Thanks-Giving

In our lives, we are all the keepers of stories.  These narratives tell us where we came from and who we are.  They also hint, for the young, at who we will become.

Yesterday, we gathered with family for Thanksgiving.  We told stories, some old and often repeated down through the years, and some new and tinged with sepia sadness at those no longer present, who live on only in our memories.  They are our recent losses, those of blessed memory.  Of course, we were also creating stories in present tense, right then and there:  my grand-niece’s first Thanksgiving.  Stories multiply and branch out from other stories to become trees reaching down to the past and up to the future.

As I watched people, I could read them as stories.  Or, at the very least, I could imagine them as characters in a larger fabric of our existence:  a crazy quilt of many colors, a host of fall-colored autumnal trees, strong and true.

Then, last night, I dreamed I told too many stories.  I had revealed too much, giving away secrets and the keys to the kingdom.  I awoke before the consequences of my storytelling were known.

But to reach maximum velocity, a story must put someone at risk:  the characters, the narrator, the storyteller.  Conflict and jeopardy rule the day in a good story.  They are the building blocks, the central core of any narrative, in truth or imagination.  Therefore, a storyteller must be brave.  We cannot tremble in darkness, nor should we shun the light.  Stand tall and simply tell it straight and true.  Relish the recitation; revel in its revealing detail.  The story is us.  And the keeper of stories is a trust sacred to this world.  For the storytellers and the stories, we give thanks.

Dear Memory

 

In this haunting and luminous work, Victoria Chang gives us a series of epistles and found collages to address the melancholic remembrances of things past.  Dear Memory:  Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief (Milkweed Editions, 2021) is an elegy and lament for the dead and gone:  her ancestors, her teachers, and friends.  She quotes poet Mary Jo Bang:  “What is an elegy but the attempt / To rebreathe life / Into what the gone once was…”  The book is filled with light and shadow, the pneuma of humanity and the human condition.  More poetry than prose, the book is a connotative tour de force of what it means to be alive and to live with the breath of memory and regret.

Chang is a poet, a teacher, and program chair in the Creative Writing Department at Antioch University.  She believes in writing that puts language at risk, allowing words to build into something beyond the self.  She asks:  “Can I be the hawk and the storm that tries to murder the hawk?”  The question is fraught with danger.  She confronts and sifts through memory and goes directly to how our lives often play out in the blood, the DNA of who we are, and what we do with our brief time in this human epoch.  She documents the sorrow and grace of her existence, both visually and in words.  “Perhaps something never happened if no one remembers it,” she writes.  “Perhaps there’s no truth.  Just memory and words.”

Coupled with her words are these haunting collages, many composed of documents and paper fragments of her past.  She writes dialogue with her mother directly in the spaces on each picture as if conducting an interview.  Other collages are family photographs, some with faces etched out as if demonstrating how they dwell in the shadows of her history.  Collectively, the collages tell the parallel story; they weave into and out of the word-epistles.  The letters and the collages are rare jewels.  They both enhance and magnify the threads that bind the story together from word to image.  Her poet’s sense of the spare and lyrical is ever-present in the art and the words.

Often, Chang’s language stuns us with its beauty and insight.  “Maybe our desire for the past grows after the decay of our present, she writes.  “When the present is more than we can hold, it turns into history.  And the future turns into water.  The water between your countries.”  It is this water that her family journeyed over to find their destiny.  Chang feels her place in America, but the book she creates also pays homage to those who made that journey and who, in turn, made her a unique part of a new nation, a new home.  This is an immigrant story, and Chang pays artful attention to this most American of ideas.  She wonders if memory is different for immigrants, “for people who leave so much behind.  Memory isn’t something that blooms but something that bleeds internally, something to be stopped.  Memory hides because it isn’t useful.”  It is clearly the calling of the poet-artist to bring the memory forward, to shine light, muted or harsh, to illuminate the darkness of experience, of grief, of sorrow, of regret.

There are gaps in her family history that she does not fully understand and wants to explore.  Memories, dreams, reflections, all kaleidoscope together in the form of questions she did not ask at the time, or did not find the answers to later.  “The things that didn’t matter at the time are often the most urgent questions after someone has died,” she writes.

She devotes much to a discussion of silence and grief.  What is not said speaks volumes.  It is silence that cannot be undone, and in that way, Chang tells us, it is like death.  The story ends when no one remembers the words, the people in the photographs, the significance of things.  But the dead are wise.  They know things.  “By the time we die,” Chang writes, “we know everything we need to know.”  Those of us left behind must wonder what the dead have taken with them.  It is up to the living to remember the strands of the story and continue it.

Chang circles back to writing at the end.  She recognizes that dragging a “not-yet-ready memory” into the light is often painful.  It is difficult and lacerating.  “More and more,” she writes, “I think writing is not a choice but an act of patience.  An act of listening to silence, into silence.”  It is in silence that, paradoxically, we hear voices.  In silence, we communicate with the dead, with our own souls, and where the world is still enough to hear our own breath rushing in and out of our lives.  It takes bravery and courage to listen to the silences and become aware.  Victoria Chang models such heroism for us, and the result is a shimmering and beautiful book.

Anvils, Mallets & Dynamite

Jaime Weinman, in his book Anvils, Mallets & Dynamite:  The Unauthorized Biography of Looney Tunes (Sutherland House, 2021) takes a deep dive into the legendary and wildly popular Warner Brothers cartoons created between 1930 and 1963 featuring Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Sylvester and Tweety, and the irrepressible Foghorn Leghorn among a host of others.  The cartoons were created to be the hors d’oeuvre to the main course of whatever Warner Brothers picture was scheduled at the local movie theater, but most of us of a certain age remember Bugs and company from Saturday mornings on one of the big three networks back in the day.

I have some specific memories of these beloved cartoons.  While my mother slept in, I would take some money from her purse and bike to the local Alta Dena bakery for a dozen chocolate and a dozen powdered donuts.  While my siblings and I munched away, we watched the Road Runner continually outwit Wile E. Coyote, leaving him smashed, bashed, and broken.  We watched while Bugs dressed as a woman to seduce the rather thick Elmer Fudd and send him off to hunt Daffy instead of Bugs, thoroughly convinced it was duck season instead of “wabbit” season.  No Beanie and Cecil for me, and Scooby Doo’s stoner act got old quickly.  Bugs Bunny, the trickster extraordinaire, never seemed tired.  Considering we were watching cartoons created in the 1940s and 1950s, our interest never waned even as we watched from the far future of the late 1960s and 70s.

Looney Tunes could be violent, and the popular characters rarely faced consequences for their actions, but we loved them.  Weinman theorizes that kids did not always connect with Looney Tunes characters “because we know that nothing has consequences for them, and they seem to know it too.”  I admired Bugs’ facility with words, his ability to con Porky or Elmer or Daffy, and always come out on top.  Rarely is he flustered or thrown off his game.  Weinman believes the cartoons adopted an “anything for a laugh” philosophy, which “isn’t what we expect of first-rate art.”  Is a cartoon first-rate art?  Arguably, yes!

Weinman goes on to write that “To celebrate the greatness of works of art, you have to acknowledge their limitations, the sides of the world that they don’t or can’t see.  Looney Tunes cartoons leave out a lot of human experience, and speak to only one kind of mood.  But what we ask of art is not that it tell us everything, but that it tell us something, that it have a style and a viewpoint that makes sense to us.  Every good Looney Tunes cartoon has that.”

The book offers a deep and well-researched history of the cartoons, along with how characters were perceived by the public, which ones became popular, and which ones were eventually phased out.  There were also several instances in their long history that characters were subtly, or even dramatically altered when different animation teams and producers took over.  Many of the most successful characters had speech impediments exploited for humor, something in our more careful age would not fly.  But these “vocal quirks” endeared them to audiences over generations.  It is also interesting to note which characters the studio thought would be the breakout stars.  For instance, they placed their faith in Daffy Duck as the definitive Looney Tunes cartoon character.  Of course, Bugs Bunny changed that.  The cartoons also attacked common themes in the culture, like hunting as a sign of manliness.  Porky Pig destroyed that fanciful notion, as did Elmer Fudd in his hunting cap, chasing both Bugs and Daffy with disastrous results.  However, Weinman points out that what makes Looney Tunes great is the ability of the writers and artists “to portray the maximum amount of comedy violence while still being charming, fun, family entertainment.”

Of course, the cartoons were produced during some of the most fraught times in the twentieth century, and they often reflected those crises specifically or tangentially.  When the cartoons were combined into packages and sold into syndication, several were removed for their overt racism.  They were singled out for their racist stereotypes and black-face gags, wholly inappropriate today and in the late 1960s and 1970s when they were a major block of Saturday morning programming for kids.

So what happened to Bugs and the gang?  Well, the syndication packages were divided and reassembled and then redivided again.  Many are available on YouTube.  Check your local listings, as the saying goes.  The characters did return to prominence in the Space Jam movies, the most successful project for Looney Tunes since the original Warner Brothers cartoon studio shut down.

If you are a fan of the cartoons, Jaime Weinman’s book is a must-have.  For the casual cartoon connoisseur, or someone who remembers the taste of chocolate and powdered donuts on a Saturday morning along with the telescoping concentric circles receding into the distance with “That’s all Folks!” that marked the end of each cartoon, this is an insightful and interesting book, as much about childhood and memory as American culture and a rabbit, who despite the odds, always came out on top, the trickster heading off into the sunset, on top of the world.

 

Burning Boy

What makes American writer Stephen Crane unique, according to Paul Auster, author of Burning Boy: The Life and Work of Stephen Crane (Henry Holt and Company, 2021), is the cinematic nature of his art.  It is “as if each sentence were a small work in itself, a separate photograph or drawing to be contemplated for a moment before the next one replaces it.”  This is “what one might call a cinematic style before the language of movies had been invented.”  This is not a style found just in Crane’s masterpiece, The Red Badge of Courage; his cinematic style can be found throughout his work.

Auster attributes this to the way Crane saw his world.  “Every sound triggered off a color in his mind,” he writes, and he found it strange that others did not have a similar reaction.  Sounds could be colors, but he also found color in emotions and “various shades of thought.  These responses were felt deep within and absorbed into Crane’s body, which was the site of a constant inrush of raw sensation, and not only can traces of these collisions between the outside and the inside be found all over his work, it seems perfectly plausible that a man with such a finely tuned nervous system should have been known for his darting, restless, inconstant personality.”

Crane left behind no journals or notebooks to let us know what he was thinking and feeling when he wrote and lived.  Everything comes down to his writing—his journalism, novels, and most especially, his short fiction, albeit it an original story or a retelling of his life experiences.  So Auster relies on the letters, journals, recollections and unpublished memoirs of others to fill in the considerable gaps in Crane’s life.  He also devotes a sizable portion of the real estate in this comprehensive and exhaustively researched book to lit-crit analysis and evaluation of the writer’s oeuvre.  His audience is “the invisible army of so-called general readers, that is, people who are not academics or writers themselves, the same people who still take pleasure in reading old standbys such as Melville and Whitman…”  His concern is that Crane is no longer read by anyone anymore.  Crane has a place in the American canon, and although he is best known for The Red Badge of Courage and Maggie:  A Girl of the Streets, Auster discusses the full range of Crane’s work, including his startlingly dark and beautiful poetry.

Crane also died young of tuberculosis and other ailments that robbed him of life at the age of 28.  “When an artist dies at such a young age,” Auster writes, “it is impossible not to wonder what kind of work that artist would have done later in life.”  Auster convinces the reader that Crane packed a full life into his years, but they were not always pleasant.  He battled constant financial jeopardy, and he wrote much of his work in a frantic effort to stave off the bill collectors and debts he accumulated.

Stephen Crane was born into a large family of fourteen brothers and sisters.  His hallmark traits were stubbornness and absolute truthfulness.  He did not take to college and found “Humanity was a much more interesting study.”  He read voraciously on his own and worked as a journalist to get more experience in the world and to practice his craft.  Auster sums up his style this way:  “Crane’s obsessions and stylistic trademarks:  an abundant use of color imagery to express both emotional states and sensory experiences, a gift for unexpected metaphors and jolting similes, an animistic view of the natural world (the trees, stones, and plants in the woods are alive), a dispassionate approach to character that posits the isolation of the individual in the face of an indifferent universe, and a close scrutiny of the metaphysics of fear, the same fear that runs through every paragraph of The Red Badge of Courage…”  He did his best work when “he was afraid, trembling in his bones and scarcely aware of what he was doing—or why he was doing it.”

When writing a biography, one can become an apologist for the subject’s bad behavior.  Auster does a little of this with Crane.  He claims that Crane did not “hate people who were not like himself.  He simply did not understand them, and rather than make the effort to penetrate their thinking or attempt to see the world through their eyes, he stood back and watched, either with indifference (immigrants) or fascination (Indians) but nearly always with a sense that the person he was looking at was alien to him, an inscrutable Other.”  One would expect Crane to observe and report, the twin responsibilities of a journalist.  He was also a product of his time.

Crane was a man with a strong creed to which he swore absolute fidelity:  “we are the most successful in art when we approach the nearest to nature and truth.”  Auster does an excellent job of getting to Crane’s “nature and truth,” even if the windows into the interior were limited to the work and his letters.  He recognizes Crane’s obsession with death and dying.  He offers up the central events of Crane’s life, especially when he nearly drowned off the coast of Florida, an experience that became the basis for his short story, “The Open Boat.”  We learn of his consorting with prostitutes and his battles to be with his companion, Cora.  He walks us through the final days as the writer slipped away, giving us his most poignant last words:  “I leave here gentle, seeking to do good, firm, resolute, impregnable.”

Paul Auster demonstrates the value and necessity of Stephen Crane’s work.  His writer’s philosophy to “strip it to the bone…” and “say as much as you can by saying as little as you can,” resonates today.  However, Auster also reflects on Crane’s larger importance to our culture as he writes the last sentences of this book in the early days of 2020:  “[Crane’s] books are being forgotten again.  It is a dark time for America, a dark time everywhere, and with so much happening to erode our certainties about who we are and where we are going next, perhaps the moment has come to dig the burning boy out of his grave and start remembering him again.  The prose still crackles, the eye still cuts, the work still stings.  Does any of this matter to us anymore?  If it does, and one can only hope it does, attention must be paid.”