 |
|
|
|
|
 |
 |
|
||
 |
 |
|
||
|
||||
 |
|
|||
|
||||
|
||||
Favorites of 2007January 05, 2008 It's been about 10 years since I read enough books or saw enough movies in one year to make a "10 Best" list. The fewer books I read and movies I see, the less interesting 10 Best lists become: most of the fun in reading 10 Best lists lies in deciding whether the list-maker is an opinionated jerk or a thoughtful person with impeccable taste, and it's impossible to do this if you haven't read (or even heard of) most of the books or movies. Last month Timmi Duchamp of Aqueduct Press asked me to contribute to the best-of-2007 retrospective to be posted in the Aqueduct Press blog. Aqueduct is a publisher of books -- novels, story collections, innovative essay anthologies, and the occasional monograph, all related in some way to feminist fantasy and science fiction -- but Timmi didn't restrict the contributors to books. We could write about movies, or about anything that might be considered "text." Did that include songs? It did. I turned in my assignment about an hour before Morgana V turned into a pumpkin. You can read it (and see a 1996 photo of me wearing deely-bobbers) here. It confirmed my suspicion that making lists is much more interesting than reading them, which raises the question of why I think you're going to sit still long enough to read what follows -- or why anyone sits still long enough to read anything when there are so many other interesting things to do in the world, or why anyone who (at least some of the time) can't see the point of reading pours so many hours and energy and forgone income into writing. Like Walt Whitman I contradict myself, and like Iris DeMent (whose birthday it is today) I guess I'll just let the mystery be, at least for now. What follows isn't a 10 Best list. How many items it contains depends on how you count, and I don't claim that they're the best of anything. What they are is encounters that told me something important, or reminded me of something I was on the verge of forgetting. Most of the encounters involve words, often with music. They're what keeps me keepin' on. When you live one day at a time, such encounters are your stepping-stones and your signposts and your clouds in the sky. Here goes. War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Spending two winter months in 19th-century Russia isn't everybody's idea of a good time, but I loved it. My encounter with Tolstoy reminded me that words can blow people away across languages, cultures, and centuries, and that, as Muriel Rukeyser wrote, "the universe is made of stories / not atoms." This is probably on the 10 Best lists of other discerning people, but none of them was the copyeditor. That was me. I got to spend two months dancing with the atoms of one of the greatest novels of all time. And I've still got Richard Pevear's letter on my fridge: "Dear Copyeditor," it begins, "First of all, thank you for a perfect job of copyediting -- precise, sensitive, thorough, and witty." My new apartment. Moving always sucks, but as moves go, this wasn't bad -- thanks again to Wendy, Alex, and Luis for the hands and Ginny for the Ford 350. The proof of the moving is in the living: I've been in residence since March 1, 2007, and I still love the place. The sun rises out my front door and sets behind the woods that I can see from my desk. The space suits me, the light is wonderful, the neighbors (my landlords) are great, and there are plenty of places to walk. Rhodry isn't wild about the stairs, but he loves sleeping and watching the world from the deck. Maybe the best single thing about the place is the kitchen, which leads me to . . . Bread. I'm baking bread again. I can make better contributions to potlucks than beer and Doritos. After five years' absence from the fair, my breads won a blue and a red in 2007. The freezer is well stocked with cranberries (cranberry bread is a specialty of the house), not to mention a loaf of whole wheat raisin bread that I haven't got round to yet. There's a sourdough sponge rising in the big bowl on the counter. I'm about to go add flour and knead. Making lists is more fun than reading them, but with bread it's a toss-up: the making and the eating hang even in the balance. Boston Fiction Festival. No balance here: one side's way up and the other's way down. The run-up was great. When "Showing at Makonikey," an excerpt from The Mud of the Place, was chosen as a winner, I was euphoric. Recognition for one's work is nearly always good; recognition from people who've never met you is better; and recognition that comes with a reading gig is best of all. Seeing my bio and a bit of my story up on the festival website kept a bounce in my step through the spring and into the summer. The gig itself was a big disappointment. The venue was tiny, the promotion negligible. The real bummer is that this is all too typical of the "lit'ry" scene: so many writers contending to get published in low-circulation magazines that even they don't read, that no one they know reads, and whose readers they may never meet. For me writing is a performance art. As with any performance art, the audience becomes part of the work in strange and various ways. Writing without audience is like a pipe burst in the basement: water spraying every which way, squandering its power, doing no one any good. The Natural Law of Water, Poems by Kathleen Culver. I met Corky Culver at the Feminist Women's Writing Workshops in 1987. Corky is not someone you ever forget. She's a wise, brassy crone dyke from Florida and a contagiously wonderful writer. So last winter, pretty much out of the blue, she asked if I'd read the manuscript for her forthcoming poetry collection and, if I was so inclined, give her a blurb for the back cover. Sure, I said. The manuscript, called Bloodlines, arrived promptly via e-mail, but I was less than prompt in getting to it, mainly because it was January, when I was trudging through Tolstoy's Napoleonic Russia and obsessing about moving. After a couple of nudges from Corky, I snapped to it; fortunately the poems were so good that they pretty much wrote their own blurb. The published book, rearranged and retitled, arrived in late summer. It's beautiful, the poems are great, and there I am on the back cover. (You can order your own copy from Corky's hometown bookstore, Wild Iris Books.) The Seeger Sessions: We Shall Overcome, by Bruce Springsteen and a whole bunch of musicians. Also a live concert audience, and they're all having such a blast that I wish I could go back to May 27, 2006, and be there. Springsteen decided to do songs written by, performed by, and/or in the tradition of Pete Seeger. Naturally he threw in a few written by and in the tradition of Bruce Springsteen. "O Mary Don't You Weep, Don't You Mourn" segues easily into "Johnny 99" and thence into "Old Dan Tucker" and pretty soon you're wondering why so many people waste so much time trying to decide what's rock, what's folk, what's gospel, and what's kick-butt political. Is this Squatters' Speakeasy stuff or what? Springsteen adds a few New Orleans verses to Blind Alfred Reed's "How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live?" I can't help noticing how "Martha's Vineyard" scans like "Oklahoma," as in "My Martha's Vineyard home has blown away." If The Decline, Fall, and Overthrow of the Bush Administration has a soundtrack, this is it. Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War, by Joe Bageant. Bageant is a border-crosser. He grew up working-class white, aka "redneck," in Winchester, Virginia; left town and gradually became a writer (there's a whole other book in there); and after 30 years in the wider world he went home again. Border-crossers are interpreters. The good ones know what people on one side need to say, and what people on the other side need to hear -- and vice versa. The borders Bageant crosses are ones that privileged people don't see or pretend they don't see, between urban and rural, middle-class and working-class, just-getting-by and sliding-further-behind. The occupational hazard of border crossing is being tongue-tied: so much sensory input is screaming toward your mouth that you don't dare say anything, and you want to take heads from both sides of the border and knock them together. Bageant manages to keep telling stories that a whole lot of us desperately need to hear. In the border crosser's pantheon he's right up there with Gloria Anzaldúa, and lucky for us he's still alive. The Ultimate Counterterrorist Home Companion: Six Incapacitating Holds Involving a Spatula and Other Ways to Protect Your Family, by Zack Arnstein and Larry Arnstein. If the title alone doesn't crack you up, nothing I can say will persuade you to read this book. It's a hoot. I've already given an embarrassing number of copies away and may have to order more from the Independent Publishers Group. You can too. The Midnight Special is a syndicated show on public radio. It's about as old as I am, but Rich Warren didn't get involved with it till 1974 (the year I graduated from college); he's been the sole host since 1996. I listen to it every Sunday morning, 10 a.m. to noon, on WUMB-FM. Warren calls it "folk music with a sense of humor." In mid-December he played a set about drinking, the pièce de resistance of which was a hilarious parody of Stan Rogers's "Barrett's Privateers" called "Garnet's Home-made Beer." Garnet was obviously Garnet Rogers, Stan's brother, and "Steeleye Stan" also made an appearance. The lyricist and lead singer was one Ian Robb, and this was one of those times when I knew on the basis of one song that I had to have the CD it was on, From Different Angels. Turns out I had to have two CDs: two shipped for the same price as one, and Finest Kind, the traditional-music trio of which Robb, an Anglo-Canadian, was highly recommended. I've been playing both into the ground since the day they arrived. It occurs to me that this is not the first time I've bought a CD based on something Rich Warren played on The Midnight Special -- several years ago I discovered the Capitol Steps in exactly this way -- and what occurs to me next is how important the intermediaries are who connect writers and musicians and other interesting people with those who are dying to meet them, even if we don't know it yet -- their audiences, in other words. The Midnight Special is definitely a key link for me. So is WUMB-FM, and AlterNet (where I first encountered both Deer Hunting with Jesus and The Ultimate Counterterrorist Home Companion), and Ladyslipper Music in North Carolina, from which I just received some CDs that the Squatters were curious about. Intermediaries and border crossers belong to the same clan. They're precious and indispensable. Support them however you can.
|
|
|||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
 |
|
|||
 |
|
|||
Home - Writing - Editing - About Susanna - Bloggery - Articles - Poems - Contact Copyright ©
Susanna J. Sturgis. All rights reserved. |
||||