Consultation (cont’d)
“And how do you distinguish one creature from another?”
“Simple. I added a random name generator to the program, and it ascribes a name of several words to each creature. Sometimes the names are rather hilarious …”
“Like … ?” The Professor became interested.
“Like, for example, Theophrastus Phillippus Aureolus Bombastus von Hohenheim—this one I like more than any other.”
“Can you sum that up?”
“Yes! Paracelsus, meaning ‘greater than Celsus’—so he nicknamed himself. With him I have fully succeeded. He teaches that amusing creatures ‘are made by me, God, from the alchemical extraction of the world, like in the great laboratory, and bear the image of the Creator.’ I am not sure about the ‘extraction’ but, as you can see, Paracelsus realized whom he looked like and who created him. And he is not the only one who has cracked me.”
“If so, then you deserve praise, God, you accomplished a lot!”
“Ah, Professor, if it were not for one thing: These amusing creatures are mostly busy destroying each other. With each new cycle of the program they create increasingly sophisticated weapons to kill their relatives.”
“I do not want to repeat myself, God, but your single time dimension causes the problem. It leaves them no alternative; so be it, keep these three spatial dimensions—they are certainly accustomed to them—but introduce at least one additional time dimension, and you’ll see it all will change for the better.”
“I’ll try, Professor, but I fear that this would come as a shock for them.”
“So introduce it cautiously, slowly, so that initially only scientists can guess the existence of the second time dimension—there should be scientists there, right? And so on, until you reach the politicians, and then these will decide how to proceed,” the Professor suggested with sarcasm in his voice.
Knowing that the sarcasm was caused by the Professor’s recent failure in the elections, God in his own way wanted to comfort him: “Professor, you should see how my amusing creatures hold elections. Recently the opposition there has won sixty percent of the vote and, nevertheless, lost.”
“It cannot be true,” the Professor was astonished. “I do not believe it! You mean your amusing creatures have been able to think of nonlinear logic?”
“Yes, imagine that … but not the scientists, no. Scientists out there were persecuted for centuries! A few hundred cycles ago they burned at the stake a philosopher who claimed that the creation of only one universe is unworthy of me, God.”
“Imagine that! They managed to hit upon it! What insight! And what was your philosopher’s name?”
“Giordano Bruno,”[*] replied God.
“Nice name, I like it,” the Professor said thoughtfully, and unexpectedly added: “Excellent! Really, I did not expect this much from you, God. I will recommend your work for the prize.”
The Professor looked at God, wanting to see the seeds of joy on his face, but God was silent. He sat with his head bowed.
“Is something wrong, God? You’re not happy with that?”
“I am glad, of course,” God sighed. “But, you see, Professor, the data of these two visionaries, Paracelsus and Bruno, are long in the archives, and few of the amusing creatures are aware of them. There are now various fashionable theories about the origins of the amusing creatures. While some do recognize me, God, as the creator of the universe, for some reason they have decided that I did this in six days, in the end personally sculpting from clay the first amusing creatures. Complete misapprehension of the problem. Then there are those who believe that the theory about six days is a fairytale, and argue that amusing creatures emerged during the evolution of other, equally funny though less intelligent creatures. That is closer to reality, but they have completely eliminated the possibility of my very existence, while, in fact, I conceived and wrote the program that really drives their evolution,” God said with undisguised bitterness in his voice. “And one of the highest authorities in this school of thought is trying to convince everyone that I, God, am just some mental virus that gets into the heads of amusing creatures in early childhood. I do not know what to say. Me—a virus?”
“Do not worry, God,” said the Professor. “One cannot avoid surprises in such a complex problem. But that’s why it is so interesting! I was wrong. Do not delete this universe. Leave and continue to monitor its development. At the same time, here is my advice: make a backup copy and cautiously enter the second time dimension—you will see a lot of new interesting things. But only after exams!”
_____
[*] The great Italian philosopher and poet Giordano Bruno was burned alive at Campo dei Fiori in Rome on the morning of February 17th, 1600, after spending eight years in the jails of the Holy Inquisition.
___________________
Ruben Varda (Vardapetian) was born in Yerevan, the capital of Soviet Armenia. He wrote and later published in Moscow his first fantasy novel in Russian, The Girl with a Lute. Ruben is now writing his second novel. He received his PhD in physics from the Moscow Lomonosov University and then worked in Armenia, teaching and doing research in in the Yerevan University and in the Academy of Sciences. In 1992 he moved to Denmark and in 1996 was posted by the Danish Ministry of Research to Brussels. Since then he has lived in the Belgian capital, mainly occupied with the management of R&D projects, the latest being on EU-Russia cooperation in nanoelectronics.
Consultation
Ruben Varda
From Voice from the Planet: An Anthology of Living Fiction
Edited by Charles Degelman
Harvard Square Editions 2010
~
“You’re making progress, Kit, I like your universe. You managed to achieve rapid stabilization. This promises long life without any shock. Tell me, how do you see its future? What might its zest, or uniqueness, be, so to speak?”
Kit smiled, flattered by the words of her Professor. “You are right, Professor, it is stable, that’s true, but because of this, it is not very lively. Not much happens there. At the moment I do not see any zest, and I’m afraid I have to add one more spatial dimension.”
“And if you continue to play with the initial conditions, without adding a new dimension?”
“Fine, but remember that not much time is left, examinations are coming soon. If you need my assistance, come and see me.”
“Is there anyone left behind the door?” asked the Professor. “Tell them to come in.”
“I believe only God is waiting,” Kit said, gathering her papers.
“Come in, God, come in. As usual you’re the last,” mumbled the Professor. “Well, has there been any progress?”
“I took into account all your remarks, Professor, and look what I got,” said God, unfolding his paper.
“Well, and what have you there, God?” asked the Professor in a tired voice. This group of students was his biggest, and they exhausted him with the results of their numerous simulations.
“You see, Professor, since your last consultation I have considered many different models. You know, my specialty is bio-universes, so I tried to build a model of the universe where at some stage of the development bits and pieces based on silicon or carbon emerge. In the beginning nothing good happened, and even when I succeeded for a short time in creating large molecules, they soon broke up into component parts. But once I got lucky: I managed to create quite a complicated and twisted helix molecule, after which the process went with astonishing speed. And then I set a goal: to create, firstly, a biological object in my image, so that in its appearance it would be like me, and secondly, to ensure that sooner or later the object would realize that by its very existence it is indebted to me and only me.”
“Modesty, God, humbleness! You’re still a student and look at your ambition! You think I do not know where this new fashion comes from? Creationism, or so they call it? And what good is it? What have you achieved with it, God, tell me.”
God’s mood began to worsen. He had expected praise and support from the Professor, and it turned out that all his efforts were in vain.
Noticing this, the Professor felt his duty to support the talented, but somewhat presumptuous student.
“Do not worry, God, if it does not work with this one, build another universe. Your universe is just a file, and it can always be deleted.”
“I would like to leave it and see what happens with these amusing creatures.”
“You can leave it if you like, but for me everything is clear: your universe has entered into the nonlinear mode. You managed to create life, but it turned out that to sustain one life another one should be destroyed. These amusing creatures, as you call them, will continue to deteriorate and, eventually, they will destroy this very life for which you created your universe. My advice to you, God: Go for a new universe. By the way, how many dimensions did you have there?”
“Initially there were many, but eventually only three spatial and one time dimension survived.”
“That’s it! And does time flow back and forth there, or only in one direction?”
“Only one, Professor,” mumbled God.
“All clear! With only one time coordinate you make them forever hurry, jump like grasshoppers and overtake time, whence all this aggression. Why not try to build inverse bio-universes with one spatial and three time dimensions?” the Professor suggested cheerfully.
“I did try, Professor,” God sighed sadly. “Even worse: they crawl along a single spatial coordinate and perpetually fight, either with ancestors or with descendants, and even with both simultaneously.”
“Well, I do not know what to advise you, God. I am afraid that as long as you stick to your creationism, nothing sensible will come out. Look at Kit and others. They created quiet universes. It is a real pleasure to look at them.”
“You know, Professor, I would have removed this universe and started a new one long ago if not for some amusing creatures. You laugh, but I have become attached to them.”
“I do not understand, God.” The Professor was genuinely surprised. “You mean to tell me that you learned to work at the level of individual creatures? There should be billions of them there! How do you do it?”
“I wrote a little program called ‘Guardian Angel.’ It follows the life of every amusing creature from birth to death, after which it automatically enters the data into the archive and destructs itself. As soon as a new creature is generated, the program copies a new guardian angel for it.”
| Continued >> |
____________________
Ruben Varda (Vardapetian) was born in Yerevan, the capital of Soviet Armenia. He wrote and later published in Moscow his first fantasy novel in Russian, The Girl with a Lute. Ruben is now writing his second novel. He received his PhD in physics from the Moscow Lomonosov University and then worked in Armenia, teaching and doing research in in the Yerevan University and in the Academy of Sciences. In 1992 he moved to Denmark and in 1996 was posted by the Danish Ministry of Research to Brussels. Since then he has lived in the Belgian capital, mainly occupied with the management of R&D projects, the latest being on EU-Russia cooperation in nanoelectronics.
The Masturbator (cont’d)
What would she have said to Kevin if there had been some kind of closure to their marriage. No, that was impossible to imagine even now. But what if he had been a different man, not just a good provider, not just her mother’s idea of a suitable choice for Sylvia. What if he had been someone she loved. But why, if that were the case, would they have been breaking up. For the time being she couldn’t go there.
“I’m sorry,” Jerod said looking up at her, “you seem like a nice person. I didn’t mean anything. Really.”
She smiled a little.
He sat back in the chair. She noticed her blouse from yesterday still hung over its arm.
“After our second child, my wife insisted I get a vasectomy. I didn’t want to, but she insisted. Said she wouldn’t ever have sex with me again unless I did. I understood that she didn’t want any more children and it wasn’t as if giving birth had been easy—both girls were born by Cesarean section—but she could have easily have been fixed, herself, during the second delivery. It was almost as if she wanted revenge. In fact, it was after I had the surgery, she told me she wanted a divorce.”
Sylvia stared at him. What if closure wasn’t telling your husband anything but listening to what he had to say instead?
“I mean, if I had become impotent, that would have been all right, but to have it done to me seemed, somehow unreasonable. I felt I was giving up something. Going in, undressing, having someone apply a local anesthetic and then the doctor making cuts in my scrotum, tying off the seminal tubes …”
“Is that any worse than having a baby by a Cesarean operation?”
“No, of course not. But that wasn’t a planned thing, at least not the first time. We’d both gone through Lamaze training. Oh, I don’t know, after the vasectomy was done, it didn’t seem to matter. No, that’s not true. I want to start over. But can’t.”
“Why? Because of a vasectomy? Most women my age don’t want more children.”
“Oh, I know. I don’t mean that exactly, but …”
“So what do you want, besides what you asked for already, because that just is not going to happen.”
“What I would like is to sit in this chair …”
“Ok.”
“And have you take off your clothes, as you would if you were going to shower.”
“And then …”
“And then, with you on that bed, naked, and me sitting in this chair, I want to masturbate.”
“Masturbate?”
“That’s it. I promise I won’t touch you. I won’t go near you. And afterwards I’ll get in my car and leave and you will never hear or see me again.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
After a minute Sylvia pulled her tank top over her head, straightened her hair a bit and took off her bra. She untied her tennis shoes and after shaking them off, stood up to push her sweatpants and shorts to the floor. She kept her white socks on and hiked back up onto the bed.
Then it was his turn. Sylvia watched as he unzipped his pants and pulled out his penis. It reminded her of a pink, blind mole coming out of its hole. There was a time when their back yard had been soft with mole tunnels just under the grass. The exterminator had shown them a picture of one. It had been taken at night with an infrared camera. The head and little mouth of the mole pointing up through a hole, like a penis. Like this penis.
The visitor began to tug on himself. He eyed the fur patch toward the bottom of Sylvia’s white torso. His right hand went faster and faster. Slowly she opened her legs.
Outside cement started to slide from the truck along a metal shaft toward the framed-off area on the ground.
It rushed forth. Then was done.
____________________
John (Jack) Lehman is the founder and original publisher of Rosebud Magazine, as well as the literary editor of Wisconsin People & Ideas. A nationally published writer and poet with twenty-five years experience teaching creative writing, Lehman grew up in Chicago but now lives with his wife, Talia Schorr, and their three dogs and multiple cats in Rockdale, the smallest incorporated village in Wisconsin.
The Masturbator
John Lehman
From Lost on Clearview Road
Zelda Wilde Press 2011
~
Jerod did not want to enter the house, but was asking if he could. She wanted him to, but was acting as if she didn’t.
“I lived here. We were married and now we have been divorced for several years. It would mean a lot to me to just wander through and see the place again.”
“I don’t know. My husband is at work and the kids …”
“Ah yes, I understand. I was just driving by—I have returned to live in Madison—and had an impulse to stop back here and ask.”
In reality Sylvia and her husband were separated. They had moved to this small town, Black Earth, ten years earlier, were raising their two sons there and had learned to live separate lives together—he was on the road Monday through Friday, she wrote a little and was a devoted mother. Now the company wanted him to work out of the Milwaukee office several hours away. She had decided to keep the boys in school and not to move. Kevin, her husband, who had just rented a new place, was tired of her and their relationship anyway.
Sylvia had recognized the last name, Latimer, of the visitor at the door, and when he mentioned he and his now-divorced wife had brought up their son and daughter here, she had relented and invited him in. It wasn’t that he was not appealing, but she was tired of men. Tired of agreeing with them, disagreeing with them; tired of having to deal with them. On the other hand he seemed decent enough. She thought, who knows, in a few years she might feel like visiting the past herself, at least briefly. They had walked through the living room, the dining area, the bedroom her sons shared and even peeked into the kitchen. Now she was heading up the stairs with him following, to the bedroom she and her husband once shared together. There was a small bathroom and shower off the hall and a spare bedroom to the back that as long as she could remember was filled with boxes from their initial move.
When they entered the rather simple, second-story master bedroom with a dormer window and queen size bed, Jerod touched her elbow. She jerked it away.
He wore a grey polo shirt, khaki pants and penny-loafers. Sylvia had been jogging earlier this morning and still had on a turquoise tank top and sweat pants.
“Sorry,” he said. “It’s just that this room and this morning bring back so many emotions.” Jerod slumped down into an over-stuffed chair across from the bed.
She looked at him in an irritated way.
“It’s like you are watching a play,” he continued, “… called ‘My Life.’ It’s not as interesting or as exciting as you expected it would be. Maybe you switch seats, but it doesn’t matter. So you sit in the dark waiting for it to be over.”
“What do you want,” she finally asked.
“I want to have sex with you.”
“No.”
“Right here, right now.”
“No.”
But she wasn’t frightened. This was not an aggressive man who was going to press himself on her against her will. He was a defeated man, and for some reason she felt sorry for him, as she would have for Kevin if he would have let her.
“No,” she repeated, “and perhaps you’d better leave.”
But when he closed his eyes and continued to stay in the chair, Sylvia sat down on the edge of the bed. There was a green satin bedspread on it. A wedding gift from one of Kevin’s fellow workers. Sylvia had high cheekbones and short blonde hair. She was in her mid thirties and in relatively good shape. In that moment she thought back over her own life. Both she and Kevin had had some sexual infidelities over their fifteen years, but their marriage had ended later, that sexual mischief far behind. All she wanted, all she ever wanted was a man in love with her who was not looking for more. What was amazing was that they had remained together as long as they had. Maybe it was the boys.
Outside a cement truck with its noisily-churning load jockeyed into place with a series of grunts and beeps. The County was replacing a segment of sidewalk down the block that had been damaged when they widened the road. There was a pause, then someone revved the engine as a chute must have been lowered into place. Both Sylvia and the stranger listened.
| Continued >> |
____________________
John (Jack) Lehman is the founder and original publisher of Rosebud Magazine, as well as the literary editor of Wisconsin People & Ideas. A nationally published writer and poet with twenty-five years experience teaching creative writing, Lehman grew up in Chicago but now lives with his wife, Talia Schorr, and their three dogs and multiple cats in Rockdale, the smallest incorporated village in Wisconsin.
J.D. Salinger: A Life
By Kenneth Slawenski
Random House 2011
Reviewed by Norma Gay Prewett
The Spiritual Hermitage of Pure Art [cont’d from part one]
Kenneth Slawenski is generally overly-slavish in his devotion to Salinger’s memory (this is not an authorized biography) as I think one should be when writing autobiography perhaps. A large exception occurs when he discusses Salinger’s longest-term marriage, to Claire Douglas. Slawenski writes, “During the Spring of 1962, [Salinger and family] received an invitation from President Kennedy to attend a White House dinner honoring popular authors.” He had previously declined an invitation to another official function, but he adored Kennedy and was nearly persuaded to attend. When he balked, Jackie herself called him on the phone, a call Claire fielded.
Slawenski summarizes this reluctance as a sign of Salinger’s not being able to endure an occasion that “would have been ‘phony.’ ” I find this rather sophomoric on the part of the biographer, committing as he does the lamentable unsophisticated error of mistaking person and persona. Holden Caulfield is not Salinger, after all. Slawenski’s analysis of the Kennedy incident seems more emotionally in tune when he notes that “Claire and Peggy” probably never forgave him for denying them the experience of Camelot.
“By the mid-1980s, Salinger had been silent for twenty years,” he notes. “Though he had decided against publishing his own work, he was unable to stop others from writing about him.” Among these were James E. Miller (incidentally a former professor of mine), Frederick Gwynn, and Harold Bloom. British writer Ian Hamilton attempted his own version as late as 1987 and was rebuffed and taken to court.
Joyce Maynard in 1999 offered fourteen letters for auction, they were purchased for $200,000 by Peter Norton, who offered them back to Salinger. When Salinger died on January 27, 2010, at age 91, even those who had been embroiled in lawsuits with him appeared to eulogize. A fact which appears to please the over-protective Slawenski is that dozens, perhaps hundreds of admirers started posting YouTube readings of his work, seemingly “not caring how [they] looked in front of the camera.”
Salinger’s death also occasioned a lamentable resurgence of what his biographer calls “Salinger-mania,” including stories about his existing “on frozen peas” and being “habitually infatuated with teenage girls.” Yet Slawenski alludes earlier to the same lack of solid judgment in his remark that Salinger had “seldom chosen [women] wisely … [and] continued to make poor decisions.” It is in this context that his relationship with Joyce Maynard, which takes up page after page of Joyce Maynard’s memoir, gets its one notice here: “one of those choices would rise to haunt him.” Snarkily, Slawenski sums up Maynard’s year of living with Salinger as her having decided that she had been “cast away … by a man who used her callously.”
Yet, though I admit a little bias in favor of Maynard from having read her other writings, I think there are more reasons than one to not dismiss this quirk on Salinger’s part quite so quickly. Humbert Humbert’s adoration of Lolita has been roundly approved, though it always made me squirm. Lewis Carroll probably had physically chaste, but imaginary lustful ideas about Alice. Many great, but insecure, men habitually choose partners whom they can more easily impress, manipulate, etc. His first wife of three, Claire, was fifteen years younger than he.
It is also a fact that Salinger’s next and last marriage (he was married a total of three times) was also to a woman, who, though no teenager, was forty years younger. (Maynard had been thirty-five years younger; Oona O’Neill, daughter of the famed playwright, was six years younger and only 16 when Salinger fell for and unsuccessfully pursued her. She is sometimes thought to be the prototype of Catcher’s Sally Hayes.) Holden is not he, but Holden’s descriptions of young girls and Buddy Glass’s nearly weird descriptions of his own mother’s legs and lower body (in Seymour), as well as Sergeant X’s attraction to the pretty young Esmé in “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor,” are not unmixed with sexual attraction.
But enough gossip. One still cannot deny that Slawenski has unearthed some previously little-known facts. One important one, on which he spends considerable time in the book, is Salinger’s genuinely (though rarely self-proclaimed) authentic heroism. Not only did the author land at Normandy on D-Day, June 6, 1944, a moment his biographer calls “a turning point” in Salinger’s life, but he also helped liberate Dachau, though Slawenski notes that “like so many who encountered such scenes … Salinger has never spoken directly of his experiences and we can never be sure exactly what his intelligence duties demanded.” These two iconic events alone would have established his street cred. But he also apparently served well and nobly as an everyday soldier—and suffered what we would call PTSD today. Meanwhile, he wrote and sent off story after story, trying sometimes in vain to break into the “slicks” and the literaries.
While I claim no special expertise in Salinger-enalia, and while Slawenski has certainly been diligent in his documentation of his subject’s life, the tentative tone of the book at times puts me off. One critic, the writer Jay McInerney in the New York Times Book Review, finds the biography lacking in one key element: “If you really want to hear about it, what’s missing—and this is not necessarily Slawenski’s fault—is Salinger’s voice. I was tempted to say his inimitable voice, but of course it’s been imitated more often than that of any American writer, except possibly Salinger’s pal Hemingway, infiltrating the language of our literature and refertilizing the American vernacular from which it sprang.”
McInerney does make the biographer’s excuses for him, however:
Slawenski is handicapped in part by the legacy of Ian Hamilton, author of In Search of J. D. Salinger (1988). As Slawenski recounts, after being stonewalled by Salinger and his small, tight circle of friends, Hamilton tracked down a great deal of unpublished correspondence and quoted extensively from Salinger’s letters and books. When a galley of the book reached Salinger, he called in the lawyers and demanded that Random House remove quotations of unpublished letters from the text. The initial district court ruling in favor of Random House and Hamilton was overturned on appeal—with major repercussions for American copyright law and with the immediate result that Hamilton was forced to paraphrase the letters he’d relied so heavily on. Slawenski is muzzled by that 1987 ruling and also by his fastidious interpretation of fair-use copyright law in regard to quoting from the fiction, limiting himself pretty much to short phrases. The bulk of the book was written when the litigious Salinger was still alive, but I can’t help wondering if his heirs might have proved a little more relaxed about quotation.
I titled this review “The Spiritual Hermitage of Pure Art,” though I was tempted to use a play on what I think is one of the all-time wonderful titles, “The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls” (even though an acquaintance of Salinger’s, A.E. Hotchner, may have claimed that he invented the bulk of the title, according to Slawenski). Salinger was fascinated by titles and one of the best at inventing them, from “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” to “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period.”
But I held my explanation for the title of this review for the end because I think its origin is best explained by a vision Salinger had of himself in the world which is mirrored in Salinger’s own epitaph, read by his son Matthew at a memorial service in which he said his father was “in this world, but not of it.”
Clothed in metaphor, it becomes another vision Salinger had of being an observer in a ballroom where “the music was becoming dimmer and dimmer and the dancers appeared farther and farther away.” As Slawenski aptly and poetically notes, Jerome David Salinger was “confounded … torn between the social world around him and the spiritual hermitage of pure art.”
[< Back to part one]
____________________
Norma Gay Prewett taught English for 34 years and recently became RETINO (retired in name only) from University of Wisconsin-Whitewater (as Gay Davidson-Zielske). She is now free to do any dang thing she wants anytime she wants, but will probably continue to write, bike, quilt, keep her coop, and meditate at her retreat, Piney Wood Mews. She also co-produces Mindseye Radio which airs first Fridays at 11 PM on WORT-FM or radio4all.net.
J.D. Salinger: A Life
By Kenneth Slawenski
Random House 2011
Reviewed by Norma Gay Prewett
The Spiritual Hermitage of Pure Art
It is fitting and proper that I should end my thirty-year career as an English teacher writing about J.D. Salinger. In 1965, a timid country girl sat in the second row of Mrs. Rosalie Stotmeister’s English class in a small-town high school falling in love—with Holden Caulfield, with learning, with a teacher who would be the first to take me in hand, direct my meandering teen-aged mind to loftier pursuits than whose class ring I should accept, and show me what courage and commitment to teaching looks like.
A giant of a woman in a blue-plaid Pendleton jacket and stern shoes, she spotted me despite my cowering. When she couldn’t hear my whispered answers in response to her questions in class, she demanded I come in early to school (which meant she had to come in early too, I later understood) and be given “voice development classes,” which meant calling out things from the third-floor landing of the high school loudly enough that Mrs. Stotmeister (“Stotsy” to both admirers and detractors) could hear and repeat my words.
Today, this direct instruction might qualify as bullying, but even then, I think I knew that she was teaching me to stand up for my ideas, be bold, and giving me confidence that I had never earned on my own. When she introduced the class to The Catcher in the Rye, that slim little red book with the gold lettering that had already been derided at colleges as being profane and dangerous to youthful minds, I grabbed it eagerly.
My mistake was trying to read it at the supper table, stashed on my lap. Though meals in my family were not really decorous affairs, my mother had apparently had a bad enough day not to put up with being disrespected one more way. She snatched the book, which happened to fall open to one of the four times Salinger uses “Fuck” in the book—the notorious mummy graffiti incident where someone has scrawled the “F-word” on a sarcophagus (page 204 of the Bantam edition if you have to know).
Mother scowled. She made an appointment with this MRS. Stotmeister, an amazing act of courage which must have filled my mother, a shy but devout Baptist woman, with terror. It was clash of the Titans to my mind, but Catcher stayed in the curriculum, I continued to read it, and a few years later, by then a teaching assistant with my own class of scared college freshmen, I taught the dangerous book for the first time. By then, I had befriended another grad student who was so enamored of Salinger that he seemed to want to become either the author or a member of the author’s fictional Glass family. Like untold numbers of other young people, I began to think, talk, act like my version of the family that seemed infinitely wiser, wittier, more interesting than my own.
I became a “Salingerite,” as John Updike dubbed us in a slighting review of Franny and Zooey. Years intervened and I broadened my literary palate and began to read and teach widely enough that J. D. Salinger seemed just another comfortable friend of my youth. I think I taught Catcher one more time and found its ironic language, by then so much parodied and badly mimicked, a little passé. The final piece of the personal part of this review arrived just last week, while I was cleaning out my office for retirement from teaching. High on a dusty shelf, filled with my childish scrawled notes (such as “not literally” next to the words “it killed me”), was my original high school copy of Catcher.
Ten years ago, when the editor of Cambridge Book Review asked me to review Joyce Maynard’s At Home in the World, Maynard’s memoir of her years as Salinger’s lover, my curiosity had again been piqued. My observation in that review was: “Everything is fair game in this book and reading these gutsy confessions is enervating and energizing … Maynard confesses all, from her precocious longing for world-shine and all-encompassing ability to dissemble, to her breast implants, which gave her an instant 40-inch bust. She made me squirm with her descriptions of ‘Jerry’ Salinger’s sexual preferences …”
Now, having finished Kenneth Slawenski’s new biography, J.D. Salinger: A Life, the contrasts and yet ironic similarities between Maynard’s style of being in the world and Salinger’s abound. Among his last parting “shots” at Maynard when he dismissed her as his lover: “The trouble with you, Joyce,” he (allegedly) says, “is you-love-the-world.” But, perhaps he doth protest too much?
One of the best parts of reading A Life was that it compelled me to seek out and reread much of Salinger’s other work. Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction, larded as they are with internal, though not external autobiographical bits, reminded me of what a tender soul Salinger was. His love for the world, especially the innocent parts of the world, shine through. He also reminded the world in Carpenters, of R.H. Blyth’s famous and useful definition of sentimentality: “giv[ing] to a thing more tenderness than God gives to it” (quoted in A Life). Slawenski nearly mirrors this definition when he asks, “If Seymour Glass loved the fullness of living … why did he end his own life—and why did Salinger, enjoying the liberation of writing freely and without regard to opinion, similarly end the life of his authorship?”
Salinger essentially quit publishing (though not writing) for the last forty years of his life. He rebuffed many efforts to meet him, interview him, and endured trickery and treachery from people who should have known better to pry information out of him and his neighbors. Apparently, he was well-loved enough by his neighbors in Cornish, New Hampshire to have earned their concerted effort to foil pilgrims and reporters.
When people inquired, they were sent on wild J.D. chases ending on dirt roads or at fictional addresses. His wife and children (two, a girl, Peggy, and a boy, Matthew) did not fare as well, since in his need to protect them, he seems to have endeavored to cloister them, according to Slawenski. In this one detail, Maynard’s reportage concurs. Intimacy with his real intimates was not his strong suit. Vacations to Europe and to New York were plentiful for a few years—then even these dried up.
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Norma Gay Prewett taught English for 34 years and recently became RETINO (retired in name only) from University of Wisconsin-Whitewater (as Gay Davidson-Zielske). She is now free to do any dang thing she wants anytime she wants, but will probably continue to write, bike, quilt, keep her coop, and meditate at her retreat, Piney Wood Mews. She also co-produces Mindseye Radio, which airs first Fridays at 11 PM on WORT-FM or radio4all.net.
Birds of Wisconsin
B.J. Best
New Rivers Press 2010
Reviewed by Amy Lou Jenkins
B.J. Best claims he is not an avid bird watcher, yet the author photo on the back cover of Birds of Wisconsin depicts the poet in a wooded setting wearing a canvas fedora that is perfectly suited to an aviary expedition. So, by virtue of a book of poems about birds and his adorned noggin, let’s call him a bird-watching devotee anyway.
Best carries no binoculars to identify nuanced coloration of the migrating warblers; he hunches over no microscope to inspect graveled gizzards. He observes birds through the lens of Owen Gromme’s (1896-1991) life. Gromme, painter and artist, outdoorsman, environmentalist, curator of birds and mammals at the Milwaukee Public Museum (including taxidermy duties) is the renowned illustrator and author of Birds of Wisconsin (1963), one of the first books detailing birdlife in the state. Anyone who studies Gromme is going to see a lot of birds.
Best’s poems sharpen and blur. Divided into three parts, Birds of Wisconsin pulls lines of resonance through the legacies of Gromme and from the lives and landscapes of the Midwest. We move through facts as detailed as a dissected gullet and as boundless as flight itself.
Part one, Instructions on Flying, offers an experiential draw to winged wilderness. The opening poem, titled “owen gromme as a child watched canada geese staging,” begins:
they were the reason i quit high school:
to muck about the bottom of the lake,
hushed in the rushes and waiting for wings […]
In the poem “junco,” four brief lines in length, the unsentimental solid grayness of Wisconsin’s winter proffers a comforting structure of harmony to implied landscapes and bird imagery: “broken sleep / swept across the slate-colored morning / the husk of a sunflower seed / in the snow.”
B.J. Best
Part two, The Prayers of Birds, gifts birds with personified introspection and the occasional well-timed wink or knife through the heart. “The Prayer of the Common Pigeon” begins with the line, “Forgive me, I have defiled yet another city statue,” and ends with, “I have forgotten what it is to be bird.”
Part three, Instructions on Landing, weaves through actual and supposed events and moments in Gromme’s life. “Bird Dissection,” from part one, is repeated and morphed in part three. We see through the lenses of Best and Gromme as they slice, inspect, and lean close: “You open a nuthatch call to a piff of spores, and are / now concerned they seed in your lungs: // Record your findings on ruled paper, black ink.”
The counterintuitivity in the final poem, “owen gromme lies down and accepts the finality of it all,” which riffs on Gromme’s claim that he has never painted a bird that satisfied him, explodes our passion for the ephemeral life. Best injects us with thoughts and glimpses that cannot be captured within rhetoric.
Readers don’t have to be steeped in understanding of Gromme, birds, or poetic theory to enjoy this themed collection. Best will woo you. These poems open heavy doors. Don your bird-watching hat or not, but do journey with Best through Birds of Wisconsin.
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Amy Lou Jenkins BSN MFA is the author of the award-winning essay collection, Every Natural Fact. She holds an MFA in Literature and Writing from Bennington College. Unless it’s so cold it hurts, she would rather be outside.
Battle
Elli Hazit
Bestial
mangy months of pain
Not wrenching, pointed cuts
but underwhelming, relentless
A thick unctuous solution
A beckoning, hellish lure—
to sleep, to anywhere else
Then the insidious beast
flipped side over
spit out gnawing anxiety
Eyes open
Dread and awe
sprawled in every room
Came to stay
Where is the quiet place?
Dry hands grab and clutch
Don’t let the obsessions
past the crippled, blind sentry
bowed over, mouth agape
The lapping somnolence
The careening insanity
left no dates
Consumed time
Survival
that stubborn, scraggly urchin
laughable and weak
Written off
Prevailed
The David
swung all available weapons
Downed the devil
____________________
Elli Hazit was born in San Francisco in 1960. She earned her bachelor’s degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her master’s degree from Boston University. Hazit lived in Paris, France from 1983 to 1997. Her writing has been published in the International Herald Tribune, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and the Cambridge News. She has also produced radio programs for WORT-FM, Madison. One of her stories, “The Tangerines and the Dogs,” was broadcast internationally on the BBC World Service Programme.
Like A Name
Elli Hazit
Literacy
What product of what hot night, room
here ponders the correct answer?
A rudimentary measure of knowledge attained
Knowing isn’t everything
They orbit, leaves in the wind
Eyes and hands leading toward questions
Sometimes the spark glows
with strange names that sound like murmurs
They gather,
cadences broken on space, air, compression
into someone making something, of someone
from nothing
Cells in a frenzy of procreation,
impulses drive them, reign when not in check
and they’re always checking
Reviewing
Then later
there will be recovery
All this to connect to
Productivity
to achieve leisure
Another chance
at creation?
____________________
Elli Hazit was born in San Francisco in 1960. She earned her bachelor’s degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her master’s degree from Boston University. Hazit lived in Paris, France from 1983 to 1997. Her writing has been published in the International Herald Tribune, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and the Cambridge News. She has also produced radio programs for WORT-FM, Madison. One of her stories, “The Tangerines and the Dogs,” was broadcast internationally on the BBC World Service Programme.
A.M.
Elli Hazit
A distracting influence
with good manners
Gazing at a tree’s width,
its bare tendrils of branches
There’s no compensation for misbehavior
We are insatiable
Nights of release are
glossed over in the grooming
and accessories
of a prepared countenance
and competence
Worries come unbeaded and fall
rippling around on the floor
Clothes are heaped on chairs, the bed
and the door is closed discreetly
on the private mess
where strangers are unwelcome
There’s a reluctance to organize
the day’s thoughts
much less pathways to order
only to be undone by haste
and misgiving
She rises,
all this in mind
____________________
Elli Hazit was born in San Francisco in 1960. She earned her bachelor’s degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her master’s degree from Boston University. Hazit lived in Paris, France from 1983 to 1997. Her writing has been published in the International Herald Tribune, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and the Cambridge News. She has also produced radio programs for WORT-FM, Madison. One of her stories, “The Tangerines and the Dogs,” was broadcast internationally on the BBC World Service Programme.
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