Since I have like three venues to publish it in, and I told Tao I needed a galley, I feel obliged to write a review of Tao Lin’s novel, Richard Yates. I don’t think I will ever read anything by Richard Yates. Reading Tao Lin has a way of erasing any literary knowledge one had. I eagerly anticipated this release after reading Eeeee Eee Eeee and Shoplifting from American Apparel. He sold shares in this novel to publish it and not have to work at a vegan restaurant while he was writing it.

I feel not conscious enough of how I’m mimicking Tao Lin’s Style. Tao Lin’s Style is infectious and hypnotic. Writing about Tao Lin in Tao Lin’s style, as The Observer, or rather Christian Lorentzen, did, is hard to resist. I think the Observer was lazy. I approve of that laziness. Of course, as with Hemingway, another “bad” writer whose parody comes easy, and whom Tao Lin namechecks as much as Yates, and includes in the index, the style slips in anyway. While reading Tao Lin I find myself becoming much drier and flatter. I lose my obligation to feel strongly about anything, especially about how I feel about anything.

Tao Lin is indeed kind of a hipster writer. He’s easy to hate. I think when people say something is “polarizing” that thing often itself has an intense focus on neutrality. Some of the key phrases to use in a Tao Lin parody are “neutral facial expression” and “I feel neutral” and “said in Gmail Chat”. If you use these phrases you will be immediately parodying Tao Lin, and you don’t need anything else. Everything he writes is autobiography, or so it seems. Everything is exactly as it seems. It’s just one damn thing after another but there are some interesting elisions and refillings of previous story that are perhaps occuring more in Richard Yates.

There are more changes in Richard Yates from his previous style. Someone must have commented on the names of his characters, like how obvious it is that the main character is always Tao Lin but named like Sam or something. So he named the Tao Lin character Haley Joel Osment and the teenage Jersey girl he met on the internet Dakota Fanning. The ages are about right but the great thing about it is you still can’t actually picture the actors as the characters. I now see “Haley Joel Osment” and that represents a Taiwanese-American hipster writer to me. I wonder whether any kind of defamation charges could be brought but it’s too obviously a stunt. I am willing to honestly believe Haley Joel Osment crossed state borders to statutory rape Dakota Fanning, who is variously self-destructive. I do because those are the characters. There’s really a lot of name-dropping in this, which brings up that issue of how much writers have to be literary historians, or just more culturally aware, or whatever.

I’m afraid that it’s almost a homage to the novel’s namesake that Richard Yates has a pretty clear structure and plot, and particularly that it’s about someone simultaneously epitomizing and feeling alienated from contemporary American society. The story is most of the arc of a codependent relationship. In case you don’t know what that is, it’s when someone stays romantically involved because they feel the other person needs them and the other person (who often has some compulsion or addiction the first person enables) does more of that to get more from the first person. Neither person involved is very good and both are very depressed. What I like about depression in Tao Lin is that it’s not necessarily pathological. Halfway through the book I totally thought he’d impregnated her.

At first it seems like he just emotional abuses her and then it turns out Dakota Fanning’s been secretly binging and purging. I don’t think the “spoiler” concept is relevant here. “Haley Joel Osment” comes across as a total dick even though he does sort of know what to do. I like that Tao Lin does that with not-himself. I like the realism about this couple creating their own little world. I want to use the terms “party girl” and “cheese beast” and have someone understand them. I think Tao Lin is a party girl. I am a party girl. It’s easy to say the attitude is immature and neurotic, and I want to shrug that off as harmless and ubiquitous but the impact on “Dakota Fanning” makes it actually more morally conscious than a parody of Tao Lin. But “Shoplifting” already kind of had that underlying moral message. I think a lot of the couple’s professions of need actually sound kind of weird to me because I feel like every time I’ve said anything like that it was very very self-aware.

I don’t know. A lot of what they, and Tao Lin, do say is self-aware, but so dry that there’s no difference. I always feel like the manuscript was written with a lot less capitalization and punctuation, so it’s gone through that transformation already. Tao Lin definitely is being about neutrality in representation as a direction with an impossible goal. That’s too figurative for a Tao Lin parody. I don’t want to tell you what to do with these books but I do think Tao Lin is important to be able to parody.

I wanted to include some quotes from the book but it lost all the highlights I put in before about 2/3 of the way through and I didn’t want to be biased.

Anyway, I guess I like him because he’s familiar. He steals from places near the place where I work, but doesn’t mention stealing from us, which I appreciate. We have a similar social anxiety and detachment, and have our most emotionally intense experiences through internet chatting. He makes me think “I could do that” but this review was my chance to and I don’t think I could, or want to, and neither could that Observer guy.

Reviewed by K.A. Sitafalwalla

Partially a proclamation to the 1970’s, the artists and the derelicts, the rich and poor, the talented and talent-less, “Just Kids” stands as an ode to friendship and love; everything in between. Patti Smith’s memoir is poetic and true with an honesty and straightforwardness that is disguised in her poetry and music. Smith is a sage, a modern day Siddhartha reliving and recounting her experiences with the wisdom only experience and reflection can procure.
Opening the first pages of the stoic purple hardcover book one notices the choice of font, the simplicity of the layout and timelessness of the physicality of a book. The story told is the same: stoic, knowing, and open for a reader to take what he or she needs. The reader finds in the pages a retelling of Patti’s youth, her innocence, drive, ambition and devotion. Although the book is splashed with images of lanky Patti in her 20’s, her voice has slithers of grey and insight. It is as if she had been courting the tale her entire life, rolling it over and over, negotiating, chastising, disbelieving, and when the first words spiraled off her Remington typewriter she finally understood how and why those years of glamorous poverty and community of strangers gave way for the artist within.

We are introduced to young Patti in her home in Chicago and the foundation from which her artistic inclination, intellectual curiosity, and austere simplicity, are rooted. Her father admired the works of Salvador Dali while her mother taught her to kneel down by her bed and pray. Little did Patti, the rebellious punk rocker, know the significance these notions would carry. Years later in the Chelsea Hotel, in the blur of the faceless famous, Dali acknowledged her presence: “You are like a gothic crow.” From Chicago she and her family move to New Jersey; she becomes alienated from the life she was familiar with but this move initiated her bond with literature. Her character deepens, as do her relationships with her siblings; relationships that will keep her grounded and free.

Patti’s steadfast devotion is part of her nature. She never veers too far from poetry, music, or the people whom she loves. Her commitment, inspiration and fortitude are unyielding. Just Kids tells the life and love past of Robert Mapplethorpe. He was a multi faceted artist who showed Patti the life of a true artist. He remains the artist of her life as he continues to be her muse. The memoir fulfills a promise to Mapplethorpe: “Before Robert died, I promised him that I would one day write our story.” The love they shared was unique in that they were kindred spirits, devoted and married to each other by forces beyond explanation. There is a mystical aura to their friendship filled with coincidences and knowing; a kind of trust that comes from beyond the world of matter driven by fate. With their separate artistic visions they complimented each other, challenged each other and depended on each other. They found balance in chaos, a routine of Nescafe, “bad” doughnut shops, and a muse in one another. As a couple they waxed and waned but their foundation for an everlasting friendship had been sealed.

Historical moments – markers in time –ground the story. We hear the artists’ reply to the Son of Sam horrors, the Kent State Massacre, the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King. Smith observes the change in the air, the attitude shift from the peace peddling hippies to the transcendentalist beatnik poets to the defiant, questioning artists who will become the forbearers of Punk and the underground downtown art movement of the early 70’s. The disorder of the changing face of America stood as comrade, instigator, and bystander to Patti and Robert’s own relationship. The reader witnesses their many phases, their hunger and need for each other and mutual understanding of an unyielding bond.

Just Kids is a salute to an uncompromising artistic ethic she and Mapplethorpe pursued. It is a celebration of youth and the peculiar satisfaction of freedom regardless of how many burnt cups of coffee, day old rolls, or second-hand stores one must endure. For it was not a matter of subjectification, it was a matter of being free in New York City, free to board in the Chelsea Hotel, free to sleep in Tompkins Square Park, free to express the vision of the artists’ truth.
Patti Smith’s mythic storytelling might come as a revelation, her references to God and the power of prayer, her religious upbringing, and the faith that embossed her life gave her certain buoyancy –trust in herself and trust in progress: the journey of her life. Her rowdy stage performances of the 70’s and critique of socio-political happenings hardly fit with the geeky bookstore clerk of her youth. Smith shares her excitement in feeling the changed energy in the air when Bob Dylan attended his first Patti Smith performance. She calls it an “initiation,” as if she needed that nod from another poet whom she respected to confirm, validate, and encourage her own artistic quest.

Smith offers an intimate account of a bourgeoning art scene in downtown New York. She is straightforward, honest, and romantic. Her commitment to art is both a dedication and allegiance to the many that inspired her: Rimbaud, Genet, Dubuffet, Piaf; and the many that challenged, protected and collaborated with her: Dylan, Ginsberg, Shepherd, Hamill. But among them all it was Robert Mapplethorpe that taught her to see and practice through the lens of an artist.

by Kurt Gottschalk

I first heard about it when I was about 12 — a store where Kiss albums could be procured for about a dollar less than at the mall; a store that, strangely, wasn’t in the mall. It wasn’t far, but it did mean asking my mother to make another trip.

Things seemed different at this new store. It wasn’t as crowded, but people were talking to each other and the guy behind the counter even asked me about what I liked. Before long a relationship had been established — between myself and Danny and John, two of the clerks — but also between myself and the store. I went in every weekend with my $5.86 (almost 25% of the paycheck from my after-school job) and bought what they told me to buy. I might object that things seemed too weird (David Bowie, Devo), but I’d always oblige and ultimately never felt misguided. (On some weeks I’d save a few dollars by perusing the cut-out bin, unknowingly buying into a mob ring by doing so. I didn’t know about that underworld relationship until years later, after reading William Knoedelseder’s highly recommended Stiffed: A True Story of MCA, the Music Business, and the Mafia.)

The difference between the store at the mall and the store down by, well, another shopping plaza became central to my adolescent identity. Danny and John not only crafted my musical development, taking me by the hand and guiding me through art rock and into punk and new wave, but they became the figureheads for what would become my circle of friends in high school. In a small, conservative city in central Illinois, even listening to Elvis Costello or The Clash put one on the outs. Weirdos certainly weren’t heteros (somehow “Devo” even became slang for “gay”). I met other young music obsessives Danny and John had been grooming, and we came to be friends. We taped each other’s records and tried to form bands. The store at the mall no doubt did more business than the one in the plaza. They had all the Top 40 albums on the wall and the latest hits on the sound system. But they weren’t there to have conversations or to tailor recommendations. And they certainly weren’t there to recognize the kids with the burning curiosity and help them along their ways. They were there to move product.

That store at the mall might be something like what Internet record shopping is today. Certainly there are those who would argue that any number of online-community models replicate the brick-and-mortar experience (and in truth my interest here is more in exercising a bit of nostalgia than in proving them wrong). The two worlds are certainly parallel. People who started purchasing recorded music only after the Santana / Matchbox 20 merger have their own ways of learning and acquiring. And they have their ways of begging, borrowing and stealing, if on a larger scale, just as we had ours. (A Buddy Holly cassette held in one hand at JC Penney, a George Jones in the other while the coat is put on, the tapes left midway in the sleeves because I just had to know what they sounded like). But for those who came of age fondling vinyl, the record store was a shrine, a temple for the merchandising of art that cannot be replaced by virtual experience.

I went on to work both sides of the divide, or all three if you count a life spent haunting stores. As a co-founder of the online store Squidco and, currently, a member of the collective operating the ESP Records storefront in Brooklyn, I’ve worked the culture of both Internet and physical stores. Online stores may be more convenient, and are sometimes cheaper, but nothing matches the clubhouse of the actual shop.

That club feeling is a big part of what Gary Calamar and Phil Gallo’s Record Store Days: From Vinyl to Digital (Sterling Publishing) is about. The book is a well deserved glorification of the independently-owned shop, full of photos and stories about record store proprietors. It makes for a bit of a sad celebration: In large part is comes off like being at a wake where no one talks about the cause of death. Avoiding the sad state of record sales until 175 pages in makes the book seem a bit hollow, although the story of the dying industry in the face of Internet file-sharing is discussed and written about so much that it might be just as well. When Calamar and Gallo finally do get to the state of the industry, they handle it succinctly. It’s not an economics textbook, and they do a reasonable job of covering the issue and getting out again. And while the business end of the record business isn’t really the thrust of the book, the authors also include a good and concise discussion of the controversies around Soundscan, the point-of-sale data collection system that replaced the copies-shipped method of charting record sales in the 1990s, causing a major shift in the Billboard charts.

The rest of the colorful volume is full of love letters and mash notes, all torn from the diary of defining cool by commercial means and related by merchants and musicians. Susanna Hoffs remembers naming her band The Bangles so she could be among her favorites in the “B” section. (It’s my favorite section as well, although Hoffs may not have been shopping for Derek Bailey and Anthony Braxton). Robyn Hitchcock reveals the “fetish element” of collecting punk singles for the picture sleeves. And my fellow WFMU DJ Michael Shelley recalls mirroring my JC Penney act, going to the New Rochelle Mall to pocket Nick Lowe and XTC 7”s. (New York clearly had cooler malls than Illinois).

For the most part, the book reads like a bunch of guys hanging out at a record store swapping stories, which in a sense underscores what the local store is all about. A more incisive look at the ins and outs of making and selling records, can be found in the documentary I Need That Record! The Death (or Possible Survival) of the Independent Record Store. Brendan Toller’s film, available on DVD from MVD Visual, is a good history entertainingly told. In 77 minutes, Toller covers the disappearance of local stores and ties that to a corporatization that reaches back to the radio payola scandal of the early 1960s and up to the current day, where Wal-Mart represents 20% of all national record sales.

As succinctly put by Legs McNeil, former editor of both Punk and Spin magazines, “When you’ve got accountants running the record labels, you’re not going to have very good music.” Or, as Glenn Branca says in a boisterous interview, “Criminals, thieves and bastards are attracted to making money.”

As with Record Store Days, I Need That Record does a good job taking a national focus, representing New England to California and the oases in between. Toller is a dynamic storyteller, using cartoon graphics, film and animation clips, and old TV spots (including some vintage MTV) to frame a complicated story where the villains aren’t always apparent and the crimes not completely clear. The case Toller makes against corporate control of distribution of what is, after all, supposed to be art is ultimately quite scathing.

The future of the music industry remains, of course, a gapingly open question. But at least for the generations who didn’t grow up buying and listening to music on a computer, the record-store clubhouse hasn’t been replaced yet. As Rand Foster, proprietor of Long Beach, CA, store Fingerprints, tells Calamar and Gallo, “The important part of retail is the culture you’re selling. It’s the museum element that stimulates people.”

reseña por Daniel Torres en Lourdes Vásquez reciente libro “Tres Relatos y Un Infortunio”

“Estoy cerca de la puerta. Presiento que cada pisada marca el final de mis días. Detengo el paso en el dintel”.
“La gente es propensa a toda clase de accidentes”.
“A Guille le falleció una pierna”.

Estas tres oraciones, que sirven de epígrafe a esta reseña, son las oraciones iniciales de los tres cuentos que aparecen en el nuevo libro de la puertorriqueña Lourdes Vázquez, titulado Tres relatos y un infortunio, publicado en la serie “Semillas de Eva”, de la editorial de la Fundación Ross en Rosario, Argentina. El propósito de esta serie es editar pequeños libritos, de 18 por 9 centímetros, para vender, además de en librerías, en puestos de revistas, farmacias, supermercados, etc., dentro de Argentina. Lourdes Vázquez es la primera extranjera que publica en esta serie, siendo todas las demás escritoras de Argentina.
En cada una de estas sorprendentes historias aparece el desastre, el infortunio, el accidente, la muerte, el dolor, la desgracia, como leimotiv de las acciones de los personajes. En “La habitación”, el primer cuento que abre la brevísima colección, se narra la vida de una hija que vuelve al Caribe desde Galicia para cuidar de sus padres envejecientes. “Accidentes”, el segundo cuento, habla de las anécdotas que cuenta Malena, una señora que limpia apartamentos, sobre los habitantes de una comunidad donde vive la narradora del relato. El último cuento, “Memoria de Guille” es casi un poema sobre un personaje fascinante, el típico viejito achacoso que descubre los límites de su cuerpo, lo que no invalida para nada su proclividad al deseo: “Guille, en la soltura de su vejez y a pleno día, quedaba quieto debajo de cualquier palo de jobos y entre el claroscuro de las ramas repentinamente surgían senos de hembras de diversas formas y color. Tanto seno le excitaba la memoria y alteraba la razón y la paz del día…”
Lourdes Vázquez es conocida por su poesía y su narrativa, la que le valió el prestigioso Premio Juan Rulfo de cuento (Francia) en el 2002. Su literatura tiene un centro solar: la problemática de la mujer contemporánea en sus relaciones con la familia tradicional que ha querido siempre alienar la identidad femenina al espacio privado de la casa. Vázquez crea, a través de su escritura, mujeres reales y fuertes que cuestionan estas artimañas que el patriarcado ha querido tenderle siempre a lo femenino.
“La habitación”, el primer cuento de Tres relatos y un infortunio, aborda la tensión cultural entre madres e hijas. La mirada que nos ofrece la narradora hacia la relación tensa que una hija tiene con su madre envejeciente es reveladora. El lenguaje delata esta tensión: “¿De dónde sale la fortaleza física de este esqueleto?”. La narradora protagonista nos pinta una imagen de la madre que va más allá de las visiones idealistas que tenemos del concepto de la maternidad. Aquí “el esqueleto” es la madre de la protagonista, y mantiene su autoridad matriarcal ante la visita de una hija ilegítima de su esposo. La crítica a la costumbre nada ortodoxa del macho caribeño que tiene hijos fuera del matrimonio humillando a su esposa ante la sociedad es mordaz. O así lo entiende la madre cuando dice: “…en esta familia las únicas hijas que existen son las mías”, afirmando su lugar de esposa legítima en el orden de las cosas. Para la hija, sin embargo, es la negación de conocer a otra hermana habida fuera del matrimonio. El rasgo que más destaca de este cuento es la distancia que toma la narradora protagonista al alejarse de la familia, y al optar por “construir mi mitología, para poder dar a mis hijos la esperma de donde puedan agarrarse”. Ella no será una madre castradora como la suya, sino que construirá su propia “mitología” más allá del seno materno y le dará a su prole esa “esperma” de la que “puedan agarrarse” para pisar firme.
“Accidentes” es un relato en el que se instala el rumor como protagonista. Malena nos cuenta, a través de la voz de la narradora, las historias de las personas que viven en un edificio de apartamentos que la misma Malena limpia, y al hacerlo, tiene un acceso ilimitado a la intimidad de sus ocupantes: “Malena me contó más tarde que le preguntó al viudo, qué va a hacer con la ropa de la difunta y el viudo respondió, ‘no sé’”. La diégesis o la narración se da de manera oblicua: de Malena, a la narradora, a nosotros: “No era muy fashionista la profe, me dijo Malena. ¡Qué buen corazón tienes Malena!, le contesté”. En este pasaje vemos el comentario de la narradora acerca de Malena y las palabras mismas de ella así como el comentario dirigido a los lectores por parte de la narradora. Todo un circuito de diégesis o narración que comienza con la primera mención del personaje en el cuento: “Todo esto me lo contó Malena mientras limpiaba mi apartamento”. Aquí Lourdes Vázquez se acerca a esa comunidad de mujeres que hablan entre sí y comentan la vida o los “accidentes” de los otros, acorde con el título del cuento en cuestión. Hasta que Malena desaparece con una sola nota: “No haga preguntas sobre mi paradero. Que sirva ésta para despedirme. He sufrido un grave accidente”. El desconcierto de la narradora protagonista la lleva a reflexionar sobre esta poética del infortunio que aquí nos ocupa: “Miré por la ventana, la gente caminaba con paso rápido y ojos de sospecha como temiendo una desgracia”.
“Memoria de Guille” en su brevedad y su efectividad es tal vez el cuento mejor logrado de la serie, no sólo por la ternura con que Lourdes Vázquez construye el personaje desde la dedicatoria (“Ay! Guille, me haces falta”), hasta la caracterización del viejito “dressed to kill” o vestido para matar, a la hora de alistarse para “su visita médica”: “Y ahora, Guille vestido con guayabera y pantalón haciendo juego. Perfumado con Old Spice, ya está listo… Vestido de inglés en expedición geográfica, vestido como un reparador de sillas eléctricas, o como un cowboy el día de su boda. Vestido Guille con gafas de Versace…”
Los achaques típicos de los viejitos a cierta edad, lo que recuerda al padre postrado en la cama del primer cuento, “La habitación”, es el paradigma que trabaja Lourdes Vázquez en este breve texto, donde la caracterización de un solo personaje clave, Don Guille, es el orden de la narración. El signo Guille encarna ese infortunio mismo que es la edad y la vejez, pero poetizado aquí por medio de las descripciones del individuo, que pese a la decadencia de su cuerpo enfermo, se viste de guayabera y pantalón “haciendo juego”, a la caribeña, llevando gafas de marca Versace. El título del cuento, “Memoria de Guille”, lo dice todo. Es el recuerdo, la imagen del tiempo detenido en un cuerpo disfrazado, como acaba la historia.

Tres relatos y un infortunio es, pues, la nueva entrega que nos hace Lourdes Vázquez como una filigrana. La edición en libro de bolsillo color naranja es como un folleto de viaje, palabra, narración y poesía, que nos acerca a tres historias sostenidas sobre el hilo fatídico del infortunio y su poética.

Daniel Torres*

· Spanish and Latin American Studies Professor at Ohio University.
· Lourdes Vázquez latest are Cibeles que sueña= Cybele, As She Dreams, Artist Book by Yarisa Colón Torres; the anthology Cuando narradoras latinoamericanas narran en los Estados Unidos (Ross, 2009) and the script: A Porcelain Doll with Violet Eyes Staring into Space=Una muñeca de cerámica con ojos violetas (Wheelhouse, 2009).

Written by Phaedra Pinkston
 
Arising NYC poet Puma Perl newly released poetry book, “Knuckle Tatoos” accounts the artist’s exploration from the hard knocks of self liquidation to personal fulfillment. 
 
The Brooklyn native grew up being  inspired by the beatnicks of the 1950s and keeps busy performing open at open mic nights in lower Manhattan and postings on her inventive online blog http://pumaperl.blogspot.com/ 
 
Perl chose the title because much like tatoos, she feels the past is something one can never hide or erase.  This is not the poet’s first published works, “Belinda and Her Friends” was Perl’s first collection of poetry published in 2004.  The author describes the book as more character driven poems. 
 
Knuckle Tatoos can be found at St. Marks Bookstore in Manhattan and Amazon.com

Love can be found in the daily details and the recognition of change as inevitable in 7 Continents 9 Lives (Bowery Books 2010), by Fay Chiang, a genre-defying collection of poems, prose poems, journal entries and dramatic monologues that includes work from the poet’s previous two volumes published by Sunbury Press. It’s a brave, beautiful, compassionate, harrowing, imperfect and impossibly generous piece of work. Chiang, an activist in the multiethnic communities of New York City’s Chinatown and the Lower East Side since the 1970s, has composed the poem of a fulsome life.

The volume’s personal narrative tells of her family’s immigration from Southern China and Singapore to Chinatown; it encompasses the diasporic Chinese communities in Italy, Germany and throughout the world. The poems recount Chiang’s travels and, through her good ear, capture the voices of working women, interlacing the narrative with their stories. Among the finest poems are the deft portraiture of women, including “Mrs. Oltrani” and the two grandmother poems, “Orchard Street” and “Grandma.” The latter ends with the stunning close, “We continued our walk, admiring the peaches and apples hanging in other people’s gardens,” as good an image of envy and otherness in America as I’ve ever read.
Chiang mourns the deaths of her father and her brother’s Hodgkin’s disease, mental illness and suicide. In the poem for her brother Peter, “Tall Grasses Rippling in Wind”—what a lovely title!— she writes, “past tomatoes /fallen off the vine / too soon,” that becomes a prefiguring of his premature “ripening.” Chiang recounts her own experience living with stage IV breast cancer, while in “David” she laments the state of the health care system and the condition of cultural silence by describing an HIV-positive client’s passing. What saves the narrative from utter grimness and despair is the poet’s remarkable understatement and acceptance of mortality. I’m reminded of essayist Richard Rodriguez’s comment that AIDS had somehow “Mexicanized” San Francisco in its confrontation with a generation’s death. Chiang has envisioned a future in which “You tell me, / Buddha said, / There is no heaven,” even imagining her own departure, saying, “No I could not bear this,” that is, the well-rehearsed rituals of yet another Chinese funeral and wake.
In “Midnight Blue Sky,” the poet contemplates her own suicide, but is drawn back by the awareness of change, the lightness of a Coney Island beach scene, the anti-nativist observation that “Each wave of newly arrived immigrants gracing these shores, the cold steel blue Atlantic, would settle and fiercely claim the city as its own.” In place of a politics of polarization, Chiang offers a poetics of inclusion, hence hope. In “Magic,” the poet observes the ways in which children, including her own daughter, reawaken adults to the loving details of the world, in “practicality and shrewdness.” The wonderful short lyrics, “Landscape” and “Home,” have the economy of Chinese and Japanese poetry, and a wistful ancestral longing.
The poet’s voice is conversational, accessible, deceptively simple and unadorned, modest, and sometimes raging, especially in the early poem, “Chinatown,” with its withering critique of the American culture’s homogenizing effect: “american tv sold mickey mouse and donald ducks / to little dick and janes and run spot run / in the suburbias of white picket fences / and automobiles.” But by and large, hers is a storyteller’s voice. Formally, Chiang favors a shorter line that isn’t often justified along the left margin but broken along the page, signifying movement. The collage of genres recalls Jean Toomer’s classic Cane, which also ignored or transcended questions of genre and convention.
The autobiographical narrative often circles and backtracks, so that “Journal Entry Jan. 1, 1975” describes her father’s death, while “Autumn Dusk,” which follows immediately afterwards, fictionalizes a conversation between father and daughter that remained unsaid during his lifetime. The latter poem gives itself over to the father’s elegiac voice: “in this light /in this autumn light / this September.”
There’s a satisfying wholeness to Fay Chiang’s 7 Continents 9 Lives, the arc of an active and conscious life. If I were to identify a single quality that marks the poet’s perspective, it would have to be full acceptance and inclusiveness: working class communities of color, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, those living with HIV, cancer or mental illness, the dispossessed, artists and creators as a force for social change. In the first section of “Images,” for example, the poet paints a carnivalesque scene on St. Marks Place in the Lower East Side in which she encounters an “old woman in raggedy coat and kerchief” who proceeds to tell her that she’s an artist-nun who sang “jesus light my fire in a lesbian bar.” The story is told without irony, grotesqueness or meanness, but with a common laughter; Chiang’s level, democratic gaze restores the homeless woman’s full humanity, and effects in the reader a “healing [that] has its own pace; / nothing to do with logic” (“Tall Grasses Rippling in Wind”). If that isn’t the poet’s task, I don’t know what is.

I’ve known Fay Chiang since 1974 when she was executive director of Basement Workshop. At the time I was coordinator of Basement’s Writers Workshop.

by Christopher Heffernan

The cult classic Trout Fishing in America, written by Richard Brautigan and first published in 1967, has been released in a new edition by Mariner Books, a subsidiary of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.  The book has not been published on its own since the early ‘80’s when Houghton Mifflin began packaging Brautigan’s books together in single volume sets with Trout Fishing in America set together with The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster and In Watermelon Sugar.  The new standalone edition, costing $13.95, and running 112 pages has a warm introduction from former poet laureate Billy Collins but also comes with a startling peculiarity.  For the original edition and the subsequent packaged editions after the covers had been a picture of Brautigan with a woman in front of a blurred statue of Benjamin Franklin.  It may at first seem like it does not matter but the first chapter of the book speaks directly about this cover, so it seems strange that Mariner decided to change the cover to the childlike drawing of a fish that was used for the dedication page and instead put the photo that is the theme of the first chapter called “The Cover for Trout Fishing in America” inside the book, just before the introduction.  Of course the book business demands that as time goes by and tastes change so must covers change but with a post modern tour de force that uses meta as one of its key elements and has the first chapter titled and dealing directly with the cover, it is self defeating to change it. 

The book is divided up into 47 sections or chapters, each with a title, and ranging in length from one page to roughly six.  It is a quick read and a fun read and it is a read you can always go back to as the undercurrents that Brautigan deals with offer a depth that lurks in the back of each chapter and the back of the reader’s mind so that there are always new connections to be made and new feelings to be felt.  The sections are split into different threads and themes with some recurring but with no over all coherent story, making it lyrical.  But this does not make it any less of a novel.  What engages the reader is, first, Brautigan’s prose style; smooth, light, with easily read and digestible sentences that move easily and naturally from one to the other.  Then there is the clash of themes where, here, drama does not build in the character’s lives, it is built in the reader himself as the different images and scenes, descriptions and events constantly push into and pull each other along.  And then there is the aspect of metafiction, fiction that reflects upon itself.  Brautigan takes it and puts in the first chapter and references the cover, as mentioned, a photo taken in front of a Benjamin Franklin statue in a park in San Francisco. 

The self referencing is important as it starts the function of building the book as an experience in the reader.  Good books make reading an experience so that the reader is not following a story but actually having emotional reactions to the work, is actually feeling and creating memories of feeling; so what Brautigan does by opening the book with a discussion of the cover is telling the reader that the event isn’t a story, or the book, but is actually the reader, as the reader must go back and observe the cover and now knows that the author who is now the narrator knows that he is writing a thing and he’s telling you he’s writing it so that like all good metafiction he points out that the thing is not the Thing but is a reflection of it and that the real Thing is life itself.  And then he goes on with the other themes, most particularly the degradation of America, as an optimistic description of the statue of Ben Franklin statue and the word WELCOME facing the four directions, are coupled with bums at a church across the street waiting for free sandwiches.  It is a scene of poverty and a clash with the manufactured image of America that moves throughout the book.  The image is then heightened by a Kafka quote that reads, “I like the Americans because they are healthy and optimistic.”

This degradation through its many facets, the rise of technology, loss of value, loss of a connection with something more natural or organic, etc, runs the length of the book and is paralleled and contrasted with the other large thread that is of pastoral scenes of fishing.  Many of these scenes involve a family, moving around from campsites in America, illustrating the splendor of the country and the depth of its natural beauty while at the same time reinforcing the book with the metaphor for fishing, sustenance, a theme as old as Christ.  What is remarkable about the book is that although Brautigan has forgone classic structure he retained one of the oldest themes, that of life returning life to itself with the symbol of fish.  That this lost connection with nature can be retrieved through fishing.  Over the centuries this theme often involved a redemption, usually of land or character but always in the end of life.  Brautigan knows this but does not state it.  Instead he gives the reader events and description so that instead of being told what the problem is it is made implicit and instead of being told what to do about it the book, being set up as an event itself, activates the reader’s own sympathy or empathy or even urgency.  This is one of the key elements that made it such a hit in the ‘60’s.  It was a true cry, a sign, pointing directly at the clash of technology and nature and that nature was loosing—as Brautigan points out when addressing the camping craze in America that the Coleman lamp has become the beacon of these people and that it is “unholy”; and as he points to the rise of consumerism which is wonderfully illustrated in the section titled “The Cleveland Wrecking Yard.”  In this chapter the narrator finds out about a place that sells streams for trout fishing, that you can go there and build a stream, paying for it by the foot, stock it with fish and even surround it with trees and shrubs and wildlife to make a perfectly manufactured natural setting.  Brautigan’s light style makes these few pages seem almost cutesy as the narrator is picking out what he wants and discusses options as if buying a car with the salesman.  But those Brautigan undercurrents begin to creep up and the astute reader will begin to realize that it is a simple but poignant and strong commentary on, what was at the time, a rising consumerism that is now our everyday way of life.  Though we do not buy trout streams by the foot, almost everything else in our society, including our health and our bodies, has become commodities for profit. 

What stands out in the book, though, as truly astounding, is the relationship that “Trout Fishing in America” has with the reader, that it is a thing, not only the book itself, but in the book “Trout Fishing in America,” exists as an object to be explored, a personification, an event and even an entity unto itself.  Brautigan begins this creation of Trout Fishing in America as an entity right in the second chapter where the narrator wonders about when he first heard about Trout Fishing in America and there is a response after his brief musings by Trout Fishing in America itself.  This sets the stage for Trout Fishing in America not being simply an activity or even a pastoral state of mind to be reached in the tranquility of nature, but an actual entity, running around out there.  It moves, it talks, it does things.  It is at the same time a hotel and a bum named Trout Fishing in America Shorty.  It is all these things and more and Brautigan does not waste his or the reader’s time by trying to define it or explain it so that the reader may on his own grasp it.  This is where his having the book as a true experience comes into play, because it is the event of reading all of the chapters and sections against each other where Trout fishing in America is all of these different things and exists as different things, undefined and explained in their relationships that, in the end, the reader must put it all together into the actual experience, the way that any person who lives through an event puts the pieces together for a full understanding. 

It is not all completely out of bounds.  In the end Brautigan brings the pastoral family of campers to the city and the park in San Francisco with the Franklin statue that starts the book, pinching the whole thing off almost as it had begun.  Here, with their little girl, they come across Trout Fishing in America Shorty who, old and broke and nearing death beckons to the child who at first pays him attention then with a flippancy and frivolity runs away.  It is a scene of contrasts and foils, of warmth and desperation, of family and loneliness that is offered to the reader, so typical of this book and Brautigan, with no implicit meaning other than what the reader can get from it with his own senses.  

Over all the book is short and accessible, easy to read, and easy to read on many levels.  It is an exquisite example of post modernism and a triumph of literary themes and explorations that edge into the prophetic.  It is almost sad that this book is a cult classic, that its association with the 60’s and the counter culture movement has basically trumped its validity as solid work of fiction.  Hopefully, now, enough time has gone by and with the publication of this new edition by itself the up and coming generation of readers will see Trout Fishing in America for what it truly is.

JUST KIDS –Patti Smith

Harper Collins, New York, 2010

279 pps.

Reviewed by Bonny Finberg

     Patti Smith has kept her promise to Robert Mapplethorpe to tell their story. By doing so through the lens of a generation of artists in New York at that time, she’s written our story as well. Her book could be subtitiled: “Talkin’ ‘Bout My Generation,” the Pete Townsend song she covered as if she’d written it herself.

     The book opens when, as a very young girl, Smith sees her first swan gliding then taking flight from the Prairie River in Humboldt Park. The sight of it “generated an urge I had no words for, a desire to speak of the swan…its whiteness the explosive nature of its movement, and the slow beating of its wings.” This prescient moment, almost allegorical, is later played out in her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe whose place in her life was in some sense that of a fairy godfather, transforming her from insecure, self-effacing duckling to magnificent swan with wings from whose powerful beating rhythm comes an artistry of overwhelming beauty. Ironically, and typical for the times, Smith makes the conscious pledge to herself to support her artist/lover by giving him the freedom of not having to hold a job while she does. She works at various jobs so he can develop his art and afford studio space, while in the evenings, accompanying him on their routine visits to Max’s Kansas City. Their first, decidedly uneventful foray into Max’s was in 1969. Andy Warhol was no longer a regular after being shot by Valerie Solanas, though his second string, so to speak remained. Hanging out in the right places in order to meet the right people, though extremely important to Mapplethorpe is only something Smith does for his sake. She describes her reticence and painful social awkwardness. They start out in the front room near the bar spending their time drinking Cokes and trying to figure out how to work their way into the back room where the art world stars drink and commiserate, engaged in repartee that resembles a Looking Glass version of the Algonquin.

     Despite her self-consciousness in the presence of the royalty holding court in the back room, she rises to the occasion, spurred on by Mapplethorpe’s relentless pursuit of entering their inner circle. After a self-executed haircut, she describes the attention and approval that finally delivers her into the sanctuary of their Mad Tea Party.

     Patti Smith’s early religious training redefined events in clearly revelatory ways. She saw art as her “calling.” Her first confrontation with art was on a family trip to the Philadelphia Art Museum. Like much of Smith’s encounters, this was an epiphany. After a short stint in a factory in South Jersey, where she lived at the time, she left for the bus stop to take the bus to New York. Her mother had given her a white waitress outfit, complete with shoes, to ensure her survival. (They ended up in the bathroom of the first and last restaurant she would ever work in.) The going was rough and she slept in the park and in doorways before finally finding a place in Brooklyn to share. Her first meeting with Mapplethorpe happened while working behind a jewelry counter. It’s the kind of meeting that romantic movies are made of and begins a deep and long relationship that spans over twenty years.

     Among other things, these two were drawn together by their commitment to art as primary over all other pursuits. They shared musical tastes, sometimes playing certain records over and over again, and supported each other’s vision. The happy balance between their differences was maintained by the admiration and recognition of the other’s perspective and method. Smith recalls the snowy Christmas night when, walking in Time Square, they came upon the billboard “WAR IS OVER If you want it. Happy Christmas from John and Yoko.” She remarks that Mapplethorpe was impressed by the idea of artists taking over 42^nd Street. She was struck by the humanity of the statement. “For me it was the message. For Robert the medium.” This was 1969. The end of the Sixties when Smith and Robert both turned 23. With the uncanny certainty and foresight he often shows in this story, Mapplethorpe declares at the beginning of the Seventies: “This is our decade.”

     Smith and Mapplethorpe’s days at the Hotel Chelsea provide one of the most compelling and evocative aspects of this book. Their time spent with Harry Smith, encounters with William Burroughs, Viva, Candy Darling and scores of others are funny and insightful. Even when Smith was not on intimate terms with some of these well known artists, her observations from her perch on a couch in the lobby opens a window into a time when the New York art world was an accessible, diverse universe for anyone with eyes and ears. She is privy to Shirley Clarke, Diane Arbus and Jonas Meekas, as they each pass through the lobby. Viva enters like an unapproachable diva in order to intimidate Stanley Bard, then owner of the Chelsea, so as to distract him from the fact of her outstanding rent.

     An interesting revelation about Smith here is that she was not so much the wild child that her stage persona suggested. She drank little, if at all, and never smoked dope. In fact, her descriptions of Mapplethorpe and Harry Smith readying to go out after smoking a joint is pretty funny. They try on various outfits and look for keys while she, having thrown some simple but hip outfit together, sits waiting impatiently. It isn’t until much later that after having smoked herself that she thinks back and understands their distraction.

     Smith’s development as a poet/performer informs some of the most fascinating sections. Her meeting with Lenny Kaye and their first performance at St. Mark’s Church Poetry Project is a Punk version of “A Star is Born” without the tragedy. There is little evidence here of struggling to become famous. It seemed that all who knew her were pushing her to go public. Once she did, she inspired adulation from the outset, and never stopped. She continues to give radioactive performances all over the globe.

     The larger part of this book covers a time of cheap all-night diners and five and dime stores full of cheap housewares, toys and kitsch that could be recycled into art objects. I’d forgotten some of these places until I read them in these pages: Benedict’s, Child’s, Lamston’s. It was a time when we made our own greeting cards and gifts by hand and paid rent that equaled about one week’s salary. It was New York at a time when you might have to struggle to survive and do your art, whereas now it seems more necessary to sacrifice your art in order to survive. It was a place where misfits from everywhere else could co-exist, if cynically, with those who came to make their fortune. You met people in the street or the park and were friends for life. You could work for two weeks as a waitress at Max’s (even if only in the front room where people got their own drinks and stiffed the waitress as I sadly learned) and make enough money for a cheap (illegal) charter flight to Europe. Pot was $15 an ounce.

     It all sounds so idyllic even in the writing of it here. Of course, being in your twenties and thirties makes any decade “the” decade. But this was before the AIDS epidemic, Rudy Giuliani, overdevelopment and, of course, 9/ll. So many were lost — people and places. But thanks to Patti Smith’s detailed records from journals and notebooks, photographs and drawings, we have them here for all time.

Sam Shepard’s new book of stories, Day Out of Days, is a romp through the highways of America, through the personal history of the narrators, as well as through the historical past of the many areas of the States that the highways touch and pass through, that is often as brutal and violent as it is insightful and illuminating. Published by Knopf and covering 282 pages, this new work of fiction is broken up into 133 sections that range in length from a paragraph to ten or so pages with the majority of them being only one or two or three pages and mixed in with a few titleless poems (reminiscent of his earlier work Motel Chronicles) and nonnarrative based dialogues that go untethered to any particular character, a technique used in both of his previous books of short stories, Cruising Paradise and Great Dream of Heaven. Names are rarely used and a name for a narrator or narrators is never brought up so though the steady voice of the pieces holds without much variation one cannot assume that they are all being told by the same voice, in the same vein that one cannot assume that they are all different. There is an ambiguity to who is doing the telling, but it is not an ambiguity that stumps the reader or clouds the experience of the stories with being obtuse or opaque but rather enhances the themes and the overall structure of existential query and self reflection, and by not making it the personal journey of one man, or the shared experiences of many that can be compared against each other, he does both. By never explicitly stating whether the sections are linked by one or many voices the reader must digest the stories, the journey, as both, as though it is one man traveling the heart of America, traveling his past, and as the many, the multiple people whose emotional landscapes are inextricably tied to the shared experiences of what it means to be human. And for Sam what it means to be human (or at the very least, what this book investigates as the plane of the human living condition) deals tremendously with memory.

The first story, “Kitchen,” a lyrical piece, talks mainly of the past of the narrator who lists the things around him in the kitchen, many of which are photographs, that lay out a snapshot of his past as well as a dip into the historical past with references to Sitting Bull, Henry Miller and Samuel Beckett. This story is almost an archetype for the entire book as it deals with memory, the past, horses, the historical past and isolation, as the narrator says now no one comes around and that they know better and alludes to having engineered this isolation that is the fulfillment of the way of life that the narrator describes as a sinking ship, by putting a pit bull out front to keep these visitors away. In the last story of the book, called “Gracias,” the reader finds a narrator who, after driving for miles ends up in a small town with an ancient church, “ . . . walking hand in hand with our children, . . .” where having gone down a narrow side street, the family hears a piano that, when it stops, they all applaud, after which they hear a small voice from somewhere in the house say, “Gracias.” The one paragraph piece ends with the line, “That was one of those days I remember.” So here, the reader is given many of the themes that run through the book but they have resolved. They have gone from a self inflicted crippling isolation to a simple scene of music and togetherness. But the path between these two is anything but straight.

The journey along this path is literally a journey for many of the characters in the pieces themselves. Many of the sections of the book are titled with place names designated with highway numbers, “Haskell, Arkansas (Highway 70)”, “Williams, Arizona (Highway 40 West)”, “Alpine, Texas (Highway 90)”. But these places, many times, serve no real importance to the narrator, they are truck stops and gas stations, they are diners, where the narrator through the weight or sublimity of travel has become self reflected and introspective, is grappling with the greater understanding of his own life through the desolation of the place or in some cases the historical significance, which in many cases is tied directly to Native Americans. Though the narrator(s) are not Native American, it is the theme of the struggle for life, as it is now instituted in the American cultural mythology that Native Americans were systematically wiped out, that they were smashed to pieces by an overwhelming force that when fought against destroyed them even more, that binds the narrative voices together in an understanding of an impending doom, of a death that will wipe out the individual. And with this exploration goes the idea of simpler tribal times, as the journeyman grapples with modern life and is often seduced by the noble savage ideology in order to combat this awful destruction that is not lurking, but is waiting, often, in plain sight, in the faces of those around him, in his own face.

The doom is signified in many cases by memory. Memory is a major component of the book, through all the themes, pieces, characters, narrators, they are all linked by their memory of their lives, not haunted by individual events, but haunted by memory itself, by the life once lived, by the path gone by so far in what has been lived, and tied to the dysfunction of memory as many of the narrations have an inability to either remember with accuracy or to know that things have been forgotten, or that they are not being recalled properly, which in many of the sections is itself a certain death; that not only does the breakdown of the memory signify the onset of age and the impending end, but that as the events are remembered inaccurately, or with a tremendous effort to bring back the tiniest pieces, as is the case in “Indianapolis (Highway 74)”, where the narrator cannot recall a lover who he had lived with when she is standing in front of him, enormous existential anxiety is created that often defines the narrator’s emotional landscape.

Fathers and sons find their way into many of the sections of the book, a theme that riddles much of Shepard’s earlier fiction as many times there are sons learning how to deal with the disappointment of an inadequate father and fathers dealing with the profundity and, at times, absurdity of being a parent. A striking example comes from the piece “Bernallilo” which mimics an older piece from a previous collection, where the narrator’s father is stumbling drunk out of a bar and is struck and killed by a car. Here the father’s death is framed in his inadequacy as he has ended up a drunk and the son must forever live with it as it has cost him his father and a small psychological disorder as he explains at the end that he is now forever afraid of being blindsided by cars. The violence with which this event occurs is wrought throughout the book. And it is not a violence that spreads itself against the action of a story in order that the characters or even reader learn from it, that it has some intrinsic value as to educate us in life or mature us, but is rather presented as simple fact, as what is a gross base part of life that has no value in growing consciousness but is simply one other thing that we as humans must digest. In dealing with this more specifically there are two running stories through out the book, though in their sections, they are more lyrical than narrative. One is of a decapitated head found on the side of the road and the other is of a mercenary. In the decapitated head thread the sections themselves do not have much violence but violence is the backdrop as the head had been violently removed from the body and the head, through an all permeating voice, gains the aid of a passerby to bring him to a lake and toss him in. It is the aftermath of the violence, the consuming horror of the ripples from the event that is concerned here as at first the passerby must deal with what is happening, then the narration moves on to the head itself and his concerns and regrets. The mercenary is straight violence, where this man is hired to kill a man, skin his face off his skull and bring it back to his contractors. He does. Later the mercenary becomes more self reflective, but never about the way he makes a living, the violence, as that is the sustenance of his life, not something to be derided or avoided. And between these two threads are the inevitable arguments and confrontations that lace every type of relationship of a tough and violent world where Shepard often delves into the historical past, of the battles and destruction that have shaped the landscape that is being driven through, observed and examined.

But the book is not all hardship and destruction, destitute anxiety and a meaninglessness that must be dealt with the best way a person can, there is also the triumph. Many of the pieces are lyrical, many without a specific narrative direction that lets the event portrayed unfold in what, at times, is close to being imagistic poetry. Here there are birds and rivers, there is the moon and memory is not something shot full of holes as it fades away, it is something not even considered as the world, many times with music, played or listened to, is exposed as a thing not destroying us with an inane and senseless self destructing rage, but a place, like many of those places along the highways of the American west, of a beauty that comes on unfathomable and satisfies some undefined thing in all of us.

the winter wind sits in the living room
so we huddle in the kitchenin our winter coats looking silly
and too cold to do anything
but light a candle eat melon seeds
as I wonder
what do we wear when we go outside?
— poem by Frances Chung, p. 25, 1970
from “Crazy Melon & Green Apples”

On November 8, 2009, I picked up the Village Voice because of its headline “The Great Walls of Chinatown Living in Cubicles @ 81 Bowery” by Elizabeth Dwoskin . It reminded me when while traveling through India, a rich X-boyfriend exclaimed, “How can they live like this?” (see photo-”A Delhi Untouchable”) I smiled & knew how & why because I grew up in Chinatown, NYC. Since then, after making me homeless, the X lives comfortably in Provincetown.

Meanwhile, reading the article, I find the writer makes landlord-tenant relations a Catch-22 even with the intervention of Dept. of Buildings’ evictions and judicial system’s re-installment of tenants. It’s a no win unprofitable game for the Chinese in America. Where are the low-income housings? Ms Dwoskin only describes the Bowery as its traditional vicinity for “losers”….never describing the evictions as a racist act benefiting the landlord. Obviously, it is a continuum battle for low-income families. Now, there is every reason for gentrifying the nabe.

An Untouchable in New Delhi, India © photo by Susan L. Yung

“Plenty” in her short life is what she wrote, knowledgably. She was emerging as a public figure to become a spokesperson for life in Chinatown, which is the Chinese immigrant story as reflected like the Jews of Lower East. In 1977, inside a “slum” ghettoized neighborhood, Frances prepared her first manuscript that she had “written a secret book entitled “Crazy Melon”. She submitted to various funding sources for publications and routinely, had been rejected. It would be a social class problem where at that time, (is the norm) … to be reckoned as amateurish writings by elite writers like Kimiko Hahn, graduate of Columbia University, or Kenneth Roth. Nevertheless, by 1980, Frances began to receive a poetry grant from New York State Council on the Arts-Creative Artists Public Service (NYSCCA CAPS) in 1980-81; A New York Times Co Foundation scholarship (1986); and a NYSCA Writer-in-Residence fellowship (1987-1988). This gave her confidence to submit her second manuscript, “Green Apple” for “conventional poetry competitions” such as the publication Walt Whitman Award sponsored by the Academy American Poets in NYC. Her brief poems, short vignettes and prose reflect her precise selection of words. Her sparse lines describes a single Asian woman’s (maybe feminist) subtle thoughts during the Ethnic (Black, Hispanic and Asian) Civil Rights movement of the 60s-80s. Her work is “not prophetic, but the creation of deeper silences in which to safeguard personal or community thought, feeling and relationships from the onslaught of real estate speculation, … exploitation by the garment industry, and the ideology of a nation at war against yet another Asian populace, the Vietnamese.” She never joined a union, a NGO organization or participated in Chinatown worker’s issues. Her sole participation had been in women’s writers groups of LES or whenever they had blossomed in the late 70s. Eventually, such women’s intellectual groups diminished in late 80s. Maybe, she lacked political motivations or to participate in any activities such as attending marches, rallies; demonstrations and other radical/revolutionary changes would stunt her career as educator.

In Frances Chung’s 40 years, she poetically, with a touch of sardonic humor, described the boundaries of NYC’s Chinatown from Canal St to the diverse culture of Lower East Side during the years of 1966-1990. She died in 1990. However, there is only one posthumously book that has been published by Wesleyan College and edited by Walter K. Lew, a poet and Korean-American scholar. He had total access of her two manuscripts to print this singular book entitled “Crazy Melon & Chinese Apple-the Poems of Frances Chung”. The book came out in 2000; 10 years after her tragic death and it took me twenty years later to find the book to peruse. By now, any trace of this poet’s qualitative experiences are forgotten and there are more writers of Asian American descent in NYC capable of writing about the same perpetual struggles as experienced in the 60s & 70s.

The paperback book has 144 pages of Frances’ poems, vignettes and prose writings with 30 pages of Walter K. Lew’s titles of “Commentary”, “About the Text” and “Appendix.” His intensive research and faithful chronology of her writings portrays the writer’s development from adolescent to a matured woman with speculative lovers as perceived by Walter K. Lew. He even directed her cover design that trivializes her manuscript into a small illustration. Frances’ intent is to utilize a Chinese wrapper’s design where she had scotch taped for her front manuscript, “Crazy Melon”. The wrapper enclosed dried sweet plums where Westerners are unfamiliar with its tart sweet taste and flavor. (Hard to explain.) I would prefer if the artwork had been blown-up full size to appreciate the candy wrapper’s artistry since it reflects the art of Asia. The cover’s design is important for marketing of the book’s contents especially if it is a foreign culture to an ignorant mainstream American culture.

Luckily, I had survived NYC’s various stereotypical labels and can enumerate or reflect the similar experiences as well as go beyond the melding compatibilities or incongruence of Eastern (mainland China) and Western cultures due to my various travels to third world nations. I seem to complete the cycle of growing up in a Chinatown and returning to the same ghetto/barrio problems that are also inherent throughout the world.

Frances and I were classmates in Junior High School and High School. I had moved into the Chinatown neighborhood at the age of 12 from 2 years in the Bronx and 10 years in Portland, Oregon, my birth state. NYC’s cultural shock had affected me grandly since my family in Portland, Oregon were the only Chinese living within a mile from another Chinese family. The NYC culture of finding Asian families of 7-10 people living in close vicinities crammed in three room apartments can be disorientating and especially in a classroom of 30 Chinese students who were highly smart with competitive grades. In addition, most of my classmates went to Chinese schools to learn reading and writing calligraphy as well as speak Cantonese from 3:30-5:30 at the Consolidated Benevolent Association on Mott St. Thus their capacities to be studious, smart, intellectually observant, lacking leisure time to enjoy competitive sports, artistic activities, attending social functions and events such as rock concerts, dating, dance mixers, and other social activities to mold and meld into mainstream culture. Instead, they became the model minority for other ethnic groups in NYC. These were high achievers whose parents were employed in the laundries, restaurant businesses and garment factories. There were some students whose parent’s were from Chinatown’s small businesses that lined the streets of Chinatown retaining the village traditions of Mainland China. Rarely, were their parents in the professional professions such as MDs, PhDs, lawyers, professors, architects, engineers, corporations, etc. Thus, the environment and experiences that Frances Chung grew up motivated her to be a role model for her classmates. Being a straight “A” student enabled her to escape a future of poverty. She expresses her hopes, childhood traumas, “observations” of the local, residential eccentrics and/or “eccentric.” happenings She traveled as a tourist or “was it a jet-setter lifestyle”? Upon her return to Chinatown as her home base, Frances makes comparisons of her world wind travels and her life in provincial Chinatown, as cited in the following lines:

The echoes of the night trucks
bouncing off the cobblestones
on Canal Street play on the
silences in my bones. Playing
games with the red and green
light on the corner of Mott and
Canal, we find an excuse to run—
we who know that those who are
brave cross Mott Street on a
diagonal. (page 4)

Her quick terse observations become humorously timeless. She purposely focused on her subjects depending on quick descriptions that embodies the brief moment, lingering the experience with unforgettable words different from her mother tongue. Her sensitive observations can, to a Westerner, be considered neurotic. She could be bipolar, a schizoid silently suffering the contradictions while developing a voice contrary to the Chinese traditions, as well as develop a vocabulary to emote feelings and subtly suggest a precocious mind.

…the young man stopping her in the street to say “Arigato” and then looking hurt when she explained she was not Japanese. And then the man whispered as she walked past on Mott Street “do you ever play with yourself? You and me … I could really sock it to you.”

Friends wrote from Europe wishing her a Happy Valentine’s Day. (p. 41)

…..blue mannequin eye. Some brides stood proudly without
heads, one-armed, even one naked bride with no nipples. (p. 34)

He will jump out of his hospital window. Before
you leave, he will ask you to bring toothpicks the next
time you come. (p.70)

the Mexican night
fresh smell of el campo
luciérnagas (p.118)

Her sharp wit encompasses the years of living in a confined, stifling community describing bitter hardships and taboo traditions that need broken as in:

There is a group of Chinese-American men who think of
themselves as Chinese warriors. They are beautiful
anachronisms. They study the martial arts, practice
calligraphy, consult the I Ching and go to sword flicks to
blow their minds. (p.61)

The reader can decipher double innuendos subtly expressed with select words as in

“…see her taking care of teacups in the
association. She seems imported.” (p.67)

These lines suggest the dormant domesticity of an immigrant woman. Frances abhors the servitude by highlighting the activity and ending in a simple statement. The word “association”, for a Chinese person, automatically indicates the family’s village name of colloquial China and their patriarchal history of migrating to America. It is the alternative social services provided in an insular community behind the gift shops, restaurants, & grocers familiar to tourists. However, due to the Exclusion Act of 1864 the sojourner men had to organize a methodology to legitimize a system of protection for their assimilations and survival in White dominating America. These family associations provided loans for small businesses, shelters for family arrivals, filed paper works for citizenships, provide translators, keep records of village members with same name sakes, locate separated family members, etc.

Often, Frances references the exotic teas, foods: Hispanic and Chinese as only some readers can experience due to their individual family upbringings. She reminisces her childhood of identifying peculiar actions as normal such as “banging on the kitchen table” and observing roaches scattering in seven directions which she states “I must reread “Metamorphosis”. She describes stealing a snail from a grocer’s stall and once in the apartment, “spraying drops of water from our fingers to see if it was home.” (p.28). These childhood memories are unusual little moments of joy for a ghetto child to ruminate.

Frances’ quick observant words express feelings that many Asian artists and writers lack. Most major AA writers only write about their ID crises whereby they are constantly dependent and too busy finding a role model to emulate. For example: for men it would be “Bruce Lee” and for women “Suzie Wong”. There are other occupations to be pre-occupying as filmmakers, photographers, writers, or musicians, poets etc. So in American history Asians will be portrayed or considered as some form of enemy as oppose to being just American. Maybe it is a rites of passage to call a Chink “Chink”, Japanese “Jap” and so on “whatever….” Thus we’ll be stuck as templates Bruce Lees and Suzy Wongs, the fundamental stereotypes for Americans to fall back on and thus stalemating the cultural definitions of Asian Americans. In the following poem, Frances indicates her rebellious attitude, minimizing the words:

We use newspaper for a
tablecloth. And when I
want to make my mother
sad I tell her that I’m
going to cook American
food when I get older. (p.52)

In the afterward section, Walter Lew did an intensive research of Frances short-lived life where many of her poems express the static turmoil of living/growing up in a ghetto and her desires to go beyond the boundaries of Chinatown as well as travel before settling into a sedate profession.

Frances had prepared two manuscripts for publications, “Crazy Melon” and “Chinese Apple”. The latter has “a richer conception of the scope and achievement of Chung’s writing” as described by Lew. He footnoted and charted France’s chronological progress of writing each poem, prose etc. This can be quite obsessive and stringently limiting for further interpretations since we will never witness Frances’ full maturity through her writings. Her early form of expression and early writings of an Asian American woman is obliterated by other living women writers. Frances Chung’s sensitive works precedes the west coast notables Maxine Kingston Hong and Amy Tan. These two women write about the first generation Chinese coping with an unfamiliar culture in a new country while Frances reflects the struggles of living in a ghettoized neighborhood. Her subtle words slowly stings with angry. Unfortunately, she never expressed it through participatory demonstrations, joined any grassroots organizations, be a political activist or bona fide artist. She just became a teacher in the Lower East Side and slowly submitted her ms to various funding sources. It took awhile for recognition but by then it became too late. To know the source of her brain tumor … was it from too much overuse in being a straight A student or the adult stresses of being Asian in a Hispanic community or never understanding a loved one?

In her poems, Frances’ last lines as experienced in the ghetto, constantly stings the mind with ironies that reaches a certain level of timeless miseries. Often it can be stifling and her escape route would be

“…every cockroach that runs across
my mind
whispers that I haven’t seen Peking.” (p. 44)

Here are a few other extracted last lines:

“everything in life being guesswork
cooking without teaspoons
eternal windowshoppers
we women were sometimes like children (p.60)

Chinese New Year …….Banners
across Chinatown. So many dragons to
follow. Oranges to cut. Shrimp chips
flowering. (p. 24)

When I went to JHS 65 on Forsyth St, many of my friends were fascinated with Frances’ straight A grades and her competitiveness to outshine their intelligences. I seemed to only surpass her with my math and history grades. However, I felt her quiet complacent solitude disturbing as an introvert incapable to speak out or make complaints as I became rebellious to NYC’s education system and often spoke my mind to various teachers. Even when we were in Washington HS, an all girl’s school, Frances kept to herself and achieved all the straight A’s. After graduation, she managed to go to an elite school, Smith College with scholarships while I attended Hunter College. After college, I participated in a non-profit cultural organization, Basement Workshop to become an expressive artist. Via this organization, with other peer groups of identical begrudges, we were able to culminate in a Confucius Plaza demonstration as our civil rights movement.

However, Frances shied from such demonstrative activities and would submit her manuscripts to the Basement Workshop in the hopes of publication. The organization was too busy dealing with internal logistics of mobilizing volunteers into a collective consciousness and administering an arts space to prevent street gangs rather than finance a publication. At that time, she had finished her 2 years foray in the Peace Corps situated in Central and South America. In addition, she taught in LES as a trilingual teacher, Spanish, Chinese, & English. Poetry became her outlet of expression and she taught poetry at St. Mark’s Project and Henry St. Settlement. She was able to receive 3 poetry awards: NYSCA CAPS (1980-81), NY Times Co. Foundation scholarship (1986) and a NYSCA Writer-in Residence fellowship (1987-88). Besides South America, she traveled extensively to Europe, Asia and Africa. Frances was slowly becoming acknowledged until she was overtaken by her brain tumor. Thus after her death does her poems become a significant testimony to a life style that is slowly disappearing due to encroaching gentrification of Chinatown after LES’s final gentrification.

I find myself falling into Frances’ affinities and identify closely with her struggles that it often becomes painful to reflect how our lives are parallel of self-destruction and resurrections. However, in the late 80s, Frances fell a victim of an institution’s negligence. Once diagnosed, she underwent surgery. While in a coma, Frances was injected with antibodies that the doctors had unknowingly been unaware of her allergies. During her unconsciousness, she died with the poison burning through her veins. I also had the same allergy reaction when recuperating from surgery and luckily; I was conscience to complain the burning sensation coursing through my veins. The doctors were able to counter the poisonous drug with the correct antibody.

As Frances relies on selected words to describe a lifestyle in Chinatown, I tend to record with a camera, stills and videos. Thus, I been able to also travel, record and compare similarities of foreignness and isolated observations on the hopes that social changes would be evitable, especially in the socio-economic improvements. However, little has evolved through such expressions in the arts to expedite these social changes. As Asians, we are still imbued with stereotypical labels due to mainstream resistances. Recently in the past year of 2008, there had been a rash of fires and evictions occurring in Chinatown. For example, in 2008, on a very cold winter night, prompted by a landlord’s complaints, the Department of Buildings evicted 50 Chinese men from their SRO rooms and relocated them up in the Bronx. These men were unable to read or speak English and were alienated in a Hispanic community. With the assistances of the young determined community activists of Chinese Americans Against Anti-Violence (CAAAV) and the rallying efforts of Chinatown Tenants Union (CTU), it took a year for the men to return to their familiar environment-Chinatown.

There are more Chinese bums
In the neighborhood now. No
one knows where they come from
but they appear with crazy
smiles and unshaven faces.
One of them looks like a poet. (p.19)

Did ALL these poems caused her brain to develop a tumor? Was it the wait and frustration of submitting her ms to publishing houses and the constant rejections? Or the wait until other Asian friends could print them in “another Asian” collective anthology every 10 years. She had been a member of Ordinary Women, Basement Workshop, St Marks Poetry Project, and Henry St Settlement. Like Iris Chang’s tragic suicide in 2004 (a well known published writer of Chinese American History who died at the age of 38. See my written article entitled: Iris Chang: A Deceased Role Model Minority). Both died in the same age range which can be suspiciously speculative. Frances’ goals were the same … to explain 20th century modern hardships in order to become an artistic entity as a writer & poet. In the 21st century, Chinatown is being gentrified where many prime properties are converted to skyscrapers leaving nothing to be preserved or become historic landmarks, to retrace and hide the miseries of the still inherent oppressions of an ethnic immigrant slum life.

Frances Chung subliminal speculative poems & prose writings describe the barrios/ghettoes like Jacob Riis’ photos of LES. She praises or glorifies no mentors, persons, or spiritual beings. The reader is introduced to a lifestyle that Luc Sante, writer of “Low Life”, might write if he was Asian. Frances might be described as the sweet, romantic Asian American “muckrakers” who unlike the anarchist, Emma Goldman, wrote about her present situation in the hopes of being published as a contemporary writer.

Like an American pioneer, Frances Chung’s writings are before her time. Her narrative voice preludes the writings of Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston. Frances’ enduring words have historic significance as her voice transcends and echoes the 20th Century innocence of life in a slum/ghettoe/barrio during an era of restitution and reconstruction of an American eye sore called “oppression and racism” which leads us to our present situation of Age of Terrorism and Anarchism. As gentrification encroaches and eradicates areas of ol’ Chinatown starting from Park Row’s middle class neighborhood to Mott St’s small businesses, Frances words will haunt my generation while the next generation welds with the New Recession with unemployments, scapegoatings, glass ceilings, inflationary rent increases, lack of labor skills, lack of artists reflecting a minorities’ subculture.

RIP, Frances Chung

Welcome to the Labyrinth of multiple negatives. Books so bad they’re
perfect to pillory populate the latest Unbearables anthology, a
lavish production whose reach tries strenuously to exceed its grasp; but
nobody grasps like an Unbearable. The world is their oyster and it isn’t
easily digestible.
Even without counting graphic artists such as David Sandlin, Kaz, and
Ken Brown, over 70 contributors take pot shots at the books that bother
them, and they don’t waste time on trash. Each takes a tangent off the
concept and few look back, that’s not how they roll. Some state their
premise clearly like a survey response or an assignment, others go after
imaginary titles (Jerome Sala) or their own work (Ron Kolm). The work is
at its most enjoyable when core members wallow in self-mythologizing,
inventing characters out of each other. bart plantenga turns in a
novelesque tale of proofreaders driven too far, Mike Randall paints the
Unbearable Big Fish as “relentlessly cruising the shallow water for
talent that will cough up some ‘edgy’ material for less than scale.”
Tribulations of the writer’s life are the one keen constant.
Despite some targets being hit more than once, like the Bible, James
Joyce, and the Chicago Manual of Style, no two entries are alike. Some
of the Beats are back for another drubbing, along with their parasitic
hangers-on, taken out by Gerald Nicosia and Mike Golden, while Henry
Darger and Barbie hide behind Gertrude Stein. Lit pop-stars like Sedaris
and Chabon, icons like Ballard, Borges, Mailer and Calvino are roasted
as well, more for being distracting or disappointing than execrable.
By digging into the books that have riled them up, this pack of
writer/proles has levitated a pungent Pentagon of provoking prose out of
a hole greater than some of its parts.

Published by Autonomedia, paper, 16.95$

Sea of Poppies, by Amitav Ghosh
Reviewed by Poonam Srivastava

Amitav Ghosh is a world-renowned best selling author. After reading Sea of Poppies I see why. He is a damn good storyteller. The subject of Sea of Poppies is vast and rich. Despite the huge intellectual effort that is required by the writer of such a historical epic, readers are served a tale that takes them easily by the heart. Ghosh sets his work in the world of the early global economy at the beginnings of the nineteenth century, India 1830s. The economy of the British Empire is in its transformation from the export / import of slaves from Africa to indentured servants from the subcontinent. The first Opium War is a mere decade or so away when the Ibis sails into the Hooghly River preparing to load up.

The ship is named for the ibis bird. The mascot of the University of Miami is an American White Ibis. The ibis was selected as the school mascot because of its legendary bravery during hurricanes. The ibis is the last sign of wildlife to take shelter before a hurricane hits and the first to reappear once the storm has passed. Miami’s sports teams are nicknamed “The Hurricanes”(Wikipedia)

The Ibis is about to face many hurricanes. This majestic ex-slave ship is meant to carry a cast of passengers and crew that include an unlikely amalgam of souls: from both the East: India and China; and West: Britain – of course, but also France, and the U.S. — from every class: from the Raja who exults in the noble art of flying kites with his heir apparent to the lowest of the low — a giant of a Dalit who eats road kill and dares to disobey society’s dictums. A hurricane is brewing that will cause these souls to choose sides on their voyage across the Black Water. A hurricane is also gathering between the forces of these economies: the Chinese, the Indians, the merchants and the governments.

The writer presents all the key players in a story about the basics of human existence. He shows the various existences that keep them true to their stations. There are beautifully crafted moments portraying fully the effect of Erwin Goff’s understanding of institution. (The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, 1959) Ghosh’s brilliance is that he doesn’t content himself with description of the everyday. He goes further. He shows the raw passions that rule despite the social pressures and norms; he studies the inner mechanisms of meaning-formation. His women are free even within their total subjections to their men. His men are powerless whether mere kings of their households or actual sons of royal blood holding lands as far as the eye can see.

Sea of Poppies opens up with Deeti’s vision. She is called Deeti, short for her given name. She is also called mother of Kabutri. She has married well and is a dutiful member of her new home, a village near Ghazipur – an inland suburb of a medium sized city nearly two days journey away. Her husband is a respected worker of import in the local opium factory that has in the past generation appropriated the lands of this fiefdom. Where people had gardens that allowed subsistence as well as money, there is now only debt. So, despite Deeti’s being well off and dutiful she has her own pool of troubles. Not the least of it is that her husband is an addict to the stuff he produces. He is completely incapable of any of his duties except to go to work and come home. How she conceived Kabutri on the night of her wedding, which took her virginity, is something Deeti would rather not think about. In the ten years of married life she knows that there were more than the usual bride and groom present in her opium drenched wedding bed. The bruises on her wrists that first morning after her wedding night given her husband’s physical reality suggested a mystery that she uncovers much to her disgust and shame.

The vision of a tall-masted ship, at sail on the ocean, came to Deeti on an otherwise ordinary day, but she knew instantly that the apparition was a sign of destiny, for she had never seen such a vessel before, not even in a dream: how could she have, living as she did in Northern Bihar, four hundred miles from the coast. Her village was so far inland that the sea seemed as distant as the nether-world: it was the chasm of darkness where the holy Ganga disappeared into the Kala-Pani, ‘the Black Water.’

This first paragraph sets us up so quickly for the great adventure that is this book; for the many great adventures that it contains. Deeti’s journey is just as important to the reader as that of the raja, or the servant boy of the French botanist’s estate, or the half Negro sailor that brings the Ibis physically in front of Deeti’s eyes, or the big hulk of a man who is whipped and raped by the royal guards for falling out of favor, or the British shipping mogul that has just converted his slave ship into opium carrier only to discover that the Chinese aren’t buying it any more. The action moves quickly towards fortunes made and lost; loves betrayals and surprises, and the ineffable surfacing and resurfacing of the human spirit being slapped by wave after wave of circumstance.
Jodu was not among those who was hoping for an all-out fight, and he was unreservedly glad when another voice rang across the deck to put an end to the altercation: ‘Avast there…Bas!’

With the two malums going at it hank for hank, no one had noticed the Kaptain coming on deck: …He was much older…for the effort of climbing up the side-ladder had robbed him of his wind, sending streams of perspiration down his face…“Stash it there, you two! Enough with your mallemarking.”

What one is treated to through the 468 pages is a delicious attention not only to plot and historical accuracy but to voice and sound. The book gracefully incorporates the various versions of language of the colonized and the colonizers and brings the sound quality to a higher resolution to give each character his or her distinct cadence and tone. Sea of Poppies is a delight to the inner ear as well as the inner eye. It is a soulful book that can be digested on many levels. No mere rant, this novel moves the reader to a place beyond understanding. The ending is a cliffhanger that has this reader aching to begin the second book.

I highly recommend this novel to all but the most prudish.