Truth, Fiction, and Bigger Truth

August 2, 2013August 1, 2013 / jpbohannon / 1 Comment

A few days ago I received a message from my friend Gerry Bracken who started off with the words “I rarely read fiction, but I picked up a copy…” And he recommended a detective novel based in L.A. to where I was then flying.

Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings

Yesterday, I was browsing through Maria Popova’s blog, “brain pickings,” and I clicked on her bookshelf. (http://bookpickings.brainpickings.org/) Her site routinely discusses books, authors, and readers. And the titles she list are predominantly non-fiction: titles that I jot down and often pick up at the library.

And then last night, I read the ExPlore twitter posting (also managed by Maria Popova). It listed Bill Gates’ reading list for the Summer of 2013. The list is daunting, fascinating and wide-ranging, but except for a single novel, it was all non-fiction. (Click here to see list.)

What is with this reluctance to read fiction? Are we wasting our time? Or more importantly, am I wasting my time.

There once was a time, when the reading of fiction–particular of novels–was considered by many as a harmless past-time for idle girls and not the pursuit of serious, intelligent people. But that was 200 years ago. In the interim, fiction has taken on a bit more gravitas, a bit more legitimacy.

At times, however, I feel haunted by that ancient attitude. And at other times, I feel deliciously guilty for sinking into a novel. Shouldn’t I be learning something? Shouldn’t I be boning up on something? Refining what I know? Discovering new ideas?

Well, I don’t know.

A while back, I ghostwrote a book on the history of Ireland. I researched assiduously, read primary and secondary sources, talked and listened to people and their stories, pored over all the news reports, particularly those on the current events that were unfolding before my eyes.

Colum McCann’s true fiction TransAtlantic

But I know I never got near the truth that I got in reading Colum MCCann’s novel Trans Atlantic. The section(s) on George Mitchell and the Irish peace negotiations, for instance, was better history than I could have ever gleaned in a biography or history book. There was life in those pages, in the account of Mitchell’s days in Belfast, on his dealings with the myriad politicians and organizations, in his observations of the ordinary people and the details around him. Did everything happen the way McCann described it? Probably not. Was it true? I believe very much so. A bigger truth than the historians can share.

I have learned much from fiction–I have learned about people: people in drastic circumstances, in simple ordinariness, in great passion, and in wrenching heartbreak. I have learned about pride and hubris, of great loyalty and great betrayal, of sacrifice and of love. I have met more people in the pages that I have read than I ever could have in the life that I led.

And, in a way, after all, that is what we’re here for–to learn about the wide variety of fellow human beings who share our moment in time and space.

I need to turn my back on this guilt about reading fiction.

Book Review: TransAtlantic by Colum McCann–the world continues spinning.

July 31, 2013September 29, 2013 / jpbohannon / 1 Comment

National Book Award Winner, Colum McCann

Around this time last year, a friend of mine lent me a paperback copy of Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin. It was nothing short of masterful, an eloquent novel filled with beauty, wit, humor, and wisdom–and a helluva story as well. A variety of personal histories are threaded around the dazzling 1974 tight-rope walk of Philippe Petite between the World Trade Towers and set against the more resonant chapter in the Towers’ history, with the tragedy of 9/11 looming in the background. The writing was dizzily beautiful, every page an extraordinary read.

When I returned to work at the beginning of the school year, I learned that many of my colleagues were also reading McCann’s novel. And each of them held the same high opinion.

Now, this summer I was excited for the release of McCann’s latest novel, Trans Atlantic. And my anticipation was well worth it.

Like the previous work, McCann’ new novel is steeped in history, although this work stretches from 1847 to 1998 and concerns three separate stories of historic figures who have traveled across the Atlantic.

The novel begins in 1919 with two pilots, Alcock and Brown, both veteran RAF flyers, about to embark on the first transatlantic flight. The two leave from Newfoundland for Ireland, with a thermos of tea, a few wax-papered sandwiches, a load of mail, and a lot of gumption. At one point, close to their end point then get caught in an enormous cloud. They lose their perspective, not knowing what’s up or down, what’s left or right, The only way to survive is to go into a spin–a dangerous thing in itself. But the ultimate fly out and land in a bog field in Galway. The soft earth swallows the nose of their plane.

In fact, “spinning” is a theme that plays greatly in this book–seemingly carrying on a theme outlined in the last novel.

The second story comes seventy years earlier, and Frederick Douglas, the escaped slave, has traveled to Ireland to promote his book. (Although he had tried to book first class passage, he had been threatened and made to sleep in steerage.) In Ireland, however, he is feted and adored by the Anglo-Irish; he gives speeches to large audiences, garners great donations to send home to the abolitionist movement and his book sells well. But he too feels he is spinning. At one point, he even refers to himself as a tightrope walker (he says “funambulist”–I had to look it up.) Again we are echoing the tropes of the last novel.

Douglas is “spinning” because while he is being celebrated for his passion for equality and the end of slavery in America, he witnesses the utter horror of the starving Irish, starving while rivers of food, livestock and goods are exported to the rest of the British Empire. (Ireland led the British Empire in beef exports during the years of the potato famine!) It is the beginning of the potato blight, and Douglas is greatly affected by what he sees–the men whose faces are brown from eating bark, the woman whose arms are like ropes asking them to take care of her dead infant–affected by the disparity between the Anglo overlords and the downtrodden Irish.

On stage, he meets and joins the great liberator, Daniel O’Connell, but when he later expounds O’Connell’s beliefs at table, his host pulls him aside and tells him not to “bite the hand that feeds him.” Douglas’ tightrope-walk is to embrace justice and freedom for his people, while keeping silent about the horrors of Ireland in the 1840s. The one will bring funds and awareness to the abolitionist movement back home; the other would dry those funds up. It is a dizzying conundrum.

The third story takes place in 1998 and follows George Mitchell as he jets back and forth across the Atlantic negotiating what would become the Good Friday Peace Accord. Mitchell has been picked by President Clinton to lead this historic conference, and, aside from the constant jetting back and forth, he feels his head spinning from the various participants in the process: the separate governments, the various paramilitary organizations, the political parties, the loyalists, the nationalists, the Gaels, the Unionists, etc.

Here is the world that Mitchell is trying to straighten out, trying to stop from spinning further out of control:

The Battle of the Boyne. Eniskillen. Bloody Sunday. There was a clue in every detail. Gary was a Prod. Seamus was a Taig. Liz lived on the Shankill Road. Bobby on the Falls. Sean went to St. Columba’s. Jeremy to Campbell. Bushmill’s was a Protestant whiskey. Jamesons for Catholics. Nobody drove a green car. Your tie was never orange. You went for holidays in Bundoran or you went to Portrush. Fly you flag. Pick your poison. Choose your hangman.

Added to this, the ex-senator, is an old father. At sixty-four, his son is only five months old. Talk about your head spinning. In the five months of his son’s life, Mitchell has been home less than twenty days–his transatlantic treks becoming more and more urgent. (Mitchell did this for two years and received zero salary, just expenses.)

All three stories–like the stories in Let the Great World Spin–are threaded together in a marvelous tapestry of history and generation, of perspective and connection. Four generations of women–from the scullery maid who met Douglass in 1846 and emigrated on a coffin ship to America to her great, granddaughter shaken but unbowed by the Troubles that George Mitchell is striving to repair–weave their story through the historic narrative.

And the language is exquisite. The streets of New York, the light on the town of Cove, the sky above the Atlantic, the horrors of a Civil War field hospital, the ice fields of Minnesota, all are described with details that are both lyrical and true. The inner and outer lives of both the historic personages and the fictional characters are drawn with verisimilitude and generosity. And the story itself is affirmative and moving, profoundly moving.

In an NPR interview after Let the Great World Spin won the National Book Award, McCann implied that he now thinks of himself as a New York writer. That may be so. But the transatlantic tug is a strong one, and his Irish way with words is very much still serving him well.

Find the book and read it. It is that good.

Quote of the Week #13: July 21, 2013

July 21, 2013August 11, 2013 / jpbohannon / 1 Comment

illustration 2012 jpbohannon

“If my books had been any worse, I should not have been invited to Hollywood, and if they had been any better, I should not have come.”

Raymond Chandler

Book Review: Tenth of December by George Saunders

July 17, 2013July 15, 2013 / jpbohannon / Leave a comment

To be truthful, I was put off by all the hype that surrounded Tenth of December when it was released back in January. Articles about the short stories and their author, George Saunders, were everywhere. All the major papers, magazines and blogs were praising, lavishly, both the collection and Saunders himself. All of sudden I was seeing articles about or by Saunders from years past, all floating to the front, all becoming part of this giant group-hug! He was compared to Twain and Flannery O’Connor, to Vonnegut and Pynchon, to Bartheleme and Welty. Even the late David Foster Wallace was corralled in for a blurb on the inner covers.

And now, I can say, all the hype was legitimate and deserved. Tenth Of December is something special.

The longest story in the book “The Semplica Girl Diaries” begins with a father, in the near future, starting a diary. As he begins, he recounts his fears and worries for his children, fears that they are growing up with so much less, materially, than their classmates. He also reveals his own anxieties about his failure as a provider of these consumer necessities. During the course of his journaling, the family is teased with a windfall and then pushed towards ruin. Oddly enough, strung throughout the story, literally, are third-world women who sell themselves in America as lawn ornaments, putting his own focus on material success in a very skewed light.

Other fathers–or father figures– appear throughout the stories. In the first story, “Victory Lap,” a young boy saves a girl who is being abducted. But he second guesses all of his heroic actions in terms of what his father would say about his getting involved and not completing his chores. At the same time, the perpetrator keeps worrying about his own father–and while carrying out his violent abductions–worries whether his father would be proud of the way he is doing things.

In a very short piece, “Sticks,” an aloof, mean-spirited and inaccessible father dresses a crucifix-like contraption for every holiday: Santa for Christmas, a groundhog for February 2nd, a soldier for Veterans Day, etc. When his wife dies, he dressed the pole as Death and makes a memorial to her. His own–and the sticks’–ending is seemingly inconsequential, but full of pathos nevertheless.

George Saunders

On the whole, Saunders’ stories are full of dysfunctioning families trying to succeed in a world of plastic values and overwrought commercialism. It is filled with simple people having difficulty coping in an increasingly complicated world. This world he describes is a bit off-kilter, but it all seems unnervingly familiar. And his telling of these tales is enjoyable and unforgettable.

Life and death, hope and despair, pride and self-loathing: these are the topics that Saunders addresses but in a way that is funny as often as it is heart wrenching, a way that is wryly observed, emotional and thought provoking.

All that hype was well deserved after all.

Movie Review: Hannah Arendt dir. by Margarethe von Trotta

July 8, 2013July 15, 2013 / jpbohannon / Leave a comment

illustration 2013 jpbohannon

The philosopher, political theorist and writer, Hannah Arendt has received a thoughtful and deserving biopic from director Margarethe von Trotta, in her eponymous film, Hannah Arendt. The film’s intelligence reflects the life of the mind that Arendt lived–and an honest and hard intelligence at that. Concentrating on the period when Arendt covered the Adolph Eichmann trials for New Yorker magazine–and the fury that it unleashed– it shows Arendt resolute in her thinking, uncolored by prejudice or sympathies.

Her coverage of the Eichmann trial ended with these words, this pronouncement:

Just as you [Eichmann] supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations—as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world—we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang.

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Arendt’s biography is well know. Born into a secular Jewish family, she studied under Martin Heidegger with whom she reportedly had a long affair. Her dissertation was on Love and Saint Augustine, but after its completion she was forbidden to teach in German universities because of being Jewish. She left Germany for France, but while there she was sent to the Grus detention camp, from which she escaped after only a few weeks. In 1941, Arendt, her husband Heinrich Blücher, and her mother escaped to the United States.

From there she embarked on an academic career that saw her teaching at many of the U.S.’s most prestigious universities (she was the first female lecturer at Princeton University) and publishing some of the most influential works on political theory of the time.

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But the film, concerns a small time period in her life–but one for which many people still hold a grudge. The film begins darkly with the Mosada snatching Eichmann off a dark road in Argentina. Back in New York City, Arendt (Barbara Sukowa) and the American novelist, Mary McCarthy (Janet McTeer) are sipping wine and gossipping about the infidelities of McCarthy’s suitors. Even genius can be mundane–perhaps a subtle reference to Arendt’s conclusions from the trial. When news of Eichmann’s arrest–and trial in Israel–is announced, Arendt writes to William Shawn (Nicholas Woodeson) at the New Yorker, asking if she might cover the trial for the magazine. Shawn is excited; his assistant, Francis Wells (Megan Gay,) less so.

Of course, the trial–and Arendt’s commission to follow it–is fascinating and controversial and we listen in on Arendt and her husband and their circle of friends as they debate and argue and opine. Aside from Mary McCarthy and the head of the German department at the New School where Arendt is teaching, the guests at Arendt’s apartment are all friends from Europe, German-Jews who have escaped the Shoah/Holocaust. Listening to their different conversations is fascinating and electrifying. This is a movie about “thinking.”

Conversing in Arendt’s apartment.

In Israel, Arendt meets with old friends, friends who remember her argumentative spirit, and stays with the Zionist, Kurt Blumenfeld. From the outset, one sees that Arendt is not thinking along the same lines as the masses following the trial.

“Under conditions of tyranny it is much easier to act than to think.”

Hannah Arendt

At the trial, there is a telling moment, when Arendt watches Eichmann in his glass cage sniffling, rubbing his nose and dealing with a cold. It is then, a least in the film, that she comes to understand that this monster is not a MONSTER. She sees him as simply a mediocre human being who did not think. It is from here that she coins the idea of the “banality of evil.”

Upon returning home–with files and files of the trial’s transcripts–her article for the New Yorker is slow in coming. Her husband has a stroke, and the enormity of what she has to say needs to be perfect.

When it is finally published, the angry reaction is more than great. The critic Irving Howe called it a “civil war” among New York intellectuals. (Just last week, the word “shitstorm” was added to the German dictionary, the Duden, partly due to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s use of the word to describe the public outcry she faced over the Eurozone’s finacial crisis. It is an apt term for what occurred upon publication of Arendt’s coverage.)

It is this extraordinary anger towards Arendt–and her staunch defense–that makes up the final moments of the film. In the closing moments, Arendt speaks to a packed auditorium of students (and a few administrators). She has just been asked to resign, which she refuses to do. These are her closing words:

“This inability to think created the possibility for many ordinary men to commit evil deeds on a gigantic scale, the like of which had never been seen before. The manifestation of the wind of thought is not knowledge but the ability to tell right from wrong, beautiful from ugly. And I hope that thinking gives people the strength to prevent catastrophes in these rare moments when the chips are down.”

This is, more than anything else, a film about thinking.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

The extraordinary anger shown in the film is still felt by many today and, in fact, seems to have colored some of the reviews that I have read and heard. Some of these reviewers seem to be reviewing the life and work of Arendt and not the film of Margarethe von Trotta, for von Trotta’s film is a unique, masterpiece. It is more than a biography of a controversial thinker…it is a portrait of thought itself. Arendt attempts to define “evil”–certainly an apt exercise at the time. She defines it–to her friends, to her classes, to her colleagues, and to herself–and finds that it is not “radical” as she once had posited. It is merely ordinary. Goodness, she sees, is what has grandeur.

The film, Hannah Arendt, is well worth seeking out. It is thoughtful, provoking, controversial, and, at times, even funny. You can’t ask for much more for the price of a movie ticket. As always, here’s a trailer:

Dylan’s rhythms and the 13-year old poet

July 6, 2013July 6, 2013 / jpbohannon / Leave a comment

So, out of the blue on Saturday morning I receive a poem by a young boy, Domenic Feola, thirteen years old. I don’t know him, never taught him, probably never will. He is a suburban kid who runs cross-country at one of the city parks. But his ear is impeccable and his language is crisp. And the rhythm of his poem is infectious (until the last couplet where in trying to sum up his feelings he loses is footing) .

The City

by Domenic Feola

Bright lights, fast trains
Cold nights, heavy rains
Dirty air, bus fare
Pigeons flying everywhere
Crowded streets, traffic jams
Music beats, grand slams
Bugs fly, kids cry
No stars in the night sky
Noisy bars, littered trash
Big cars, no cash
Garbage smells, huge hotels
In the shadows, spiders dwell
Scary strangers, taxi cabs
Hidden dangers, science labs
Museums of art, cherry tart
Broken beat up shopping carts
If you say I’m biased, I would agree
I think the suburbs are more for me.

Pretty sophisticated for a thirteen-year-old boy. Or for anyone, for that matter. Great imagery, great confidence and impressive rhythm. If I could, I would talk to him about the rhythm. That is the strength of the poem–but there are a few times where it needs to be tightened, where some minor tweaking would make it even better. But it is impressive nevertheless.

Album Cover Subterranean Homesick Blues

In fact when I first read the poem I could hear Dylan–specifically “Subterranean Homesick Blues” –in the rhythm. Here’s the second verse from Dylan’s song:

Maggie comes fleet foot
Face full of black soot
Talkin’ that the heat put
Plants in the bed but
The phone’s tapped anyway
Maggie says that many say
They must bust in early May
Orders from the DA
Look out kid
Don’t matter what you did
Walk on your tip toes
Don’t try, ‘No Doz’
Better stay away from those
That carry around a fire hose
Keep a clean nose
Watch the plain clothes
You don’t need a weather man
To know which way the wind blows.

from “Subterranean Homesick Blues”

The short 5 and 6 syllable lines are similar. The grammatical “packages” the same.

Now, I read someone say that this Dylan song was one of the first rap songs. But that’s not true, it’s utter nonsense. Dylan was influenced by “talking blues,” Chuck Berry’s rock-and-roll, and the Beats like Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Ferlinghetti. (Notice in the iconic picture at the top, Alan Ginsberg talking to folksinger Bob Neuwirth on the left side of the photo.)

On the other hand, Dominic Feloa (who probably doesn’t know who Bob Dylan is) more than likely has been influenced by rap and hip-hop. It is all around him, in the music he listens to, the advertisements he is bombarded with, the zeitgeist of the culture. Yet his rhythms are a bit different. It might be that his non-urban background (and his youth) gives his rap rhythms a subtle difference, a blunter edge. But they are working.

So, cheers to Dominic Feloa. Keep writing. Show your work to your teachers. Find someone to work with, to work against. Write–revise–and write again. Send your work out. Expect rejection. Work harder. Good luck to you. Thanks for letting me read your poem.

And, of course, I couldn’t leave without sharing a video, a promotion for the 1965 Dylan documentary Don’t Look Back, a promotion that did have an enormous influence on what was to become “music videos.” This was the original…it has been copied/parodied countless times:

Book Review: The Flashman by George MacDonald Fraser

July 3, 2013July 3, 2013 / jpbohannon / 1 Comment

Errol Flynn as Robin Hood (1938)

Guy Williams as Zorro (1957-1962)

As a child I had two heroes–characters whom I would pretend to be, jumping off walls, running in alleys and woods, with friends or by myself. The one was Robin Hood. The other was Zorro. These were my heroes–and I’m sure for a variety of reasons. They both were rebels, outsiders fighting against established tyranny. (The evil Prince John in the former case, Spanish rule in the latter.) Robin Hood fought for the little people (the put-upon Saxons) as did Zorro (the colonized Californians.)

Both were dashing swashbucklers and always more cunning and cleverer than their enemies. They were both perfect role models for a young boy, for in addition to their skill with swords and bows and horses, in addition to their noble goals and pure hearts, they were gentlemen. And for some reason that appealed to me. (Probably for the same reason why I believe God should sound like Cary Grant in all portrayals!)

As I grew and my reading advanced, I found other such characters that appealed to me: The Three Musketeers, The Scarlet Pimpernel, even Charles Darnay and Sydney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities. Unwittingly, I was drawn to those characters who punctured the established hypocrisy and tyranny and who stood up for the little guy, the oppressed, the wronged.

Albert Finney as Tom Jones (1963)

And then I discovered Tom Jones. His skills were nowhere near as impressive as the others–although he was a great sportsman, a horseman, and a lover of life–but his charm and his concern for the weak and put-upon were similar. And he was the ultimate outsider–he was a bastard, found lying in the bed of the benevolent Squire Allworthy. Tom’s enemies were the hypocritical upper class who resented his being taken in by the squire, and who, in a way, both condemned and envied his life-loving ways. He was easy to root for. Certainly, he had his faults, but even these faults could be explained away. And in the end, he one-upped the toffs who had persecuted him–affirming life over priggishness.

So where is this all taken me? To a “hero” I can’t abide.

A friend of mine, a writer and comic in Brooklyn, had often asked me if I had ever read any of George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman novels. I hadn’t, but promised I’d look into them. But I never got around to it. Finally, as a gift last Christmas, he bought me the first novel, Flashman.

Book Cover of Flashman by George MacDonald Fraiser

I wanted to like it. But the hero was different from my past heroes in an important quality: he was part of the ruling classes, an imperialist, an Englishman lording it over the Empire on which the “sun never set.” A bit of a wild oat–the character Sir Harry Paget Flashman, first appeared in Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown’s Schooldays, as one of Tom’s classmates who was expelled for drunkenness– Flashman desires to tell his side of the story and move forward. (Indeed, Fraser cleverly takes this very minor character, fleshes it out and runs with it–for more than a dozen novels.) But even Flashman describes himself as “a scoundrel, a liar, a cheat, a thief, a coward—and oh yes, a toady.”

Upon expulsion from school, he seduces (and beats) his father’s mistress; his father buys him a position in the army, and from there his (mis)adventures begin. These adventures could be a lot of heroic fun (ala Barry Lyndon), except it is all coming from the wrong perspective–from the view of those in charge. And because of that assumption of superiority, Flashman is as prejudiced and arrogant as any British officer could be at the time. And I found it uncomfortable to read. The Indians and Afghans and Irish and Italians are all stereotyped and all looked down upon and insulted. And they fare much better than the women; for the women–no matter what nationality–are not even human but mere objects for Flashman’s seductions. And he is completely unfeeling in his disposal of them.

Exotic locales, derring-do (though Flashman runs from more battles than he partakes in), and a flip irreverence is often a fun entertainment. But my heroes fight from the bottom up…not the other way around. Falstaff, who holds many of the same characteristics as Flashman, is much more likeable–but that can be because he is not an imperialist, a man who believes his own entitlements. To be honest, I simply don’t like Flashman, never mind the book.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Ironic coincidence….

There is a scene in Flashman (1969) when Flashman has been transferred from Calcutta to Afghanistan. He is explaining the condition there. Ironically, it sounds very much like Afghanistan history over the past four decades (if you change the nationalities of the forces involved). Here is what Flashman says:

“The reason we sent an expedition to Kabul, which is in the very heart of some of the worst country in the world, was that we were afraid of Russia. Afghanistan was a buffer, if you like, between India and the Turkestan territory … and the Russians were forever meddling in Afghan affairs.”

Then, ” the British Government had invaded the country, … and put our puppet king, Shah Sajah, on the throne in Kabul, in place of old Dost Mohammed, who was suspected of Russian sympathies.”

“I believe, from all I saw and heard, that if he had Russian sympathies it was because we drove him to them by our stupid policy; at any rate, the Kabul expedition succeeded in setting Sujah on the throne, and old Dost was politely locked up in India. So far, so good, but the Afghans didn’t like Sujah at all, and we had to leave an army in Kabul to keep him on his throne. It was a good enough army,…but it was having its work cut out trying to keep the tribes in order, for apart from Dost’s supporters there were scores of little petty chiefs and tyrants who lost no opportunity of causing trouble in the unsettled times, …”

I don’t know about you but this summary of the world in 1839 sounds eerily familiar to me.

Yes, Yes, Yes: Affirmation ala Molly Bloom

June 20, 2013July 2, 2013 / jpbohannon / 6 Comments

yes I said yes I will Yes.

Last Sunday was Bloomsday, the international celebration of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses.

Dublin had its usual extravaganza with crowds retracing Leopold Bloom’s wanderings and with women’s hats that rivaled those worn at major horse races (remember to bet it all on “throwaway.”) In New York, the complete novel was read outside writer Colum McCann’s tavern, aptly named Ulysses. And at Philadelphia’s Rosenbach Museum and Library, (where Joyce’s manuscript is housed) there was, beside the usual full reading, an unusual installation.

The artist, Jessica Deane Rosner, wrote out the entire text of the novel on 310 yellow, rubber, dish gloves and suspended them from the gallery ceiling in a very Joycean spiral. Rosner stated that it was Joyce who showed us that the things of everyday life–including the muck and the un-pretty–are the very essence of and inspiration for Art.

And so she used the mundane kitchen gloves to carry Joyce’s text–a text replete with the beauty of life’s mundane grime and natural effluences.

Jessica Deane Rosner’s Text of Ulysses on yellow rubber gloves.

Jessica Deane Rosner’s Ulysses Glove Project suspended from ceiling of Rosenbach Gallery

But that’s not what I want to talk about today. …

I want to talk about the last seven words of the novel, the strong affirmation that ended Molly Bloom’s long nighttime reverie in the early hours of June 17, 1904.

It is this affirmation, the “yes I said yes I will Yes” that makes Ulysses so important. For, if ever there was a modern Everyman, it is her husband, Leopold Bloom. Leopold the ridiculous, the schlump, the man she has cuckolded just hours before. Leopold the grieving, the masturbatory, the lecherous, the neighborly, the isolated, the humane, the persecuted. And to him–and he is each of us– Molly proclaims a resounding Yes!

And we all need to do more of the same. To say “Yes.”

I have a good friend, Ken Campbell, who served thirteen long months in Vietnam before becoming one of the leading figures in the Vietnam Vets Against the War movement. This fall the two of us went together to see Samuel Beckett’s Endgame. I wallowed in the existential bleakness; he did not. He enjoyed the company. He had spent too long in Vietnam, wondering every night if he was going to live another day, and today he has no time for Beckett’s desperate vision.

He sides much more with Molly Bloom’s “Yes”!

So here’s to saying “yes.” Saying “yes” to all the myriad things and people that life places in front of us: like the noodle shop at 56th and 6th in NYC… the children’s fountain on the Ben Franklin Parkway…the surprise of 310 yellow rubber gloves hanging from an elegant ceiling.

I can’t write, so I read Denis Johnson…

June 17, 2013June 18, 2013 / jpbohannon / 4 Comments

…and now I know I can’t write.

At times I feel I’m kidding myself. Who do I think I am pretending to be a writer, a poet, a thinker? I am just an everyday slug without the discipline to get anything really worthwhile done. And discipline is what you need. How many times do we hear that just showing up is 90% of the struggle? Just do the work, day in and day out, we are told, and the creation will come.

I don’t do the work.

And so as I sneak off for my hour-and-a-half, two hours, I try to jump-start my atrophied mind by reading for a while at first. Unfortunately today, I began re-reading Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son, a collection of eleven wise, lively, brutal, intense, truthful short-stories.

I’ve never felt so washed up in my life!

The first story, “Car Crash While Hitchhiking” is riveting. It’s like a very bad car accident that you can’t turn away from. The narrator, the hitchhiker, has been on the road from Texas to Kansas City. The first driver fed him amphetamines and Canadian Club; the second ride was a hashish filled bubble to the city limits; and the third ride was the fateful ride–a family of four with a nine-month old baby on the back seat, destined to be brutalized in a head-on collision. The narrator is flawed and generous and seemingly prescient, for he seems to know that it is this family that picks him up that will suffer. His final words long after the car accident and while being admitted to the Detox at Seattle General are puzzling–if not telling: “And you, you ridiculous people, you expect me to help you.”

God, could it be Jesus’ son?

Much later in the collection–one could label Jesus’ Son an episodic novel rather than a collection of short stories with its single narrator and progressive (though disjointed) chronology–the narrator is in detox and is shaving another man. (The drugs they are giving him have steadied his hands to such a degree that he has taken to shaving fellow patients.) Here is part of the scene:

Just below one cheekbone, Bill had a small blemish where a bullet had entered his face, and in the other cheek a slightly larger scar where the slug had gone on its way.

“When you were shot right through your face like that, did the bullet go on to do anything interesting?”

“How would I know? I didn’t take notes. Even if it goes on through, you still feel like you just got shot in the head?”

But they aren’t Bill’s only wounds. “I’ve been shot twice,” Bill reveals. …”Once by each wife for a total of three bullets, making four holes, three ins and one out.”

This is the world of Jesus’ Son. There are bullet wounds and heartaches. There is addiction and abortion, love and lovelessness, disease and car-crashes and murder. Johnson once said about his stories “Some of us go to the movies to see everybody shooting each other, and then there’s another bunch who actually shoot each other.” It is this latter bunch that people Johnson’s stories. But in addition to “shoot[ing] each other,” they seek salvation, search for love, and try to survive on the wrong track that life has set them on.

Intense and unsettling, witty and thrilling, the stories are both unforgettable and beautiful. Something any writer should aspire to.

So, Another Weird Coincidence…

So, I had sneaked out to this coffee house to do this wee bit of writing and reading. And I was considering saying something about the title–Jesus’ Son–and how it was taken from the Lou Reed song “Heroin.” I had just decided against it when Lou Reed’s “Sweet Jane” comes on the sound-system and that sealed the deal. When I mentioned the coincidence to the guy at the counter, he replied, “Lou is everywhere.” I didn’t know, hah!

So, if you want, here’s a recent version of Lou Reed singing “Heroin” from where the title came:

Book Review: Deadman’s Pedal by Alan Warner…coming of age in Scotland

June 14, 2013June 17, 2013 / jpbohannon / Leave a comment

Alan Warner belongs to a certain group of writers who came of age in Scotland in the last decades of the 20th century. Those with more recognizable names would included Irvin Welsh who gave us Trainspotting, James Kelman with his unique voice of urban rootlessness, Ian Banks (who died last week) and A.L. Kennedy with their distinctive fictions, and Ian Rankin who gave us Inspector Rebus and his Edinburgh detective novels. Among these, Alan Warner seems the one who has gained less recognition over here in the States. And that is a shame.

Warner’s first novel Morvern Caller was a magnificent tale of a young woman who steals her dead boyfriend’s novel from his computer, changes the name on the manuscript and quickly and decadently burns through the advance that the novel garners, moving from her dilapidated Scottish town through the ravages of the European rave scene. A later novel with the unfortunate title The Sopranos follows a group of high school choir girls from a rural western outpost on its class trip to Edinburgh. Both novels are memorable for their voice, for the seeming accuracy of Warner’s portrayals of 16 and 17-year olds. And both are fun.

Warner returns to the same locale from which Morvern Caller and the girls from The Sopranos escape in his newest novel, The Deadman’s Pedal. And again, he is dealing with characters of a certain age, characters who are between childhood and adulthood, characters who are innocents even as they are losing their innocence.

The novel takes place around “the Port,” Warner’s fictionalized treatment of the town of Oban in western Scotland and is held together by the train line that serves the area and which is dwindling in impact. In fact the title “Deadman’s Pedal” refers to a device that on a runaway train is set to brake in the case of an engineer losing consciousness.

Simon Crimmons is turning sixteen and wants to quit school, get a motorbike, and get a job. He is considered well-to-do by his companions because his father owns a trucking company, but wealth is a relative thing, and the Crimmons family is certainly working class in comparison to the lordly Bultitude’s. In fact, Simon, the town and the novel itself are greatly aware of class distinctions. And this is a running theme throughout.

Yet it is in terms of young Simon’s desires that the class distinctions are most evident. For he is torn between the beautiful and always available Nikki Caine from the Estate houses and the enigmatic Varie Bultitude–of the town’s legendary, aristocracy. Managing such affairs is always risky and managing one between such two disparate worlds is like being on a run-away train.

When Simon mistakenly gets a job as a trainee train driver–he thought he was applying for a hospital position–he discovers the extent of these class divisions. He says to Vaire, “I’ve got the whole railway telling me I’m not working class enough and I’ve got you telling me I’m not middle class enough. This country needs to sort out the class question. As far as it applies to me.”

And to make matters more difficult, Simon’s father is caught up in it as well. He sees his son’s work on the trains as a betrayal, as his son’s working for a competitor that could ultimately put him out of business. It’s never easy being sixteen. It seems much harder for Simon Crimmons.

The joy of the novel–apart from the very real depictions of young desire, lust, and confusion–is the language itself. Some may find the dialect off-putting at first, but it quickly becomes second nature, but the narration itself is pure genius: A funeral for a dead train man is told with humor, nostalgia and poignancy; Simon’s first kiss is described as sweet, anxious, innocent and thrilling; the grounds of the Bultitude property are given an almost gothic eeriness and grandeur. (The Bultitudes are said to bury their dead in glass coffins…the aristocracy is always with us!)

Early in the novel, Simon and his friend Galbraith show Nikki the secret hideout they have built out in the wilds. They make her promise not to mention it to the other boys knowing that it is a childish thing and that the others would tease them for it. It is here that Simon and Nikki first have sex– in a short scene that is both innocent and knowing. It is a scene–positioned in his boyhood escape– that captures the very tension of this novel, the tension between innocence and adulthood, between desire and attainment, between the people and their landscape.

Alan Warner
Photo: Jayne Wright

Alan Warner is an extraordinary writer. That his name is little known outside Britain is an injustice, but one that may be set aright by Deadman’s Pedal–a novel that is larger than its Scottish setting, a novel that is universal in its wonders, its desires, and its struggles.