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"content": "\u003cp>Right off the bat, yes the title is brilliant: It both makes me laugh and makes me feel like a right ponce (because I DID love school! And I DO love work!). Welsh’s breakout novel \u003cb>Trainspotting\u003c/b> holds a dear place in my heart. The way Welsh used various levels of Scottish dialect for different characters, in places it was like a foreign language, forced you to slow down and feel the sound of the words in your mouth. Only Anthony Burgess in \u003cb>A Clockwork Orange\u003c/b> has done a better job of rendering the contents of a drugged-up young man’s mind as vicious and beautiful poetry. \u003cb>Trainspotting\u003c/b>, and the hit movie spawned from it, made Irvine Welsh rich and famous. He spends a lot of time here in the Bay Area: I once spied him at a party at the Bambuddha Lounge, where every time I glanced at him he was scribbling on a slip of paper — signing autographs, he was — for anyone who asked, all night long. If you’re an Edinburgh Castle regular, you may have also seen him give a reading there, and if you’re like me you may have just nodded and laughed at random intervals because ye didnae ken a feckin word but ye hud a grand oul piss-up ennywey, ha hoor sor.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What I’m trying to say is that I’ve always had generally positive feelings toward oul’ Irvine, and when I picked up \u003cb>If You Liked School, You’ll Love Work\u003c/b>, I was genuinely insulted by what a bloody mess it is. Containing four short stories (including the title story) and one long novella entitled “The Kingdom Of Fife,” the book is about as nuanced as a terrible dirty joke. I say this as someone who is not reflexively offended by stuff. I thought \u003cb>Borat\u003c/b> was a brilliant film, for example, and I differ with fellow KQED blogger Paula Rogers, who found the work of \u003ca href=\"http://www.kqed.org/arts/lit/index.jsp?id=15120\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\"> underground comics god R. Crumb\u003c/a> to be upsettingly misogynist and racist. So Irvine Welsh had an extremely high bar to cross for me to say this: the stories in this book are almost across-the-board misogynist, and in places, racist as well. But more offensive to me is the fact that they are lazy, unfunny, and poorly written.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The collection kicks off with “Rattlesnakes.” Three San Francisco residents on their way back from Burning Man get stranded in the Nevada desert. The protagonist, Eugene, is a third wheel, tagging along with his friend Scott and lusting after Scott’s girlfriend Madeline. Out of gas and camping on the roadside, Eugene gets bit by a rattlesnake, in a very unfortunate spot. (Guess where! Just GUESS.) A tussle ensues over which half of the horrified couple gets to suck the poison out, and just when it seems like it couldn’t get much wackier, folks, they’re set upon by Mexican highway bandits. Despite a career of making fascinating anti-heroes out of Scottish street toughs, Welsh opts to depict these guys with a level of compassionate nuance not seen since the Frito Bandito: “–Two faggots and a dirty leetal lady, Alejandro said evenly, his features creasing up in malice.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The D.O.G.S. of Lincoln Park” takes place in Chicago and centers on a group of backstabbing, careerist female friends. They are the “D.O.G.S.” of the title: “Desperate obsessive girl snobs.” One of them loses her papillon, Toto, and turns to her neighbor for help. Her neighbor happens to be a Korean chef with a penchant for wielding knives. “…blade very very sharp. Can easy sever four inches of bamboo.” Consider this for a moment: A menacing asian swordsman chef… a missing dog — if you’re thinking, oh please god, he couldn’t possibly be going THERE — you’d be wrong. It ends with an allegedly humorous twist, but still: lazy, dumb, bad. Like a bloody and X-rated version of \u003cb>Alfred Hitchcock Presents\u003c/b>, the stories all set up a ridiculous situation and then solve it with an even more ridiculous twist at the end.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Female characters in this book fall into two general categories. There’s the skinny, bitchy, sexy but insane coke-fueled harpy, and there’s the fat, pathetic, lonely, disgusting old harridan. In the latter category is the title character of “Miss Arizona,” a faded beauty queen once married to a film director, desperate for attention from a young biographer who comes to ask questions. A cross between \u003cb>Sunset Boulevard\u003c/b> and \u003cb>Psycho\u003c/b>, it keeps all the plot holes of both and the clever writing of neither. “The Kingdom Of Fife” has a little bit more to recommend it, perhaps because Welsh is back on home turf. What had seemed like a pitch-perfect ear for dialogue turns sour outside the reaches of Scotland: his American characters all talk slightly wrong. The final, longest story takes place in Cowdenbeath, a town in Fife, Scotland, and concerns various characters surrounding the horse tracks and stables there. A burnout ex-jockey lusts after a pair of pretty young show jumpers, and one of them, Jenni, slowly cottons on to the fact that her tatooed gruff old dad is a major player in local organized crime. But even this one story has plenty of groaningly ridiculous plot elements, and Welsh’s trademark dialect writing feels like a party trick.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I’m bewildered. The guy is on the masthead of \u003cb>Tin House\u003c/b>. Is literary credibility something we can revoke? Is there a license we can pull? I guess not. I haven’t read any Irvine Welsh books since \u003cb>Trainspotting\u003c/b>, so maybe this decline has been ongoing. Maybe he just decided that there was no money in crafting literature, especially if your core readership are the same guys who made \u003cb>Jackass\u003c/b> number one at the box office. Or perhaps Welsh was pressed to deliver the second in a two-book deal? His last novel \u003cb>Bedroom Secrets Of Master Chefs\u003c/b> just came out in paperback, and this followup is coming right on its heels. In the afterword, Irvine Welsh thanks his screenwriting partner for “providing me with the space to complete these stories, at a period when demands on our time were particularly high.” Bingo. Maybe someday he’ll have time to compose another masterpiece. Meanwhile, this outing is for the hardcore fans only. To misquote Dylan Thomas’s assessment of Flann O’Brien: this is just the book to give your brother, if he is a loud, dirty, boozy boy. But he’s just about the only one who’ll enjoy it.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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He spends a lot of time here in the Bay Area: I once spied him at a party at the Bambuddha Lounge, where every time I glanced at him he was scribbling on a slip of paper — signing autographs, he was — for anyone who asked, all night long. If you’re an Edinburgh Castle regular, you may have also seen him give a reading there, and if you’re like me you may have just nodded and laughed at random intervals because ye didnae ken a feckin word but ye hud a grand oul piss-up ennywey, ha hoor sor.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What I’m trying to say is that I’ve always had generally positive feelings toward oul’ Irvine, and when I picked up \u003cb>If You Liked School, You’ll Love Work\u003c/b>, I was genuinely insulted by what a bloody mess it is. Containing four short stories (including the title story) and one long novella entitled “The Kingdom Of Fife,” the book is about as nuanced as a terrible dirty joke. I say this as someone who is not reflexively offended by stuff. I thought \u003cb>Borat\u003c/b> was a brilliant film, for example, and I differ with fellow KQED blogger Paula Rogers, who found the work of \u003ca href=\"http://www.kqed.org/arts/lit/index.jsp?id=15120\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\"> underground comics god R. Crumb\u003c/a> to be upsettingly misogynist and racist. So Irvine Welsh had an extremely high bar to cross for me to say this: the stories in this book are almost across-the-board misogynist, and in places, racist as well. But more offensive to me is the fact that they are lazy, unfunny, and poorly written.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The collection kicks off with “Rattlesnakes.” Three San Francisco residents on their way back from Burning Man get stranded in the Nevada desert. The protagonist, Eugene, is a third wheel, tagging along with his friend Scott and lusting after Scott’s girlfriend Madeline. Out of gas and camping on the roadside, Eugene gets bit by a rattlesnake, in a very unfortunate spot. (Guess where! Just GUESS.) 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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I’m bewildered. The guy is on the masthead of \u003cb>Tin House\u003c/b>. Is literary credibility something we can revoke? Is there a license we can pull? I guess not. I haven’t read any Irvine Welsh books since \u003cb>Trainspotting\u003c/b>, so maybe this decline has been ongoing. Maybe he just decided that there was no money in crafting literature, especially if your core readership are the same guys who made \u003cb>Jackass\u003c/b> number one at the box office. Or perhaps Welsh was pressed to deliver the second in a two-book deal? His last novel \u003cb>Bedroom Secrets Of Master Chefs\u003c/b> just came out in paperback, and this followup is coming right on its heels. In the afterword, Irvine Welsh thanks his screenwriting partner for “providing me with the space to complete these stories, at a period when demands on our time were particularly high.” Bingo. Maybe someday he’ll have time to compose another masterpiece. Meanwhile, this outing is for the hardcore fans only. To misquote Dylan Thomas’s assessment of Flann O’Brien: this is just the book to give your brother, if he is a loud, dirty, boozy boy. But he’s just about the only one who’ll enjoy it.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Kiara Brinkman: Up High in the Trees",
"headTitle": "Kiara Brinkman: Up High in the Trees | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>Sebastian Lane is 7 years old and everyone keeps asking him if he’s okay. His mother used to ask, and now it’s his sister Cass, his dad, his teacher Mrs. Lambert, constantly asking. When not asking, they’re telling him that everything is going to be all right. It’s supposed to seem comforting, maybe, but young Sebby doesn’t seem to notice or care whether things are all right or not. He’s a little kid, a strange one at that, and his mom is dead. She’s been hit and killed by car. How could it possibly be helpful for any adult to ask him if he’s okay?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Up High In The Trees\u003c/b> is a debut novel by San Francisco teacher and writer Kiara Brinkman, and Grove/Atlantic appears to be putting some serious marketing budget behind it. Check any of your favorite mommy blogs over the last couple weeks and it’ll be there, in the AdSense sidebar. I had some trepidation about reading it, actually. Everything that I knew about the plot can be summed up in four words: Autistic Kid, Dead Mom. Ever since Mark Haddon’s \u003cb>Curious Incident of the Dog In The Night-Time\u003c/b>, narrated by an autistic teenager, books narrated by fictional or actual people on the autism spectrum have become a bit of a publishing fad. Especially beloved are savants that have abilites that appear magical to boring neurotypicals like you and me (Daniel Tammet, author of \u003cb>Born On A Blue Day\u003c/b> , can allegedly recite pi to 22,514 places). These books lead us to believe that men with Asperger’s are always doing calculus, and women with autism are wordlessly communing with animals (like Temple Grandin does with livestock, or Dawn Prince-Hughes with gorillas). Going in, I wondered, is this book going to be painfully precious? As I’ve remarked before, novels in the Women’s Weepie vein tend to traffic in issues that almost automatically make you burst into tears before you finish the first page. Did Kiara manage to write a whole Autistic-Kid-Dead-Mom book without making it so every reader wants to crawl into the cupboard under the sink?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Miraculously, yes. But not for the reasons I’d imagined. She managed it because her novel isn’t an Autistic Kid book. It wasn’t until three-quarters of the way through the book that I noticed something. Never once does she say that Sebby is autistic. It’s in the ads, on the jacket and in the reviews, but it’s not ever stated in her book. It’s fiction, for God’s sake, it doesn’t need to be. Sebby is certainly odd, dislocated from his place and time. Hence the title: “up high in the trees” is where Sebby’s mom told him he lived before he was born. And he’s still there, floating above, looking down. Does he have autism? Who cares? I’m a reader, not a doctor, I’m not in the business of diagnosis. Giving Sebby a convenient label takes away a great deal of the beauty and mystery from an otherworldly creation. It dumbs down what turned out to be a very beautiful and deeply strange little book. He’s certainly odd, but no odder than anyone else in the story.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If Sebby has some sort of diagnosed cognitive issue going on, he himself is not aware of it. He crawls into small, dark, comforting spaces, and is yelled at to “stop hiding.” In school, he just falls asleep. Blessedly, he doesn’t do math or do any horse-whispering. \u003cb>Up High In The Trees\u003c/b> is entirely filtered through Sebby’s skewed perspective, in short vignettes, usually less than a page long. As a result, the plot is fragmented, he sees and recounts things that don’t make a whole lot of sense. His mother has been hit and killed by a car under ambiguous circumstances. His father pulls Sebby out of school and holes up with him in the family’s mountain cabin. Sebby’s two older siblings, Cass and Leo, stay home. Alone with Sebby, Dad begins to completely unravel. Here’s a favorite scene of the Lane family attempting to interact in some kind of normal fashion:\u003cbr>“I’m having a Beatles party, [Dad] says.\u003cbr>What? Leo asks. \u003cbr>A Beatles party, says Dad. I’m playing all the songs in order. Some songs I have to listen to more than once, he says, because they’re too good. \u003cbr>In order of the American release or the UK release? Leo asks. He wipes his nose with the back of his hand.\u003cbr>American, dad says.\u003cbr>Oh, Leo says and walks away.\u003cbr>It’s Thanksgiving, Cass tells Dad.”\u003cbr>The “Beatles party” Thanksgiving continues for 16 straight hours. The Lane kids wonder aloud if someone should make a turkey, but decide against it. Would YOU be able to tell which member of this family is allegedly the “autistic” one, given the way they all behave? Suspend some disbelief, folks! It’s fiction. Strange behavior does not have to be explained away in a novel, if it serves a purpose.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Brinkman uses no quotation marks when characters speak, which contributes to the dislocated, underwater feeling. Sebby imagines incidents from his mother’s life, things that happened when he wasn’t there or wasn’t born. These might be stories he’s been told, or he’s inventing them, or maybe he really is “up high in the trees,” traveling through his mother’s past, watching them happen: “At the end of the pier, Mother dropped her favorite thing. It was an owl carved out of pink soap. She dropped the pink owl in the water to see if she would jump in to save it and she did.” Such an emotionally complex, symbolically rich sentence, I don’t even want to attempt to unpack it. The book is full of those. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Up High In The Trees\u003c/b> takes place in 1992. There are passing references to world events, to Clinton’s election and other things. It appears, though, that the main reason for anchoring the narrative in that year is that it establishes the parents as baby boomers, and gives Brinkman a reason to weave a ’60s soundtrack through the novel that you can practically hear. Music is being listened to, or discussed, constantly. The aforementioned Beatles, the Mamas and the Papas, the Beach Boys: Brinkman never quotes the lyrics directly but gets Sebby to mention them in a sideways fashion that lets you identify the songs. In one particularly moving passage, Sebby comes upon his father singing the lyrics of Van Morrison’s “Cypress Avenue” at the top of his lungs. “The words get stuck in Dad’s head and then he has to let them out. This has happened before… Dad says the words about cherry wine. His head is rocking and his hand bangs against his chest with each word.” Whether we’re looking at a man wracked by grief, Asperger’s, drunkenness, or mental illness, Brinkman leaves in the eye of the beholder. Sebby doesn’t have words for any of these things, and so neither do we.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One good thing that could come out of this book being marketed as part of the current autism fad is that it will attract readers who would never have otherwise picked it up. Tricked into thinking they’re reading popular fiction, they will instead find a fairly audacious, difficult, small literary masterpiece. If you allow Sebby Lane to transport you up high in the trees, you will be altered by the experience.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Sebastian Lane is 7 years old and everyone keeps asking him if he’s okay. His mother used to ask, and now it’s his sister Cass, his dad, his teacher Mrs. Lambert, constantly asking. When not asking, they’re telling him that everything is going to be all right. It’s supposed to seem comforting, maybe, but young Sebby doesn’t seem to notice or care whether things are all right or not. He’s a little kid, a strange one at that, and his mom is dead. She’s been hit and killed by car. How could it possibly be helpful for any adult to ask him if he’s okay?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Up High In The Trees\u003c/b> is a debut novel by San Francisco teacher and writer Kiara Brinkman, and Grove/Atlantic appears to be putting some serious marketing budget behind it. Check any of your favorite mommy blogs over the last couple weeks and it’ll be there, in the AdSense sidebar. I had some trepidation about reading it, actually. Everything that I knew about the plot can be summed up in four words: Autistic Kid, Dead Mom. Ever since Mark Haddon’s \u003cb>Curious Incident of the Dog In The Night-Time\u003c/b>, narrated by an autistic teenager, books narrated by fictional or actual people on the autism spectrum have become a bit of a publishing fad. Especially beloved are savants that have abilites that appear magical to boring neurotypicals like you and me (Daniel Tammet, author of \u003cb>Born On A Blue Day\u003c/b> , can allegedly recite pi to 22,514 places). These books lead us to believe that men with Asperger’s are always doing calculus, and women with autism are wordlessly communing with animals (like Temple Grandin does with livestock, or Dawn Prince-Hughes with gorillas). Going in, I wondered, is this book going to be painfully precious? As I’ve remarked before, novels in the Women’s Weepie vein tend to traffic in issues that almost automatically make you burst into tears before you finish the first page. Did Kiara manage to write a whole Autistic-Kid-Dead-Mom book without making it so every reader wants to crawl into the cupboard under the sink?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Miraculously, yes. But not for the reasons I’d imagined. She managed it because her novel isn’t an Autistic Kid book. It wasn’t until three-quarters of the way through the book that I noticed something. Never once does she say that Sebby is autistic. It’s in the ads, on the jacket and in the reviews, but it’s not ever stated in her book. It’s fiction, for God’s sake, it doesn’t need to be. Sebby is certainly odd, dislocated from his place and time. Hence the title: “up high in the trees” is where Sebby’s mom told him he lived before he was born. And he’s still there, floating above, looking down. Does he have autism? Who cares? I’m a reader, not a doctor, I’m not in the business of diagnosis. Giving Sebby a convenient label takes away a great deal of the beauty and mystery from an otherworldly creation. It dumbs down what turned out to be a very beautiful and deeply strange little book. He’s certainly odd, but no odder than anyone else in the story.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If Sebby has some sort of diagnosed cognitive issue going on, he himself is not aware of it. He crawls into small, dark, comforting spaces, and is yelled at to “stop hiding.” In school, he just falls asleep. Blessedly, he doesn’t do math or do any horse-whispering. \u003cb>Up High In The Trees\u003c/b> is entirely filtered through Sebby’s skewed perspective, in short vignettes, usually less than a page long. As a result, the plot is fragmented, he sees and recounts things that don’t make a whole lot of sense. His mother has been hit and killed by a car under ambiguous circumstances. His father pulls Sebby out of school and holes up with him in the family’s mountain cabin. Sebby’s two older siblings, Cass and Leo, stay home. Alone with Sebby, Dad begins to completely unravel. Here’s a favorite scene of the Lane family attempting to interact in some kind of normal fashion:\u003cbr>“I’m having a Beatles party, [Dad] says.\u003cbr>What? Leo asks. \u003cbr>A Beatles party, says Dad. I’m playing all the songs in order. Some songs I have to listen to more than once, he says, because they’re too good. \u003cbr>In order of the American release or the UK release? Leo asks. He wipes his nose with the back of his hand.\u003cbr>American, dad says.\u003cbr>Oh, Leo says and walks away.\u003cbr>It’s Thanksgiving, Cass tells Dad.”\u003cbr>The “Beatles party” Thanksgiving continues for 16 straight hours. The Lane kids wonder aloud if someone should make a turkey, but decide against it. Would YOU be able to tell which member of this family is allegedly the “autistic” one, given the way they all behave? Suspend some disbelief, folks! It’s fiction. Strange behavior does not have to be explained away in a novel, if it serves a purpose.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Brinkman uses no quotation marks when characters speak, which contributes to the dislocated, underwater feeling. Sebby imagines incidents from his mother’s life, things that happened when he wasn’t there or wasn’t born. These might be stories he’s been told, or he’s inventing them, or maybe he really is “up high in the trees,” traveling through his mother’s past, watching them happen: “At the end of the pier, Mother dropped her favorite thing. It was an owl carved out of pink soap. She dropped the pink owl in the water to see if she would jump in to save it and she did.” Such an emotionally complex, symbolically rich sentence, I don’t even want to attempt to unpack it. The book is full of those. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Up High In The Trees\u003c/b> takes place in 1992. There are passing references to world events, to Clinton’s election and other things. It appears, though, that the main reason for anchoring the narrative in that year is that it establishes the parents as baby boomers, and gives Brinkman a reason to weave a ’60s soundtrack through the novel that you can practically hear. Music is being listened to, or discussed, constantly. The aforementioned Beatles, the Mamas and the Papas, the Beach Boys: Brinkman never quotes the lyrics directly but gets Sebby to mention them in a sideways fashion that lets you identify the songs. In one particularly moving passage, Sebby comes upon his father singing the lyrics of Van Morrison’s “Cypress Avenue” at the top of his lungs. “The words get stuck in Dad’s head and then he has to let them out. This has happened before… Dad says the words about cherry wine. His head is rocking and his hand bangs against his chest with each word.” Whether we’re looking at a man wracked by grief, Asperger’s, drunkenness, or mental illness, Brinkman leaves in the eye of the beholder. Sebby doesn’t have words for any of these things, and so neither do we.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One good thing that could come out of this book being marketed as part of the current autism fad is that it will attract readers who would never have otherwise picked it up. Tricked into thinking they’re reading popular fiction, they will instead find a fairly audacious, difficult, small literary masterpiece. If you allow Sebby Lane to transport you up high in the trees, you will be altered by the experience.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "52nd Venice Biennale (Part Two)",
"headTitle": "52nd Venice Biennale (Part Two) | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>For most residents of Europe and North America, the nineteenth century has become a hazy memory. The colonial wars that devastated large swaths of Africa and drained European treasuries have now become romanticized, the terror and violence aestheticized à la Isak Dinesen’s \u003cb>Out of Africa\u003c/b> (albeit the Hollywood version, complete with teak camp chairs and billowing white muslin dresses). A quick survey of \u003cb>Check List Luanda Pop\u003c/b> at the 52nd Venice Biennale, however, brings the recent past back in visceral ways. For those living in the Third World, the nineteenth century remains close. (\u003ca href=\"http://www.kqed.org/arts/visualarts/index.jsp?id=18020\">See Part One of this post\u003c/a>.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In contrast, the major First World players seemed intent upon eliding history. The American, British, and French pavilions featured artists — \u003ca href=\"http://www.sophiecalle.net/\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">Sophie Calle\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/gallery/2007/jun/07/emin?picture=329989763\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">Tracey Emin\u003c/a>, and \u003ca href=\"http://www.queerculturalcenter.org/Pages/FelixGT/FelixIndex.html\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">Felix Gonzalez-Torres\u003c/a> — whose oeuvres are largely lyric in nature. For each of these artists, art rises from personal experience. The curators of these pavilions have refused to truly engage history on any meaningful level, choosing instead to go the formal and lyric route, because that route cleaves closest to safety.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gonzalez-Torres was, in many ways, a bold choice. Gonzalez-Torres was openly gay, and several of the pieces in the American pavilion were created after Gonzalez-Torres’s lover died from AIDS-related complications. In the late 1980s and early ’90s, when Gonzalez-Torres first began exhibiting his “endless stacks” and candy pieces, the work was considered highly subversive, even aggressive. (One of Gonzalez-Torres’s candy pieces, a memorial to his lover, invites viewers to taste his vanished lover’s sweetness.) Almost fifteen years have passed between Gonzalez-Torres’s death (in 1994) and the 52nd Biennale. In those intervening years, Gonzalez-Torres entered the American canon. The work was powerful then partly because it crossed so many lines, because it introduced an interiority, and an experience, still taboo in mainstream America.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Yet the viewer feels little of this in the American pavilion. There, the Gonzalez-Torres installation largely feels formal. Nancy Spector (of the Guggenheim Museum in New York City) mounted an elegant installation of the artist’s work. There are a few “political” works, such as Gonzalez-Torres’s “endless stack” of offset prints reading “Veteran’s Day Sale,” or \u003cb>Untitled (Public Opinion, or Everybody has One)\u003c/b>, a candy piece featuring cellophane-wrapped licorice candies. There are also a number of abstract pieces, such as Gonzalez-Torres’s light-bulb sculptures, that read — in the American pavilion’s elegant context — as beautiful and “bourgeois.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://www.kqed.org/arts/images/blog/venice-5.jpg\" border=\"0\" style=\"float:right;margin-left: 5px;margin-bottom: 5px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Consider \u003ca href=\"http://www.ndmoa.com/PastEx/Disappeared/OscarMunoz/index.html\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">Oscar Muñoz’s\u003c/a> video installation \u003cb>Proyecto de Memorial (Memorial Project)\u003c/b> (2004-2005), as a foil to Gonzalez-Torre’s lyric engagement. Muñoz filmed himself painting the faces of those who “disappeared” during Colombia’s drug wars. We see the artist’s fingers, grasping a paintbrush. Our focus remains directed towards the individual faces. Absorbed by the act of painting, we watch each face flesh out and develop into an individual. Muñoz paints these miniature portraits with water, on grey stone. The images evaporate within seconds, leaving behind a piece of blank stone. Savvy viewers with a long memory might recall the United States’ messy involvement in Colombia and several other Latin American countries. Muñoz tells a story that has largely been suppressed. He chooses not grief’s private language, but memorial’s public idiom.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Like lyric poetry, the works in the French and British pavilions represent formal (and aestheticized) iterations of subjective (and often deeply private) experiences. I found it surprising to walk into the British pavilion and find Tracey Emin’s erotic sketches. The experience is a bit like walking into an alternate universe where Sappho, and not Homer, is considered the “poet laureate” of ancient Greece. And yet it lacks some of the frisson and subversion implicit in that comment, for I do not believe that the choice to exhibit Emin came from a desire to subvert history in order to give us herstory. The personal is very often the political. In Gonzalez-Torres’s case, the personal is very, very political. Yet Gonzalez-Torres’s works are swamped by his fellow artists’ relentless focus on selfhood and subjectivity.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://www.kqed.org/arts/images/blog/venice-6.jpg\" border=\"0\" style=\"float:left;margin-right: 5px;margin-bottom: 5px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Rather, Tracey Emin and Sophie Calle take us back to bourgeois comfort, for the bourgeois world remains the kernel of these artists’ obsessions. Both Emin and Calle interrogate the rules, procedures, and languages that structure this world. Their installations, with their focus upon eroticism and desire (Emin’s installation features a series of erotic sketches, Calle’s installation takes a lover’s break-up letter as its point of departure), remain bound up in the bourgeois realm of pleasure and consumption.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There is, of course, a time and a place for such works, just as there is a time and a place for Sappho and for Homer. But next to those works that do reach out and address history, these works, with their myopic focus upon private transgressions and personal moments, read to me as “thin.” Each set of works (which we might crassly divide into the “private” and the “public,” those concerned with the nation, versus those concerned with the individual) takes up a very different type of discourse.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The structure of the Venice Biennale calls upon each pavilion to generate a national identity. It asks the artist to represent a nation. The art that goes on these walls, despite the artist’s best efforts, will be read in terms of the “nation.” Viewers expect these works to take part in national mythologies. Here, art comes to be identified with a collective (a society, a place, a nation). There is a sense that art is part and parcel of a broader community, and that cultural production should bear some responsibility for that community.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Perhaps the developed nations no longer feel the same urgency. For the developing nations, the stakes seem so much higher. The Biennale is a chance to fabricate a myth, to put up a front. It is an arena for new nations to try out identities and tell stories — in other words, it is a chance for new nations to play at power and agency, to take on things that developed nations already take for granted. The developed nations seem to turn away from history, while the emerging nations reach out to seize history with both hands. For the emerging nations, the old histories — the old concept of the nation and its attendant myths — have not yet lost their force.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In this context, the refusal to engage history raises a host of other questions. Why do curators choose to turn inwards and engage the private subject at this moment? What are we trying to evade? Why the lacuna? Why this silence? By circling in domesticity’s waters, the curators of the French and British pavilions avoid making overt political statements on behalf of their nations, but they also (perhaps inadvertently) give off an image of callousness and irresponsibility. They seem uninterested (or unwilling) to take part in the Biennale’s larger conversation.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "For most residents of Europe and North America, the nineteenth century has become a hazy memory. The colonial wars that devastated large swaths of Africa and drained European treasuries have now become romanticized, the terror and violence aestheticized à la Isak Dinesen's \u003cb>Out of Africa\u003c/b> (albeit the Hollywood version, complete with teak camp chairs and billowing white muslin dresses). A quick survey of \u003cb>Check List Luanda Pop\u003c/b> at the 52nd Venice Biennale, however, brings the recent past back in visceral ways. For those living in the Third World, the nineteenth century remains close. ",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>For most residents of Europe and North America, the nineteenth century has become a hazy memory. The colonial wars that devastated large swaths of Africa and drained European treasuries have now become romanticized, the terror and violence aestheticized à la Isak Dinesen’s \u003cb>Out of Africa\u003c/b> (albeit the Hollywood version, complete with teak camp chairs and billowing white muslin dresses). A quick survey of \u003cb>Check List Luanda Pop\u003c/b> at the 52nd Venice Biennale, however, brings the recent past back in visceral ways. For those living in the Third World, the nineteenth century remains close. (\u003ca href=\"http://www.kqed.org/arts/visualarts/index.jsp?id=18020\">See Part One of this post\u003c/a>.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In contrast, the major First World players seemed intent upon eliding history. The American, British, and French pavilions featured artists — \u003ca href=\"http://www.sophiecalle.net/\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">Sophie Calle\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/gallery/2007/jun/07/emin?picture=329989763\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">Tracey Emin\u003c/a>, and \u003ca href=\"http://www.queerculturalcenter.org/Pages/FelixGT/FelixIndex.html\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">Felix Gonzalez-Torres\u003c/a> — whose oeuvres are largely lyric in nature. For each of these artists, art rises from personal experience. The curators of these pavilions have refused to truly engage history on any meaningful level, choosing instead to go the formal and lyric route, because that route cleaves closest to safety.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gonzalez-Torres was, in many ways, a bold choice. Gonzalez-Torres was openly gay, and several of the pieces in the American pavilion were created after Gonzalez-Torres’s lover died from AIDS-related complications. In the late 1980s and early ’90s, when Gonzalez-Torres first began exhibiting his “endless stacks” and candy pieces, the work was considered highly subversive, even aggressive. (One of Gonzalez-Torres’s candy pieces, a memorial to his lover, invites viewers to taste his vanished lover’s sweetness.) Almost fifteen years have passed between Gonzalez-Torres’s death (in 1994) and the 52nd Biennale. In those intervening years, Gonzalez-Torres entered the American canon. The work was powerful then partly because it crossed so many lines, because it introduced an interiority, and an experience, still taboo in mainstream America.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Yet the viewer feels little of this in the American pavilion. There, the Gonzalez-Torres installation largely feels formal. Nancy Spector (of the Guggenheim Museum in New York City) mounted an elegant installation of the artist’s work. There are a few “political” works, such as Gonzalez-Torres’s “endless stack” of offset prints reading “Veteran’s Day Sale,” or \u003cb>Untitled (Public Opinion, or Everybody has One)\u003c/b>, a candy piece featuring cellophane-wrapped licorice candies. There are also a number of abstract pieces, such as Gonzalez-Torres’s light-bulb sculptures, that read — in the American pavilion’s elegant context — as beautiful and “bourgeois.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://www.kqed.org/arts/images/blog/venice-5.jpg\" border=\"0\" style=\"float:right;margin-left: 5px;margin-bottom: 5px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Consider \u003ca href=\"http://www.ndmoa.com/PastEx/Disappeared/OscarMunoz/index.html\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">Oscar Muñoz’s\u003c/a> video installation \u003cb>Proyecto de Memorial (Memorial Project)\u003c/b> (2004-2005), as a foil to Gonzalez-Torre’s lyric engagement. Muñoz filmed himself painting the faces of those who “disappeared” during Colombia’s drug wars. We see the artist’s fingers, grasping a paintbrush. Our focus remains directed towards the individual faces. Absorbed by the act of painting, we watch each face flesh out and develop into an individual. Muñoz paints these miniature portraits with water, on grey stone. The images evaporate within seconds, leaving behind a piece of blank stone. Savvy viewers with a long memory might recall the United States’ messy involvement in Colombia and several other Latin American countries. Muñoz tells a story that has largely been suppressed. He chooses not grief’s private language, but memorial’s public idiom.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Like lyric poetry, the works in the French and British pavilions represent formal (and aestheticized) iterations of subjective (and often deeply private) experiences. I found it surprising to walk into the British pavilion and find Tracey Emin’s erotic sketches. The experience is a bit like walking into an alternate universe where Sappho, and not Homer, is considered the “poet laureate” of ancient Greece. And yet it lacks some of the frisson and subversion implicit in that comment, for I do not believe that the choice to exhibit Emin came from a desire to subvert history in order to give us herstory. The personal is very often the political. In Gonzalez-Torres’s case, the personal is very, very political. Yet Gonzalez-Torres’s works are swamped by his fellow artists’ relentless focus on selfhood and subjectivity.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://www.kqed.org/arts/images/blog/venice-6.jpg\" border=\"0\" style=\"float:left;margin-right: 5px;margin-bottom: 5px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Rather, Tracey Emin and Sophie Calle take us back to bourgeois comfort, for the bourgeois world remains the kernel of these artists’ obsessions. Both Emin and Calle interrogate the rules, procedures, and languages that structure this world. Their installations, with their focus upon eroticism and desire (Emin’s installation features a series of erotic sketches, Calle’s installation takes a lover’s break-up letter as its point of departure), remain bound up in the bourgeois realm of pleasure and consumption.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There is, of course, a time and a place for such works, just as there is a time and a place for Sappho and for Homer. But next to those works that do reach out and address history, these works, with their myopic focus upon private transgressions and personal moments, read to me as “thin.” Each set of works (which we might crassly divide into the “private” and the “public,” those concerned with the nation, versus those concerned with the individual) takes up a very different type of discourse.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The structure of the Venice Biennale calls upon each pavilion to generate a national identity. It asks the artist to represent a nation. The art that goes on these walls, despite the artist’s best efforts, will be read in terms of the “nation.” Viewers expect these works to take part in national mythologies. Here, art comes to be identified with a collective (a society, a place, a nation). There is a sense that art is part and parcel of a broader community, and that cultural production should bear some responsibility for that community.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Perhaps the developed nations no longer feel the same urgency. For the developing nations, the stakes seem so much higher. The Biennale is a chance to fabricate a myth, to put up a front. It is an arena for new nations to try out identities and tell stories — in other words, it is a chance for new nations to play at power and agency, to take on things that developed nations already take for granted. The developed nations seem to turn away from history, while the emerging nations reach out to seize history with both hands. For the emerging nations, the old histories — the old concept of the nation and its attendant myths — have not yet lost their force.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In this context, the refusal to engage history raises a host of other questions. Why do curators choose to turn inwards and engage the private subject at this moment? What are we trying to evade? Why the lacuna? Why this silence? By circling in domesticity’s waters, the curators of the French and British pavilions avoid making overt political statements on behalf of their nations, but they also (perhaps inadvertently) give off an image of callousness and irresponsibility. They seem uninterested (or unwilling) to take part in the Biennale’s larger conversation.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Austin Grossman: Soon I Will Be Invincible",
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"content": "\u003cp>A while ago, a friend introduced me to the concept of Mr. Exposition Man. Mr. Exposition man is a superhero with only one power — the ability to summarize backstory at blinding speed. Mr. Exposition Man can appear at any time and take on the guise of any character: wherever there is a sloppily plotted film, comic book, or novel, wherever a bad guy has struck and the local officials are baffled and an author didn’t feel like taking the time to set up the scene, someone will say, “Who would do such a thing?” At this signal, Mr. Exposition Man will step out of a shadowy corner, saying, “It all started back in 1987…”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Mr. Exposition Man’s magical appearance relieves the need to do the hard work of foreshadowing, character development, or smooth transitions. That’s why he appears so often in the sorts of films that spend fifty times more on special effects as they do on a screenwriter. When I picked up Austin Grossman’s new novel \u003cb>Soon I Will Be Invincible\u003c/b>, a more literary treatment of a world peopled with superheroes and arch-nemeses, I was hoping that Grossman would not feel the need to employ Mr. Exposition Man’s services. Grossman is well known in the world of video game design, as well as a PhD candidate in English Lit at UC Berkeley. He also happens to be the twin brother of sci-fi novelist and Time Magazine book critic Lev Grossman. The Grossman twins are both Harvard grads, and all of this is the kind of stuff that has book jacket copy writers at major houses salivating.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Austin Grossman knows his stuff. He has clearly spent a lifetime steeped in comic book lore and his superhero knowledge is vast and encyclopedic. The novel’s premise is similar to that of Alan Moore’s classic \u003cb>Watchmen\u003c/b> or even to the pixar movie \u003cb>The Incredibles\u003c/b>. It takes place in a sort of counter-factual present day, in which a significant minority of humans have super powers, and this causes them no end of emotional, moral, and physical torment. “This morning on Planet Earth, there are one thousand six hundred and eighty-six enhanced, gifted, or otheriwise-powered persons,” the book opens. These members of the “powered community,” or “metahumans” as they prefer to be called, came by their abilities in myriad ways. “Once in a hundred million times, a lifetime of factors align, and at the right moment something new coalesces out of high-tech industrial waste, genetic predisposition, and willpower, with a dash of magic or alien invention,” one of our two narrators, Fatale, explains. “It started happening more often in the early 1950s, and no one knows why — nuclear power plants, alien contact, chlorinated water, or too many people dancing the Twist.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Grossman alternates the action between two narrators, one on the side of the forces of light and the other for the forces of darkness. Dr. Impossible, an angry narcissist with childhood problems, developed his abilities after being accidentally hit with a “zeta beam.” As the book opens he is being held in a special prison, a holding facility for captured supervillains — but being, of course, a supervillain means he escapes in short order. In the custody of two young, green interrogators, he makes quick work of them. “They can’t believe they’re interrogating me, the terror who held the Supersquadron at bay for over a decade. A guy who stood in the oval office and told the President of the United States to call him Emperor.” (anyone else feel the impulse to insert a Dick Cheney joke here?) “And now I’m inches away, chained… I see no reason why I should make this easy for them.” His archnemesis, the golden boy, American hero, unbeatably powerful CoreFire, has disappeared, and is maybe dead. Now, finally, Dr. Impossible believes, he will be unstoppable. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The rest of the chapters are narrated by Fatale, a fascinating, complex creation for whom being a “hero” is more a curse and burden than a gift. Fatale is half a woman wired and grafted inside a 400-pound, 6-foot-7-inch metal and elecronic body. She has no memory of who she was before half of her was sheared away by a bus and a stone wall in Sao Paolo, no life before the top-secret army “super soldier” program turned her into this cyborgian thing. When she is recruited to join a famous hero team called the Champions in order to fight the newly emboldened Dr. Impossible, she takes the job. How could she not? What else could she possibly do?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The natural pace of a superhero story is serial and open-ended. Room is always left for a new character to rise or an old enemy to re-emerge so that there will be a plot for the sequel or the next volume of the comic or the newer version of the Xbox game. In a stand-alone book, there’s only one way to fit in all that necessary information — Mr. Exposition Man, lecturing away at us. Many things about \u003cb>Soon I Will Be Invincible\u003c/b> are clever and entertaining. I love the chapter titles, each of which riffs on an old comic cliche: “Welcome To My Island,” “At Last We Meet,” and “But Before I Kill You” are a few of my favorites. An appendix in the back of the book is “Selections From the International Metahuman Database,” a list of the names and powers of various superheroes and baddies, many of whom are not in the book or who are just mentioned in passing. I get the feeling that inventing heroes is the fun part for Grossman. Choosing just a few and rendering them in three dimensions, however, is not his strongest suit.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If \u003cb>Soon I will Be Invincible\u003c/b> doesn’t succeed on all fronts, it’s not really Austin Grossman’s fault. It’s just that he chose to take on the unenviable task of using 1000 words to describe what should have been a picture, for 280 pages. IS there any way to write a (non-graphic) novel about superheroes and prevent it from reading like a transcript, a pale imitation of a Marvel series, an Xbox game, or a Hollywood blockbuster? Not even Mr. Exposition Man can answer that question.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>A while ago, a friend introduced me to the concept of Mr. Exposition Man. Mr. Exposition man is a superhero with only one power — the ability to summarize backstory at blinding speed. Mr. Exposition Man can appear at any time and take on the guise of any character: wherever there is a sloppily plotted film, comic book, or novel, wherever a bad guy has struck and the local officials are baffled and an author didn’t feel like taking the time to set up the scene, someone will say, “Who would do such a thing?” At this signal, Mr. Exposition Man will step out of a shadowy corner, saying, “It all started back in 1987…”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Mr. Exposition Man’s magical appearance relieves the need to do the hard work of foreshadowing, character development, or smooth transitions. That’s why he appears so often in the sorts of films that spend fifty times more on special effects as they do on a screenwriter. When I picked up Austin Grossman’s new novel \u003cb>Soon I Will Be Invincible\u003c/b>, a more literary treatment of a world peopled with superheroes and arch-nemeses, I was hoping that Grossman would not feel the need to employ Mr. Exposition Man’s services. Grossman is well known in the world of video game design, as well as a PhD candidate in English Lit at UC Berkeley. He also happens to be the twin brother of sci-fi novelist and Time Magazine book critic Lev Grossman. The Grossman twins are both Harvard grads, and all of this is the kind of stuff that has book jacket copy writers at major houses salivating.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Austin Grossman knows his stuff. He has clearly spent a lifetime steeped in comic book lore and his superhero knowledge is vast and encyclopedic. The novel’s premise is similar to that of Alan Moore’s classic \u003cb>Watchmen\u003c/b> or even to the pixar movie \u003cb>The Incredibles\u003c/b>. It takes place in a sort of counter-factual present day, in which a significant minority of humans have super powers, and this causes them no end of emotional, moral, and physical torment. “This morning on Planet Earth, there are one thousand six hundred and eighty-six enhanced, gifted, or otheriwise-powered persons,” the book opens. These members of the “powered community,” or “metahumans” as they prefer to be called, came by their abilities in myriad ways. “Once in a hundred million times, a lifetime of factors align, and at the right moment something new coalesces out of high-tech industrial waste, genetic predisposition, and willpower, with a dash of magic or alien invention,” one of our two narrators, Fatale, explains. “It started happening more often in the early 1950s, and no one knows why — nuclear power plants, alien contact, chlorinated water, or too many people dancing the Twist.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Grossman alternates the action between two narrators, one on the side of the forces of light and the other for the forces of darkness. Dr. Impossible, an angry narcissist with childhood problems, developed his abilities after being accidentally hit with a “zeta beam.” As the book opens he is being held in a special prison, a holding facility for captured supervillains — but being, of course, a supervillain means he escapes in short order. In the custody of two young, green interrogators, he makes quick work of them. “They can’t believe they’re interrogating me, the terror who held the Supersquadron at bay for over a decade. A guy who stood in the oval office and told the President of the United States to call him Emperor.” (anyone else feel the impulse to insert a Dick Cheney joke here?) “And now I’m inches away, chained… I see no reason why I should make this easy for them.” His archnemesis, the golden boy, American hero, unbeatably powerful CoreFire, has disappeared, and is maybe dead. Now, finally, Dr. Impossible believes, he will be unstoppable. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The rest of the chapters are narrated by Fatale, a fascinating, complex creation for whom being a “hero” is more a curse and burden than a gift. Fatale is half a woman wired and grafted inside a 400-pound, 6-foot-7-inch metal and elecronic body. She has no memory of who she was before half of her was sheared away by a bus and a stone wall in Sao Paolo, no life before the top-secret army “super soldier” program turned her into this cyborgian thing. When she is recruited to join a famous hero team called the Champions in order to fight the newly emboldened Dr. Impossible, she takes the job. How could she not? What else could she possibly do?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"title": "Armistead Maupin: Michael Tolliver Lives",
"headTitle": "Armistead Maupin: Michael Tolliver Lives | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>Back in the mid-1970s, a naïve, 20-something Mary Ann Singleton arrived in San Francisco for the first time. She immediately fell in love with the mystical beauty of the city and its ridiculously fascinating denizens. Making her new home at 28 Barbary Lane, Singleton’s life soon became intertwined with the building’s colorful tenants: the enigmatic Anna Madrigal, the womanizing Brian, and the sweet, sexy, hopelessly romantic gay guy, Michael Tolliver… So began life in the \u003cb>Tales of the City\u003c/b>, the mythical world created by one of San Francisco’s greatest literary heroes, Armistead Maupin.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Maupin began cranking out \u003cb>Tales of the City\u003c/b> as a column in the \u003ci>San Francisco Chronicle\u003c/i> in 1976. There were still a few hippies hanging around Golden Gate Park smoking pot, Safeway in the Marina was the place for straights to hook up, and the gay liberation movement was just beginning to make a home for itself in the Castro. There was no such thing as AIDS. It was perhaps one of the most exciting, hopeful times to be living in our city, and the tenants of Barbary Lane were in the thick of it all. Maupin’s extraordinary ability to merge local news, gossip and culture with the hilarious and sometimes heartbreaking adventures of Mary Ann and her friends deeply resonated with San Franciscans. Readers didn’t just identify with the \u003cb>Tales of the City\u003c/b> characters — they actually were the characters.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For those of us who didn’t arrive in San Francisco until long after Maupin’s column ceased to exist, we can only dream about what it was like to pick up the \u003ci>Chronicle\u003c/i> and “find ourselves” in \u003cb>Tales of the City\u003c/b>. However, with \u003cb>Michael Tolliver Lives\u003c/b>, Maupin has given Barbaryphiles (the nickname given to \u003cb>Tales\u003c/b> fans) some idea of what that experience must have been like.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Although Maupin says \u003cb>Michael Tolliver Lives\u003c/b> is not an addition to the six-book \u003cb>Tales of the City\u003c/b>series, there’s no doubt — thankfully — that is precisely what this book is. When we last checked in on the \u003cb>Tales\u003c/b> characters in 1989, Mary Ann’s former best friend Michael “Mouse,” having tested positive for HIV, was preparing for an early death. However, as the title implicitly states, Michael is alive and well, thanks to drug cocktails. And although he’s not a regular at the End Up anymore, with regular shots of testosterone and a Viagra prescription, he has an active sex life with a much younger boyfriend. Michael is clearly a character with which Maupin intimately identifies (Maupin, 62, is married to Christopher Turner, 35), and he lovingly writes from Tolliver’s first-person perspective.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Maupin recently stated, “I was interested in pursuing the life of an aging gay man, and Michael was the perfect vehicle… However, as soon as I started writing, I found that, one by one, all the other characters stepped forward and asked to be present. It felt natural, so I went with it.” Hooray! Brian is contemplating retirement, his daughter Shawna, now in her mid-20s, is an up-and-coming pansexual writer (a character who seems a lot like Michelle Tea) and Anna Madrigal is holding court in her new home somewhere around Duboce Triangle. Whether you’ve read the \u003cb>Tales\u003c/b> books numerous times, as seems to often be the case in this town, or haven’t thought about the inhabitants of Barbary Lane in the 18 years since \u003cb>Sure of You\u003c/b> hit shelves, it’s a genuine thrill to find out what’s been going on in the lives of these and all of Maupin’s other relentlessly loveable characters. Even if you’ve never read any of Armistead’s books, \u003cb>Michael Tolliver Lives\u003c/b> is still a fabulous read.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Much to the delight of his droves of fans, Maupin recently hinted that another book about the \u003cb>Tales\u003c/b> characters could be in the works, saying, “I’ve lived in that world for 30 years, even when I was writing non-\u003cb>Tales\u003c/b> books. Whatever I have to offer seems to come through those characters, and I see no reason to abandon them.” Armistead’s fans aren’t abandoning him either. I went to a Maupin book signing at Book Passage in the Ferry Building on the day \u003cb>Michael Tolliver Lives\u003c/b> was released. It was quite a scene, with throngs of old ladies, young men and everything in between. Apparently more people showed up for Maupin than did for Bill Clinton.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This book is Armistead at his very best. In this humble scribe’s opinion, there isn’t an author around that can, with so few words, capture the essence of a character like Maupin. And of course, as in all Maupin works (with the exception of \u003cb>Maybe the Moon\u003c/b>), our beloved city is perhaps his most important character of all. \u003cb>Michael Tolliver Lives\u003c/b> is a must-read not only for obsessive Barbary-philes like myself, but for anyone who has ever walked down Castro Street or gazed across the Bay from the Marin Headlands, and thought, “Yep, this is where I belong.”\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Back in the mid-1970s, a naïve, 20-something Mary Ann Singleton arrived in San Francisco for the first time. She immediately fell in love with the mystical beauty of the city and its ridiculously fascinating denizens. Making her new home at 28 Barbary Lane, Singleton’s life soon became intertwined with the building’s colorful tenants: the enigmatic Anna Madrigal, the womanizing Brian, and the sweet, sexy, hopelessly romantic gay guy, Michael Tolliver… So began life in the \u003cb>Tales of the City\u003c/b>, the mythical world created by one of San Francisco’s greatest literary heroes, Armistead Maupin.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Maupin began cranking out \u003cb>Tales of the City\u003c/b> as a column in the \u003ci>San Francisco Chronicle\u003c/i> in 1976. There were still a few hippies hanging around Golden Gate Park smoking pot, Safeway in the Marina was the place for straights to hook up, and the gay liberation movement was just beginning to make a home for itself in the Castro. There was no such thing as AIDS. It was perhaps one of the most exciting, hopeful times to be living in our city, and the tenants of Barbary Lane were in the thick of it all. Maupin’s extraordinary ability to merge local news, gossip and culture with the hilarious and sometimes heartbreaking adventures of Mary Ann and her friends deeply resonated with San Franciscans. Readers didn’t just identify with the \u003cb>Tales of the City\u003c/b> characters — they actually were the characters.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For those of us who didn’t arrive in San Francisco until long after Maupin’s column ceased to exist, we can only dream about what it was like to pick up the \u003ci>Chronicle\u003c/i> and “find ourselves” in \u003cb>Tales of the City\u003c/b>. However, with \u003cb>Michael Tolliver Lives\u003c/b>, Maupin has given Barbaryphiles (the nickname given to \u003cb>Tales\u003c/b> fans) some idea of what that experience must have been like.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Although Maupin says \u003cb>Michael Tolliver Lives\u003c/b> is not an addition to the six-book \u003cb>Tales of the City\u003c/b>series, there’s no doubt — thankfully — that is precisely what this book is. When we last checked in on the \u003cb>Tales\u003c/b> characters in 1989, Mary Ann’s former best friend Michael “Mouse,” having tested positive for HIV, was preparing for an early death. However, as the title implicitly states, Michael is alive and well, thanks to drug cocktails. And although he’s not a regular at the End Up anymore, with regular shots of testosterone and a Viagra prescription, he has an active sex life with a much younger boyfriend. Michael is clearly a character with which Maupin intimately identifies (Maupin, 62, is married to Christopher Turner, 35), and he lovingly writes from Tolliver’s first-person perspective.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Maupin recently stated, “I was interested in pursuing the life of an aging gay man, and Michael was the perfect vehicle… However, as soon as I started writing, I found that, one by one, all the other characters stepped forward and asked to be present. It felt natural, so I went with it.” Hooray! Brian is contemplating retirement, his daughter Shawna, now in her mid-20s, is an up-and-coming pansexual writer (a character who seems a lot like Michelle Tea) and Anna Madrigal is holding court in her new home somewhere around Duboce Triangle. Whether you’ve read the \u003cb>Tales\u003c/b> books numerous times, as seems to often be the case in this town, or haven’t thought about the inhabitants of Barbary Lane in the 18 years since \u003cb>Sure of You\u003c/b> hit shelves, it’s a genuine thrill to find out what’s been going on in the lives of these and all of Maupin’s other relentlessly loveable characters. Even if you’ve never read any of Armistead’s books, \u003cb>Michael Tolliver Lives\u003c/b> is still a fabulous read.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Much to the delight of his droves of fans, Maupin recently hinted that another book about the \u003cb>Tales\u003c/b> characters could be in the works, saying, “I’ve lived in that world for 30 years, even when I was writing non-\u003cb>Tales\u003c/b> books. Whatever I have to offer seems to come through those characters, and I see no reason to abandon them.” Armistead’s fans aren’t abandoning him either. I went to a Maupin book signing at Book Passage in the Ferry Building on the day \u003cb>Michael Tolliver Lives\u003c/b> was released. It was quite a scene, with throngs of old ladies, young men and everything in between. Apparently more people showed up for Maupin than did for Bill Clinton.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This book is Armistead at his very best. In this humble scribe’s opinion, there isn’t an author around that can, with so few words, capture the essence of a character like Maupin. And of course, as in all Maupin works (with the exception of \u003cb>Maybe the Moon\u003c/b>), our beloved city is perhaps his most important character of all. \u003cb>Michael Tolliver Lives\u003c/b> is a must-read not only for obsessive Barbary-philes like myself, but for anyone who has ever walked down Castro Street or gazed across the Bay from the Marin Headlands, and thought, “Yep, this is where I belong.”\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Jack Pendarvis: Your Body Is Changing",
"headTitle": "Jack Pendarvis: Your Body Is Changing | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>During my college years I interned at various litmags, sorting through slush piles in search of gold. I must have read hundreds of stories, and skimmed several hundred more. One of the very few that affected me deeply was called “The Pipe.” It involved a security guard and a paramedic, hired to watch over a pipe sticking out of the ground. Six feet beneath the pipe is a radio DJ, attempting to break some sort of record for being buried alive, a la David Blaine. The paramedic and guard are there in case the DJ rings his distress bell and wants to come up. But the bell never rings, and so the two men have plenty of time to get stoned and drunk, have sex with transsexual women in the back of the ambulance, trade insults, and attempt to poison each other. Things go so far off the deep end that you start to wonder, what if the DJ’s distress bell isn’t hooked up properly, and he’s been ringing it all this time? Is there even a DJ buried down there at all? And if there is, wouldn’t he be dead by now?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The story somehow combined laugh-out-loud hilarity and existential terror, an ingenious cross between \u003cb>No Exit\u003c/b> and \u003cb>Waiting for Godot\u003c/b>. I raved about it to the editors of the magazine I was reading for at the time, but for some unfathomable reason they took a pass. I forgot the author’s name, but never forgot the story. Fast forward five years or so: I pick up Jack Pendarvis’ first story collection, \u003cb>The Mysterious Secret of the Valuable Treasure\u003c/b>. There it is: “The Pipe.” I almost drop the book.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Less than a year after the paperback release of \u003cb>Mysterious Secret\u003c/b>, Pendarvis follows it up this month with \u003cb>Your Body Is Changing\u003c/b>, a selection of several short pieces and one longish novella that, in its best moments, proves Pendarvis to be capable of brilliant po-mo social satire in the tradition of Kurt Vonnegut, or George Saunders (who provides some glowing blurbage).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The universe inhabited by Pendarvis’ characters closely resembles our own, except with the mechanisms that serve to regulate normal human behavior strangely absent. Everyone in his stories, whether they know it or not, is utterly, floridly, unabashedly, batshit insane. Pendarvis has a tremendous gift for rendering the mindless niceties of colloquial speech. The characters speak, and you are lulled into thinking this is a normal person talking, saying the kind of thing you’ve heard a million times before, until the camera pulls back and what you thought you saw is something completely else.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Here’s a quote from an ad exec being interviewed in “Courageous Blast: The Legacy of America’s Most Radical Gum:” “There’s a lot of talk right now about courage and whatnot, but whenever I’m pressed for a definition I just say, take a look at It Better Be Gum.” What is “It Better Be Gum?” A mystery substance that causes horrible diarrhea and permanent gastrointestinal damage (or, in the words of the ad exec, a “sea change in the way Americans engage with gum as a recreational snack.”) A huge fan of the product explains that he didn’t realize the terrible burning and the hours on the john were caused by his favorite gum. “I just thought there was something wrong with me.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The problem with \u003cb>Your Body Is Changing\u003c/b> is the same problem that most story collections have — unevenness. The title novella takes up about half the length of the book, and alongside it are seven brief pieces, some only a page or two long. Some of them appeared originally online, and they are as insubstantial as cotton candy. Some lean a bit too heavily on the cheap shot and the one-note gag.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The title novella, though, is terrific and too short. I wish Jack Pendarvis had jettisoned the filler and expanded “Your Body Is Changing” to novel length, so we could spend more time with Henry Gill, a fourteen-year-old Alabama resident, committed fundamentalist Christian, and guilt-wracked seeker of truth, whose deep religious conviction co-mingles with his sweaty-palmed, feverish sexual fantasies. Its opening paragraph is an image so startling and singular that I have to quote the whole thing:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Henry and his mother returned from Wednesday-night prayer meeting to find an enormous owl eating sausage biscuits out of a torn sack on the kitchen counter. When they walked in the door, the owl turned its head all the way around on its neck and looked over at them just as calm as could be, and it was holding a biscuit in one set of talons like a man eating half a sandwich.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp> If you say you’re not physically compelled to keep reading after an opening like that, you’re a liar.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Henry is abandoned by his mother early on, and literally stumbles into the dark woods, like Dante at the start of the Divine Comedy. Henry meets people who test and challenge his faith, and he does battle against his private urges, with limited success. He has a favorite book called “Your Body Is Changing: a Christian Teen’s Guide to Sexuality” which has taught him that “Masturbation is a perfectly normal urge that happens to everyone on the planet and it must be avoided at all costs.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He finds shelter with a family of “secular humanists” headed by a pathetic college professor, a red-stater’s worst nightmare of pompous coastal intelligentsia. “I would pay a million dollars to a person who could show me a prayer that accomplished even as much as one miniscule droplet of gasoline,” he says. Henry is horrified. “These people probably wish they were in France right now,” Henry thinks, “making fun of the President and going number two on the American flag.” He spends a lot of time fantasizing about Hollywood actresses, imagining how he would save their doomed souls and also get to second base.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp> Henry eventually finds Brother Lampey, a preacher, builder of scarecrows, goat owner and “outsider artist” (another wonderfully batshit Pendarvis original) who takes him under his (foul-smelling, unwashed) wing. After many misadventures, Henry finds a path out of the dark woods of his soul, in a most surprising fashion.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jack Pendarvis has a unique voice and vision. He holds up a distorted funhouse mirror to post-millenial America, and will make you think as much as he will make you laugh — and by the time you get to the end of the book, no pieties (neither Fundamentalist Christian nor Secular Humanist) will be left intact.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>During my college years I interned at various litmags, sorting through slush piles in search of gold. I must have read hundreds of stories, and skimmed several hundred more. One of the very few that affected me deeply was called “The Pipe.” It involved a security guard and a paramedic, hired to watch over a pipe sticking out of the ground. Six feet beneath the pipe is a radio DJ, attempting to break some sort of record for being buried alive, a la David Blaine. The paramedic and guard are there in case the DJ rings his distress bell and wants to come up. But the bell never rings, and so the two men have plenty of time to get stoned and drunk, have sex with transsexual women in the back of the ambulance, trade insults, and attempt to poison each other. Things go so far off the deep end that you start to wonder, what if the DJ’s distress bell isn’t hooked up properly, and he’s been ringing it all this time? Is there even a DJ buried down there at all? And if there is, wouldn’t he be dead by now?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The story somehow combined laugh-out-loud hilarity and existential terror, an ingenious cross between \u003cb>No Exit\u003c/b> and \u003cb>Waiting for Godot\u003c/b>. I raved about it to the editors of the magazine I was reading for at the time, but for some unfathomable reason they took a pass. I forgot the author’s name, but never forgot the story. Fast forward five years or so: I pick up Jack Pendarvis’ first story collection, \u003cb>The Mysterious Secret of the Valuable Treasure\u003c/b>. There it is: “The Pipe.” I almost drop the book.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Less than a year after the paperback release of \u003cb>Mysterious Secret\u003c/b>, Pendarvis follows it up this month with \u003cb>Your Body Is Changing\u003c/b>, a selection of several short pieces and one longish novella that, in its best moments, proves Pendarvis to be capable of brilliant po-mo social satire in the tradition of Kurt Vonnegut, or George Saunders (who provides some glowing blurbage).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The universe inhabited by Pendarvis’ characters closely resembles our own, except with the mechanisms that serve to regulate normal human behavior strangely absent. Everyone in his stories, whether they know it or not, is utterly, floridly, unabashedly, batshit insane. Pendarvis has a tremendous gift for rendering the mindless niceties of colloquial speech. The characters speak, and you are lulled into thinking this is a normal person talking, saying the kind of thing you’ve heard a million times before, until the camera pulls back and what you thought you saw is something completely else.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Here’s a quote from an ad exec being interviewed in “Courageous Blast: The Legacy of America’s Most Radical Gum:” “There’s a lot of talk right now about courage and whatnot, but whenever I’m pressed for a definition I just say, take a look at It Better Be Gum.” What is “It Better Be Gum?” A mystery substance that causes horrible diarrhea and permanent gastrointestinal damage (or, in the words of the ad exec, a “sea change in the way Americans engage with gum as a recreational snack.”) A huge fan of the product explains that he didn’t realize the terrible burning and the hours on the john were caused by his favorite gum. “I just thought there was something wrong with me.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The problem with \u003cb>Your Body Is Changing\u003c/b> is the same problem that most story collections have — unevenness. The title novella takes up about half the length of the book, and alongside it are seven brief pieces, some only a page or two long. Some of them appeared originally online, and they are as insubstantial as cotton candy. Some lean a bit too heavily on the cheap shot and the one-note gag.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The title novella, though, is terrific and too short. I wish Jack Pendarvis had jettisoned the filler and expanded “Your Body Is Changing” to novel length, so we could spend more time with Henry Gill, a fourteen-year-old Alabama resident, committed fundamentalist Christian, and guilt-wracked seeker of truth, whose deep religious conviction co-mingles with his sweaty-palmed, feverish sexual fantasies. Its opening paragraph is an image so startling and singular that I have to quote the whole thing:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Henry and his mother returned from Wednesday-night prayer meeting to find an enormous owl eating sausage biscuits out of a torn sack on the kitchen counter. When they walked in the door, the owl turned its head all the way around on its neck and looked over at them just as calm as could be, and it was holding a biscuit in one set of talons like a man eating half a sandwich.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp> If you say you’re not physically compelled to keep reading after an opening like that, you’re a liar.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Henry is abandoned by his mother early on, and literally stumbles into the dark woods, like Dante at the start of the Divine Comedy. Henry meets people who test and challenge his faith, and he does battle against his private urges, with limited success. He has a favorite book called “Your Body Is Changing: a Christian Teen’s Guide to Sexuality” which has taught him that “Masturbation is a perfectly normal urge that happens to everyone on the planet and it must be avoided at all costs.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He finds shelter with a family of “secular humanists” headed by a pathetic college professor, a red-stater’s worst nightmare of pompous coastal intelligentsia. “I would pay a million dollars to a person who could show me a prayer that accomplished even as much as one miniscule droplet of gasoline,” he says. Henry is horrified. “These people probably wish they were in France right now,” Henry thinks, “making fun of the President and going number two on the American flag.” He spends a lot of time fantasizing about Hollywood actresses, imagining how he would save their doomed souls and also get to second base.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp> Henry eventually finds Brother Lampey, a preacher, builder of scarecrows, goat owner and “outsider artist” (another wonderfully batshit Pendarvis original) who takes him under his (foul-smelling, unwashed) wing. After many misadventures, Henry finds a path out of the dark woods of his soul, in a most surprising fashion.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jack Pendarvis has a unique voice and vision. He holds up a distorted funhouse mirror to post-millenial America, and will make you think as much as he will make you laugh — and by the time you get to the end of the book, no pieties (neither Fundamentalist Christian nor Secular Humanist) will be left intact.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Joan Didion once wrote, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” I agree. Little kids love to hear violent fairy tales of children lost in the woods, to remind themselves just how safe and cozy in bed they are. It’s a way to vicariously experience, and maybe somehow prevent, the most horrific aspects of human misfortune. That need doesn’t go away with the onset of adulthood. Otherwise there wouldn’t be such huge markets for books about murderers, deadly mountaineering accidents, or soul-crushing child abuse. None of those things happen in \u003cb>The Descendants\u003c/b>, a first novel from local author Kaui Hart Hemmings. The tragedies are a bit more subtle and a lot more commonplace. And they even happen in the insulated world of old-money Hawaii, so protected from the kind of problems that most people have. The fact that tragedy strikes, even in this place, makes it all the more terrifying.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>We tell ourselves stories in order to live, and Hemmings’ story takes on a few truths that we’d really rather not face, but often have to: Sometimes, a person in the prime of life will have an accident that leaves her gravely injured. Sometimes, a person will cheat on his or her spouse, even if they desperately love and need each other. Sometimes, though it’s no one’s fault, little girls will have to grow up in the world without their mother. It’s the stuff of nightmares, yet I’d be willing to bet that scores of women across America will be packing \u003cb>The Descendants\u003c/b> into their luggage to read this summer on Hawaiian beach vacations. Laying on chaises in the sun, reading about a family falling to pieces, they will look up at their own kids and spouses frolicking in the surf, and they will take a deep breath and appreciate for a moment how safe and cozy they are. That’s why we read about tragedy — to ward it off.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Hemmings’ novel (expanded from her prizewinning short story, “The Minor Wars”, which appeared in her story collection \u003cb>House Of Thieves\u003c/b>) has plot elements that are fairly similar to those of any number of other works in the much maligned “Women’s Fiction” genre. Parents fight with kids, spouses fight with each other, tragedy visits itself upon the unsuspecting. It doesn’t matter: novelty is not why you read a book like this, anyway. You read it to hear how a new singer reinterprets an old standard, and Kaui Hart Hemmings sings it beautifully.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Matt King, the book’s narrator, a lawyer, describes his situation like this: “I have inheritance issues. I belong to one of those Hawaii families that make money off of luck and dead people.” Descended from a Hawaiian princess who married a wealthy white land speculator, it’s now fallen to Matt to dissolve the family trust. He has the largest number of voting shares, and because of this, his vote will be the only one that counts when they meet to decide which time-share condo or shopping mall developer wins the bid for the family’s vast and valuable land holdings. But, Matt’s wife Joanie — a gorgeous, wild island girl, a former model with a taste for partying and fast boats — is lying in a deep coma. She was launched from a cigarette boat during a race and nearly drowned. Her condition keeps getting worse, and Matt is forced to abide by the conditions of her living will. He will have to withdraw life support, stop feeding her, and let her pass away.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Matt pulls his daughters out of school, so they have time to say goodbye. 10-year-old Scottie, tough and at times disturbingly adult, inherited her mother’s penchant for chasing danger. After an incident in which Scottie hurts herself at the beach in order to get a boy to rescue her, Matt remarks that it’s exactly the kind of thing her mother would have done: “Joanie WOULD think that story was hilarious. I think of her while we were dating. She loved creating dramas that involved men, pain, sex.” Matt’s older daughter Alexandra, 17, has taken on her mother’s beauty and her party-girl lifestyle. When we first encounter her in the book, she’s drunk on her boarding school’s soccer field. Alex lets her father in on a secret she’d kept with her mother: at the time of the accident, Joanie had been carrying on a passionate affair. Matt has a lot of questions, and sets about answering them before Joanie dies: who is he? Did he love her? Does he deserve a chance to say goodbye?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What prevents all of this from falling down the treacle well is Matt’s funny, real, exasperated voice. he simply cannot believe that all of this is happening to him, and he’s dealing as best he can. Describing Troy, Joanie’s friend who was piloting her boat when the accident happened, he says “Troy is so slow. His great-grandfather invented the shopping cart, and this has left little for Troy to do except sleep with lots of women and put my wife in a coma.” At times, Matt’s daughters seem to him like strangers, a foreign invading alien species. He asks the housekeeper what they do, and what they like, studying up like you would for an exam. Other times, he talks to them like you’d talk to any adult confidante, confessing everything, no matter how personal or upsetting. Alex is a full accomplice in Matt’s effort to find and confront Joanie’s lover. These are not things a child psychologist would suggest to help get your kids through grief.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Matt is as clueless and adrift as anyone would be when thrust into such a situation, but especially so for someone who seemed destined for a life of sun, sand, and leisure. The immensity of what’s about to happen dawns on him slowly. “I need to remember to feed the children. I need to make sure they wash and brush their teeth and go to doctors…They need to say ‘yes’, not ‘yeah,’ to put their napkins in their laps, to chew gum with closed mouths. I need more time.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The phrase “Minor Wars,” from which Hemmings’ original short story took its title, comes from Matt’s nickname for the Portuguese man-of-war, a kind of stinging jellyfish. “I called them minor wars because they were like tiny soldiers with impressive weapons–the gaseous bubble, the whiplike tail, the toxic tentacles–advancing in swarms.” It’s too bad that Hemmings didn’t keep her original title, because it’s such a wonderfully evocative phrase, and so perfect for Matt’s situation. One “minor war” wouldn’t kill you. But a whole swarm might make you wish you were dead. Matt doesn’t cave, though, he soldiers on, he figures things out, he loves his daughters, he needs and relies on them. They deal with their tragedies in the real, messy, messed-up way that real people do. An impressive achievement, \u003cb>The Descendants\u003c/b> is hopefully just the first in a long line of solid, enjoyable, smart yet beach-readable novels from Kaui Hart Hemmings. After all, we still need more stories in order to live.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Joan Didion once wrote, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” I agree. Little kids love to hear violent fairy tales of children lost in the woods, to remind themselves just how safe and cozy in bed they are. It’s a way to vicariously experience, and maybe somehow prevent, the most horrific aspects of human misfortune. That need doesn’t go away with the onset of adulthood. Otherwise there wouldn’t be such huge markets for books about murderers, deadly mountaineering accidents, or soul-crushing child abuse. None of those things happen in \u003cb>The Descendants\u003c/b>, a first novel from local author Kaui Hart Hemmings. The tragedies are a bit more subtle and a lot more commonplace. And they even happen in the insulated world of old-money Hawaii, so protected from the kind of problems that most people have. The fact that tragedy strikes, even in this place, makes it all the more terrifying.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>We tell ourselves stories in order to live, and Hemmings’ story takes on a few truths that we’d really rather not face, but often have to: Sometimes, a person in the prime of life will have an accident that leaves her gravely injured. Sometimes, a person will cheat on his or her spouse, even if they desperately love and need each other. Sometimes, though it’s no one’s fault, little girls will have to grow up in the world without their mother. It’s the stuff of nightmares, yet I’d be willing to bet that scores of women across America will be packing \u003cb>The Descendants\u003c/b> into their luggage to read this summer on Hawaiian beach vacations. Laying on chaises in the sun, reading about a family falling to pieces, they will look up at their own kids and spouses frolicking in the surf, and they will take a deep breath and appreciate for a moment how safe and cozy they are. That’s why we read about tragedy — to ward it off.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Hemmings’ novel (expanded from her prizewinning short story, “The Minor Wars”, which appeared in her story collection \u003cb>House Of Thieves\u003c/b>) has plot elements that are fairly similar to those of any number of other works in the much maligned “Women’s Fiction” genre. Parents fight with kids, spouses fight with each other, tragedy visits itself upon the unsuspecting. It doesn’t matter: novelty is not why you read a book like this, anyway. You read it to hear how a new singer reinterprets an old standard, and Kaui Hart Hemmings sings it beautifully.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Matt King, the book’s narrator, a lawyer, describes his situation like this: “I have inheritance issues. I belong to one of those Hawaii families that make money off of luck and dead people.” Descended from a Hawaiian princess who married a wealthy white land speculator, it’s now fallen to Matt to dissolve the family trust. He has the largest number of voting shares, and because of this, his vote will be the only one that counts when they meet to decide which time-share condo or shopping mall developer wins the bid for the family’s vast and valuable land holdings. But, Matt’s wife Joanie — a gorgeous, wild island girl, a former model with a taste for partying and fast boats — is lying in a deep coma. She was launched from a cigarette boat during a race and nearly drowned. Her condition keeps getting worse, and Matt is forced to abide by the conditions of her living will. He will have to withdraw life support, stop feeding her, and let her pass away.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Matt pulls his daughters out of school, so they have time to say goodbye. 10-year-old Scottie, tough and at times disturbingly adult, inherited her mother’s penchant for chasing danger. After an incident in which Scottie hurts herself at the beach in order to get a boy to rescue her, Matt remarks that it’s exactly the kind of thing her mother would have done: “Joanie WOULD think that story was hilarious. I think of her while we were dating. She loved creating dramas that involved men, pain, sex.” Matt’s older daughter Alexandra, 17, has taken on her mother’s beauty and her party-girl lifestyle. When we first encounter her in the book, she’s drunk on her boarding school’s soccer field. Alex lets her father in on a secret she’d kept with her mother: at the time of the accident, Joanie had been carrying on a passionate affair. Matt has a lot of questions, and sets about answering them before Joanie dies: who is he? Did he love her? Does he deserve a chance to say goodbye?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What prevents all of this from falling down the treacle well is Matt’s funny, real, exasperated voice. he simply cannot believe that all of this is happening to him, and he’s dealing as best he can. Describing Troy, Joanie’s friend who was piloting her boat when the accident happened, he says “Troy is so slow. His great-grandfather invented the shopping cart, and this has left little for Troy to do except sleep with lots of women and put my wife in a coma.” At times, Matt’s daughters seem to him like strangers, a foreign invading alien species. He asks the housekeeper what they do, and what they like, studying up like you would for an exam. Other times, he talks to them like you’d talk to any adult confidante, confessing everything, no matter how personal or upsetting. Alex is a full accomplice in Matt’s effort to find and confront Joanie’s lover. These are not things a child psychologist would suggest to help get your kids through grief.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Matt is as clueless and adrift as anyone would be when thrust into such a situation, but especially so for someone who seemed destined for a life of sun, sand, and leisure. The immensity of what’s about to happen dawns on him slowly. “I need to remember to feed the children. I need to make sure they wash and brush their teeth and go to doctors…They need to say ‘yes’, not ‘yeah,’ to put their napkins in their laps, to chew gum with closed mouths. I need more time.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The phrase “Minor Wars,” from which Hemmings’ original short story took its title, comes from Matt’s nickname for the Portuguese man-of-war, a kind of stinging jellyfish. “I called them minor wars because they were like tiny soldiers with impressive weapons–the gaseous bubble, the whiplike tail, the toxic tentacles–advancing in swarms.” It’s too bad that Hemmings didn’t keep her original title, because it’s such a wonderfully evocative phrase, and so perfect for Matt’s situation. One “minor war” wouldn’t kill you. But a whole swarm might make you wish you were dead. Matt doesn’t cave, though, he soldiers on, he figures things out, he loves his daughters, he needs and relies on them. They deal with their tragedies in the real, messy, messed-up way that real people do. An impressive achievement, \u003cb>The Descendants\u003c/b> is hopefully just the first in a long line of solid, enjoyable, smart yet beach-readable novels from Kaui Hart Hemmings. After all, we still need more stories in order to live.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>My friends know me as an unapologetic reader of romances.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Though I prefer my romance cloaked in a literary guise, as in Michael Ondaatje’s Orientalist fantasy, \u003cb>The English Patient\u003c/b> (a favorite from my schoolgirl days), I am not above supermarket paperbacks (the kind featuring well-muscled men embracing tousled, buxom women on the cover). I will even occasionally devour the short stories in the back of women’s magazines (such as \u003ci>Cosmo\u003c/i> or \u003ci>Glamour\u003c/i>). And they move me. Though I understand their tricks, these stories still make me cry.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I cried through the final thirty pages of Anita Shreve’s new novel, \u003cb>Body Surfing\u003c/b> (Little, Brown). At 29, Sydney Sklar, the novel’s narrator, is both a divorcee and a widow. Numbed by tragedy, Sydney seems content to drift with the current. When Sydney takes a position as a summer tutor, she drifts into the Edwards family. Trouble comes in threes, and this will hold true for Sydney.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Though in many ways \u003cb>Body Surfing\u003c/b> hews closely to the conventions of the genre, the book departs from the typical romance by emphasizing Sydney’s desire to make a place in the world. Sydney hungers, not for a singular passion, but for family’s comfort and security. \u003cb>Body Surfing\u003c/b> plays on the contrast between the close-knit Edwards family, and Sydney’s own shattered nuclear family. Desire renders Sydney a close observer. She watches the Edwards family with an intensity that borders on obsession.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Shreve gives Sydney a voice that is slow and deliberate. Sydney seems to be all eyes, as if through sheer force of will she can assimilate the external world through her sense of sight. Consider Sydney’s description of the Edwards’ beach house in New Hampshire, “Knife blades of grass pierce the wooden slats of the boardwalk. Sweet pea overtakes the thatch. Unwanted fists of thistle push upward from the sand. On the small deck at the end of the boardwalk are two white Adirondack chairs…and a faded umbrella behind them. Two rusted and immensely heavy iron bases for the umbrella sit in a corner, neither of which, Sydney guesses, will ever leave the deck.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Neither of the iron bases will leave the deck, but Sydney, as a stranger, must one day quit the house. Acutely aware of her own temporary status, she exists in a kind of purgatory, alternately jealous and critical, desirous and resentful. Comparing herself (the mistress, the nuclear family’s ultimate “outsider”) to her lover’s wife, Anne Sexton once wrote, “She is the sum of yourself and your dream./Climb her like a monument, step after step./She is solid./As for me, I am a watercolor./I wash off.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Like Sexton, Sydney is fearful of her own impermanence, yet unable to take steps to remedy the situation. Instead, she savors the Edwards’ closeness, watching their family rituals and histories from the sidelines. Shreve’s writing, at its best, reminds me of Alice Munro or Joyce Carol Oates, two contemporary writers who treat the subjects of family and womanhood with a cool, careful precision.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Shreve was once a journalist, and her penchant for objectivism, for latching onto the choice detail, remains in evidence throughout her writing. \u003cb>Body Surfing\u003c/b> is not a Jamesian affair, full of interlinked sentences and choice epigrams. Shreve is fond of choppy sentences — perhaps a holdover from her correspondent days — and brief paragraphs. It is a kind of writing that is less psychological than descriptive, more prosaic than poetic. Characters commit actions, but like Sydney, we remain outside, unable to access (or understand) their motivations. Shreve’s gift lies in her ability to describe a situation, and hand over a mise-en-scene that is brief and pointed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In its best moments, \u003cb>Body Surfing\u003c/b> is clear and lucid, like the sunlit rooms in the Edwards’ beach cottage. Shreve knows how to plot, and the narrative’s twists and turns are generally satisfying, though she includes encounters (like Sydney’s dinner with Mr. Cavalli, or the lesbian subplot involving Sydney’s pupil, Julie, and a surfer-girl from Montreal) that feel unmotivated.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Joyce Carol Oates’s assessment of Alice Munro’s \u003cb>The Progress of Love\u003c/b> can be equally applied to Anita Shreve’s \u003cb>Body Surfing\u003c/b>. Munro’s book, Oates writes, is “a volume of unflinching honesty, uncompromising in its dissection of the ways we deceive ourselves in the name of love; the bleakness of its vision is enriched by the author’s exquisite eye and ear for detail. Life is heartbreak, but it is also uncharted moments of kindness and reconciliation.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Unlike Oates or Munro, who are equally comfortable delving into life’s less savory side, Shreve retains the romance’s penchant for a satisfying ending. Despite the plot’s tragic overtones, \u003cb>Body Surfing\u003c/b> remains a summer confection. Darkness comes and goes, but we remain buoyant, confident that the next cresting wave will propel us towards happiness.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "My friends know me as an unapologetic reader of romances. \u003cp>Though I prefer my romance cloaked in a literary guise, as in Michael Ondaatje's Orientalist fantasy, \u003cb>The English Patient\u003c/b> (a favorite from my schoolgirl days), I am not above supermarket paperbacks (the kind featuring well-muscled men embracing tousled, buxom women on the cover). I will even occasionally devour the short stories in the back of women's magazines (such as \u003ci>Cosmo\u003c/i> or \u003ci>Glamour\u003c/i>). And they move me. Though I understand their tricks, these stories still make me cry.\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>My friends know me as an unapologetic reader of romances.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Though I prefer my romance cloaked in a literary guise, as in Michael Ondaatje’s Orientalist fantasy, \u003cb>The English Patient\u003c/b> (a favorite from my schoolgirl days), I am not above supermarket paperbacks (the kind featuring well-muscled men embracing tousled, buxom women on the cover). I will even occasionally devour the short stories in the back of women’s magazines (such as \u003ci>Cosmo\u003c/i> or \u003ci>Glamour\u003c/i>). And they move me. Though I understand their tricks, these stories still make me cry.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I cried through the final thirty pages of Anita Shreve’s new novel, \u003cb>Body Surfing\u003c/b> (Little, Brown). At 29, Sydney Sklar, the novel’s narrator, is both a divorcee and a widow. Numbed by tragedy, Sydney seems content to drift with the current. When Sydney takes a position as a summer tutor, she drifts into the Edwards family. Trouble comes in threes, and this will hold true for Sydney.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Though in many ways \u003cb>Body Surfing\u003c/b> hews closely to the conventions of the genre, the book departs from the typical romance by emphasizing Sydney’s desire to make a place in the world. Sydney hungers, not for a singular passion, but for family’s comfort and security. \u003cb>Body Surfing\u003c/b> plays on the contrast between the close-knit Edwards family, and Sydney’s own shattered nuclear family. Desire renders Sydney a close observer. She watches the Edwards family with an intensity that borders on obsession.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Shreve gives Sydney a voice that is slow and deliberate. Sydney seems to be all eyes, as if through sheer force of will she can assimilate the external world through her sense of sight. Consider Sydney’s description of the Edwards’ beach house in New Hampshire, “Knife blades of grass pierce the wooden slats of the boardwalk. Sweet pea overtakes the thatch. Unwanted fists of thistle push upward from the sand. On the small deck at the end of the boardwalk are two white Adirondack chairs…and a faded umbrella behind them. Two rusted and immensely heavy iron bases for the umbrella sit in a corner, neither of which, Sydney guesses, will ever leave the deck.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Neither of the iron bases will leave the deck, but Sydney, as a stranger, must one day quit the house. Acutely aware of her own temporary status, she exists in a kind of purgatory, alternately jealous and critical, desirous and resentful. Comparing herself (the mistress, the nuclear family’s ultimate “outsider”) to her lover’s wife, Anne Sexton once wrote, “She is the sum of yourself and your dream./Climb her like a monument, step after step./She is solid./As for me, I am a watercolor./I wash off.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Like Sexton, Sydney is fearful of her own impermanence, yet unable to take steps to remedy the situation. Instead, she savors the Edwards’ closeness, watching their family rituals and histories from the sidelines. Shreve’s writing, at its best, reminds me of Alice Munro or Joyce Carol Oates, two contemporary writers who treat the subjects of family and womanhood with a cool, careful precision.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Shreve was once a journalist, and her penchant for objectivism, for latching onto the choice detail, remains in evidence throughout her writing. \u003cb>Body Surfing\u003c/b> is not a Jamesian affair, full of interlinked sentences and choice epigrams. Shreve is fond of choppy sentences — perhaps a holdover from her correspondent days — and brief paragraphs. It is a kind of writing that is less psychological than descriptive, more prosaic than poetic. Characters commit actions, but like Sydney, we remain outside, unable to access (or understand) their motivations. Shreve’s gift lies in her ability to describe a situation, and hand over a mise-en-scene that is brief and pointed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In its best moments, \u003cb>Body Surfing\u003c/b> is clear and lucid, like the sunlit rooms in the Edwards’ beach cottage. Shreve knows how to plot, and the narrative’s twists and turns are generally satisfying, though she includes encounters (like Sydney’s dinner with Mr. Cavalli, or the lesbian subplot involving Sydney’s pupil, Julie, and a surfer-girl from Montreal) that feel unmotivated.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Joyce Carol Oates’s assessment of Alice Munro’s \u003cb>The Progress of Love\u003c/b> can be equally applied to Anita Shreve’s \u003cb>Body Surfing\u003c/b>. Munro’s book, Oates writes, is “a volume of unflinching honesty, uncompromising in its dissection of the ways we deceive ourselves in the name of love; the bleakness of its vision is enriched by the author’s exquisite eye and ear for detail. Life is heartbreak, but it is also uncharted moments of kindness and reconciliation.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Unlike Oates or Munro, who are equally comfortable delving into life’s less savory side, Shreve retains the romance’s penchant for a satisfying ending. Despite the plot’s tragic overtones, \u003cb>Body Surfing\u003c/b> remains a summer confection. Darkness comes and goes, but we remain buoyant, confident that the next cresting wave will propel us towards happiness.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>I work in a bookstore. Not too long ago, a tiny, frail, elderly man was helped out of a cab and into the shop by two young men, who shuffled him up to the counter. “DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM!” the guy yelled at me. I admitted that I didn’t, and when he told me his name, I recognized it, but I’ve never read any of his work. He is someone highly regarded in certain literary circles, although he didn’t make much money from it, nor has he achieved fame, despite more than half a century of exquisitely crafted literary output. He shouted a couple more questions at me (“I want to speak with the owner! The OWN-ER!”) and his attendant shot me a sympathetic look. They took him to visit his books. After they left, I saw that he had taken all of his works (dusty and rarely purchased) from the low shelf where they were displayed, and moved them to eye-level, pointedly placing them next to and on top of some books by a far more famous, less talented, and long-dead contemporary.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When I started reading \u003cb>The Last Novel\u003c/b>, David Markson’s latest scrapbook of aphorisms and unattributed anecdotes, I realized that it was narrated by that guy. I don’t mean that actual literal person, I mean someone in a similar predicament. The Novelist (as Markson’s narrator calls himself), an unrecognized, aging writer, repeats a sad refrain throughout the book: “Old. Tired. Sick. Alone. Broke.” This is my first time grappling with Markson’s work, about which the terms Postmodern and Experimental get thrown around a lot. He pushes, to the point of breaking, the whole concept of what one can set down on paper and refer to as a “novel.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>The Last Novel\u003c/b> is more like a list, consisting of sentence-long paragraphs — many of them just sentence fragments. All of them are little biographical anecdotes about great authors, poets, composers, painters, and musicians of the past. These anecdotes fall into several categories:\u003cbr> 1) Stories about works now viewed as masterpieces that were scorned in their own time, or conversely, celebrated in their own time and now are unjustly consigned to the dustbin of history.\u003cbr>2) Stories from the lives of great geniuses who died penniless, with holes in their shoes, in debt to the grocer.\u003cbr>3)Tales of geniuses who got old and feeble and lost their faculties.\u003cbr> 4)Quotations, from antiquity through the present, about artists who can’t give up drinking.\u003cbr>5)Incidents of blatant anti-Semitism, directed at those aforementioned geniuses. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>The Last Novel\u003c/b> is the fourth of four books (a quartet? a tetralogy?) that witness a creator’s struggle with — and against — what he is creating. In the first of the four, \u003cb>Reader’s Block\u003c/b>, the narrator is referred to as “The Reader.” In \u003cb>This Is Not a Novel\u003c/b>, he’s “The Writer.” In \u003cb>Vanishing Point\u003c/b> he’s moved up to “Author,” and finally in this one he’s graduated to Novelist. What is his reward? Loneliness, the deaths of his friends, a life that consists largely of encounters with pharmacists and the building superintendent.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Novelist tells us almost nothing about himself, but the glimpses we do get are devastating: he notices a pharmacist noticing his threadbare coat. He calls the answering machines of friends recently dead, just to hear their voices on the outgoing message. But for the most part, if we want to know who the character is that’s telling the story, all we have to go on is his choice of moments from the lives of others that he catalogs here. “Vermeer died in 1675. at which time one of his largest debts was, in fact, to a Delft baker. For bread to feed a family of thirteen.” “I am quite content to go down in history as a scissors and paste man. Said Joyce.” “A heart attack while swimming, Theodore Roethke died of.” “I’ve had it with those cheap sons of bitches who claim they love poetry but never buy a book. Growled Kenneth Rexroth.” Individually you might think, why is he telling us this? but collectively, you get a fascinating glimpse of the Novelist through the company he keeps — in books.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>None of the anecdotes are attributed. None of the quotes have quotation marks. This begs the question, how do we know if any of this is accurate? Is it plagiarized, is it made up? A couple months ago, \u003ci>Harper’s Magazine\u003c/i> published a \u003ca href=\"http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/02/0081387\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">remarkable essay\u003c/a> by Jonathan Lethem on the subject of plagiarism. Using scores of examples, he makes the case that a lot of what now gets called “copyright infringement,” or misuse of “intellectual property” would be better viewed as part of the organic process of art making. Since the beginning of time, he asserts, artists have borrowed from one another, poaching little shiny bits and pieces, magpie-style, an “ecstasy of influence.” “Any text is woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages, which cut across it through and through in a vast stereophony,” he says. At the end, Lethem provides an annotation that’s even longer than the original piece: it reveals that the entire essay is “plagiarized,” a Frankenstein’s monster stitched together from dozens of sources. I found it to be a brilliant, audacious piece of work. But David Markson blows Lethem out of the water. He’s turned borrowing from other sources into an entire career, and made it a form of art in itself. I thought of comparing the two even before I came across this passage in Markson’s novel: “Future generations will regard Bob Dylan with the awe reserved for Blake, Whitman, Picasso, and the like. Said an otherwise seemingly rational writer named Jonathan Lethem.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Novelist laments the great under-recognized masterpieces, but he seems to think there’s some objective standard for deciding what a masterpiece is — a standard of his own choosing. In addition to his negative opinion of Bob Dylan, he pauses to give bad reviews to some modern artists, easy targets mostly: Christo’s Central Park installation of orange-curtained gates and Damien Hirst’s rotting shark have nothing remotely to do with art, he asserts. Stravinsky’s “Rite Of Spring,” or Manet’s “Olympia,” though, are just a few of the UNjustly panned, in his opinion — even though they were the shocking works of their day. It comes dangerously close to boring old man humbuggery, and I’m grateful he didn’t pause to rant about how young kids these days only know how to write emails and back in my day we wrote by hand and studied the classics and blah blah blah. But you could feel it implied.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s really easy to get lazy and conflate Novelist’s thoughts and opinions with David Markson’s. But he’s way too much of a trickster to be so obvious. However, it isn’t easy to shake the suspicion that Markson is putting one over on you, and he’s enjoying your boredom and confusion. Your inability to understand his weird non-book proves Novelist is an unrecognized genius. “For no reason whatsoever, Novelist has just flung his cat out one of his four-flights-up front windows,” so says the bottom of page 131. But then, what’s this on 135? “Novelist does not own a cat, and thus most certainly would not have thrown one out a window. Nonetheless he would lay odds that more than one hopscotching reviewer will be reading carelessly enough here to never notice these two sentences and announce that he did so.” (Hey — screw you, Novelist! I read every word!)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I have a number of friends and colleagues who \u003ca href=\"http://www.edrants.com/?p=6121\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">worship David Markson\u003c/a>, and happily devour everything he’s ever written, including the recent reissue of two detective novels he wrote for a quick paycheck back in the sixties. \u003cb>Epitaph For a Tramp\u003c/b> and \u003cb>Epitaph For a Dead Beat\u003c/b> have come out recently as \u003ca href=\"http://www.citylights.com/book/?GCOI=87286100162640\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">a single paperback volume\u003c/a>, and from what I’m told they are great fun. For someone who has the fortitude to take on Markson’s more esoteric work, \u003cb>Wittgenstein’s Mistress\u003c/b>, I’m told, is the one to read. The first novel that Markson wrote in the epigrammatic style that is now his trademark, its narrator is a woman who might be the only person alive on earth, or she might be insane. After all the hours I’ve spent trying to unravel what Markson means by all his trickery, I think I can relate.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>I work in a bookstore. Not too long ago, a tiny, frail, elderly man was helped out of a cab and into the shop by two young men, who shuffled him up to the counter. “DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM!” the guy yelled at me. I admitted that I didn’t, and when he told me his name, I recognized it, but I’ve never read any of his work. He is someone highly regarded in certain literary circles, although he didn’t make much money from it, nor has he achieved fame, despite more than half a century of exquisitely crafted literary output. He shouted a couple more questions at me (“I want to speak with the owner! The OWN-ER!”) and his attendant shot me a sympathetic look. They took him to visit his books. After they left, I saw that he had taken all of his works (dusty and rarely purchased) from the low shelf where they were displayed, and moved them to eye-level, pointedly placing them next to and on top of some books by a far more famous, less talented, and long-dead contemporary.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When I started reading \u003cb>The Last Novel\u003c/b>, David Markson’s latest scrapbook of aphorisms and unattributed anecdotes, I realized that it was narrated by that guy. I don’t mean that actual literal person, I mean someone in a similar predicament. The Novelist (as Markson’s narrator calls himself), an unrecognized, aging writer, repeats a sad refrain throughout the book: “Old. Tired. Sick. Alone. Broke.” This is my first time grappling with Markson’s work, about which the terms Postmodern and Experimental get thrown around a lot. He pushes, to the point of breaking, the whole concept of what one can set down on paper and refer to as a “novel.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>The Last Novel\u003c/b> is more like a list, consisting of sentence-long paragraphs — many of them just sentence fragments. All of them are little biographical anecdotes about great authors, poets, composers, painters, and musicians of the past. These anecdotes fall into several categories:\u003cbr> 1) Stories about works now viewed as masterpieces that were scorned in their own time, or conversely, celebrated in their own time and now are unjustly consigned to the dustbin of history.\u003cbr>2) Stories from the lives of great geniuses who died penniless, with holes in their shoes, in debt to the grocer.\u003cbr>3)Tales of geniuses who got old and feeble and lost their faculties.\u003cbr> 4)Quotations, from antiquity through the present, about artists who can’t give up drinking.\u003cbr>5)Incidents of blatant anti-Semitism, directed at those aforementioned geniuses. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>The Last Novel\u003c/b> is the fourth of four books (a quartet? a tetralogy?) that witness a creator’s struggle with — and against — what he is creating. In the first of the four, \u003cb>Reader’s Block\u003c/b>, the narrator is referred to as “The Reader.” In \u003cb>This Is Not a Novel\u003c/b>, he’s “The Writer.” In \u003cb>Vanishing Point\u003c/b> he’s moved up to “Author,” and finally in this one he’s graduated to Novelist. What is his reward? Loneliness, the deaths of his friends, a life that consists largely of encounters with pharmacists and the building superintendent.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Novelist tells us almost nothing about himself, but the glimpses we do get are devastating: he notices a pharmacist noticing his threadbare coat. He calls the answering machines of friends recently dead, just to hear their voices on the outgoing message. But for the most part, if we want to know who the character is that’s telling the story, all we have to go on is his choice of moments from the lives of others that he catalogs here. “Vermeer died in 1675. at which time one of his largest debts was, in fact, to a Delft baker. For bread to feed a family of thirteen.” “I am quite content to go down in history as a scissors and paste man. Said Joyce.” “A heart attack while swimming, Theodore Roethke died of.” “I’ve had it with those cheap sons of bitches who claim they love poetry but never buy a book. Growled Kenneth Rexroth.” Individually you might think, why is he telling us this? but collectively, you get a fascinating glimpse of the Novelist through the company he keeps — in books.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>None of the anecdotes are attributed. None of the quotes have quotation marks. This begs the question, how do we know if any of this is accurate? Is it plagiarized, is it made up? A couple months ago, \u003ci>Harper’s Magazine\u003c/i> published a \u003ca href=\"http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/02/0081387\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">remarkable essay\u003c/a> by Jonathan Lethem on the subject of plagiarism. Using scores of examples, he makes the case that a lot of what now gets called “copyright infringement,” or misuse of “intellectual property” would be better viewed as part of the organic process of art making. Since the beginning of time, he asserts, artists have borrowed from one another, poaching little shiny bits and pieces, magpie-style, an “ecstasy of influence.” “Any text is woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages, which cut across it through and through in a vast stereophony,” he says. At the end, Lethem provides an annotation that’s even longer than the original piece: it reveals that the entire essay is “plagiarized,” a Frankenstein’s monster stitched together from dozens of sources. I found it to be a brilliant, audacious piece of work. But David Markson blows Lethem out of the water. He’s turned borrowing from other sources into an entire career, and made it a form of art in itself. I thought of comparing the two even before I came across this passage in Markson’s novel: “Future generations will regard Bob Dylan with the awe reserved for Blake, Whitman, Picasso, and the like. Said an otherwise seemingly rational writer named Jonathan Lethem.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Novelist laments the great under-recognized masterpieces, but he seems to think there’s some objective standard for deciding what a masterpiece is — a standard of his own choosing. In addition to his negative opinion of Bob Dylan, he pauses to give bad reviews to some modern artists, easy targets mostly: Christo’s Central Park installation of orange-curtained gates and Damien Hirst’s rotting shark have nothing remotely to do with art, he asserts. Stravinsky’s “Rite Of Spring,” or Manet’s “Olympia,” though, are just a few of the UNjustly panned, in his opinion — even though they were the shocking works of their day. It comes dangerously close to boring old man humbuggery, and I’m grateful he didn’t pause to rant about how young kids these days only know how to write emails and back in my day we wrote by hand and studied the classics and blah blah blah. But you could feel it implied.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s really easy to get lazy and conflate Novelist’s thoughts and opinions with David Markson’s. But he’s way too much of a trickster to be so obvious. However, it isn’t easy to shake the suspicion that Markson is putting one over on you, and he’s enjoying your boredom and confusion. Your inability to understand his weird non-book proves Novelist is an unrecognized genius. “For no reason whatsoever, Novelist has just flung his cat out one of his four-flights-up front windows,” so says the bottom of page 131. But then, what’s this on 135? “Novelist does not own a cat, and thus most certainly would not have thrown one out a window. Nonetheless he would lay odds that more than one hopscotching reviewer will be reading carelessly enough here to never notice these two sentences and announce that he did so.” (Hey — screw you, Novelist! I read every word!)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I have a number of friends and colleagues who \u003ca href=\"http://www.edrants.com/?p=6121\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">worship David Markson\u003c/a>, and happily devour everything he’s ever written, including the recent reissue of two detective novels he wrote for a quick paycheck back in the sixties. \u003cb>Epitaph For a Tramp\u003c/b> and \u003cb>Epitaph For a Dead Beat\u003c/b> have come out recently as \u003ca href=\"http://www.citylights.com/book/?GCOI=87286100162640\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">a single paperback volume\u003c/a>, and from what I’m told they are great fun. For someone who has the fortitude to take on Markson’s more esoteric work, \u003cb>Wittgenstein’s Mistress\u003c/b>, I’m told, is the one to read. The first novel that Markson wrote in the epigrammatic style that is now his trademark, its narrator is a woman who might be the only person alive on earth, or she might be insane. After all the hours I’ve spent trying to unravel what Markson means by all his trickery, I think I can relate.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>War is a constant presence in our media. Violence and protests and shady government dealings make the headlines everyday, and the consequences of these current battles will likely be felt for generations. Where did all of this start? Why have we been saddled with violence just feeling like another inevitability?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>The Ancient Book of Myth and War\u003c/b> from Red Window and AdHouse books offers a series of illustrations about the elemental beginnings of war, or at least its roots in our Western culture. Imagery of Greek gods and warriors feature prominently in the book, with the ratio of spears and swords far outnumbering the appearance of handguns. This historical take helps to offset the seriousness of the subject. Instead of gore and grief, comically tragic warriors, mythical monsters, and stylish abstractions recall battles. 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Morse also contributed a few modern war pieces, including a disturbing, though visually stunning, painting of a young child soldier killing under the watchful gaze of his father. This piece further referenced the manifestations of ancient war with use of the word “insurgent.” His lovely “The Hand-Off” makes expert use of the “impressionistic atmosphere” of wet-on-wet technique, and tells a fascinating story in one single moment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://louromano.blogspot.com/target=\" offsite>Lou Romano\u003c/a> focused mainly on Greek mythology, with several appearances of Medusa, swords and shields, and the mighty Zeus in blocky, primitive forms. His “Trojan Horse” is an amazingly simple and evocative use of big, angular shapes and gradient color. Straying outside the Mediterranean, Romano’s depiction of Durga, a Hindu goddess, is a gorgeous balancing act of bold color and composition, and one of the best pieces in the book.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://donshank.blogspot.com/\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">Don Shank\u003c/a> contributed only a few paintings, but his lovely abstractions of spindly lines and meditative color fields fit with the Cubist-inspired motif. His “Archway Usher,” of a lone figure sheparding geese on a sunny day, was particularly nice, and gave a peaceful and inviting intermission in a book of aggression and strife.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://n8wragg.blogspot.com/\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">Nate Wragg\u003c/a> illustrated the many trials of Pathetos, the sweetly inept warrior in the vein of some bumbling Odysseus. With a short little body, beady eyes, and pointy nose reminiscent of the \u003ca href=\"http://www.franchising.com/littlecaesarspizza/images/logo.gif\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">Little Caesar’s Pizza icon\u003c/a>, Pathetos navigates an adorably gruesome world of stylish, big-eyed yetis, hydra, and even the perils of the beautiful Venus.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Each of the thirty five paintings is set with a short explanatory paragraph. More so than in their visual work, the respective writing styles really set the four artists apart. Morse and Romano opt for a more serious, poetic brevity in explanation, and include notes on their process such as thoughts about what types of watercolor they used, or the benefits of a certain technique. Shank offers quick and maybe slightly sarcastic explanations that are an entertaining complement to his gorgeous art. His titles such as, “Map of the First Galactic War (Article 1)” give backstory to abstract paintings, and work to fit them inside the war theme. Wragg invests the most in his written contribution, telling a complete story of Pathetos and his numerous botched encounters with various monsters. This narrative gives the book a strong momentum and humor, and seeing poor Pathetos meet one gruesome end after another is weirdly endearing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>The Ancient Book of Myth and War\u003c/b> is available through Red Window and \u003ca href=\"http://www.adhousebooks.com\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">AdHouse Books.\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>War is a constant presence in our media. Violence and protests and shady government dealings make the headlines everyday, and the consequences of these current battles will likely be felt for generations. Where did all of this start? Why have we been saddled with violence just feeling like another inevitability?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>The Ancient Book of Myth and War\u003c/b> from Red Window and AdHouse books offers a series of illustrations about the elemental beginnings of war, or at least its roots in our Western culture. Imagery of Greek gods and warriors feature prominently in the book, with the ratio of spears and swords far outnumbering the appearance of handguns. This historical take helps to offset the seriousness of the subject. Instead of gore and grief, comically tragic warriors, mythical monsters, and stylish abstractions recall battles. This is not a glorification or simplification of war, but rather a team using the history and power of the subject for a series of bold, experimental paintings.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>All four artists who contributed to the book are colleagues at Pixar, and their work is saturated with the kind of retro, fluid ease in chunky brushstrokes, soft bleeds, and cartoony figures that must just be in the drinking water there. All of the artists also seem quite taken with Picasso, making heavy use of his imagery of maniacal bulls, multi-colored fractured faces, and jaunty abstraction. Media ranged from pen and ink, to water media, and digital.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Individually, the artists explore varied themes. \u003ca href=\"http://scottmorse.blogspot.com/\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">Scott Morse\u003c/a> took a serious approach, drawing on myths from many cultures, and investing his paintings with heavy symbolism. Morse also contributed a few modern war pieces, including a disturbing, though visually stunning, painting of a young child soldier killing under the watchful gaze of his father. This piece further referenced the manifestations of ancient war with use of the word “insurgent.” His lovely “The Hand-Off” makes expert use of the “impressionistic atmosphere” of wet-on-wet technique, and tells a fascinating story in one single moment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://louromano.blogspot.com/target=\" offsite>Lou Romano\u003c/a> focused mainly on Greek mythology, with several appearances of Medusa, swords and shields, and the mighty Zeus in blocky, primitive forms. His “Trojan Horse” is an amazingly simple and evocative use of big, angular shapes and gradient color. Straying outside the Mediterranean, Romano’s depiction of Durga, a Hindu goddess, is a gorgeous balancing act of bold color and composition, and one of the best pieces in the book.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://donshank.blogspot.com/\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">Don Shank\u003c/a> contributed only a few paintings, but his lovely abstractions of spindly lines and meditative color fields fit with the Cubist-inspired motif. His “Archway Usher,” of a lone figure sheparding geese on a sunny day, was particularly nice, and gave a peaceful and inviting intermission in a book of aggression and strife.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://n8wragg.blogspot.com/\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">Nate Wragg\u003c/a> illustrated the many trials of Pathetos, the sweetly inept warrior in the vein of some bumbling Odysseus. With a short little body, beady eyes, and pointy nose reminiscent of the \u003ca href=\"http://www.franchising.com/littlecaesarspizza/images/logo.gif\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">Little Caesar’s Pizza icon\u003c/a>, Pathetos navigates an adorably gruesome world of stylish, big-eyed yetis, hydra, and even the perils of the beautiful Venus.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Each of the thirty five paintings is set with a short explanatory paragraph. More so than in their visual work, the respective writing styles really set the four artists apart. Morse and Romano opt for a more serious, poetic brevity in explanation, and include notes on their process such as thoughts about what types of watercolor they used, or the benefits of a certain technique. Shank offers quick and maybe slightly sarcastic explanations that are an entertaining complement to his gorgeous art. His titles such as, “Map of the First Galactic War (Article 1)” give backstory to abstract paintings, and work to fit them inside the war theme. Wragg invests the most in his written contribution, telling a complete story of Pathetos and his numerous botched encounters with various monsters. This narrative gives the book a strong momentum and humor, and seeing poor Pathetos meet one gruesome end after another is weirdly endearing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>The Ancient Book of Myth and War\u003c/b> is available through Red Window and \u003ca href=\"http://www.adhousebooks.com\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">AdHouse Books.\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>“Being around women whose opinions don’t count for anything makes you lazy,” says Ike Bradshaw, a prison guard whose voice is one of the four that narrate Susanna Moore’s newest novel. He’s talking about the inmates, of course, the women of Sloatsburg Correctional Institution who taunt, yell, fight and flirt with him, day in and day out. The context is left a little ambiguous, though, so he could be referring to the wife who recently left him. He could also be talking about Louise Forrest, the prison psychiatrist who is also his sometime lover and the main protagonist of this dark tale. Moore’s books straddle a line between the “popular” and the “literary,” for want of better terms. (The best known of them, \u003cb>In The Cut\u003c/b>, was made into a recent film starring Meg Ryan.) She deals in the pop-fiction crime universe of killers and victims, but comes at it from an angle that makes genre distinctions feel totally arbitrary.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Louise Forrest has taken a new position as chief psychiatrist at the prison, despite having much more lucrative and less stressful prospects elsewhere. This confuses everyone: neither the inmates nor the other prison personnel can tell which side she’s on. She may have started out wanting to work there for some high-minded social justice reason, which she is now too exhausted to recall. Her party-boy husband Rafael has left her and gone to Hollywood, leaving her with their son, Ransom. She is fighting, with all her might, to hold herself together. Her dry wit keeps her from losing it entirely. “When I’m feeling overwhelmed,” she says, “…I remind myself that I am a physician. I am the mother of an eight-year-old boy. I am not an inmate. I have not embezzled from the Ladies’ Garment Workers Union or killed my common-law husband with a George Foreman grill.” The fact that she has to remind herself she isn’t in prison illustrates just how disorienting it can be to spend a career inside an institution. The prisoners are only there because they have to be. Who would CHOOSE to spend time in such a place?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Along with Louise, the other main narrator is Helen, an inmate and one of Louise’s patients. Helen is an infamous child-killer. She murdered her son and daughter at the behest of unseen dark forces, and Moore clearly modeled her on Andrea Yates, a deeply religious and occasionally psychotic woman who drowned her five kids a few years back. Moore’s skill lies in creating such instantly recognizable character voices that you would know exactly who was speaking even if there weren’t any line breaks to indicate it. Helen seems oddly sweet and innocent, incapable of truly understanding what she has done. She sends a fan letter and a photo of her kids — the kids she killed — to a famous Hollywood starlet.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That starlet, Angie, is the fourth narrator in the chorus, a vapid, drug-addled social climber who is sleeping with Dr. Forrest’s estranged husband. It’s a bit of a cute coincidence, and a couple other not-very-believable coincidences mar what is otherwise a very engaging novel.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Helen recounts her therapy sessions with Forrest. She talks about her hideously abusive childhood, her marriage to a controlling preacher, and the black-robed Horsemen of the Apocalypse that come riding their black stallions into her prison cell on occasion. “The Horsemen believed in me, and I believed in them,” she says. “The idea that I might of imagined them, well, I deserve to die if that is true.” (We always know a shift into Helen’s voice because she says “might of” instead of “might have.”) Through Helen’s eyes we discover the infinitely complex universe of life in a women’s prison. Barely able to function on any level, Helen is doing her best to navigate the jealousies, alliances, romances, breakups, business opportunities and time-wasting craft projects that make up the bulk of daily life for the women of Sloatsburg.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The most fascinating aspect of Moore’s novel is her dissection of the ongoing soap operatic relations among the prisoners. “Families” are formed, with mothers, fathers, children, cousins, nieces, nephews. Packaged commissary snacks are used as ingredients for all kinds of unhealthy and gross-sounding concoctions. If a woman is seen chewing bubble gum, it’s a sign she’s sleeping with a guard. Love affairs — complete with ungrammatical, grade-school-style mash notes — are constant, even between women who profess to hate lesbians. It’s all an attempt to find some kind of warmth or human kindness — or failing that, some kind of control or advantage — in a cold and unkind place. The endless rules and regulations make no sense: one inmate is denied a visit with her child because the kid is wearing a hooded coat — the hood is a dress code violation. Prisoners are not adults anymore, they’ve become the “Big Girls” of the title.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There is another entire storyline that comes into play, involving Forrest and Ike Bradshaw, the guard, and how their relationship lights a fuse in the mind of Forrest’s son Ransom that leads to tragic consequences. We find out a lot more about Angie the starlet, whose insular life of manicures and tanning sessions ends up sounding like its own kind of prison. The characters are unforgettable, for sure. What doesn’t always work so well is the story that brings them all together. Some aspects don’t feel believable, and some of the shocking-twist plot points truly come out of nowhere. The up-to-the minute cultural references will probably sound dated almost immediately (in one scene, two guys in a bar debate Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise’s divorce). But overall, \u003cb>The Big Girls\u003c/b> works more often than it doesn’t. The larger points Moore makes — about male-female relations, motherhood, and whether anyone is truly free — will stick with you for a long time.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "\"Being around women whose opinions don't count for anything makes you lazy,\" says Ike Bradshaw, a prison guard whose voice is one of the four that narrate Susanna Moore's newest novel. He's talking about the inmates, of course, the women of Sloatsburg Correctional Institution who taunt, yell, fight and flirt with him, day in and day out. The context is left a little ambiguous, though, so he could be referring to the wife who recently left him. He could also be talking about Louise Forrest, the prison psychiatrist who is also his sometime lover and the main protagonist of this dark tale. Moore's books straddle a line between the \"popular\" and the \"literary,\" for want of better terms. (The best known of them, \u003cb>In The Cut\u003c/b>, was made into a recent film starring Meg Ryan.) She deals in the pop-fiction crime universe of killers and victims, but comes at it from an angle that makes genre distinctions feel totally arbitrary.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>“Being around women whose opinions don’t count for anything makes you lazy,” says Ike Bradshaw, a prison guard whose voice is one of the four that narrate Susanna Moore’s newest novel. He’s talking about the inmates, of course, the women of Sloatsburg Correctional Institution who taunt, yell, fight and flirt with him, day in and day out. The context is left a little ambiguous, though, so he could be referring to the wife who recently left him. He could also be talking about Louise Forrest, the prison psychiatrist who is also his sometime lover and the main protagonist of this dark tale. Moore’s books straddle a line between the “popular” and the “literary,” for want of better terms. (The best known of them, \u003cb>In The Cut\u003c/b>, was made into a recent film starring Meg Ryan.) She deals in the pop-fiction crime universe of killers and victims, but comes at it from an angle that makes genre distinctions feel totally arbitrary.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Louise Forrest has taken a new position as chief psychiatrist at the prison, despite having much more lucrative and less stressful prospects elsewhere. This confuses everyone: neither the inmates nor the other prison personnel can tell which side she’s on. She may have started out wanting to work there for some high-minded social justice reason, which she is now too exhausted to recall. Her party-boy husband Rafael has left her and gone to Hollywood, leaving her with their son, Ransom. She is fighting, with all her might, to hold herself together. Her dry wit keeps her from losing it entirely. “When I’m feeling overwhelmed,” she says, “…I remind myself that I am a physician. I am the mother of an eight-year-old boy. I am not an inmate. I have not embezzled from the Ladies’ Garment Workers Union or killed my common-law husband with a George Foreman grill.” The fact that she has to remind herself she isn’t in prison illustrates just how disorienting it can be to spend a career inside an institution. The prisoners are only there because they have to be. Who would CHOOSE to spend time in such a place?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Along with Louise, the other main narrator is Helen, an inmate and one of Louise’s patients. Helen is an infamous child-killer. She murdered her son and daughter at the behest of unseen dark forces, and Moore clearly modeled her on Andrea Yates, a deeply religious and occasionally psychotic woman who drowned her five kids a few years back. Moore’s skill lies in creating such instantly recognizable character voices that you would know exactly who was speaking even if there weren’t any line breaks to indicate it. Helen seems oddly sweet and innocent, incapable of truly understanding what she has done. She sends a fan letter and a photo of her kids — the kids she killed — to a famous Hollywood starlet.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That starlet, Angie, is the fourth narrator in the chorus, a vapid, drug-addled social climber who is sleeping with Dr. Forrest’s estranged husband. It’s a bit of a cute coincidence, and a couple other not-very-believable coincidences mar what is otherwise a very engaging novel.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Helen recounts her therapy sessions with Forrest. She talks about her hideously abusive childhood, her marriage to a controlling preacher, and the black-robed Horsemen of the Apocalypse that come riding their black stallions into her prison cell on occasion. “The Horsemen believed in me, and I believed in them,” she says. “The idea that I might of imagined them, well, I deserve to die if that is true.” (We always know a shift into Helen’s voice because she says “might of” instead of “might have.”) Through Helen’s eyes we discover the infinitely complex universe of life in a women’s prison. Barely able to function on any level, Helen is doing her best to navigate the jealousies, alliances, romances, breakups, business opportunities and time-wasting craft projects that make up the bulk of daily life for the women of Sloatsburg.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The most fascinating aspect of Moore’s novel is her dissection of the ongoing soap operatic relations among the prisoners. “Families” are formed, with mothers, fathers, children, cousins, nieces, nephews. Packaged commissary snacks are used as ingredients for all kinds of unhealthy and gross-sounding concoctions. If a woman is seen chewing bubble gum, it’s a sign she’s sleeping with a guard. Love affairs — complete with ungrammatical, grade-school-style mash notes — are constant, even between women who profess to hate lesbians. It’s all an attempt to find some kind of warmth or human kindness — or failing that, some kind of control or advantage — in a cold and unkind place. The endless rules and regulations make no sense: one inmate is denied a visit with her child because the kid is wearing a hooded coat — the hood is a dress code violation. Prisoners are not adults anymore, they’ve become the “Big Girls” of the title.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There is another entire storyline that comes into play, involving Forrest and Ike Bradshaw, the guard, and how their relationship lights a fuse in the mind of Forrest’s son Ransom that leads to tragic consequences. We find out a lot more about Angie the starlet, whose insular life of manicures and tanning sessions ends up sounding like its own kind of prison. The characters are unforgettable, for sure. What doesn’t always work so well is the story that brings them all together. Some aspects don’t feel believable, and some of the shocking-twist plot points truly come out of nowhere. The up-to-the minute cultural references will probably sound dated almost immediately (in one scene, two guys in a bar debate Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise’s divorce). But overall, \u003cb>The Big Girls\u003c/b> works more often than it doesn’t. The larger points Moore makes — about male-female relations, motherhood, and whether anyone is truly free — will stick with you for a long time.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003cb>Please Note:\u003c/b> This review has been slightly edited. I based some of my original comments on the belief that Vlautin’s novel was a reissue of a book originally published in the UK in 1999. I got this information from the book’s own copyright page, which clearly states, “First UK paperback edition published in 1999 by Faber and Faber Limited.” I’ve since confirmed with Vlautin’s publicist that the 1999 copyright date is a typographical error: the book was only just published in the UK in 2006. Before I found this out, I was mystified as to why the HarperCollins publicity machine wasn’t more upfront about how old a book it was. Well, mystery solved: It’s not even a year old. My opinion of the HarperCollins publicity department has improved significantly. Meanwhile, my opinion of the HarperCollins proofreading department has fallen off a bit, and my opinion of Willy Vlautin’s body of work is entirely unchanged. -SK\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There’s this short little book, written in the 1990’s by a not-so-young-anymore young guy, narrated by a protagonist who’s done a lot of hard living, who sort of wanders aimlessly but retains his sense of childlike wonder about the world and the things that are in it. It’s an absolutely flawless pieces of poetry, the kind of thing that makes me weep, actually weep, when no one is looking. The book begins with a car crash, the inevitability of which is rendered thusly: “My jaw ached. I knew every raindrop by its name. I sensed everything before it happened. I knew a certain Oldsmobile would stop for me even before it slowed, and by the sweet voices of the family inside I knew we’d have an accident in the storm.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There’s this other short little book, set inthe 1990’s, whose protagonist is a hard-living yet wide-eyed innocent kid who does a lot of drinking and gambling but retains a childlike innocence about the world and the things that are in it. It’s so leaden and formulaic, it makes me despair for the state of American writing. The book also begins with a car crash, the inevitability of which is rendered thusly: “Bad luck, it falls on people every day. It’s one of the only certain truths.” \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The first book is \u003cb>Jesus’ Son\u003c/b> by Denis Johnson, a multitalented poet, novelist, and playwright who took the dissipated life of a drug-addled man in his twenties and elevated it to an almost mystical, saintly meditation on redemption and loss. The second book is \u003cb>The Motel Life\u003c/b> by Willy Vlautin, the singer of an obscure alt-country outfit called Richmond Fontaine. It was first published in the UK last year, and is now being released in the US by HarperPerennial, just in time to capitalize on the release of a new Richmond Fontaine album, \u003cb>Thirteen Cities\u003c/b>. From what I gather, Richmond Fontaine has built up quite the British and European following over the past decade. One review in a UK magazine said they are well known to fans of the “Americana genre”: something that doesn’t really exist here in the same form. British and Irish reviews of Vlautin’s novel also use the word “Americana” liberally. I get the sense that it’s popular over there because it depicts a kind of defeated, romantic, western, lonely open road sensibility that has no analogue in Britain, that appears “authentically” American and totally exotic if you grew up in, say, London. But let’s compare books again: \u003cb>Jesus’ Son\u003c/b> treads the same geographic and demographic terrain as Vlautin’s book, it reads like it was written by a man who walked through hellfire and came through it clutching one of Satan’s hot coals, as proof. On the other hand, \u003cb>The Motel Life\u003c/b> reads like it was written by a man who read \u003cb>Jesus’ Son\u003c/b> (along with the complete works of Raymond Carver, perhaps) and thought he’d try that, too.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Vlautin bites off way more than he can chew with this story, a meandering tale of two brothers ekeing out one of the most miserable existences in fiction since “The Little Match Girl.” Frank Flannigan, the narrator, and his older brother Jerry Lee, both in their late teens, are living in Reno on their dead mother’s life savings. Ever since she died of cancer they have been attempting to live on their own, so as to avoid foster care and all its attendant horrors. But they’re not doing too good a job of it, to say the least. They hop from sleazy motel to motel, working odd jobs like scrubbing down vehicles in a used car lot. They hang out in casinos with ne’er-do-wells, they have sex with sad abused girls, and they drink. They drink more than it seems humanly possible to drink. Beer is consumed on nearly every page of the book, at every hour of the day, sometimes alongside Pepto Bismol or a glass of milk.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jerry Lee has already lost a leg while train-hopping when the story begins, but the misery carnival has barely begun. Driving drunk, he has hit and killed a kid on a bike. Displaying a virtuoso talent for poor decision-making, Frank and Jerry Lee decide to dump the kid’s body on the side of the road and run. What follows is a series of flashbacks that get us up to speed on how all this came to be, interspersed with made-up stories that Frank tells Jerry Lee when they can’t sleep.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The narrative is oddly unmoored in time, there are almost no references that will help you figure out what year it’s supposed to be (Willie Nelson is the favorite singer of the brothers). Also they never seem to consume any drug other than beer, which seems surprising, since I’d think it would actually be easier and cheaper for a couple of teenagers in Reno to get high than buy a six-pack. The only detail grounding the story in time is that the climax takes place during the week of the Tyson-Holyfield heavyweight championship bout. Reno and its myriad motels are unrelentingly bleak: It’s always cold and just about to snow, the asphalt is always lit by neon, and the next big win is always just out of reach. You could invent a fun drinking game where every time a character says he “Hurts Real Bad,” you do a shot. The characters are wooden, the dialogue rings false, Reno as rendered here is like a stage set. Every glimmer of hope or change is snatched away, and by page fifty you can already guess how it’s all going to end. (Hint: not well.).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The American debut of \u003cb>The Motel Life\u003c/b> is getting the full frontlist treatment from HarperPerennial, and not only that, it’s a “P.S.” edition: it has a special section of bordered pages in the back that contain an interview with Willy Vlautin and other supporting materials. Harper has been doing a lot of this, a sort of DVD Special Feature in book form. And just like on a DVD, the special features can be fascinating and revelatory, or they can be totally superfluous. In the interview, Willy Vlautin almost seems like a character Denis Johnson could have written, going on about drinking and road life and betting on horses at the track. When asked what the high point of his life would be, he says to the interviewer, “having a girl like you think you’re actually alright and worth spending time with.” My favorite moment comes when he describes how he sold, for a criminally paltry sum, his complete collection of Charles Bukowski novels: “I had this revelation: Maybe if I got rid of the Bukowski books I wouldn’t be a loser anymore. Maybe if I sold the books I wouldn’t be sweating to death and hung over…Maybe I’d amount to something. It had to be Bukowski’s influence that was ruining me.” Oh, Willy, what are we gonna do with you?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I listened to a couple Richmond Fontaine songs online while writing this review, in an attempt to get in the right frame of mind. They were fine, they pretty much sound like Uncle Tupelo (a seminal ’90s alt-country band) only with a horn section, and a more limited range of song subjects (living in your mother’s basement, betting on horse races). Then, to cleasnse my palate, I listened to an album by the arguable progenitor of alt-country, Gram Parsons, a guy so hardcore he drank himself to death at the age of 27. One of the iconic tunes from his brief career is a soaring, gorgeous duet with Emmylou Harris, a cover of the cheesy rock ballad “Love Hurts”: “Some folks fool themselves I guess, but they’re not fooling me,” goes the bridge. He hits the high note, and you get the sound of a man who’s taken his pain and made it beautiful. For a true hard-drinking, soul-searing hit of pure Americana, rather than a stage-managed rehash, listen to some Gram Parsons while you read Denis Johnson. Only in his wildest dreams is Willy Vlautin fit to shine the boots of either man, let alone step into them.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cb>Please Note:\u003c/b> This review has been slightly edited. I based some of my original comments on the belief that Vlautin’s novel was a reissue of a book originally published in the UK in 1999. I got this information from the book’s own copyright page, which clearly states, “First UK paperback edition published in 1999 by Faber and Faber Limited.” I’ve since confirmed with Vlautin’s publicist that the 1999 copyright date is a typographical error: the book was only just published in the UK in 2006. Before I found this out, I was mystified as to why the HarperCollins publicity machine wasn’t more upfront about how old a book it was. Well, mystery solved: It’s not even a year old. My opinion of the HarperCollins publicity department has improved significantly. Meanwhile, my opinion of the HarperCollins proofreading department has fallen off a bit, and my opinion of Willy Vlautin’s body of work is entirely unchanged. -SK\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There’s this short little book, written in the 1990’s by a not-so-young-anymore young guy, narrated by a protagonist who’s done a lot of hard living, who sort of wanders aimlessly but retains his sense of childlike wonder about the world and the things that are in it. It’s an absolutely flawless pieces of poetry, the kind of thing that makes me weep, actually weep, when no one is looking. The book begins with a car crash, the inevitability of which is rendered thusly: “My jaw ached. I knew every raindrop by its name. I sensed everything before it happened. I knew a certain Oldsmobile would stop for me even before it slowed, and by the sweet voices of the family inside I knew we’d have an accident in the storm.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There’s this other short little book, set inthe 1990’s, whose protagonist is a hard-living yet wide-eyed innocent kid who does a lot of drinking and gambling but retains a childlike innocence about the world and the things that are in it. It’s so leaden and formulaic, it makes me despair for the state of American writing. The book also begins with a car crash, the inevitability of which is rendered thusly: “Bad luck, it falls on people every day. It’s one of the only certain truths.” \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The first book is \u003cb>Jesus’ Son\u003c/b> by Denis Johnson, a multitalented poet, novelist, and playwright who took the dissipated life of a drug-addled man in his twenties and elevated it to an almost mystical, saintly meditation on redemption and loss. The second book is \u003cb>The Motel Life\u003c/b> by Willy Vlautin, the singer of an obscure alt-country outfit called Richmond Fontaine. It was first published in the UK last year, and is now being released in the US by HarperPerennial, just in time to capitalize on the release of a new Richmond Fontaine album, \u003cb>Thirteen Cities\u003c/b>. From what I gather, Richmond Fontaine has built up quite the British and European following over the past decade. One review in a UK magazine said they are well known to fans of the “Americana genre”: something that doesn’t really exist here in the same form. British and Irish reviews of Vlautin’s novel also use the word “Americana” liberally. I get the sense that it’s popular over there because it depicts a kind of defeated, romantic, western, lonely open road sensibility that has no analogue in Britain, that appears “authentically” American and totally exotic if you grew up in, say, London. But let’s compare books again: \u003cb>Jesus’ Son\u003c/b> treads the same geographic and demographic terrain as Vlautin’s book, it reads like it was written by a man who walked through hellfire and came through it clutching one of Satan’s hot coals, as proof. On the other hand, \u003cb>The Motel Life\u003c/b> reads like it was written by a man who read \u003cb>Jesus’ Son\u003c/b> (along with the complete works of Raymond Carver, perhaps) and thought he’d try that, too.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Vlautin bites off way more than he can chew with this story, a meandering tale of two brothers ekeing out one of the most miserable existences in fiction since “The Little Match Girl.” Frank Flannigan, the narrator, and his older brother Jerry Lee, both in their late teens, are living in Reno on their dead mother’s life savings. Ever since she died of cancer they have been attempting to live on their own, so as to avoid foster care and all its attendant horrors. But they’re not doing too good a job of it, to say the least. They hop from sleazy motel to motel, working odd jobs like scrubbing down vehicles in a used car lot. They hang out in casinos with ne’er-do-wells, they have sex with sad abused girls, and they drink. They drink more than it seems humanly possible to drink. Beer is consumed on nearly every page of the book, at every hour of the day, sometimes alongside Pepto Bismol or a glass of milk.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jerry Lee has already lost a leg while train-hopping when the story begins, but the misery carnival has barely begun. Driving drunk, he has hit and killed a kid on a bike. Displaying a virtuoso talent for poor decision-making, Frank and Jerry Lee decide to dump the kid’s body on the side of the road and run. What follows is a series of flashbacks that get us up to speed on how all this came to be, interspersed with made-up stories that Frank tells Jerry Lee when they can’t sleep.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The narrative is oddly unmoored in time, there are almost no references that will help you figure out what year it’s supposed to be (Willie Nelson is the favorite singer of the brothers). Also they never seem to consume any drug other than beer, which seems surprising, since I’d think it would actually be easier and cheaper for a couple of teenagers in Reno to get high than buy a six-pack. The only detail grounding the story in time is that the climax takes place during the week of the Tyson-Holyfield heavyweight championship bout. Reno and its myriad motels are unrelentingly bleak: It’s always cold and just about to snow, the asphalt is always lit by neon, and the next big win is always just out of reach. You could invent a fun drinking game where every time a character says he “Hurts Real Bad,” you do a shot. The characters are wooden, the dialogue rings false, Reno as rendered here is like a stage set. Every glimmer of hope or change is snatched away, and by page fifty you can already guess how it’s all going to end. (Hint: not well.).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The American debut of \u003cb>The Motel Life\u003c/b> is getting the full frontlist treatment from HarperPerennial, and not only that, it’s a “P.S.” edition: it has a special section of bordered pages in the back that contain an interview with Willy Vlautin and other supporting materials. Harper has been doing a lot of this, a sort of DVD Special Feature in book form. And just like on a DVD, the special features can be fascinating and revelatory, or they can be totally superfluous. In the interview, Willy Vlautin almost seems like a character Denis Johnson could have written, going on about drinking and road life and betting on horses at the track. When asked what the high point of his life would be, he says to the interviewer, “having a girl like you think you’re actually alright and worth spending time with.” My favorite moment comes when he describes how he sold, for a criminally paltry sum, his complete collection of Charles Bukowski novels: “I had this revelation: Maybe if I got rid of the Bukowski books I wouldn’t be a loser anymore. Maybe if I sold the books I wouldn’t be sweating to death and hung over…Maybe I’d amount to something. It had to be Bukowski’s influence that was ruining me.” Oh, Willy, what are we gonna do with you?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I listened to a couple Richmond Fontaine songs online while writing this review, in an attempt to get in the right frame of mind. They were fine, they pretty much sound like Uncle Tupelo (a seminal ’90s alt-country band) only with a horn section, and a more limited range of song subjects (living in your mother’s basement, betting on horse races). Then, to cleasnse my palate, I listened to an album by the arguable progenitor of alt-country, Gram Parsons, a guy so hardcore he drank himself to death at the age of 27. One of the iconic tunes from his brief career is a soaring, gorgeous duet with Emmylou Harris, a cover of the cheesy rock ballad “Love Hurts”: “Some folks fool themselves I guess, but they’re not fooling me,” goes the bridge. He hits the high note, and you get the sound of a man who’s taken his pain and made it beautiful. For a true hard-drinking, soul-searing hit of pure Americana, rather than a stage-managed rehash, listen to some Gram Parsons while you read Denis Johnson. Only in his wildest dreams is Willy Vlautin fit to shine the boots of either man, let alone step into them.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"info": "A one-hour radio program to hear celebrated writers, artists and thinkers address contemporary ideas and values, often discussing the creative process. Please note: tapes or transcripts are not available",
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"airtime": "SUN 1pm-2pm, TUE 10pm, WED 1am",
"meta": {
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"source": "City Arts & Lectures"
},
"link": "https://www.cityarts.net",
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"rss": "https://www.cityarts.net/feed/"
}
},
"closealltabs": {
"id": "closealltabs",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "/podcasts/closealltabs",
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"order": 1
},
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"id": "code-switch-life-kit",
"title": "Code Switch / Life Kit",
"info": "\u003cem>Code Switch\u003c/em>, which listeners will hear in the first part of the hour, has fearless and much-needed conversations about race. Hosted by journalists of color, the show tackles the subject of race head-on, exploring how it impacts every part of society — from politics and pop culture to history, sports and more.\u003cbr />\u003cbr />\u003cem>Life Kit\u003c/em>, which will be in the second part of the hour, guides you through spaces and feelings no one prepares you for — from finances to mental health, from workplace microaggressions to imposter syndrome, from relationships to parenting. The show features experts with real world experience and shares their knowledge. Because everyone needs a little help being human.\u003cbr />\u003cbr />\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510312/codeswitch\">\u003cem>Code Switch\u003c/em> offical site and podcast\u003c/a>\u003cbr />\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/lifekit\">\u003cem>Life Kit\u003c/em> offical site and podcast\u003c/a>\u003cbr />",
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"id": "commonwealth-club",
"title": "Commonwealth Club of California Podcast",
"info": "The Commonwealth Club of California is the nation's oldest and largest public affairs forum. As a non-partisan forum, The Club brings to the public airwaves diverse viewpoints on important topics. The Club's weekly radio broadcast - the oldest in the U.S., dating back to 1924 - is carried across the nation on public radio stations and is now podcasting. Our website archive features audio of our recent programs, as well as selected speeches from our long and distinguished history. This podcast feed is usually updated twice a week and is always un-edited.",
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"meta": {
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"source": "Commonwealth Club of California"
},
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL3d3dy5jb21tb253ZWFsdGhjbHViLm9yZy9hdWRpby9wb2RjYXN0L3dlZWtseS54bWw",
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"title": "Forum",
"tagline": "The conversation starts here",
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"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Forum-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
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"order": 9
},
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vS1FJTkM5NTU3MzgxNjMz",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "http://freakonomics.com/",
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"meta": {
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"source": "WNYC"
},
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/freakonomics-radio/id354668519",
"tuneIn": "https://tunein.com/podcasts/WNYC-Podcasts/Freakonomics-Radio-p272293/",
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},
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"id": "fresh-air",
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?s=143441&mt=2&id=214089682&at=11l79Y&ct=nprdirectory",
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"info": "A live production of NPR and WBUR Boston, in collaboration with stations across the country, Here & Now reflects the fluid world of news as it's happening in the middle of the day, with timely, in-depth news, interviews and conversation. Hosted by Robin Young, Jeremy Hobson and Tonya Mosley.",
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"hidden-brain": {
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"info": "Shankar Vedantam uses science and storytelling to reveal the unconscious patterns that drive human behavior, shape our choices and direct our relationships.",
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"airtime": "SUN 7pm-8pm",
"meta": {
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"source": "NPR"
},
"link": "/radio/program/hidden-brain",
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"how-i-built-this": {
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"title": "How I Built This with Guy Raz",
"info": "Guy Raz dives into the stories behind some of the world's best known companies. How I Built This weaves a narrative journey about innovators, entrepreneurs and idealists—and the movements they built.",
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"airtime": "SUN 7:30pm-8pm",
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"link": "/radio/program/how-i-built-this",
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/how-i-built-this-with-guy-raz/id1150510297?mt=2",
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"hyphenacion": {
"id": "hyphenacion",
"title": "Hyphenación",
"tagline": "Where conversation and cultura meet",
"info": "What kind of no sabo word is Hyphenación? For us, it’s about living within a hyphenation. Like being a third-gen Mexican-American from the Texas border now living that Bay Area Chicano life. Like Xorje! Each week we bring together a couple of hyphenated Latinos to talk all about personal life choices: family, careers, relationships, belonging … everything is on the table. ",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Hyphenacion_FinalAssets_PodcastTile.png",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "/podcasts/hyphenacion",
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"order": 15
},
"link": "/podcasts/hyphenacion",
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"spotify": "https://open.spotify.com/show/2p3Fifq96nw9BPcmFdIq0o?si=39209f7b25774f38",
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},
"jerrybrown": {
"id": "jerrybrown",
"title": "The Political Mind of Jerry Brown",
"tagline": "Lessons from a lifetime in politics",
"info": "The Political Mind of Jerry Brown brings listeners the wisdom of the former Governor, Mayor, and presidential candidate. Scott Shafer interviewed Brown for more than 40 hours, covering the former governor's life and half-century in the political game – and Brown has some lessons he'd like to share. ",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/The-Political-Mind-of-Jerry-Brown-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "/podcasts/jerrybrown",
"meta": {
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"order": 18
},
"link": "/podcasts/jerrybrown",
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/id1492194549",
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},
"latino-usa": {
"id": "latino-usa",
"title": "Latino USA",
"airtime": "MON 1am-2am, SUN 6pm-7pm",
"info": "Latino USA, the radio journal of news and culture, is the only national, English-language radio program produced from a Latino perspective.",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/radio/wp-content/uploads/sites/50/2018/04/latinoUsa.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "http://latinousa.org/",
"meta": {
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},
"link": "/radio/program/latino-usa",
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?s=143441&mt=2&id=79681317&at=11l79Y&ct=nprdirectory",
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"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/510016/podcast.xml"
}
},
"marketplace": {
"id": "marketplace",
"title": "Marketplace",
"info": "Our flagship program, helmed by Kai Ryssdal, examines what the day in money delivered, through stories, conversations, newsworthy numbers and more. Updated Monday through Friday at about 3:30 p.m. PT.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 4pm-4:30pm, MON-WED 6:30pm-7pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Marketplace-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.marketplace.org/",
"meta": {
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"source": "American Public Media"
},
"link": "/radio/program/marketplace",
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},
"masters-of-scale": {
"id": "masters-of-scale",
"title": "Masters of Scale",
"info": "Masters of Scale is an original podcast in which LinkedIn co-founder and Greylock Partner Reid Hoffman sets out to describe and prove theories that explain how great entrepreneurs take their companies from zero to a gazillion in ingenious fashion.",
"airtime": "Every other Wednesday June 12 through October 16 at 8pm (repeats Thursdays at 2am)",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "https://mastersofscale.com/",
"meta": {
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"source": "WaitWhat"
},
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"rss": "https://rss.art19.com/masters-of-scale"
}
},
"mindshift": {
"id": "mindshift",
"title": "MindShift",
"tagline": "A podcast about the future of learning and how we raise our kids",
"info": "The MindShift podcast explores the innovations in education that are shaping how kids learn. Hosts Ki Sung and Katrina Schwartz introduce listeners to educators, researchers, parents and students who are developing effective ways to improve how kids learn. We cover topics like how fed-up administrators are developing surprising tactics to deal with classroom disruptions; how listening to podcasts are helping kids develop reading skills; the consequences of overparenting; and why interdisciplinary learning can engage students on all ends of the traditional achievement spectrum. This podcast is part of the MindShift education site, a division of KQED News. KQED is an NPR/PBS member station based in San Francisco. You can also visit the MindShift website for episodes and supplemental blog posts or tweet us \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/MindShiftKQED\">@MindShiftKQED\u003c/a> or visit us at \u003ca href=\"/mindshift\">MindShift.KQED.org\u003c/a>",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Mindshift-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
"imageAlt": "KQED MindShift: How We Will Learn",
"officialWebsiteLink": "/mindshift/",
"meta": {
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"source": "kqed",
"order": 12
},
"link": "/podcasts/mindshift",
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vS1FJTkM1NzY0NjAwNDI5",
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}
},
"morning-edition": {
"id": "morning-edition",
"title": "Morning Edition",
"info": "\u003cem>Morning Edition\u003c/em> takes listeners around the country and the world with multi-faceted stories and commentaries every weekday. Hosts Steve Inskeep, David Greene and Rachel Martin bring you the latest breaking news and features to prepare you for the day.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 3am-9am",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Morning-Edition-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.npr.org/programs/morning-edition/",
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"link": "/radio/program/morning-edition"
},
"onourwatch": {
"id": "onourwatch",
"title": "On Our Watch",
"tagline": "Deeply-reported investigative journalism",
"info": "For decades, the process for how police police themselves has been inconsistent – if not opaque. In some states, like California, these proceedings were completely hidden. After a new police transparency law unsealed scores of internal affairs files, our reporters set out to examine these cases and the shadow world of police discipline. On Our Watch brings listeners into the rooms where officers are questioned and witnesses are interrogated to find out who this system is really protecting. Is it the officers, or the public they've sworn to serve?",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/On-Our-Watch-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "/podcasts/onourwatch",
"meta": {
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"source": "kqed",
"order": 11
},
"link": "/podcasts/onourwatch",
"subscribe": {
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5ucHIub3JnLzUxMDM2MC9wb2RjYXN0LnhtbD9zYz1nb29nbGVwb2RjYXN0cw",
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},
"on-the-media": {
"id": "on-the-media",
"title": "On The Media",
"info": "Our weekly podcast explores how the media 'sausage' is made, casts an incisive eye on fluctuations in the marketplace of ideas, and examines threats to the freedom of information and expression in America and abroad. For one hour a week, the show tries to lift the veil from the process of \"making media,\" especially news media, because it's through that lens that we see the world and the world sees us",
"airtime": "SUN 2pm-3pm, MON 12am-1am",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/radio/wp-content/uploads/sites/50/2018/04/onTheMedia.png",
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"meta": {
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"source": "wnyc"
},
"link": "/radio/program/on-the-media",
"subscribe": {
"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/on-the-media/id73330715?mt=2",
"tuneIn": "https://tunein.com/radio/On-the-Media-p69/",
"rss": "http://feeds.wnyc.org/onthemedia"
}
},
"pbs-newshour": {
"id": "pbs-newshour",
"title": "PBS NewsHour",
"info": "Analysis, background reports and updates from the PBS NewsHour putting today's news in context.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 3pm-4pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/PBS-News-Hour-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.pbs.org/newshour/",
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"source": "pbs"
},
"link": "/radio/program/pbs-newshour",
"subscribe": {
"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/pbs-newshour-full-show/id394432287?mt=2",
"tuneIn": "https://tunein.com/radio/PBS-NewsHour---Full-Show-p425698/",
"rss": "https://www.pbs.org/newshour/feeds/rss/podcasts/show"
}
},
"perspectives": {
"id": "perspectives",
"title": "Perspectives",
"tagline": "KQED's series of daily listener commentaries since 1991",
"info": "KQED's series of daily listener commentaries since 1991.",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Perspectives_Tile_Final.jpg",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "/perspectives/",
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"source": "kqed",
"order": 14
},
"link": "/perspectives",
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