DANGEROUS LIT

Well, it's that time again, folks:  Banned Books Week.  Stand up for your First Amendment rights and read something by, oh maybe John Steinbeck.  Or...Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, Margaret Atwood.  Or...here's a shocker:  Jean M. Auel (Earth's Children series...yep).  Read Maurice Sendak and J.K. Rowling to your kids. Get really radical and read To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, or A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle.  Those perennial winners (or should I say "losers" in this case?) The Catcher in the Rye and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn are still out there upsetting parents.  And teachers are still putting them on reading lists.  Will we never learn?  Anyway, you can get the whole story, as it were, from that radical leftist organization, The American Library Association - or just go here and get the list of the 100 most challenged books from 1990 to 2000.  It was a very good decade.

WHEREVER YOU ARE, LEONARD, HERE'S TO YOU

From Garrison Keilor's wonderful site, The Writer's Almanac, this snippet about one of my favorite singer/poet/songwriters, Leonard Cohen:

      It's the birthday of poet, novelist and songwriter Leonard Cohen, born in Montreal, Canada (1934).  He's the author of many books of poetry, including Let Us Compare Mythologies (1956) and Death of a Ladies' Man (1978), and novels such as Beautiful Losers (1966). 

He learned to play guitar at a socialist summer camp when he was a teenager, but at the time he only used the guitar to get girls.  He was more interested in poetry, and by the early 1960's he was considered one of Canada's most promising young poets. Then in 1966, the folksinger Judy Collins heard some of his songs, which he had written and performed only for friends, and she persuaded him to perform in public and make a record. He's been recording music ever since.

His most famous song is "Suzanne" from Songs of Leonard Cohen (1968).  It goes, "Now Suzanne takes your hand / And she leads you to the river / She is wearing rags and feathers / From Salvation Army counters / And the sun pours down like honey / On our lady of the harbour / And she shows you where to look / Among the garbage and the flowers."  

Leonard Cohen wrote, "As our eyes grow accustomed to sight they armour themselves against wonder."

You young folk may not even know him, but was there ever anyone with so much sorrow in his voice?  Someone who made you feel a life of heartbreak and pain when he sang his often cynical, often depressing, always wonderful, songs?  He was one of the muses of my youth, perfectly able to express the depths of youthful despair and degradation, longing, beauty - it was all there, "among the garbage and the flowers."  I still have some old LP's of his.  Imagine that. I haven't listened to him in years, but he's got an album coming out next month - he's still going strong.  Check out the website link at the beginning of the quote from The Almanac.  Great stuff there, if you've been missing Leonard.

ANGELS AND SPIRITS, AND KINSEY MILHONE

I finished the Louise Erdrich (Four Souls), and actually read something else in between - whose name I don't exactly remember - and am now in the middle of Sue Grafton's latest alphabetical mystery:  R is for Ricochet.  This is not literature, but Kinsey Milhone (Grafton's detective) is like an old friend now, and I am compelled to keep up with her adventures.  And misadventures.  Four Souls more closely resembled literature; I do in fact think that all of Erdrich's work deserves to be called literature.  She, like Faulkner, has created a world in her novels.  Place is as important as plot or character in these books, and the place, plot and recurring characters all intertwine from book to book.  I do want to write more about Erdrich's world, but don't have the time right now.  This is the week I begin my second job, afternoons at La Casita doing homework help and ESL with Hispanic children from the local elementary and middle schools. I seem to have time to either read books, or write about reading books.  Pretty clear choice, eh?

(Isn't everyone in love with her?)

I do want to say a word about "Angels in America," however.  Not a book, but the HBO series made from Tony Kushner's play.  We have finished watching "Six Feet Under," the first two seasons on DVD and we're waiting for season #3 to come out.  I feel rather like a junkie who's had all drug sources suddenly and visciously removed.  So, jonesing for something to watch on the weekend, I spied "Angels in America" on the shelf.  We don't have HBO and there are times I truly regret it.  The screening of Kushner's opus was one of them.  So Part I (Milennium Approaches) of Angels came home with me on Friday.  G and I were pinned to the sofa for the entire 179 minutes of it, no bathroom breaks, no mixed nuts or diet Pepsi breaks, no answering the phone when it rang.  Rivetted.

I've never seen anything this good, certainly not on TV.  I read on AOL early this morning that it cleaned up on Emmy Awards - and how glad I am to know that this kind of genius is rightfully rewarded.  The screenplay is brilliant (Kushner wrote it, thank with great thanksgiving whatever gods may be), the acting as well (Meryl Streep as the old rabbi?  imagine that! and Emma, oh Emma, I'm so in love with you!), the direction - ! - Mike Nichols outdid himself. We are waiting til next weekend to bring home Part II (Perestroika), we won't have any time to watch it until then.  I may have to buy this pair of DVD's, it will need many more than one watching.  And I regret more than ever that I didn't get to see it on stage during its run.  I'd love to see how they managed many of those scenes, easy enough with special movie effects, on a stage.

 

A SHORT DIET OF FLUFFY JUNK

First, I would like to thank the other lost souls who watch "Six Feet Under" with avid enthusiasm.  I don't feel like such a freak any more. I have been paying attention to the writers and directors on the episodes, and find that those directed by Kathy Bates are my favorites.  G and I are working our way through the second season now - and can it be true that we'll have to wait a year for the third season to be out in DVD?  Oh, say it isn't so.  We'll have to slow our pace down somewhat.

The past four weeks have been crazy, hectic - back to school, voter registration, interviewing for a second job in the afternoons (how poor must we be for me to even THINK of doing this?), etc.  So my reading has been mainly fluffy junk.  Or, Junky fluff.  Either way.  Finished The Burglar on the Prowl, by Lawrence Block, then read Shoot the Moon, by Billie Letts.  If I'd gotten R is for Ricochet, I'd have read it too by now.  But I'm number 28 on the library waiting list.  So, I read a real book:  Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, by Dai Sijie.  This one has been a real book for so long that soon it will be a movie.  How I hope they can do it justice.  It's a fantastically visual book, the impulse to put it on film is irresistable.  I thought about many of the scenes filmically while I was reading it, there's no way not to.  I read the book in one afternoon over the holiday weekend just past - G and I were both wiped out, so we spent the weekend as lazily as possible:  reading, napping, going out to eat, avoiding all the tourists at the beaches.

Mara has a short piece on this book in her book journal, Ex Libris, that saves me the time of doing my own.  I think we both enjoyed this story for the same reasons - how it illustrates the power of reading, the influence of literature, on the lives touched by its magic.  Though Mao banishes intellectuals and literature from his China, sends young scholars to the countryside for "re-education" in an effort to rid their minds of all thoughts save how to survive their daily toil - contraband books surface, are read by lamplight, enjoyed, new worlds envisioned.  This is a dear little book that I wanted not to end - alas, it did, all too soon.  Give yourself a treat, meet these young men, and their friend, the little Chinese seamstress, as they make their way through an alien world, and a suitcase of banned books.

P.S. - Oh my, I just did some searching and discovered that the film WAS made, in 2002, but apparently never released in this country.  It came out in China and France (where Dai Sijie now lives), it seems.  I will have to see if it's available here somehow.  Does anyone know this?