After Sappho by Selby Wynn Schwartz

After Sappho by Selby Wynn Schwartz
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I passed out a LOT of business cards at the Bay Area Book Festival here in Berkeley spring of 2023, and Selby Wynn Schwartz or her publicist responded with After Sappho: A Novel, which is really not a conventional “novel” at all, but a sort of epistolary, interlocking set of semi-biographical sketches of brilliant, creative women who loved and were inspired, embraced and periodically surrounded by other brilliant, creative women in the simultaneously ignorant, tolerant and brutally hostile worlds of men’s law, culture and morals from mid 1800s Italy through Paris and Britain of 1928.

All interspersed with lucid declarations, crystalline fragments of Sappho’s’ poems in translation and stunning pulsations of Schwartz’ prose that read like lyric verse. It’s mostly chronological, but not always, often seeming like an echoing, simultaneous present; and the names, genders and identities shift with time, relationships, marriages, threats, mysteries, maturations, forgettings and identities as much or more; and for oddly similar reasons as Myers’ The Forger of Marseille and Doctorow’s red team blues: a martin hench novel do.

Schwartz “holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UC Berkeley and has been happily teaching writing for more than a decade. While on faculty in Columbia University’s Undergraduate Writing Program, she helped to shape new writing curriculum around human rights, gender and sexuality, social justice issues, and the arts… explores the politics of embodiment.”

“Explores the politics of embodiment.” 

Doesn’t that have a nice ring to it? No wonder After Sappho was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2022. *

She/They/He does understand WHY some of “these things” are going on. 

Schwartz expresses “why” like Arachne weaving Zeus and other gods’ seduction, rape and infidelities into her tapestry in her textile contest with virgin warrior rationalist Athena. The craft of Schwartz’s writing in such a captivating manner displays masculine overreach cruelly oppressing and purposely misunderstanding the divine modern muses of Isadora Duncan, Eleanora Duse, Colette, Vita Sackville-West and many more with their petty, arrogant and bullying legal, religious and cultural chains.

Sappho can be erased, fragmented and minimized with the lie that she committed suicide for the love of a man; but only if her courage, self-love, love for women, nature and artistry are torn apart and thrown away, too.

"These things now for my companions/ I shall sing beautifully."

Sappho, Fragment 160.

*  https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/authors/selby-wynn-schwartz 

Published 19 October, 2023 as “Boundaries of Fiction, Power, Humans,” Knox Book Beat in The Berkeley Times.


View all my reviews

red team blues by Cory Doctorow

Red Team Blues by Cory Doctorow
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Cory Doctorow’s red team blues: a martin hench novel is “science fiction” foreseeing an honest and moral international cybersecurity sleuth (Hench) among brilliant, violent and/or unscrupulous high-tech financial power barons that feels “all too true.” I mean, look at Elon Musk and our “very stable” former President – are these the guys we really want clashing and finagling over our lives, planet, governments and billions of dollars’ worth of semi-invisible, somewhat intangible and very volatile digital resources?  Do we have a choice? (I hope so...)

Some of them/us are humane, some bumbling, some crazy and some downright rotten to the core; just like Doctorow’s awesome and eventually captivating cast of characters.

Doctorow starts out spamming us with tech talk in the first 20 pages, trying to drive out the non-nerds, I guess, but then really picks up with a more and more believable and endearing first person narrator (Hench) in a fast-moving, dialogue-rich, both serious and entertaining tale of hide-and-go-seek action and research “gone bad.” 

Very, very bad. But not nearly as “over the top” violent and objectifying as John Wick, The Wild Bunch et cetera. He carves out mostly sympathetic, genuine relationships of all kinds and multi-dimensional, intelligent female characters! Thank you! 

It’s all set in the Bay Area (of course) and environs, which makes it even more relevant; and deeply conscious of our phenomenally wealthy / horrifically poor divide full of spectacular elevations, suffering populations and plummeting overnight crashes. His character development, detail and voice consistency are quite good, without being bulky: well-balanced and compact in a way that other writers haven't all mastered. 

A good read!

Published 19 October, 2023 as “Boundaries of Fiction, Power, Humans,” Knox Book Beat in The Berkeley Times.


View all my reviews

The Forger of Marseille - Linda Joy Myers

The Forger of Marseille: A Novel by Linda Joy Myers

        My rating: 4 of 5 stars

 

The power of “fiction” is its believability. Linda Joy Myers’ The Forger of Marseille: A Novel does a very good job of stepping from her previous genre of memoir into historical fiction. At the Berkeley Books Inc., Myers outlined her four years of travel and research --interviews, tours, memoirs, stories, true life accounts; how she pursued “info trees,” “research rapture” delving into “the tome of history” to produce a blending of the Spanish Civil War, Nazi demonizing of race, politics and religion in Germany, Austria and Poland reaching into France from 1938 Berlin to the Marseille of 1940-41. With her key characters so positioned and swept along; she’s created believable SS, Vichy government agent and Americans’, artists’ and resistance collaborators’ efforts, failures and successes.

I would have liked a little more detail of the main characters’ and places appearances in order to place and picture them adequately throughout the book; particularly as their names change with their passports as they travel from here to there. Not all of us have been to Le Boulevard Saint-Germain, or even remember exactly what it looks like even if we have. Get lyrical, if not poetic! You can do it, and it might even be fun.

And, quite honestly, the lack of contraceptive use by the lovers is a major plot blunder in this day and age and then. It stopped me in my tracks. They could not have had that much intercourse and still produced all those forged papers and midnight passports over two years without quite a few “French letters” in between, n’est-ce pas? 

Young, somewhat healthy, persistent? A hot lover with medical background? C’mon. Naive young woman and lusty young man or not, at least he “ought to know better,” as well as Myers, because the power of “fiction” is its believability. I’ll forgive Myers for this because it’s her first novel, but it makes her heroine just a tiny bit false.

Her “stateless” citizens and refugees in prisons, interrogations, internment camps and under aerial bombings are not that far from the Ukraine, U. S. borders and Middle East of today. Or the Vietnam, Iraq and Irans of our lifetimes.

I love one of her main themes: 

“never, never forget the power of art.” 

– très bien, merci!
 

Published 19 October, 2023 as “Boundaries of Fiction, Power, Humans,” Knox Book Beat in The Berkeley Times.


View all my reviews

Archana Horsting, On the Fringe of the Field

Published as “Six Creative! Human! Dynamic! Solutions!” in Knox Book Beat, The Berkeley Times, 21 September, 2023.

The catalog to the magnificent art show, Archana Horsting, On the Fringe of the Field, A Survey of Works 1972 – 2022, produced by Berkeley’s Kala Art Institute, was another striking gift. As Kala co-founder with Yuzo Nakano, leading and contributing with classes, fellowship and residency programs as well as her own art; Horsting has been as monumental and dynamic in the East Bay art scene as her labyrinths, etchings, drawings and linear and smudged “oil stick on paper” “which feels to me like the soil or the earth itself.”  

The three articles, a fine interview and her Artist’s Statement all expand the history, origins, breadth, ”beauty and mystery” “pointing toward meaning” of her already “bold” “personal visual vocabulary.” “Problems of metaphor, symbolism and artistic communication” was the theme of her undergraduate program at Santa Cruz, and Berin Golonu notes how “her choice of title (Padovan Arches) after the work’s creation speaks to the way in which our minds are wired to make associations when our minds are confronted with the strange or unrecognizable.” 

Thus, I understood, as well as could admire, abstraction, as never before. “Associations are drawn from the scope of our life experiences.” Again – childlike or childhood trust and release to sensation and emotion create and/or echo the heretofore undiscovered, hidden or ancestrally, biologically innate “meaning.”

Marvelous! 

See also https://www.kala.org/gallery/exhibitions/
 

In the Cities of Sleep: Elizabeth C. Herron

In the Cities of Sleep by Elizabeth Herron
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
 

Art House Gallery on Shattuck Avenue near Ashby hosted another Poetry Flash reading where Elizabeth C. Herron read from In the Cities of Sleep, a moving interplay between her individual perception and love of beings, nature and the world in light of the crushing disparities of climate change, political and social injustice, the humbling infinitude of Creation/ the Cosmos.

I wrote the words “private,” “insignificant” and “infinitely beautiful” in my notebook, not knowing whether they were from one of her poems, my impression of her, or something she said.

The Sonoma County Poet Laureate, she juxtaposed Greta Thunberg’s quote about our “house on fire” in the epigraph with the nursery rhyme “Ladybug, Ladybug, fly away home.” 

The silhouette of a leafless tree before a terrifying orange-red blur on the cover takes on new meaning.

In “Ghost Dance” there are similar paradoxes of

Quiet spaces in the mind
wide as the Great Plains…
In Nebraska and Kansas,
the harvester pitches over acres
pocked for thousands of years
by burrows and warrens that caught the rain
for the Ogallala aquifer…
grinding over the quiet spaces in the mind
of the First Nations…
How will we live
without the quiet
spaces in the mind?

In “Nesting,” reproductive avian behavior balances precariously with
“The mother in her kitchen
unable to avert” the arc of a stray bullet from
“her eleven-year-old daughter;”

with “The mallards… wander
within the slain grass, dazed
by the absence of their nest, the disappearance
of their eggs.”

In her Art House Gallery reading of “Ceremony” I noted: “A threat to all species… a long period of denial…” and “the shift from known identity to no identity to” a place where “new emerge.”

Again, the “Liminal State” where great genius, great wounds and complete transformational leaps are possible. Don’t miss her long poems, and the lovely lines like

“Across the small chaos
of our bed, the cat stretches
one paw toward you, closes his eyes,
and sleeps.”

(Published in “Six Creative! Human! Dynamic! Solutions!” in Knox Book Beat, The Berkeley Times, 21 September, 2023.)
View all my reviews

Beverly Burch: The Latter Days of Eve at Gallery 2727

Latter Days of Eve: Poems by Beverly Burch
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Published 25 May 2023 as “Poetic Expressions” in The Berkeley Times, “Knox Book Beat.”

The 2727 Gallery “Multi-Use Event and Program Space, Residential/Studio Space” at 27th and California was a lovely place for Poetry Flash to host a poetry reading for Robert Thomas’ 2023 Sonnets with Two Torches and One Cliff and Beverly Burch’s 2022 Leave Me A Little Want in the early, chilly days of spring.

Both books proved a marvelous delight, but Ms. Burch’s addition of Latter Days of Eve, one of those “left behind” releases of 2019, became a wonderful boon. Taking Back Old: Poetry Celebrating Old Women, 2022, came in the mail and rounded out some of the “almost lost” years of pandemic publishing with Berkeley’s hidden flowerings and roots.

A lot of F2F events in Berkeley “got cancelled” for two years, but that didn’t mean we all stopped writing or wanting to share. So it was fine to munch, raise a glass, schmooze and hear fine, magical words and heartening thoughts and feelings among aficionados of small press poetry and the spoken word.

Beverly Burch’s A Little Want was mostly very good, but her Latter Days of Eve was definitely excellent, and won awards like the John Ciardi Prize for Poetry to prove it.

I have been wondering a lot about women and men, boys and girls; about love, desire, power and control. (like for 55 years or more?) She is a Berkeley psychotherapist (you have my sympathy), and I felt she unsheathed my tough, coarse, protective, snakelike skin as I read her wonderful poems. (“Difficult” mothers and religious upbringings are hard “crosses to bear.”)

So right, so RIGHT! Brava!

Latter Days of Eve, Beverly Burch, 2022 , BkMk Press, University of Missouri-Kansas City.
 

Wonderful Wordsmiths: Thomas, Burch and Welch

View all my reviews

Wanderland Writers in Japan!

Wandering in Japan: The Spirit of Tokyo, Kyoto and Beyond by Wanderland Writers
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Editors (and writers) Linda Watanabe McFerrin and Laurie McAndish King have really hit their stride in their Wandering in Japan: The Spirit of Tokyo, Kyoto and Beyond. 

A nice big volume of travel essays, stories and poems with super photos, prints and painting reproductions, elegant bullet points, helpful glossary and writer biographies.

They “threw out the rules” and included several of their own best pieces among those sometimes covering the exact same locations through the eyes of different writers like veteran travel writers Joanna Biggar, Anne Sigmon and Tania Romanov as well as “visitors” Rob “Tor” Torkildson, Lowry McFerrin and others, with a foreword by Don George.

The variety of tones and viewpoints, often deeply introspective as well as sense-descriptive and detailed, is well-modulated to give a broad view of a culture so unlike America the respect it deserves. We are more influenced by Japan and Asia, especially on the West Coast, than we think.

Highly recommended to both armchair and actual travelers; and an open door to inner and outer evolutions and cultural changes, too.

(Published as “Six Creative! Human! Dynamic! Solutions!” in Knox Book Beat, The Berkeley Times, 21 September, 2023.)
 

It has been an immense comfort and pleasure to read six books filled with original, inspiring, clever and profound observations, images and ruminations on creativity, the arts, humans, world cultures and travel. 

Mary Mackey, Phyllis Grilikhes, Archana Horsting, Elizabeth C. Herron, Linda Watanabe McFerrin, Laurie McAndish King, Alan Bern, Joanna Biggar, Anne Sigmon, Tania Romanov Rob “Tor” Torkildson, Lowry McFerrin and Don George. 

#bookpassage #anthropology #arts #art #dance #rhythm #movement #poetry #writers #creativity #social #humanrelations #peace #travel #japan #kyoto #tokyo

View all my reviews