Miss Ang Has a Very Comfortable Life

And now a little departure from the normal, as I saw this today and had to post. In January of 1998 I bungeed off the bridge at Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe. Recently a South African woman did the same jump, and the bungee snapped. Amazing footage. Erin Langworthy survived with scratches. Damn! That’s a story to tell, I only bounced back up and around.

As far as Frankenthaler’s art, intuitively and with a further and deeper glance, I do not see why her paintings have value. Her art does not interest me, I pass it by and look for something else.

This brings me to my mother, and do not think I imply that she should be famous. Her talent is worthy of greatness, but her output, ambition, drive, complacency et al have hindered her overall body of work. She is exactly where she should be in the art world, someone who is appreciated by family and friends. Nevertheless, take a look at the art within this post. What would you rather have on your wall?

In Taiwan I read Bukowski’s The Most Beautiful Woman in Town. I’ve never read the English. Bukowski’s language is simple, guttural, direct, and not to underestimate the difficulties of translation, but I’d bet Bukowski makes for less work than, say, Baudelaire. Below are the first paragraphs, in Chinese and English. As for my Chinese ability, it’s horrendous, it takes me ten times as long to read in Chinese than in English, and I’m so disfluent in the language that I can only manage to fake understanding to get any native speaker to converse with me, but it’s a passion. After attempting to translate the original, and I’m certain I didn’t get everything right, I then set the story in Taiwan with tangible changes. On this I’m half performing artist, half creative artist, but it’s different enough that the Bukowsky estate shouldn’t be bothered terribly.

镇上最美丽的女人: 凯丝是姐妹中最年轻,也是最美丽的一个. 凯丝是镇上最美丽的女孩. 二分之一印第安血统,丰满而有异国情调的胴体, 如蛇般的火热胴体, 还有灵活的眼睛. 凯丝是流畅灵活的火焰. 她就像是肉体困不住的精灵. 她的黑色长发如丝缎, 婉转飘逸如同她的身躯. 她的精神不是非常高昂, 就是非常低落. 凯丝时不走中间路线的. 有人说她疯了. 无趣的人才会这么说. 无趣的人永远无法了解凯丝. 对男人而言, 他似乎只是个性爱机器, 他们才不在乎她疯了没有, 除了少数情况, 当他们准备抓住凯丝时, 凯丝就会流走, 逃脱男人掌握.

“Kai Na was the youngest of three daughters, and the most beautiful. She was most beautiful girl in Taipei, and the most beautiful girl in Taiwan. Half Atayal aborigine, and half Chinese, she had serpentine physique and black eyes, with silk hair that Oriental poets thought extraordinary. Her soul, if not noble, carried a detached air that showed humility. She did not walk down the center path. Some said she was crazy. Usually mediocre people thought this. The men she came across considered her a sexual machine. They did not care if she was crazy…”

Quotes from Bobby Fischer:

“Nobody has single-handedly done more for the U.S. than me. But now I’m not useful anymore, you see. The Cold War is over and now they want to wipe me out, get everything I have, put me into prison.”

“Dear Mr. Osama bin Laden allow me to introduce myself. I am Bobby Fischer, the World Chess Champion. First of all you should know that I share your hatred of the murderous bandit state of ‘Israel’ and its chief backer the Jew-controlled U.S.A. also know [sic] as the ‘Jewnited States’ or ‘Israel West.’ We also have something else in common: We are both fugitives from the U.S. ‘justice’ system.”

(On 9/11) “I applaud the act. The U.S. and Israel have been slaughtering the Palestinians, just slaughtering them for years. Robbing them and slaughtering them. Nobody gave a shit. Now it’s coming back to the U.S. Fuck the U.S. I want to see the U.S. wiped out.”

Fred Phelps! The dorkball behind the Westboro Baptist Church, Mr. Phelps foments hatred of homosexuals, as shown by ridiculous protests at the funerals of US soldiers. Luckily, his evil flops to the floor relatively harmless. The homophobic fellow at the right aligns himself with Phelps. Their ignorance promotes the ugliest side of religion, and does more to turn people from Christianity than anything Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, or Richard Dawkins could pen.

Did Fred Phelps write this headline?

“David Rocklin’s The Luminist is based on the early life of a mid-19^th century British photographer, Julia Margaret Cameron, who lived with her jurist husband in Calcutta. Rocklin moves the setting to the 1830 British colony of Ceylon (Sri Lanka) where his heroine, Catherine Colebrook, attempts to lobby the court to show sympathy for the natives because a corrupt and greedy governor is bent on removing them, sometimes by killing, so he can sell off their farms to patrons. Her husband, Charles, is a member of the colonial law court. Enter Tamil boy Eligius, whose 15-year old father, after pleading the tax-burdened case of the locals at court, is murdered. Eligius is employed at the Colebrook family’s decaying estate. His father’s cohorts push Eligius to seek revenge or, at the very least, to steal from his employers or give locals access to the household. Eligius, however, forms a bond with Catherine as a photographer’s assistant.

Catherine, a scientist and artist, is obsessed with her quest to tame images of light and shadow. The photos through much of the story prove too ephemeral to convince doubters; the images fade within minutes after appearing. Eligius, though, shows prowess at mastering the magnification and direction of light. He becomes indispensible. Photography achieves the forbidden, a kiss stolen between dark-skinned Eligius and Catherine’s teen daughter, Julia. Couple that with the fateful clash between native and colonialist cultures and you reward all but the reader who requires a thriller’s pace.

If you read for story you will be pleased, you will want to read on. And if you seek character, you may ache for Eligius in his nearly hopeless quest to please a benefactor in order to save his family while risking the vengeful wrath of locals who believe he’s a traitor. Or Catherine, whose passion is pure, whose quest we trust, and you will follow anxiously one step behind while the Colebrook family, in company with Eligius and his sister, escape angry looters in hopes of making it onto the last ship out. But if you read for language you might find yourself stumbling over prose that is often eloquent but at other times stiff, or, worse, opaquely shadowed in the murk of, ahem…”purple prose.” 

Flaubert coined a term for a narrative device known as the “flaneur,” or “loafer.” This referred to a character that drifts without purpose through town, looking left and looking right, observing, reporting, reflecting without urgency. This flaneur becomes an obvious stand-in for the author.  This drifting consciousness becomes a “noticer” appearing as a detached voice. How a story gets told is essentially a matter of deciding who will do the noticing, to whom the story is addressed, and from what distance. A problem arises when tone, level of diction, or figurative language is inconsistent and without obvious explanation.

Rocklin’s prose drifts from concrete realism into verbal excess. As R. B. Myers, in his A Reader’s Manifesto (The Atlantic, July/August 2001), notes, “Everything is in…self-conscious, writerly prose… as long as it keeps the reader at a respectfully admiring distance.”  When Rocklin’s flaneur stays true to what can be observed, the telling is clear and engaging: “Colonials congregated in groups like clusters of nettles, festooned in their finest linens and silks. The nun tugged at brilliantly hued sashes fixed around their throats while they raged at each other in something approaching verse.  Their voices rose and fell while white boys carved into parchment with the sharpened quills of native birds.” This depiction of Eligius watching a ship’s arrival could be said to lack that scintillating detail that makes it just “this,” for example what exactly is a “brilliant hued sash”?  But his flaneur more than makes up for lack of detail when describing the process of photography: “They used gun cotton to bathe the plates in silver salt.  They lacquered skins of collodion onto them and potassium mixed with oil of lavender to lend flexibility.” But Rocklin’s flaneur cannot resist adding, “Light and shadow became their accomplices.”  Aside from the anthropomorphism, this “noticer” veers into a didacticism that can’t really be explained as belonging to either Eligius or Catherine. While not egregious, it distracts. 

And there are stiff passages of dialogue. “No more of this baseless fear…” says Catherine to her daughter.  “This is science, and a little faith…”  To which Julia replies, “This nameless pursuit shouldn’t be yours,” which leads Catherine to quip, “If it suits you to bow quietly, then do so.”  Historical fiction suffers, generally, from characters who deliver speeches as if they are so far back in time no one could speak in easeful conversational tones. Rocklin’s flaneur can’t resist punctuating the prose with “…outside the sky shed much of its black skin and bruised over with color,” or, “Charles’ stirrings had slowed to nothing. His mouth opened and remained.”  Or, when all seems lost on the colonial’s ship, when we least want to be distracted, we are confronted with, “Old by the time of its arrival, the remains of something already gone into history.”

Hemingway’s Old Man and The Sea contains stilted dialogue, proof that aesthetic mistakes are not always fatal. Thankfully, in The Luminist, there are many touching scenes.  At the docks, for example, Eligius and his younger sister are torn out of the Colebrooks’ grasp and forced away.  Before decamping for England and abandoning her loyal assistant, Catherine presses the folded camera, an icon of everything worthwhile in this story, into Eligius’s arms.  “Listen,” says Catherine, “We will find each other again.” 

The Luminist is a story worth reading. The characters are taken on a journey we know well, but in a manner that breathes freshness and urgency into that old story of exploitation. The insights into pioneer photography are a terrific added bonus for readers who like to learn something from their novels, who favor “loafers” telling stories like charismatic tour guides. I only wish Rocklin had trusted his riveting story to be enough.

Scott Driscoll holds an MFA from the University of Washington and has been teaching creative writing for the University of Washington Extension for seventeen years. He’s written articles for Alaska and Horizon Airlines Magazines and Poets and Writers. Other fiction and essays of his are in American Fiction, Cimarron Review, Crosscurrents, Ex-Files: New Stories About Old Flames (with Junot Diaz, Jennifer Egan, and David Foster Wallace), Gulfstream, Image, The Seattle Review, The South Dakota Review, and a notable work in Best American Essays, 1998.

The Decline of Reading: QED

According to Fair Use, I’m posting…and as far as you, Mr. Matt ”Revenge of the Nerds” Salinger, well, who and what smell are you?

JD SALINGER EXPLAINS WHY HE’LL NEVER SELL THE STAGE & SCREEN RIGHTS TO CATCHER IN THE RYE

 At The Nervous Breakdown I write about Experienced: Rock Music Tales of Fact & Fiction, a rock ‘n’ roll anthology edited by Roland Goity and John Ottey and published by Vagabondage Press, that combines memoir, journalism, and short story. The writers are Jim DeRogatis, Fred de Vries, Sean Ennis, Laurel Gilbert, Brian Goetz, James Greer, Ed Hamilton, Harold Jaffe, Brad Kava, David Menconi, Adam Moorad, Corey Mesler, Scott Nicholson, Carl Peel, J.T. Townley, and Timothy Weed.

“…The anthology fits my world. I’ve tasted more embarassment than “fame” as a bass player in a Seattle band whose accomplishments were a write-up in The Stranger, some college radio air time (both due to having contacts), and gigs at a couple decent clubs, one or two where strangers outnumbered friends. Anyone who loves music can understand the pull of this world of fantasy and reality; Experienced revisits and expands this dream.

James Greer opens with “Hunting Accidents”, a foray into the two years he played bass for cult group Guided By Voices, and the book he subsequently wrote, Guided By Voices: A Brief History….(Read entire article here)“