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Reading Lolita in Tehran

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Reading Lolita in Tehran
This is one of those books that people tell you is really great, and you think “yeah, yeah, a book group in Tehran … sounds interesting.” I don’t know where we all got the idea that this book is about a book group of the sort we know here … a sort of hen night where a bunch of women get together and after a desultory discussion of the book at hand, retreat into drinks and gossip and general social activity.

This book is not about that kind of book group. This book is about women who are reading for their lives.

Azar Nafisi returned to Iran on the cusp of the revolution to teach at the University of Tehran. Like any junior professor, she was filled with excitement and anxiety, but bit by bit, she found herself hemmed in by a revolution that forced her to wear the veil, that arrested, imprisoned and murdered her students and colleagues, that closed the universities, that “made me irrelevant.”

I’d been reading along thinking of John Ashcroft and Bush, of the “Patriot” Act, and Homeland Security, of the sheer impotent rage I felt as I heard Bush say this evening on TV that the new bill to clearcut the forests so they won’t burn is “just common sense” when Nafisi recounted this anecdote: “Khomeni had asked a leading political cleric, Modaress, what he should do when an official in his town decided to call his two dogs Sheikh and Seyyed, a clear insult to clerics. Modaress’s advice, according to Khomeni, had been brief and to the point: “Kill him.” Khomeni concluded by quoting Modaress: “You hit first and let others complain. Don’t be the victim, and don’t complain.”

How does one fight these sorts of bullies? Clearly this is the motto of the current administration, and like Nafisi, I too have retreated into the sanctuary of reading, of gardening, of keeping my head down and hoping I can outlast this bunch.

Which is where reading and writing fiction comes in. Nafisi gives one of the most cogent arguments I’ve ever read for why fiction matters. Fiction matters, she says because “A novel is not an allegory … It is a sensual experience of another world. If you don’t enter that world, hold your breath with the characters and become involved in their destiny, you won’t be able to empathize, and empathy is at the heart of the novel.” And empathy is exactly what ideologues seek to repress. In discussing Lolita with her students, Nafisi “mentioned that Humbert was a villan because he lacked curiosity about other people and their lives, even about the person he loved most, Lolita. Humbert, like most dictators, was interested only in his own vision of other people. He created the Lolita he desired, and would not budge from that image.”

I could not help but think as I read this book of the ways the right wing has bullied their way into the seat of power, by declaring that their dogmatic beliefs are simply “common sense,” and that anyone who doesn’t agree with them is not an “American.” I don’t know what tools we have to fight ideologues — I failed miserably at exactly this task in graduate school, and I fear that I don’t have what it takes to fight this fight on a political level either. I’m just an artist, and I have my family/social novel I’m working on … but what if I’m working on this while the call is going out to put us all in veils, while the arguments are being made that we shouldn’t mind, because after all, it’s just taking your shoes off to get on an airplane. Why are we all being so unreasonable? Isn’t this, after all, for the greater good?

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Louis Owens

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… what Steinbeck is arguing in his writing is that we have to be responsible for what he terms the whole thing, known and unknowable, in a very deep way: that if you step into a tide pool, you have to realize that that step has changed the entire universe, and that will fit neatly into what Silko’s arguing in Ceremony, the whole sense of having to be careful, to walk in balance, to be responsible for knowing that every single act of humanity changes the world. Steinbeck was arguing that sixty years ago, before anybody in white America really was… Louis Owens

I’ve been meaning to write about Louis for some time now, but it was a ridiculous photo I saw on the San Francisco Chronicle website a couple of days back of troops preparing for battle by doing a “Seminole War Dance” that brought his spirit back into the room. It was the kind of thing that he would have laughed at, with that dark laugh of his, a laugh that for a long time managed to stay just ahead of the despair at its heart.

I’ve been thinking of Louis because he was the only writer I knew personally whose work took as its central question the real problem of evil, how evil walks in the world, how evil manifests itself in violence. Louis’s novels, particularly The Sharpest Sight, Bone Game and Dark River all take as their central question the ramifications of violence — on individuals, on cultures, on landscape and place. Louis is the guy I would have called, or emailed when I saw that silly photo, the guy I would have gone to because Louis had the singular ability to acknowledge your fear, your despair, your flagging faith with the kind of dark joke that could keep you going.

And I’ve been thinking of Louis, because for several days I’ve been trying to wrap my brain around the process that brings a person to the point where he or she feels entitled to kill another person. There was a death penalty advocate on NPR the other morning, I only heard a fragment of it, but he was saying that the Supreme Court’s recent stay of execution wouldn’t deter him from proceeding with executions even in the face of DNA evidence exonerating those on death row. Coming on the heels of our President’s weird television appearances in which it was clear that he was looking forward to going to war, that despite his words to the contrary, all his body language screamed how badly he wanted to go to war, that he really really wanted to go kill Iraquis, and that he felt fully entitled to do this, that he felt they deserved to be killed by him, I found myself missing Louis. So this morning, when I couldn’t sleep, I went to Google; I thought maybe I could find something of his out there about violence that would help me make sense of this process. There’s a section of the interview from which I pulled Louis’ quote about Steinbeck, where he and John Purdy discuss Vietnam. Louis didn’t go to Vietnam, but his beloved older brother Gene did, and came back deeply wounded by the experience. Gene disappeared one night, and it was thirty years before Louis found him again. (His essay Finding Gene describes the experience.) I thought this exchange about Dark River was interesting:

JP: … I like how you play with …the “week-end warrior” who is out there trying to experience the “thrill” of war . . .

LO: The militia . . .

JP: Yeah, but even more insidious than that in some ways, less blatant. The professional person who comes from the urban center to learn the ways of the “wilds” and to hunt humans. Then the convention of the Vietnam veteran, the Black OPS type of characters, and you take them all apart.

LO: Well, good. I�m glad you think that. And actually, the militia were inspired by a group of guys I ran into when I was backpacking on a reservation. They were wearing camouflage uniforms, out practicing war. Disneyland with weapons. I know there are people like that, practicing violence against others. ….

JP: That group is an interesting group because it has such a wide array of characters; they�re all participating in the same type of activity, but operating from different backgrounds and values, so there are these moments of crises for some of them: “Are we going to kill these women, or what?” It is no longer a game, and they have to decide.

LO: Ironically, in a group like that the most violent are often the individuals who never experienced war.

JP: They haven�t had to live the aftereffects.

LO: Well, yeah. You were in Vietnam. You know what I�m talking about. I wasn�t but my brother was there for three years and a lot of my friends were there and a number of them died there. It seems to me that it is almost always the people who haven�t experienced the immediacy of violence who are capable of getting involved in it as a game.

As a game. That’s certainly how it’s being portrayed on the television (yeah, yeah, I turned it on again last night despite my best intentions). As the latest, “realest,” reality TV. But those aren’t suckers who volunteered for some stupid tv show out there, they’re actual people who for any variety of reasons agreed to take up arms and defend our country (note: defense not offense) and despite the ways the media and the government are colluding to try to assure us that this is a “clean” war, that these strikes are “surgical” go read the guys who were there the last time, and what they have to say about the experience on the ground.

The doublespeak is so virulent right now. This morning’s newspaper is full of angry letters to the editor from people outraged by the peace demonstrations. There is this suffocating voice from the right, a voice so full of anger and hostility, calling for unanimity. Claiming that dissent is treason. Claiming that we all need to obey. Like my inability to figure out how someone makes it okay in their own head to go kill someone else, I don’t really understand why anyone would think a nation of people all lined up in lockstep agreement is a good thing. Unless maybe it’s denial at the heart of it all.

Louis says in the John Purdy interview:
I guess one thing I’m working on in most of my writing is the way America has tried, and continues to try, to bury the past, pretending that once it’s over we no longer need to think about it. We live in a world full of buried things, many of them very painful and often horrific, like passing out smallpox-infested blankets to Indians or worse, and until we acknowledge and come to terms with the past we’ll keep believing in a dangerous and deadly kind of innocence, and we’ll keep thinking we can just move on and leave it all behind. That’s a reason that one of Nightland’s protagonists, Will, ends up living on a ranch containing a world of buried things, including even a smashed Range Rover…. But he�s going to stay there. You can�t run from that buried history.
But you can try to shout down anyone who mentions it, I guess. You can start a war to “prove” our dangerous innocence.

Louis was my mentor and my friend. I can’t ask Louis any of the questions I want to ask him, the questions I’m posing in this entry, because on July 25 of last year, Louis put a gun to his chest and shot himself. Somehow the violence he’d spent his life exploring in fiction came off the page and claimed him. Louis’ friend Glen Martin said it best, expressed the shock and sorrow and anger many of us felt, still feel.

Violence begets only violence.

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Things you can do instead of planning Part Two of your new novel.

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Things you can do instead of planning Part Two of your new novel. I finished Part One the other day … well I didn’t exactly “finish” it but I do have a draft that seems sort of alive and is stable enough that I have to stop tinkering with it and go on to the next part of the book. I’m trying not to dwell on the fact that it’s taken me almost four years to get to this point, nor to dwell on the fact that I’m back at the edge of terra incongnita, that place where I have to make up a bunch of new stuff. Rewriting is way more fun than writing.

So, here are some of the things a person could do on a Sunday instead of diligently getting out the enormous sheets of paper with the post-it removeable stickum and outlining scenes.

Go to Mass. Hard to feel bad about that one. After all, it is Lent. Our priest was a little shook up, aparently he was felled after morning Mass on Ash Wednesday by an enormous kidney stone, and he choked up a couple of times during the homily talking about how even though we know we are safe in God’s love, things can get kind of scary sometimes. It was endearing. He seems like a pretty good priest, and we prayed a lot for peace in the Middle East, and even here in conservative Montana, people seemed really to be praying that we won’t go to war.

Walk the dogs. It is very very cold … one bank says it’s 6 degrees and the other bank, a block up the street says it’s 4 degrees. The dog park is out on a low bluff along the Yellowstone River, and it’s windy. None of the usual characters were out there this morning and the dogs were a little miffed that they got a short walk, but too bad, my fingers were frozen and there wasn’t anyone to talk to while freezing.
Read the New York Times. I get the Sunday NY Times by mail, so I actually read last Sunday’s Times this morning. I read the Bozeman Chronicle too, but that only takes about fifteen minutes, including Parade and the comics. It’s a pretty good paper, but Sunday is distinctly unsatisfying. My friend Hope who lives on a ranch in Colorado and I were talking about how much we like reading the Sunday Times a week late… it takes all the urgency out of the news parts of the paper, and since the Magazine and the arts sections aren’t particularly timely, it makes for a very relaxing reading experience. I was especially struck by Judith Shulevitz’s essay Bring Back the Sabbath (sorry, it’s now in the annoying NYT archive where you’re supposed to pay for content). For several years now, I’ve avoided committing to activities on Sunday. I haven’t been consiously thinking of this as keeping the Sabbath, but whether or not I make it to Mass (which was pretty much never in California, thanks to the recent scandals and the enormity of that parish. I guess I just don’t like big congregations), I like taking Sunday to be quiet, do some reading, cook something, clean my house, putter. Shulevitz traces how she gradually found herself joining a Synagogue and practicing the Sabbath again, as well as traces the history of the Sabbath in American history. It’s good to have some space in the week where you’re not all caught up in trying to accomplish anything.

Make a big pot of Lamb and White Bean Stew. Chop up an onion, a couple of carrots, and a couple of celery stalks into dice. Chop up the last of the prosciutto butt that was tucked away in the freezer. Saute the prosciutto bits in oil, then add the onions and saute until translucent. Add the carrots and celery with some red pepper flakes, a couple of cloves, a couple of bay leaves, some of last summer’s sage that happens to be hanging in the back of the pantry, and a generous sprinkling of herbes de provence. Smash and peel a bunch of garlic cloves (five or six if, like me, you like garlic). Throw them in with the vegetables. Add 1 cup of small white beans soaked overnight (or a can of white beans, or even unsoaked beans if you didn’t think about it in advance). Add the leftover 1/4 bottle of white wine, a good slug of vermouth (for that herbal flavor) and a pint of chicken broth. Add two lamb shanks. Bring to a bare simmer and let cook all day so it fills your house with a lovely smell and plan to eat it while watching Clinton and Dole on 60 minutes.

Blog
Stop blogging and suck it up and go try to figure out what these characters want to do next. Even if it is Sunday, nonetheless, it would be good to get this done before another work week begins and sucks me in.

Happy Sunday everyone.

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Sylvia Plath, Baking and Feminism:

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Sylvia Plath, Baking and Feminism: There have been a number of articles on the web lately about Kate Moses new book Wintering, a fictional account of Sylvia Plath’s last months when she was writing Ariel. The piece that got me thinking was the essay Kate Moses wrote for the Guardian called “Baking with Sylvia”. In this essay, Moses talks about how for both herself and for Sylvia Plath, baking was a way of creating order out of chaos, and how as she found herself up against her deadline for the book, Moses also found herself baking on a near-daily basis, much as Plath had those last months while living in London and writing Ariel.

Baking is one of those things that tends to sort cooks into categories, because in order to be a good baker, you have to be able to really follow the directions. I’m an okay baker — I have a couple of standbys — simple fruit tarts, a fluffy yellow sponge cake filled with fresh fruit and iced with whipped cream that I cribbed from Dom Deluise’s fabulous cookbook: Eat This…It’ll Make You Feel Better:…. But even that cake, a cake so good I’ve had strange men look up at potlucks and say “who made this, I want to marry her,” belies my essential inability to follow a recipe with exactitude. Dom’s sainted mother, whose recipe this is, uses canned peaches with heavy syrup, and sliced almonds; I like defrosted frozen raspberries and mint leaves, and sometimes I put custard in the middle like Dom’s mom, sometimes I don’t. Real bakers don’t improvise like this. Real bakers weigh the flour. Real bakers actually take the knife and level off the flour in the measuring cup. My brother is a real baker, and has wowed Christmas crowds with stunning renditions of Jacques Pepin’s Paris Brest. In high school, we could always tell when my beautiful cousin Dede was having trouble with food again because she’d start baking, turning out exquisite cakes that she wouldn’t dream of eating. Me, I’m a sloppier cook — which is why I bake bread. Bread is forgiving of improvisation, even the sourdough bread I’ve been experimenting with the past couple of months. There were a few brick-like loaves, and the round loaves keep coming out too flat, but for the most part, it’s all bread. Nice clean wholesome bread made with sourdough starter, locally grown and milled wheat, and a little salt.

So what does any of this have to do with Plath? Nothing I guess, except that it struck me as I read Moses’ essay about her own baking, and its relationship to the inevitable tension between writing and family life (“As I neared the end, my husband and two children were getting used to my conspicuous absence, or my thousand-mile stare when I was physically present … My five-year-old was sometimes heard muttering in the hallway, ‘Mommy’s behind the door.’”), I became sad for Plath, sad for Anne Sexton, and Adrienne Rich, sad for all those women who lived in a world where baking and intellectual activity, where home life and poetry were considered mutually exclusive. I remember my own terror, my own worries that if I got married, had kids, had a domestic life, I’d never be a writer — and this was thirty years after Plath, Sexton, Rich, Lessing. Despite my fears, I was living in a world where this juggling act was at least possible. How much more difficult must it have been for them? The continual juggling between family life and intellectual life?

Salon ran an excerpt from Wintering, and it looks interesting. I seem to keep blogging about books I haven’t read yet, and neglecting the ones I have read.I’m not sure what that’s all about — as I work my way through the pile I’ll try to reoprt back more regularly.

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White House Postpones Poetry Symposium

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White House Postpones Poetry Symposium

Both MobyLives and Blog of a Bookslut have blogged this today, but what really struck me was the following statement from the White House: “While Mrs. Bush respects the right of all Americans to express their opinions, she, too, has opinions and believes it would be inappropriate to turn a literary event into a political forum.”

While I appreciate that the First Lady is at least interested in books, and in promoting literacy, one has to wonder where on earth she got the idea that the “literary” is not political. Please. Good for Sam Hamill, Rita Dove, and Stanley Kunitz for leading the charge and refusing to be co-opted as some kind of safe, “nice,” “literary” sideshow.
Sam Hamill and Poets Against the War are calling on American poets to make ” Feb. 12 a day of Poetry Against the War. We will compile an anthology of protest to be presented to the White House on that afternoon.” Come on all you poets out there, let’s show the White House that poetry is not some nice safe occupation for an afternoon, no light diversion from the events of the day, but is, in the immortal words of Adrienne Rich, something “You must write, and read, as if you life depended on it.” (What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics)

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Bookslut notes that…

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Bookslut notes that The Lovely Bones story lives on, and points to this totally inane conversation on Poynter which seems to argue that David Mendelsohn’s review could only be motivated by “backlash” against the book’s commercial success, and that critics should go easy on first novels, particularly if they are heavily promoted. There are so many holes in this argument that I don’t actually know where to start, so I think I’ll just start by saying, as an author, that any review which surpasses the level of “liking/disliking” and addresses the artistic ambition and accomplishment of a work is so rare that, once one gets over the shock, it must be a relief. I’m sure that if I was Alice Sebold, I’d be completely dismayed by the NYRB review, but on the other hand, who else is going to challenge her to set the bar higher with the next book? Sebold’s no frail flower, she’s certainly survived worse than one serious but critical review, and I have every expectation that her next novel will be interesting, and perhaps will avoid some of the pitfalls of the first one.

What I found useful in the NYRB review, however, was the way he used The Lovely Bones as a jumping-off place for a discussion of our current cultural mania for pablum comfort, for our desperate need to believe, in Mendelsohn’s words, that “we needen’t really be sad, that nothing is, in the end, really scary.” As one who wrote a dark novel, a novel in which everything does not work out okay, and everyone does not come out at the end feeling that chimera emotion “closure,” I can testify to the force of the cultural backlash against this particular idea. (At my 20th high school reunion last summer, you would have though from the reaction of the suburban moms, that I had actually taken a small child out into the woods and lost her myself.) Somehow in America, we have become incapable of acknowledging that things, more often than not, do not work out well, that life can offer up events from which we may never “heal,” that “closure” is a myth.

Which brings me to the inimitable Jeanne d’Arc and her discussion this morning of how prosecutors and the media have tapped into this powerful myth, how they have held the death penalty out as a carrot to the survivors of murder victims and have promised them that if they press for the death penalty, they will achieve this mythical state of “closure” upon the execution of their loved one’s murderer. Now, maybe it’s the Catholic in me, but I’ve never understood why, as a nation, we seem to sanction revenge in this way. Haven’t any of these people ever read the New Testament? Isn’t Jesus the guy who makes the radical argument that it is only in forgiving those who have trespassed against us that we are sanctified? But I digress, what I really wanted to point out here is the manifold nature of this myth of “closure.”

There is no closure.

People never “get over” heartbreak and grief. We simply learn to live with it the way one eventually accepts that the broken leg will always ache when damp weather moves in. It was the Buddha who taught that the First Noble Truth is suffering, and that it is our resistance to and denial of suffering which causes more suffering. Suffering itself isn’t “bad” — suffering just is. It is our attachment to the idea that suffering is bad, our attachment to the idea that suffering is to be avoided or denied, our attachment to the idea that suffering shouldn’t be happening to us, because we are such nice people, we did everything right, it isn’t fair that is the problem. As a nation, as a culture, I’d like to respectfully suggest that we all just grow up please.

Stories matter. It matters that The Lovely Bones elides the true nature of suffering. It matters because the fact that the book has sold millions of copies demonstrates how badly people want to believe that we can get through life without growing up, without facing the inevitable reality of suffering and injustice. Stories matter because in our desperation to deny that suffering and injustice are real, we promulgate false stories to the victims of real crimes. We hold out hope for a coherent narrative, a narrative in which everything will make sense, in which all the loose ends will be neatly tied together. Stories matter because our desperate quest for a coherent narrative leads us to participate in human sacrifice, to participate in a system where the point was simply to sentence someone, anyone, to death, so that we can claim “closure” and “healing” for the victims of crime.

George Ryan may have been a tarnished govenor (not the first in Illinois, by a long shot) but read the speech. He was willing to stand up and declare that we cannot, as a free society, afford the cost of this false story. That we cannot be a nation that is willing to offer up for public sacrifice the lives of these men and women, too many of whom are not guilty of the crimes of which they have been accused. That we cannot afford to be a society willing to kill innocent people. It was a brave and noble thing to do, and I for one, applaud him.

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Bookslut and “The Lovely Bones”

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Bookslut pointed out this review of The Lovely Bones at the New York Review of Books. I just finished reading Alice Sebold’s first book, her memoir, Lucky. The most interesting aspect of the memoir was it’s narration of Sebold’s changing relationship to her own victimhood, and the ways that her attempts to deny and repress the emotional impact of being violently raped hobbled her emotional and artistic life for many years.

I haven’t read The Lovely Bones yet myself, but I want to use Mendelsohn’s essay as a jumping-off place for a discussion (which I assume will be ongoing on this blog), about the the ways that fiction, like all art, must not simply reaffirm our perceptions of the world, but rather, must challenge us to re-examine our most deeply held beliefs, hopes, and fears. However, because we live in a welter of narrative, from blogs to television to novels to movies to the stories we tell one another at parties, because we are aswim in narrative constructs that have come to seem “natural,” we may not even be aware when we’re responding to the fulfillment of a story we wish to be told, rather than the story we must hear.

In his review, Mendelsohn argues that the critics have made precisely this mistake with The Lovely Bones. That after September 11, we were all so anxious to be reassured that we mistook Sebold’s story for the “fearless and ultimately redemptive portrayal of dark material” it was touted to be. However, Mendelsohn argues that in fact, “darkness, grief and heartbreak is what The Lovely Bones scrupulously avoids. This is the real heart of its appeal.” He argues that “It is hard to read … The Lovely Bones without thinking of … those TV “movies of the week” with their predictable arcs of crisis, healing, and “closure,” the latter inevitably evoked by an obvious symbolism.” He gives several excellent textual examples to support this claim, and goes on to speculate that part of the novel’s gigantic appeal is that in a nation traumatized by September 11, Sebold’s “fantasy of recuperation” has “a vital subconscious appeal,” especially for a “public … now able to see itself as an entire nation of innocent victims.” Finally he concludes by asserting that “Confidence and grief management are what The Lovely Bones offers … it too is bent on convincing us that everything is OK.”

So what, you ask, do I have against redemption? Against being OK? Well, nothing, of course. What I have is a gripe against these stories, these little narrative pills that tell us that “closure” and “healing” can be achieved without the true harrowing of the soul that they demand. What I have is a gripe against is the enormous cultural and professional pressure to create narratives in which “closure” and “healing” can be attained, narratives which posit that, in David Mendelsohn’s words, “we needen’t really be sad, that nothing is, in the end, really scary.” I also have a gripe against the idea that it is the purpose of fiction to explain us to ourselves, to wrap up complex experiences in tidy little packages in which the characters all neatly explain how they feel about the events that have taken place, in which the characters, like good little puppets, step forward and tell us exactly what it all means.

So what’s a writer to do? Of course, the only one who can actually answer that is each writer for him- or herself, but the question I’d ask is how can we use language, our only tool as writers, to create experience rather than simply describe it? Of the books I’ve listed in my Current Fiction Picks section is Mary Rakow’s first novel, The Memory Room. Now this is a book that dives deep into the wreck, a book in which it is always in question whether Barbara, the protagonist, will ever be able to make sense of the moral evil at the heart of her childhood, an evil she repressed for a very long time. The book is formally daring, it is utterly disinterested in the usual cause-and-effect conceits of traditional mainstream narration, opting instead for a collage of Barbara’s perception, memory, and evasion of memory, interspersed with fragments of Paul Celan and the Psalms. This is a harrowing, stunning novel. A novel that is often difficult to read, and yet is so beautiful that one is compelled to return to the text. This is emphatically not a novel that sets out to reassure anyone that the world is OK. In an interview with LA Weekly, Rakow discusses the form of the book: “I consciously changed the form, several times and quite radically based on my sense of the world. This meant I had to change how the pages looked so that when I looked at it there was no lying going on. For example … when I heard of these two young boys, a toddler and an infant, thrown over the bridge into the Los Angeles River in broad daylight, I could no longer write from one margin across the page to the right. It felt like a lie. I thought, Is this how the world is? Is this what I can say to that surviving toddler? And the resounding answer was, immediately and radically, No. From that point on, for several years, I wrote in what I called “dots” — two or three lines of text running across the top inch of the otherwise all-white page. I wrote thousands of these and eventually grouped them by color. I tied the piles with ribbon. Red, blue, yellow, black, white, green, blue, indicating their emotional timbre. … My ordering of the colored dots was like musial composition. … That early ordering was a huge task for me to get the sequence right, and took me probably over a year.”

It is one of the central tasks of any artist to to cleave to the story that must be told, despite the many many temptations one will encounter to tell the story people want to hear. If that means inventing new forms in which to tell those stories, then so be it. If that means writing odd fragments and spending years trying to figure out how they fit together, then one’s task is to have the courage to keep at it. If that means trying to find a path through the constraints of traditional narrative form, then again, one’s task is to have the courage to keep at it. But I’d ask you writers out there, to keep asking yourselves at every turn, what am I writing, the story that needs to be heard, or the story they want to hear?

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Book Alert …

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Book Alert For the past couple of weeks I’ve been reading Buffalo for the Broken Heart: Restoring Life to a Black Hills Ranch, by Dan O’Brien. He’s one of those writers who other writers rave about, but who isn’t well known to the general public, but he should be. This is a terrific book about O’Brien’s long struggle to keep his ranch afloat, and the huge leap of faith he took in the early nineties when he converted the ranch from cattle to buffalo. It’s also about the ecosystem of the great plains, and how we’ve messed it up, and the hope that by re-introducing native wild herbivores like buffalo, perhaps we can not only restore the land itself, but figure out a way to live there that makes any kind of sense at all.

Since I’m interested in the meat issue, I bought some buffalo short ribs last time I was at the Co-op. I’ll have a full report later as whether the Daube with Wild Mushrooms and Orange worked (from another essential cookbook, Patricia Wells’ Bistro Cooking. I have never cooked anything out of this book that wasn’t wonderful, easy, and came out exactly like I’d hoped it would. A bombproof cookbook). But I have to say, just cutting up the meat, it was clear that this is wild meat. It’s much darker than beef, a deep brownish-red, and a completely different consistency. It makes beef seem pink and mushy. And browning it up, there was none of that tallow-y scent you can sometimes get from beef. I’ll be curious to see, as I get a better source of local grass fed beef, if they’re more similar than the buffalo is to regular supermarket beef. Atr the moment, the stew is in the cool-it-off-and-skim-the-fat stage, and I haven’t decided whether we’re having it tonight or tomorrow. I’ll let you know.

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Margaret Young: Willow from the Willow

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Book Alert Although this summer was a tough one for the UC Davis Creative Writing community, as we lost both Walter Pavlich and Louis Owens, one happy result was that I found my old friend Margaret Young again. I ordered her first collection, Willow from the Willow months ago, but for some reason I’m still not able to pin down, I’ve been unable to read poetry for a couple of months. It happens sometimes. My brain just won’t work for poetry and it all just sits there on the page looking like words that have been arranged, words that fail to cohere. This never has to do with the quality of the work, just some strange thing in my brain. The other day, while waiting for a friend to come pick me up to go hiking with the dogs, I opened Margaret’s book and found myself transfixed. I spent half an hour standing in a doorway reading these poems. And then I came home and read them all again, slowly. They’re beautiful and tough, full of vintage dresses and inconsolable grief, food and landscapes. This is a collection deeply engaged with the beauty and heartbreak of the Ten Thousand Things. This book is a treasure and my heartfelt thanks go out to Margaret for not only writing it, but for opening up my poetry-head again. Check it out.

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