"Don't Agonize, ORGANIZE!" The Girl by Meridel LeSueur

The Girl by Meridel LeSueur
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

27 April, 2023, published as "Don't Agonize, Organize!" Knox Book Beat in The Berkeley Times.

         Born in 1900, Le Sueur was hunted and haunted by sexual predators and the Red Scare police and agents of the 30s and 1950s, but bolstered by a forthright courage, her bond with like-minded others and a powerful determination that kept her going through 1996. 

        The never-named “girl’s” first person narrative and compelling spoken word multilogue is radically unpretentious and boldly descriptive in the urgency of youth, the heaviness of the Great Depression and the fluidity of the present moment. Taken directly from intimately heard speech, rendered without quotation marks; half a dozen different stories from a Women’s Alliance writer’s group in 1939 are blended together and narrowed down to the rushing epic year through one young woman: her Minnesota family’s farm and city of St. Paul, her viscerally immediate world.        

Portions of The Girl were published in various places between 1935 – 1945, then gathered together and re-edited in 1978 to “a work of fiction” which Prof. Neala Schleuning said “does not tell us about the thirties—she invites us to join in that experience…opens the panorama…for us to see the rhythms of that culture, those people…different from the flowering prairies of the Midwestern farms and villages…a stark world…of urban poverty and the beginnings of our modern bureaucratic world.” (p. 201) (photo: residents of a tenement USA early 1930s)

        A woman in “Robber Baron” America who told vivid truths about her life and the politico-social world around her; about others as well as mass movements. “Big picture” linking intimate story. To expose those who employed violence, money, murder and the media who cruelly controlled and manipulated women, the elderly, immigrants, workers, minorities, people of color, the disabled and disadvantaged. Sound familiar? Sadly, YES.

“This is one of the stories they didn’t want you to read,” her website says, and it’s true. 

        LeSueur had been a writer all her life; but had two children, an extended family, wide community involvement and leaned more toward journalism, lyricism, collectivism, labor and feminist activism than intellectual self-analysis and justification. When I knew her in The Women Poets of the Twin Cities in the 1970s to the 90s, she despised the effete sophistication of T. S. Eliot and reveled in the ferocious eroticism and embodied spirituality of the Second Wave of Feminism boiling to the surface of the literary world. (photo: Audre Lorde, Meridel LeSueur and Adrienne Rich in 1980)

        Her great-granddaughter says she, “wheelchair-bound, was passionately cherished and celebrated for writing visionary, raw, sensual poetry and prose about poverty, and organizing, and corn, and hunger, and Indigenous sovereignty, and state violence, and wheat fields.” LeSueur led us forward in the ascendance of female leaders, adventurers, labor, political, artistic and cultural organizers and soothsayers who emerged by necessity, choice and bravery during that time and then again in The Second Wave of Feminism of the 1960s and 70s.

        She had an automatic sense of being a uniquely caring and gifted woman among ALL women, ALL humanity, and using her life experiences, self-confidence and gifts for all living beings of her times into the past and future, especially the voiceless. Artistic and cultural organizers and soothsayers emerged by necessity and bravery, stepping forward when circumstances, fellow-sufferers and inner “hungers” demanded action, not excuses. (Photo: Minneapolis Star Tribune November, 1985)       

Women, multicultural, conscious and feminist attendees, speakers, scientists and performers at the recent Bioneers conference here seemed to be a large majority; dynamic, multi-talented and of all ages. The upcoming Bay Area Book Festival looked that way, too.  

        Wake up, Listen to Each Other, Get Together, Go!


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Myths of Pete Najarian

 Mutual In Love Divine by Pete Najarian

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I read Pete Najarian’s The Naked and the Nude, then when his stories of fear, desire, “love,” disappointment, guilt, rejection, rage and loneliness began to repeat themselves, his Mutual in Love Divine. A slightly less objectifying perspective in Divine, but still caught in a cycle into his eighties, unresolved.

Although his paintings on the covers and throughout both Regent Press Berkeley’s books are beautifully reproduced and well-executed; his repetition of woman-as-object, everyone-as-other and everywhere-as-lonely lean towards too much. There’s little dialogue, which he admits he’s “not good at” writing; characters are named but barely described, and the only really good narrative of his environment comes in a day-long trail ride up and down a high Sierras mountain with his friend Bill.

Divine matured as he went along, especially in “Freud’s Story,” about his Mother. She had survived the Armenian Genocide, but a million others did not. It’s an outstanding portrait, much more empathetic, descriptive and narrative than the internal self-examinations of the other pieces. She had Petros, called “Pete” in the U. S., and there were “seven years of happiness” before her second husband had a stroke, working in a sewing factory and then working at home with no time for complaints. 

The word “love” comes up a lot in Divine, but Najarian’s fear and resentment stop him right at the edge of the trust and openness that real love needs to live and grow. According to Freud, that’s his Mother’s fault. (Not.)(Traumatic “ancestral memory?”)

The “eternal boy” who feels abandoned: “Remaining a bachelor son, however, can be so painful I want to die… the older she grows the more enlightened she appears, and nothing seems to bother her except the ants in her kitchen.” (He fails to haul the concrete to patch her walls, however, and she, elderly, injures herself trying to.) 

“Keep the refrigerator full and the sheets clean and the walls clean and everywhere clean because that’s what being a mother meant, to feed and to clean and not to complain about petty things.” 

Maybe he could take a life lesson from hers?


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Navigate Change, Foster Resilience, and Co-create the Cities We Need

 Speculative Futures: Design Approaches to Navigate Change, Foster Resilience, and Co-create the Cities We Need by Johanna Hoffman

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

30 March, 2023, published as “Pushing ThOur Boundaries,” The Berkeley Times, Knox Book Beat.      

      Speculative Futures: Design Approaches to Navigate Change, Foster Resilience, and Co-create the Cities We Need, by Johanna Hoffman, (2022) from Berkeley’s North Atlantic Books, is simply marvelous. An absolute relief when contemplating not only the common-sense/realistic but the fantastic/boundless transformations as SIMULTANEOUSLY POSSIBLE. 

      She may be “all spin,” but I don’t care. Anybody who uses examples from Blade Runner and Black Panther; calls out the “negative impacts of 1950s urban planning" as well as the racism/classism of the 2020 Oakland “Slow Streets” redevelopment; and has chapter titles like “Shared Language” and “Collective Imagination” has my interest and support right away. 

    

     She knows the structures must be “doable,” even though “the future is not a destination, but a process and a path.” (p. 150) Hoffman (Joanna in Wikipedia) herself is diversely undefinable as marketing executive, urban planner and “had a reputation at both Apple and NeXT as one of the few who could successfully engage with (Steve) Jobs,” particularly in writing the first draft of the Macintosh User Interface Guidelines. (Wikipedia) 

“Speculative futures tools help us:
        • challenge the status quo
        • increase individual and social resilience
        • balance short-term needs with long-term change, reorienting our understanding of cities toward more adaptive capacity
        • create more collaborative and equitable development by supporting cooperation over persuasion (My italics. wc) (I particularly like that one)
        • shift our collective imagination toward resilient possibility and cultivate more proactive planning as a result.”

      Her “Takeaway: By giving us permission to imagine, speculative futures encourage a shift in attitude from “What’s the problem?” to “What’s possible?” In doing so, they question our assumptions about existing norms to see if they’re really the paradigms we want to shape what lies ahead. … Speculative futures offer practices that create the forward-thinking, adaptive plans that modern uncertainty requires.”
“This is the time for imagination…Assuming that devastation is the entirety of what’s ahead is limited thinking. What if the best times are still to come? We owe it to ourselves and future generations to ask. The tools to help us ask are there. We just have to use them.”

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Sisters of the Revolution: A Feminist Speculative Fiction Anthology

Goodreads -- ***** Five Stars

30 March, 2023, published as “Pushing ThOur Boundaries” in The Berkeley Times, Knox Book Beat.    

     Sci Fi, fantasy, mythology and even folklore twists written as far back as the 1960s and 70s are part of Sisters of the Revolution: A Feminist Speculative Fiction Anthology, from Oakland’s PM Press.       

Published in 2015, Ann and Jeff VanderMeer skillfully selected a profound, exotic, global array of “feminist” women writers and stories for the anthology, from Octavia E. Butler’s brilliant 1987 “The Evening and the Morning and the Night” to Rachel Swirsky’s sexy, surreal and subtly philosophical 2008 “Detours on the Way to Nothing” and Vandana Singh’s triumphant 2003 “The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet,” seen through the eyes of her baffled, self-righteous husband and his unsuccessful attempts to dominate or even restrain her (and his own) transformation. 

     I use the VanderMeer’s term “feminist” in quotes, because, as they amply demonstrate, that term has blossomed and diversified as vastly their stories do since The Second Wave of the 1960s, far further than suffrage and legal rights: “Broadened the debate to include a wider range of issues: sexuality, family, domesticity, the workplace, reproductive rights, de facto inequalities, and official legal inequalities,” (Wikipedia) (2 March 2023  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-wave_feminism  17 March 2023). 

     The “bad old days” of violent masculism, colonization, rampant, rape-and-pillage commercial-industrialism and techno-social gentrification are “back at us” in the 2000s with some short-term gains and many, many long-term losses hidden from view and right out in the open. For some humans, it is only “that much easier” to become global, autocratic despots and slave-owners, consciously or automatically. For others, total hand-to-mouth mindless labor and/or disaster oppress and loom overhead. 

     The term “speculative fiction” as a genre label goes back at least to 1889, but Robert A. Heinlein (Stranger in a Strange Land) related it to science fiction in an editorial in the Saturday Evening Post in 1947. Since then, authors like Judith Merrill, Harlan Ellison and Margaret Atwood used the term to re-form and push the boundaries of restrictive “science fiction.” Certainly, H.G. Wells’ 1895 The Time Machine and George Orwell’s 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-four’s political, social, gender and bio-engineering themes foreshadowed both age-old and pivotal questions of propaganda, war, ecological devastation and reproductive tyranny hammering down on us now.

     Some of these are rewrites of the Pygmalion and Galatea myth, others set in futures dystopian, utopian and questionable. Butler “began her story wondering how much of what we do is encouraged, discouraged, or otherwise guided by what we are genetically…biology, medicine and personal responsibility.” (p. 128) 

     In 1979, Tanith Lee turned “the traditional sword and sorcery tale” on its head in “Northern Chess;” and in “The Screwfly Solution,” (James Tiptree Jr./ Alice Bradley Sheldon 1977) “When It Changed,” (Joanna Russ 1972), “The Men Who Live in Trees” (Kelly Barnhill 2008), “Boys”” (Carol Emshwiller 2003) and “Fears” (Pamela Sargent 1984) the authors all posit places, societies and times that may or may not be Earth, future, past or contemporary. (photo Nichelle Nichols, NASA Recruiter, as Nyota Uhura in Star Trek: The Next Generation)

     They suggest condemnation, warnings and/or fleeting hope. There is a small, but very important, part of human life, mind, heart and spirit that is sexually and hormonally determined. It need not be entirely generalized nor delineated by government, religion or society. ThOur evolutionary pluses and minuses can be weighed, examined and balanced. “Speculative fiction” demonstrates amazing possibility, scope and flexibility through story, language and reframing, far beyond the distressed (and undressed) damsels on the covers of 1950s Fantastic magazines.  

     A wonderful and thought-provoking anthology, now available as an e-book, too.

Rainbow Weather: Poems for Environmental Healing - John Curl

 Rainbow Weather: Poems for Environmental Healing by John Curl

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

John Curl got his Rainbow Weather: Poems for Environmental Healing to me after Poetry Flash’s Watershed. If you are pondering whether to give a graduate or special friend a copy of Omar Khayyam’s The Prophet as a token of your pride, respect, love and esteem; you should give them Rainbow Weather instead. It’s that good, and just about as timeless, as well as more timely in the sense of contemporaneous currency.

The way he writes has Khayyam’s eternal quality, however, too. As one of the founders of Berkeley’s Indigenous Peoples Day who spent a year with the Navajo Nation in 1970 and since then working for Indigenous people’s rights, he says he’s a “Historian celebrating the accomplishments of native cultures and the works of ancient American poets.” 

He sounds like it, and has earned his chops as an activist in the craftspeoples’ collective movement of the East Bay and as a writer of poetry, “translator, fiction and non-fiction writer on social justice and historical perspectives,” too. Pronouncements. Incantations. Riddles in plain sight. Listen…
“our purpose in life is to ascend back to
that all-knowing state we originated from.” The Purpose of Mirrors

“America is suffering.
America is grieving from a broken heart.” What’s Wrong With This Country?

“The rider on the crest of the hill
contemplates the long road
watching both sun and rain in
the distance, searching the horizon.” Knight of Pentacles

If I had just one book to take into a high school or junior high school English class, this would be it.

“Sometimes the search for a livable
world can seem like dancing with
a lover who lets you just near
enough to almost touch her with
your outstretched fingers, then
dances away into the shadows
and mists just out of reach.

Yet what can we do but follow her
love song into those elusive mists over
and over again, until we make her ours.”

Book review published in The Berkeley Times, Knox Book Beat, 23 February, 2023


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Stories for Clever Children - James M. LeCuyer

 Stories for Clever Children & All Curious and Thoughtful Adults by James M. Lecuyer

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

James M. LeCuyer’s Stories for Clever Children & All Curious and Thoughtful Adults is the offshoot of a disturbingly multifaceted writer. You really never know what he’s going to make happen next, but it’s always totally cool and just right. He is wacky, deeply philosophical in a totally plebeian way (if that’s possible), occasionally obscene, vacillatingly frightened, outrageous, furious, bizarre, practical and snort-laughingly funny while also being completely understandable to anyone with a slightly open mind.

I’m going to read his Duck Lessons tonight, even before I send this to my editor, and going out tomorrow to buy his poetry, A Brick for Offissa Pupp, and stories, Threnody for Sturgeon, even though I don’t remember what a threnody is and could probably get them from him or Floating Island and Outskirts Presses for free. 

He’s that good.
You should, too. And I don’t often say should, especially about spending money, even for books.

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Tempered by Fire: A History of the Berkeley Fire Department

“There is a fault line running through our country…We are not only killed by earthquakes, we are killed by poor building standards.” A man whose brother and nephew were killed in Kahramanmaras, Turkey, interviewed by Jane Ferguson, 10 February 2023, PBS News. 

Tempered by Fire: History of the Berkeley Fire Department, 3rd ed., by Linda P. Rosen, is a very timely piece of public safety history considering our recent “year-round” wildfire season, global climate change and other disasters, as well as the horror of the earthquake in Turkey (since the Hayward Fault lies right under the Clark Kerr Campus in Berkeley).

Why is this in “Knox Book Beat?” Because Rosen’s history of the BFD points out not only the tremendous heroism, reorganizations, mechanization and sacrifices of the Fire Department and their personnel through the years, but the frank foolishness shown by voters, government, land and resource developers in spite of “Not Enough Water” “to fight fires.” (p.1)

In the “grass-covered hills” left by the conquistadors, missionaries and ranchers; Gold Rush miners, settlers and speculators planted flammable “eucalyptus groves and Monterey pines,” building “wooden buildings” and “brown-shingle houses” after the oak and sequoia/ coastal redwood water-condensing forests had been stripped off. “Tapping springs, damming creeks, building reservoirs, and installing tunnels and aboveground lead pipes” “could not solve the problem” in 1883, 1893, and beyond; even with paid City firefighters replacing scattered volunteer units in 1905.

Narrow, winding streets and huge homes on brush-filled lots were built back in crowded areas after hill fires of the more devastating 1923 and 1991. Berkeley City Council “acted on Chief Rose’s fire report” proposing a new fire code, “but the lumber companies and the shake-roof industry actively campaigned against it, and the ordinance was repealed in a citizen’s referendum in May 1924.” In the aftermath of 1991, “Fire Chief Cates proposed sweeping changes,” some of which were implemented, but “the salt water system and cisterns were not constructed (until 2000 p. 43). Many businessmen were afraid that disruption during construction would cause economic loss.”

Are University of California Berkeley, larger landlords and developers paying in enough to fund the public services necessary to save lives and livelihoods as well as investment properties? 2005, 2011, 2014 and 2016 saw warehouse and church fires fought, and there was a six-alarm high-rise fire in November of 2020 that took three days to extinguish. As Rosen concludes, “Ravenous life rebuilds, no lessons learned” even though “an officer stands guard.”

https://berkhistory.org/product/tempered-by-fire/

This book came to Knox Book Beat from John Aronovici of the Berkeley Historical Society & Museum. He knows me from our volunteer group, Community for a Cultural Civic Center, who have been observing and avidly participating in the City’s process of planning the transformation of the Martin Luther King Jr. Park, Maudelle Shirek Old City Hall Building and the Veterans’ Memorial Building, particularly since at least December of 2019. The Historical Society is in the Veteran’s Building now and is proposed to move into Maudelle Shirek, where Berkeley Community Media is already serving Council and the Public.

Seismic upgrades of both of the historic buildings have been one of the CCCCs priorities; and we, the Downtown Business Association and MANY other “members of the public” helped fund assessment and pricing of proposed retrofits and improvements; now very urgent in light of the failure of Measure L.

Please get involved in your local municipal, county and state governments to monitor policies, budgets and priorities. Thank you.

Published 23 February, 2023 as "Tempered by Fire," in The Berkeley Times, Knox Book Beat.

Berkeley Historical Society, P.O. Box 1190, Berkeley, CA 94701 info@berkhistory.org