Robert R. Mitchell's Blog, page 10

The last Washingtonian English Major in the world to read Sherman Alexie

Alexie’s book of short stories was published late in 1993, the year I was finishing up a family history for a philanthropic couple in Ballard and realizing that the writing job straight of college had been a fluke and represented the last of the gifts Life was to bestow freely on a man simply because he’d always been a good student. School is artificial. It rewards good students who mind their Ps and Qs without them otherwise lifting a finger. That ain’t the way life works and I realized that as soon as my first writing gig was done. By the time 1994 rolled around, I’d sent out enough resumes and made enough phone calls to realize that I wasn’t going to be writing for a living again anytime soon. In high school I was a 4.00; in college a 3.99 Summa Cum Laude; in real life I was a part-time Starbucks bean scooper and a graveyard Texaco cashier sitting behind a bullet-proof window that had long ago been removed. While I was very grateful for both of the jobs, I was keenly aware of the disparity between my expectations and reality. That was about the time Sherman Alexie’s fame literally exploded all over the Puget Sound region. He was everywhere, his books were everywhere and everyone was reading Alexie. I suspect the dose of real life and a bit of the angry white man syndrome may have played a role in my decision to forego The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven and all his subsequent books until it had been so long that it would have been embarrassing to start. We’re halfway through 2013 and about the only benefit I can think of in having waited 20 years is that I’m old enough, I’ve read enough, and I’ve written enough to truly appreciate how good Sherman Alexie really is.
Ball players and magicians (of all kinds) populate the 24 stories (the latest edition includes 2 which were originally cut). Both professions require their top talents to make the impossible look easy, exactly what Alexie does in this thematically unified collection of short stories. His prose is deceptively approachable: more Hemingway than Faulkner (it is not surprising he won the Special Citation for the 1994 PEN/Hemingway Award for Best First Fiction). His words are precisely and carefully colloquial, the conversations so real you almost instantly forget you’re reading them and instead lean in to hear better. As in Hemingway, his characters partake of the sacraments of real life: in this case, fry bread and Diet Pepsi, whiskey and vodka, jokes and tears. Quickly calibrated to the rhythm of life on the Spokane Indian Reservation, we settle in for a captivating story of kids and adults in dire straits surviving and dreaming, but that’s just the beginning. Like a boy hopping from rock to rock down the bank of a river, sometimes teetering, jumping left, jumping right, backing up, Alexie touches on history, myth, fantasy, emotion, storytelling and pain without missing a beat, without an awkward segue, without falling off moss-covered boulders of race and racism; all the while making his way down the bank of the river to the edge of the falls where the story comes together and pours down into a dark deep pool of resonating truth. Before the reader is aware anything extraordinary has occurred, Alexie has pulled a Camaro out of their ear and launched them bodily cross-court in a multidimensional slam dunk, all in ten pages. And then you start the next story.

Review of Love in the Broken-Bird World: Dreamer's Songs

Love in the Broken-Bird World: Dreamer's Songs by K.L. /Anonymous

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


For as long as we humans have walked the earth, we have wondered about Existence and whether we’re truly alone. People who claimed to communicate with or receive messages from an unseen “Other” were both revered and ridiculed, something that continues to this day. Unlike the New Age “Channelers” of the 1980s, our most recent example of high profile “mystics,” Anonymous (hereafter referred to as “A”) doesn’t claim to be possessed by or speaking on behalf of a particular historical or mystical figure; offer access to “secret” or previously unknown knowledge; ask for cash donations (aside from the $.99 you pay for the book), or even provide his/her name.

With that said, “A” isn’t simply claiming to have jotted down the content of dreams, either. We’ve all been encouraged at one point or another to do that for shits and giggles, writing grist, enlightenment or Freudian analysis. This book is different because “A” does suggest that the words come from an “Other” with knowledge of other languages and of the future. Whacko alert? Maybe, but “A” addresses that. And really, you’re not being asked to reject your family, shave your head and join a commune. All you’re risking is a buck and an hour of your time. Love in the Broken-Bird’s World – Dreamer’s Song is well worth the risk.

You be the judge. Taken on their own, some fragments sound a little like bumper stickers (“Love exists”); a rapidly thumbed text message at the end of the work day (“Cycling home”); pithy, literary descriptions (“Just an egg of a man”); Bible verses (“True love never forces itself”) or yes, New Age aphorisms (“Transcendent mother; transcendent in all”).

Others are beautifully haiku-like (“Little bird learning something about snow. Silence in the trees.”); invigorating like Beat Poetry (“No east or west… plain. Now we are embracing the holy spree. It’s mad wonderful”); and philosophically challenging (“You see the lowly lie… comfortable”). There are also captivating, multi-line poems you must read over and over.

The beauty of Love in the Broken-Bird’s World – Dreamer’s Song, however, is realized when you look at the work as a whole, including the humble preface which could be subtitled “Apologia of an unexpected, part-time modern mystic.” The jotted fragments themselves, when read together, remind me of a Bob Dylan song. Seemingly random parts telling us different things that in the end, in their entirety, show us a stunning vision of truth. Do I believe they came from someone or something other than “A”? I can’t say one way or the other. If they did, it’s goose bump-worthy. If they didn’t, the work stands on its own as a distinctly human “revelation.”




View all my reviews

This guy drove 2000 miles to hike up to Desolation Peak

Look at his photos and then read his story at the end. Very cool.

http://www.dharmabeat.com/desolationp...

Giveaway!

http://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/sho...

Enter to win!!

Only Shot at a Good Tombstone

Is Shakespeare Dead?

As students of pop culture and older Americans will recall, the April 8th 1966 cover of Time Magazine famously asked “Is God Dead?” While certainly controversial, no one for a moment pretended the question was even remotely universal. In fact, if the necessity of the question had been put to a vote, Time Magazine would have played McGovern to John Q. Public’s Nixon. Forty-seven years later, however, the question of a significantly less omnipotent personage’s mortality would likely resonate like a viral meme (is that redundant?): “Is Shakespeare Dead?”

As I often like to relate, one of my college professors would half-jokingly argue that Shakespeare was so ridiculously superior to any other writer past, present or future, that he could very well have been a vastly superior alien life form. That was in 1987 when we were still using payphones, going to the library to check out books and watching television on tubed televisions wired to aerials on the roof. Today, on the other hand, in a world simultaneously consumed with constant, global communication and averse to “words” longer than three letters let alone phrases or complete sentences; we may have finally reached a point at which it truly is too much to expect high school students to read The Bard.

I reread Macbeth for the first time in many years because our youngest son, a junior in high school, was reading it in English class. He couldn’t grasp why he had to and I couldn’t grasp his disaffection. I dove in and was almost immediately shocked by how difficult it was. Nearly every line of the hallowed text required referencing multiple footnotes even though I was using the same Riverside Shakespeare I’d used in college, complete with carefully underlined passages and professor-driven marginalia. Maybe back then my fellow English majors and I were so totally immersed in our studies that we understood more of the text more quickly or maybe we were so amazed by Shakespeare and professors and life itself that we’d unconsciously spend twenty minutes deciphering a dozen words without realizing we were doing so; kind of like the lost hours that UFO abductees report. When my son can communicate to hundreds of people all over the world with his thumbs on a cell phone held under his desk in fifteen seconds or less using a universally understood pidgin of words and three-letter acronyms, can I really expect him to engage in what amounts to the painstaking translation of an ancient, long-dead foreign language?

In terms of the content itself, Macbeth is quite similar to current pop culture sensations like Game of Thrones, an HBO series based on the “A Song of Ice and Fire” books by George R.R. Martin. Brutal murderous gore? It’s in there. Mysterious supernatural encounters, complex royal lineage intrigues, sex, boozing, epic battles, ancient legends and existential angst? It’s ALL IN THERE. Of course, this argument for Macbeth’s relevance and entertainment value seems to simultaneously undermine my professor’s whole “so superior it’s alien” claim. Or does it?

To be continued…

Beat ghosts....

A sad story but one that illustrates how we're not that far removed from those we esteem as giants.


http://www.seattlepi.com/local/articl...

Remarkable story about a remarkable story

http://www.seattlepi.com/news/medical...

Rereading Macbeth: Harder than I thought

OK, score one for the kid. This is slow going. It's quite possible that the last time I read Macbeth was in college with this same copy of The Riverside Shakespeare complete with ballpoint pen underlining and fervent annotations jotted as neatly as possible as if applied to the margins of holy writ. One of my favorite professors used to say that Shakespeare was so superior to his contemporaries and anyone since that he would be a believable example of an extraterrestrial alien if such a thing exists. I’ve always remembered that, obviously, but I forgot how painstakingly one must unravel each arcane reference, each elegant rhythm, each multi-layered image, like an archeologist unwrapping the almost ethereal gauze of an ancient, mummified king. Now, without the benefit of a professor in front of the room I turn to an invention which did not even exist when I was in school, the internet. Even heavily annotated versions of the play like the one found in The Riverside Shakespeare, only address a fraction of the questions modern readers have, so you end up drawing on several sources. Only when all those questions are answered can you relax a bit and really begin appreciating the language itself with its rhymes and rhythms and cadences. I’ve not even made it to Act I Scene IV yet, but already I’ve felt the holy shit stirring realization of alien intelligence that I felt as an idealistic English Major a quarter century ago. I’m glad that the passing of time hasn’t killed that. The Riverside Shakespeare

Rereading Macbeth

Rereading Macbeth since our youngest is thus far thoroughly unimpressed.Macbeth

Review of Nancy Bevilaqua's Holding Breath

As it worked out, I read Nancy Bevilaqua’s Holding Breath immediately after rereading a bunch of Jack Kerouac. The juxtaposition of the two makes it easier to explain why Holding Breath is a “must read.” Both writers captured the essence of their subjects with a combination of autobiography and thinly veiled fiction (which they unveiled at the earliest opportunity). Both writers are permanently and inextricably intertwined with their art. We react not only to the story or memoir; we react to the writers as people. As people, they unhesitatingly confess weaknesses and vulnerabilities that leave readers slightly uncomfortable because in America, it’s only cool to reveal enough weakness to make the inevitable happy ending seem poignant. While each writer firmly grounds their story in history, they take care to illuminate the street-level dynamics too often lost in the “official record.” In Holding Breath, you suffer the stares of passers-by, smell the trash in the New York gutter and feel the warmth of an appreciated cup of coffee. The comparison falls apart, however, when it comes to love. Aside from Maggie Cassidy, Kerouacs’ love interests tragically seem more like interests than loves. Nancy and David, however, strike us as 20th century “star-crossed lovers;” the long list of circumstances arrayed against them merely amplifying the longing and eventual grief. Fortunately for us, Nancy fought through and found peace for herself, her family and her readers. Holding Breath is absolutely a “must read.”Holding Breath: A Memoir of AIDS' Wildfire Days