Shouts and Mise en Place

Ode to Table 49

Jerking home on the subway,
peering at dead stars and office buildings
empty lighted windows, I appreciate
the man and his wife at table 49
who ordered an expensive bottle
of Grand Cru Champagne from 1999.
A good year, I was fourteen and playing
softball in freshly mown grass that,
even then, smelled to me like childhood.
“No special occasion,” he said
when I asked what the bottle was for;
she said “Because it’s summer.”

Americans Do Their Business Abroad: Peace Corps Volunteers Tell It Like It Is

During years editing my college literary magazine, I read hundreds of poems and short stories about studying abroad, almost all of which ended with the author “finding himself” through understanding a new culture. Mostly, the content of those revelations seemed a bit obvious. The withered hands of the old woman selling mangos; a host mother who cooks and cleans for men who never lend a hand; a tired walk home from the bar with new friends and a feeling of inclusion. Suddenly, you see that giving a few dollars won’t help; you find that you are with the women in the kitchen; you realize that you are privileged (gasp!) but that your common humanity trumps everything. Then you go home.

I don’t mean to belittle the experiences people have while living abroad; I studied abroad twice, lived in Argentina for over a year, and believe in the importance of travel for opening our minds and making us more tolerant. I do mean to belittle the clichés of self-discovery and cultural epiphany that destroy many well intentioned travel stories. Americans Do Their Business Abroad: The Peace Corps Latrine Reader, a collection of stories by former members of the Peace Corps, sets itself apart from this type of writing immediately. On the back cover, the editors admit that Peace Corps memoirs usually “[bring] expectations for a certain type of book (heartwarming, uplifting, nice). Many books give you that experience. And we like those books[…] The world needs those books. This is not that book.” Instead, this book delivers insight into the lives of Peace Corps volunteers by chronicling their underfunded, slapdash, and well-intentioned if not well-executed attempts to make a difference in poor communities around the world.

A piece in the book that stands out for style as well as substance is John W. Evans prose poem, “Rock is Coking.” He describes watching the Rock give the smack down week after week with his host family. The strange, staged, benign violence of the World Wrestling Federation is juxtaposed with the real violence of poverty and ignorance of the viewers lives. Except for the author, no one watching knows the matches are fixed; you wonder how they view the own, seemingly fixed match of the poor fighting their own poverty.

The Corps members relate experiences of failure and even ambivalence. They remember other Peace Corps volunteers suffering from loneliness and alienation, some making it by truly integrating into their host communities, others surviving by drinking and cynicism. They tap into a truth that I will never forget about living abroad; the time between the adventures is lonely, slow, and hard. Still, the journey is (usually) worth it, and these story tellers have captured some truly humorous and touching moments.

I have two friends currently in the Peace Corps and as I read the stories in the book, I wished them good experiences, good health, and above par toilet facilities. I know they will both be fine—they both have exceptional senses of humor, which is what these stories showcase above all else. Humor as the ultimate weapon against tedium, loneliness, diarrhea, and a bee flying up your asshole to give you the sting of your life.

Thanks to the editors of this book for sending it to me for free to review. Want me to review your book, story, or poem? Make my week and send it to me!

The Smithsonian National Zoo and Survival of the Merriest

The National Zoo in Washington DC is an impressive zoo, and I say this as a spoiled native San Diegan who yawns at the news that another zoo is getting a panda. Pandas? We’ve had pandas for years. Talk to me when you have baby pandas. The National Zoo, though, more than meets my high standards. Large, open air enclosures, an abundance of flora both in and outside the enclosures, a wide variety of animals (including pandas), meandering paths; it even one-ups the San Diego Zoo by being a part of the Smithsonian, and thus free.

Yesterday was my first visit to the National Zoo. The sun was shining, the tourists were minimal, and the animals were out and about. I saw a panda shambling towards me, a red wolf appear out the long grass, and a baby anteater, asleep atop his frenetically sniffing mother. At the Spectacled Bear enclosure, I enjoyed watching the animal in silence until a group of girls came up behind me. “There’s only one?” a girl complained, and then they began to hoot and coo and make look here noises at the animal until it retreated into the bushes. I felt embarrassed on behalf of my species and wandered away.

At three, I stumbled upon the Giant Pacific Octopus feeding in the Invertebrates House. A fish, skewered on the end of a wire, was lowered into his tank and darted in front of him. He flashed from light pink to red and then slowly released from the glass wall to entangle his prey. While he fed, I noticed that the octopus had a blue tube tucked up in his tentacles; he never let it go, even while chewing. The ranger told us that the Giant Pacific Octopus has more nerve endings in his arms than he does in his brain, so, while he’s the smartest invertebrate, that isn’t saying much. Nonetheless, he needs stimulus to keep his will to survive so the zoo created a program to stimulate the octopus by places different objects in the tank. Every animal at the zoo has some kind of stimulus program.

Thinking about it, it seemed strange that animals need more to survival than just surviving. Why is it true that animals, humans included, aren’t content with simply sleeping and eating? We are programmed to do anything to survive, yet survival isn’t enough. We need challenges and, when we aren’t challenged to get our basic needs, we need blue play tubes or iPhones or books or skateboards; the list is endless, making us free to endlessly invent. This truth, that there is more to surviving than continuing to breath, seems to be forgotten too often by people who don’t see the point in funding the arts or majoring in, say, English. Doctors keep us alive now for nearly a century. That’s a lot of time to fill.

Yesterday, I survived by going to the National Zoo. What did you do?

Alcoholic and Overwhat?

I love getting the New Yorker; it never ceases to surprise, interest, and irritate me, particularly the poetry section. I am frequently forced to wonder, after reading a dead Slovenian poet’s unfinished work or a Russian revolutionary’s translated refutation of Bolshevism, are there no living English-language poets whose work I might understand? No poets whose (not posthumous) reputations could use a boost? Reading John Updike’s poetry several weeks ago, I discovered his prose and poetry were the same (one had line breaks) and was forced to do a little editing with my favorite red pen.

My window tells me the euonymus (an evergreen shrub, I learned)
arrives now at the last and deepest shade

of red, before its leaves go. One of

My grandsons leaves a phone message for me;

his voice has deepened. A cold that wouldn’t let go,

is now a cloud upon my chest X-ray:

pneumonia. My house is now a cage

I prowl, window to window, as I wait

for time to take away the cloud within.

Just a thought.

Last week, though, it wasn’t the poems that bothered me the most; it was the word choice in one specific article. The magazine arrived just as I was dashing to work, so it was on the subway that I read and circled a phrase that startled me, the kind of phrase I might usually skim over without really thinking. In an article entitled “Cash for Keys,” journalist Tad Friend writes about Leo Nordine, a man who works in real estate in LA, turning foreclosed houses for banks, chasing tenets, and making millions of dollars. Describing Nordine’s impoverished roots, Friend says that Nordine’s mother was, “alcoholic and overweight, shuffle[ing] the family among stucco dumps in the South Bay.”

Alcoholic and overweight? Like alcoholic and blond or alcoholic and black? Alcoholic and totally unrelated physical characteristic? Both of these descriptors seem meant to explain why Nordine and his mother were moving from house to house, poor and unstable. But do they? Perhaps we can assume that she was an alcoholic whose disease was destroying her (not, say, an alcoholic who, sober after 15 years of AA, is tired of hearing alcoholic used as synonymous with abuser), but I am not sure what Friend meant us to assume about her being “overweight.” Sadly, I can take a guess. Lazy, selfish, dirty, careless; they are all stigma attached to being overweight.

In stark contrast to his mother, Nordine reportedly gets up at 4:30am to catch the perfect surf, eats “five raw eggs and raw salmon jerky,” and then goes to his martial arts class. He lives in a 4 million dollar home (no more “shacks” for him) and works 20 hour days. No alcohol or food addict here, just a dyed in the wool southern Californian, addicted to exercise and work.

Did Nordine’s mother’s addiction to alcohol and food keep her from holding down a job or paying her rent on time? Does Nordine’s addiction to work and fitness make him an absent, obsessive husband and father? I have no idea nor could I say which addictions are better; any addiction has the potential to be harmful. I just can’t read more jab at overweight people, essentially equating being fat with being an unfit mother, without pausing to object.

Not Enough Monsters for Macondo

The Monsters of Templeton, by Lauren Groff, is a book about the life and history of a town, Templeton, and Willie, its prodigal daughter. Willie is a graduate student at Stanford who has returned to her home town of Templeton after an affair with a professor leaves her pregnant and unsure about returning to school. Her mother, Vi, whose own unwanted pregnancy resulted in one daughter and a slew of aborted ambitions is not happy to see her back. To make a bad homecoming worse, Willie’s mother, a recent convert to Christianity, makes an overdue confession. Willie’s father is not some unknown hippy from San Francisco, as previously asserted, but a man in Templeton, a man Willie has known her whole life. Who is it? asks Willie, pissed off. Figure it out, responds her mother, and Vi gives her one clue. Willie’s father is an illegitimate descendent of Marmaduke Temple, the town’s ancient founder and a legitimate ancestor of Vi’s.

Off to the library! says Willie. Wait a minute! said I. Aren’t you more than a half a page’s worth of angry that your mother has lied to you for years about a father figure you could have had? Apparently not. Instead, Willie takes on the project of finding her father with PhD candidate zeal, immersing herself and the reader in the past of Templeton and her family.

Groff’s forays into the past are engaging and she uses a variety of styles to take her readers back. Two women converse via letters that Willie finds, others get their own voices and we hear first person accounts of the past that takes us beyond what Willie herself can experience. Creative as these accounts are, they rely for their suspense on the secret of Willie’s father’s identity and, at the end of the book, that suspense collapses as all the plot obstacles turn out to be straw men. We learn that Willie is not pregnant after all, but has simply imagined it so thoroughly that she stopped having periods. No worries, then, about getting that abortion or not. Also convenient, Willie’s father is one of the men in the town that Willie has always felt close to, a man, in fact, tortured by his inability to have children, leaving him emotionally primed to step into that role for Willie. Willie drives back to Stanford, assured by her professor/former lover that everything is fine, feeling she has grown.

Of course plots resolve and books end, but I had wanted something deeper and darker from Groff. Groff explains in the preface that she has created the fictional town of Templeton to represent the strange, dark, even magical side of the Cooperstown of her childhood. Ready for Gabriel García Marquez’ village of Macondo, I was disappointed that Groff didn’t take her premise far enough to make it work. Instead, she created a reality in which magic is a rare and supremely convenient visitor, which makes it unbelievable. For instance, stuck in her research on her father, Willie is literally possessed by the house spirit and sent to a toy horse that contains a document with the final clue. This is the only time anyone is possessed in the course of the book, but Willie takes it in stride. Magical realism succeeds when you don’t question the appearance of magic in the reality that the author creates. Groff creates a reality with so much history and conflict and interconnectivity that I think she forgets to keep including the magic. When it finally appears, it jars instead of intrigues, and throws off the tone of a nonetheless ambitious and enjoyable first novel.

The Monsters of Templeton, by Lauren Groff

361 pgs. Hyperion Books. $14.95.

Burroughs' Naked Grocery List

Everyone needs a snack and, according to The New Yorker, the special snack needs of William S. Burroughs are currently on sale for 500 dollars. A grocery list, confirmed to be in Burroughs' own handwriting, creates a delightful picture of the artist at work, or at least at table.

Coca-Cola

Dry cat food

::then he subversively begins to number the items mid list::

1. Waffles (plain buttermilk) crackers

2. Triscuits

3. Cat food (canned)

4. Vodka last but not least

5. Marshmallows

Imagine Burroughs sitting down to a Naked Lunch of waffles, followed during the dying day with a stiff vodka and coke and a roasted marshmallow chaser. I hope he already had graham crackers and a chocolate bar. It makes me want to write a poem using only those ingredients or raid my freezer for a few strawberry Go Lean waffles.

Who would buy such a list? Would you, if it were Charlotte Bronte's market day journal or J.K. Rowling's Safeway receipt? Why, exactly, are we fascinated by the minutiae of the daily life of not only writers, but celebrities in general? For my money, I'll take the 500 dollars and buy a whole crate full of books. That's the gift these authors meant to be giving.

photograph from The Book Bench

Twilight: Vampires and Sex Cause a Rare Yawn

Today, while making a delicious burrito of leftover turkey and canned black beans, I listened to literary critic Maureen Corrigan read her review of the vampire sensation that is sweeping the nation, Twilight. Corrigan finds herself “bitten and smitten” after having read the first two books, a condition with which I can sympathize. I read the first book of the Twilight series in a bus traveling between Ushuaia, Argentina and Punta Arenas, Chile. Having acquired it for free in a hostel book exchange, I had no idea that this was the vampire book of the year in the US. I enjoyed it the way I enjoy most romance novels worth the paper they are printed on—the sexual tension titillated, the plot moved forward quickly, and did I mention the sexual tension (Meyer believes in abstinence, as do her characters)? Let’s face it; Twilight has little to offer in the way of character development or profound insight. What it offered, and what I unabashedly enjoyed, was a story about improbable love, obsession, and sexual frustration. My boyfriend was 5,000 miles away; I sympathized.

Fast forward to December, home again, reading book number two and now knowing that this series was a Big Fucking (Abstaining) Deal. The second book was dismal. The plot? Main character Bella groans and pines and essentially does everything short of suicide to get Edward, her vampire boyfriend, back. Naturally, he has only left her to protect her, something Bella-the-eternally-convinced-of-her-unworthiness does not grasp but something the reader knows throughout the entire 608 page book. By the end of the book, I was so ready for the inevitable reconciliation to occur that, when it did, I couldn’t work up my usual appreciation for love triumphant.

In her review of Twilight, Corrigan comments upon Bella’s single-minded desire, “[Meyer’s] vampire adventure tales aren't so much about ‘I vant to suck your blood,’ as they are simply about ‘I want, I want.’”

Yes, Bella wants and wants Edward. Bella wants Edward and only Edward, to the exclusion of wanting to further her education, have friends, be honest with her family, or even stay alive. Erotic horror often contains this element of wanting that which will destroy you. The wives of Dracula have their personalities erased (and get those fun white stripes in their hair); they aren’t women we envy. Turning this paradigm on its head, Meyer portrays Bella’s desire as positive rather than terrifying, yet it is no less self-effacing than the subjugation of his brides by Dracula.

Corrigan argues that the “brilliance [of] Meyer's revision of the Dracula tale” lies in her replacement of sex with abstinence, but this replacement changes nothing. The traditional vampire tale of male dominance over women using sex as the weapon is still in place. The only difference is that Edward controls Bella by denying her sex instead of by forcing her into it through seduction. Bella is controlled by her desire for Edward, and after a while that makes her a dull heroine and, I would imagine, a dull girlfriend. It definitely makes for dull reading, which is rare when werewolves, vampires, and fainting females share a book cover.

I haven’t read the third book and I don’t plan to unless stranded once again in Patagonia with miles of open road to go. I am just a little bit tempted to skip ahead and read the fourth, which I am told is the sex-festival after the marriage, but I don’t think I will. Another 1,200 pages of Bella begging for the privilege of sex and vampire immortality might be more than I can take.