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An Open Letter to Suellen Lazarus

August 04, 2009 - View Single Entry

Note: Ms. Lazarus, a Vineyard summer resident, is the organizer of the biennial Martha's Vineyard Book Festival. The 2009 edition was held this past Sunday in Chilmark.

Sorry, I didn't make it down to the festival on Sunday. I'm sure you didn't notice my absence. I hope it went well.

Back in mid-spring I e-mailed a query to the book festival's website, introducing myself and my novel, The Mud of the Place. I'm a longtime year-round resident, and Mud is almost entirely set on off-season Martha's Vineyard. At that late date, I didn't expect an invitation to speak at the festival, but I did expect a reply. When after several weeks I still hadn't received one, I snail-mailed you a copy of the book, along with a related op-ed of mine that had just been published in the Vineyard Gazette. As a veteran book reviewer and former bookseller, I know as well as anyone that there are plenty of poorly written and poorly designed books out there. I wanted to assure you that mine was worthy of your consideration. You might not know my name, or that of Mud's small-press publisher, but surely you would recognize those whose advance praise appears on the book, such as Karen Joy Fowler, Cynthia Riggs, and Susan Klein. Recognizing that you'd not have time to read a 400-page novel with summer and the book festival fast approaching, I enclosed a copy of Holly Nadler's perceptive and enthusiastic review from the Gazette. Once again -- no acknowledgment, no reply, nothing.

My e-mail didn't bounce back as undeliverable, and the post office didn't return my parcel. I think they both reached their destination. So I'm curious: Why was the Martha's Vineyard author of a pretty good Martha's Vineyard novel of so little interest to the Martha's Vineyard Book Festival?

Silence is hard to interpret, and it may be folly to even try, but over the years I've learned a fair amount about silence, and about invisibility, so here goes anyway. Most of us see what we expect to see. Someone goes haywire and commits a dastardly crime and everyone's amazed. Or your kid sister or the nerd down the street grows up to win a Nobel Prize -- who would have thought . . . ? For most of summer people, Martha's Vineyard only exists when you're in residence. We don't literally disappear when you leave, of course; we're more like a room that goes dark when you turn the lights off.

Likewise, for the summer people, most of the island's year-round working people exist only in relationship to them. What we do and what we are when we're not serving hors d'oeuvres at your party, cleaning your house, fixing your car, or ringing up your purchases is not of compelling interest. This is fine with us. We're (usually) cordial and competent, and (often) willing to go out of our way to do our jobs well, but these are our jobs. They aren't our whole lives. Our off-season lives are as opaque to you as that dark room is when you're standing in the doorway.

My Mud of the Place has two protagonists. One is a gay man, the other a lesbian. I knew from the get-go that this would be a problem. In our society the lives of affluent white heterosexual men, in real life or in fiction, are presumed to have universal relevance, while the lives of women, gay people, people of color, and working people are seen as parochial, exotic, and of limited appeal. What I didn't anticipate was that a focus on year-round Martha's Vineyard would turn out to be a similar, and perhaps even greater, liability. Beyond stocking the book, neither Bunch of Grapes nor Edgartown Books has shown any interest in either the book or its author, and apart from that Gazette review, neither have the two island newspapers.

What to make of this? The Mud of the Place is no masterpiece; as a longtime reviewer and editor, I can point out its flaws as well as anybody. But readers like it, and often want to talk about it, and remember details from it months after they finish it. It's pretty good if you'll pardon my saying so. And it's one of the very few books to take Martha's Vineyard as its subject since Dr. Milton Mazer's (nonfiction) People and Predicaments, which was published in 1975. To me this is a selling point. To you, and the island bookstores, and the island newspapers, it seems to be a liability. The Mud of the Place, it seems, takes place in that dark room that you leave behind at the end of the summer, and you aren't interested enough to turn on the lights.

I expect more curiosity, and more courage, from anyone who claims to love books.

Sincerely yours,

Susanna J. Sturgis

Stillborn Conversations

August 03, 2009 - View Single Entry

Like the president, I was fascinated by the country's fascination with the Gates incident -- although I'm not sure how fascinated "the country" is with it all. The usual pontificators sure like to pontificate about it, and to read the entrails of their pontifications, and plenty of others are gathered around jeering or heckling or going "Rah, rah, rah!" Plenty of people wish we could have a "national conversation" about race, but I often get the impression that most of them think that the perceived lack of one is somebody else's fault. Me, I wonder if we're capable of having a smart conversation about any significant topic in this country, but this is as good a place to start as any.

Conversations require not only speaking but listening. There's precious little listening in U.S. national discourse these days. Negotiating, sure, and horse-trading and mutual back-scratching, but not much listening. Race and racism, like other important subjects, are addressed in speeches, monologues, diatribes, rants -- you name it. Whether the speaker is Barack Obama, Rush Limbaugh, Oprah Winfrey, Michael Moore, or Al Sharpton, we can hear them, but they can't hear us, even if we talk back to them. That's not a conversation.

What passes for national conversation in this country is carried on primarily by top-of-the-heap journalists ("pundits"), academics, and politicians, most of whom are lawyers. These people are all trained in, and rewarded for, one-way communication. They're skilled at debating. Debates are not conversations. Conversations don't have winners and losers. If you try to "win" all your conversations, pretty soon no one will want to talk with you.

If these people converse at all, it's mostly with each other, at work or at cocktail parties. In these settings they're unlikely to meet anyone new or hear anything they didn't already know, and in the -- improbable, but certainly not impossible -- event that they encounter someone from a different, less privileged background, the chances are excellent that this someone will be circumspect and polite. One of the privileges of being privileged is that you can not-hear anything that makes you uncomfortable. (You can appear to be listening very attentively but take in only what you choose to hear.)

The still-rolling aftermath of the Gates incident is so frustrating. Professor Gates hoped his unhappy experience would become a "teaching moment" -- in true professorial style, he emphasized the teaching, not the learning. The speaking, not the listening. So we've had lectures, speeches, expositions, and pontifications ad nauseam. It remains to be seen what we've learned: for sure we've all learned something, and I hope it isn't "There's no point in even trying to talk about this stuff."

July License Plate Report

July 31, 2009 - View Single Entry

I-OW-A.

Maybe if I spell it in ALL CAPS and draw out the syllables, it'll look more impressive?

Maybe not.

I thought I saw Hawaii going down the Beach Road, but I wouldn't swear to it. My certainty was at best 75 percent and probably less. Not good enough. Gotta keep the game honest. Cheating at the license plate game is like cheating at solitaire.

That makes 38 for the year.

Book Sale

July 31, 2009 - View Single Entry

This afternoon I went down to the West Tisbury Library's annual book sale. Actually I went down there twice. It's held at the West Tisbury School, an easy walk from where I live, so the first time I went down with Travvy. I tied Trav to a tree and he quickly made it clear that he was going to caterwaul like a baby with a wet diaper as long as I was out of sight. So we went home, I left him on the deck, and back I went to the school.

The sale takes up the entire gym. Books as far as the eye can see, sorted into categories, arranged on tables, each with a sign proclaiming its category. Books are also laid out under the tables, in cardboard boxes or the lids of cardboard boxes. Books, books, books. One side of my mind was considering all the work that went into the writing of each of those books; the other side was thinking, Who cares about any of this shit?

My primary motive was to see if I could find any out-of-print Joanna Russ books, but since science fiction wasn't sectioned off from other fiction I quickly gave that up. I did spot a paperback of Karen Joy Fowler's Sarah Canary (already have the hardcover) and, over by the wall, a William Gibson (not interested). Recognizing old friends was a major pleasure, like Paule Marshall and Alice Walker. I spotted an Alexander McCall Smith, one of the #1 Ladies Detective Agency books that I haven't read, but decided that I didn't really want to buy it. Perry Garfinkel's Buddha book was on the Vineyard authors table. Perry was Calendar editor at the Martha's Vineyard Times when I was running the copy desk. He had National Geographic connections, out of which this book came. The idea of Perry writing about spirituality of any kind cracks me up, and I actually considered buying the book, but it was priced at $2.50 (most hardcovers were $1) and my curiosity wasn't worth that much.

What I did come home with:

Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It. Maclean's Young Men and Fire blew me away; it was also indirectly responsible for introducing me to the music of James Keelaghan, whose "Cold Missouri Waters" I heard on the radio circa 1997 and immediately recognized its narrator, Wag Dodge, as the smoke jumper Maclean had written about in Young Men and Fire. I always meant to read Maclean's acclaimed A River Runs Through It, but never got around to it. I snagged the mass-market movie-tie-in edition for 25 cents. As a bonus I got a photocopy of the New York Times review of the movie, dated October 18, 1992, with some competent doodles on the back.

Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead. Long time ago, in my Lammas Bookstore days, I sold Storyteller. Philistine that I am, what I remember most clearly was its unusual trim size. I do remember liking it, and Ceremony, though I don't remember much about either. This looked worth a try. $1.

Elizabeth Marshall Thomas's The Hidden Life of Dogs. Another one I meant to read when it was new and never did, maybe because I read an excerpt somewhere and that told me enough to blather around it in public. I liked the author's Reindeer Moon, a novel about paleolithic Siberia, much more than Jean Auel's much more celebrated Clan of the Cave Bear, but damned if I can remember why. Hidden Life of Dogs was published the year before Rhodry was born. I have a hell of a lot more firsthand experience of dogs now than I did then. We'll see how it goes, and how it stacks up with the Coppingers' book. It set me back $2.

Companies We Keep, by John Abrams. John Abrams is a local saint. I don't trust saints of any kind. Abrams runs South Mountain Company, a construction company right here on Martha's Vineyard. Construction companies and real estate agents rank high on my list of Enemies of the Island, though of course they're generally assumed to be the backbone of the economy. If vivisectionists and pimps were the backbone of your economy, would you consider that a good thing? I figure I ought to read the book. If I decide he really is a saint, you can shoot me. If I don't, this should give me ideas for Squatters' Speakeasy, if the universe ever gives me a green light to go back to fiction. Besides, it only cost a buck.

Angela Carter's Burning Your Boats, her collected short stories. Carter is much admired by several writers I much admire, but I've spent little time with her work. She died at age 51, which makes me grateful that I didn't and am still slogging onward. Checking out her short fiction is the least I can do. $1.

Not a bad haul for $5.25, and there's actually a pretty good chance that I'll read 'em all.

Travvy the Red

July 28, 2009 - View Single Entry

I just reacquainted myself with my trusty little Canon PowerShot. It's been so long since I used it that I had to reload the software, which was wiped in the mid-April Windows crash, and refresh my recollection of what all those teeny damn buttons mean. I can't wait till all these digital gadget designers hit their fifties and have to fish their reading glasses out of whatever pile of junk they're buried under before they can decipher the labels on their gadgets. Anyway, we're back in business now, and of course I had to practice on the most photogenic resident.

In these photos you can see the red tinge that's been appearing in his coat. So far it's mostly on his front half, and most noticeable on his head and ruff. Malamute people call this "sable." It's a reddish-brown color, caused by phaeomelanin (I learned that off a neat website on malamute coat color genetics). The color can be present at birth, it can show up as the dog ages, and it can also lighten or darken over time. Trouble, Travvy's dad, is gray, sable, and white; Mayhem, his mom, is gray and white. His entire litter started off gray and white. I wonder how many of the others have started showing red. For Fellow Traveller a distinct red tinge seems singularly appropriate. Here's Travvy!

Travvy on the deck. I leave him there sometimes when I go out. He watches me go (guilt, guilt, guilt) then woo-woos vigorously when I come back up the stairs. Unfortunately my PowerShot doesn't do the sound effects.

Also on the deck, in the shade of the plastic round table. Between the rail supports at upper right can be glimpsed the clothesline, and on it my blue towel. This towel is supposed to live next to my outdoor shower, which is under the deck, but every time it rains, the towel gets soaked, and it's rained so often this summer that the towel is usually on the line. When I hang laundry (these days it's mostly T-shirts), Trav keeps an eye out from above.