preserve is not quite unfathomable. But the temptation to assign a I took in the view that he must have taken in so many anything because to write means to acknowledge that the meaning, a coherence, to these random acts, is strong, and times—the palm trees lining the street and the green expanse thing you are writing about has vanished. As much as you how couldn’t it be? The existence of life itself, the fact that of the park named after a Spanish conqueror. He must have try to touch it, it is not there. I can now see that what I’ve everything is rather than isn’t, is the result of the victory of liked this crisp, southern light, inexistent in gray Eastern always searched for in books is the glimpse they gave me organized matter over chaos and disorder. In fact, accord- Europe, the liquid space opening before him, soaked in solar into Death’s playground. I could smell Death at work in a ing to a recent scientific experiment, the probability that out perplexity; he must have felt as I have so many times that book’s pages, the reality that once was and was now paper; of nothing something will appear is slightly greater than its here time doesn’t move, that its wheel has morphed into still, I could touch the paper and feel that this was what was left opposite. In other words: it is scientifically more probable transparent liquidity like one of those Dalí watches, or to use of us, of our thoughts and our bodies. I understood why for matter to organize itself in coherent forms than to remain a formidable English expression, that time was being killed. photographs always made me so sad, whatever their subject: in a chaotic form. Therefore, one may conclude that, insofar The International Cottages were built a couple of years because what I saw was not a beautiful girl smiling in a pink as what we call “coincidence” represents the triumph of after his death, so he didn’t get to eat fried bread with cheese bathing suit, but Death smiling at me with black, sulfurous coherence over randomness, it may be part of life’s logic to and admire the other dwarf houses. He was a grumpy old teeth. organize itself in meaningful life forms. What is surprising man, not easy to get along with, one of the ladies of Hungar- I don’t remember where I stayed that first time when I is not that Márai and Zweig killed themselves on the same ian descent told me, so very likely he would have mumbled came to the city, but it was not at the Balboa Park Inn. It day of the year, but that these kinds of coincidences don’t and grumbled with even more zest than I. I should add here was only twenty years later that I discovered it, when the happen more often. that grumbling has never stopped me from enjoying any- novel I never intended to write brought me back. It is also possible, of course, that this is not a coincidence thing, and that I often perform this exercise in discontent as From the inn I walked every day through the park—the at all, and in fact, Márai chose the date of his death in a an homage to my Eastern European heritage, as they say, all same park through which Márai himself had walked, deliberate way: the date when his twin brother in exile and the while savoring the kitsch, whether it comes in an “ethnic sometimes daily, from his apartment at 2820 6th Avenue, lost language stepped beyond, into the realm of what we like dish” or an object of some kind that happens to pass my which faced the other side of the park, or more precisely, the to imagine as the center of a circle with no circumference— way. Kundera says in one of his essays that, if for a French- street running perpendicular to Park Boulevard where the therefore, no possibility for exile, and no language, save for man bad taste is the ultimate crime, for an East European inn is located—passing by the Zoo with its huge parking lot that of universal harmony. kitsch is intolerable. There is definitely some truth to this, speckled with hundreds of cars from which tanned tourists but the Americanized East European that inhabits my body sporting shorts and baseball caps emerged holding the sticky henever I think about Sándor and Stefan—and cannot solve the unbreakable dilemma of her pure, skin-deep hands of five-year-olds and, like some long-forgotten ancient these days this happens quite often, as it happened enjoyment of what her esprit critique would call a cheesy, hordes, advanced toward their ultimate destination, which in when I was working on my dissertation—I think brainless, soporific materialization of kitsch. this case was not a city; it was, in fact, a reversed invasion, about not writing a novel, or about not writing at all. For, It was therefore with outmost pleasure that, at the end of for the barbarians were leaving behind them the glossy ma- Wif to write—a novel, a story, a poem—one needs, besides a the day, she returned to her Orient Express studio where she chinery of civilization, heading toward the wilderness (the dubious skill in manipulating words and what we call “feel- spent the night watching three American classics on TCM. Zoo also advertised an “African park”). Their advance was ings,” a certain arrogance that one is called by some imper- not without perils, as right at the Zoo’s entrance, a group of sonal, divine force to organize chaos into a new form, then, Mexican union workers holding a big sign tried to stop their to be able not to write, one has to kill in oneself that childish passage demanding support for their struggle against what vanity and replace it with a supreme self-effacement, with a they called “the Zoo’s anti-labor practices.” The hordes of Alta Ifland lives in Northern California and is the author of blank desire to leave no trace at all; not on the page, not in tourists accepted the brief delay with the understanding that the story collections Elegy for a Fabulous World and Death- the world, not for the loved ones. To leave no trace. This all quests must undergo some trials, and that this was their in-a-Box. “Dying in San Diego” is from a novel-in-prog- has been the ultimate, impossible goal of my life, and the final one before entering the gates of the Animal Kingdom, ress, Longing for the Promised Land. day I publish a novel, I will have publicly admitted that I where they could take their garments off and roar with failed miserably, that I, who have always thought of myself