A painful pursuit of happiness

In her 1977 novel, "The Women's Room," Marilyn French raged against men and had her protagonist find a kind of happiness in earning her Ph.D. in English lit at Harvard, and in a circle of friends as angry as she was.  In her final novel (she died in May, 2009 at age 79), her protagonist finds happiness by insisting that she will be happy and by returning to what some would consider very traditional feminine roles of raising and cooking food.

"The Women's Room" sold 21 million copies worldwide, striking a spark with women who felt abused in misogynistic marriages or furious because their husbands had dumped them for younger women.

It's a classic of feminist literature, although a very bleak one. In the ‘70s, the media discovered the male midlife crisis, which often involved acquiring a new "trophy wife," to replace the one who helped them achieve some success. Apparently they had not heard about millennia of tribal life, which often included polygamy, or about concubines or the mistresses of many royals.

The contrast between French's first and last novels reminds me of nothing so much as the famous Freud quote: "The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is 'What does a woman want?'" (From Sigmund Freud: Life and Work, by Ernest Jones, 1953.)

Love Children (from The Feminist Press at the City University of New York), is set in the  '60s and up to 1976. French has dropped her protagonist, Jess, back into traditional women's roles -- farming and cooking a la Alice Waters-- to find her bliss. There's nothing wrong with farming and cooking, so I'm left wondering a few things: Is she being ironic? Was what she wanted all along just for women in those traditional fields to get a full measure of respect? Does she want us to notice that different women, and men, at different times in their lives, might want something new?Jess is an interesting character. Born in 1953, she'd have been 23 as the book ends -- perhaps a bit young to have packed in all the experience French recounts. But there is a lot of chronological confusion here, which could have benefited from some heavy editing and fact-checking at the Feminist Press. For instance, Jess is convinced that it was her generation alone which stopped the Vietnam War.

There were many reasons that war ended, and many people involved in ending it, including the-then chairman of the Bank of America, Louis B. Lundborg. In 1970 he told the country "An end to the war would be good, not bad, for American business. War is, as we would say in business, a low-yield operation." Then we got serious about getting out.
As she approached 80, French was interviewed on the PBS program Life 2. She said there were compensations for growing old, that one is no longer bound by the anguishes of youth. "Adolescence... the first job... not knowing how to act, not knowing how people felt about you, wondering if you fit in or not." At a certain age, you no longer care, she says. "What is there to be afraid of anymore?"That's a comforting thought, and it's a shame it isn't better expressed in "Love Children."

Crash course on Haiti

Voodoo, AIDS, Creole food, sex tourism – that's what most of us know about Haiti. It's not much help today in understanding why the island nation is in such desperate straits after an earthquake, and with so few of its own resources to care for its people.

The reasons are many and complicated, starting with the 1804 slave revolt against France which made it the first African-American republic in the New World. Then you've got colonialism, imperialism, over-population, dreadful education and health care, deforestation, inappropriate architecture – pacts with the devil don't enter the list.

One of the best resources is Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared M. Diamond (New York : Viking, 2005.) the chapter One island, Two Peoples, Two Histories: the Dominican Republic and Haiti explains it: Crippling reparations paid to France after independence, isolation as a French-speaking nation in a Spanish-speaking region, the brutal reign of the Duvaliers, Papa Doc and Baby Doc, from 1956 to 1986. The Duvaliers followed an invasion by US Marines in 1915 which created years of repression of political dissent, and American-installed puppet rulers.

Diamond is a professor of geography and physiology at UCLA and author of Guns, Germs and Steel and the forthcoming book Natural Experiments of History.  Diamond was on Forum, the NPR show, Thursday, Jan.21 . Check their schedule for the podcast: http://www.kqed.org/radio/programs/forum/


For more recent history, see the story by John Maxwell of the Jamaica Observer at http://www.counterpunch.org

Censored 2006: The Top 25 Censored Stories (New York : Seven Stories Press, [2005]) includes Diplomacy by death squad.

Avengers of the New World : The Story of the Haitian Revolution, Laurent Dubois,

Cambridge, Mass. : Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004.

In a remarkable year in which the 200th anniversary of Haiti's independence collided with the undeniable recognition that Haitian politics are still being shaped by outside forces, Harvard University Press launched a retelling of the events and individuals who engineered the Haitian Revolution. Dubois (Michigan State Univ.) emphasizes the impact of French revolutionary principles (i.e., the Rights of Man) on the Haitian rebel slaves, as well as the inextricable influence of French politics on the fate of its Caribbean colony.

Haitian Book Centre was

founded in 1977 to spread Haitian culture in the United States. Their inventory consists of all the classics of Haitian literature plus all the newly published titles by Haitian authors here and abroad and can be browsed online. They carry numerous categories, including children's books, art, history and fiction. Their major customers are university and public libraries. Worth browsing, especially the tempting collection of Images of Haiti.

Haitian-born Edwige Danticat, now a Miami resident, has a breath-taking number of books and awards:

• Breath, Eyes, Memory (novel, 1994)

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  Krik? Krak! (stories, 1996)
  
  
  
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  The Farming of Bones (novel, 1998)
  
  
  
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  Behind the Mountains (young adult novel, 2002, part of the First Person Fiction series)
  
  
  
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  After the Dance: A Walk Through Carnival in Jacmel, Haiti (travel book, 2002)
  
  
  
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  The Dew Breaker (novel-in-stories,2004)
  
  
  
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  Anacaona: Golden Flower, Haiti, 1490 (young adult novel, 2005, part of The Royal Diaries series)
  
  
  
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  Brother, I'm Dying (memoir/social criticism, 2007)
  
  
  
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  The Butterfly's Way (anthology editor)
  
  
  

Danticat wrote the foreword to Tram Nguyen's book, We Are All Suspects Now: Untold Stories from Immigrant Communities after 9/11.

She also wrote a foreword for the Harper Perennial edition of Their Eyes were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, and for Pesea Book's Starting With I: Personal Essays By Teenagers, edited by Andrea Estepa.

Danticat wrote the introduction to Alejo Carpentier's novel, 'The Kingdom of this World', describing the legacy of revolution and its flaws. In 2009 she received the MacArthur Genius Award.

Much fiction and film on Haiti is, frankly, pretty cheesy. If you're in the mood for that, try The Comedians, best known for starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in an illicit affair (again?) but with a fine performance by Alec Guinness. Screenplay from his book by Graham Green (and of course the book is better.)

For how to create zombies, there's The Serpent and the Rainbow, from a much-criticized book by anthropologist and botanical explorer Wade Davis, Ph. D., who spent more than three years in the Amazon and Andes as a plant explorer, mostly through the Harvard Botanical Museum. Serious stuff about medicinal plants; director Wes Craven has turned it into some pretty fine cheap thrills and nervous giggles. Stars Bill Pullman as the ethnobotanist and Zakes Mokae as Peytraud, the delightfully evil priest and chief of the Tontons Macoutes, Duvalier's dreaded secret police.

A gallant Soviet trickster

Traveler,teacher, gardener, cook, publisher and now novelist (novella-ist?) Barbara Baer of Forestville in west Sonoma County finds beauty, even comedy, in the darkest oppressive days of the late Soviet Union.

Grisha the Scrivener, based on a man she knew during her time of teaching there in Tashkent and Georgia, carries the tale of  “our miserable Russian century” in this heart-breaking and laugh-making tale. An exiled Georgian journalist, he seems to embody the spirit of the samizdat, the underground  self-published literature and news which brave dissidents passed on by hand. They were the Internet of that brutally controlled society.
Ghost Road Press of Denver published it.
Grisha, Gregory Gregorovich Samidze, hangs on to hope through imprisonment, TB, through 26 years by clinging to a fragile private life which can't be touched by the government – occasional decent food, love, family and friends. His life is a reminder of the German song Die Gedanken sind Frei, thoughts are free. (English versions by Pete Seeger, Leonard Cohen and others are on YouTube,)
Baer told Sara Peyton of the Santa Rosa Press Democrat: “In life the real Grisha, whose name was Guivi, was such a trickster, such a bundle of contradictions, such an odd man and such a dishonest man, that he became my muse. He's not real-to-life anymore than any character is, but when he died I just couldn't let him die in my imagination. I read and reread the last letters he wrote to me in desperation during the civil war but I couldn't do anything to help him and that always stayed with me. So I gave him a longer life.”

Baer appropriately introduced Grisha the Scrivener at the September 2009 Sonoma County Book Festival, of which she has been a major supporter.
A graduate of Stanford University in English Lit, she has long been passionate about pomegranates; her Floreant Press in 2006 published Pomegranate Roads:  A Soviet Botanist's Exile from Eden, by Dr. Gregory Levin, a botanist who trekked across Central Asia and the Trans-Caucasus in search of rare, endangered and mysterious wild pomegranates for more than 40 years,. After the break-up of the Soviet Union, he was exiled from his own hidden Eden and his collection of 1,117 pomegranates.
Floreant, at http://www.floreantpress.com/index.htm also has published memoirs and collections of memorable writing by California women.
A tireless traveler, Baer also has taught in India and recently celebrated a milestone birthday in Paris.

Have cleaver, will travel

Obsessive author Julie Powell, whose blog about a year of cooking  Julia Child's recipes became a popular movie, has a new obsession - butchery - and a new book, Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession.
Women of a certain age loved the film Julie and Julia for the sparkling performances by Meryl Streep as Julia, Jane Lynch as her sister and Stanley Tucci as Julia's appreciative husband.  We worried about demure Amy Adams, working so hard as Julie. And there was the nostalgia for the post-war days when Julia started cooking (my English companion gasped "oh, real butter!") and the '60s when we started cooking from Mastering the Art of French Cooking.
There were some murmurs of sympathy at the time for her husband, Eric, who was portrayed as just a little miffed at all the attention he wasn't getting from his cooking/blogging wife. Reactions to the new book are less polite.  Critics are calling it a bloodbath, boring, clumsy, self-obsessed, embarrassing.  Okay, the briefest possible synopsis:  Success, infidelity, butchering, divorce, tell all in too much detail.  TMI du jour.
Dare we hope this signals an end to the dear diary confessional memoir by people with nothing much to say?
My review of the movie:  http://lakeconews.com/content/view/10164/42/

Bordering on madness

Thriller writer T. Jefferson Parker (at left) , a Southern California native, focuses on the gun suppliers on our border with Mexico for his new novel, Iron River. Los Angeles Times reporter Tim Rutten reviews it in the January 6 LAT books features.

And in today's San Diego Union,

Mater Dei student slain in Mexico

Teen gunned down in car near home

(If I hadn't sworn never to use the phrase “ripped from the headlines” this would be an appropriate place for it.)
Rutten writes: “Parker has said elsewhere that, because of its lax gun laws and indifference to their consequences south of the border, he considers the United States 'complicit' in Mexico's current agonies. 'Iron River' makes that point without a moment's descent into the didactic. This is gripping literary entertainment with a point.”

Mexican gun laws may also be partly responsible. The 1917 Constitution guarantees the right of Mexican citizens to own guns but subsequent amendments make it next to impossible for the average person - therefore, smuggling thrives.

The late author Gary Jennings (Aztec, and much more) once wrote to me in response to a fan letter that he had smuggled a rifle in for a farmer neighbor who wanted to shoot wolves and other predators which were killing his sheep.

No doubt I'll have more to say once I've read the book. Mexico, and my friends there from several years as an ex-pat, are never far from my heart and mind.

Growing old grumpily

A lot of us know Duane Jackson from “The Last Picture Show” (1971), which introduced him as a very young man growing up in a dusty and dying Texas town - "Anarene, Texas, 1951, Nothing much has changed..."

We followed him through Larry McMurtry's novels set in Anarene/Thalia/Archer City as everything in oilman Duane's life changed with the fluctuations of the oil business.  Archer City's real, and the author's hometown, where he still lives. We can deduce that much of Duane's story is McMurtry's; although the author never became a super-rich oilman, he did become rich and famous through his writing, and won an Academy Award for the script of Broke Back Mountain, written with Diana Ossana, his life and writing companion for several years now.
Duane is elderly in Rhino Ranch, McMurtry is 73.  Both have had heart attacks. Both have an openly hostile relationship with the tiny hometown (pop. 1,800), according to D (for Dallas) magazine.  That's easy to understand when you read Duane's remarks about people who never read a book and consider that McMurtry  has imported one of the world's largest collections of books into the little town.

They're as exotic as the African rhinos imported into Thalia by billionairess K.K. Slater, who thinks they'll make a dandy tourist attraction.
Duane is even more depressed than he was in the last Thalia book, Duane's Depressed, in which his lesbian psychotherapist insisted he visit Egypt to cheer up after a heart attack. An odd choice, given the country's focus on death, but it did once have a giant library in Alexandria.  At the time, McMurtry said it was his last book about the dusty little town.  He says that again about this one.

He's interested in the Rhino Ranch, and especially in one of its occupants, the 3,500 pound rhino that frequently walks with him, which he calls Double Aught (the name of the largest size of buckshot.) One day the rhino just disappears.  So do a young former porn star who takes up with him briefly, and a San tribesman Slater imports to tend the animals. 

Duane doesn't give any of the disappearances much thought; things come, things go.  He has quite a Zen attitude to life and has become fairly reclusive, spending much of his time at an isolated cabin, having the occasional laconic conversations with his old pals and the occasional dinner (chicken fried steak with cream gravy-that can't be good for a bad heart) in the town's one pretty bad restaurant.

Considering the protagonist's apparent exhaustion and lack of interest in much of anything, it's surprisingly fun to read, and ponder whether that huge rhinoceros is a symbol for the weight of history.  McMurtry has said frequently that in writing his stories of the old West he wanted to de-mythologize its heroic image. That hasn't worked very well, but if you haven't read his early efforts it's worth catching up with Lonesome Dove and the dynamically aging Aurora Greenway of Terms of Endearment and Evening Star. They're excellent movies too, with Shirley Maclaine as Aurora and Jack Nicholson as her ex-astronaut lover.

The Irish spring some surprises

Who would expect marijuana and homosexuality to pop up in Irish movies? Their wit is no surprise, but it's usually applied to subjects like wakes, priests and the lottery.
In How About You the reluctant temporary manager of a home for some cranky old folks finds a way to make the holidays merry without alcohol. The outstanding cast includes Vanessa Redgrave.
Goldfish Memory follows the adventures of contemporary young Dubliners exploring their options in that beautiful city.
That title? Supposedly, goldfish have a memory only three seconds long so everything is always fresh and new. But how would anyone know?

Sherlock Holmes, new and old

Brilliant idea of Guy Ritchie's to to give us the young and active Holmes and Watson, especially as Robert Downey Jr. is one of our very best physical actors.  Can't wait to see it! Preview online at http://sherlock-holmes-movie.warnerbros.com/

Another favorite version of the great detective is Laurie R. King's in her Mary Russell series, in which teenage Mary trips over the retired Holmes, becomes his apprentice and later his wife. Mystery, romance, extremely palatable early 20^th century history (and trustworthy – King is a meticulous researcher.) The series begins with The Beekeeper's Apprentice, but start anywhere-- you'll catch up. The author's site at http://www.laurierking.com/ is well worth reading. Mystery: Why has no one adapted any of King's books to film? It can't be prejudice against old man-young woman stories.