TSP – The Story Prize Guest Blog: My Anti-House

Sunday, December 29, 2013

Carolyn Cooke’s Anti-House

 

In the 59th in a series of posts on 2013 books entered for The Story Prize, Carolyn Cooke, author of Amor and Psycho (Alfred A. Knopf), gives us a tour of her eccentric studio.

 

Where do you do most of your work? 
I work in an uninsulated cabin that sits alone on a hill, not quite visible from my house, which is by almost any American standard also a cabin. The cabin that is not my house—call it my anti-house—has nine recycled windows and looks out over redwoods, tanoak, bullpines, and the ocean. A wooden ladder rises to a loft, which holds a futon covered with sheets that never need to be changed and an important pillow made from one of my husband’s old shirts and embroidered with the words “I Love You Mom,” which I keep as I might keep a deed in a safe deposit box, as proof. I sleep better and harder here than anywhere I’ve ever slept, and dream higher-quality dreams.

The anti-house is furnished with discards from my other life. The only precious object is an antique card table with a bit of inlay work at the front. My desk chair, straight-backed and Puritan, has a hole in the seat and wisps of horsehair coming out. There’s also a lounge chair with a pony hide that went through a fire (here, in 1999, my fault). Next to the chair sits a reading table containing a white metal lamp of the kind that cost $2 in the 1970s, two dictionaries, and four ivory elephants. The elephants—they used to be five—are the last things my Nana asked about before she died: “Have you lost my ivory elephants already?” with a kind of resignation I might one day remember to practice. There’s a mug containing the same red pencils my grandfather used to correct my letters to him and three wood-and glass cases containing rocks and birds’ eggs. A canvas guest chair bought at Conran’s in New York in 1980 threatens constantly to rip, but I don’t worry about that because I rarely have guests. 

 The cabin contains a minimum of everything (besides human company) I need to survive: hot plate, sink, coffee articles, cans of soup, and a jar of peanut butter bought from the co-op the year my daughter turned nine. There’s one fork, one spoon, a Buck knife, and a Ball jar. There’s a telephone, an olive-green typewriter bought in Hamburg, Germany, in 1991, a dog bed, and a dog.

 

The books here are those I wandered up the hill with—essays, novels, diaries and poetry: Woolf, Dostoevsky, Nabokov, Roth, Trevor, Joyce, Ellison, Davis, Munro, Paley, Jewett, Lahiri, Lopez, Gaitskill, Michaels, Chekhov, Sontag, Didion, Eliot, Glück, Robinson, Stevens, Whitman, and Yeats. There are letters of Flaubert and Bishop (this last a fat volume that went through the fire and smells strongly of ashes and pine) and also twenty or so binders of letters, notes, journals, and sketches, which I combine in an endless work called “The Cord” and pillage regularly.

My anti-house is a private shell, a container for things that seemed important enough to drag up the hill. Myself, for example. It contains the part of life I made out of nothing, out of sentences. When I make my way here and get to work, I leave myself for a while, forget what I am. Later I head down the hill blurry and disoriented, stumbling over pine roots.

Where does this obsession come from, to see life, to nail it down with words, essentially instead of living, or as a way of living? I have a friend who designed and built an art studio in one of the years it took me not to finish my second book. He dug holes, poured concrete, laid joists and beams, erected a shell, ran electric wire through the walls, hung sheet rock, painted and plumbed—while I constructed and tore down phrases. (Now he has an anti-house to face his demons in.)

 

The house I live in embraces what Roland Barthes has called “the spectacular pleasures of domestic life”: newspapers, Band-Aids, roast chickens, day lilies, brass polish, old address books, train sets, ski jackets, sheet sets, screw drivers, stamps, soaps, vitamins, constant wireless contact with the world and an evolving cast of people to whom I feel connected by ties of affection and duty. My anti-house says no to all that.

Posted by Larry Dark at 9:17 AM

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Labels: 2013 contributors’ posts, Carolyn Cooke

26th Anniversary

26^th anniversary.  It was the whole time in a day.  We disposed of a dead mouse, accessing the inner Woody Allen movie and confronting the terrors that have been the sous-conversation of the marriage. Who takes care of whom and what? Considerable heat – a little agony, a little ecstasy, followed by a long walk in the redwoods, a frittata, a competitive Times crossword, a promise to trade two 300-page manuscripts this Thursday and Friday, the constant conversation/negotiation/anxiety that apparently comforts us.  We are maniacs now, too extreme for anyone but each other.  We end the evening with a playlist:  J.U.F. meets Amy Winehouse, Mabel Mercer meets Leonard Cohen, Siouxsie and the Banshees meet Mahalia. Amid the chaos of this extended effort and the sudden silence of the music, we retreat to our separate corners, momentarily at peace.

Note to self:  “Are you in your stall, brother?” Virginia supposedly said to Leonard – a courtesy between writers/intimates who work a room away from each other – before unleashing the full force. 

Why There Are Words Literary Reading Series presents: An interview with Carolyn Cooke By Nancy Au

Carolyn Cooke’s Daughters of the Revolution was listed among the best novels of 2011 by the San Francisco Chronicle and The New Yorker Magazine. Her short fiction has appeared in AGNI, The Paris Review, and two volumes each of Best American Short Stories and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. These stories were collected in The Bostons, which won the PEN/Bingham Award and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway. She teaches in the MFA writing program at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco.

1.) In Daughters of the Revolution, your character Madeleine is described as an expert at “coaxing nature to an unnatural intensity.” This reminds me of how a writer’s craft can lie in forming sentences with words that might not naturally go together to create a compelling emotion or image in readers’ minds. You do this so beautifully. What does your revision process look like to do so? How much work goes into reshaping individual sentences in your writing?

Carolyn Cooke:  I appreciate what you suggest here:  that our job is to put together words that don’t “naturally go together.”  For me writing is like performance art of a solitary kind. You have material, and a shimmery idea or image.  But the hot moments happen while you’re blind. You can almost feel the parallel world running through your veins, coming out the ends of your fingers. Other times sentences lie there in a state of such pitiable crudeness you have to pound the keys like a bricklayer chopping old grout with a hammer.  Edwin Arlington Robinson spoke of the “ache to be sublime.”  I need experiences of the sublime every day.  It’s like an addiction:  spending hours trying to lose consciousness of ordinary life, waiting for the jolt of capturing something unsayable.

2.) Your character, Carole, is an artist, a gifted painter who “for years…worked only on painted heads…They looked like bowling balls, decapitations. They looked as if they had rolled there.” This image makes me wonder if you are also a visual artist. How do these types of images come into your mind? Do you have suggestions for writers to likewise invigorate their scenes?

Carolyn: My ambition is to write the way Lucian Freud painted. Somebody said that being painted by Freud was like being “flayed alive.” His family sat for him anyway. I would have, too.  There’s a brutal quality of attention in Freud’s work that feels almost indistinguishable from love. This has to do with the time it takes to really see people who matter to us – even if they’re characters in a novel. It isn’t a trick of paint or of language. Daughters was influenced by two Chicago painters:  Judith Raphael, who paints pubescent girls in attitudes borrowed from heroic Roman sculpture, and Susanna Coffey, who for many years painted only her own head – but many, many versions. I’m not a visual artist, but seek out friends who are. The problems of writers interestingly resemble the problems of painters and performance artists and choreographers. A line like “Build up the color from white” could have been a prompt for Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady.

3.) You have some of the best, most interesting names for characters. What is your process like in selecting first names like “God” (short for Goddard), and last names like Rebozos? Do you have a personal “rule” that you stick to when naming characters?

Carolyn: My mother was delivered by a man named Coffin. New England is filled with people who go by interesting names – Bun, Shirty, Mucker, Squeak. Look at the early witch hunters – Cotton and Increase Mather. As I hammered away at my novel, my God and Carol Faust enacting their gendered drama, Lawrence Summers got thrown out of Harvard for a line of dialogue that might have come from my own first draft  – and Drew Faust became president of Harvard! Names matter, but I resist trying to create a semblance of the ordinary. Ordinary life isn’t really my subject.

4.) The idea of individuality and personhood — who we believe ourselves to be — seems to be a theme in your novel. For example, when Mrs. Graves helps to type another character’s obituary (I won’t reveal who’s obituary!), she is overcome with a sense of control and closeness to that person. She could edit the obituary as she saw fit, “feeling she knew him better than anyone.” I took this to mean that we are not in control of our own identity, that others see us (and will remember us after death) as they want to. Can you talk about that? What are other themes that you find yourself exploring?

Carolyn: Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary that “If my father had lived to be ninety his life would have ended mine.”  The role of women – especially wives and daughters – in mopping up the literary lives of men, of typing up the remnants as a means of self-expression and because it’s expected, is too provoking to thump on here.  Sexuality and mortality are compelling themes, too.

5.) What would I find on your writing desk right now if I could glimpse it, and what would that tell me about the crafting of Daughters of the Revolution?

Carolyn: I’ve now lived in Northern California for over 20 years – and feel liberated to shift focus from the world of Daughters. Right now my desk is piled up with reading about technology and identity – Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, and a couple of books by Ellen Ullman: Close to the Machine about her life as an early software engineer and her new novel, By Blood, about adoption, the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, eavesdropping, sexuality, and San Francisco in the 1970s. Ronaldo Wilson’s Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man – incredibly sexy, scary work. Wilson spontaneously creates prose poems — and records them on his iPhone while running. He’s literally an insight machine. Justin Torres’s We The Animals – because I’m about to meet him at Why There Are Words!  I have a big, messy scribbled-over copy of my forthcoming collection of short stories, Amor & Psycho, and eight or ten small yellow lined pads filled with urgent matter – images, dreams, stolen dialogue, lists of books, essential lines. Half the time I can’t even read the words. Sometimes misreading is useful.  Maybe the point is just being surrounded by writing, by the mess and process of it.  

Come out and hear Carolyn Cooke — and Justin Torres! — June 14.

Egyptomaniac

Like many people all over the world this week, I’ve gorged myself on whatever information I can find about the people’s revolution in Egypt. I watch Al Jazeera English while listening in the background to CNN, scanning updates from the New York Times and the BBC, and following six or seven Twitter feeds, Facebook pages and blogs. In the face of such relentless “connection,” who has time to read?

Writers constantly experiment to find how various shades of “meaning” can be conveyed by information and atmosphere, description and detail. Many of the narratives we (as writers and readers) value are not “informative” in a 24-hour cycle way; they speak to other urgencies, which in heated moments feel harder to articulate. What kinds of information and description best broadcast the “situation” on the ground? What kinds of detail evoke the atmosphere and context of the larger social-economic-cultural-historical picture?

Dare I mention – novels, essays, memoirs?

The late, great Cairo-raised Palestinian critic and public intellectual Edward Said, who so eloquently challenged and dissected the western construct of “Orientalism,” describes in an essay called “After Mahfouz” the ways in which “narrative prose fiction played a crucial role in creating a national consciousness” in Egypt and the Arab world, and how “Arabic novelists stood squarely wherever issues of destiny, society and direction were being debated or investigated.”

This weekend, I’ll be turning back to a few works of fiction and nonfiction born of Egypt, to tap into the deeper currents of last week’s events.

André Aciman, Out of Egypt: A Memoir
Alaa Al Aswany, The Yacoubian Building
Naguib Mahfouz, Midaq Alley, The Thief and the Dogs, and Miramar
Max Rodenbeck, Cairo: The City Victorious
Edward Said, Reflections on Exile

Finally, I’ll take a sneak peek at “El Shooq,” the photo portfolio by noted musicologist and resident of Cairo, Kristina Nelson, which will appear in the CIIS literary magazine, Mission at Tenth, later this spring. The portfolio documents the shooting of the recently-released film “El Shooq” (Translated as “Lust”) by author and screenwriter Sayed Ragab – as well as compelling photos of Tahrir Square in the “Days of Hope.”

What books, images and other texts and works have moved you to think more deeply about Egypt and the Middle East?

———————
Carolyn Cooke is an Associate Professor in the Writing, Consciousness and Creative Inquiry MFA Department at the California Institute of Integral Studies, and the author of the novel, Daughters of the Revolution, forthcoming in June from Alfred A. Knopf.

Going Graphic: The Comics and Tragics of Mere Literary Mortals

A few years ago I drew a couple of spontaneous, semi-tragic comics. One described events on the day my father died, and the other an afternoon in 1998 when my 98-year-old grandmother demanded that we visit the pet cemetery; she no longer wished to be buried on top of her husband in the family plot. I’d worked over this material before – writing is for me a form of chewing – but it felt both too charged and too ridiculous. The visual aspects of both stories overwhelmed my desire to describe them in words. And so, with my poor spatial sense and stick figure skills, I drew them. The form – the structure of the four boxes – opened three-dimensionally; my pen moved in a new way, described a wheelchair pushed by my then-three-year old daughter up a vertiginous hill into the pet cemetery. Choosing a few visual elements and severely limiting the narrative opened both stories up. Four panels, and suddenly, the stories made sense.

A few of the most intensely imagined novels I’ve read over the past decade (or two) have been, well, graphic: Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (The Holocaust) and In the Shadow of No Towers (9/11); Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (Iranian Revolution of 1979), Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (a young lesbian comes out more or less simultaneously with her father). Last Saturday night, Gene Luen Yang came to CIIS to talk about his trajectory from comics geek to author of American-Born Chinese, the first graphic novel to be nominated for the National Book Award.

The quality that allows comics to handle serious, even tragic subjects, Yang says, is “intimacy.” Comics remind me inexorably of the seductive spinning drugstore racks of my youth, filled with cheap newsprint stories whose cachet consisted almost entirely of my economic power to acquire and devour them. (One working definition of “intimacy” must certainly be early experience of greedy possession.)
But the comic is also – by the very limits of the frame – a withholding medium. Roland Barthes described engagement by the reader brought about by the author’s refusal to reveal the whole story as “writerly” fiction. The reader “reads” into the text – “enters” it in an erotic and (if you are lucky enough to have this sort of imagination) a literal sense. Spiegelman’s Jewish mice, or the simply rendered, repetitive masses of veiled women in Satrapi’s Persepolis, or the father in Fun Home, the funeral director with a fever for restoration, are all wittily, charmingly rendered – and serious as death. The device of the frame is also an invitation to the gaze.

I thought again of these frames last night, while watching the Iranian Director Abbas Kiarostami’s brilliantly intimate film, “10.” The film consists of ten scenes that take place entirely within a car, as a young-ish Iranian woman, a photographer, divorced, loosely veiled, drives around Tehran. Everything we know about the woman, the city and the social, religious and political culture she inhabits comes from her seemingly casual conversation within the “frame” of the car, as the woman talks with her son, her sister, and even picks up strangers, including an old woman, a young, spurned would-be bride, and a prostitute.

The narrative never enters the mind of the woman; there’s no internal monologue, no voice-over. Yet frame is, if not quite a “voice,” a definite point of view. The constraints of the film echo the cultural and gender constraints upon the woman. We see her up close, all revealing surface – perhaps more intimately than she can see herself. The constraint of the frame (and possibly even the constraint of making such a revealing film in an authoritarian theocratic country like Iran) becomes part of the power of the story. This is not a psychologically nuanced story “about” a divorced female photographer living in Iran; it is, arguably, a more difficult thing – a story about the relentless surface of the world.

In conversation with poet Brynn Saito, Gene Yang described how as a kid he was drawn to the “two-in-one” clash-of-titans adventures like “Thing” and “Rom.” He persevered in solitary authorship, becoming weirder and more singular, as writers often do. In the world of comics, however, “self-publishing” and mini-comics sold by hand at conventions are not signs of loser-ness, but of “awesomeness,” he said – they show that you can manage and navigate the real world as well as fantasy.

The Revenge of the Geeks has been lavishly rendered by David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin’s recent film, “The Social Network” (book by Ben Mezrich), which chronicles and snarkily champions the asbergersy genius of the Mark Zuckerbergs over the old-money noblesse-obligey veneer of the WASP ancien régime. Meanwhile, in another realm of geekdom, it was inspiring to hear two American-born artist-writers named Brynn and Gene discussing their respective Chinese and Korean-Japanese families’ career expectations (“any specialty of doctor is okay”) and ways in which comics, graphic novels and even traditional poetic forms can eloquently render complex experiences of class, ethnicity, gender, alienation, tragedy and yes, even comedy – to capture the heroic quotidian, and the primal struggles of mortals.

Danger and Beauty: Stories We Tell to Live

We were talking about the intersection of information and atmosphere in the short stories of the Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat. What kind of consciousness and expectation does the reader bring to stories “about” Haiti? The challenge for Danticat is to subvert what we thought we knew, to write with the authority of observed detail, even detail observed inarguably in the imagination or passed down generations, hardened to a gemlike consistency. The challenge is to suggest (but not slavishly replicate) the sensations of lived life, to break down the distancing wall of our pity and evoke rather than merely name the atrocities – rape, suicide, dislocation, poverty, torture, murder – that
humans suffer at one another’s hands.

The job of the reporter is to give us facts and evidence, causes and effects. The job of the fiction writer is to refuse the simple story we thought we knew, to inscribe indelible marks on our soul. The artist Francis Bacon said, “I look for phrases that cut me.” This strikes me as a fairly accurate description of the serious and complex experience of reading Danticat, whose stories again and again reveal stark beauty of the hard thing said simply: “Madame Roger came home with her son’s head.” Or, “Her teeth were a dark red, as though caked with blood from the initial beating during her arrest.” Or, “The woman we had been staying with carried her dead son by the legs.” “All of these women were here for the same reason. They were said to have been seen at night rising from the ground like birds on fire.”

The risk of repelling the finer sensibilities of the reader is one risk of writing beautifully about danger and survival. Offending fellow survivors is another. In his essay “Return to Sender,” Mark Doty speaks of writing a memoir that ended his relationship with his father. “If there is meaning in this,” Doty writes, “it is that art cannot be counted on to mend the rifts within or without. Its work is to take us to the brink of clarity.” Writing does not alleviate suffering. Doty’s father’s silence “is a burning in which I reside.”

Survival stories – the stories we tell to live – may be realist or postmodern, geopolitical or personal. They may find forms of beauty in the most harrowing things. Indeed the act of reading – of taking the hard stories of others into our own skins – may even expand and intensify human suffering, which is one definition of consciousness.

This Saturday night (October 9th) at the Litquake Lit Crawl, students and faculty of the California Institute of Integral Studies’ MFA Department present “Danger and Beauty: Stories We Tell To Live.” 7:15-8:15 p.m. at the Women’s Building, Room A, 3543 18th Street, San Francisco. Readers include Sarah Stone, April Serr, Brynn Saito, Pauline Reif, and Carolyn Cooke.

The Novel, Unplugged

Did you happen to see the essay on the back page of yesterday’s (July 18, 2010) New York Times Book Review? It’s by Gary Shteyngart (also interviewed by Deborah Solomon in the Sunday mag about his new novel Super Sad True Love Story – the greedy gut!). It’s called “Only Disconnect,” and is a witty take on “unplugging” for a weekend in upstate New York and reading a novel instead of playing with his iphone:

“I open a novel, A Short History of Women, by Kate Walbert, a book I will grow to love over the coming week, but at first my data-addled brain is puzzled by the density and length of it (256 pages? How many screens will that fill?), the onrush of feeling and fact, the surprise that someone has let me not into her Facebook account but into the way other minds work. I read and reread the first two pages understanding nothing. Big things are happening. World War I. The suffragist movement. Out of instinct I almost try to press the text of the deckle-edged pages, hoping something will pop up, a link to something trivial and fast. But nothing does. Slowly, and surely, just as the sun begins to swoon over the Hudson River and another Amtrak honks its way past Rhinebeck, delivering its digital refugees upstream, I begin to sense the world between covers, much as I sense the world around me, a world corporeal and complete, a world that doesn’t need the press of my thumb, because here beneath the weeping willow my input is meaningless.”

How cool for Kate, her book as the delivery mechanism for such a revelation.

Summer Reading for Sufferers of Long Attention Span Disorder

Here’s a possibly insane confession in the context of a blog: I suffer from Long Attention Span Disorder. Most bytes of information move too fast and demand too little engagement for me to remember them. By the time I’ve walked a mile up our dirt road to collect The New York Times folded into a rainproof sleeve and placed by hand in its blue roadside box, my husband knows all the bad news already; he’s also digested new feeds via the Daily Kos and Matt Drudge, and knows already what Glen Beck, Sarah Palin and John Stewart have to say about the Uzbecks and the Kyrgyz or gay marriage as a civil rights issue or why the BP oil spill is the fault of militant environmentalists or whether the new female version of Viagra should be federally subsidized. Besides a constant loop of headline news, CNN delivers a ticker tape of fresh hells at the bottom of the screen. Most media experiences leave me feeling ratlike and red, my eyes darting, tail twitching, waiting for the next bomb to drop.

I prefer, when possible, to get my news of the world in the form of a good, long book. Instead of Tweets and feeds, I like to drop out of the digital life for hours or days, and come back changed, salt dripping down my chin and one eye larger than the other.

For many of us in academe, Summer is reading season, a hot, wanton time for big novels and stories, wild works of the imagination. I try to read all summer with disciplined abandon, precisely the way my grandmother used to devour a Whitman’s sampler. I’m gluttonous for information, atmosphere, language, story, strangeness, for substance I can’t get from travel, conversation, news, films, theory. Here follow nine excuses to spend the next nine weeks with your nose in a book:

1. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun
A big, realist novel of the Biafran secession from Nigeria following the 1966 coup by the Muslim-dominated Hausa Fulani tribe in the North, the subsequent attacks on the Igbo and Yoruba people of the South – and the infamous chaos and famine that followed. The novel reveals multiple aspects of postcolonial and tribal experience through the unforgettable character of Ugwu, a houseboy swept up into the great current of history. Adichie also nails the revolutionary temper of the privileged Igbo family at the center of the novel – a Marxist university professor and two sisters – who become increasingly active in the movement for Biafran Independence.

2. Ayyan Hirsi Ali, Infidel
The Somali-born Hirsi Ali, who has lately been commandeered by Christopher Hitchens and the American Enterprise Institute for her renunciation of Islam, tells complex stories tracing the dissolution of the Somali Republic between Independence from Britain, Italy and France in 1960, through the dictatorship of Siad Barre and the total dissolution of the federal government in 1991. The period coincided with her childhood, spent in Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia and Kenya. In fearless prose, Hirsi Ali describes the rising influence of the Muslim Brotherhood and the long reach of the Darod and Hawyie Clans, which provide structure and protection for the Somali diaspora. Hirsi Ali’s radical self-assertion in refusing her “destiny” (an arranged marriage and, finally, Islam itself) has made her an international pariah – and a hero.

3. Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf
My all-time favorite biography. Lee is an insight machine, drilling into the soul, the consciousness and the sensibility of the dazzling, doomed modernist; she’s particularly smart about links between social dis-ease, art and madness. Warning: You may be distracted from the remainder of this list by the compulsion to read Woolf for the rest of the summer.

4. Audre Lorde, Zami: A Biomythography
Lorde’s poetic sensibility was so iconoclastic she had to invent a genre for her autobiography: part lesbian/feminist manifesto, part social history of Harlem in the 1950s, part meditation on memory and imagination in the tradition of Nabokov’s Speak, Memory.

5. Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory
A gripping and obscenely articulate account of the development of a peculiarly international consciousness.

6. Herta Muller, The Land of Green Plums and Alta Ifland, Elegy for a Fabulous World
A novel and a collection of stories about life in Communist Romania (Ifland’s book is set in a Romania thinly disguised as Ukrane) under Nicolae Ceausescu. Muller won the Nobel Prize last year, and Elegy is Ifland’s exciting debut.

7. Julie Orringer, The Invisible Bridge
At 600 pages, Julie Orringer’s epic novel about the fate of Hungarian Jews in World War II seems like a great commitment. Reading it is more like a summer fling – intense, consuming, informative, swift-feeling. It’s an all-night book that left this reader in a tangle of sheets, exhausted, depressed, and satisfied.This is an important novel, in the tradition of Sheila Kohler’s Children of Pithiviers, Edie Meidav’s Crawl Space and Irene Nemerovsky’s autobiographical novels – but more documentary in scope with its combustion of research, imagination and compassionate channeling.

8. Lydia Davis, The Collected Stories
An extremely long collection of extremely short stories (sometimes disguised or unmasked as prose poems or essays) by a master of atmospheric pressure and compression.

9. David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
At 1,079 pages this huge, mind-bending novel by the late DFW is no joke. Philosophical, exuberantly virtuosic and compulsively iconoclastic, this demanding tome about the fragmentation of the American attention span may not be the best place to start for those new to the Wallace oeuvre (I’d try Brief Interviews with Hideous Men or Girl with Curious Hair). But when will you next find time to swim in such a wide sea?

Marilyn Bucher, Orchidophile

Our neighbor Marilyn Bucher died this winter, suddenly, at home. Something stopped – her heart, her breathing. She was seventy-four years old, a chain-smoking orchid expert who raised varieties from around the world in an outbuilding on her property. Marilyn was the first person to move to Red Tag Road in the 1970s after parcels were sold off by the timber company that logged this part of the ridge. The ten-acre parcels went for one or two thousand dollars each and Marilyn and her husband, Jim, bought one. They arranged for a truck to deliver wood for their house, but the truck stopped where the pavement ended. It took Marilyn and Jim a few months to carry all the lumber the mile downhill. It took a few years to build their house, but they didn’t get around to putting in electricity until ten years ago. Once they did, Marilyn claimed she lost certain powers she’d had before, including the ability to see in the dark.

Marilyn didn’t go in for conspicuous consumption. One winter, years ago, she told me she lived mostly on wild mushrooms and generic cigarettes. She dressed like a handyman, had a gravelly voice and wore bright red lipstick. She loved dogs and stars. She understood Latin, especially as it related to the taxonomy of plants. To know her at all was to marvel at the hardiness of the human organism. A few years ago she had eye surgery, and the doctor had to give her a paralyzing drug as a precaution against her chronic cough, so the laser beam could safely impale her retina.

She called me up one afternoon this winter. The power was out, rain had been falling hard, for weeks, and I think she felt lonely. We talked about our dogs, about the unusual mushrooms we’d seen along the road, about the vagaries of power. Marilyn mentioned again that she was almost sorry she’d electrified her house. Now she felt depressed when the power went out; she’d grown used to TV.

The houses on Red Tag road aren’t marked with numbers; they’re hidden, even, from view. Such discretion might be a badge of outlaw honor here, or maybe it’s been our habit. Anyway, the first responders couldn’t find Marilyn’s cabin among the several cabins that several humpy driveways led to. We heard that her grandson, Chance, tried to revive her, until the paramedics finally found their way to the middle of nowhere, where we live.

I think of the orchids Marilyn felt such kinship with, how fragile and hardy and forgiving they are. Their homes are simple, their roots all exposed. Not quite grounded, they live on mist the way Marilyn lived on smoke. Until 2008 when she scaled back her worldly pursuits to take care of her husband, Marilyn was the contact person for the Sonoma County Orchid Society, where she gave regular talks on such subjects as “CPR for orchids” and “Preparing your Orchids for the Show.” I love to think of her standing in the Veteran’s Building in her man’s plaid shirt and her mud-stained boots, steam rising through her fingers, explaining to gangs of well-heeled orchidophiles how to pimp their Malaxis paludosa.

A Crash Course in Urban Adolescence

The Warfield Theater on Market Street in San Francisco almost literally reeks of history, from Al Jolson to The Killers, interlarded with The Grateful Dead, Phish, Patti Smith and The White Stripes. Last weekend twenty young Bay Area poets took the stage for the 14th Annual Youth Speaks Grand Slam Poetry Finals, spitting monologues, diatribes, hip hop songs and short stories of brilliant intensity for an audience of about 2,000 – a crash course in urban adolescence, circa April 2010.

Here’s the young woman with the big red flower in her ear, case #389214B (or something like it) preparing to be released from the welfare system the day she turns 18. She has 65 days left of high school, plans for college. But without her group home she’ll be homeless. Her caseworker, “Katie,” suggests that if she drops out of school or becomes pregnant she’ll qualify for help. “You suggesting I get pregnant?” the young woman asks and Katie says, “I’m just giving you the information.” There’s the young man whose family came from the hills of China, via Laos, Vietnam and Thailand to Oakland. His sense of identity is fierce, but not easily named. What are you, people ask, what are you, what are you? Another teenager describes drowning by fried food and fast food. Here is what my family eats every day, her poem says, here is what we eat when someone dies, this is what I eat when I feel hungry and scared. The greens the most unhealthy thing, greens with a ham hock, covered in grease. Why do we still eat like we’re slaves? Another young woman feels her body is “genetically modified to fail.” A first-year student at Berkeley catalogues the sexist language she could use to describe a repulsive date: “motherfucker” and “son-of-a- bitch” and “bastard” all demean women. Language is just another enemy, twisting the same old flawed reality into familiar expressions. An androgynous-looking poet describes the process of chiseling away her feminine self: “When I cut my hair everything fell away/ When I cut my hair I became poetry.” Another young woman sees Superwoman at the grocery store – she’s the one with “ten full shopping bags, a baby on her hip and a smile that comes with a mean switch.” A few poets speak of the influence of police brutality and street violence, about nickel nines and Wendy’s parking lot, about Oscar Grant III being shot in the back on a BART train by the Oakland Police while lying face down, unarmed. The gesture – arms floating up and down like birds’ wings, the back crumpling inwards – keeps returning in poems about the streets, as if it were the universal gesture of Oakland. Kids trope toward and veer from suicide. Palestine and the effects of white phosphorous shimmer in the foreground, and a Sikh kid signals the audience to shout out “Sick! Sick!” when he points a finger to duplicate the judgment that rains down upon the turban he can’t wear. The Warfield fills up with the popping sound of oppression exploding into expression, the sound of silence breaking.