Wednesday, February 8, 2012
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
Solid & Salvific: "Saving Sourdi" : Part One
At some point today, I will write about May-lee Chai’s story, “Saving Sourdi,” but I’ll follow Emily Dickinson’s idea of the circuitous route in getting there.
I’ve always been a proponent of bringing a book with you wherever you go. This may not be such a grand idea for some folks, those perhaps used to subway drives into the city every morning. But for a kid who grew up in what used to be, in speaking of physical and geographical space, wide-open areas, bringing a book with me wherever I went was a lesson I had to learn and relearn.
The South I grew up in was a place where a parent took you to the library to get books. The library was a wondrous place, a place where all the books literally reflected light when you opened the door and looked at the shelves. I have a fascination and fondness for mylar covers to this day, probably, because I view them unconsciously as the brilliant nimbus surrounding a book, a piece of wonder itself that reflects in form the inspirational and fantastical fictional luminescence that the book holds within it. Libraries in my days didn’t have carpet on the floors. The floors were tile, hard and solid and sending the somehow reassuring sound of shoes and heels striking the floor when they did so (libraries can actually be too quiet for one’s concentration; sometimes I feel practically unsafe when I sit in a library now; I always have the feeling that someone is sneaking up on me, and the library has somehow short-circuited my sense of hearing’s ability to notify me of it), and I had at least two reasons to be thankful for this; it created more light (I will always remember the libraries in my youth as being very bright places) and, as an asthma sufferer, it lessened the presence of dust. The libraries I went to were also very clean; sadly, I can’t say as much for the brightness and cleanliness of modern public libraries. They have now lost a grand interaction with natural forces, they miss out on what could be a pastoral reading environment, and they seem like tombs and bureaucratic vaults rather than inviting temples to things sacred. And, yet, in spite of myself, I love our libraries still.
Now, however, people having books with them or reading and transforming mundane wait time into something so much better is a trend I am very glad to see changing. Begrudgingly, I have to admit that the electronic explosion has helped this tremendously. Now, almost everywhere I go, someone is reading a book or, more often than not, has an e-Reader. I’m firmly and forever in the give-me-a-real-physical-book camp. I’m also very sorry that so many authors have been cheated regarding profits made from electronically scanned versions of their works that major publishing houses don’t feel the need to pay them for (we would call this piracy were I to undertake such methodology to get an author’s work; somehow society always sanctions illegal methods for those with lots of money, power, position, and status but fine if not jail us little folks when we do the same thing). I am, however, thankful that Kindles and Nooks and whatever other devices are out there encourage the young and young-at-heart to read wherever they are and whenever they are threatened with minutiae and the boogey of boredom. I don’t know, because I’ve never done it, but it must be fascinating to want to read a book while sitting at the mall or at McDonald’s or while waiting for one’s license renewal, download said book in a few minutes’ time, and then read it. Because, although I see the physical book itself as a cogent technology and media, perhaps the greater and more important thing is simply to get people to read. I think we are edging out of the era in which, according to Philip Roth, people spent fewer than two hours a day reading. I see many people lost in books now, and I honestly think we’re a better world for it.
So it was yesterday that I found myself following my principles and reading a book that I received a reviewer’s copy of gratis, namely Literature & Composition: Reading, Writing, Thinking (edited by Jago et al., not to be confused with the many books that have similar titles, e.g. Literature: Reading, Reacting, Writing edited by Kirszner & Mandell; it’s not that the titles are misleading – they’re all literature anthologies aimed for AP programs or college courses – it’s just that they’re trying to compete in a market place that decreases imagination by encouraging publishers to use titles that always and eternally let their readers know exactly what to expect; we used to call that Hell).
My mother told me that literature gives us windows into other times. One could say the same about people’s souls. And so it was that I got to look into May-lee Chai’s soul yesterday in the most unlikely of spots (not in heaven but in National Tire and Battery in Antioch, TN) for the most likely of reasons (trying to diagnose problems with a 2003 Kia Rio that has nearly 200,000 miles on the odometer); I had time to sit, and, having time to sit, I’ve trained myself - with tenacity that a dog-handler would appreciate – to do two tasks (sit and read) at once. All that to say: I was reading “Saving Sourdi.”
I’ve always been a proponent of bringing a book with you wherever you go. This may not be such a grand idea for some folks, those perhaps used to subway drives into the city every morning. But for a kid who grew up in what used to be, in speaking of physical and geographical space, wide-open areas, bringing a book with me wherever I went was a lesson I had to learn and relearn.
The South I grew up in was a place where a parent took you to the library to get books. The library was a wondrous place, a place where all the books literally reflected light when you opened the door and looked at the shelves. I have a fascination and fondness for mylar covers to this day, probably, because I view them unconsciously as the brilliant nimbus surrounding a book, a piece of wonder itself that reflects in form the inspirational and fantastical fictional luminescence that the book holds within it. Libraries in my days didn’t have carpet on the floors. The floors were tile, hard and solid and sending the somehow reassuring sound of shoes and heels striking the floor when they did so (libraries can actually be too quiet for one’s concentration; sometimes I feel practically unsafe when I sit in a library now; I always have the feeling that someone is sneaking up on me, and the library has somehow short-circuited my sense of hearing’s ability to notify me of it), and I had at least two reasons to be thankful for this; it created more light (I will always remember the libraries in my youth as being very bright places) and, as an asthma sufferer, it lessened the presence of dust. The libraries I went to were also very clean; sadly, I can’t say as much for the brightness and cleanliness of modern public libraries. They have now lost a grand interaction with natural forces, they miss out on what could be a pastoral reading environment, and they seem like tombs and bureaucratic vaults rather than inviting temples to things sacred. And, yet, in spite of myself, I love our libraries still.
Now, however, people having books with them or reading and transforming mundane wait time into something so much better is a trend I am very glad to see changing. Begrudgingly, I have to admit that the electronic explosion has helped this tremendously. Now, almost everywhere I go, someone is reading a book or, more often than not, has an e-Reader. I’m firmly and forever in the give-me-a-real-physical-book camp. I’m also very sorry that so many authors have been cheated regarding profits made from electronically scanned versions of their works that major publishing houses don’t feel the need to pay them for (we would call this piracy were I to undertake such methodology to get an author’s work; somehow society always sanctions illegal methods for those with lots of money, power, position, and status but fine if not jail us little folks when we do the same thing). I am, however, thankful that Kindles and Nooks and whatever other devices are out there encourage the young and young-at-heart to read wherever they are and whenever they are threatened with minutiae and the boogey of boredom. I don’t know, because I’ve never done it, but it must be fascinating to want to read a book while sitting at the mall or at McDonald’s or while waiting for one’s license renewal, download said book in a few minutes’ time, and then read it. Because, although I see the physical book itself as a cogent technology and media, perhaps the greater and more important thing is simply to get people to read. I think we are edging out of the era in which, according to Philip Roth, people spent fewer than two hours a day reading. I see many people lost in books now, and I honestly think we’re a better world for it.
So it was yesterday that I found myself following my principles and reading a book that I received a reviewer’s copy of gratis, namely Literature & Composition: Reading, Writing, Thinking (edited by Jago et al., not to be confused with the many books that have similar titles, e.g. Literature: Reading, Reacting, Writing edited by Kirszner & Mandell; it’s not that the titles are misleading – they’re all literature anthologies aimed for AP programs or college courses – it’s just that they’re trying to compete in a market place that decreases imagination by encouraging publishers to use titles that always and eternally let their readers know exactly what to expect; we used to call that Hell).
My mother told me that literature gives us windows into other times. One could say the same about people’s souls. And so it was that I got to look into May-lee Chai’s soul yesterday in the most unlikely of spots (not in heaven but in National Tire and Battery in Antioch, TN) for the most likely of reasons (trying to diagnose problems with a 2003 Kia Rio that has nearly 200,000 miles on the odometer); I had time to sit, and, having time to sit, I’ve trained myself - with tenacity that a dog-handler would appreciate – to do two tasks (sit and read) at once. All that to say: I was reading “Saving Sourdi.”
Sunday, February 5, 2012
Mining Meinke, or Twenty-Six Years Later
Be forewarned regarding today's post. There will be digressions upon digressions . . .
Peter Meinke came to Belmont University sometime around 1993 or so. I am unsure of the exact date, though I could probably look it up had I the time and inclination. But soon my workaday world will start, and that will be the end of it all regarding the time I may put toward such things. Better to get the post written, I suppose. Meinke's visitation wasn't controversial in any way. The visitation, or, rather near-visitation, that was controversial was Dr. Jim Brock's attempt to get Joseph Brodsky to visit our campus. The administration thought Jackson Brown, the author of the Life's Little Instruction Books series would be a better choice. Evidently, from what I gathered in conversation with people through the years, Brodsky, upon hearing the school was convening on the issue of himself or Brown opted out of the contest altogether, perhaps upon principle that a culture deserves the results it gets, especially when one is as short-sighted and often as bigoted as enclosed religious groups become when erecting institutions and becoming associated with them and riding their coat tails (see the current controversy over religious groups asking for the right to exclude members at Vanderbilt University for more). I was enraged at Belmont, especially Dr. William Troutt (who was a friend of Brown's if rumors and information were true), regarded James Brock as a martyr for fighting the issue and undoubtedly hurting his career, and disappointed in deeply metaphysical ways that, with my limited resources, I had just missed seeing, hearing, and meeting one of the poets I regarded most highly in the world, in all of literature. Indeed, we got Jackson Brown. Of course, I refused to go. Had I been smarter, I would have attended and asked him what he thought about being Brodsky's replacement, as it were. I'm sure he would have had a pithy little anachronism for it all. And I suppose because I'm still writing about his, perhaps it shows what little I've accomplished in my own life and my fixation with this event speaks to an immaturity . . . but, on the other hand, how does one recover from having the opportunity to meet one of the most fascinating, powerful, and inspiring poets of one's time taken out from under you by the thing he spoke most often against: a bureaucratic behemoth that regulates our lives beyond our own small defenses? How does one get over the fact that you never got to meet the most humble of poets, a man who won the Nobel Prize in Literature, yet opened his acceptance speech reminding his audience of all the great poets who were more deserving of the award than himself, those who should have been recognized by the world, but, ultimately, weren't? I honestly don't think I will ever get over this. And Joseph is dead now, perhaps a step closer to the anonymity he saw in the world no matter how often he glossed it over with notions of his very own, self-styled version of Christianity or Christian notions in his work (the mere mention of which might have caused Belmont to send him our way). Anyway, all of that to say: Peter Meinke was the first good choice by the administration at Belmont in bringing a literary cultural experience to its campus. Spearheaded by the wonderful wizard of Belmont Boulevard, Dr. John H. E. Paine, Peter came to our campus and gave a reading of his works.
At the time of this reading, I was in my early twenties. And, for whatever reason, Peter had chosen to spend the evening reading selections of poetry. And, though I liked it, I truly didn't understand or appreciate it. At that time in my life, I was heavily steeped in either classics or contemporary authors that I viewed as banging on that door. I was collecting the Northwestern Newberry Library Editions of Herman Melville's works and would rather have done this and had funds for this more than anything else in the world. I would read Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Bunin, Hawthorne, Emerson, and Poe any chance I could get. One of the saddest moments in my life was when I had to simply accept that fact that I would probably never be able to afford Hawthorne's Journals, because they simply weren't published in a way that made them within my range of purchasing power. I sat up on the night of my honeymoon, very early in the morning, actually, staring out a window and wondering why Nashville didn't have a poetic voice that could bring out some sort of meaning beyond the mundane reality it seemed to exhibit. (Later, I would learn of Randall Jarrell.) That sort of tells you where I was at. So, let's face it, Peter Meinke, as wonderful an author as he is, wouldn't have appealed to someone constantly looking into the face of that.
So, here I am, twenty-six years after its initial publication, approximately twenty years after I met Meinke, reading selections from The Piano Tuner for the first time. And the time doesn't matter. Because Meinke is a master. There's not a scarier, more literate story out there than "The Piano Tuner." There's not a more startling story out there than this one. If you're not scared at the end of that, you're lying. The only response I had was: this is why people need to carry weapons. A gun would have leveled the playing field; anything less, yes, the homeowner was a dead duck. If you've never read this work, I don't want to ruin it for you with spoilers. But the story subverts your expectations every step of the way. You think it's going to be a two-men-sharing-different-cultural-contexts story, then you think it's going to be a damaged war veteran teaching universal pity to a veteran who did well, then you think it's going to be an outright crime story, and then, well, it gets scariest with the last several words. As a literary product, it's simply amazing. And, yes, some people are going to criticize it for having a big bad Black man as the boogeyman, but you'd be foolish to do so. This is as fleshed-out of a character as you're ever going to get. You're only looking for racism (sometimes a type of reverse racism in itself, which, in this case, I think would be the only way one could fault this work on those grounds; finally, I'm saying: don't bring the charge of racism against Meinke; you'd be foolish to do so) if you find it here.
I was, after that point, overwhelmed with Meinke's great powers of characterization. I honestly would have to sit down and read and reread these works to discover the tools of the master craftsman behind these works. But each character seems as real as someone you've known. Each story is fully believable. Each story is powerful, hopeful, and sad in their own ways. And I know my descriptions are getting rather juvenile here, but Meinke is mining the everyday. And though, admittedly, these works aren't going to rival Herman Melville or even James Dickey any time soon, they contend with many and perhaps most of the contemporary fiction I read now. It's like a literary version of a George Foreman comeback. You stick these stories out there, and they're just as powerful as the day they were written. I knew women, my mother's relatives, as a matter of fact, quite like the women in "Ruby Lemons." And though I've never met a brother and sister like the ones in "Alice's Brother," the delineation of their vocal and mechanical movement toward truth and personal revelation that's been waiting a lifetime is, if not fully believable to me (because I've never had such an experience), resonant with a life experience you can nevertheless feel the impact of; the story leaves you with a feeling of emotional sadness for this pair as well as longing for their perhaps future consummation of an inclination toward a love we don't recognize as a society. If a story can make you do that, I'd say the author's done his job. (I can hear Philip Roth railing against the publisher, many years later and in absentia, of course, who said he wouldn't publish Nabokov's pornography as I wonder about the people who won't read this story now based on my description of it.)
Well, work just literally called via cell phone. The day's begun. Make sure you add some literature to yours.
Work Cited
Meinke, Peter. The Piano Tuner. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1986.
Peter Meinke came to Belmont University sometime around 1993 or so. I am unsure of the exact date, though I could probably look it up had I the time and inclination. But soon my workaday world will start, and that will be the end of it all regarding the time I may put toward such things. Better to get the post written, I suppose. Meinke's visitation wasn't controversial in any way. The visitation, or, rather near-visitation, that was controversial was Dr. Jim Brock's attempt to get Joseph Brodsky to visit our campus. The administration thought Jackson Brown, the author of the Life's Little Instruction Books series would be a better choice. Evidently, from what I gathered in conversation with people through the years, Brodsky, upon hearing the school was convening on the issue of himself or Brown opted out of the contest altogether, perhaps upon principle that a culture deserves the results it gets, especially when one is as short-sighted and often as bigoted as enclosed religious groups become when erecting institutions and becoming associated with them and riding their coat tails (see the current controversy over religious groups asking for the right to exclude members at Vanderbilt University for more). I was enraged at Belmont, especially Dr. William Troutt (who was a friend of Brown's if rumors and information were true), regarded James Brock as a martyr for fighting the issue and undoubtedly hurting his career, and disappointed in deeply metaphysical ways that, with my limited resources, I had just missed seeing, hearing, and meeting one of the poets I regarded most highly in the world, in all of literature. Indeed, we got Jackson Brown. Of course, I refused to go. Had I been smarter, I would have attended and asked him what he thought about being Brodsky's replacement, as it were. I'm sure he would have had a pithy little anachronism for it all. And I suppose because I'm still writing about his, perhaps it shows what little I've accomplished in my own life and my fixation with this event speaks to an immaturity . . . but, on the other hand, how does one recover from having the opportunity to meet one of the most fascinating, powerful, and inspiring poets of one's time taken out from under you by the thing he spoke most often against: a bureaucratic behemoth that regulates our lives beyond our own small defenses? How does one get over the fact that you never got to meet the most humble of poets, a man who won the Nobel Prize in Literature, yet opened his acceptance speech reminding his audience of all the great poets who were more deserving of the award than himself, those who should have been recognized by the world, but, ultimately, weren't? I honestly don't think I will ever get over this. And Joseph is dead now, perhaps a step closer to the anonymity he saw in the world no matter how often he glossed it over with notions of his very own, self-styled version of Christianity or Christian notions in his work (the mere mention of which might have caused Belmont to send him our way). Anyway, all of that to say: Peter Meinke was the first good choice by the administration at Belmont in bringing a literary cultural experience to its campus. Spearheaded by the wonderful wizard of Belmont Boulevard, Dr. John H. E. Paine, Peter came to our campus and gave a reading of his works.
At the time of this reading, I was in my early twenties. And, for whatever reason, Peter had chosen to spend the evening reading selections of poetry. And, though I liked it, I truly didn't understand or appreciate it. At that time in my life, I was heavily steeped in either classics or contemporary authors that I viewed as banging on that door. I was collecting the Northwestern Newberry Library Editions of Herman Melville's works and would rather have done this and had funds for this more than anything else in the world. I would read Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Bunin, Hawthorne, Emerson, and Poe any chance I could get. One of the saddest moments in my life was when I had to simply accept that fact that I would probably never be able to afford Hawthorne's Journals, because they simply weren't published in a way that made them within my range of purchasing power. I sat up on the night of my honeymoon, very early in the morning, actually, staring out a window and wondering why Nashville didn't have a poetic voice that could bring out some sort of meaning beyond the mundane reality it seemed to exhibit. (Later, I would learn of Randall Jarrell.) That sort of tells you where I was at. So, let's face it, Peter Meinke, as wonderful an author as he is, wouldn't have appealed to someone constantly looking into the face of that.
So, here I am, twenty-six years after its initial publication, approximately twenty years after I met Meinke, reading selections from The Piano Tuner for the first time. And the time doesn't matter. Because Meinke is a master. There's not a scarier, more literate story out there than "The Piano Tuner." There's not a more startling story out there than this one. If you're not scared at the end of that, you're lying. The only response I had was: this is why people need to carry weapons. A gun would have leveled the playing field; anything less, yes, the homeowner was a dead duck. If you've never read this work, I don't want to ruin it for you with spoilers. But the story subverts your expectations every step of the way. You think it's going to be a two-men-sharing-different-cultural-contexts story, then you think it's going to be a damaged war veteran teaching universal pity to a veteran who did well, then you think it's going to be an outright crime story, and then, well, it gets scariest with the last several words. As a literary product, it's simply amazing. And, yes, some people are going to criticize it for having a big bad Black man as the boogeyman, but you'd be foolish to do so. This is as fleshed-out of a character as you're ever going to get. You're only looking for racism (sometimes a type of reverse racism in itself, which, in this case, I think would be the only way one could fault this work on those grounds; finally, I'm saying: don't bring the charge of racism against Meinke; you'd be foolish to do so) if you find it here.
I was, after that point, overwhelmed with Meinke's great powers of characterization. I honestly would have to sit down and read and reread these works to discover the tools of the master craftsman behind these works. But each character seems as real as someone you've known. Each story is fully believable. Each story is powerful, hopeful, and sad in their own ways. And I know my descriptions are getting rather juvenile here, but Meinke is mining the everyday. And though, admittedly, these works aren't going to rival Herman Melville or even James Dickey any time soon, they contend with many and perhaps most of the contemporary fiction I read now. It's like a literary version of a George Foreman comeback. You stick these stories out there, and they're just as powerful as the day they were written. I knew women, my mother's relatives, as a matter of fact, quite like the women in "Ruby Lemons." And though I've never met a brother and sister like the ones in "Alice's Brother," the delineation of their vocal and mechanical movement toward truth and personal revelation that's been waiting a lifetime is, if not fully believable to me (because I've never had such an experience), resonant with a life experience you can nevertheless feel the impact of; the story leaves you with a feeling of emotional sadness for this pair as well as longing for their perhaps future consummation of an inclination toward a love we don't recognize as a society. If a story can make you do that, I'd say the author's done his job. (I can hear Philip Roth railing against the publisher, many years later and in absentia, of course, who said he wouldn't publish Nabokov's pornography as I wonder about the people who won't read this story now based on my description of it.)
Well, work just literally called via cell phone. The day's begun. Make sure you add some literature to yours.
Work Cited
Meinke, Peter. The Piano Tuner. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1986.
Saturday, February 4, 2012
The Many Voices It Takes
Lately, I've had a predisposition toward buying old books, the older the better. And I don't do this with any eye toward collectible value. I'm looking for knowledge, definitely not resale value. I stopped that long ago when I sold Sherman Alexie's Water Flowing Home for a pittance so that I could afford my wife some earrings for her birthday. But by continuing to buy old books I've learned those lessons that historians warn us about when they use the now cliche but still quite true phrase: "Learn history or be doomed to repeat it."
Lately, I've been thinking about the voices in our society. We've had many voices speaking for and against the common people, trying to take their pay and benefits worldwide. And I'm speaking both literally and metaphorically, here. Our voices have never been more important. But we forget just how many voices it takes. One of the now long-forgotten voices in the fight for civil rights in America was Harry Roskolenko. I don't mention his name to suggest that he was more important than others; I do so to point out, rather, that he was just as important as the other voices that have now been engraved in our (again) literal and metaphorical cultural consciousness. Somehow, even for the best and worst endeavors, we always worship the figureheads and forget about all the mass of people it takes to make a movement move through the impediments forged against it. As we are now trying to change the world that we are living in (and Republicans in political positions - Bill Haslam in my part of the world - are the worst evidence that we're not vocal enough), we must remember that all of those Occupy Wall Street people are wonderfully necessary for their part in achieving change. And if the Occupy movement has moved on (which, evidently, it hasn't, because there is new legislation being created to make putting a mattress and sleeping materials on a public area illegal), then we need to find the next best thing.
But don't forget Harry. Go back and look at what this guy had to say and wonder why he's been forgotten. And perhaps use his body of work as a gauge to judge just how much work it takes to effect change as well as just how valuable one person can be in doing their part, whether they have a statue of themselves sitting on a hill or not.
Lately, I've been thinking about the voices in our society. We've had many voices speaking for and against the common people, trying to take their pay and benefits worldwide. And I'm speaking both literally and metaphorically, here. Our voices have never been more important. But we forget just how many voices it takes. One of the now long-forgotten voices in the fight for civil rights in America was Harry Roskolenko. I don't mention his name to suggest that he was more important than others; I do so to point out, rather, that he was just as important as the other voices that have now been engraved in our (again) literal and metaphorical cultural consciousness. Somehow, even for the best and worst endeavors, we always worship the figureheads and forget about all the mass of people it takes to make a movement move through the impediments forged against it. As we are now trying to change the world that we are living in (and Republicans in political positions - Bill Haslam in my part of the world - are the worst evidence that we're not vocal enough), we must remember that all of those Occupy Wall Street people are wonderfully necessary for their part in achieving change. And if the Occupy movement has moved on (which, evidently, it hasn't, because there is new legislation being created to make putting a mattress and sleeping materials on a public area illegal), then we need to find the next best thing.
But don't forget Harry. Go back and look at what this guy had to say and wonder why he's been forgotten. And perhaps use his body of work as a gauge to judge just how much work it takes to effect change as well as just how valuable one person can be in doing their part, whether they have a statue of themselves sitting on a hill or not.
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