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"content": "\u003cp>In his introduction to \u003cem>Kurt Vonnegut: Letters,\u003c/em> Dan Wakefield, the book’s editor and a longtime Vonnegut \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bokononism\">karass\u003c/a> member, writes of the late author’s aspiration to be a “cultivated eccentric.” Over the course of six decades of letters to family, friends, admirers, detractors and fellow writers, Vonnegut shows himself to be so much more, both in terms of ambition and accomplishment. In fact, viewed in its totality, the collection — by turns hilarious, heartbreaking and mundane — is striking in just how uneccentric it shows the author to be. Vonnegut himself is a near-perfect example of the same flawed, wonderful humanity that he loved and despaired over his entire life.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Letters\u003c/em> should be read as a necessary companion piece to Charles J. Shields’ evenhanded 2011 Vonnegut biography, \u003cem>And So It Goes\u003c/em>. The Shields book reveals a successful but mostly unhappy man, one with a penchant for professional betrayals (he nixed an agreement with longtime friend and editor Knox Burger); an anti-war, liberal champion who had no problem investing in napalm manufacturer Dow Chemical.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The singular, iconic author was certainly complicated — and at times vain and quick to anger. Those critics who pigeonholed him as a sci-fi hack promptly felt the wrath of his epistolary ripostes. For example, six years after achieving lasting fame for his classic, \u003cem>Slaughterhouse-Five,\u003c/em> a miffed Vonnegut felt compelled to write to Osborn Elliott, the editor of \u003cem>Newsweek,\u003c/em> concerning a piece on science fiction written by Peter Prescott. Prescott’s offending lines went like this: “Few sf [science fiction] writers aim higher than what a teen-age intelligence can grasp, and the smart ones, like Kurt Vonnegut, carefully satirize targets — racism, pollution, teachers — that teen-agers are conditioned to dislike.” To which Vonnegut tersely replied, “I have never written with teen-agers in mind, nor are teen-agers the chief readers of my books. I am the first sf writer to win a Guggenheim, the first to become a member of the National Institute for Arts and Letters, the first to have a book become a finalist for a National Book Award.” He goes on to list his undeniably impressive accomplishments and titles for several more lines.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This fierce pride in his work and resistance to the shallow critical dismissals that would label him a one-trick genre pony were tempered by a constant and playful deprecatory air. In 1959, Vonnegut wrote a short missive to a writer acquaintance named Norman Mailer: “I have just finished reading your \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advertisements_for_Myself\">ad for yourself\u003c/a> — a lot of it twice, at your suggestion. Since my reputation is worthless, my comments on the book would be worthless, so f – – – them.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>His note to Mailer continues with an anecdote about a time, about 10 years prior, when the two of them socialized with Vonnegut’s drunk mother-in-law: “[She] was about two feet away from you, indoors, separated from you by a window shade drawn over an open window. She said to me in a loud, indignant squawk, ‘Well — I think you’re cuter than he is …’ It’s a fact, incidentally — I \u003cem>am\u003c/em> cuter than you are. Respectfully, Somebody named Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Vonnegut saved some of his harshest criticisms for censors who would ban and sometimes burn his novels without having read a single page, and there are no shortage of these scathing attacks in the collection. But it’s the letters to his children that reveal the private figure. In the early ’70s, soon after he took a teaching position at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (where he mentored the likes of John Irving and Gail Godwin), Vonnegut split from his wife, Jane. Though the breakup was mostly amicable, its quiet fallout underlies much of the subsequent correspondence with his daughters Nanette and Edith. In an unintentionally amusing letter dating from 1973, Vonnegut refers to Geraldo Rivera, Edie’s then-husband — and current Fox News reporter — as “a fierce Democrat and closet Marxist.” So it goes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Toward the end of his life, the correspondence gets a bit sadder and more self-reflective, as is to be expected. In a few late letters, Vonnegut refers to himself as one of “Melville’s whalers, who didn’t talk anymore because they’d said all they had to say.” By the time he died, in 2007, the writer had outlived his first wife and many friends. In many of the letters, you get the sense that he is just killing time — making silkscreen paintings, writing tributes and blurbs — while waiting for the end.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If that seems unpleasant, consider it in light of his unsuccessful 1984 suicide attempt. 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"content": "\u003cp>“The fact is I am quite happy in a movie, even a bad movie,” admits Binx Bolling, the hero of Walker Percy’s 1961 novel \u003cem>The Moviegoer\u003c/em>. It’s the same for a lot of us — cinema affects us in ways we don’t always understand, and even the worst films appeal to our nostalgia and sense memories in manners that defy the normal rules of taste and logic. (Currently, on my DVR: \u003cem>La Dolce Vita\u003c/em>, a classic I know I \u003cem>should\u003c/em> see at some point, and \u003cem>Gymkata\u003c/em>, a truly terrible 1985 martial-arts flick I’ve watched a dozen times. Guess which one I’m going to turn on tonight?)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In \u003cem>The Big Screen\u003c/em>, British-American film critic and historian David Thomson attempts to answer some fundamental questions about the world’s favorite hobby. How do we relate to the movies? “The cinema is the embodiment of ‘let there be light,’ ” he writes. But where does the light come from? Does it illuminate us or blind us?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Of course, these are difficult and possibly even unanswerable questions. But Thomson — arguably the world’s most intelligent student of the cinema — proves remarkably up to the task. \u003cem>The Big Screen \u003c/em>is beautiful and expansive, “a love letter to a lost love” that has the capacity to change the way we look at film.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Thomson’s book is essentially a collection of new essays, covering movies from D.W. Griffith’s brilliant but notoriously racist \u003cem>The Birth of a Nation \u003c/em>to the critically reviled Adam Sandler “comedy” \u003cem>Jack and Jill\u003c/em>. While there’s not an even remotely boring chapter in the book, the centerpiece of the volume is formed of two long essays, “Sunset and Change” and “Film Studies,” in which Thomson jumps from topic to topic breathlessly, almost suddenly, but with transitions that somehow make more sense than they should.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s like listening for an hour to a smart, hyperactive friend discuss the art he loves the most; the downloading of information leaves you a little exhausted but mostly elated. Thomson has a gift for making his original observations sound almost obvious — film noir, he writes, “is the one genre that admits we’ll lose,” and \u003cem>Casablanca \u003c/em>is “fake, foolish and fanciful beyond belief” but is still “the best fun.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And while he’s unafraid to dive into the canons of some of cinema’s most celebrated but challenging directors — Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman are both discussed — he takes a refreshingly democratic view. \u003cem>The Passion of Joan of Arc \u003c/em>and \u003cem>Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel\u003c/em> earn Thomson’s thorough consideration, as do \u003cem>The Ten Commandments \u003c/em>and \u003cem>Deep Throat\u003c/em>. He thoughtfully, if grudgingly, considers the impact of hardcore pornography on viewers (“It resembles a weekend in Las Vegas, and breeds as many dismayed losers”) and takes on the mediocre-at-best career of filmmaker George Lucas (“a great entrepreneur, and a marker of industry … [with a] contented lack of personality”).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But all of the history, all of the opinion, is in service of answering those previously stated questions. And these: What does film do to us? Does it isolate us or contribute to a common cultural language? There are no sure-thing conclusions in art, but Thomson’s guess is as good as any: We watch movies to see ourselves from unrealistic angles, because we crave the feeling of desire, and we love the artifice, the uncertainty. “It’s an impossible venture,” Thomson writes, “but it is a legacy of American film — the gift of unreality.” Or, in the words of Joan Didion, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Movies, for many of us, are life, and for about 90 minutes, in the comforting darkness of a theater, we can pretend that nothing will ever end. \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/\">http://www.npr.org/\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Assaying+The+Legacy+Of+%27The+Big+Screen%27&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAzOTIwODA0MDEyNTA4MTM1OTcyMGJmMA001)\">\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>“The fact is I am quite happy in a movie, even a bad movie,” admits Binx Bolling, the hero of Walker Percy’s 1961 novel \u003cem>The Moviegoer\u003c/em>. It’s the same for a lot of us — cinema affects us in ways we don’t always understand, and even the worst films appeal to our nostalgia and sense memories in manners that defy the normal rules of taste and logic. (Currently, on my DVR: \u003cem>La Dolce Vita\u003c/em>, a classic I know I \u003cem>should\u003c/em> see at some point, and \u003cem>Gymkata\u003c/em>, a truly terrible 1985 martial-arts flick I’ve watched a dozen times. Guess which one I’m going to turn on tonight?)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In \u003cem>The Big Screen\u003c/em>, British-American film critic and historian David Thomson attempts to answer some fundamental questions about the world’s favorite hobby. How do we relate to the movies? “The cinema is the embodiment of ‘let there be light,’ ” he writes. But where does the light come from? Does it illuminate us or blind us?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Of course, these are difficult and possibly even unanswerable questions. But Thomson — arguably the world’s most intelligent student of the cinema — proves remarkably up to the task. \u003cem>The Big Screen \u003c/em>is beautiful and expansive, “a love letter to a lost love” that has the capacity to change the way we look at film.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Thomson’s book is essentially a collection of new essays, covering movies from D.W. Griffith’s brilliant but notoriously racist \u003cem>The Birth of a Nation \u003c/em>to the critically reviled Adam Sandler “comedy” \u003cem>Jack and Jill\u003c/em>. While there’s not an even remotely boring chapter in the book, the centerpiece of the volume is formed of two long essays, “Sunset and Change” and “Film Studies,” in which Thomson jumps from topic to topic breathlessly, almost suddenly, but with transitions that somehow make more sense than they should.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s like listening for an hour to a smart, hyperactive friend discuss the art he loves the most; the downloading of information leaves you a little exhausted but mostly elated. Thomson has a gift for making his original observations sound almost obvious — film noir, he writes, “is the one genre that admits we’ll lose,” and \u003cem>Casablanca \u003c/em>is “fake, foolish and fanciful beyond belief” but is still “the best fun.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And while he’s unafraid to dive into the canons of some of cinema’s most celebrated but challenging directors — Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman are both discussed — he takes a refreshingly democratic view. \u003cem>The Passion of Joan of Arc \u003c/em>and \u003cem>Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel\u003c/em> earn Thomson’s thorough consideration, as do \u003cem>The Ten Commandments \u003c/em>and \u003cem>Deep Throat\u003c/em>. He thoughtfully, if grudgingly, considers the impact of hardcore pornography on viewers (“It resembles a weekend in Las Vegas, and breeds as many dismayed losers”) and takes on the mediocre-at-best career of filmmaker George Lucas (“a great entrepreneur, and a marker of industry … [with a] contented lack of personality”).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But all of the history, all of the opinion, is in service of answering those previously stated questions. And these: What does film do to us? Does it isolate us or contribute to a common cultural language? There are no sure-thing conclusions in art, but Thomson’s guess is as good as any: We watch movies to see ourselves from unrealistic angles, because we crave the feeling of desire, and we love the artifice, the uncertainty. “It’s an impossible venture,” Thomson writes, “but it is a legacy of American film — the gift of unreality.” Or, in the words of Joan Didion, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Movies, for many of us, are life, and for about 90 minutes, in the comforting darkness of a theater, we can pretend that nothing will ever end. \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/\">http://www.npr.org/\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Assaying+The+Legacy+Of+%27The+Big+Screen%27&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAzOTIwODA0MDEyNTA4MTM1OTcyMGJmMA001)\">\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>During a college visit to Colorado in September, Ruth Bader Ginsburg told students that she expects to rule this coming term on the Defense of Marriage Act. The 1996 law is already on its deathbed — since last year, the Justice Department has refused to argue in court for its constitutionality — but it remains on the books. That means the 130,000 or so married gay couples in America receive none of the federal benefits that straight married couples do.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Naturally, Ginsburg wouldn’t be drawn out on how she’d vote. But Michael Klarman, a Harvard law professor, former Ginsburg clerk and author of a new legal history of same-sex marriage, thinks he already knows the outcome. “The handwriting on the wall is as clear as it ever gets,” he writes. DOMA is going to be scrapped, and soon after same-sex marriage will be the law of the land.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>How can he be so sure? Well, that’s the story of \u003cem>From the Closet to the Altar\u003c/em>, which looks at the litigation of gay life — and specifically gay marriage — from World War II to today. It comes on the heels of \u003cem>Victory: The Triumphant Gay Revolution\u003c/em>, Linda Hirshman’s excellent recent history of the American gay rights movement. Klarman’s book, in turn, chronicles how the courts responded to that movement — and how judges who once dismissed gay equality out of hand now seemed poised to enshrine it in law.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the 1970s and 1980s, gays made important strides on issues from police harassment to employment to health. But it wasn’t until the mid-1990s, when Hawaii came close to legalizing same-sex unions, that both gay advocates and homophobes began their battle royale. The Hawaii case set off a state-by-state arms race to legalize or block gay nuptials: As of today, six states and Washington, D.C., allow same-sex marriages, with three more — Maryland, Maine and Washington — likely to join them this year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The 50-state marriage battle may be messy, but it has had one major benefit: S\u003cem>ome\u003c/em> gay Americans can wed, and that has helped acclimate the country to its inevitable legalization nationwide. As a question of constitutional law, same-sex marriage is a no-brainer to anyone who has ever read the 14th Amendment. In his meticulous opinion last year, Vaughn Walker, the judge in the California case \u003cem>Perry v. Schwarzenegger \u003c/em>(later \u003cem>Perry v. Brown\u003c/em>), wrote that while laws concerning gays must be given “strict scrutiny,” the highest level of analysis, a law forbidding gay marriage doesn’t even meet the “rational basis test,” the lowest level.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That doesn’t mean any court will just say so, though. Klarman makes the point that when it comes to social issues, courts track American views pretty closely, and they expand rights only when the country can handle it without massive backlash. If sodomy laws were upheld in 1986 and struck down in 2003, it’s not because of a change in jurisprudence; it’s because America became a nation in which such laws were untenable.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Since 2010, in a shift more rapid than anyone predicted, poll after poll has shown that a majority of Americans support marriage equality. So when \u003cem>Perry \u003c/em>or another case eventually makes it to the high court, it will be much easier for Anthony Kennedy — “undoubtedly the most powerful justice in the history of the U.S. Supreme Court,” Klarman asserts — to continue the legacy he began back in 1980, when he wrote a surprisingly pro-gay opinion as a judge on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. And the 76-year-old Kennedy, who also wrote the decision that voided sodomy laws, probably has an eye on history.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“What justice,” Klarman writes, “would not be tempted to author the opinion that within a few short years likely would become known as the \u003cem>Brown v. Board\u003c/em> of the gay rights movement?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Readers of \u003cem>From the Closet to the Altar\u003c/em>, especially gay ones, might regret that Klarman seldom steps beyond the legal frame to discuss the history of marriage itself and why marriage has become nearly the only issue on the gay rights agenda today, supported even by those gays who disdain monogamy and the nuclear family. Like no other custom in America, marriage is a marker of civil equality, a question of citizenship as much as love. Opponents may suggest that marriage has some eternal, inviolable form, but marriage has in fact been altered and expanded throughout American history to reflect society’s changing views toward women, racial minorities, debtors, the mentally disabled, prisoners and other populations once excluded from a bedrock civic institution.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But while Klarman may not give the full picture of marriage equality, his legal analysis is beyond fault — especially given how quickly the terrain is shifting. When his book went to press, the author could still write with a fair degree of assuredness that “Obama is unlikely to endorse gay marriage before the 2012 election,” lest he lose support in swing states like Ohio or Pennsylvania. That outdated statement shouldn’t be held against Klarman. On the contrary, it’s just further confirmation of his argument that at this speed, and with this much support, the legalization of same-sex marriage is a near certainty. \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/\">http://www.npr.org/\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Mapping+The+Road+%27From+The+Closet+To+The+Altar%27&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAzOTIwODA0MDEyNTA4MTM1OTcyMGJmMA001)\">\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>During a college visit to Colorado in September, Ruth Bader Ginsburg told students that she expects to rule this coming term on the Defense of Marriage Act. The 1996 law is already on its deathbed — since last year, the Justice Department has refused to argue in court for its constitutionality — but it remains on the books. That means the 130,000 or so married gay couples in America receive none of the federal benefits that straight married couples do.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Naturally, Ginsburg wouldn’t be drawn out on how she’d vote. But Michael Klarman, a Harvard law professor, former Ginsburg clerk and author of a new legal history of same-sex marriage, thinks he already knows the outcome. “The handwriting on the wall is as clear as it ever gets,” he writes. DOMA is going to be scrapped, and soon after same-sex marriage will be the law of the land.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>How can he be so sure? Well, that’s the story of \u003cem>From the Closet to the Altar\u003c/em>, which looks at the litigation of gay life — and specifically gay marriage — from World War II to today. It comes on the heels of \u003cem>Victory: The Triumphant Gay Revolution\u003c/em>, Linda Hirshman’s excellent recent history of the American gay rights movement. Klarman’s book, in turn, chronicles how the courts responded to that movement — and how judges who once dismissed gay equality out of hand now seemed poised to enshrine it in law.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the 1970s and 1980s, gays made important strides on issues from police harassment to employment to health. But it wasn’t until the mid-1990s, when Hawaii came close to legalizing same-sex unions, that both gay advocates and homophobes began their battle royale. The Hawaii case set off a state-by-state arms race to legalize or block gay nuptials: As of today, six states and Washington, D.C., allow same-sex marriages, with three more — Maryland, Maine and Washington — likely to join them this year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The 50-state marriage battle may be messy, but it has had one major benefit: S\u003cem>ome\u003c/em> gay Americans can wed, and that has helped acclimate the country to its inevitable legalization nationwide. As a question of constitutional law, same-sex marriage is a no-brainer to anyone who has ever read the 14th Amendment. In his meticulous opinion last year, Vaughn Walker, the judge in the California case \u003cem>Perry v. Schwarzenegger \u003c/em>(later \u003cem>Perry v. Brown\u003c/em>), wrote that while laws concerning gays must be given “strict scrutiny,” the highest level of analysis, a law forbidding gay marriage doesn’t even meet the “rational basis test,” the lowest level.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That doesn’t mean any court will just say so, though. Klarman makes the point that when it comes to social issues, courts track American views pretty closely, and they expand rights only when the country can handle it without massive backlash. If sodomy laws were upheld in 1986 and struck down in 2003, it’s not because of a change in jurisprudence; it’s because America became a nation in which such laws were untenable.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Since 2010, in a shift more rapid than anyone predicted, poll after poll has shown that a majority of Americans support marriage equality. So when \u003cem>Perry \u003c/em>or another case eventually makes it to the high court, it will be much easier for Anthony Kennedy — “undoubtedly the most powerful justice in the history of the U.S. Supreme Court,” Klarman asserts — to continue the legacy he began back in 1980, when he wrote a surprisingly pro-gay opinion as a judge on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. And the 76-year-old Kennedy, who also wrote the decision that voided sodomy laws, probably has an eye on history.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“What justice,” Klarman writes, “would not be tempted to author the opinion that within a few short years likely would become known as the \u003cem>Brown v. Board\u003c/em> of the gay rights movement?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Readers of \u003cem>From the Closet to the Altar\u003c/em>, especially gay ones, might regret that Klarman seldom steps beyond the legal frame to discuss the history of marriage itself and why marriage has become nearly the only issue on the gay rights agenda today, supported even by those gays who disdain monogamy and the nuclear family. Like no other custom in America, marriage is a marker of civil equality, a question of citizenship as much as love. Opponents may suggest that marriage has some eternal, inviolable form, but marriage has in fact been altered and expanded throughout American history to reflect society’s changing views toward women, racial minorities, debtors, the mentally disabled, prisoners and other populations once excluded from a bedrock civic institution.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But while Klarman may not give the full picture of marriage equality, his legal analysis is beyond fault — especially given how quickly the terrain is shifting. When his book went to press, the author could still write with a fair degree of assuredness that “Obama is unlikely to endorse gay marriage before the 2012 election,” lest he lose support in swing states like Ohio or Pennsylvania. That outdated statement shouldn’t be held against Klarman. On the contrary, it’s just further confirmation of his argument that at this speed, and with this much support, the legalization of same-sex marriage is a near certainty. \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/\">http://www.npr.org/\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Mapping+The+Road+%27From+The+Closet+To+The+Altar%27&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAzOTIwODA0MDEyNTA4MTM1OTcyMGJmMA001)\">\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>It’s been five years since the Amazon Kindle started one of the most enduring literary controversies of recent times: the fight between e-books and printed books. If you’re a devoted reader, you’re probably already sick of the back and forth between the excitable technophiles and the stubborn Luddites. The proponents of e-books rave about the unexplored avenues, the hypertext, the entire world of literature accessible with just one click. The rest of us — well, we like the way books feel and smell, OK? It might seem sentimental, but that’s falling in love for you. Logic doesn’t necessarily apply.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Of course it’s a false dichotomy — there’s room enough for all kinds of readers, and a great novel is a great novel, whether you’re immersed in an old, yellowed paperback or the glowing screen on a smartphone. And there’s really not that much daylight between the technology devotees who geek out about the latest operating system upgrade, and the old-school literature fans who know the name of every local bookstore cat. Whether your hero is Steve Jobs or Stephen Crane, we’re all just in love with information and the power of the word — and that’s the point Robin Sloan attempts to make in his debut novel, \u003cem>Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore\u003c/em>, one of the most thoughtful and fun reading experiences you’re likely to have this year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sloan’s novel follows Clay Jannon, a young San Franciscan with a background in the tech industry, as he starts work at the titular bookstore, a mysterious establishment with comically tall shelves and a bizarre, infrequent clientele. Most of the store’s customers don’t buy books at all; they borrow a series of beautiful, cryptic volumes that contain nothing but grids of numbers. Clay recruits some fellow high-tech friends to try to figure out the secret behind the store and its curious proprietor, and they end up on the trail of what might be history’s weirdest book club.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s a convoluted plot that relies a little too heavily on convenient coincidences, but Sloan pulls it off with his extremely charismatic prose. He’s a deeply funny writer: When the bookstore owner asks Clay if he owns a Kindle, “[i]t feels like it’s the principal asking me if I have weed in my backpack.” And when Clay builds a 3-D computer model of his new workplace, complete with simulated shadows and precise coordinates, he notes: “If this sounds impressive to you, you’re over thirty.” (Disclosure: It does, and I am.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sloan is new to the fiction game; he’s spent his career as a “media inventor” working for companies like Current TV and Twitter. So it’s not surprising that his book isn’t flawless. Amid the insights (“We all come to life and gather allies and build empires and die, all in a single moment”) and inspired observations (“This is the kind of store that makes you want to be a teenage wizard”) are occasional groaners (“San Francisco is a good place for walks if your legs are strong”) and descriptions too clever by half (a simple bagel becomes a “tasty toroid”). Perhaps the biggest problem with \u003cem>Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore\u003c/em> is its epilogue, which ties up the book’s loose ends far too neatly. If it weren’t for the perfectly rendered last paragraph, Sloan’s closing pages could have been a disaster, badly marring an otherwise fine novel.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But there’s so much large-hearted magic in the book, it seems almost petty to complain. Sloan is remarkably gifted and has an obviously deep affection for both literature and technology. (The “wizards” at Google play a key role in the book, though they do come in for some gentle ribbing.) He believes books and computers can complement each other, make each other better, make the \u003cem>world\u003c/em> better, and he argues his case with the infectious fervor of a fanboy. At its best, \u003cem>Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore \u003c/em>reminds us of the miracle of reading, no matter how you choose to do it. \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/\">http://www.npr.org/\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Page+And+Screen+Make+Peace+In+%27Mr.+Penumbra%27&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAzOTIwODA0MDEyNTA4MTM1OTcyMGJmMA001)\">\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>It’s been five years since the Amazon Kindle started one of the most enduring literary controversies of recent times: the fight between e-books and printed books. If you’re a devoted reader, you’re probably already sick of the back and forth between the excitable technophiles and the stubborn Luddites. The proponents of e-books rave about the unexplored avenues, the hypertext, the entire world of literature accessible with just one click. The rest of us — well, we like the way books feel and smell, OK? It might seem sentimental, but that’s falling in love for you. Logic doesn’t necessarily apply.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Of course it’s a false dichotomy — there’s room enough for all kinds of readers, and a great novel is a great novel, whether you’re immersed in an old, yellowed paperback or the glowing screen on a smartphone. And there’s really not that much daylight between the technology devotees who geek out about the latest operating system upgrade, and the old-school literature fans who know the name of every local bookstore cat. Whether your hero is Steve Jobs or Stephen Crane, we’re all just in love with information and the power of the word — and that’s the point Robin Sloan attempts to make in his debut novel, \u003cem>Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore\u003c/em>, one of the most thoughtful and fun reading experiences you’re likely to have this year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sloan’s novel follows Clay Jannon, a young San Franciscan with a background in the tech industry, as he starts work at the titular bookstore, a mysterious establishment with comically tall shelves and a bizarre, infrequent clientele. Most of the store’s customers don’t buy books at all; they borrow a series of beautiful, cryptic volumes that contain nothing but grids of numbers. Clay recruits some fellow high-tech friends to try to figure out the secret behind the store and its curious proprietor, and they end up on the trail of what might be history’s weirdest book club.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s a convoluted plot that relies a little too heavily on convenient coincidences, but Sloan pulls it off with his extremely charismatic prose. He’s a deeply funny writer: When the bookstore owner asks Clay if he owns a Kindle, “[i]t feels like it’s the principal asking me if I have weed in my backpack.” And when Clay builds a 3-D computer model of his new workplace, complete with simulated shadows and precise coordinates, he notes: “If this sounds impressive to you, you’re over thirty.” (Disclosure: It does, and I am.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sloan is new to the fiction game; he’s spent his career as a “media inventor” working for companies like Current TV and Twitter. So it’s not surprising that his book isn’t flawless. Amid the insights (“We all come to life and gather allies and build empires and die, all in a single moment”) and inspired observations (“This is the kind of store that makes you want to be a teenage wizard”) are occasional groaners (“San Francisco is a good place for walks if your legs are strong”) and descriptions too clever by half (a simple bagel becomes a “tasty toroid”). Perhaps the biggest problem with \u003cem>Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore\u003c/em> is its epilogue, which ties up the book’s loose ends far too neatly. If it weren’t for the perfectly rendered last paragraph, Sloan’s closing pages could have been a disaster, badly marring an otherwise fine novel.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But there’s so much large-hearted magic in the book, it seems almost petty to complain. Sloan is remarkably gifted and has an obviously deep affection for both literature and technology. (The “wizards” at Google play a key role in the book, though they do come in for some gentle ribbing.) He believes books and computers can complement each other, make each other better, make the \u003cem>world\u003c/em> better, and he argues his case with the infectious fervor of a fanboy. At its best, \u003cem>Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore \u003c/em>reminds us of the miracle of reading, no matter how you choose to do it. \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/\">http://www.npr.org/\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Page+And+Screen+Make+Peace+In+%27Mr.+Penumbra%27&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAzOTIwODA0MDEyNTA4MTM1OTcyMGJmMA001)\">\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "The Anti-Romance Novel I Didn't Know I Needed",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003cem>Elissa Schappell is the author of \u003c/em>Blueprints for Building Better Girls.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I was never more confident in my knowledge of the world of men and women than the summer I was 13. I’d become an expert, certainly not through any \u003cem>hands-on\u003c/em> experience with boys, but by reading the trashy romance novels my best friend, Michele, had pinched from her mother.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That summer I read books whose covers featured beautiful wild-haired maidens, heaving bosoms barely contained in torn blouses, on stallions, heads thrown back, submitting to or resisting the advances of some rogue.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I liked beginnings that promised drama — unbidden passion and misadventure — and endings that promised happily ever after. I liked the sexy bits. (I really liked the sexy bits.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I found Erica Jong’s \u003cem>Fear of Flying\u003c/em> in my mother’s room. If I’d had any clue it was about a 29-year-old married lady’s quest for casual sex with a stranger, no strings attached (something she describes as “rarer than a unicorn”), if I’d known it was a feminist call to arms — one that would breathe life into the second wave of feminism by challenging women to question how emotionally and sexually fulfilling their lives were — if I’d had any inkling how neurotic the protagonist was (a horny poet named Isadora Wing), or how ambiguous the ending was, I would never have opened it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But I did. The cover was an invitation to naughtiness — a naked woman, spied through a half-opened zipper, her breasts barely obscured.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Instead what I found was a parade of totally unerotic sexual encounters. The awkward fumblings of Isadora’s youth, the marathon sex with husband No. 1 that left her limping, the impotence of her charismatic lover Adrian Goodlove, who would lure her away from her second husband, Bennett Wing, a psychoanalyst who never kissed her.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What ever happened to tradition? Soul mates united despite all odds, riding off into the sunset on that stallion. I didn’t realize then, of course, how depicting a woman with a sex drive like a man’s and the freedom to act on her impulses without punishment was revolutionary. Or how this message of female independence would ultimately serve me better than any romance novel, which built up my expectations about sex and relationships in a way that was sexist and limiting.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Back when I was 13, the greatest thing that could happen to a girl would be for a boy to chase her during recess. On the rare occasion I’d been singled out as a target, I’d let the boy catch me, struggling just the right amount in his arms. I’d feign indignation, although what I really felt was proud and powerful.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Later, when I’d fantasize about what it would be like to have a boy’s hands on me, I’d worry about being a nymphomaniac. After all, everyone knows sex was only good between two people in love (and people in love got married). So wasn’t there something wrong with me that I considered the prospect of only having sex with one man incredibly boring and terribly unfair? Men got to do whatever they wanted, why couldn’t I?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This was the very type of injustice Jong was challenging. With \u003cem>Fear of Flying\u003c/em>, I got a peek into adulthood, but at the time, I couldn’t make that leap. To me, it was just intimidating. Because if life was as messy and complicated for women as Jong proposed, why would anyone want to grow up?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/series/153588024/pg-13-go-to-teen-reads?ps=books_nav_pg13\">PG-13\u003c/a> \u003cem>is produced and edited by Ellen Silva and Rose Friedman with production assistance from Annalisa Quinn.\u003c/em> \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/\">http://www.npr.org/\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=The+Anti-Romance+Novel+I+Didn%27t+Know+I+Needed&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAzOTIwODA0MDEyNTA4MTM1OTcyMGJmMA001)\">\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cp>What would happen if two of the biggest names of the Renaissance — Niccolo Machiavelli and Leonardo da Vinci — teamed up as a crime-fighting duo? That’s the idea behind Michael Ennis’ new historical thriller, \u003cem>The Malice of Fortune. \u003c/em>The mystery novel pairs the ruthless political philosopher and the genius inventor and artist together as an unlikely detective team on the trail of a serial killer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ennis first dreamed up the idea of Machiavelli-as-mystery-detective 12 years ago. “The conceit was he would use the precepts of [his political treatise] \u003cem>The Prince\u003c/em> to solve a crime,” Ennis explains.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ennis wanted his work of fiction to be set against a backdrop of real events and historical figures. It takes place at the end of 1502 in a politically fractured Italy. The Borgias and a group of wealthy noblemen with their own private militias are in a struggle for control of the country. While researching these events, Ennis discovered that Machiavelli and Leonardo crossed paths in the same small Italian city at the same time these events were taking place.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s when Ennis remembered that Leonardo had famously dissected corpses. “I went: Oh! He could be a Renaissance forensic pathologist!” With Leonardo’s forensics expertise and Machiavelli’s talents as a profiler, Ennis now had a crime-fighting team with a contemporary edge — a kind of Renaissance CSI. But he still needed a crime.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the small Italian city, Ennis says Machiavelli and Leonardo “both met someone … who I believe I can establish was what we would describe today as a psychopathic serial killer,” Ennis says. Of course, Ennis can’t say \u003cem>who\u003c/em> that is without giving away the whodunit, but he can say this about the guy:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“He was very fond of killing people routinely when he didn’t need to,” Ennis says. “And he liked to make a game out of it. It often involved mutilation — it often involved symbolic mutilation.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Just to make things a little more interesting, Ennis added some romance to the drama in the character of the beautiful courtesan Damiata, who would steal Machiavelli’s heart.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ennis thought he had written a winner, but when he tried to get the book published, no such luck. His agent sent the book around once and didn’t get any takers. He made some changes, sent it out again — and still there was no interest. Finally, with the help of an editor, Ennis made drastic cuts in the book.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’d taken two bites at the apple,” Ennis says. “Now we had a manuscript that was half the length of the manuscript we’d originally submitted, but we’re coming back for the third bite of the apple. Who’s gonna listen to us?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At this point, Ennis’ agent came up with an idea: They would self-publish the book and send out about 50 copies to independent booksellers to gauge their reaction. Holland Saltsman of Pudd’nhead Books just outside St. Louis was one of the first booksellers to receive a copy. Saltsman remembers thinking: “I’m gonna try and get it in the hands of everyone I possibly can, simply because I think it’s such a beautiful story,” she says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Saltsman wasn’t alone. More than 20 booksellers wrote back praising the novel. Armed with their comments, Ennis and his agent submitted the novel again, and this time Doubleday bought it (reportedly for six figures.) Saltsman says she was fascinated by the Renaissance Italian world that Ennis brought to life.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It talks about what the mission of man is, or the motivation of man,” she says. It “also talks about fortune, or what’s your fate?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Saltsman says thinking about motivation, fate and power through this lens gave her a better understanding of the groundwork for \u003cem>The Prince. \u003c/em>And it encouraged her to pick up the cutthroat treatise that made Machiavelli’s name synonymous with unscrupulous leadership.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Saltsman says she now has a completely different idea about who Machiavelli was. That’s exactly what Ennis is hoping for, because, he says, if you read everything that Machiavelli has written, “you acquire a picture of a man who is anything but Machiavellian. He’s a scrupulously honest public servant; he’s a loyal, charismatic friend; he’s an incurable romantic.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And, not to mention, a great detective. \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/\">http://www.npr.org/\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Renaissance+CSI%3A+Machiavelli-Da+Vinci+Detective+Duo&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAzOTIwODA0MDEyNTA4MTM1OTcyMGJmMA001)\">\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“He was very fond of killing people routinely when he didn’t need to,” Ennis says. “And he liked to make a game out of it. It often involved mutilation — it often involved symbolic mutilation.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Just to make things a little more interesting, Ennis added some romance to the drama in the character of the beautiful courtesan Damiata, who would steal Machiavelli’s heart.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ennis thought he had written a winner, but when he tried to get the book published, no such luck. His agent sent the book around once and didn’t get any takers. He made some changes, sent it out again — and still there was no interest. Finally, with the help of an editor, Ennis made drastic cuts in the book.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’d taken two bites at the apple,” Ennis says. “Now we had a manuscript that was half the length of the manuscript we’d originally submitted, but we’re coming back for the third bite of the apple. Who’s gonna listen to us?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At this point, Ennis’ agent came up with an idea: They would self-publish the book and send out about 50 copies to independent booksellers to gauge their reaction. Holland Saltsman of Pudd’nhead Books just outside St. Louis was one of the first booksellers to receive a copy. Saltsman remembers thinking: “I’m gonna try and get it in the hands of everyone I possibly can, simply because I think it’s such a beautiful story,” she says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Saltsman wasn’t alone. More than 20 booksellers wrote back praising the novel. Armed with their comments, Ennis and his agent submitted the novel again, and this time Doubleday bought it (reportedly for six figures.) Saltsman says she was fascinated by the Renaissance Italian world that Ennis brought to life.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It talks about what the mission of man is, or the motivation of man,” she says. It “also talks about fortune, or what’s your fate?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Saltsman says thinking about motivation, fate and power through this lens gave her a better understanding of the groundwork for \u003cem>The Prince. \u003c/em>And it encouraged her to pick up the cutthroat treatise that made Machiavelli’s name synonymous with unscrupulous leadership.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Saltsman says she now has a completely different idea about who Machiavelli was. That’s exactly what Ennis is hoping for, because, he says, if you read everything that Machiavelli has written, “you acquire a picture of a man who is anything but Machiavellian. He’s a scrupulously honest public servant; he’s a loyal, charismatic friend; he’s an incurable romantic.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And, not to mention, a great detective. \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/\">http://www.npr.org/\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Renaissance+CSI%3A+Machiavelli-Da+Vinci+Detective+Duo&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAzOTIwODA0MDEyNTA4MTM1OTcyMGJmMA001)\">\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Great fiction is built around characters that follow the fruitless and wrongheaded paths they’re offered, which is how readers savor safe passage into someone else’s impetuosity. Yunior, who first appeared in Junot Diaz’s debut collection, \u003cem>Drown,\u003c/em> is the narrator in several of the stories in the Pulitzer Prize–winning author’s third book, \u003cem>This Is How You Lose Her.\u003c/em> Yunior is now middle-aged, middle-class, a self-described \u003cem>sucio\u003c/em> struggling to mature into adulthood and not succeeding particularly well. Most of the stories here dissect Yunior’s reckless behavior, and all of them feature characters with a ham-fisted approach to love. The collection deals in different brands of exile, self-imposed or cultural, by which people are forced to live the paradoxical condition of both needing and rejecting connection.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>From a laundry facility supervisor and the freshly emigrated employee looking to grift her way into the American dream to a family negotiating the decline of a charismatic son’s health, each story is merciless in its treatment of the heart’s desires and defenses. In the last pages of the story “The Cheater’s Guide to Love,” Yunior examines the Doomsday Book, a folder of material his ex-girlfriend leaves behind after their breakup:\u003c/p>\n\u003cblockquote>\n\u003cp>“And finally when you feel like you can do so without blowing into burning atoms, you open a folder … copies of all the emails and fotos from the cheating days and the ones the ex found and compiled and mailed to you a month after she ended it. \u003cem>Dear Yunior, for your next book.” \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003c/blockquote>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003c/em>That “next book” would seem to be the book we have in hand, a book filled with revelations that offer the reader a deeper understanding of how one’s history informs one’s present.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Diaz banks on the appeal of his characters to balance their less palatable qualities: cruelty, abuse, infidelity. From story to story, he brandishes the force of these voices, almost always to strong effect. This complexity is one of the greatest appeals of Diaz’s work.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The dark ferocity of each of these stories and the types of love it portrays is reason enough to celebrate this book. But the collection is also a major contribution to the short story form. Although the title story’s ending falls flat, nearly every story exemplifies the beauty of Diaz’s minimalist and voice-driven writing. Like his hugely popular and heralded novel \u003cem>The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao\u003c/em>, the new book is written in a mix of Spanish, pop culture-speak and Americana, and reveals a perplexing web of labor, friendship and family. It is more realist and compressed than \u003cem>Oscar Wao\u003c/em>, but Diaz’s touch is unmistakable.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In what may be the most poignant story, “Invierno,” Diaz tells the tale of a young Yunior and his brother when they’ve first arrived to the States from the Dominican Republic. It’s snowing, but they’re forbidden by their father to venture outside. Instead they watch the other children play. Diaz writes, “That night I dreamed of home, that we’d never left. … Learning to sleep in new places was an ability you were supposed to lose as you grew older, but I never had it.” This seems to be the condition of many of the characters in the book, aching to find home in resistant climates.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Yunior might some day rank with Philip Roth’s Nathan Zuckerman or John Updike’s Harry Angstrom as an enduring American literary protagonist who embodies the peculiar struggle men face as they make their way through their lives and the lives of the women they implicate in their folly. Yet Diaz inflects this struggle with the complicated particulars of cultural exile, of want and of the bravado that is born of fear. \u003cem>This Is How You Lose Her\u003c/em> is as funny as it is brutal, as complex as it is candid. It is an engrossing, ambitious book for readers who demand of their fiction both emotional precision and linguistic daring. \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/\">http://www.npr.org/\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=%27Lose+Her%27+Finds+Power+In+Resonant+Voices&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAzOTIwODA0MDEyNTA4MTM1OTcyMGJmMA001)\">\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Great fiction is built around characters that follow the fruitless and wrongheaded paths they’re offered, which is how readers savor safe passage into someone else’s impetuosity. Yunior, who first appeared in Junot Diaz’s debut collection, \u003cem>Drown,\u003c/em> is the narrator in several of the stories in the Pulitzer Prize–winning author’s third book, \u003cem>This Is How You Lose Her.\u003c/em> Yunior is now middle-aged, middle-class, a self-described \u003cem>sucio\u003c/em> struggling to mature into adulthood and not succeeding particularly well. Most of the stories here dissect Yunior’s reckless behavior, and all of them feature characters with a ham-fisted approach to love. The collection deals in different brands of exile, self-imposed or cultural, by which people are forced to live the paradoxical condition of both needing and rejecting connection.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>From a laundry facility supervisor and the freshly emigrated employee looking to grift her way into the American dream to a family negotiating the decline of a charismatic son’s health, each story is merciless in its treatment of the heart’s desires and defenses. In the last pages of the story “The Cheater’s Guide to Love,” Yunior examines the Doomsday Book, a folder of material his ex-girlfriend leaves behind after their breakup:\u003c/p>\n\u003cblockquote>\n\u003cp>“And finally when you feel like you can do so without blowing into burning atoms, you open a folder … copies of all the emails and fotos from the cheating days and the ones the ex found and compiled and mailed to you a month after she ended it. \u003cem>Dear Yunior, for your next book.” \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003c/blockquote>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003c/em>That “next book” would seem to be the book we have in hand, a book filled with revelations that offer the reader a deeper understanding of how one’s history informs one’s present.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Diaz banks on the appeal of his characters to balance their less palatable qualities: cruelty, abuse, infidelity. From story to story, he brandishes the force of these voices, almost always to strong effect. This complexity is one of the greatest appeals of Diaz’s work.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The dark ferocity of each of these stories and the types of love it portrays is reason enough to celebrate this book. But the collection is also a major contribution to the short story form. Although the title story’s ending falls flat, nearly every story exemplifies the beauty of Diaz’s minimalist and voice-driven writing. Like his hugely popular and heralded novel \u003cem>The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao\u003c/em>, the new book is written in a mix of Spanish, pop culture-speak and Americana, and reveals a perplexing web of labor, friendship and family. It is more realist and compressed than \u003cem>Oscar Wao\u003c/em>, but Diaz’s touch is unmistakable.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In what may be the most poignant story, “Invierno,” Diaz tells the tale of a young Yunior and his brother when they’ve first arrived to the States from the Dominican Republic. It’s snowing, but they’re forbidden by their father to venture outside. Instead they watch the other children play. Diaz writes, “That night I dreamed of home, that we’d never left. … Learning to sleep in new places was an ability you were supposed to lose as you grew older, but I never had it.” This seems to be the condition of many of the characters in the book, aching to find home in resistant climates.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Yunior might some day rank with Philip Roth’s Nathan Zuckerman or John Updike’s Harry Angstrom as an enduring American literary protagonist who embodies the peculiar struggle men face as they make their way through their lives and the lives of the women they implicate in their folly. Yet Diaz inflects this struggle with the complicated particulars of cultural exile, of want and of the bravado that is born of fear. \u003cem>This Is How You Lose Her\u003c/em> is as funny as it is brutal, as complex as it is candid. It is an engrossing, ambitious book for readers who demand of their fiction both emotional precision and linguistic daring. \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/\">http://www.npr.org/\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=%27Lose+Her%27+Finds+Power+In+Resonant+Voices&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAzOTIwODA0MDEyNTA4MTM1OTcyMGJmMA001)\">\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Dominican author Junot Diaz joins us this week on \u003cem>Alt.Latino\u003c/em>. Best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/books/titles/137975217/the-brief-wondrous-life-of-oscar-wao\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao\u003c/a>, Diaz is one of the most exciting contemporary Latin writers in the business. His new book, \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/books/titles/160133753/this-is-how-you-lose-her\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">This Is How You Lose Her\u003c/a>, tells the story of a man’s downward spiral after his fiancée finds out about his numerous infidelities and leaves him. In true Diaz fashion, the book’s characters are charming, sad, hilarious and at times infuriating. One man’s life serves as a window into other issues, as well: the Caribbean exodus, sexism in Hispanic culture, the resilience of immigrant communities in America and more.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While we’d planned for a simple discussion with Diaz about his new book and the music he loves, we got more than we bargained for; the discussion felt like a get-together with old friends. Diaz (who thrilled us with kind words about \u003cem>Alt.Latino\u003c/em>), Felix Contreras and I discussed topics as lighthearted as dating and good places to eat Dominican food in D.C., but also as deep as the Afro-Caribbean diaspora and machismo in the Latin community.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sit back, relax and join in on our conversation — it’s the crown jewel of \u003cem>Alt.Latino\u003c/em>‘s Guest DJ series.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>—————————————————————————————\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Esta semana en \u003cem>Alt.Latino\u003c/em>\u003cem>, \u003c/em>recibimos la visita del autor dominicano Junot Díaz, ganador del premio Pullitzer por su novela \u003cem>La maravillosa vida breve de Óscar Wao\u003c/em>. Díaz es uno de los autores que ha producido la literatura más conmovedora de los últimos tiempos, y su más reciente libro, \u003cem>Así es como la pierdes\u003c/em>, no es excepción. Se trata de cómo la vida de Yunior se desmorona luego de que su prometida descubre sus numerosas infidelidades y lo abandona. Es característico en la obra de Díaz, que los personajes provoquen risa, pena, compasión, furia y frustración. La historia de Yunior nos sirve para navegar otras temáticas: el éxodo del pueblo caribeño, el machismo en la cultura hispana, y la fortaleza de las comunidades inmigrantes en Estados Unidos.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Originalmente habíamos planeado una simple conversación con Díaz acerca de su nuevo libro y la música que el ama. Pero gratamente recibimos más de la cuenta, y la charla se convirtió en una especie de reunión amistosa. Diaz (que manifestó su admiración por nuestro programa), Félix y yo hablamos sobre temas como los mejores lugares de comida dominicana aquí en Washington D.C., pero también acerca de temas impactantes como la diáspora afro-caribeña y la cosificación de la mujer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Una de nuestras mejores entrevistas. Pero dedíquenle atención al programa de esta semana — y hágannos saber su opinión. \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/\">http://www.npr.org/\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Guest+DJ%3A+Pulitzer+Prize-Winning+Author+Junot+Diaz&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAzOTIwODA0MDEyNTA4MTM1OTcyMGJmMA001)\">\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "Diaz stops by \u003cem>Alt.Latino\u003c/em> to talk about books, music, immigration, the Caribbean diaspora, machismo and why so many men relate to Oscar Wao. And, of course, he picks an exciting assortment of bachata and urban merengue to play on the show.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Dominican author Junot Diaz joins us this week on \u003cem>Alt.Latino\u003c/em>. Best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/books/titles/137975217/the-brief-wondrous-life-of-oscar-wao\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao\u003c/a>, Diaz is one of the most exciting contemporary Latin writers in the business. His new book, \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/books/titles/160133753/this-is-how-you-lose-her\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">This Is How You Lose Her\u003c/a>, tells the story of a man’s downward spiral after his fiancée finds out about his numerous infidelities and leaves him. In true Diaz fashion, the book’s characters are charming, sad, hilarious and at times infuriating. One man’s life serves as a window into other issues, as well: the Caribbean exodus, sexism in Hispanic culture, the resilience of immigrant communities in America and more.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While we’d planned for a simple discussion with Diaz about his new book and the music he loves, we got more than we bargained for; the discussion felt like a get-together with old friends. Diaz (who thrilled us with kind words about \u003cem>Alt.Latino\u003c/em>), Felix Contreras and I discussed topics as lighthearted as dating and good places to eat Dominican food in D.C., but also as deep as the Afro-Caribbean diaspora and machismo in the Latin community.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sit back, relax and join in on our conversation — it’s the crown jewel of \u003cem>Alt.Latino\u003c/em>‘s Guest DJ series.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>—————————————————————————————\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Esta semana en \u003cem>Alt.Latino\u003c/em>\u003cem>, \u003c/em>recibimos la visita del autor dominicano Junot Díaz, ganador del premio Pullitzer por su novela \u003cem>La maravillosa vida breve de Óscar Wao\u003c/em>. Díaz es uno de los autores que ha producido la literatura más conmovedora de los últimos tiempos, y su más reciente libro, \u003cem>Así es como la pierdes\u003c/em>, no es excepción. Se trata de cómo la vida de Yunior se desmorona luego de que su prometida descubre sus numerosas infidelidades y lo abandona. Es característico en la obra de Díaz, que los personajes provoquen risa, pena, compasión, furia y frustración. La historia de Yunior nos sirve para navegar otras temáticas: el éxodo del pueblo caribeño, el machismo en la cultura hispana, y la fortaleza de las comunidades inmigrantes en Estados Unidos.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Originalmente habíamos planeado una simple conversación con Díaz acerca de su nuevo libro y la música que el ama. Pero gratamente recibimos más de la cuenta, y la charla se convirtió en una especie de reunión amistosa. Diaz (que manifestó su admiración por nuestro programa), Félix y yo hablamos sobre temas como los mejores lugares de comida dominicana aquí en Washington D.C., pero también acerca de temas impactantes como la diáspora afro-caribeña y la cosificación de la mujer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Una de nuestras mejores entrevistas. Pero dedíquenle atención al programa de esta semana — y hágannos saber su opinión. \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/\">http://www.npr.org/\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Guest+DJ%3A+Pulitzer+Prize-Winning+Author+Junot+Diaz&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAzOTIwODA0MDEyNTA4MTM1OTcyMGJmMA001)\">\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Exclusive First Read: 'Telegraph Avenue'",
"headTitle": "Exclusive First Read: ‘Telegraph Avenue’ | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>\u003cem>Michael Chabon sets his sprawling new novel, \u003c/em>Telegraph Avenue,\u003cem> in his adopted home of Berkeley, Calif., and its grittier southern neighbor, Oakland. With its multiracial, multigenerational cast of jazz musicians, former blaxploitation stars, midwives, gay teens and Black Panthers-turned-politicians, the book both celebrates and gently sends up the countercultural norms and complex racial politics of East Bay life. The plot nominally revolves around Archy Stallings’ and Nat Jaffe’s efforts to save their used-record store (located on the eponymous Telegraph Avenue), which is threatened when a black football legend and entrepreneur makes plans to locate a media megastore in the neighborhood. This exclusive excerpt finds Nat’s wife, Aviva — “the Alice Waters of midwives” — presiding over a home birth with her business partner, Archy’s wife, Gwen. The episode is part of a very long day for Gwen, who has just caught Archy with another woman. Telegraph Avenue will be published Sept. 11.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003chr>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003ch6>PARENTS’ ADVISORY: This excerpt contains adult content and language that some readers may find offensive.\u003cem> \u003c/em>\u003c/h6>\n\n\u003chr>\n\u003cp>“Hello?” Gwen called, letting herself in the front door. A small black Buddha greeted her from a low table by the front door, where it kept company with a photograph of Lydia Frankenthaler, the producer of an Oscar-winning documentary film about the neglected plight of lesbians in Nazi Germany; Lydia’s partner, Garth; and Lydia’s daughter from her first marriage, a child whose father was black and whose name Gwen had forgotten. It was a Chinese Buddha, the kind that was supposed to pull in money and luck, jolly, babyfaced, and potbellied, reminding Gwen of her darling husband apart from the signal difference that you could rub the continental expanse of Archy Stallings’s abdomen for a very long time without attracting any flow of money in your direction. “Somebody having a baby around here?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“In here, Gwen,” Aviva said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Lydia and Garth, a lawyer for the poor, were having their baby in their living room. It was a large room with a vaulted ceiling and nothing between it and the canyon but a wall of solid glass. The girl — Arabia, Alabama, she had a geographical name — sat marveling blankly at the spectacle of her naked mother reposed like an abstract chunk of marble sculpture in the center of the room. Against her legs the girl held a rectangle of cardstock to which she had pasted the three pages of her mother’s birth plan, decorating the borders in four colors of marker with flowers and vines and a happy-looking fetus labeled BELLA. Two low sofas had been pushed to the sides of the room to make space for a wide flat sandwich crafted from a tatami mat, a slab of egg-carton foam rubber, and a shower curtain decorated with a giant self-portrait of Frida Kahlo. Garth, a small-boned, thin-shanked man with a red beard and red stubble on his head, lay sleeping on the improvised bed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’m at nine!” said Lydia by way of greeting, adding whatever comment was provided by her spread, furryish butt cheeks and the backs of her legs as she bent over in the downward-facing-dog position to grab two handfuls of floor. “A hundred percent effaced.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’ve been trying to persuade her to try a little push,” said Aviva. She tilted back on her haunches, down on the floor beside Lydia, studying the looming pale elderly secundigravida. Disapproving of the woman, but only Gwen would have caught it, the lips pursed to the left as if with holding a kiss. Barefoot in a loose cotton shift over black ripstop pedal pushers, the roiling surf of her black hair, with its silver eddies, pulled back and tied in a sloppy bun. Stubble showing blue against her luminous shins. Toenails painted a deep cocoa red like the skin of Archy’s Queen of Sheba. “But all Mom wants to do is goof around like that.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I don’t want to push,” Lydia said. A string of pain drew and cinched her voice, a yogic voice, inverted and tied carefully to the rhythm of her breathing. “Is it okay, Gwen? Can’t I just stay this way for a little while longer? It feels a lot better.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If Aviva said it was time to try a little push, then it was, in Gwen’s view, time to try a little push. You did not get to be the Alice Waters of Midwives by leaving your gratins in the oven too long.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Well, you’ve got gravity working for you,” Gwen tried, less inclined than her partner to patience or politeness but good for at least one go-round with an upside-down naked lady in labor. “But if anybody ever pushed out a baby in that jackknife thing you’ve got working right there, Lydia, then I never heard about it.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It could be interesting,” Aviva said. “Now that you mention it. Maybe you should give it a try.” The words were humorous, but her tone continued to be critical, at least to Gwen’s ear.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Let me just wash my hands and whatnot, and then I’ll fire up my Doppler and see what’s happening in there,” Gwen said, dropping her bag on a black leather armchair. “Hi, honey.” \u003cem>Arcadia\u003c/em>. “What do you think of all this, Miss Arcadia?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The girl shrugged, eyes wide and teary but not despairing. Without cant or reference to the threefold moon goddess or other such nonsense, it was a deep and solemn business that they were about in this room, and nobody was going to feel that, in all its fathomlessness, like a kid. Certainly not old Garth over there, sacked out with one toe poking out of his left sock and sleep working the bellows of his skinny frame.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Kind of gross,” the girl said, hoisting the birth plan higher as if to shield herself from the grossness of it. Article Seven requested that the umbilical cord not be cut until the placenta had ceased to pump. Article Twelve was some kind of nonsense about the use of artificial light. Gwen was not one to disrespect a well-made birth plan, but there were always wishful thinking and juju involved, and when things went the way they were going to go, as they must, many plans took on a retrospective air of foolishness. “No offense, Mom.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You don’t.” The string cinching tighter. “Have to. Watch it, baby. I told you — “\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I want to stay.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Gross can be interesting,” Gwen said. “Huh?” Arcadia nodded.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Lydia lowered her hips and sank to her knees, giving way like a sand castle, and on all fours she rested, head hung, eyes closed, as if about to pantomime some animal behavior. “I’m going to push now,” she announced. In the same stewardessy voice, she added, “Everyone please shut up.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Her tone was wrong and startling, like a struck wineglass with a secret flaw, and at once Garth sat up and gaped at Gwen, blinking, wiping his lips with his sleeve. “What’s wrong?” he said. His eyes came unstuck from Gwen’s, and he looked around, kicking up from the deep-sea trench of a dream, looking for his new baby, finding his wife, who was seeing nothing at all.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Everything’s fine, sweetie,” Aviva said. “Only we’re going to need Frida Kahlo.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gwen went into the kitchen to drink a glass of water and, in the name of asepsis if not pride, eradicate every last whiff of Elsabet Getachew from her hands. \u003cem>No excuse for you — \u003c/em>that was sterling dialogue. She strangled the renascent memory of her shame with a pair of latex-free gloves. When she came back into the living room, she saw that Frida Kahlo had been veiled with an orange bath towel. Lydia lay on her back, propped up on an old plaid bolster, pale abdomen shot like an eyeball with capillaries, making a new kind of low growling sound that built slowly to an energetic whoop and flowered in a burst of foul language that made everybody laugh.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Good one,” Aviva said. “Good one.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Though Aviva had caught a thousand babies with hands that were steady and adept, now that it was time, she deferred to her partner, to the virtuoso hands of Gwen Shanks, freaky-big, fluid as a couple of tide-pool dwellers, cabled like the Golden Gate Bridge.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As Aviva gave way to Gwen, she tried by means of her powerfully signifying eyebrows to communicate that she felt something in this situation to be amiss, something not provided for in the birth plan, which lay sagging and looped onto itself under the little girl’s chair. Aviva’s apparent psychic ability to know in advance when something might go wrong, especially in the context of a birth, was not merely the statistical fruit of an abiding pessimism. Skeptic that she was, Gwen had seen Aviva make unlikely but correct predictions of disaster too many times to discount. Gwen frowned, trying to see or feel what Aviva had detected, coming up short. By the time she turned to Lydia, every trace of the frown had been blown away.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Okay,” she said, “let’s see what little old Miss Bella is up to.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gwen lowered herself by inches and prayers to the floor and, when she arrived, saw that the inner labia of Lydia Frankenthaler had conformed themselves into a fiery circle. A smear of fluid and hair presented its credentials at this checkpoint, advance man for the imminently arriving ambassadress from afar.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You’re working fast now,” Gwen said. “You’re crowning. Here we go. Oh my goodness.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Lydia, honey, remember how you said you really didn’t want to push,” Aviva said, climbing in alongside Gwen, “well, now I would actually like you to stop. Stop pushing. Just let her — “\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Coming fast,” Gwen said. “Look out.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There was a ripple of liquid and skin, then with a vaginal sigh, the little girl squirted face-up into Gwen’s wide hands. The small eyes were open, nebular, and dull, but in the instant before she cried out, they ignited, and the child seemed to regard Gwen Shanks. The air was filled with a hot smell between sex and butchery. The father said “\u003cem>oh\u003c/em>” and pressed in beside Gwen to take the sticky baby as she passed it to him. Arcadia hung back, aghast and thrilling to the redness of the birth and the life kindling in her father’s hands. They wrapped the baby loosely in a candy-striped blanket, and as Aviva stroked Lydia’s hair and helped to raise her head, Garth and Arcadia made the necessary introductions of mother and baby and breast. That left Gwen, crouched at the other end of the silvery umbilicus, to observe the heavy flow of blood that seeped from Lydia’s vagina in a slow pulsation, like water from a saturated sponge.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It required all of Gwen’s training and innate gift for minimization of disaster not to pronounce the fatal syllables “\u003cem>Ho, shit.\u003c/em>” But Aviva caught something in her face or shoulders, and when Gwen looked up from the pulsing blood that had begun to pool in a red half-dollar on the shower curtain, her partner was already on her way around to have a look. Aviva hunched down behind Gwen, an umpire leaning in on a catcher’s shoulder to get a better look at the ball as it came down the pike. She smelled of lemon peel and armpit in a way that barely registered with Gwen by now except as a steadying presence. They settled in to wait for the placenta. The soft click-click of the baby’s nursing marked the passing of several minutes. Aviva reached down and gave a gentle tug on the umbilical cord. She frowned. She made a humming sound deep in her throat and then said, “Hmm.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Her tone pierced the bubble of family happiness up by Lydia’s head. Garth looked up sharply. “Is it all right?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s fine.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gwen ripped back the Velcro straps of her hypodermic kit, unrolled it, and felt around with her left hand for the vial of Pitocin.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Right now,” Aviva said, “the placenta is feeling a little shy, so we just all want to really encourage the uterus to do some contracting for us. Lydia, you just keep right on nursing her, that’s the very best thing you can do. How’s that coming?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“She went right on!” Lydia cried. Everything was wonderful in the world where she had taken up residence. “Great latch. Sucking away.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Good,” Gwen said, practicing the business of syringe and vial in a mindful series of ritual taps, sinking the vial onto the shaft of the needle, reading the tale of liquid and graduation. “Keep it up. And just to make sure it all gets nice and tight and contracted in there, we’re going to give you a little Pitocin.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“What’s the deal?” said Garth. He craned forward to see what was happening between his wife’s legs. There was not, say, an ocean of blood, but there was more than enough to shock an innocent new father awash in a postpartum hormonal bath of trust in the world’s goodness. “Oh, goddammit. Did you guys fuck something up?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He swore stiffly but with a sincere fury that took Gwen by surprise. She had pegged him as the gently feckless type of Berkeley white guy, drawstring pants and Teva sandals worn over hiking socks, sworn to a life of uxorial supportiveness the way some monks were sworn to the work of silence. Gwen didn’t know that Garth and Lydia had quarreled repeatedly over the idea of home birth, that Garth had viewed Lydia’s insistence on having their baby at home as the latest in a string of reckless and unnecessarily showy acts of counterconventionality that included refusing, to date, three separate proposals of marriage from Garth. Garth believed in hospitals and vaccines and government sanctioned monogamy and had absorbed from his poor black and Latino clients powerful notions of the sovereignty of bad luck and death. He had suffered no ill fortune throughout the length of a tranquil, comfortable, and fulfilling life and so at any moment anticipated — even felt that he deserved — the swift equalizing backhand of universal misfortune.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s okay, Dad,” Gwen said. “It’s going to be okay.” “Yeah?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Oh, yeah.” She laid it on, but only because she could do so in good conscience. This kind of hemorrhaging was not unusual; the Pitocin would kick in momentarily, the uterus would contract, the mysterious bundle of the placenta, that doomed and transient organ, would complete its brief sojourn, and that would be that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I mean, well,” Garth said. He appeared to consider and decide against speaking the words that had entered his mind, so as not to cause alarm, then said them any way: “It’s just that it looks kind of bad.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gwen’s eyes snapped onto the little girl, but Arcadia seemed to have decided not to know anything except the baby sucking at her mother’s left breast and the feel of her mother’s hand in hers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“That’s mostly just lochia,” Gwen said. “Lining, mucus, all that good stuff. It’s normal.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Mostly,” Garth repeated, his tone both flat and accusatory.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“How about you run get us some towels, Dad,” Aviva suggested. “And lots of them.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Towels,” Garth repeated, clinging to the rope of his desire to be useful.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Definitely,” Gwen said. “Go on, honey. Go on and get us like every damn towel you got. Also, yeah, some sanitary pads.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gwen had a more than adequate supply of pads in her bag, but she wanted to give him a concrete mystery to grow entangled in, hoping that might keep him busy for a few minutes. Whenever she asked Archy to bring her a Tampax, he always got this look on his face, somewhere between intimidation, as by an advanced concept of cosmic theory, and dread, as if mere contact with a tampon might cause him spontaneously to grow a vagina.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Garth went away muttering, “Towels and sanitary pads.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Aviva called Aryeh Bernstein. “Sorry to bother you,” she said. She gave him the essentials, then listened to what their backup OB had to say about Lydia Frankenthaler’s placenta. “We did. Yep. Okay. All right, thanks, Aryeh. I hope I won’t have to.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“What did he say?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“He said more Pitocin and massage.” “On it,” Gwen said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As Aviva prepped another push, Gwen laid her hands on Lydia’s belly and felt, blindly and surely, for the hard shuddering uterus. She sank her fingers into the crepey flesh of Lydia’s abdomen and kneaded with dispassion and no more tenderness than a baker. She disbelieved in the mystical power of visualization according to strictures of her 97 percent rule, but that did not prevent her from imagining with every flexion of her fingers that Lydia’s womb was clenching, sealing itself up, condensing like a lump of coal in Superman’s fist to a hard bright healthy diamond.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>They heard cabinets slamming in a bathroom somewhere with a panicked air of comedy, and then a glass broke, and the girl jumped. It was not impossible that Gwen jumped, too. Aviva held steady, guiding the second needle into Lydia’s vein.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Hey, there, Arcadia,” Gwen said. “How you doing?” “Good.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You got a nice strong grip on your mom’s hand, there?” The girl nodded, slow and watchful. Gwen winced at the false tone of cheeriness she could hear creeping into her voice. “Know what I’m doing? I’m massaging your mom’s uterus. Now, I know you know what a uterus is.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Yes.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Duh. Of course you do, smart as you are.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Oh, uh, Gwen, um,” Lydia said, and she sank back deeper against the plaid bolster, her head lolling like a flower on a broken stem. Her left arm with the baby curled in its crook subsided, and there was a loud smack as the small mouth popped loose. “Oh, man, you guys, I don’t know.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Any change?” Aviva said. “Some.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gwen tried not to look at her partner as Aviva went over to her flight bag, a gaudy pleather thing blazoned with the obscurely ironic legend sulaco, and broke out the bags, barbs, and tubing of an IV kit. Gwen crouched, up to her elbows in the dough of the woman’s life, knowing that everything was going to be all right, that it was a matter of hormones and massage and a husband judiciously sent to find Kotex and bath towels. She also knew that she suffered from or had been blessed with a kind of reverse clairvoyance, the natural counterpart to her partner’s predictive pessimism. Gwen was resistant to if not proof against clear signs of danger or failure. Not because she was an optimist (not at all) but because she took failure, any failure, whether her own or the universe’s, so personally. If a bridge gave way outside of Bangalore, India, and a bus full of children plunged to their deaths, Gwen felt an atom sized but detectable blip of culpability. She had been taught firmly that you could not take credit for success if you were unprepared to accept blame for failure, and one useful expedient she had evolved over the years for avoiding having to do the latter was to refuse — not consciously so much as through a reflexive stubbornness — to acknowledge even the possibility of failure. And that was what she would have to accept if she looked up from her wildly bread-making hands and saw Aviva, with that grim measuring gaze of hers, holding up the bag of intravenous saline to catch the sunshine, her mouth drawn into a thin defeated line.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Don’t fall asleep, Mommy,” Arcadia said. “Here comes Daddy with the towels.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>***\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gwen hurried along the corridor, bleeding from a fresh cut on her left cheek, trussing her belly with one arm, trying to keep up with Aviva, who was trying to keep up with the single-masted gurney on which Lydia Frankenthaler was being sailed toward one of the emergency room ORs by a crew of two nurses and the EMT who had accidentally slammed the ambulance door on Gwen’s face. The EMT hit the doors ass-first and banged on through, and the nurse who was not steering the IV pole turned and faced down the midwives as the doors swung shut behind her. She was about Gwen’s age, midthirties, a skinny ash eyed blonde with her hair in a rubberband ponytail, wearing scrubs patterned with the logo of the Oakland A’s. “I’m really sorry,” she said. She looked very faintly sorry. “You’ll have to wait out here.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This was a sentence being passed on them, a condemnation and a banishment, but at first Aviva seemed not to catch on, or rather, she pretended not to catch on. As the Alice Waters of Midwives, she had been contending successfully and in frustration with hospitals for a long time, and though, by nature, she was one of the most candid and forthright people Gwen had ever known, if you sent her into battle with another nurse, an intake clerk, or most of all an OB, she revealed her self to be skilled in every manner of wheedlings and wiles. It was a skill that was called upon to one degree or another almost every time they went up against hospitals and insurance companies, and Gwen relied upon and was grateful to Aviva for shouldering the politics of the job so ably. She envied the way it seemed to cost Aviva nothing to eat shit, kiss up, make nice. Catching babies was the only thing Aviva cared about, and she would surrender anything except her spotless record for catching them safe and sound. She had, Gwen felt, that luxury.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“No, no, of course, we’ll wait,” Aviva said in a chipper voice. She made a great show of gazing down at herself, at her white shirt with its chart of blood islands, at the chipped polish on her big toenail. With the same partly feigned air of disapproval, she surveyed Gwen’s cheek, her played-out saggy-kneed CP Shades. Then Aviva nodded, granting with a smile the whole vibe of dirt and disorder that the partners were giving off. “But after we clean up and scrub in, right? then it’s no problem, right” — leaning in to read the nurse’s badge — “Kirsten? If you want to check with Dr. Bernstein, I’m sure …”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gwen could see the nurse trying to determine whose responsibility it was in this situation to be the Asshole, which was of course the purpose of Aviva’s gambit. Sometimes that awful responsibility turned out to be endlessly deferrable, and other times you got lucky and ended up in the hands of someone too tired or busy to give a damn.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Bernstein’s stuck in traffic,” Kirsten said. “The attending’s Dr. Lazar. I’ll check with him. In the meantime, why don’t you two ladies go ahead and have a seat.” She told Gwen, “You’re going to want to have a seat.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>You have a seat, bitch. That’s my patient maybe bleeding to death in there.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“No, thank you,” Gwen said. “I prefer to stand.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Her relations toward authority, toward its wielders and tools, were — had to be — more complicated than her partner’s. She could not as blithely subordinate her pride and self-respect to the dictates of hospital politics, distill her practice of midwifery, the way Aviva did, to the fundamental business of the Catch. But Gwen knew, the way a violinist knew tonewood, how to work it. She had grown up in a family of doctors, lawyers, teachers, cops. For many years her father was an assistant district attorney for the city of Washington, D.C., and then a lawyer for the Justice Department. Both of her mother’s sisters were nurses. Her uncle Louis had been a D.C. patrolman and plainclothesman and was now the chief of security for Howard University, and her brother, Ernest, ran a lab at George Mason. To the extent that Gwen had been hassled in her life by representatives of the white establishment, she had been trained to get the better of the situation without compromising herself, some times by dropping a name, sometimes by showing a respect that she genuinely felt or could at least remember how to simulate. Mostly by letting the doc or the officer feel that she understood how it was to be on the job.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“But truly, thank you, Kirsten,” Gwen added, reaching for chipper like a note that was just beyond her range. “We really appreciate your taking the time. We know how busy you are.” She smiled. “And maybe I will sit down a minute, at that.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As though doing Kirsten a favor, Gwen lowered herself into one of the plastic chairs bolted to a nearby wall.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Definitely want to have somebody look at that cheek,” the nurse said, her brittle tone expressing solicitude for the cheek less, Gwen thought, than for her own worn-out, urban-population-serving self.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Oh, thank you so much for your concern,” Gwen said. Struggling a little harder, knowing from the way Aviva was looking at her, that she was starting, in Aviva’s phrase, to \u003cem>leak\u003c/em>. “Now, please, honey, go ask the doc when we can see our patient.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It must have been the “honey.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Kirsten said, “She’s not your patient anymore.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This was not technically true. As a result of years of hard work, steady and sound practice, slowly evolving cultural attitudes in the medical profession, and long, unrelenting effort begun by its founder and senior practitioner, by the summer of 2004, Berkeley Birth Partners enjoyed full privileges at Chimes General Hospital, with every right to assist in and attend to the care of Lydia Frankenthaler, who would remain a patient until such time as Lydia herself decided otherwise. But Aviva and Gwen had come this evening in an ambulance, giving off a whiff of trouble, with an unnecessary police escort they had managed to acquire along the way. Like a pair of shit-caked work boots, they were being left outside on the porch.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’ll wait here.” Aviva stepped in with the perfect mixture of unctuous sweetness and professional concern, spiking it lightly, like a furtive elbow to the ribs, with a warning to Gwen to seal all leaks or else shut the hell up. “As soon as you talk to the attending, you come find us, okay, Kirsten?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gwen followed Aviva into the bathroom, fighting the urge to apologize, wanting to point out that if you were white, eating shit was a choice you could make if you wanted; for a black woman, the only valid choice was not to.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In silence at separate sinks, they washed their hands and faces and rued the ruination of their shirts. The reverberation of water against porcelain intensified the silence. In the mirror, Gwen saw her partner staring at the bloodstains with an emotion between horror and hollowness, looking every one of her fortyseven years. Then their eyes met in the reflection, and the defeated look was gone in an instant, smuggled off, hooded and manacled, to the internal detention facility where Aviva Roth-Jaffe sent such feelings to die.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I know,” Gwen said. “I was leaking.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Literally,” Aviva said, coming in to get a look at the damage the ambulance door had done to Gwen’s cheek. It had stopped bleeding, but when Aviva touched it, a fresh droplet formed a bead on the cut’s lower lip. The cut was about the size of a grain of pomegranate, pink and ugly. It would leave a scar, and Gwen was prone to keloids, and so forever after, she thought, she would have something special to remind her of this wonderful day. In her mind, she replayed her stumble, the optic flash as her face struck the steel corner.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You need a stitch,” Aviva said. She leaned in to look at Gwen’s cut. “Maybe two.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>They went out to the ER and, after a few minutes of further genial self-abasement by Aviva, found themselves shown into an examination room with needle, suturing thread, and a hemostat. When it came time for novocaine, Gwen sat on her hands and told Aviva to go ahead and sew it up. “One stitch I can handle straight,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Better call it two.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Two, then.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Aren’t you fucking macho.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’m liable to start crying anyways, might as well give me a reason.” Gwen gasped as the needle bit. “Ow, Aviva, ouch.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Aviva tugged the thread with a severe gentleness, breath whistling in her nostrils. Gwen focused her attention on the pendant that hung from a leather thong around Aviva’s throat. It had been made by Julie Jaffe in a flame-work class at the Crucible, lovely and enigmatic, a small glass planet, a teardrop of blue alien seas and green continents and polar caps tinted ice blue. For as long as Gwen had known him, Julie had been a mapper of worlds, on newsprint and graph paper and in the phosphor of a computer screen. Gwen recalled having asked him where he found the inspiration for the tiny glass world he had presented her as a Christmas present last year, and she tried to take comfort or at least find shelter from the pain of the suture needle in the memory of his reply: \u003cem>By living there\u003c/em>. Then Aviva sank the barb a second time, and that was when Gwen started to cry, no big show or anything, they were both a couple of cool customers, your Berkeley Birth Partners. No sobbing. No whoops of grief. Just tears welling up and spilling over, stinging in the fresh seam of the wound. To be honest, it felt pretty good.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She permitted the tears to flow only as long as it took Aviva to snip the thread from the second stitch, lay down the hemostat, peel off her gloves, and hand Gwen a tissue. Gwen dabbed her eyes and then used the tissue to blow her nose, a nice big honking blast.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“They aren’t going to let us in,” Gwen said bitterly. “I guess not.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Where’s Bernstein?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“He was in the city. He’s coming.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We need to be \u003cem>in \u003c/em>there. They’re going to want to do a hysterectomy, I know it. When all they need to do is just \u003cem>wait \u003c/em>a little. Lazar. Who’s Lazar?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Don’t know him.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Tell me she’s going to be all right.” “She will be all right.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I should have noticed it sooner.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There was nothing to notice until you noticed it. You noticed it right away.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gwen nodded, ducking her head, balling the tissue in her fist. She stood up and paced the room, stopped, hugged herself, notching her arms into the groove over the swell of her abdomen. She sat down, stood up, blew her nose again, and paced the room some more. She knew perfectly well there was nothing anyone could have done, but somehow that only made it feel more imperative to blame herself. It implied no kind of self-exoneration if she felt compelled to blame some other people, too. “I can’t believe they aren’t letting us in there!”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Take it easy,” Aviva said in a hushed voice that was meant, Gwen knew, to communicate the fact that she was talking too loudly. But Gwen could tell that she was rattling Aviva, and for some reason, it pleased her to see it. For the second time that day, she had a sense of trespassing on some internal quarantine, crossing a forbidden zone into the \u003cem>ponfarr\u003c/em>; amok time. It would not be right for Aviva to make her go there alone.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’ve had enough of this,” Gwen said. “Aviva, no, seriously. Listen to me.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I can hear you loud and clear, Gwen.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Come on. You have worked too hard. We have both earned the right to be treated better than this.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There was the squeak of a sneaker on tiled floor. The partners turned, startled, to the door of the examining room, where a young pink-faced doctor appeared, his head shaved almost to the scalp, leaving only a ghostly chevron of pattern baldness. Dead-eyed, already tired of listening to them before they ever opened their mouths.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’m Dr. Lazar,” he said. “I was able to do a manual removal of the placenta. Mrs. Frankenthaler is stable, uterine tonicity looks good. We stopped the bleeding. She’ll be fine.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The partners stood, perfectly still, tasting the news like thirsty people trying to decide if they had just felt a drop of rain. Then they fell on each other and hung on tight, Gwen half stupid with relief, drunk on it, clinging to Aviva as if to keep the room from spinning.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Dr. Lazar studied the celebration with his flounder eyes and a mean smile like a card cheat with a winning hand. “Do you think,” he said after an interval not quite long enough to pass for decent, “uh, I don’t know, do either of you ladies think maybe you could explain to me how you managed to screw up this birth quite so badly?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Excuse me?” Gwen said, letting go of Aviva as the dizziness abruptly passed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Ten more minutes of sage-burning or whatever voodoo you were working, and that mom — “\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>“Voodoo?”\u003c/em>Gwen said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Instead of wincing at this clear instance of having said something he was bound to regret, Dr. Lazar turned gelid, immobile. But he flushed to the tips of his ears. “You know what?” he said. “Whatever.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He turned and walked out of the room, and Gwen noticed a purple Skittle adhering to the seat of his surgical scrub trousers. For some reason, the sight of the smashed piece of candy stuck on the doctor’s ass inspired a minute compassion for the fish-eyed and weary young man with his burden of alopecia, and this, in turn, sent her over the edge.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Gwen!” Aviva said, but it was too late, and anyway, the hell with her.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>***\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>An hour ago, when they had blown in on a gust of urgency from the ambulance bay, EMT yelling instructions, calling for a stretcher, Garth looking modestly wild-eyed, dancing like a man who had to pee, holding the baby who needed to be fed, Aviva breaking out a bottle of Enfamil from her backpack and cracking it with a sigh and that formula smell of vitamins and cheese, the wonderful avid baby needing every ounce of it — Gwen had failed to remark just how busy it was tonight at the emergency room of Chimes General Hospital.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Every room seemed to be occupied. Her pursuit of Dr. Lazar was haunted at its edges by glimpses of a pale hairy shin slashed with red. A forlorn teenager in a volleyball uniform clutching her arm at a surrealist angle.A young man with baby dreadlocks gripping either side of a sink as if about to vomit. The whole scene scored with a discordant soundtrack of televisions and woe, the nattering of SpongeBob, an old man’s ursine expectorations, a pretty Asian woman cursing like a sailor as something nasty was extracted from the meat of her hand, the horrific shrieking of a toddler being held down by its father while a phlebotomist probed its arm for a vein. Outside the last examination room before the waiting area, a young Hispanic man lolled in a chair, holding a bloody ice pack to his face, while from inside the room, a doctor yelled cheerfully in English at his bleeding companion as if the man were deaf and retarded.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I am a nurse,” Gwen said, managing to sound calmer than she felt, catching up with Lazar. “Please tell me that I did not just hear you employ the term ‘voodoo’ in reference to my licensed and certified practice of midwifery.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Lazar stopped at the threshold of the waiting area, where he planned, she assumed, to tell Garth and Arcadia that Lydia would be okay, business that was definitely more important, as Gwen knew perfectly well in some cool, quiet corner of her being, than whatever point she was attempting to make. The doctor turned to confront her with an air of resigned willingness to go along, an obedient soldier saddling up for the ride into the valley of death.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I know you were burning something,” he said. “I could smell it on her.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It was ylang-ylang,” Aviva said, hurrying up behind them, taking a step toward Gwen as if to interpose her body between Gwen and the doctor. “Her husband was burning it during the first part of her labor. She likes the smell.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“That woman,” Gwen said, “Lydia. The placenta was retained. There was stage zero hemorrhage, borderline stage one. Uterine atonicity. And she went into a hypovolemic shock.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Correct,” the doctor said, impatient.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Even though we had her on a course of supplements and immediately began to administer oxytocin and do uterine massage. Exactly like you or any doctor would have done. Is that not correct?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He blinked, not wanting to give up anything to her.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“So tell me this, Doctor, how many accretas, how many postpartum hemorrhages, have you guys had here this month? Like, what, I’m going to say six?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I wouldn’t know.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Ten?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I don’t know the answer to that, Ms. Shanks, but see, the thing is, when those things happen here, okay? When they happen here? When there’s some hemorrhaging? Which does occur, of course. Then the patient’s \u003cem>already in the damn hospital\u003c/em>. Where she ought to be.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gwen looked over at the young man with the ice pack, his visible eye dull and maddened, his knuckles swollen like berries on the point of rot.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You know what?” Aviva said, and out came the pointing finger so feared by all who loved her, Gwen among them, as the Berkeley faded and the Brooklyn broke through, and all at once Aviva’s proximity no longer buffered but menaced the doctor. “In fifteen years, my practice has never lost a single mother. And not one single baby. Can this place make that claim? No, I happen to know very well it can’t, and so do you.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Who would ever want to have a baby \u003cem>here\u003c/em>?” Gwen observed, half to herself, a hand settling on her belly like an amulet or shield.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s a \u003cem>birth\u003c/em>,” the doctor said. “You know, call me crazy, but maybe in the end that’s one of those things you just don’t want to try at home. It’s not like conking your hair.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Somebody gasped out in the waiting room. An arch, eager female voice went \u003cem>Awwwwww shit\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You racist,” Gwen began, “misogynist — “\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Oh, come on, don’t start that crap.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Lazar turned his back on her and went into the waiting room. Throwing up his hands, shaking his head: all the bad acting people tended to engage in when they were most sincere. Gwen stayed right with him. Everyone in the waiting room raised their head, face blank and attentive, prepared if not hoping for further entertainment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Don’t you bait me,” Gwen said, feeling an internal string, years in the winding, snap with a delicious and terrible twang. “Don’t you ever try to bait me, you bald-headed, Peewee Herman–looking, C-sectioning, PPO hatchet man.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Ho! Uh-\u003c/em>uh\u003cem>! Go, Mommy!\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gwen was right up against him, her body, her belly, the pert cupola of her protruding navel flirting through the fabric of her blouse with actual physical contact. He backed off, betraying the faintest hint of fear.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Garth stood up, holding the baby stiffly, forlornly, as if it were a rare musical instrument, some kind of obscure assemblage of reeds and bladders that he would now be called upon to play. His blue eyes looked frightened, bewildered, and when she saw him, Gwen felt ashamed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Arcadia, curled in on herself in a plastic armchair, woke up and started to cry.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Mr. Frankenthaler?” the doctor said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Garth, she’s fine,” Aviva said. She hurried over to Garth, rubbed his shoulder. “She’s fine, she’s going to be fine.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Why don’t you come with me, Mr. Frankenthaler? I’ll take you to see your wife,” Lazar said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“She isn’t my wife,” Garth said, dazed. “My last name is Newgrange.” Lazar crouched down in front of Arcadia and spoke, in a tender voice, words that only she could hear. She nodded and sniffled, and he moved a thick coil of her dark hair, damp at the end with tears, out of her eyes, painting a shining trail across her cheek. Suddenly, the man was the kindest doctor in the universe. He stood up, and Arcadia took hold of the hem of her father’s windbreaker, and they followed Lazar back into the ER. Two seconds later, Lazar reappeared and pointed his finger at Gwen in a parody, perhaps unconscious, of Aviva’s recent performance. “I’m writing this up,” he told Gwen, who stood there, shoulders heaving, all the righteousness emptied out of her, the last bright tankful burned off in that final heavenward blast. “Count on that.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Did you hear the way he spoke to me?” she said to Aviva, to the room, a note of uncertainty in the question as if seeking confirmation that she had not in fact imagined it. ” ‘Voodoo.’ ‘It’s not like having your hair conked.’ Did you hear? I know everybody in this room heard the man.” Aviva was back to the hushed voice, gently taking hold of Gwen’s elbow.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I heard,” she said, “I know.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You \u003cem>know\u003c/em>? I don’t think you do.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Oh, come on,” Aviva said with an unfortunate echo of Lazar in her tone. “For God’s sake, Gwen. I’m on your side.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“No, Aviva, \u003cem>I’m \u003c/em>on my side. I didn’t hear him say one damn word to \u003cem>you\u003c/em>.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gwen pulled her arm free of Aviva’s grasp and trudged out of the waiting room, through the covered entranceway to the ER, and out to the drive way, where Hekate the Volvo still sat, her hazard lights faithfully blinking. The late-summer-afternoon breeze carried a smell of the ocean. Gwen shivered, a spasm that started in her arms and shoulders but soon convulsed everything. She had barely eaten all day, which was horrible, reprehensible, two months from delivery and already a Bad Mother. Now she felt like she was starving and at the same time like she might throw up. The stitches burned in her cheek. There was a reek of butts and ashes, out here beyond the doors, and a live thread of fresh smoke. She turned to see a pair of women whom she recognized from the waiting room, young and wide-eyed with matching taffy curls, cousins or possibly sisters, one of them even more hugely pregnant than Gwen, sharing a Kool with an air of exuberant impatience as if, when they finished it, something good was going to happen to one or both of them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Hello,” Gwen said, and they laughed as if she had said something stupid or as if she herself were stupid regardless of what she might say. They were among those who had cheered and taken great pleasure in Gwen’s public argument with Dr. Lazar. The pregnant one smoked, in haling in that strange impatient way, and studied Gwen as if the sight of her confirmed some long-held theory.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You a midwife?” the pregnant woman said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gwen nodded, trying to look proud and competent, a credit to her profession and her people. The pregnant woman dropped the burning cigarette and stepped on it, and then she and her companion turned to walk back to the emergency room, the pregnant woman’s flip-flops scraping and slapping against the soles of her feet.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“See, now,” she told her companion, “don’t want to be messing with that country shit.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>From the forthcoming novel \u003c/em>Telegraph Avenue\u003cem>. Copyright 2012 by Michael Chabon. Reprinted by permission of the author. Audio courtesy Harper Audio. All rights reserved.\u003c/em>\u003cem>\u003c/em> \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/\">http://www.npr.org/\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Exclusive+First+Read%3A+%27Telegraph+Avenue%27&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAzOTIwODA0MDEyNTA4MTM1OTcyMGJmMA001)\">\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "Michael Chabon's sprawling new novel features a multigenerational, multiracial cast of characters, from gay teens to former blaxploitation stars, revolving around efforts by two men to save their used-record store.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cem>Michael Chabon sets his sprawling new novel, \u003c/em>Telegraph Avenue,\u003cem> in his adopted home of Berkeley, Calif., and its grittier southern neighbor, Oakland. With its multiracial, multigenerational cast of jazz musicians, former blaxploitation stars, midwives, gay teens and Black Panthers-turned-politicians, the book both celebrates and gently sends up the countercultural norms and complex racial politics of East Bay life. The plot nominally revolves around Archy Stallings’ and Nat Jaffe’s efforts to save their used-record store (located on the eponymous Telegraph Avenue), which is threatened when a black football legend and entrepreneur makes plans to locate a media megastore in the neighborhood. This exclusive excerpt finds Nat’s wife, Aviva — “the Alice Waters of midwives” — presiding over a home birth with her business partner, Archy’s wife, Gwen. The episode is part of a very long day for Gwen, who has just caught Archy with another woman. Telegraph Avenue will be published Sept. 11.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003chr>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003ch6>PARENTS’ ADVISORY: This excerpt contains adult content and language that some readers may find offensive.\u003cem> \u003c/em>\u003c/h6>\n\n\u003chr>\n\u003cp>“Hello?” Gwen called, letting herself in the front door. A small black Buddha greeted her from a low table by the front door, where it kept company with a photograph of Lydia Frankenthaler, the producer of an Oscar-winning documentary film about the neglected plight of lesbians in Nazi Germany; Lydia’s partner, Garth; and Lydia’s daughter from her first marriage, a child whose father was black and whose name Gwen had forgotten. It was a Chinese Buddha, the kind that was supposed to pull in money and luck, jolly, babyfaced, and potbellied, reminding Gwen of her darling husband apart from the signal difference that you could rub the continental expanse of Archy Stallings’s abdomen for a very long time without attracting any flow of money in your direction. “Somebody having a baby around here?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“In here, Gwen,” Aviva said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Lydia and Garth, a lawyer for the poor, were having their baby in their living room. It was a large room with a vaulted ceiling and nothing between it and the canyon but a wall of solid glass. The girl — Arabia, Alabama, she had a geographical name — sat marveling blankly at the spectacle of her naked mother reposed like an abstract chunk of marble sculpture in the center of the room. Against her legs the girl held a rectangle of cardstock to which she had pasted the three pages of her mother’s birth plan, decorating the borders in four colors of marker with flowers and vines and a happy-looking fetus labeled BELLA. Two low sofas had been pushed to the sides of the room to make space for a wide flat sandwich crafted from a tatami mat, a slab of egg-carton foam rubber, and a shower curtain decorated with a giant self-portrait of Frida Kahlo. Garth, a small-boned, thin-shanked man with a red beard and red stubble on his head, lay sleeping on the improvised bed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’m at nine!” said Lydia by way of greeting, adding whatever comment was provided by her spread, furryish butt cheeks and the backs of her legs as she bent over in the downward-facing-dog position to grab two handfuls of floor. “A hundred percent effaced.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’ve been trying to persuade her to try a little push,” said Aviva. She tilted back on her haunches, down on the floor beside Lydia, studying the looming pale elderly secundigravida. Disapproving of the woman, but only Gwen would have caught it, the lips pursed to the left as if with holding a kiss. Barefoot in a loose cotton shift over black ripstop pedal pushers, the roiling surf of her black hair, with its silver eddies, pulled back and tied in a sloppy bun. Stubble showing blue against her luminous shins. Toenails painted a deep cocoa red like the skin of Archy’s Queen of Sheba. “But all Mom wants to do is goof around like that.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I don’t want to push,” Lydia said. A string of pain drew and cinched her voice, a yogic voice, inverted and tied carefully to the rhythm of her breathing. “Is it okay, Gwen? Can’t I just stay this way for a little while longer? It feels a lot better.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If Aviva said it was time to try a little push, then it was, in Gwen’s view, time to try a little push. You did not get to be the Alice Waters of Midwives by leaving your gratins in the oven too long.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Well, you’ve got gravity working for you,” Gwen tried, less inclined than her partner to patience or politeness but good for at least one go-round with an upside-down naked lady in labor. “But if anybody ever pushed out a baby in that jackknife thing you’ve got working right there, Lydia, then I never heard about it.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It could be interesting,” Aviva said. “Now that you mention it. Maybe you should give it a try.” The words were humorous, but her tone continued to be critical, at least to Gwen’s ear.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Let me just wash my hands and whatnot, and then I’ll fire up my Doppler and see what’s happening in there,” Gwen said, dropping her bag on a black leather armchair. “Hi, honey.” \u003cem>Arcadia\u003c/em>. “What do you think of all this, Miss Arcadia?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The girl shrugged, eyes wide and teary but not despairing. Without cant or reference to the threefold moon goddess or other such nonsense, it was a deep and solemn business that they were about in this room, and nobody was going to feel that, in all its fathomlessness, like a kid. Certainly not old Garth over there, sacked out with one toe poking out of his left sock and sleep working the bellows of his skinny frame.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Kind of gross,” the girl said, hoisting the birth plan higher as if to shield herself from the grossness of it. Article Seven requested that the umbilical cord not be cut until the placenta had ceased to pump. Article Twelve was some kind of nonsense about the use of artificial light. Gwen was not one to disrespect a well-made birth plan, but there were always wishful thinking and juju involved, and when things went the way they were going to go, as they must, many plans took on a retrospective air of foolishness. “No offense, Mom.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You don’t.” The string cinching tighter. “Have to. Watch it, baby. I told you — “\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I want to stay.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Gross can be interesting,” Gwen said. “Huh?” Arcadia nodded.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Lydia lowered her hips and sank to her knees, giving way like a sand castle, and on all fours she rested, head hung, eyes closed, as if about to pantomime some animal behavior. “I’m going to push now,” she announced. In the same stewardessy voice, she added, “Everyone please shut up.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Her tone was wrong and startling, like a struck wineglass with a secret flaw, and at once Garth sat up and gaped at Gwen, blinking, wiping his lips with his sleeve. “What’s wrong?” he said. His eyes came unstuck from Gwen’s, and he looked around, kicking up from the deep-sea trench of a dream, looking for his new baby, finding his wife, who was seeing nothing at all.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Everything’s fine, sweetie,” Aviva said. “Only we’re going to need Frida Kahlo.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gwen went into the kitchen to drink a glass of water and, in the name of asepsis if not pride, eradicate every last whiff of Elsabet Getachew from her hands. \u003cem>No excuse for you — \u003c/em>that was sterling dialogue. She strangled the renascent memory of her shame with a pair of latex-free gloves. When she came back into the living room, she saw that Frida Kahlo had been veiled with an orange bath towel. Lydia lay on her back, propped up on an old plaid bolster, pale abdomen shot like an eyeball with capillaries, making a new kind of low growling sound that built slowly to an energetic whoop and flowered in a burst of foul language that made everybody laugh.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Good one,” Aviva said. “Good one.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Though Aviva had caught a thousand babies with hands that were steady and adept, now that it was time, she deferred to her partner, to the virtuoso hands of Gwen Shanks, freaky-big, fluid as a couple of tide-pool dwellers, cabled like the Golden Gate Bridge.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As Aviva gave way to Gwen, she tried by means of her powerfully signifying eyebrows to communicate that she felt something in this situation to be amiss, something not provided for in the birth plan, which lay sagging and looped onto itself under the little girl’s chair. Aviva’s apparent psychic ability to know in advance when something might go wrong, especially in the context of a birth, was not merely the statistical fruit of an abiding pessimism. Skeptic that she was, Gwen had seen Aviva make unlikely but correct predictions of disaster too many times to discount. Gwen frowned, trying to see or feel what Aviva had detected, coming up short. By the time she turned to Lydia, every trace of the frown had been blown away.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Okay,” she said, “let’s see what little old Miss Bella is up to.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gwen lowered herself by inches and prayers to the floor and, when she arrived, saw that the inner labia of Lydia Frankenthaler had conformed themselves into a fiery circle. A smear of fluid and hair presented its credentials at this checkpoint, advance man for the imminently arriving ambassadress from afar.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You’re working fast now,” Gwen said. “You’re crowning. Here we go. Oh my goodness.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Lydia, honey, remember how you said you really didn’t want to push,” Aviva said, climbing in alongside Gwen, “well, now I would actually like you to stop. Stop pushing. Just let her — “\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Coming fast,” Gwen said. “Look out.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There was a ripple of liquid and skin, then with a vaginal sigh, the little girl squirted face-up into Gwen’s wide hands. The small eyes were open, nebular, and dull, but in the instant before she cried out, they ignited, and the child seemed to regard Gwen Shanks. The air was filled with a hot smell between sex and butchery. The father said “\u003cem>oh\u003c/em>” and pressed in beside Gwen to take the sticky baby as she passed it to him. Arcadia hung back, aghast and thrilling to the redness of the birth and the life kindling in her father’s hands. They wrapped the baby loosely in a candy-striped blanket, and as Aviva stroked Lydia’s hair and helped to raise her head, Garth and Arcadia made the necessary introductions of mother and baby and breast. That left Gwen, crouched at the other end of the silvery umbilicus, to observe the heavy flow of blood that seeped from Lydia’s vagina in a slow pulsation, like water from a saturated sponge.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It required all of Gwen’s training and innate gift for minimization of disaster not to pronounce the fatal syllables “\u003cem>Ho, shit.\u003c/em>” But Aviva caught something in her face or shoulders, and when Gwen looked up from the pulsing blood that had begun to pool in a red half-dollar on the shower curtain, her partner was already on her way around to have a look. Aviva hunched down behind Gwen, an umpire leaning in on a catcher’s shoulder to get a better look at the ball as it came down the pike. She smelled of lemon peel and armpit in a way that barely registered with Gwen by now except as a steadying presence. They settled in to wait for the placenta. The soft click-click of the baby’s nursing marked the passing of several minutes. Aviva reached down and gave a gentle tug on the umbilical cord. She frowned. She made a humming sound deep in her throat and then said, “Hmm.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Her tone pierced the bubble of family happiness up by Lydia’s head. Garth looked up sharply. “Is it all right?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s fine.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gwen ripped back the Velcro straps of her hypodermic kit, unrolled it, and felt around with her left hand for the vial of Pitocin.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Right now,” Aviva said, “the placenta is feeling a little shy, so we just all want to really encourage the uterus to do some contracting for us. Lydia, you just keep right on nursing her, that’s the very best thing you can do. How’s that coming?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“She went right on!” Lydia cried. Everything was wonderful in the world where she had taken up residence. “Great latch. Sucking away.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Good,” Gwen said, practicing the business of syringe and vial in a mindful series of ritual taps, sinking the vial onto the shaft of the needle, reading the tale of liquid and graduation. “Keep it up. And just to make sure it all gets nice and tight and contracted in there, we’re going to give you a little Pitocin.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“What’s the deal?” said Garth. He craned forward to see what was happening between his wife’s legs. There was not, say, an ocean of blood, but there was more than enough to shock an innocent new father awash in a postpartum hormonal bath of trust in the world’s goodness. “Oh, goddammit. Did you guys fuck something up?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He swore stiffly but with a sincere fury that took Gwen by surprise. She had pegged him as the gently feckless type of Berkeley white guy, drawstring pants and Teva sandals worn over hiking socks, sworn to a life of uxorial supportiveness the way some monks were sworn to the work of silence. Gwen didn’t know that Garth and Lydia had quarreled repeatedly over the idea of home birth, that Garth had viewed Lydia’s insistence on having their baby at home as the latest in a string of reckless and unnecessarily showy acts of counterconventionality that included refusing, to date, three separate proposals of marriage from Garth. Garth believed in hospitals and vaccines and government sanctioned monogamy and had absorbed from his poor black and Latino clients powerful notions of the sovereignty of bad luck and death. He had suffered no ill fortune throughout the length of a tranquil, comfortable, and fulfilling life and so at any moment anticipated — even felt that he deserved — the swift equalizing backhand of universal misfortune.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s okay, Dad,” Gwen said. “It’s going to be okay.” “Yeah?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Oh, yeah.” She laid it on, but only because she could do so in good conscience. This kind of hemorrhaging was not unusual; the Pitocin would kick in momentarily, the uterus would contract, the mysterious bundle of the placenta, that doomed and transient organ, would complete its brief sojourn, and that would be that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I mean, well,” Garth said. He appeared to consider and decide against speaking the words that had entered his mind, so as not to cause alarm, then said them any way: “It’s just that it looks kind of bad.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gwen’s eyes snapped onto the little girl, but Arcadia seemed to have decided not to know anything except the baby sucking at her mother’s left breast and the feel of her mother’s hand in hers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“That’s mostly just lochia,” Gwen said. “Lining, mucus, all that good stuff. It’s normal.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Mostly,” Garth repeated, his tone both flat and accusatory.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“How about you run get us some towels, Dad,” Aviva suggested. “And lots of them.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Towels,” Garth repeated, clinging to the rope of his desire to be useful.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Definitely,” Gwen said. “Go on, honey. Go on and get us like every damn towel you got. Also, yeah, some sanitary pads.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gwen had a more than adequate supply of pads in her bag, but she wanted to give him a concrete mystery to grow entangled in, hoping that might keep him busy for a few minutes. Whenever she asked Archy to bring her a Tampax, he always got this look on his face, somewhere between intimidation, as by an advanced concept of cosmic theory, and dread, as if mere contact with a tampon might cause him spontaneously to grow a vagina.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Garth went away muttering, “Towels and sanitary pads.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Aviva called Aryeh Bernstein. “Sorry to bother you,” she said. She gave him the essentials, then listened to what their backup OB had to say about Lydia Frankenthaler’s placenta. “We did. Yep. Okay. All right, thanks, Aryeh. I hope I won’t have to.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“What did he say?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“He said more Pitocin and massage.” “On it,” Gwen said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As Aviva prepped another push, Gwen laid her hands on Lydia’s belly and felt, blindly and surely, for the hard shuddering uterus. She sank her fingers into the crepey flesh of Lydia’s abdomen and kneaded with dispassion and no more tenderness than a baker. She disbelieved in the mystical power of visualization according to strictures of her 97 percent rule, but that did not prevent her from imagining with every flexion of her fingers that Lydia’s womb was clenching, sealing itself up, condensing like a lump of coal in Superman’s fist to a hard bright healthy diamond.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>They heard cabinets slamming in a bathroom somewhere with a panicked air of comedy, and then a glass broke, and the girl jumped. It was not impossible that Gwen jumped, too. Aviva held steady, guiding the second needle into Lydia’s vein.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Hey, there, Arcadia,” Gwen said. “How you doing?” “Good.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You got a nice strong grip on your mom’s hand, there?” The girl nodded, slow and watchful. Gwen winced at the false tone of cheeriness she could hear creeping into her voice. “Know what I’m doing? I’m massaging your mom’s uterus. Now, I know you know what a uterus is.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Yes.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Duh. Of course you do, smart as you are.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Oh, uh, Gwen, um,” Lydia said, and she sank back deeper against the plaid bolster, her head lolling like a flower on a broken stem. Her left arm with the baby curled in its crook subsided, and there was a loud smack as the small mouth popped loose. “Oh, man, you guys, I don’t know.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Any change?” Aviva said. “Some.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gwen tried not to look at her partner as Aviva went over to her flight bag, a gaudy pleather thing blazoned with the obscurely ironic legend sulaco, and broke out the bags, barbs, and tubing of an IV kit. Gwen crouched, up to her elbows in the dough of the woman’s life, knowing that everything was going to be all right, that it was a matter of hormones and massage and a husband judiciously sent to find Kotex and bath towels. She also knew that she suffered from or had been blessed with a kind of reverse clairvoyance, the natural counterpart to her partner’s predictive pessimism. Gwen was resistant to if not proof against clear signs of danger or failure. Not because she was an optimist (not at all) but because she took failure, any failure, whether her own or the universe’s, so personally. If a bridge gave way outside of Bangalore, India, and a bus full of children plunged to their deaths, Gwen felt an atom sized but detectable blip of culpability. She had been taught firmly that you could not take credit for success if you were unprepared to accept blame for failure, and one useful expedient she had evolved over the years for avoiding having to do the latter was to refuse — not consciously so much as through a reflexive stubbornness — to acknowledge even the possibility of failure. And that was what she would have to accept if she looked up from her wildly bread-making hands and saw Aviva, with that grim measuring gaze of hers, holding up the bag of intravenous saline to catch the sunshine, her mouth drawn into a thin defeated line.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Don’t fall asleep, Mommy,” Arcadia said. “Here comes Daddy with the towels.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>***\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gwen hurried along the corridor, bleeding from a fresh cut on her left cheek, trussing her belly with one arm, trying to keep up with Aviva, who was trying to keep up with the single-masted gurney on which Lydia Frankenthaler was being sailed toward one of the emergency room ORs by a crew of two nurses and the EMT who had accidentally slammed the ambulance door on Gwen’s face. The EMT hit the doors ass-first and banged on through, and the nurse who was not steering the IV pole turned and faced down the midwives as the doors swung shut behind her. She was about Gwen’s age, midthirties, a skinny ash eyed blonde with her hair in a rubberband ponytail, wearing scrubs patterned with the logo of the Oakland A’s. “I’m really sorry,” she said. She looked very faintly sorry. “You’ll have to wait out here.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This was a sentence being passed on them, a condemnation and a banishment, but at first Aviva seemed not to catch on, or rather, she pretended not to catch on. As the Alice Waters of Midwives, she had been contending successfully and in frustration with hospitals for a long time, and though, by nature, she was one of the most candid and forthright people Gwen had ever known, if you sent her into battle with another nurse, an intake clerk, or most of all an OB, she revealed her self to be skilled in every manner of wheedlings and wiles. It was a skill that was called upon to one degree or another almost every time they went up against hospitals and insurance companies, and Gwen relied upon and was grateful to Aviva for shouldering the politics of the job so ably. She envied the way it seemed to cost Aviva nothing to eat shit, kiss up, make nice. Catching babies was the only thing Aviva cared about, and she would surrender anything except her spotless record for catching them safe and sound. She had, Gwen felt, that luxury.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“No, no, of course, we’ll wait,” Aviva said in a chipper voice. She made a great show of gazing down at herself, at her white shirt with its chart of blood islands, at the chipped polish on her big toenail. With the same partly feigned air of disapproval, she surveyed Gwen’s cheek, her played-out saggy-kneed CP Shades. Then Aviva nodded, granting with a smile the whole vibe of dirt and disorder that the partners were giving off. “But after we clean up and scrub in, right? then it’s no problem, right” — leaning in to read the nurse’s badge — “Kirsten? If you want to check with Dr. Bernstein, I’m sure …”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gwen could see the nurse trying to determine whose responsibility it was in this situation to be the Asshole, which was of course the purpose of Aviva’s gambit. Sometimes that awful responsibility turned out to be endlessly deferrable, and other times you got lucky and ended up in the hands of someone too tired or busy to give a damn.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Bernstein’s stuck in traffic,” Kirsten said. “The attending’s Dr. Lazar. I’ll check with him. In the meantime, why don’t you two ladies go ahead and have a seat.” She told Gwen, “You’re going to want to have a seat.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>You have a seat, bitch. That’s my patient maybe bleeding to death in there.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“No, thank you,” Gwen said. “I prefer to stand.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Her relations toward authority, toward its wielders and tools, were — had to be — more complicated than her partner’s. She could not as blithely subordinate her pride and self-respect to the dictates of hospital politics, distill her practice of midwifery, the way Aviva did, to the fundamental business of the Catch. But Gwen knew, the way a violinist knew tonewood, how to work it. She had grown up in a family of doctors, lawyers, teachers, cops. For many years her father was an assistant district attorney for the city of Washington, D.C., and then a lawyer for the Justice Department. Both of her mother’s sisters were nurses. Her uncle Louis had been a D.C. patrolman and plainclothesman and was now the chief of security for Howard University, and her brother, Ernest, ran a lab at George Mason. To the extent that Gwen had been hassled in her life by representatives of the white establishment, she had been trained to get the better of the situation without compromising herself, some times by dropping a name, sometimes by showing a respect that she genuinely felt or could at least remember how to simulate. Mostly by letting the doc or the officer feel that she understood how it was to be on the job.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“But truly, thank you, Kirsten,” Gwen added, reaching for chipper like a note that was just beyond her range. “We really appreciate your taking the time. We know how busy you are.” She smiled. “And maybe I will sit down a minute, at that.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As though doing Kirsten a favor, Gwen lowered herself into one of the plastic chairs bolted to a nearby wall.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Definitely want to have somebody look at that cheek,” the nurse said, her brittle tone expressing solicitude for the cheek less, Gwen thought, than for her own worn-out, urban-population-serving self.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Oh, thank you so much for your concern,” Gwen said. Struggling a little harder, knowing from the way Aviva was looking at her, that she was starting, in Aviva’s phrase, to \u003cem>leak\u003c/em>. “Now, please, honey, go ask the doc when we can see our patient.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It must have been the “honey.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Kirsten said, “She’s not your patient anymore.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This was not technically true. As a result of years of hard work, steady and sound practice, slowly evolving cultural attitudes in the medical profession, and long, unrelenting effort begun by its founder and senior practitioner, by the summer of 2004, Berkeley Birth Partners enjoyed full privileges at Chimes General Hospital, with every right to assist in and attend to the care of Lydia Frankenthaler, who would remain a patient until such time as Lydia herself decided otherwise. But Aviva and Gwen had come this evening in an ambulance, giving off a whiff of trouble, with an unnecessary police escort they had managed to acquire along the way. Like a pair of shit-caked work boots, they were being left outside on the porch.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’ll wait here.” Aviva stepped in with the perfect mixture of unctuous sweetness and professional concern, spiking it lightly, like a furtive elbow to the ribs, with a warning to Gwen to seal all leaks or else shut the hell up. “As soon as you talk to the attending, you come find us, okay, Kirsten?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gwen followed Aviva into the bathroom, fighting the urge to apologize, wanting to point out that if you were white, eating shit was a choice you could make if you wanted; for a black woman, the only valid choice was not to.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In silence at separate sinks, they washed their hands and faces and rued the ruination of their shirts. The reverberation of water against porcelain intensified the silence. In the mirror, Gwen saw her partner staring at the bloodstains with an emotion between horror and hollowness, looking every one of her fortyseven years. Then their eyes met in the reflection, and the defeated look was gone in an instant, smuggled off, hooded and manacled, to the internal detention facility where Aviva Roth-Jaffe sent such feelings to die.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I know,” Gwen said. “I was leaking.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Literally,” Aviva said, coming in to get a look at the damage the ambulance door had done to Gwen’s cheek. It had stopped bleeding, but when Aviva touched it, a fresh droplet formed a bead on the cut’s lower lip. The cut was about the size of a grain of pomegranate, pink and ugly. It would leave a scar, and Gwen was prone to keloids, and so forever after, she thought, she would have something special to remind her of this wonderful day. In her mind, she replayed her stumble, the optic flash as her face struck the steel corner.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You need a stitch,” Aviva said. She leaned in to look at Gwen’s cut. “Maybe two.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>They went out to the ER and, after a few minutes of further genial self-abasement by Aviva, found themselves shown into an examination room with needle, suturing thread, and a hemostat. When it came time for novocaine, Gwen sat on her hands and told Aviva to go ahead and sew it up. “One stitch I can handle straight,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Better call it two.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Two, then.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Aren’t you fucking macho.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’m liable to start crying anyways, might as well give me a reason.” Gwen gasped as the needle bit. “Ow, Aviva, ouch.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Aviva tugged the thread with a severe gentleness, breath whistling in her nostrils. Gwen focused her attention on the pendant that hung from a leather thong around Aviva’s throat. It had been made by Julie Jaffe in a flame-work class at the Crucible, lovely and enigmatic, a small glass planet, a teardrop of blue alien seas and green continents and polar caps tinted ice blue. For as long as Gwen had known him, Julie had been a mapper of worlds, on newsprint and graph paper and in the phosphor of a computer screen. Gwen recalled having asked him where he found the inspiration for the tiny glass world he had presented her as a Christmas present last year, and she tried to take comfort or at least find shelter from the pain of the suture needle in the memory of his reply: \u003cem>By living there\u003c/em>. Then Aviva sank the barb a second time, and that was when Gwen started to cry, no big show or anything, they were both a couple of cool customers, your Berkeley Birth Partners. No sobbing. No whoops of grief. Just tears welling up and spilling over, stinging in the fresh seam of the wound. To be honest, it felt pretty good.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She permitted the tears to flow only as long as it took Aviva to snip the thread from the second stitch, lay down the hemostat, peel off her gloves, and hand Gwen a tissue. Gwen dabbed her eyes and then used the tissue to blow her nose, a nice big honking blast.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“They aren’t going to let us in,” Gwen said bitterly. “I guess not.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Where’s Bernstein?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“He was in the city. He’s coming.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We need to be \u003cem>in \u003c/em>there. They’re going to want to do a hysterectomy, I know it. When all they need to do is just \u003cem>wait \u003c/em>a little. Lazar. Who’s Lazar?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Don’t know him.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Tell me she’s going to be all right.” “She will be all right.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I should have noticed it sooner.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There was nothing to notice until you noticed it. You noticed it right away.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gwen nodded, ducking her head, balling the tissue in her fist. She stood up and paced the room, stopped, hugged herself, notching her arms into the groove over the swell of her abdomen. She sat down, stood up, blew her nose again, and paced the room some more. She knew perfectly well there was nothing anyone could have done, but somehow that only made it feel more imperative to blame herself. It implied no kind of self-exoneration if she felt compelled to blame some other people, too. “I can’t believe they aren’t letting us in there!”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Take it easy,” Aviva said in a hushed voice that was meant, Gwen knew, to communicate the fact that she was talking too loudly. But Gwen could tell that she was rattling Aviva, and for some reason, it pleased her to see it. For the second time that day, she had a sense of trespassing on some internal quarantine, crossing a forbidden zone into the \u003cem>ponfarr\u003c/em>; amok time. It would not be right for Aviva to make her go there alone.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’ve had enough of this,” Gwen said. “Aviva, no, seriously. Listen to me.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I can hear you loud and clear, Gwen.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Come on. You have worked too hard. We have both earned the right to be treated better than this.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There was the squeak of a sneaker on tiled floor. The partners turned, startled, to the door of the examining room, where a young pink-faced doctor appeared, his head shaved almost to the scalp, leaving only a ghostly chevron of pattern baldness. Dead-eyed, already tired of listening to them before they ever opened their mouths.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’m Dr. Lazar,” he said. “I was able to do a manual removal of the placenta. Mrs. Frankenthaler is stable, uterine tonicity looks good. We stopped the bleeding. She’ll be fine.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The partners stood, perfectly still, tasting the news like thirsty people trying to decide if they had just felt a drop of rain. Then they fell on each other and hung on tight, Gwen half stupid with relief, drunk on it, clinging to Aviva as if to keep the room from spinning.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Dr. Lazar studied the celebration with his flounder eyes and a mean smile like a card cheat with a winning hand. “Do you think,” he said after an interval not quite long enough to pass for decent, “uh, I don’t know, do either of you ladies think maybe you could explain to me how you managed to screw up this birth quite so badly?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Excuse me?” Gwen said, letting go of Aviva as the dizziness abruptly passed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Ten more minutes of sage-burning or whatever voodoo you were working, and that mom — “\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>“Voodoo?”\u003c/em>Gwen said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Instead of wincing at this clear instance of having said something he was bound to regret, Dr. Lazar turned gelid, immobile. But he flushed to the tips of his ears. “You know what?” he said. “Whatever.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He turned and walked out of the room, and Gwen noticed a purple Skittle adhering to the seat of his surgical scrub trousers. For some reason, the sight of the smashed piece of candy stuck on the doctor’s ass inspired a minute compassion for the fish-eyed and weary young man with his burden of alopecia, and this, in turn, sent her over the edge.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Gwen!” Aviva said, but it was too late, and anyway, the hell with her.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>***\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>An hour ago, when they had blown in on a gust of urgency from the ambulance bay, EMT yelling instructions, calling for a stretcher, Garth looking modestly wild-eyed, dancing like a man who had to pee, holding the baby who needed to be fed, Aviva breaking out a bottle of Enfamil from her backpack and cracking it with a sigh and that formula smell of vitamins and cheese, the wonderful avid baby needing every ounce of it — Gwen had failed to remark just how busy it was tonight at the emergency room of Chimes General Hospital.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Every room seemed to be occupied. Her pursuit of Dr. Lazar was haunted at its edges by glimpses of a pale hairy shin slashed with red. A forlorn teenager in a volleyball uniform clutching her arm at a surrealist angle.A young man with baby dreadlocks gripping either side of a sink as if about to vomit. The whole scene scored with a discordant soundtrack of televisions and woe, the nattering of SpongeBob, an old man’s ursine expectorations, a pretty Asian woman cursing like a sailor as something nasty was extracted from the meat of her hand, the horrific shrieking of a toddler being held down by its father while a phlebotomist probed its arm for a vein. Outside the last examination room before the waiting area, a young Hispanic man lolled in a chair, holding a bloody ice pack to his face, while from inside the room, a doctor yelled cheerfully in English at his bleeding companion as if the man were deaf and retarded.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I am a nurse,” Gwen said, managing to sound calmer than she felt, catching up with Lazar. “Please tell me that I did not just hear you employ the term ‘voodoo’ in reference to my licensed and certified practice of midwifery.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Lazar stopped at the threshold of the waiting area, where he planned, she assumed, to tell Garth and Arcadia that Lydia would be okay, business that was definitely more important, as Gwen knew perfectly well in some cool, quiet corner of her being, than whatever point she was attempting to make. The doctor turned to confront her with an air of resigned willingness to go along, an obedient soldier saddling up for the ride into the valley of death.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I know you were burning something,” he said. “I could smell it on her.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It was ylang-ylang,” Aviva said, hurrying up behind them, taking a step toward Gwen as if to interpose her body between Gwen and the doctor. “Her husband was burning it during the first part of her labor. She likes the smell.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“That woman,” Gwen said, “Lydia. The placenta was retained. There was stage zero hemorrhage, borderline stage one. Uterine atonicity. And she went into a hypovolemic shock.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Correct,” the doctor said, impatient.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Even though we had her on a course of supplements and immediately began to administer oxytocin and do uterine massage. Exactly like you or any doctor would have done. Is that not correct?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He blinked, not wanting to give up anything to her.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“So tell me this, Doctor, how many accretas, how many postpartum hemorrhages, have you guys had here this month? Like, what, I’m going to say six?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I wouldn’t know.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Ten?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I don’t know the answer to that, Ms. Shanks, but see, the thing is, when those things happen here, okay? When they happen here? When there’s some hemorrhaging? Which does occur, of course. Then the patient’s \u003cem>already in the damn hospital\u003c/em>. Where she ought to be.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gwen looked over at the young man with the ice pack, his visible eye dull and maddened, his knuckles swollen like berries on the point of rot.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You know what?” Aviva said, and out came the pointing finger so feared by all who loved her, Gwen among them, as the Berkeley faded and the Brooklyn broke through, and all at once Aviva’s proximity no longer buffered but menaced the doctor. “In fifteen years, my practice has never lost a single mother. And not one single baby. Can this place make that claim? No, I happen to know very well it can’t, and so do you.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Who would ever want to have a baby \u003cem>here\u003c/em>?” Gwen observed, half to herself, a hand settling on her belly like an amulet or shield.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s a \u003cem>birth\u003c/em>,” the doctor said. “You know, call me crazy, but maybe in the end that’s one of those things you just don’t want to try at home. It’s not like conking your hair.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Somebody gasped out in the waiting room. An arch, eager female voice went \u003cem>Awwwwww shit\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You racist,” Gwen began, “misogynist — “\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Oh, come on, don’t start that crap.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Lazar turned his back on her and went into the waiting room. Throwing up his hands, shaking his head: all the bad acting people tended to engage in when they were most sincere. Gwen stayed right with him. Everyone in the waiting room raised their head, face blank and attentive, prepared if not hoping for further entertainment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Don’t you bait me,” Gwen said, feeling an internal string, years in the winding, snap with a delicious and terrible twang. “Don’t you ever try to bait me, you bald-headed, Peewee Herman–looking, C-sectioning, PPO hatchet man.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Ho! Uh-\u003c/em>uh\u003cem>! Go, Mommy!\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gwen was right up against him, her body, her belly, the pert cupola of her protruding navel flirting through the fabric of her blouse with actual physical contact. He backed off, betraying the faintest hint of fear.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Garth stood up, holding the baby stiffly, forlornly, as if it were a rare musical instrument, some kind of obscure assemblage of reeds and bladders that he would now be called upon to play. His blue eyes looked frightened, bewildered, and when she saw him, Gwen felt ashamed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Arcadia, curled in on herself in a plastic armchair, woke up and started to cry.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Mr. Frankenthaler?” the doctor said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Garth, she’s fine,” Aviva said. She hurried over to Garth, rubbed his shoulder. “She’s fine, she’s going to be fine.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Why don’t you come with me, Mr. Frankenthaler? I’ll take you to see your wife,” Lazar said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“She isn’t my wife,” Garth said, dazed. “My last name is Newgrange.” Lazar crouched down in front of Arcadia and spoke, in a tender voice, words that only she could hear. She nodded and sniffled, and he moved a thick coil of her dark hair, damp at the end with tears, out of her eyes, painting a shining trail across her cheek. Suddenly, the man was the kindest doctor in the universe. He stood up, and Arcadia took hold of the hem of her father’s windbreaker, and they followed Lazar back into the ER. Two seconds later, Lazar reappeared and pointed his finger at Gwen in a parody, perhaps unconscious, of Aviva’s recent performance. “I’m writing this up,” he told Gwen, who stood there, shoulders heaving, all the righteousness emptied out of her, the last bright tankful burned off in that final heavenward blast. “Count on that.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Did you hear the way he spoke to me?” she said to Aviva, to the room, a note of uncertainty in the question as if seeking confirmation that she had not in fact imagined it. ” ‘Voodoo.’ ‘It’s not like having your hair conked.’ Did you hear? I know everybody in this room heard the man.” Aviva was back to the hushed voice, gently taking hold of Gwen’s elbow.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I heard,” she said, “I know.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You \u003cem>know\u003c/em>? I don’t think you do.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Oh, come on,” Aviva said with an unfortunate echo of Lazar in her tone. “For God’s sake, Gwen. I’m on your side.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“No, Aviva, \u003cem>I’m \u003c/em>on my side. I didn’t hear him say one damn word to \u003cem>you\u003c/em>.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gwen pulled her arm free of Aviva’s grasp and trudged out of the waiting room, through the covered entranceway to the ER, and out to the drive way, where Hekate the Volvo still sat, her hazard lights faithfully blinking. The late-summer-afternoon breeze carried a smell of the ocean. Gwen shivered, a spasm that started in her arms and shoulders but soon convulsed everything. She had barely eaten all day, which was horrible, reprehensible, two months from delivery and already a Bad Mother. Now she felt like she was starving and at the same time like she might throw up. The stitches burned in her cheek. There was a reek of butts and ashes, out here beyond the doors, and a live thread of fresh smoke. She turned to see a pair of women whom she recognized from the waiting room, young and wide-eyed with matching taffy curls, cousins or possibly sisters, one of them even more hugely pregnant than Gwen, sharing a Kool with an air of exuberant impatience as if, when they finished it, something good was going to happen to one or both of them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Hello,” Gwen said, and they laughed as if she had said something stupid or as if she herself were stupid regardless of what she might say. They were among those who had cheered and taken great pleasure in Gwen’s public argument with Dr. Lazar. The pregnant one smoked, in haling in that strange impatient way, and studied Gwen as if the sight of her confirmed some long-held theory.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You a midwife?” the pregnant woman said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gwen nodded, trying to look proud and competent, a credit to her profession and her people. The pregnant woman dropped the burning cigarette and stepped on it, and then she and her companion turned to walk back to the emergency room, the pregnant woman’s flip-flops scraping and slapping against the soles of her feet.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“See, now,” she told her companion, “don’t want to be messing with that country shit.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>From the forthcoming novel \u003c/em>Telegraph Avenue\u003cem>. Copyright 2012 by Michael Chabon. Reprinted by permission of the author. Audio courtesy Harper Audio. All rights reserved.\u003c/em>\u003cem>\u003c/em> \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/\">http://www.npr.org/\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Exclusive+First+Read%3A+%27Telegraph+Avenue%27&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAzOTIwODA0MDEyNTA4MTM1OTcyMGJmMA001)\">\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "IM, IM, IM Superman: Morning-After Texts Between Superman, Wonder Woman",
"headTitle": "IM, IM, IM Superman: Morning-After Texts Between Superman, Wonder Woman | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>Next week, in \u003cem>Justice League\u003c/em> #12, The Man of Steel and the Amazing Amazon will … get their respective super-powered grooves on, \u003ca href=\"http://shelf-life.ew.com/2012/08/22/justice-league-12-exclusive/\">according to Entertainment Weekly\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cblockquote>\n\u003cp>Writer Geoff Johns hints that some event — possibly tragic — will impact every member of the Justice League, and cause Superman and Wonder Woman to seek solace in each other and move from super-powered colleagues to power couple. This is no one-issue stunt: “This is the new status quo,” says Johns, adding that the relationship will have a seismic impact on all the heroes and villains in the DC universe.\u003c/p>\n\u003c/blockquote>\n\u003cp>… “Power couple.” Oy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The two have been romantically linked in the past, by writers like Frank Miller (\u003cem>The Dark Knight Strikes Back\u003c/em>) and John Byrne (\u003cem>Action Comics #600\u003c/em>). But Miller’s romance took place in an alternate-future that exists inside the writer’s increasingly wackadoo head, while Byrne’s Superman and Wonder Woman were two ships — er, fully armed and operational battle stations — passing in the night.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This isn’t quite the scandal it could be. DC’s universe-wide “New 52” relaunch dissolved the Superman-Lois Lane marriage last year, even as it served to further complicate Wonder Woman’s already complicated love life.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In her own post-reboot title, written by Brian Azzarello, Wonder Woman is too busy dealing with gods-and-monsters-style mythic horror to worry much about making kissy-face with anyone, while in the pages of \u003cem>Justice League\u003c/em>, writer Geoff Johns not-so-coyly suggests that Diana’s broken her share of hearts (male and female, mortal and im-) in her time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Will these two crazy kids make a go of it? Will the gossip pages fill with all manner of wild speculation over \u003cdel>SuWon\u003c/del> \u003cdel>KalDi\u003c/del> SUP4WON?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After the jump, NPR’s Monkey See has intercepted a series of texts between a “BigRedESS” and a “1derWymyn” which may provide a clue.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (5:33 a.m.): watchin u sleep now 😉\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (5:34 a.m.): ur pretty 🙂\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (5:45 a.m.): lookin at ur lungs. They r clean haha\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (5:46 a.m.): man ur heart is big lol\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (5:47 a.m.): i mean like large anatomically haha tho u r really generous too i bet\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (5:50 a.m.): wow you got out of bed fast\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (5:51 a.m.): mouthwash is in the medicine cabinet top left\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>1derWymyn (5:52 a.m.): DUDE. WHY ARE YOU TEXTING ME? I AM RIGHT HERE.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (5:52 a.m.): goooood moooorning!!!!!!!!!!\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (5:52 a.m.): ?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (5:52 a.m.): u r shouting at me now but u r still cute not a morning person i guess ok lol\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>1derWymyn (5:53 a.m.): OKAY SINCE YOU ARE NOT ANSWERING MY QUESTION WE’LL DO IT THIS WAY. HOW DID YOU KNOW I WAS LOOKING FOR THE MOUTHWASH? ARE YOU X-RAY VISION-ING ME? IN THE BATHROOM? SERIOUSLY?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>1derWymyn (5:55 a.m.): NO ANSWER?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (5:56 a.m.): lucky guess\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (6:00 a.m.): u were great last nite :O\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (6:01 a.m.): hello?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (6:02 a.m.): helloooooo? my amazon princess? xxoo\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (6:03 a.m.): haha you flew out the bathroom window lol u r funny too 🙂\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (6:04 a.m.): lunch ltr?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BugRedESS (6:05 a.m.): well?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (6:05 a.m.): ?????\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (6:06 a.m.): ok well i will text u ltr gotta save da world etc etc haha\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (8:05 a.m.): flyin 2 the moon 4 a thing. the stars look like your shorts sexxxxyyyyy 😉\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (8:06 a.m.): so i m thinking of u is my point 🙂 🙂 🙂\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (10:00 a.m.): hey\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (10:05 a.m.): u around?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (10:06 a.m.): its just that i ran into atlas the titan and he sed he dated u?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (10:07 a.m.): its cool i just didnt kno that\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (10:07 a.m.): wuz he good 2u? u can tell me\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (11:15 a.m.): where r u lets meet 4 lunch\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>1derWymyn (11:30 a.m.): BUSY\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (11:31 a.m.): oh me too earthquakes etc no its fine\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (11:32 a.m.): txt u ltr 4 dinner?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (1:34 p.m.): wonder womaaaaaan! wonder womaaaaaan! all the world is waiting for uuuuuu! and the powers u possesssssss!\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (1:36 p.m.): stop a bullet cold! make the axis fold! change their miiiiinds! and change the woooooooorld!!!! 🙂\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>1derWymyn (1:37 p.m.): IT WAS A MISTAKE.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (1:37 p.m.): there you are princess! thai food 2nite?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>1derWymyn (1:38 p.m.): CIRCE. SHE’S MY ARCH-VILLAIN. SHE SLIPPED ME A LOVE POTION. IT WAS A WHOLE THING. I DON’T THINK OF YOU THAT WAY. LET’S STAY FRIENDS. IT’S NOT YOU IT’S ME WHATEVER JUST STOP.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (1:39 p.m.): ?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (1:40 p.m.): very funny i knew u were funny 🙂\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>1derWymyn (1:41 p.m.): NO JOKE. IT’S BEEN REAL. SEE YOU AROUND. OH AND DON’T MENTION THIS TO BATMAN. HE GETS SQUIRRELY. YOU KNOW.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (1:42 p.m.): who is putting you up to this is it\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>1derWymyn (1:43 p.m.): AND NO, IT’S NOT LUTHOR. THERE’S NO ONE ELSE. I’M JUST NOT LOOKING FOR A RELATIONSHIP RIGHT NOW.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (1:44 p.m.): its luthor isn’t it?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>1derWymyn (1:45 p.m.): IT’S REALLY NOT.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (1:45 p.m.): that dastardly villain!!!!!! >:( i will save you!!!!!\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>1derWymyn (1:46 p.m.): DON’T NEED SAVING.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (1:47 p.m.): is this because ur a\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>1derWymyn (1:48 p.m.): WOW. OK, PHONE IS DYING. GOTTA GO. BUT IF IT HELPS, YES. WHATEVER. BYE.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (1:49 p.m.): knew it wondered y u hadnt made a play 4 me b4\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (1:50 p.m.): its cool i m cool w/it. FYI.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (11:28 p.m) beeteedubs if u & whoever (hawkgirl?) want to party sometime call me maybe haha right lol 😉 😉 \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/\">http://www.npr.org/\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=IM%2C+IM%2C+IM+Superman%3A+Morning-After+Texts+Between+Superman%2C+Wonder+Woman&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAzOTIwODA0MDEyNTA4MTM1OTcyMGJmMA001)\">\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "Next week, in the pages of the comic \u003cem>Justice League\u003c/em>, Superman and Wonder Woman will become involved. We have intercepted a series of IMs that augurs ill for comics' new (super-)power couple.",
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"description": "Next week, in the pages of the comic Justice League, Superman and Wonder Woman will become involved. We have intercepted a series of IMs that augurs ill for comics' new (super-)power couple.",
"title": "IM, IM, IM Superman: Morning-After Texts Between Superman, Wonder Woman | KQED",
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"headline": "IM, IM, IM Superman: Morning-After Texts Between Superman, Wonder Woman",
"datePublished": "2012-08-23T20:04:31-07:00",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Next week, in \u003cem>Justice League\u003c/em> #12, The Man of Steel and the Amazing Amazon will … get their respective super-powered grooves on, \u003ca href=\"http://shelf-life.ew.com/2012/08/22/justice-league-12-exclusive/\">according to Entertainment Weekly\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cblockquote>\n\u003cp>Writer Geoff Johns hints that some event — possibly tragic — will impact every member of the Justice League, and cause Superman and Wonder Woman to seek solace in each other and move from super-powered colleagues to power couple. This is no one-issue stunt: “This is the new status quo,” says Johns, adding that the relationship will have a seismic impact on all the heroes and villains in the DC universe.\u003c/p>\n\u003c/blockquote>\n\u003cp>… “Power couple.” Oy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The two have been romantically linked in the past, by writers like Frank Miller (\u003cem>The Dark Knight Strikes Back\u003c/em>) and John Byrne (\u003cem>Action Comics #600\u003c/em>). But Miller’s romance took place in an alternate-future that exists inside the writer’s increasingly wackadoo head, while Byrne’s Superman and Wonder Woman were two ships — er, fully armed and operational battle stations — passing in the night.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This isn’t quite the scandal it could be. DC’s universe-wide “New 52” relaunch dissolved the Superman-Lois Lane marriage last year, even as it served to further complicate Wonder Woman’s already complicated love life.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In her own post-reboot title, written by Brian Azzarello, Wonder Woman is too busy dealing with gods-and-monsters-style mythic horror to worry much about making kissy-face with anyone, while in the pages of \u003cem>Justice League\u003c/em>, writer Geoff Johns not-so-coyly suggests that Diana’s broken her share of hearts (male and female, mortal and im-) in her time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Will these two crazy kids make a go of it? Will the gossip pages fill with all manner of wild speculation over \u003cdel>SuWon\u003c/del> \u003cdel>KalDi\u003c/del> SUP4WON?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After the jump, NPR’s Monkey See has intercepted a series of texts between a “BigRedESS” and a “1derWymyn” which may provide a clue.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (5:33 a.m.): watchin u sleep now 😉\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (5:34 a.m.): ur pretty 🙂\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (5:45 a.m.): lookin at ur lungs. They r clean haha\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (5:46 a.m.): man ur heart is big lol\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (5:47 a.m.): i mean like large anatomically haha tho u r really generous too i bet\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (5:50 a.m.): wow you got out of bed fast\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (5:51 a.m.): mouthwash is in the medicine cabinet top left\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>1derWymyn (5:52 a.m.): DUDE. WHY ARE YOU TEXTING ME? I AM RIGHT HERE.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (5:52 a.m.): goooood moooorning!!!!!!!!!!\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (5:52 a.m.): ?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (5:52 a.m.): u r shouting at me now but u r still cute not a morning person i guess ok lol\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>1derWymyn (5:53 a.m.): OKAY SINCE YOU ARE NOT ANSWERING MY QUESTION WE’LL DO IT THIS WAY. HOW DID YOU KNOW I WAS LOOKING FOR THE MOUTHWASH? ARE YOU X-RAY VISION-ING ME? IN THE BATHROOM? SERIOUSLY?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>1derWymyn (5:55 a.m.): NO ANSWER?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (5:56 a.m.): lucky guess\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (6:00 a.m.): u were great last nite :O\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (6:01 a.m.): hello?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (6:02 a.m.): helloooooo? my amazon princess? xxoo\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (6:03 a.m.): haha you flew out the bathroom window lol u r funny too 🙂\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (6:04 a.m.): lunch ltr?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BugRedESS (6:05 a.m.): well?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (6:05 a.m.): ?????\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (6:06 a.m.): ok well i will text u ltr gotta save da world etc etc haha\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (8:05 a.m.): flyin 2 the moon 4 a thing. the stars look like your shorts sexxxxyyyyy 😉\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (8:06 a.m.): so i m thinking of u is my point 🙂 🙂 🙂\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (10:00 a.m.): hey\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (10:05 a.m.): u around?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (10:06 a.m.): its just that i ran into atlas the titan and he sed he dated u?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (10:07 a.m.): its cool i just didnt kno that\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (10:07 a.m.): wuz he good 2u? u can tell me\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (11:15 a.m.): where r u lets meet 4 lunch\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>1derWymyn (11:30 a.m.): BUSY\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (11:31 a.m.): oh me too earthquakes etc no its fine\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (11:32 a.m.): txt u ltr 4 dinner?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (1:34 p.m.): wonder womaaaaaan! wonder womaaaaaan! all the world is waiting for uuuuuu! and the powers u possesssssss!\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (1:36 p.m.): stop a bullet cold! make the axis fold! change their miiiiinds! and change the woooooooorld!!!! 🙂\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>1derWymyn (1:37 p.m.): IT WAS A MISTAKE.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (1:37 p.m.): there you are princess! thai food 2nite?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>1derWymyn (1:38 p.m.): CIRCE. SHE’S MY ARCH-VILLAIN. SHE SLIPPED ME A LOVE POTION. IT WAS A WHOLE THING. I DON’T THINK OF YOU THAT WAY. LET’S STAY FRIENDS. IT’S NOT YOU IT’S ME WHATEVER JUST STOP.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (1:39 p.m.): ?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (1:40 p.m.): very funny i knew u were funny 🙂\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>1derWymyn (1:41 p.m.): NO JOKE. IT’S BEEN REAL. SEE YOU AROUND. OH AND DON’T MENTION THIS TO BATMAN. HE GETS SQUIRRELY. YOU KNOW.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (1:42 p.m.): who is putting you up to this is it\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>1derWymyn (1:43 p.m.): AND NO, IT’S NOT LUTHOR. THERE’S NO ONE ELSE. I’M JUST NOT LOOKING FOR A RELATIONSHIP RIGHT NOW.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (1:44 p.m.): its luthor isn’t it?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>1derWymyn (1:45 p.m.): IT’S REALLY NOT.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (1:45 p.m.): that dastardly villain!!!!!! >:( i will save you!!!!!\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>1derWymyn (1:46 p.m.): DON’T NEED SAVING.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (1:47 p.m.): is this because ur a\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>1derWymyn (1:48 p.m.): WOW. OK, PHONE IS DYING. GOTTA GO. BUT IF IT HELPS, YES. WHATEVER. BYE.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (1:49 p.m.): knew it wondered y u hadnt made a play 4 me b4\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (1:50 p.m.): its cool i m cool w/it. FYI.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BigRedESS (11:28 p.m) beeteedubs if u & whoever (hawkgirl?) want to party sometime call me maybe haha right lol 😉 😉 \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/\">http://www.npr.org/\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=IM%2C+IM%2C+IM+Superman%3A+Morning-After+Texts+Between+Superman%2C+Wonder+Woman&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAzOTIwODA0MDEyNTA4MTM1OTcyMGJmMA001)\">\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Robert Crais: L.A. Is 'Natural Canvas' For Nightmare",
"headTitle": "Robert Crais: L.A. Is ‘Natural Canvas’ For Nightmare | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>It’s been a few decades, and many published books, but Robert Crais can tell you exactly when mystery writing first caught his attention: He was a bright 15-year-old living in Baton Rouge, La., when he read Raymond Chandler’s \u003cem>The Little Sister\u003c/em>, which depicted the shady side of sunny Los Angeles through the eyes of private investigator Philip Marlowe.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Since then, Crais has found huge success with his own crime novels, also set in LA. The city is the perfect canvas for a modern mystery, and Crais’ eyes still grow wide when he talks about what Chandler painted on it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The way Chandler and his language portrayed Los Angeles, portrayed Philip Marlowe, lit me up the way no other fiction prior to that had,” he says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So it’s especially satisfying for Crais when critics describe him as one of Chandler’s natural descendants; but instead of the wryly laconic Marlowe, Crais’ protagonist is a smart-aleck investigator named Elvis Cole.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“In the very first book, \u003cem>The Monkey’s Raincoat\u003c/em>, I say this is not his birth name. He was actually named Philip James Cole, but his mother changed his name when he was 6 years old,” Crais says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After Cole’s single, party-girl mother had a blast at an Elvis Presley concert, she came home and legally changed his name to Elvis. Crais says the consequences of that have dogged his PI ever since.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“That instability in his early life is something that I thought important,” he says. “That’s one of the reasons he is the way he is. He’s trying to make sense out of the world; he’s trying to make sense of it for himself, and he transfers that to the people he works for.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cole’s partner and best friend is Joe Pike, essentially Cole’s opposite — as taciturn as Cole is glibly chatty. Cole dresses in colorful Hawaiian shirts, while Pike is black and gray. Cole seems open; Pike is purposefully inscrutable. Crais says Cole’s job is to restore normalcy to his clients’ lives, even as he knows it’s personally unattainable.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“He admires normal,” Crais says. “I think, in many ways, Joe Pike does, too. They’re trying to achieve balance and normalcy because they admire it, but they don’t know how to get there. That’s one of the reasons they’re so much fun for me to write.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>‘Potential For Horror And Nightmare’\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the mouth of the Venice canals, in LA’s Venice neighborhood, Crais points to large locks that control the flow of water into and out of the waterways. Dozens of these canals were built in the early 1900s in homage to the Italian city that is their namesake. Most were later paved over, but the remaining ones are expensive real estate, lined with colorful homes and fragrant gardens. Crais explains how the neighborhood, and its quirky engineering, played a role in his 2011 novel, \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/books/titles/158998352/the-sentry\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">The Sentry\u003c/a>\u003cem>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“My notion, of course, in the book was that if there were a body floating in the canals, as the canal drained, it would go downstream and be caught in the locks,” he says. “And that’s one of the devices I used.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Walking along the paths that line the canals, Crais notes how tranquil the neighborhood is: Egrets fish in the reeds at the water’s edge and the quiet is only disturbed by an occasional bark. It’s a good place for things to go wrong.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s a natural canvas,” Crais says. “You know, where there is peace and when there is tranquility, there’s always the potential for horror and nightmare.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>‘Chasing That Dream Of A Better Life’\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Crais’ most recent book, \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/books/titles/146269606/taken\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Taken\u003c/a>, is set all over the city and out in the desert. It focuses on human trafficking, which Crais says flourishes in LA because of how the city draws all kinds of people with hopes of reinvention.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“People come to LA because they’re chasing that dream of a better life,” he says. “That’s why I came here, because I thought it would be a place where I would find other people like me; people who wanted to write, people who had a dream of being something else. And that proved to be true.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Crais has prospered in LA. He was so certain that writing would be his life that he dropped out of Louisiana State University a semester short of graduation, packed his car and drove to Hollywood. His ear for dialogue got him work on television scripts in the ’70s and ’80s — he’s written for \u003cem>Hill Street Blues\u003c/em>, \u003cem>L.A. Law\u003c/em> and \u003cem>Cagney & Lacey\u003c/em> — but novels, especially mysteries, always tugged at him, and eventually he turned his back on a lucrative television career to write books full time. After that, he’s never looked back.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Crais’ 18 books, three stand-alone novels and 15 in the Cole-Pike series, have made him financially comfortable — and kind of famous. After all, not many \u003cem>New York Times\u003c/em> best-selling authors can say they’ve had a pizza named after them. Down the street from the canals, in the cafe at Small World Books, where dishes are named for famous writers, waitress Rachel Hanak lists the ingredients of the Robert Crais Pizza: salami, garlic, pepperoni and mushrooms.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s really good,” she says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>‘465 Square Miles Of Insanity’\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In his car, driving up into the Hollywood Hills and Runyon Canyon, Crais points to the kind of house Elvis Cole lives in — a glass-front A-frame with a panoramic view of the Los Angeles Basin. He says he glimpsed a similar house when he first moved to LA, and it became something for him to aspire to.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“And, many years later, when I created Elvis Cole, I thought why not put him in a place that had meant so much to me? So I gave him an A-frame house,” Crais says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He also sends Cole and Pike on regular runs through the hills. From up here, the view of the city is stunning. Crais gazes fondly on the houses and apartments; the palm trees and the skyscrapers’ glass windows winking in the distance. LA can be a hard city, but it will always be home for Crais.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There’s the Hollywood sign; there’s Griffith Observatory; there’s the great, amazing Los Angeles Basin,” he says. “It’s 465 square miles of insanity and the best food on the planet.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s also a never-ending source of inspiration for one of modern crime’s most admired writers.\u003c/p>\n\u003chr>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003ch3>\u003ca name=\"sidebar\">\u003c/a> \u003cstrong>5 Things You Probably Don’t Know About Robert Crais:\u003c/strong>\u003c/h3>\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>1. He ran away to join the circus when he was a kid.\u003c/strong> He was 13 and his parents let him do it for the summer. He worked as the assistant to the human cannonball, but it didn’t last very long. After he discovered that the alleged explosion was actually an illusion, he decided the paying public needed to know they were being had. “He’s a fake! The human cannonball is a fake!” didn’t go over too well with the circus owners, so they returned Bobby to the bosom of his family. But his sense of justice and fair play lives on in the persona of Elvis Cole.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>2. He was almost an engineer\u003c/strong>, which would have been a tragedy for lovers of crime fiction. He was in the School of Engineering at Louisiana State University, but engineering wasn’t something he wanted to do. He wanted to write, so a semester short of graduation, he dropped out. “It did not go over well on the homefront,” Crais says, “as you can imagine.” Presumably, all is now forgiven.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>3. He doesn’t know what Elvis Cole or Joe Pike look like.\u003c/strong> “I can see their bodies; I can see their movement when I’m writing them, their arms, legs and so forth,” Crais says, “but their faces are always blurs. Probably if I saw their faces, I wouldn’t be able to write them. I don’t know why.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>4. And he doesn’t want you to, either.\u003c/strong> Crais says he wants his readers to feel free to imagine what Cole and Pike look like for themselves. It’s part of the pleasure of reading, he says: “I don’t do this alone, you know. It’s like a compact between the reader and the writer. Together, we create this experience.” That’s why he won’t ever sell his Cole-Pike novels to Hollywood — not for TV, not for movies. And there \u003cem>have\u003c/em> been several offers. (He does allow the stand-alones to be made, however: \u003cem>Hostage\u003c/em>, a thriller about a beaten-down police negotiator who is called in to try to free a terrorized family, starred Bruce Willis.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>5. He is \u003cem>not\u003c/em>, he insists, Elvis Cole\u003c/strong>. But they do share two important things: the aforementioned sense of justice and fair play, and an unfortunate affinity for some of the loudest, most colorful shirts ever sold. Crais says, “Elvis is not me; he’s his own person, and that’s important to remember. But I do happen to like really colorful shirts — OK, really loud prints. And I thought, ‘Hey, this is something that Elvis could have — my fashion sense.'” Yikes. You’d have to borrow Pike’s sunglasses to look at Crais. (Not sure how you’d take them off him, though. Crais guesses Pike has maybe removed his sunglasses four times in the whole 15-book series.) \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/\">http://www.npr.org/\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Robert+Crais%3A+L.A.+Is+%27Natural+Canvas%27+For+Nightmare&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAzOTIwODA0MDEyNTA4MTM1OTcyMGJmMA001)\">\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "From murder in the Venice canals to human trafficking in the desert, Los Angeles serves as the perfect setting for Robert Crais' noir novels, starring Elvis Cole and Joe Pike, two PIs who are desperately seeking normal — both for their clients and themselves.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>It’s been a few decades, and many published books, but Robert Crais can tell you exactly when mystery writing first caught his attention: He was a bright 15-year-old living in Baton Rouge, La., when he read Raymond Chandler’s \u003cem>The Little Sister\u003c/em>, which depicted the shady side of sunny Los Angeles through the eyes of private investigator Philip Marlowe.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Since then, Crais has found huge success with his own crime novels, also set in LA. The city is the perfect canvas for a modern mystery, and Crais’ eyes still grow wide when he talks about what Chandler painted on it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The way Chandler and his language portrayed Los Angeles, portrayed Philip Marlowe, lit me up the way no other fiction prior to that had,” he says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So it’s especially satisfying for Crais when critics describe him as one of Chandler’s natural descendants; but instead of the wryly laconic Marlowe, Crais’ protagonist is a smart-aleck investigator named Elvis Cole.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“In the very first book, \u003cem>The Monkey’s Raincoat\u003c/em>, I say this is not his birth name. He was actually named Philip James Cole, but his mother changed his name when he was 6 years old,” Crais says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After Cole’s single, party-girl mother had a blast at an Elvis Presley concert, she came home and legally changed his name to Elvis. Crais says the consequences of that have dogged his PI ever since.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“That instability in his early life is something that I thought important,” he says. “That’s one of the reasons he is the way he is. He’s trying to make sense out of the world; he’s trying to make sense of it for himself, and he transfers that to the people he works for.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cole’s partner and best friend is Joe Pike, essentially Cole’s opposite — as taciturn as Cole is glibly chatty. Cole dresses in colorful Hawaiian shirts, while Pike is black and gray. Cole seems open; Pike is purposefully inscrutable. Crais says Cole’s job is to restore normalcy to his clients’ lives, even as he knows it’s personally unattainable.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“He admires normal,” Crais says. “I think, in many ways, Joe Pike does, too. They’re trying to achieve balance and normalcy because they admire it, but they don’t know how to get there. That’s one of the reasons they’re so much fun for me to write.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>‘Potential For Horror And Nightmare’\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the mouth of the Venice canals, in LA’s Venice neighborhood, Crais points to large locks that control the flow of water into and out of the waterways. Dozens of these canals were built in the early 1900s in homage to the Italian city that is their namesake. Most were later paved over, but the remaining ones are expensive real estate, lined with colorful homes and fragrant gardens. Crais explains how the neighborhood, and its quirky engineering, played a role in his 2011 novel, \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/books/titles/158998352/the-sentry\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">The Sentry\u003c/a>\u003cem>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“My notion, of course, in the book was that if there were a body floating in the canals, as the canal drained, it would go downstream and be caught in the locks,” he says. “And that’s one of the devices I used.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Walking along the paths that line the canals, Crais notes how tranquil the neighborhood is: Egrets fish in the reeds at the water’s edge and the quiet is only disturbed by an occasional bark. It’s a good place for things to go wrong.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s a natural canvas,” Crais says. “You know, where there is peace and when there is tranquility, there’s always the potential for horror and nightmare.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>‘Chasing That Dream Of A Better Life’\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Crais’ most recent book, \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/books/titles/146269606/taken\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Taken\u003c/a>, is set all over the city and out in the desert. It focuses on human trafficking, which Crais says flourishes in LA because of how the city draws all kinds of people with hopes of reinvention.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“People come to LA because they’re chasing that dream of a better life,” he says. “That’s why I came here, because I thought it would be a place where I would find other people like me; people who wanted to write, people who had a dream of being something else. And that proved to be true.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Crais has prospered in LA. He was so certain that writing would be his life that he dropped out of Louisiana State University a semester short of graduation, packed his car and drove to Hollywood. His ear for dialogue got him work on television scripts in the ’70s and ’80s — he’s written for \u003cem>Hill Street Blues\u003c/em>, \u003cem>L.A. Law\u003c/em> and \u003cem>Cagney & Lacey\u003c/em> — but novels, especially mysteries, always tugged at him, and eventually he turned his back on a lucrative television career to write books full time. After that, he’s never looked back.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Crais’ 18 books, three stand-alone novels and 15 in the Cole-Pike series, have made him financially comfortable — and kind of famous. After all, not many \u003cem>New York Times\u003c/em> best-selling authors can say they’ve had a pizza named after them. Down the street from the canals, in the cafe at Small World Books, where dishes are named for famous writers, waitress Rachel Hanak lists the ingredients of the Robert Crais Pizza: salami, garlic, pepperoni and mushrooms.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s really good,” she says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>‘465 Square Miles Of Insanity’\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In his car, driving up into the Hollywood Hills and Runyon Canyon, Crais points to the kind of house Elvis Cole lives in — a glass-front A-frame with a panoramic view of the Los Angeles Basin. He says he glimpsed a similar house when he first moved to LA, and it became something for him to aspire to.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“And, many years later, when I created Elvis Cole, I thought why not put him in a place that had meant so much to me? So I gave him an A-frame house,” Crais says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He also sends Cole and Pike on regular runs through the hills. From up here, the view of the city is stunning. Crais gazes fondly on the houses and apartments; the palm trees and the skyscrapers’ glass windows winking in the distance. LA can be a hard city, but it will always be home for Crais.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There’s the Hollywood sign; there’s Griffith Observatory; there’s the great, amazing Los Angeles Basin,” he says. “It’s 465 square miles of insanity and the best food on the planet.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s also a never-ending source of inspiration for one of modern crime’s most admired writers.\u003c/p>\n\u003chr>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003ch3>\u003ca name=\"sidebar\">\u003c/a> \u003cstrong>5 Things You Probably Don’t Know About Robert Crais:\u003c/strong>\u003c/h3>\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>1. He ran away to join the circus when he was a kid.\u003c/strong> He was 13 and his parents let him do it for the summer. He worked as the assistant to the human cannonball, but it didn’t last very long. After he discovered that the alleged explosion was actually an illusion, he decided the paying public needed to know they were being had. “He’s a fake! The human cannonball is a fake!” didn’t go over too well with the circus owners, so they returned Bobby to the bosom of his family. But his sense of justice and fair play lives on in the persona of Elvis Cole.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>2. He was almost an engineer\u003c/strong>, which would have been a tragedy for lovers of crime fiction. He was in the School of Engineering at Louisiana State University, but engineering wasn’t something he wanted to do. He wanted to write, so a semester short of graduation, he dropped out. “It did not go over well on the homefront,” Crais says, “as you can imagine.” Presumably, all is now forgiven.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>3. He doesn’t know what Elvis Cole or Joe Pike look like.\u003c/strong> “I can see their bodies; I can see their movement when I’m writing them, their arms, legs and so forth,” Crais says, “but their faces are always blurs. Probably if I saw their faces, I wouldn’t be able to write them. I don’t know why.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>4. And he doesn’t want you to, either.\u003c/strong> Crais says he wants his readers to feel free to imagine what Cole and Pike look like for themselves. It’s part of the pleasure of reading, he says: “I don’t do this alone, you know. It’s like a compact between the reader and the writer. Together, we create this experience.” That’s why he won’t ever sell his Cole-Pike novels to Hollywood — not for TV, not for movies. And there \u003cem>have\u003c/em> been several offers. (He does allow the stand-alones to be made, however: \u003cem>Hostage\u003c/em>, a thriller about a beaten-down police negotiator who is called in to try to free a terrorized family, starred Bruce Willis.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>5. He is \u003cem>not\u003c/em>, he insists, Elvis Cole\u003c/strong>. But they do share two important things: the aforementioned sense of justice and fair play, and an unfortunate affinity for some of the loudest, most colorful shirts ever sold. Crais says, “Elvis is not me; he’s his own person, and that’s important to remember. But I do happen to like really colorful shirts — OK, really loud prints. And I thought, ‘Hey, this is something that Elvis could have — my fashion sense.'” Yikes. You’d have to borrow Pike’s sunglasses to look at Crais. (Not sure how you’d take them off him, though. Crais guesses Pike has maybe removed his sunglasses four times in the whole 15-book series.) \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/\">http://www.npr.org/\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Robert+Crais%3A+L.A.+Is+%27Natural+Canvas%27+For+Nightmare&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAzOTIwODA0MDEyNTA4MTM1OTcyMGJmMA001)\">\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "A 'Man On A Ledge,' With No Room For A Stumble",
"headTitle": "A ‘Man On A Ledge,’ With No Room For A Stumble | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>It’s an arresting image, Sam Worthington out on that 40th-story ledge. He’s a fairly tough-looking guy, after all, and we know him best as the tooth-gritting blockbuster hero of\u003cem> Avatar\u003c/em> and \u003cem>Clash of the Titans\u003c/em>, so it’s head-spinning to see the man’s beefy figure as a speck hovering so precariously close to New York’s infinite sky.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The camera swirls around Worthington’s disgraced former cop Nick Cassidy, inching out past that thin strip of architecture, then back in. What if he trips, or jumps? For a while, anything seems possible, and it’s both exhilarating and terrifying.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Then the wool comes off, and it’s clear that director Asger Leth and screenwriter Pablo Fenjves have ambitions considerably less grand than their protagonist’s perch. Cassidy’s ledge game — with all the studio-unfriendly moral ambiguities it entails — is just a con, a photo op for the crowds, and Nick’s apparent desire to exit the material world is a front. What he truly, passionately wants to do is steal some jewelry.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As Nick, from way up high, barks instructions into a microphone, we watch a diamond heist play out inside a metallic gray high-security complex. Well, “high-security”: This is the sort of Hollywood vault designed for easy criminal access, where everything is Fort Knox-level secure except the air vents, and where the entire computer system comes undone with the snipping of a single red wire.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Nick’s brother (Jamie Bell) and his barely dressed girlfriend (Genesis Rodriguez) are pulling the heist on his nemesis, a snarly real-estate mogul (Ed Harris, enjoying himself) who framed Nick into a life sentence he’s currently on the run from. But just in case Nick’s justified revenge plot has created the illusion of importance, Bell and Rodriguez re-affirm the plan’s frivolity by bickering and squabbling about their relationship the entire time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Elizabeth Banks, projecting a sort of exasperated allure as Nick’s negotiator, brings a level of gravity to the situation not felt by anyone else, including Nick. Her character’s backstory — the last guy she tried to talk off a bridge ignored her and jumped into the great beyond — is intriguingly messy, but since we know far earlier than we should that Nick’s not planning anything life-threatening, this detail is wasted. With miscues like this, the film aims for Hitchcock and gets a bit turned around; we’re\u003cem> The Audience That Knew Too Much\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Director Leth comes from an esteemed filmmaking family — his father is Jorgen Leth, the renowned experimentalist best known for his 1967 short \u003cem>The Perfect Human\u003c/em>. And he knows his way around a scene, as evidenced by the film’s dizzying ledge work. All this helps explain why the film’s descent into generic silliness feels more painful than it should for a late-January thriller.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s not to say \u003cem>Man on a Ledge\u003c/em> is completely bereft of entertainment value or invention. It’s always fun to see TV reporters depicted as attention-crazed sociopaths, and Kyra Sedgwick fits that bill nicely. Harris, too, is great fun in a tailored suit and an I-am-the-1-percent smirk. And there’s an endearing quality to Nick’s brashness, the way he uses his platform to captivate a growing crowd of admirers. Maybe that’s the grandest way to go: proclaiming your existence to the heavens by bellowing, “I am an innocent man!”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For those who remember Joel Schumacher’s \u003cem>Phone Booth\u003c/em>, an eerie, economical 2003 thriller set entirely in and around Colin Farrell’s public glass prison, it’s hard not to wonder what \u003cem>Man on a Ledge\u003c/em> could have been with just a little more restraint. Both films place men in extraordinary predicaments under the public eye, but \u003cem>Phone Booth\u003c/em> demonstrated faith in the power of both claustrophobia and the slow reveal. The twitchy \u003cem>Ledge\u003c/em> can’t wait to open up its scope, but it loses its footing in the process — and Nick didn’t start with too much room to stand. Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/\">http://www.npr.org/\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "A convicted ex-cop with a hidden agenda (Sam Worthington) steps out onto a Manhattan high-rise ledge. Critic Andrew Lapin says the film's intriguing premise and daring visuals devolve into generic heist-movie silliness.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>It’s an arresting image, Sam Worthington out on that 40th-story ledge. He’s a fairly tough-looking guy, after all, and we know him best as the tooth-gritting blockbuster hero of\u003cem> Avatar\u003c/em> and \u003cem>Clash of the Titans\u003c/em>, so it’s head-spinning to see the man’s beefy figure as a speck hovering so precariously close to New York’s infinite sky.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The camera swirls around Worthington’s disgraced former cop Nick Cassidy, inching out past that thin strip of architecture, then back in. What if he trips, or jumps? For a while, anything seems possible, and it’s both exhilarating and terrifying.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Then the wool comes off, and it’s clear that director Asger Leth and screenwriter Pablo Fenjves have ambitions considerably less grand than their protagonist’s perch. Cassidy’s ledge game — with all the studio-unfriendly moral ambiguities it entails — is just a con, a photo op for the crowds, and Nick’s apparent desire to exit the material world is a front. What he truly, passionately wants to do is steal some jewelry.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As Nick, from way up high, barks instructions into a microphone, we watch a diamond heist play out inside a metallic gray high-security complex. Well, “high-security”: This is the sort of Hollywood vault designed for easy criminal access, where everything is Fort Knox-level secure except the air vents, and where the entire computer system comes undone with the snipping of a single red wire.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Nick’s brother (Jamie Bell) and his barely dressed girlfriend (Genesis Rodriguez) are pulling the heist on his nemesis, a snarly real-estate mogul (Ed Harris, enjoying himself) who framed Nick into a life sentence he’s currently on the run from. But just in case Nick’s justified revenge plot has created the illusion of importance, Bell and Rodriguez re-affirm the plan’s frivolity by bickering and squabbling about their relationship the entire time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Elizabeth Banks, projecting a sort of exasperated allure as Nick’s negotiator, brings a level of gravity to the situation not felt by anyone else, including Nick. Her character’s backstory — the last guy she tried to talk off a bridge ignored her and jumped into the great beyond — is intriguingly messy, but since we know far earlier than we should that Nick’s not planning anything life-threatening, this detail is wasted. With miscues like this, the film aims for Hitchcock and gets a bit turned around; we’re\u003cem> The Audience That Knew Too Much\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Director Leth comes from an esteemed filmmaking family — his father is Jorgen Leth, the renowned experimentalist best known for his 1967 short \u003cem>The Perfect Human\u003c/em>. And he knows his way around a scene, as evidenced by the film’s dizzying ledge work. All this helps explain why the film’s descent into generic silliness feels more painful than it should for a late-January thriller.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s not to say \u003cem>Man on a Ledge\u003c/em> is completely bereft of entertainment value or invention. It’s always fun to see TV reporters depicted as attention-crazed sociopaths, and Kyra Sedgwick fits that bill nicely. Harris, too, is great fun in a tailored suit and an I-am-the-1-percent smirk. And there’s an endearing quality to Nick’s brashness, the way he uses his platform to captivate a growing crowd of admirers. Maybe that’s the grandest way to go: proclaiming your existence to the heavens by bellowing, “I am an innocent man!”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For those who remember Joel Schumacher’s \u003cem>Phone Booth\u003c/em>, an eerie, economical 2003 thriller set entirely in and around Colin Farrell’s public glass prison, it’s hard not to wonder what \u003cem>Man on a Ledge\u003c/em> could have been with just a little more restraint. Both films place men in extraordinary predicaments under the public eye, but \u003cem>Phone Booth\u003c/em> demonstrated faith in the power of both claustrophobia and the slow reveal. The twitchy \u003cem>Ledge\u003c/em> can’t wait to open up its scope, but it loses its footing in the process — and Nick didn’t start with too much room to stand. Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/\">http://www.npr.org/\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"soldout": {
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"title": "SOLD OUT: Rethinking Housing in America",
"tagline": "A new future for housing",
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