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A Geography of Reading

"It is by reading novels, stories, and myths that we come to understand the world in which we live." -Orhan Pamuk

A Portrait of Two Artists as Just Kids

December 14, 2012 by Karen Hugg, MFA 1 Comment

When I was growing up, I was no stranger to Patti Smith. My brother had “Horses, Easter and Wave” in his album collection, which I sometimes borrowed and listened to. Every other month it seemed I’d come across Smith in rock magazines like CREEM and Rolling Stone. She was an exotic androgynous rocker making noisy music beyond anything I’d ever heard before. So decades later, when I learned she’d written a memoir, Just Kids, about her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe, I was surprised. What I’d remembered of Mapplethorpe came from an exhibition in Chicago in 1989. Intense images, often homoerotic, through a Michelangelo type of lens. So I had to read this memoir to see how these two very different people living in what I thought were two very different worlds had started out together.

Patti Smith and Robert Maplethorpe were Just Kids

Patti Smith came to New York City from a loving family in New Jersey. She wanted to be an artist. Instead she arrived in NYC without money, food, or friends. She slept on the streets. There she met a young Mapplethorpe who wanted to be an artist too. He was also without money, food, or friends, and sleeping on the streets. Easily enough they came together and began both an artistic and romantic relationship that lasted until Mapplethorpe’s death in 1989.

After reading Just Kids, I’ve found a deeper appreciation for Mapplethorpe’s work. And not just his work, but his approach to the creation of art. He took the darkness that was thriving inside and turned it outward to produce intense beautiful images. Some are shocking, some are lovely, and all of them are what they are. I can’t say the same thing about Patti Smith. She wasn’t as troubled by her childhood, seemingly, as Mapplethorpe was. She made her way into music through her poetry, which later turned into lyrics as she discovered the joy and empowerment of rock and roll. And it’s her deft poetic eye for detail while also saying something larger that makes this book valuable for any writer to read.

Jumping into the Poetry of the Moment when Writing Prose

There aren’t a lot of segues in Smith’s narrative. It’s as if she’s stringing together the pearls on a necklace of time, sharing one vignette of her and Robert before moving on to the next with only the briefest explanations of changes in space and time. But this is what’s elegant about this book, we don’t plod through all the day-to-day stuff, Smith treats us only to the sublime. Take this passage, which introduces Mapplethorpe for the first time:

“His young eyes stored away each play of light, the sparkle of a jewel, the rich dressing of an altar, the burnish of a gold-toned saxophone or a field of blue stars. He was gracious and shy with a precise nature. He contained, even at an early age, a stirring and the desire to stir.”

Through rich imagery, these sentences embody a young artist with his own unique vision, showing us what he saw, what he remembered, what was important to him. She then opens up the language and shares with us that he had a “precise nature” and contained “a stirring and the desire to stir.” This last play on words resonates because with the earlier concrete descriptions we’re already imagining whatever Mapplethorpe photos we might have seen – and if we haven’t seen his work, we’re compelled by this luscious nugget to explore them. Smith has taken us on a brief profound journey of not only Mapplethorpe’s vision but his personality as well and how those two melded into his later art.

Smith carries this tender, evocative tone throughout the book. Somehow she makes bumping into Jimi Hendrix seem like a nonchalant, sweet encounter or a run-in with Allen Ginsberg an awkward moment that the two would chuckle about later. And that’s another magnetic aspect of this book: Smith wasn’t just Robert Mapplethorpe’s lover, she ended up in relationships with other key players in the art and music world as well (Sam Shepherd, Allen Lanier) while growing friendships with the likes of Jim Carroll, Todd Rundgren, and William S. Burroughs. That she maintains such a humble and almost girl-next-door view of it all makes this story a most accessible and charming read.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of Just Kids from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business.

Filed Under: Books, USA & Canada Tagged With: Just Kids, Patti Smith, Robert Maplethorpe

Tadeusz Borowski and the Gift a Writer Can Give

October 26, 2012 by Karen Hugg, MFA Leave a Comment

this way for the gas ladies and gentlemen tadeusz borowskiIn terms of historical importance, little more can be said of This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. It, like Night, is a testament to the Nazis’ atrocities at Auschwitz. While contemporary novels wink at us with wit and an ironic tone, Tadeusz Borowski’s work floats above like a wise parent whose wrenching past overwhelms the smallness of our daily distractions and grievances. To say it’s one of the most valuable books of the twentieth century is a meager compliment.

How Borowski Came to Write This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen

In 1943, Borowski was arrested for participating in the underground education in Poland, a network of students and professors who privately continued university studies despite the Nazis ban on secondary schooling. Education had been outlawed in an effort to dumb down and enslave the Poles. Borowski was taken to Auschwitz where he worked as a laborer, unloading the cattle cars and other tasks assigned to him. He, already a journalism student, documented his experience, but this book isn’t just a memoir of events by a well-meaning but clumsy writer. It’s brilliant for its craft as well.

Discovering the Meaning in the Details

Borowski renders the inhumane events he witnessed with a removed, sometimes cynical, tone. This seems to be an act of self-preservation, compartmentalizing the horror in order to preserve his sanity and therefore his life. And so, his commentary is in how he chooses to portray what he sees. For instance, Tadek, Borowski’s literary self, describes a young German guard as having “corn coloured hair and dreamy blue eyes.” This creates a chilling portrait of the guard when the guard sells Tadek’s co-laborer a drink of water. Borowski notes the railway station is “surrounded by trees” and “a cheerful little station, very much like any other provincial railway stop,” and therefore, contrasts the regular outside world with the unspeakably violent one inside Auschwitz’s gates. By stringing together events like, “They throw her on the truck on top of the corpses. She will burn alive along with them,” and then opening the next paragraph: “The evening has come, cool and clear. The stars are out. We lie against the rails. It is incredibly quiet,” we understand in achingly vivid terms how the only solace these survivors have in the hellish world of Auschwitz are the moments of rest and cool air in between the exterminations.

Similarly in the story, “The People Who Walked On,” we see Tadek playing goalkeeper in a soccer game and how in between two throw-ins, three thousand people are put to death. When he runs to retrieve a ball, he catches sight of the newly arrived train: “People were emerging from the cattle cars … bright splashes of colour. The women were … already wearing summer dresses. The men had taken off their coats, and their white shirts stood out sharply against the green of the trees…” Later, when he runs back to retrieve the ball again, the ramp is empty: “Out of the whole colourful procession, not one person remained.” Borowski’s choice to describe how beautiful the crowd looked in the warm evening starkly lays out for us the price of life that was lost and how, when the train ramp is empty, the sublimity of their humanity has been annihilated by the Nazi’s efficient, organized terror that leaves no one behind.

At the war’s end, the Allies arrive and liberation is clear. But Borowski frames the story as one about revenge, rather than rescue. There are no melodramatic descriptions of the Allies arriving or the Nazis fleeing, only a brief tale about how the prisoners hid “our man,” presumably an S.S. officer or guard, while the American soldiers spoke to him in a larger group about upholding the law, then pulled him out and beat him to death. It’s an exemplary case of how straight depiction is far more powerful than editorializing.

How to Write After Reading Such Strength

Reading Borowski made me question what I write about. Next to This Way for The Gas, my work feels insignificant and erasable. But though my life has been blessed with peace and been free of ongoing oppression, I have faced serious challenges and wrenching, painful moments. Borowski taught me that those experiences may be the most important for me as a writer. They will enlarge and deepen my work. The trick is to keep them in my mind and heart each day that I write.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business.

Filed Under: Books, Eastern Europe Tagged With: contrast, Holocaust, Polish Literature, World War II

The Methods in Jakov Lind’s Madness

October 5, 2012 by Karen Hugg, MFA 1 Comment

lind-soul-of-woodMost stories don’t smash me to bits. As I read them, I’m moved, enchanted, worried, dismayed, relieved, sometimes annoyed. But Jakov Lind’s Soul of Wood and Other Stories just left me flattened, feeling empty, and as if I were stranded in a strange shapeless place. The question “Wow, what was that all about?” kept looping in my head like a song, and I was unable to find an answer.

But I think the answer lies in not only the mad brilliance of the story itself, but more so, for me as a writer, in the craft of how Lind created the story. By story I mean the novella, Soul of Wood, which opens the collection. The later short stories are also impressive in their own way, but Soul of Wood is the masterpiece. It’s set in Austria in the 1940s and follows Wohlbrecht, a crippled Austrian soldier, who works to hide Anton Barth, a mostly paralyzed Jewish boy, in a mountain cabin. He enlists the help of Alois, his brother-in-law, and the first half of the book centers on the two’s endeavors of dragging Barth up through the woods while trying to avoid the Nazis and their random air attacks.

Shot from all Sides by Point of View

Lind’s voice is somehow casual, witty, romantic and brusquely masculine all at once. It doesn’t just blast its way through the narrative, but rather tumbles with a clear urgency. This was probably the first technique that I’d love to emulate (oh, if I could.) But what’s crazier and even more unattainable is how the point of view wanders. It, at times, becomes dreamy and surreal before landing flatly in stark reality. Take, for instance, the following passage occurring early in the story, which by the way could be a spoiler, depending on how you view the narrative. Read at your own risk.

As Wohlbrecht and Alois return from the cabin, they stop at the side of the road. Wohlbrecht lays and dozes in the hay as Alois talks of his post-war plans. Alois plans to visit Rumania in an effort to cure his epilepsy. In one paragraph, Alois talks about a renowned doctor and his treatment that Alois believes will mend all aspects of his life. In another, the grand wealth that he and all of Vienna will enjoy after the war. As readers we are relaxed at this point in the passage, imagining hopeful situations and feeling a tender intimacy with Alois.

Then: “The loud engine sounds woke up Wohlbrecht.” This kicks off a random rotation of omniscient narration, stream of consciousness and Wohlbrecht’s spoken words. There’s little punctuation to help us distinguish between what’s happening, what’s being said and what’s being thought.

“Jumping Jesus, he cried, they’ll fly right up my ass. A burst of machine-gun fire beat down like rain on the tin roof and by the time Wohlbrecht cried ‘Cover!’ Alois was dead. Hit right in the back of the head. The blood gushed like a geyser. Alois, Alois, Wohlbrecht yelled thinking he was still asleep. Alois, where’d it get you? Alois didn’t move. Alois, don’t pretend, say something. Alois said nothing. It was so still he could hear a beetle scratching in the hay.”

Here, this mishmash of point of view hits us in the gut. We’re dealing with the sudden chaos of the moment, which poetically reflects the sudden chaos of the entire war experience. It also shows the contrast between life and death, the potential of the future and the negation of it in how Alois is dreaming of better years to come when he is suddenly killed. By the end of these few paragraphs, we’re jarred, upset, and left processing what just happened – as Wohlbrecht is. Lind doesn’t just describe trauma, he hurls us into it so we experience it first hand. That he does this by manipulating point of view is amazing.

There are other amazing aspects to Soul of Wood as well. The plot of the book later bends back on itself and we discover that much of the seemingly random events, forgotten images and off-hand mentions of names and people actually come together in a larger symbolic coherence. That coherence makes this novella one of the most under-appreciated of our time.

The Shorter Works

The Other Stories in the title are mostly outlandish, grotesque short stories rooted in the trauma of World War II. In one, a piano teacher is haunted by his past as an S.S. officer. A traveler stumbles upon a family of cannibals. A man follows his neighbor to a kind of speakeasy only to find a featureless woman who somehow sets him free. A killer about to be executed dreams of killing his father in revenge. Two men, a Jew and a Catholic-converted-Jew, share a snug hole as they hide from the Nazis. Somehow these shorter pieces unfold with a tongue-in-cheek wit. They’re also somewhat allegorical though what they represent is too complex and hidden to explore here. Suffice to say they embody Lind’s seemingly unstable spirit, macabre wit and clever narrative arcs, which leave writers like me both horrified and smiling.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of Soul of Wood from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business.

Filed Under: Books, Eastern Europe Tagged With: Austrian Literature, book review, Point of View, World War II

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Polska, 1994

Polska 1994

Clear Out the Static in Your Attic

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What I’m Reading

Isla's bookshelf: currently-reading

Birds of America
Birds of America
by Lorrie Moore
The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, Etc.
The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, Etc.
by Jonathan Lethem
The Souls of Black Folk
The Souls of Black Folk
by W.E.B. Du Bois
Bomb: The Author Interviews
Bomb: The Author Interviews
by BOMB Magazine
On Writing
On Writing
by Jorge Luis Borges

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