Book talkin'

Peter Kropotkin's Memoirs of a Revolutionist rocks. It's a fascinating account of life in czarist Russia (and an aristocracy that fetishized control and abused not just serfs but anyone who thought independently), with firsthand commentary on prisons ("universities of crime maintained by the state"; Kropotkin spent several years in a Russian prison, escaped, and later spent several years in a French prison), spy stories (mostly tales of ineptitude), details on radical self-publishing, and more--with lessons throughout about patience, courage, and insubordination.

"And then from Alexander II himself slowly faded the aureole with which my imagination had surrounded him..."

Nicolas Walter writes of Kropotkin, "In his later years he came to occupy a position similar to those of Voltaire and Tolstoy before him and of Pasternak and Bertrand Russell after him-- a subversive intellectual who was too obstinate to tame and too famous to silence..."

By turns wise, funny, inspirational, and terrifying, Kropotkin's memoirs also include tragedy (e.g., favorite brother's suicide after years of Siberian exile), yet never lose zest ("we laughed like boys...", "for fun, I once...") The style is understated and sometimes poetic, as in these lines after learning of his brother's death:

"A dark cloud hung upon our cottage for many months, -- until a flash of light pierced it, when, the next spring, a tiny being, a girl who bears my brother's name, came into the world, and with her helpless cry, set new strings vibrating in my heart."

There's a version on the web, but you should be able to find a library or used bookstore copy of this.

Edward Abbey's The Journey Home: Some Words in Defense of the American West (Dutton, 1977), illustrated by Jim Stiles, is a collection of essays first published "in somewhat different form" in American West, Audubon, High Country News, Mountain Gazette, Not Man Apart, Plateau, Playboy, and elsewhere.

Usually trenchant if occasionally apocryphal, Abbey's words about deserts, Death Valley, "development", fire lookout work, bad roads, walking, river running, mountain climbing, and the natural wonders of Hoboken, New Jersey, alternately exhort, declaim, question, describe, praise, and despair. And sometimes, seemingly, all at once. Such serious satire, loving acerbity, and prophetic paeans have a waking effect. Whether engendering thought, feeling, compassion, action, they're unlikely to leave readers bored or unmoved.

"We need wilderness because we are wild animals. [Everyone] needs a place... to go crazy in peace. Every Boy Scout troop deserves a forest to get lost, miserable, and starving in....

Civilization needs wilderness. The idea of wilderness preservation is one of the fruits of civilization, like Bach's music, Tolstoy's novels, scientific medicine, novocaine, space travel, free love, the double martini, the secret ballot, the private home and private property, the public parks and public property, freedom of travel, the Bill of Rights, peppermint toothpaste, beaches for nude bathing, the right to own and bear arms, the right not to own and bear arms, and a thousand other good things one could name, some of them trivial, most of them essential, all of them vital to that great, bubbling, disorderly, anarchic, unmanageable diversity of opinion, expression, and ways of living which free men and women love, which is their breath of life, and which authoritarians of church and state and war and sometimes even art despise and have always despired. And feared.

The permissive society? What else? I love America because it is a confused, chaotic mess-- and I hope we can keep it this way for at least another thousand years. The permissive society is the free society, the open society. Who gave us permission to live this way? Nobody did. We did. And that's the way it should be--only more so. The best cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy."

Two notable books from Vancouver-based Anvil Press:

Lincoln Clarkes' Heroines presents over a hundred black-and-white photo portraits of women heroine addicts on Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, accompanied by short essays on photographic ethics and the plight of the women portrayed. The feelings the pictures engender are powerful, disturbing, and complex. If they do nothing else, they demand, "Look at me, I am human, I am here, don't ignore me."

Alan Twigg's Intensive Care: A Memoir is a series of documentary --and autobiographical--poems about starting to lose one's mind, going into the hospital for emergency surgery to remove a brain tumor, and surviving. Accompanied at times with scrawled drafts, these are essentially love poems whether they're about loving the moment (as potentially embarrassing as it may be) or a steadfast partner who accompanies him as "one person."

A Beautiful Final Tribute #6, the latest in Bee Lavender's autobiographical series, is an engaging, gritty personal narrative about growing up around people who physically fought--and about being a girl who fought back.

Send $2 (or $12 for the full set of six issues) to Bee Lavender, P.O. Box 28870, Seattle WA 98118 ("trade and barter accepted")

The Urban Pantheist is a zine about paying attention to --and appreciating--wildlife in cities, especially in Boston where editor Jef Taylor dwells. The latest edition (Spring 2002, #3) has an amazing color photo on its cover depicting a red-tailed hawk eating a mallard, with the Boston skyline in the background. It could just as easily be Minneapolis and Loring Park. Inside: personal writings about urban birds, snakes, and salamanders--and the "what we believe" statement of the World Pantheist Movement.

Send $3 to Jef Taylor, 140A Harvard Ave., #308, Allston, MA 02134.

Books That Changed My Life (A list that's slowly growing)

Now, more than ever, Henry David Thoreau's Civil Disobedience.

"A common and natural result of an undue respect for law is, that you may see a file of soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, privates, powder-monkeys, and all, marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense and consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed, and produces a palpitation of the heart. They have no doubt that it is a damnable business in which they are concerned; they are all peaceably inclined. Now, what are they? [Humans] at all? or small movable forts and magazines, at the service of some unscrupulous man in power?...

It is not a... duty, as a matter of course, to devote [oneself] to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong... but it is ...duty, at least, to wash [one’s] hands of it, and... not to give it...support. If I devote myself to other pursuits and contemplations, I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another [person’s] shoulders... See what gross inconsistency is tolerated. I have heard some of my townsmen say, "I should like to have them order me out to help put down an insurrection of the slaves, or to march to Mexico;--see if I would go"; and yet these very men have each, directly by their allegiance, and so indirectly, at least, by their money, furnished a substitute...

Unjust laws exist; shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once? [People] generally, under such a government as this, think that they ought to wait until they have persuaded the majority to alter them. They think that, if they should resist, the remedy would be worse than the evil. But it is the fault of the government itself that the remedy is worse than the evil. It makes it worse. Why is it not more apt to anticipate and provide for reform? Why does it not cherish its wise minority? Why does it cry and resist before it is hurt? Why does it not encourage its citizens to be on the alert to point out its faults, and do better than it would have them?...

If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go; perchance it will wear smooth--certainly the machine will wear out. If the injustice has a spring, or a pulley, or a rope, or a crank, exclusively for itself, then perhaps you may consider whether the remedy will not be worse than the evil; but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn..."

Edward Abbey's Beyond the Wall (Holt Rinehart & Winston, 1984) mostly collects essays "first published during the 1970s as parts... of large-format scenic photography books" that Abbey says were so expensive his enemies could afford them but not his friends. These writings about desert wildlife, southern Utah's canyon country, and a boat trip down the Colorado, are accompanied by longer versions of pieces first published in GEO (an apocryphal-seeming account of a solo desert trek), National Geographic, and Outside. The latter describes a trip down the Kongajut in northern Alaska, culminated by this excerpt:

"As the plane takes off Gil says, 'I'm going to show you something.' He then banks and turns off course and enters a pass through the foothills west of the river. We fly a thousand feet above the lion-colored tundra. Little ponds and bogholes wink, sparkle, glitter in the light. We cross another ridge.

And there below, suddenly, the hills appear to be in motion, alive, as if the skin of the earth had begun to crawl over its rockbound bones. A broad river of caribou streams in waves west-southwesterly up the ridges and through the valleys, all its elements in rapid, parallel advance. It takes me a moment to realize that I am looking down on the greatest mass movement of untamed four-hooved animals I may ever see. It's like the stampede of the wildebeests on the Serengeti Plains.

'My God,' I say. 'How many?'

Gil banks and circles, looking down. 'Hard to tell. It's only a part of the Porcupine River herd. Maybe forty, maybe fifty thousand...

He circles one more time... then bears northwest for Barter Island... Well, I'm thinking, now I'm satisfied. Now I've seen it, the secret of the essence of the riddle of the Spirit of the Arctic-- the flowering of life, of life wild, free and abundant, in the midst of the hardest, cruelest land on the northern half of Earth.

And then, as we approach the coast and the tiny island at its edge, the frozen sea appears again, the ocean of ice, the crescent rim of whiteness stretching on, and on, and on, unbroken, apparently unlimited, toward the hazy stillness of the polar climax-- and beyond. What can I say of that? The vision chills both thought and emotion.

What can I say except confess that I have seen but little of the real North, and of that little understood less. The planet is bigger than we ever imagined. The world is colder, more ancient, more strange and more mysterious than we had dreamed. And we puny human creatures with our many tools and toys and fears and hopes make only one small leaf on the great efflorescing tree of life."

"Down in the dank and shady places grows a shady customer-- moonflower, angel's trumpet, the sacred Datura meteloides. A large gross ivory-colored thing, set amid dark and shiny green leaves, the whole plant, flowers, stem, leaves, roots, is rich in scopolamine, a potent alkaloid much prized by witch doctors. The correct dosage is said to be spiritually rewarding, but the problem is that a microgram too much may lead to convulsions, paralysis and death-- also rewarding, perhaps, but usually considered premature." (from "Desert Images")

"I have tried to analyze my own emotions on this subject: why am I so much in love with the desert? I love also the sea and the seashore, the mountains, lakes and glaciers, the soft blue-green hills of my Appalachian boyhood, the plains of Oklahoma, the blue grottoes of Capri, the dark forests of Bavaria, the misty golden hills of Scotland, yes, even the back alleys of Hoboken, New York City, Berlin, Naples, Barcelona, Brisbane, Pittsburgh. There's beauty, heartbreaking beauty, everywhere. But when I think of where I most want to be, finally, it's the old hot dusty eyeball-searing head-aching skin-blistering throat-parching boot-burning bloody goddamned desert again. Why?" (from "The Ancient Dust")

The 298-page Nasco Farm & Ranch catalog is just what you need if you're in the market for scrotal measuring tapes, complete portable bovine ejaculator systems, artificial sheep/goat vaginas, Euro-style teat dippers, and anti-suckling devices. Probably you can request a copy of the catalog here: Nasco's web site

David Petersen's Cedar Mesa: A Place Where Spirits Dwell (University of Arizona Press, 2002) is an extended essay about red rock canyon country in southeastern Utah, with 16 black and white photos by Branson Reynolds.

Petersen camps out under the stars, has a close encounter with a cougar, explores Anasazi ruins, hikes in Natural Bridges National Monument, describes the region's flora and fauna, and writes about its history.

"Out here on the Mesa...every route is the scenic route."

Friction Magazine: Once a zine, now an electronic journal and a handsomely produced annual print publication. I've read some of the latter which includes an inspirational article on street stencils.

I've also enjoyed the Spring 2002 edition of Brick, which includes good essays on Pakistan and taking care of a dying friend, as well as a thoughtful interview with the talented Charles Johnson, from which I quote:

"Why write? There's got to be a reason. Sartre writes about this in _What is Literature?_ It contains wonderful chapters: 'What is writing?' 'For Whom Does One Write?' 'Why Write?' He says a writer writes ... to say [something] that has not been said. That's why I write, and that's the kind of writing that I want to read. When I sit down to write, I think about what needs to be said.

Literature is like the sciences. There are objective problems in science that are handed down over generations, mistakes that were made, questions that were not resolved. It is the same with literature. There are books that need to be written. There are stories that need to be explored. There are subjects that never get treated. There may have been a book that treated a subject a hundred years ago, but botched it, making that book obsolete. If this is the case, we need to revisit the subject again. It's all about the efflorescence of meaning and the exploration of possibilities. Most of our writers have not done that. This is an enormously complex world. They're eating cloned beef in Japan. We have technology that didn't exist twenty years ago.... It's a remarkable time to be alive. Some people say that everything has been written. Not so. We have entirely new situations. These stories are dying to see print." (From "An Interview With Charles Johnson", Brick, Spring 2002)

Edward Abbey’s Down the River collects ("in somewhat different form") some of his essays from Backpacker Magazine, GEO, Harper’s, The New York Times, Outside, Rocky Mountain Magazine, Rolling Stone, and Running. While emphasizing accounts of floats down rivers (including the Colorado, the Tatshenshini, and Rio Dolores), they also include astute and straightforward commentary on MX missiles and anti-nuclear protesters, a couple of book reviews, and a profile of Abbey’s artist friend John De Puy (introduced to him via Rini Templeton, I was interested to learn).

Abbey’s "Footrace in the Desert" describes the Seventh Annual Louis Tewanima Memorial Footrace held on Labor Day 1980 along steep trails near New Oraibi and Old Oraibi, Arizona. (Abbey dropped out at the one-mile point and his plucky daughter finished 114th--and last.)

Worth its price just for the opening tribute to Henry David Thoreau, Down the River is full of wondering, opinionated, thoughtful, juicy writing. I liked Abbey’s report on his visit, with daughter, to the ghost town of Bodey, California, now a state historical park. About Bodey’s prostitutes, he writes, "Several of them aquired enough money, property, and husbands to join the ranks of the respectable; the majority, as seems to be usual in their profession, died early of drugs and disease or faded into the background of history--whatever that vague phrase may imply in individual pain, suffering, pleasure, joy, anonymity."

The last clause of that sentence represents a reason I keep reading Abbey.

Dan Price's longstanding zine Moonlight Chronicles is almost guaranteed to make you want to keep living, exploring, and looking at things afresh with a child's eyes. Recently published issue #31 is -- like past editions -- part sketchbook of everything from salt shakers and fire plugs to church steeples and mountain ranges; part diary of someone who likes to bike, camp out in tents, and skateboard with his son Shane; part commonplace book of clippings from his readings (which tend toward writings the exemplify the vagabond spirit).

It's always encouraging to learn about people living freely and authoring their own lives as they go. One thing I've always found engaging about Moonlight Chronicles is how it touches upon its creator's non-traditional relationship with the woman to whom he is married. (They spend time together, travel together, and share parenting, but do not live together.) Order a copy and you may find yourself inspired to start drawing again. (Send $5/issue to D. Price, Box 109, Joseph, OR 97846.)

What I've been reading (in spare moments):

Phoebe Gloeckner's The Diary of a Teenage Girl (Frog Ltd.), a novel about teen sexuality set in the mid-70s, blending comics, text, and spot illustrations--and expanding upon Gloeckner's semi-autobiographical comics compilation A Child's Life

Edward Abbey's Down the River (Dutton, 1982) which begins with a good essay on Henry David Thoreau

Zines including Al Burian's Burn Collector, boarding school student Ellen Adams' Gumshoe Monkey (no one else writes so well about the joys of camp and swinging)), and Comixville, the latter an excellent sampler of mini-comics, including six I know, but more that are new to me (send a stamp to P.O. Box 697, Portland, OR 97207)

Just out from Fantagraphics, The Complete Crumb Comics, v.16 and Mystic Funnies #3

Canyon Country Zephyr

Margaret Kaufman's Snake At the Wrist (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2002) is an unpretentious and better than average collection of contemporary poems. You be the judge:

Sirius

Lemon-scented candles snuffed,
guests departed, towels hanging
damp on the over door:
Quiet falls on everything,
the up-turned crystal
draining on the sideboard,
the crumpled linen--
on all but the dog.
Out then into the summer night.
Fireflies glaze the lawns;
a forgotten sprinkler turns,
making pavement diamonds;
and the sky--
(for this I thank the dog)
a June kaleidoscope,
patchwork of stars.

Post-Apocalyptic Talking Bird Funnies? The deceptively bleak vision of Anders Nilsen is dispelled on the penultimate page of the latest edition of Big Questions (#5). Big Questions is the best talking bird comic book I've seen, though N. James Novak's Pigeonanity is worth noting.

"You have to trust what you feel. Certainty is a mirage. Certainty is the refuge of small minds. At some point you have to just trust yourself and act. I feel this so strongly. You have to trust what you believe, trust what you feel. And follow through."

To order: $3.95 (cover price) from Anders Nilsen, 3102 W. Augusta Blvd., Chicago, IL 60622.

Yvonne Ng makes ontological and epistemological mini-comics that acknowledge Rilke, Freud, and others. Simple in graphic style, Fort-da examines basic questions about interpersonal relationships, while Panda and Rock, Lion consider being and knowing.

Panda ends with this quotation, author not cited: "Only that which bears the imprint of our choice, our taste, our uncertainty, our desire and our weakness can be beautiful."

Email the philosophical artist at geekfactor@hotmail.com

Editor Emily Hilburn Sell writes in the preface: "What we call uncertainty is actually the open quality of any given moment."

Most of the poems in Carolyn Miller's collection After Cocteau (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2002) are quite vivid. Not only are they mindful but sometimes positively about mindfulness, such as one describing the tortuous drive to Tassajara.

Some unfold slowly, at their own pace, with integrity. Some run on in sentences that might be better understood (and read aloud) if truncated. Some are not so much poetry as clear description, evocative prose in the guise of free verse. Some are honest failures, I think, good attempts that lack something, have too much of something, still need work.

There are lines worth rereading:

    Mars, Jupiter, and Venus are slow-dancing with the moon
    low in the western sky; each night they change places, and
    the moon surprises us with her new body.

There?s something more here--more heart, more moisture--than in most contemporary poetry I see published. And the whole has a rich quietness about it that asks for reflection and rereading.

Here is the shortest poem included, titled "Looking Out My Kitchen Window in Late June":

    In my garden, new flies spiral in the sun
    like small white parachutes against the thick
    dark vines. The orange trumpet flowers spill over
    and over the wall. The house is still.
    The kitchen smells of peaches. Outside: summer,
    swelling like a wave. For a moment,
    there is nothing that I want.

Photographs of people in their own places, with their families, at leisure, without artifice, invoking feelings of common humanity, Vaughn Sills? One Family (University of Georgia Press, 2001) documents the lives of a large rural Georgia family over the course of two decades, with excerpts from interviews and poetry by two of the family members.

At its worst, the photography of poor people can be exploitative. (What?s being gained and by whom?) But Sills seems a member of the family here, talking with people who?ve been working since they were children, struggling for a good lives, and taking care of each other. Her photographs show dignity and beauty where superficial glances might find none.

I restarted reading Ed Abbey's The Monkey Wrench Gang last September in Utah, but didn't get far since I was exploring by day and sleeping at night. Over the past nine months I've picked it up and read a few chapters, and finally have finished it. Frankly, I think the novel is highly overrated. If you've never read Abbey, but are considering it, start with Desert Solitaire. If you've read his essays and want to try one of his novels, consider The Fool's Progress first.

What The Monkey Wrench Gang is about: a band of four saboteurs on a mission to destroy billboards, bridges, and road-building equipment in the canyon country of southern Utah and northern Arizona. What it is: overlong, with characters that are two-dimensional caricatures.

At their best, the one-shot mini zines of Missy Kulik are effectively charming and simple, like tiny children's picture books. My favorites are A Ape (which had the effect on me of being kissed while listening to chalk squeak on a blackboard), an untitled one with an elephant on the cover (Missy, send that to Elefanzine editor Ennio Pauluzzi), and Where's A Cookie?, the latter of which really does seem like a children's picture book. In Puffy White Clouds, Missy draws what she's been seeing in the sky, from a horse jumping over a bird's nest to "a long neck bird in a bun." Send a buck and a stamp per title to: Missy Kulik, 24 Longvue Circle, Ambridge, PA 15003.

Rachel Carson's The Sense of Wonder (Harper & Row, 1965) is a book I'd like more first-time parents to know about. It consists of a short essay about sharing the joy of wildness and nature with children, along with photos by Charles Pratt and others.

"One stormy night when my nephew Roger was about twenty months old I wrapped him in a blanket and carried him down to the beach in the rainy darkness. Out there, just at the edge of where we coldn't see, big waves were thundering in, dimly seen white shapes that boomed and shouted and threw great handfuls of froth at us. Together we laughed for pure joy--he a baby meeting for the first time the wild tumult of Oceranus, I with the salt of half a lifetime of sea love in me..."

"Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is symbolic as well as actual beauty in the migration of the birds, the ebb and flow of the tides, the folded bud ready for the spring. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature--the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after the winter."

So I checked out Billy Collins to see what the fuss is all about, he being the Poet Laureate, and all that. I found Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems (Random House, 2001) to be accessible... and slight. Like light beer. The best poem in the collection is the first one ("barking, barking, barking"), but its promise is not fulfilled.

On the other hand I've been savoring and rereading Mary Karr's Viper Rum which is much more bloody and hearty and fearless. Here is the last fourth of a poem titled "County Fair":

We drove home past corn at full tassel, colossal silos,
          a windmill sentinel. Summer was starting.
My son's body slumped like a grain sack against mine.
          My chest was all thunder.
On the purple sky in rear view, fireworks unpacked--silver
          chrysanthemum, another in fuchsia,
then plum. Each staccato boom shook the night. My son
          jerked in his sleep. I prayed hard to keep
the frail peace we hurtled through, to want no more
          than what we had. The road
rushed under us. Our lush planet heaved toward day.
          Inside my hand's flesh,
anybody's skeleton gripped the wheel.

I've also read some of Barbara Kingsolver's Small Wonder, a collection of new essays, including "Setting Free the Crabs", from whence:

"Animal rights activists are practicing a form of religion, not environmental science....

My own relationships with the animals in my life are absurdly complex: Some I love, some I eat, and the scraps left over from the ones I eat, I feed to the ones I love. (Is there a song about that?) But try as I might to sort this out, I find that when I must choose, my heart always comes down on the side of biodiversity."

Ralph Waldo Emerson's Thoreau: A Biographical Essay portrays someone with whom I feel great kinship.

About Thoreau, Emerson says, "His intimacy with animals suggested what Thomas Fuller records of Butler the apiologist, that 'either he had told the bees things or the bees had told him.'" Emerson's words show that Thoreau belongs in my curvyedge pantheon:

"The habit of a realist to find things the reverse of their appearance inclined him to put every statement in a paradox. A certain habit of antagonism defaced his earlier writings,--a trick of rhetoric not quite outgrown in his later, of substituting for the obvious word and thought its diametrical opposite. He praised wild mountains and winter forests for their domestic, air, in snow and ice he would find sultriness, and commended the wilderness for resembling Rome and Paris. 'It was so dry, that you might call it wet.'

The tendency to magnify the moment, to read all the laws of Nature in the one object or one combination under your eye, is of course comic to those who do not share the philosopher's perception of identity. To him there was no such thing as size. The pond was a small ocean; the Atlantic, a large Walden Pond. He referred every minute fact to cosmical laws. Though he meant to be just, he seemed haunted by a certain chronic assumption that the science of the day pretended completeness, and he had just found out that the savans had neglected to discriminate a particular botanical variety, had failed to describe the seeds or count the sepals. 'That is to say,' we replied, 'the blockheads were not born in Concord; but who said they were? It was their unspeakable misfortune to be born in London, or Paris, or Rome; but, poor fellows, they did what they could, considering that they never saw Bateman's Pond, or Nine-Acre Corner, or Becky-Stow's Swamp. Besides, what were you sent into the world for, but to add this observation?'

Had his genius been only contemplative, he had been fitted to his life, but with his energy and practical ability he seemed born for great enterprise and for command; and I so much regret the loss of his rare powers of action, that I cannot help counting it a fault in him that he had no ambition. Wanting this, instead of engineering for all America, he was the captain of a huckleberry party."

M.F.K. Fisher's translation of Brillat-Savarin's The Physiology of Taste contains some lovely footnotes. For example:

"It is perhaps a pity that birth and death are so little watched, in our time. I have always felt that the miracle of parturition, endured or only witnessed, makes any human wiser and more humble... And the same may be true of death, which so seldom happened nowadays in the awesome quiet of a familiar chamber. Most of us die violently, thanks to the advances of science. If by chance we are meant to end life in our beds, we are whisked away like pox victims to the nearest hospital, where we are kept alone and unaware as possible of the approach of disintegration.... For myself, I should like to die... at peace in a known room, and in the company of a loved person who was not repelled or frightened by my end. I should like my children to agree with me..."

I had lovely hate mail today from an anonymous reader who disagreed with my words about Celine's Journey to the End of the Night, but rather than articulate dissent, resorted to name calling in the manner of Maledicta editor Reinhold Aman (as vituperous, but not as creative).

Speaking of Celine, his amazing Death on the Installment Plan (the Manheim translation) includes one of the best descriptions I've ever read of seasickness. Another appears in the first two chapters of a book I've been reading lately, Charles Dickens' American Notes. Dickens' book about travel to (and in) the U.S. in 1842, American Notes is both nicely written (sometimes hilarious) and clear-sighted, whether covering the perils of ocean travel, the psychological hell of prison, or the dubious habit of tobacco chewing (at that time so common in the U.S. that spittoons were omnipresent, if not always used).

James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time (1963) seems as cogent today as when it first appeared in two parts: a short letter to the author?s nephew (in The Progressive) and a long essay in The New Yorker. Reading it compelled me to pull off my shelf Notes of a Native Son and a Baldwin biography. The Fire Next Time begins with an autobiographical account of Baldwin?s years as a teenage preacher ("I found myself in the church racket"), jumps to a narrative about his meeting Elijah Muhammad, and throughout addresses race, race relations, religion, revolution, and reality with searing directness.

"The universe, which is not merely the stars and the moon and the planets, flowers, grass, and trees, but other people, has evolved no terms for your existence, has made no room for you, and if love will not swing wide the gates, no other power will or can."

"To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread. It will be a great day for America, incidentally, when we begin to eat bread again, instead of the blasphemous and tasteless foam rubber that we have substituted for it."

"A civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless."

"It is rare indeed that people give. Most people guard and keep; they suppose that it is they themselves and what they identify with themselves that they are guarding and keeping, whereas what they are actually guarding and keeping is their system of reality and what they assume themselves to be. One can give nothing whatever without giving oneself--that is to say, risking oneself. If one can not risk oneself, then one is simply incapable of giving..."

"Time and time and time again, the people discover that they have merely betrayed themselves into the hands of yet another Pharaoh, who, since he was necessary to put the broken country together, will not let them go. Perhaps, people being the conundrums that they are, and having so little desire to shoulder the burden of their lives, this is what will always happen. But at the bottom of my heart I do not believe this. I think that people can be better than that, and I know that people can be better than they are. We are capable of bearing a great burden, once we discover that the burden is reality and arrive where reality is."

"Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death--ought to decide, indeed, to earn one?s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return. One most negotiate that passage as nobly as possible, for the sake of those who are coming after us."

"There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves. People are not, for example, terribly anxious to be equal (equal, after all, to what and to whom?) but they love the idea of being superior....Furthermore, I have met only a few people--and most of these were not Americans--who had any real desire to be free. Freedom is hard to bear. It can be objected that I am speaking of political freedom in spiritual terms, but the political institutions of any nation are always menaced and are ultimately controlled here by our confusion, far more than we know, and the American dream has therefore become something much more resembling a nightmare, on the private, domestic, and international levels. Privately, we cannot stand our lives and dare not examine them; domestically, we take no responsibility for (and no pride in) what goes on in our country; and, internationally, for many millions of people, we are an unmitigated disaster..."

"...people who cannot suffer can never grow up, can never discover who they are. That man who is forced each day to snatch his manhood, his identity, out of the fire of human cruelty that rages to destroy it knows, if he survives his effort, and even if he does not survive it, something about himself and human life that no school on earth--and, indeed, no church--can teach. He achieves his own authority, and that is unshakable. This is because, in order to save his life, he is forced to look beneath appearances, to take nothing for granted, to hear the meaning behind the words. If one is continually surviving the worst that life can bring, one eventually ceases to be controlled by a fear of what life can bring; whatever it brings must be borne. And at this level of experience one?s bitterness begins to be palatable, and hatred becomes too heavy a sack to carry. "

I?ve been reading a dozen books at once. One has been unfinished for months, Ed Abbey's overrated novel The Monkey Wrench Gang (started for the second time) which is neither very funny nor profound. Jimmy Santiago Baca?s autobiography , A Place to Stand also lacks the depth I hoped to find; here?s a review from someone who appreciated it more.

David Quammen?s Wild Thoughts from Wild Places (Scribner, 1998) is, according to its author, a book of "travels, misadventures, small insights, research efforts, exercises in scientific explication and unscientific noodling, portraits of people who have fascinated and impressed me, sporting narratives, eulogies, reminiscences, valentines, warnings, second thoughts, and willful provocations..." I?ve read and enjoyed selections from it on ice, avalanches, urban pigeons ("superdoves"), tent caterpillars, and Ed Abbey (the latter a reread, actually). I've also reread the essay on crows from earlier Quammen compilation, Natural Acts, since I've been seeing so many crows lately. (Here in Minneapolis at dusk last week: crows flying from the northwest over Hennepin Avenue, hundreds of birds snaking east overhead (no two quite parallel it seemed), with hundreds more in the distance like swarming gnats en masse. I stood there with eyes pointed upward, amazed, until the flow abated to a trickle. Easily a thousand crows passed, loosely organized like teenagers spilling out of a high school for a rumble.

Rafael Campo's Landscape With Human Figure (Duke University Press, 2002) is a collection of consistently above average poetry, informed in parts by the author's multiple identities (gay Cuban-American physician). A sample:

In Case of Emergency Landing

All I could think of was your face as we
descended, light brown eyes, the careful way

you knit your brows. Outside, the thunderstorm
was like a riot of photographers,

the flashes making us seem glamorous.
But I was terrified. A howling gust

demanded sudden movement from the plane,
allowing me to glimpse Chicago?s stain

of yellow-orange lights below, a brief
reminder of how little we achieve?

and yet, how very fortunate we are
to populate such cities made of stars,

to live (however fleetingly) if not
in love, then with some kind of safety net

to save us. Call it faith, perhaps; perhaps
it's nothing more than my hand in your lap,

the gentle pressure of your grip that says
we are together, we are here to stay.

Want more? Wade through reviews from 2001.

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