to read any or all pages of this issue.

The Redwood Coast
Review
Volume 12, Number 3
Summer 2010
A Publication of Friends of Coast Community Library in Cooperation with the Independent Coast Observer
PLACE & People
was lengthy and risky, he followed his
mission steadfastly and perhaps obsessive­
ly, at the cost of his finances, his health
and his marriage. After a bitter divorce, he
reconciled with his four children, whom
he had hardly seen. (He seems to have
stopped home just long enough to con­
ceive them.) He lived to an old age and
died at the home of one of his daughters.
Fixing the
Trimmer
T
Carolyn Cooke
See trimmer page 4
Fish Show by Edward S. Curtis
I
went to Schreiner’s Small Engine
Repair because my weed whacker dis­
appeared last summer in the tall grass.
I’d managed finally to hunt the monster
down, but couldn’t get it to start—because
it was dead. “The carburetor’s corroded,
and the engine’s full of water,” said Merle
Schreiner, who owns the shop and who,
two years ago, sold me the machine,
which he calls a “trimmer.”
My first trimmer—a baby Echo—also
came from Merle. He taught me how to
use the machine: how to cold start it with
the choke, how to add the bottle of twostroke engine oil to the gallon of gas, how
to wind the polymer trimmer line through
the head, how to bump the head with the
engine running to feed out more line.
One thing I’ve always liked about
Merle is the way he just poured out last
year’s gas-oil mix into a mayonnaise jar.
Most people don’t want to touch your old
gas. I’ve seen men covered in motor oil
put both hands up to fend off a gas can
with a little of last year’s mix swirling
around the bottom. “That’s toxic waste,”
they say. “You have to dispose of it in
accordance with the laws of the State of
California.” But Merle is not a prima
donna. His skin is deeply and permanently
tanned, like a hide. He wears yellow-tint­
ed glasses like a hunter might, in the fog
at dawn. If he isn’t in the shop you ring a
buzzer on the door, or go find him at the
work sink outside with his wetsuit peeled
down around his waist, cleaning a fish or
pounding out his abalone catch.
Another nice thing about Merle:
He never assumed, just because I knew
nothing about gas-powered engines, that
I couldn’t learn. He didn’t make me feel
more stupid than I already felt about los­
ing track of the weed whacker in the tall
grass. He didn’t judge—and besides, he
had the new models polished and ready
near a wall of photographs of Merle and
his wife, Pat, posing with shotguns and
large game animals. But he didn’t try
hard to sell me one.
I said, “Maybe I should just pay some­
one to do the weedwhacking this year. ”
“They’ll charge you forty dollars an
hour,” he said. “The trimmer’s two-nine­
teen.”
I had, prophetically or prophylacti­
cally, brought along the original baby
Echo just in case. Merle looked it over,
poured in some fresh gas mix, blew dust
off the choke with a hiss of pressurized air
from a hose. He dabbed a bit of oil on the
carburetor. He fired up the machine and it
roared. I tried it myself to be sure.
“It feels a little small after the big
one,” I said.
“Yup,” he said.
I bought a bottle of two-stroke oil and
asked Merle what I owed him. “Give me
five bucks,” he said.
I carried the baby Echo out to my car.
(The big trimmer wasn’t worth fixing, but
I could leave it if I wanted.) My dog’s
head poked out the open window. Merle
asked about the dog, what kind, how
old. He used to have a shepherd he took
hunting until its back went out, retriev­
ing ducks. He scratched my dog’s ear.
I asked if he’d done any fishing lately.
“My wife and I are taking just one trip
this year,” he said. “To Michigan. We’re
Caught Shadows
Edward S. Curtis in shades of gray
Roberta Werdinger
O
nce, in India, I visited a
Hindu temple swarming with
pilgrims, elephants, priests,
housewives, children,
smartly dressed businessmen
and a Western tourist or two—the usual
improbable blend, which was quietly and
joyfully accepted by the those around
me. Then I noticed a European woman
standing a few feet away from me, bearing
a camera in front of her midriff. She was
sweeping her arm back and forth in front
of her, vigorously gesturing. I realized two
things at once: that she wanted me to step
out of the way so she could take an “au­
thentic” picture with just native Hindus
in it, and that I hadn’t seen that kind of
peremptory body language since my plane
had landed in New Delhi.
What do we see when we encounter a
photo? Does seeing a photo make some­
thing true? What does the photographer
choose to include and what to exclude?
What is it we are trying to catch? The life
and career of Edward S. Curtis (18681952), pioneer photo­grapher and Old
West adventurer, has been the subject of
a national bestseller and a local museum
exhibit. Turning over the contradictions,
sacrifices, struggles and successes of this
one life helps us to consider our own
need to produce and consume images, the
trouble we have owning and naming what
we see, and our collective urge to do so
anyway.
The Shadow Catcher, Marianne
Wiggins’s acclaimed 2007 novel, is at
once a fiction­alization of Edward Curtis’s
life, told from the point of view of his
long-suffering wife, Clara, a giddy romp
through the author’s daily trials, and
a detective story-cum-psychological
investigation into her own missing father.
A self-taught photographer from a poor
family, Edward Curtis built up a success­
ful photography studio in Seattle at the
turn of the century. He enlisted the help
of financier JP Morgan to outfit a series
of expe­ditions to native American lands
throughout the West, including Alaska.
Between 1899 and 1929 he took 40,000
photos, culminating in the publishing of
his multivolume magnum opus, The North
American Indian. Popular enough to be
requested to photo­graph the wedding of
Teddy Roosevelt’s daughter, he fell into
obscurity even in his own lifetime. At a
time when travel in the West’s wild terrain
What do we see
when we encounter
a photo? Does seeing a photo make
some­thing true?
What does the photographer choose
to include and what
to exclude? What is
it we are trying to
catch?
hese are the facts, which Wiggins
plays fast and loose with. She gets to:
she’s writing a novel, manipulating and
arranging events to suit her fancy much
as photog­raphers do before they snap
the shutter. Following in the footsteps of
influential post­modernist W. G. Sebald,
Wiggins inserts photos randomly through­
out the text, thus creat­ing a new/old genre:
the postmodern picture book. The photos
loom in sometimes disturbing ways, creat­
ing new associations and juxtapositions
simply through their unmoored status. We
are left to wonder, what do these pictures
represent? Are Curtis’s carefully staged
tableaux of native life any less theatrical
than a supposedly candid snap­shot of the
author’s parents in the 1940s? Did Curtis
have a right to rearrange the details of
the natives’ life so? Was he exploiting
them or lending them dignity? Wiggins
leaves this matter open, but the novel,
told from Clara’s point of view, is bent to
show the dam­age inflicted by fathers and
husbands who leave their family to pursue
their dreams. This motif is as old as the
dream of the West, a vast and supposedly
innocent frontier upon which a man could
make his mark.
Lurking behind the book’s title, too,
is the entire history of the recorded im­
age and the human reaction to it, which
usually ranges from extreme aversion to
infatuated adherence. In her influential
and brilliant book On Photography, Susan
Sontag said that photos are seen as “some­
thing directly stenciled off the real . . .
the registering of an ema­nation.” To have
proof that something happened is to view
a photograph. Wiggins plays with us and
with that, for we cannot tell what is real
or not in her story. It starts out with a de­
scription of a frantic journey through Los
Angeles traffic to meet with a Hollywood
producer and her agent. The purpose? To
make a book she has written called “The
Shadow Catcher” into a movie. We are al­
ready in La-La land here, for we have just
started reading a book called just that. Is
“The Shadow Catcher” that is being made
into a movie identical to the one we are
reading? When we finish reading it, will it
then be that book?
In The Shadow Catcher Edward Curtis
is portrayed as singleminded to the point
of obsession, so focused on his photog­
raphy work and, later, his mission to
photograph the Indians, that he cares little
about anything else. He brutally deflow­
ers Clara and, soon after, declares to her,
“We shall have to marry.” He is naively
surprised when she has other ideas—the
plucky Clara had been about to leave
for Seattle to seek her fortune. Yet he is
also irresistible—handsome, mysterious,
and yet available. They share an interest
in portraiture: Clara’s father had been a
portraitist before the newly arrived art of
photog­raphy rendered his job irrelevant.
He was roughly in the same position as a
typewriter salesman would have been in
1983.
Wiggins meditates on the similarity
between Curtis’s abandonment of his
family and her father’s own, as her mind
roams over the wide, beckoning spaces of
the American West. It’s as if she knows
that Western women have a competition
that they are bound to lose—the endless
sweeps of nature itself that will draw off
their men.
See curtis page 10
Page The Redwood Coast Review
Summer 2010
editor’s note
Exaltation at Zellerbach: Sonny Rollins Rising
Stephen Kessler
Z
ellerbach Hall at UC Berkeley is
one of the better concert venues
I know. Large enough (2200
seats) to accommodate world-re­
nowned acts and their audiences,
its elegant yet unsensational interior archi­
tecture gives a sense of spaciousness and
intimacy at the same time, with good acous­
tics, so that even from the cheap seats you
can see the stage clearly and hear the music
with minimal distortion. With its airy,
glass-walled lobby and comfortable, unpre­
tentious café, its friendly staff and efficient
ushers, Zellerbach seems to me an example
of civilization on its best behavior, a place
where secular culture takes on the low-key
yet reverent atmosphere some people seek
in churches, mosques and synagogues.
At a time when the University of Califor­
nia, due to its budget crisis, is slashing away
at nearly every merely humanistic program
under its brand, it’s a relief to know that,
at least for now, Cal Performances, with
its great range of artists in music, dance,
theater and world culture, is able to help the
staggering university carry on as a link to
the nonacademic world, Zellerbach a place
where anyone still solvent enough to spring
for a ticket can enjoy the benefits of any big
city’s best gathering place for entertainment.
The auditorium is a sanctuary where, with
luck, you may experience, on rare occa­
sions, sensory and spiritual bliss.
That’s what I look for in the arts, music
especially, but at movies or art shows or
poetry readings too—I want to be moved,
inspired, amazed; I want to have some­
thing revealed to me that I never knew or
expected. It doesn’t happen often, but when
it does you are reminded what art is for,
what it can do, how it can touch and aston­
ish. And it returns you to the outside world,
if not transformed (though sometimes that
as well), at least refreshed and revived and
perhaps, even, better equipped to cope with
the absurdities and indignities and stupidi­
ties of workaday existence, reassured that
life’s deepest delights can compensate for a
lot of less-edifying nonsense.
I first heard Sonny Rollins live around
1981, when he was touring with McCoy
The Redwood Coast
Review
Stephen Kessler
Editor
Barbara L. Baer
Daniel Barth
Daniela Hurezanu
Jonah Raskin
Contributing Editors
Linda Bennett
Production Director
T he R edwood C oast R eview is published
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by Friends of Coast Community Library in
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© 2010 The Redwood Coast Review. All rights
revert to authors and artists on publication.
We welcome your submissions. Please
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Thank you for your support!
Tyner and Ron Carter (with Al Foster on
drums) as the Milestone Jazzstars and they
played the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium
and absolutely cooked, transcending the
limitations of the venue with the sheer
power and virtuosity of their playing.
Tyner, a monstrous pianist in his combina­
tion of balletic agility and physical force on
the keyboard, and Carter, one of the world’s
most eloquently melodic bass players, were
suitably qualified to team up with Rollins,
storied “Saxophone Colossus,” widely con­
sidered the greatest improviser alive. It was
a wondrous and memorable evening.
Next time I had the chance to hear Rol­
lins was about 10 years later in New York
City when he gave a free afternoon concert
at South Street Seaport. Even from the back
of the sunbaked multitudes that day I could
hear the joy and lyricism in his horn, could
feel his rhythms infecting me with happy
syncopation, even though I could barely
see him onstage or make out what melody
he was playing due to the crappy outdoor
acoustics.
So when I heard he was coming to
Berkeley I bought tickets for his May 13
show in hopes that the master, pretty much
the last of his generation’s jazz geniuses still
alive and touring, had some juice left; even
without the physical power of his younger
lungs, I figured he must still have the skill
and wisdom to coax some beautiful things
out of his instrument. Soon to be 80, he
would surely bring the wealth of his vast ex­
perience—with Thelonious Monk and Miles
Davis, Clifford Brown and Max Roach,
brushes with John Coltrane and Coleman
Hawkins, echoes of Charlie Parker ringing
through his home turf of Harlem as far back
as the 1940s—and carry those sounds and
styles into fresh forms of expression.
I had no idea.
F
rom the moment he took the stage with
his quintet—a rhythm section consisting
of Russell Malone on guitar, Bob Cranshaw
on electric bass, Kobie Watkins on drums
and Victor Y. See-Yuen on percussion—
Sonny Rollins’s spirit filled the hall. His
wild white natural hair, an Albert Einstein
(or Bride of Frankenstein) electrified Afro,
his big Mosaic beard, loose tunic of a
blazing Chinese red on his hulking frame,
backed by his bandmates, their instruments
gleaming against a black background, com­
bined to give him the aura of a holy man
whose very presence commanded one’s full
attention and respect. When he put the horn
to his lips and started blowing, the house
was vaulted into a zone of pure awe.
A prodigy since his teen years in New
York, schooled on everything from hard bop
to folk songs, Western swing to calypso,
schmaltzy pop tunes to unhinged free jazz,
Rollins has an ear for catchy refrains, the
kinds of songs whose main melodies you
can whistle, and a rhythmic intensity that
swings until it almost rocks—when the band
gets into a groove your feet start moving,
you can’t keep still—without being “dance
music,” it animates you physically even in
your seat.
I didn’t recognize the opening number,
but from the first notes it epitomized this
thoroughly infectious quality of his music,
Sonny Rollins
the force of the sound was irrestistible, if
you weren’t hooked you weren’t paying
attention—though how anyone could have
escaped the fierce energy and drive and
sweep of the sonic onslaught is beyond my
comprehension.
From this smashing opener, which must
have lasted 20 minutes though it blazed
by in a flash, Rollins changed the pace by
segueing into a standard ballad, the muchrecorded (most memorably by Coltrane
and Johnny Hartman) “My One and Only
Love,” the kind of song that in ordinary
hands might come off as a series of clichés,
a bit of low-budget romantic sentiment, but
here was rendered sublime by the soloists’
inventive variations on the familiar score,
Rollins above all evoking a gorgeous yet
sharp-edged lyricism with his crisp tone and
melodic fluency, and Malone and Cranshaw
rising on their respective instruments to
meet his measure. Their version was a free
translation that brought the composition to
life with greater vividness than the original.
Time was rendered irrelevant, but again the
song soared for at least a quarter hour.
Their third selection was Rollins’s
original calypso “Global Warming,” which
he explained in his raspy voice, by way of
introduction, implies individual responsibil­
ity, in other words, “Pick up after yourself
so somebody else won’t have to. That’s
enough preaching,” he concluded, and then
things got hot. Calypso is the genre where
Rollins really gets the syncopation going,
and the band locked into a mesmerizing
groove whose momentum suffused the room
with high excitement, Malone sustaining
a hypnotic drone on guitar, and drummer
Watkins exuberantly and precisely driving
the ensemble into an extended controlled
frenzy of celebration.
During one of his recurrent retreats from
public life, back in the 1960s, Rollins used
to go out on the Williamsburg Bridge late at
night and practice without inhibitions where
he wouldn’t disturb anyone. Later he went
to Asia and stayed in a monastery
for a while. These timeouts from
performing are signs of his reflective
character and also seem somehow to
have deepened his creative res­
ervoirs, enlarged his soul, so that
when he gives himself wholly to a
performance he’s there not just to
please the audience but to transfuse
them and transcend himself with
an overflow of praise, “a state of
exaltation at existence,” as he told
an interviewer.
I’ve heard a lot of good music in
my life, but I’ve never been in the
presence of a more extraordinary
performer.
There were just two more songs
in the 100-minute show, which
closed with another near-rocker,
Rollins—moving haltingly around
the stage, huge but slightly stooped,
alternately hobbling and lurching as
if he might fall over at any sec­
ond—just blowing the bejesus out of
his reed, the bell of his tenor belting
out an unstoppable sound, the band
so perfectly in sync as to resemble
a single instrument—and at the end
the audience on its feet applauding at length
for an encore.
T
he five gentlemen came back out to take
a bow, but that was it, no encores, and
no one could fairly complain they hadn’t
gotten their money’s worth. As the house
lights came up and we started to shuffle out,
a murmur moved through the crowd, a low
buzz of amazement and bemusement at the
existence of such a musician, still able to
put out such a powerful charge at an age
when most mortals, those who are still alive,
have geared down and retired to the golf
course or to the recliners in front of their
television sets.
“I am convinced that all art has the
desire to leave the ordinary,” Rollins said
in the same interview. “But jazz, the world
of improvisation, is perhaps the highest,
because we do not have the opportunity to
make changes.”
This is why recorded music, beautiful
and moving as it may be, can never have the
one-time-only unfolding-before-your-eyes
hear-it-now-then-it’s-lost-in-the-air imme­
diacy and wonder of a live performance, and
why a performance like this one—gone now
forever—can keep on resonating indefinite­
ly, paradoxically present in the remembering
cells even long after it’s over.
The creators of such spontaneous mas­
tery can’t make changes, and yet the lucky
witness may be changed.
Stephen Kessler’s most recent book, as
editor and principal translator, is The
Sonnets by Jorge Luis Borges (Penguin).
His version of Desolation of the Chimera
by Luis Cernuda (White Pine Press) is the
winner of the 2010 Harold Morton Landon
Translation Award from the Academy of
American Poets.
readers’ letters
RCR editors critically question mass enthusiasm
I have read the spring issue, and wanted to
let you know I liked your piece on Salinger
a lot. I think of him as a terrific short story
writer. At the same time, I never understood
the worship of The Catcher in the
Rye. In my case, the fact that I am female
made the novel even more alienating. And
in my opinion, you’re right—his biggest
legacy is his reclusiveness. His death is a
big deal because now we can investigate
those mysterious 50 years. In our cur­
rent tell-all society, there’s nothing more
tantalizing than someone who kept his life
private.
I also really liked Daniela Hurezanu’s
piece on Nobel Prize winners. Her analysis
of which writers receive the prize was fas­
cinating and an aspect of the Nobel I hadn’t
thought much about before. Her comparison
of Pamuk’s My Name Is Red to Seabiscuit was hilarious. Because I too disliked
Seabiscuit, I am now unlikely to bother with
reading My Name Is Red; I trust Hurezanu’s
sensibility.
Between the two of you, you took down
some sacrosanct novels, which was
refreshing and let me know I’m not the
only one who doesn’t understand the mass
enthusiasm for certain books. My particular
bewilderment has to do with the bestseller
Eat, Pray, Love. Every single person I
have talked to about it—literally every
one—loved the book. Some of them felt it
was life-changing. (Granted, most of those
readers were women, which is not incon­
sequential.) I thought it was poorly written
and facile. Is there anyone else out there
who thought so too?
Martha Davis
San Diego
Summer 2010
The Redwood Coast Review
Page Writers & writing
Not Fade Away
At 90, Richard O. Moore is still going strong
Jonah Raskin
Writing the Silences
by Richard O. Moore
edited by Brenda Hillman and Paul Ebenkamp
California (2010), 96 pages
P
oets lurk everywhere in the San Francisco Bay
Area, and they don’t just lurk. They loom large,
rave, rant and rhapsodize. Often they’re labeled
as Beats, Buddhists, poets of the Pacific or poets
of the peaks, though of course not all Bay Area
poets are easily pigeonholed. Some go against nearly every
American and California grain and soar in unpredictable
ways. Richard O. Moore found his own way in a region rich
with poets, nesting in his own landscape, and finding his
own voice often by listening to the voices of other poets.
For decades, he was largely unknown as a poet, though he
had public faces that he showed to the world. After years of
invisibility, he’s finally made a splash in bookstores and at
poetry readings and he’s come to be recognized as one of the
grand old men of Bay Area poetry.
Moore makes his home at The Redwoods, a retirement
community in Mill Valley, and at the age of 90 he’s one
of the oldest residents. “Is this no country for old men?”
he’s asked, and on the spur of the moment he recites from
memory William Butler Yeats’s 1928 poem “Sailing to
Byzantium” that begins, “That is no country for old men, the
young / In one another’s arms, birds in the trees . . .” Poetry
is in Moore’s head and in his blood; it’s an irrepressible part
of him. At his birthday party in February, he celebrated at
Muir Beach by reading one of his own poems, “Walking Into
Ninety.” Today, he says, “I’m still walking and without a
walker.” Indeed, he seems nearly as physically fit now, and
certainly as mentally sharp, as he was as a feisty, provoca­
tive young man who told his draft board, “I’m a poet” when
asked what he did for a living. When no one believed him,
he said, “Dancer.”
Moore published his first poem in 1946. In 1949, he won
the Emily Chamberlain Cook Prize for poetry when he was
a college student in Berkeley. Over the past 60 years, he’s
written hundreds of poems, but not until this year has he had
the satisfaction of seeing a small part of his total work—in­
cluding half-a-dozen or so of his earliest poems—published
in a book. Writing the Silences, edited by Brenda Hillman
and Paul Ebenkamp, is the title. The word “silences” seems
in part to acknowledge the long years when his voice as a
poet wasn’t heard beyond his own room, or outside a small
circle of friends. Moore didn’t lobby for the publication of
the book. It was Hillman who pushed and pulled, and it’s
thanks to her efforts that Writing the Silences is in print
today. She has also written a tender introduction in which
she says that Moore’s poetry reminds her of Robert Duncan
and W. B. Yeats, and that it combines “a seriousness and
intensity that is rare now in poetry.” Moore is a tad happier
as a poet than before—but just a tad.
“When I write a poem I usually feel that the work is
done,” he tells me at his cozy apartment. “I’ve never really
cared about putting my poems into print, though I have made
assemblages of my work mostly for my own benefit.”
For much of his life, Moore has been hard to pigeonhole.
A pacifist, a photographer, a student of philosophy and an
aficionado of the international avant garde, he’s been in
and around radio and TV for more than half a century. In
1949, he founded—along with the legendary broadcaster
Lewis Hill—KPFA, the listener-sponsored radio station in
Berkeley. He presented KPFA’s first program on the air,
which was about Anglo-American folk ballads. Broadcasting
soon became a way of life for Moore. From KPFA he went
to KQED, where he worked for 20 years. From there he
moved to public TV in Minnesota where he made two series
of influential documentaries: one on American poets such
as Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery, another that focused
mostly on American prose writers.
On the wall, behind his computer, Moore has taped blackand-white photographs of five of the literary luminaries who
appear in the series, “The Writer in America”: Janet Flanner,
who wrote under the pen name Genet for The New Yorker;
Kenneth Millar, who used the alias Ross Macdonald for his
detective stories; Eudora Welty, the Mississippi-born author,
whom Moore describes as “a dear, dear friend”; Robert
Duncan, the San Francisco poet and playwright; and Tom
Parkinson, a literary critic, a friend, and a professor at the
University of California at Berkeley, who helped to bring
the work of the Beats into academia. The five photos say a
lot about his eclectic literary interests, and his passion for
writers from different regions that might come from his own
early experiences as a kind of itinerant child.
B
orn in 1920 in Alliance, Ohio, a small industrial town,
Moore bounced around the country with his parents.
His father was a soldier in World War I, but never talked
about the war; his silences seem to have been as disturbing
as speech might have been. Moore’s mother was ambitious,
but failed at all the businesses she tried during the Great
Depression of the 1930s. When he was 15, she died, and that
made all the difference in the world to him. “I can remember
that at that moment I declared my independence from the
established state of the world,” he says.
At 19, Moore enrolled at UC Berkeley and cut off all the
remaining ties with his entire family; he has never looked
back. By the age of 21, he was expelled from the college—
for both academic and political reasons. He eventually re­
turned and received a BA. Moore might have written a great
deal about his own education in and out of academia. From
Kenneth Rexroth—the Chicago-born poet, and critic—he
learned about the writings and the ideas of Peter Kropotkin,
the Russian anarchist, and about the 17th-century German
Christian mystic Jacob Bohme. But he shied away from
direct self-disclosure, as well as from the naked exploration
of the self that American poets such as Robert Lowell and
Allen Ginsberg adopted after World War II. As a young man,
literary glory rarely if ever enticed him; confessional writing
did not stir his creative juices either. Moreover, he was irked
Richard Moore, San Francisco, 2010
Moore’s poetry is often stream
of consciousness; it’s the sound,
and the shape of words, and even
what Moore calls the “taste of
words,” that carry many of his
poems forward.
by writers who turned to the first person pronoun “I” and
poured out their angst. The most powerful writers of the 20th
century, in his view— T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, James Joyce,
Williams Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens—mostly
eschewed the “I”.
Moore began to follow in their experimental, avant-garde
footsteps as an undergraduate at Berkeley. He’s been in
the modernist tradition ever since, and he’s kept modern­
ism alive and well, which means that he’s written complex,
innovative poems that resist easy interpretation and that
sometimes seem like fragments in the way that Eliot’s The
Waste Land (1922) can be viewed as an arrangement of frag­
ments. “These fragments I have shored against my ruins,”
Eliot wrote in an odd moment of first person confession in
The Waste Land.
Moore never set out to be difficult. “Anyone who intends
to be obscure probably isn’t worth reading,” he tells me.
“But I share Eliot’s idea that a poem deserves all the atten­
tion that a lawyer would give to a serious legal document.”
Unlike most of the Modernists, however, he has never cast
himself on the right politically: not as a royalist like Eliot;
nor a pseudo-fascist like Pound; nor a conservative Ameri­
can businessman like Stevens, though he was the CEO at
several nonprofit organizations including KQED. Moore
doesn’t care for labels; notions of the “Left” and “Right”
aren’t helpful, he says after years of observing political
battles and taking part in them. Still, for all his resistance to
political labels, he’s been of the left if not in it for decades.
During World War II, he was 4-F, and, though not a con­
scientious objector, he counseled young men on how they
might find a way out of military service if they were morally
and ethically opposed to war—as he was. After all these
years, he‘s still a pacifist; in Mill Valley every Friday, rain
or shine, he protests against the War in Iraq with a group
of senior citizens who also live at The Redwoods. They’ve
protested ever since the war began, and they’re the stars of a
26-minute, award-winning documentary, Seniors for Peace
by Brisbane filmmaker David L. Brown.
At KQED and KTCA in Minnesota, Moore helped to
make the American documentary into a respected genre.
With a small, dedicated crew, he produced and directed films
about a wide range of subjects: the civil rights movement in
Louisiana; Communism in Cuba and Poland; Duke Ellington
and jazz, James Baldwin in San Francisco; Fantasy Records
and popular music; and even one film on the computer and
the human mind, back in the 1960s. Irving Saraf, a Polishborn UCLA graduate and veteran San Francisco cameraman
who worked with him for years, remembers his talents.
“Moore had great leadership abilities,” Saraf tells me. “He
came from the world of poetry and from the radical political
movement. When he discovered films and images he was
instantly fascinated. Working closely, and cooperatively with
other people, he enriched his own sensibilities.”
For a couple of hours, Moore and I talked at The Red­
woods. Finally it was time for lunch. In the rain, on the way
to Fabrizio, perhaps
his favorite Italian
restaurant in Marin, he
remembered the poets
who gathered around
Rexroth in San Fran­
cisco. “I had fun with
Allen Ginsberg, Gary
Snyder, Phil Whalen,
and all the boys,” he
says. “But I was also
interested in East Coast
poetry. I was bicoastal
and got to know Anne
Sexton, Frank O’Hara
and John Ashbery,
though of all the poets
I met Ashbery was the
last accessible.” Then,
he holds forth on the
differences between
the East and the West.
“New York is more
frantic then Califor­
nia,” he explains.
“There’s New York
brilliance and New
York brittleness.”
Gazing at the redwood
trees, their boughs
heavy with rainwater,
he adds, “You can’t escape the landscape in California. It
modifies all human interactions. Here, too, life isn’t a series
of contests as it so often can be in New York.”
K
nowing the outlines of Moore’s life can make his poetry
less intimidating than it otherwise might be, though
it still demands close readings. To say that his poems are
difficult probably isn’t helpful. Most of modernist poetry is
difficult and Moore’s poems are difficult—or shall we say
challenging—in their own way. Perhaps, too, it might be
useful to say that he shares common ground with the James
Joyce of Finnegans Wake. Moore’s poetry is often stream of
consciousness; it’s the sound, and the shape of words, and
even what Moore calls the “taste of words,” that carry many
of his poems forward. Much of his art lies in both compres­
sion and omission; in the spaces that punctuate his poems he
offers the reader the opportunity to fill in phrases, ideas and
images. “Poetry is a transaction between the poet and the
reader,” he tells me. “The reader has to bring something to a
poem, and different readers bring different things. To argue
that a poem has just one single meaning is absurd.”
Given Moore’s discomfort with confessional poetry one
might not expect to find poems written in the first person.
Indeed, it’s surprising to see an “I” on the page, and while
that “I” sometimes speaks from Moore’s autobiographi­
cal experience, the “I” also seems to be a persona he has
adopted for the purpose of exploring a theme, experimenting
with an idea, and trying out a certain arrangement of words
on the page.
The poems are at once sensual and intellectual, erotic
and philosophic, and they appeal to all the senses. They
encourage a reader to think about ideas, and about the nature
of perception itself, as in the first poem in the volume,
“Shadow and Light,” which is an invitation to look, see
and notice. If the poems themselves are not always clear or
obvious, the titles often are explicit, as in “Driving to Fort
Bragg,” which conjures up the landscape of Northern Cali­
fornia in lines such as “place this with the pacific fence post
/ posturing of hawks.”
In this poem and others, Moore uses almost all the special
keys on the keyboard; he puts words in italics, and includes
[brackets], (parentheses), and dashes —. To be appreciated,
his poems have to be seen on the printed page; looking at
them adds an important dimension. There are often extra
spaces between words, and the lines are arranged so that the
reader can follow them across the page or down the page, as
in the delightfully playful title poem, “Writing the Silences,”
that’s collage-like and that begins:
See moore page 8
Page The Redwood Coast Review
Summer 2010
trimmer from page 1
Carolyn Cooke
in the center of
the room stood
an elk (head and
chest) with the
largest rack I’d
ever seen. On
a shelf along
another wall
stood a javelina,
a small, thin
animal like a
baby boar. Merle
had read in a
book that this
animal is a “pec­
cary”—not a pig,
but piglike, with
porklike flesh.
“Go figure that
out,” he said.
He’d arranged
the peccary
among sev­
eral kinds of wild
boar, and another
antelope-like ani­
mal from Mexico
whose flesh was
reputedly so
tough that no one
could eat it. But
Merle killed this
one and brought
it home on a bed
of dry ice. He
and Pat pounded the meat and ground it
up, then ground it up again. Still inedible.
They ground the meat a third time, added a
little pork and made sausages and meatballs.
Delicious.
fishing for trophy muskie on Lake Sinclair.
Usually we go hunting.”
“I saw the pictures on the walls of your
shop. Are those African animals?”
“Some are from Africa,” he said. “Some
are from New Zealand, Australia, Scotland,
Mexico, Alaska. We added a room to the
house a few years ago—we call it the mu­
seum. Are you interested in big game?”
We walked down the path to the back
door of Merle’s house; the ground glittered
with abalone and mussel shells. We walked
through the living room, where two huge
sailfish in brilliant blues and yellows hung
over two couches arranged in front of the
woodstove.
We walked from one room into another
world. Seventy heads lined the walls. Mule
deer and whitetail deer, horned sheep from
Hawaii, Scotland and New Zealand. (New
Zealand imported all its mammals from
Asia, Britain and the Himalayas, Merle
said.) One wall held African heads—a
wildebeest, a warthog, and various kinds of
antelope with elegant horns in various con­
figurations. Some grew like steeples; others
like corkscrews. Merle pointed out impalas,
an eland, a blesbok with four knobby horns
splayed across the head like a hand of fin­
gers, a waterbuck, a steenbok, a red lechwe,
an oryx, a red hartebeest, a bushbuck. He
had a zebra—the rare, endangered kind—ar­
ranged on a pedestal in what is I think called
a three-quarter pose, head and shoulders,
as well as a hide on the wall from the other,
more common kind of zebra with mellower,
muddier stripes.
An immense cape buffalo, presented as
head and shoulders, seemed so freshly and
radiantly preserved that I could distinguish
each pore on the black nose, which looked
wet. Cape buffalo are the most dangerous
of the big game animals taken by hunters
on foot. Merle remembered killing him:
“He came down to drink. I took one shot,
under the haunch here—right through the
heart.” One bullet through the heart was
also the way he killed his American bison
(2,000 pounds), whose woolly head and
chest exploded through the drywall just
above a whole preserved Florida alligator
on the floor.
T
he animals, their horns and hides fresh
and intact above expressively posed ar­
matures, looked nothing like taxidermy I’d
seen before—the hoary old black bear I used
to pat as a child visiting the Boston Museum
of Science, which remained in place 35
years later when my own kids reached out
their sticky paws in terror and awe.
The Schreiners’ collection had grown
beyond the original organizing principles.
A black bear rug and another pelt on the
wall looked as glossy as if they’d just been
brushed with boar bristles. A kangaroo pelt
hung from an Australian boomerang next
to a black moose from Alaska. On a table
Cape buffalo are the
most dangerous of
the big game animals
taken by hunters on
foot. Merle remembered killing him: “He
came down to drink. I
took one shot, under
the haunch here—right
through the heart.”
A
t home I surveyed the terrain, a mix
of stubborn, mostly volunteer grasses
five feet high growing over half an acre and
sloping steeply down the mountainside into
tangles of huckleberry and salal. Weed­
whacking such overgrowth with my baby
Echo was like cleaning the Augean stables
with a pooper scooper. The enormity of the
task roused something inside me. The job
was impossible; I wanted to do it myself.
Better still if the yard were twice as large,
the grass twice as tall, if I possessed nothing
but a scythe. It sounds dramatic: I wanted
to live. I put on my goggles, and waded
into the wild.
Carolyn Cooke’s first novel, Daughters of
the Revolution, will be published next year
by Knopf.
poetry
A Funny Thing Happened at the Kay & Billy Show
K
ay Ryan and Billy Collins are
friends! They said so on stage at
the Wells Fargo Center for the
Arts on the next-to-last day of April. Both
sounded sincere and in their repartee they
did genuinely appear to be friendly. I sup­
pose there is value in knowing that real live
poets—who are often intensely competitive
with one another—can be supportive and
praiseworthy of one another’s work.
I went to the Wells Fargo Center because
I was invited; I didn’t pay for the $35 ticket
and I suppose I ought not complain. But the
event left me feeling cheated, and I can’t
fairly blame just the two poets.
Ryan, of course, is the current and 16th
US Poet Laureate. Collins held the posi­
tion for two years, 2001-2003. The evening
started on a somber note with the usual
advisory: a representative from Copper­
field’s told the crowd that no cameras were
allowed, and no audio or video recording.
The tickets said the same thing. We were in
the realm of copyright and licensing—and
not poetic license.
In the first minute, the audience—at least
noticeable members of it—laughed, giggled,
and chuckled. They didn’t stop all evening,
and the laugher, giggles and chuckles had a
way of leveling everything that was uttered.
Granted, some of the comments by Ryan
and Collins were amusing. There is humor
in their poems, but the audience behaved as
though this was a late-night TV talk show,
and as though the two guests were dishing
out a continual stream of one-liners. I didn’t
see or hear anything that was really funny in
a sidesplitting way, though I did smile once
or twice.
Ryan—who is retiring early from her
tenure as poet laureate—read first. Then
Collins. When he finished, they engaged
in conversation. After that, there were a
half-dozen predictable questions from the
audience—such as “What’s it like to be poet
laureate?” Finally, the two authors sat at a
table in the foyer to autograph copies of the
books that Copperfield’s had piled up. The
whole evening seem to move relentlessly to­
ward the sale of books. The only none-com­
mercial aspect of the program was friendly,
magnanimous Mark Baldridge giving away
copies of the latest Poetry Flash, with a
fetchingly seductive photo of poet Kim Ad­
As a culture we’ve lost
a deeper appreciation
of poetry. Poetry has
become another vehicle
for grandstanding and
show business. Ryan
addressed this issue
when she said that the
size of the audience
didn’t matter.
Sydney Goldstein
Merle Schreiner and some of his trophies
He described the rabbits they caught on
the hunt in New Zealand, which Pat fried, or
braised with a can of beer. He showed me
the record books, piled up on a coffee table
made from the hind legs of the cape buffalo
with the tail of a warthog, slips of paper
marking the pages where Pat and Merle’s
trophies were recorded. He described the
complexities of permits and customs, the
sale or gift of the meat to local people or,
where possible, its transport home; he spoke
of thinning herds and endangered species;
he spoke with deep understanding of dry
ice, and with admiration for his taxidermist
in Scottsdale, Arizona.
Ducks flew along the tops of the win­
dows, their wings spread full. The shells
of two immense sea turtles presented their
quincunx patterns. A bobcat reached a
frozen paw into a bird’s nest near the ceil­
ing and found an egg. Eyes followed you
everywhere—brown and, of course, glassy.
Merle’s eyes, explaining all this, were soft
and alive.
“What will you do with the animals, you
know, in the future?” I asked.
“Well, we’ve thought that when we’re
gone, maybe they could stay here in a big
game museum in Gualala.”
Through Merle’s yellow glasses I saw
the existential emptiness that lies just
behind any great passion, even the quintes­
sential primal struggle, even the passion of
bloodlust: Nothing lasts; intensity, which
is everything, can only be experienced and
repeated; it cannot be maintained.
“Some people think it’s terrible,” he said.
“Well,” I said, “not me.”
Someone rang the bell up at the shop.
Kay Ryan: What’s so funny?
donizio looking like a hooker, a junkie, or
perhaps just in the cast of Cabaret.
Collins and Ryan caught the antics of
the audience early on. They commented on
it, and seemed to play up to it, and play for
laughs. Collins, of course, has long had a
habit of writing humorous poems; he has the
body language and the facial expressions of
a comedian. Ryan, it seemed to me, tried not
to be swept up in the waves of laughter. She
was wry and ironical and suggested that the
work of most contemporary poets couldn’t
compare favorably with the classical poets.
My companion of the evening, who
teaches writing at Sonoma State University
and writes poetry, enjoyed the evening more
than I. He liked the comments that Col­
lins made about Ryan’s use of rhyme, and
Ryan’s comments about Collins’s personae.
I did feel briefly that I was sitting in on a
poetry seminar with two renowned, intel­
ligent poets.
The reading took place weeks after the
publication of a feature about Ryan in The
New Yorker. I had the feeling that I would
have been better served if I’d stayed home
and read the piece, and then read Ryan’s
poetry by myself. But then I wouldn’t have
had the opportunity to see and chat with the
local poets who turned out—Mike Tuggle,
Lynn Lyman Trombetta, Clara Rosemarda,
and Jennie Orvino.
I’m glad poets from around the country
come to Sonoma County, and that Sonoma
County poets have the opportunity to hear
poets from near—Ryan lives in Marin—and
far—Collins comes from the East. Read­
ings like this one keep the literary currents
flowing.
I also know that like Ryan and Collins
I’m also guilty of playing for laughs. I have
had five or six hundred people in an audi­
ence at the Phoenix Theater in Petaluma
laughing uproariously at poems I’ve written
with titles like “I’m More Important Than
You.” I have become a prisoner of the audi­
ence—not a good thing for a poet.
As a culture we’ve lost a deeper appreci­
ation of poetry, or so it seems to me. Poetry
has become another vehicle for grandstand­
ing and show business. Ryan addressed this
issue in part when she said, in response to
a question, that the size of the audience for
poetry didn’t matter to her. “You’re here
and that’s what counts,” she said. “It doesn’t
matter that there aren’t more readers.” But if
the poetry fans and aficionados at the Wells
Fargo Center for the Arts are an indication
of the audience for poetry today, then it’s a
sad day for poets and poetry. Awe, reverence
and a sense of wonder aren’t a bad thing
where poetry is concerned. I’d like to see
and hear more from that direction and less
laughter from the gallery.
­—Jonah Raskin
Summer 2010
The Redwood Coast Review
Page science
Two Lectures
A teacher talks about physics
Hilda Johnston
’m reading a book titled The Strangest Man
about the physicist Paul Dirac, one of the discoverers
of quantum theory. He was such a quiet man that his
fellow scientists used his last name for the smallest
unit of speech, saying of someone, “He didn’t even
speak a dirac.” Farmelo, the author of this large book, is as
generous with words as his subject was stingy, so along with
learning about Dirac, the man, I’ve learned a lot about phys­
ics. Of course it’s nothing physicists haven’t known for a
long time but it is news that has stayed news. In l925, when
Dirac was a young man of 23, another scientist named Pauli
discovered the exclusion principle, which explains the be­
havior of the electron. Physicists still speak of two types of
fundamental particles, one like the electron that is reluctant
to share an energy state with more than one other electron,
and the other like the photon that welcomes any number of
fellow photons to share the same state. Because electrons
won’t orbit together at the lowest energy state, additional
electrons are forced to higher states and this is fortunate
because it makes for different atoms, and all the elements of
our world with its various shapes and forms.
When Dirac was asked to comment, he would often say,
“I don’t mind.” Perhaps he was reluctant to speak because
his father, a Frenchman living in England, insisted that
his children speak French and would grow angry if they
made a mistake. He didn’t socialize much at Cambridge
University but would relax on Sundays by driving out to
the countryside to hike or climb a tree. He spent the rest of
the week describing the quantum world not in words, but
in the language of math, which he wrote so beautifully that
his Principles of Quantum Mechanics has never been out of
print. Einstein himself, it is said, wouldn’t leave town with
out his Dirac.
The quantum world is not a miniature version of our
world like the land of the little people visited by Gulliver,
or even like Alice’s underground. No matter how small we
became, we couldn’t put a finger on a single electron. Yet
Dirac wrote a formula for the electron’s motion; he was
the first to imagine anti-matter, proposing an anti-electron,
which has been discovered and is now called a positron. A
positron going backwards in time is the same as an electron
going forward in time, and yet, who knows why, they annihi­
late each other when they meet, producing two photons.
Every meeting between particles in the quantum world
seems to result in a catastrophe of some kind in which old
particles die and new particles are born. According to Ford,
the author of another interesting book called The Quantum World, a hundredth of a second is an eternity for most
particles.
In the beginning matter and anti-matter were, it is
believed, created equal, but the decay of some of the heavy
particles “led to a small but crucial surfeit of matter,” by just
one part in a billion. Without this imbalance, says Farmelo,
matter and anti-matter would have annihilated each other
and the entire universe would have amounted to “a brief
bath of high energy light.” In that case matter in the form of
physicists would never have had a chance to discover antimatter. You can see that, even before the long and difficult
struggle of evolution, the odds of our being here were very
small. It’s a wonder then that we can look out the window
on a rainy day like today and feel dissatisfied and bored.
Electrons and all particles that are exclusionary are now
called fermions after Enrico Fermi and the social particles
like photons are called bosons after Satyendra Bose. When
Bose was a young man in what is now called Bangladesh,
he sent a paper to a prestigious physics journal in England.
After they rejected it, he sent it to Einstein, who recognized
its merit, and later worked with Bose on the properties of
light quanta or photons.
The fundamental constant of quantum mechanics is h or
Plank’s length; h, a number a hundred billion billion times
smaller than a proton, is to the quantum world what c, the
speed of light, a very large number, is to the cosmos. Since
energy is mass times the speed of light squared, we know
that there is an enormous amount of energy in even a small
amount of matter. A gram of mass was enough to destroy
Hiroshima. In quantum measurement of wavelength, h, a
very very small number, is further divided by momentum
so even an amoeba is too big and moving too fast to have
any noticeable wave length. We can’t see the wavelengths
of electrons either, but according to Ford, they “give bulk to
every atom and prevent people, baseballs and bacteria from
collapsing.”
Further Reading
The Strangest Man by Graham Farmelo
The Quantum World by Kenneth Ford
The Whole Shabang by Timothy Ferris
The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene
Einstein was dissatisfied with quantum theory because
it is based on uncertainty and probability. The symbol for
uncertainty, a little triangle, is even used in equations. How
one atom will behave is estimated from the behavior of
many atoms. If a radioactive atom has a half-life of a bil­
lion years, it will take more or less than a billion years for
the nucleus of that atom to eject a particle. Luckily for a
scientist waiting around with a Geiger counter, even a small
sample of radioactive material contains billions of atoms and
thus the counter will click every second or so, and from all
these clicks he constructs a probability curve.
A giant industry of microelectronics relies on quantum
mechanics. And anti-matter is even used by doctors. In a
If you can hold the universe in
mind with its billions of galaxies and exploding supernovas,
you really don’t need shootouts
and police chases to excite
yourself. You don’t even have
to visit Paris or Las Vegas.
Recently a NASA
satellite took pictures
of the universe at
380,000 years and
caught the ripples in
the microwave ra­
diation, which would
become galaxies as
matter congealed out
of the energy of the
original explosion.
How strange to
be looking out from
a spiral arm of the
milky way galaxy
at other stars and
galaxies that we see
in our space but not
in our time. There is
a galaxy thirteen bil­
lion light years away,
which an astronomer
named Sharon after
his sister. Because
of the finite speed of
light, we can only see
Sharon in its infancy.
And likewise an
intelligent being on
present-day Sharon
could only see our
milky way before
planets and stars had
formed out of its swirl
of gases.
It is mind bog­
gling to think of all
these other galaxies,
many bigger than our
own, and then to realize that just as an atom is mostly space,
the universe has more space than matter. According to the
physicist Sir James Jeans, if you could empty Waterloo—
that’s the central train station in London—of all but a few
specks of dust, it would still be more crowded with dust than
space is with stars.
From this perspective, you can understand the words the
architect Gaudí had inscribed on his cathedral: “Don’t weep
for small things, Mary, for flowers and even stars are small.”
Thinking about the cosmos for even a short time can have
a calming effect, like sitting by the ocean. At first you try to
comprehend the entire reach of space-time, and then you ac­
cept the swath of galaxies that your brain can handle, which,
since there seems to be the same mix of space and matter
everywhere in the universe, is a good enough sample. After
you travel into space-time, you come back to our populated
planet and are amazed perhaps to find yourself in a shoe
store, where the people inside are so balanced and focused
on their feet while the earth moves at 66,000 miles an hour
around the sun, and the sun moves around the heavy center
of the milky way, and the milky way moves out and away
from the other galaxies into ever expanding space.
If you can hold the universe in mind with its billions of
galaxies and exploding supernovas, you really don’t need
shootouts and police chases to excite yourself. You don’t
even have to visit Paris or Las Vegas. You can just take note
of seasonal changes like tourists on a train. Since Septem­
ber, traveling on Earth, we have covered millions of miles,
and now are arriving in summer, without using any fossil
fuel or vacation days.
Today, in your journal, imagine that after an extensive
voyage into space, you are returning to our galaxy, to earth,
to a habitat and a home. It may be the desert where an elf
owl stares from a hole in a saguaro cactus, or the mountains
where a dipper builds its mossy nest under roots on the bank
of a stream. Describe your trip and the particular home you
return to.
pt nunn
I
The Quantum World
PET scan, a small amount of a harmless radioactive chemi­
cal emits positrons, which react with electrons inside the
body.
If you’re as dizzy as I am from trying to imagine a world
as small as the cosmos is large, you might like to know that,
according to Ford, the familiar length of six miles is midway
between the largest and the shortest distance currently
know to science. So we are here in the center of it all. Now
without speaking a dirac, describe how it feels to be so well
situated.
The Cosmos
For a while now I’ve been interested in genetics
and embryology and the way life takes on one shape or an­
other and holds itself together as long as it can, and I haven’t
wanted to think about the entire cosmos, which seems too
chilly and indifferent to the fingered paws of tetrapods or
the two-leafed sprouts of dicotyledons. We may be made
of chemicals from the stars, but there are emergent proper­
ties that we couldn’t have imagined, like water coming from
oxygen and hydrogen. Water, children, is what makes all
the difference, and even if we’re tired of this fog, we have
to appreciate the moisture that keeps our Earth from being a
furnace like the evening star, Venus.
But lately, I suppose because we haven’t seen them for so
long, I’ve been thinking about the stars. There are so many
of them, and so many billions of galaxies, many larger than
our milky way, and even more dark matter, an invisible sub­
stance that makes up nine-tenths of the mass of the cosmos,
and yet physicists doubt there is enough mass for gravity to
keep the universe from expanding forever.
We shouldn’t think, says the physicist Timothy Ferris,
that the universe is expanding into pre-existent space. All
the space the universe has ever had has been here from the
beginning and that space is expanding.
It seems, there really was an eruption about fourteen bil­
lion years ago of what Stephen Hawking calls an instanton,
a state of infinite compression, and we, along with all the
energy and matter in the universe, are still riding the waves
of that original explosion.
Hilda Johnston lives in Berkeley and teaches in Oakland.
This is her first publication.
Page 6
opera
The Redwood Coast Review
Summer 2010
Enter the Notary
Jane Merryman
notaries, and every city, town and village
had so many according to the number of
inhabitants. These officials charged a small
fee but made good money because they
were much in demand. Theirs was an honor­
able profession.
Opera audiences were familiar with
these officials who were omnipresent in real
life. French, Italian and Spanish literature
abounds in them. Jokes about notaries were
as prevalent as jibes at lawyers are today.
On the opera stage, notaries are often
comic figures. The notary enters invari­
ably costumed in a disheveled, oversized
black robe and sports a wig, askew, and a
hat of preposterous proportions and shape.
He carries a big black ledger, a pot of ink
and a quill pen, and many large sheets of
paper covered with minuscule writing. He is
sometimes nearly blind.
Despite his drollery, the notary usually
sets in motion the great dramatic scene
of the evening. In his presence a legal
document will be created that will unalter­
ably affect the fate of any number of other
characters. To sign or not to sign, that is the
question usually roiling in the mind and the
music of the soprano, for it is the marriage
contract that lies on the table. The signing of
this contract takes place before the church
ceremony—it is the point of no return. The
unhappy girl will now be bound for life to
a wealthy old codger, and all the while the
handsome young fellow she loves anguishes
on the other side of the stage. A trio, quartet
or septet expresses the varying emotions of
all involved: despair, triumph, fear, disgust,
hatred, passion. The notary appears unaware
that all this is going on. He is searching for
his blotting paper.
False notaries turn up now and again.
Sometimes a friend or servant masquerades
as a notary to further the plot along. In
of Ferrara and the gentlemen, Albanian
nobles, and begins to itemize the terms of
the dowry and settlement. Just as ink is
about to be applied to paper, when the ten­
sion is almost unbearable, the ladies’ lovers,
who were disguised as the Albanians (and
not recognized by their girlfriends!), return
to accuse, forgive and embrace in the last
15 minutes of the three-hour performance.
The shenanigans would never end were it
not for the notary, whose presence demands
a showdown.
S
Jane Merryman
O
peras are grand in every way:
sets, costumes, music, divas
and ticket prices. Their plots
celebrate the agony and the
ecstasy of gods and goddesses
as well as kings and queens, knights and
courtesans, shepherds and servants. So it’s
surprising that some of this art form’s great
dramatic moments revolve around a worka­
day functionary, the notary.
Webster’s dictionary defines notary as a
public officer who attests or certifies docu­
ments such as deeds and wills to make them
authentic. I used the services of a notary
when I created my living trust.
A notary also takes affidavits and deposi­
tions and witnesses documents in order for
them to comply with the legal code. The
office is bare bones—a desk, a chair and a
telephone; perhaps the notary does not have
an office, but travels to other offices or ven­
ues where required. And all that is required
is to certify someone else’s signature, affix
one’s own signature and seal, and record the
date.
Pretty prosaic. Yet, the notary is one of
opera’s most fraught characters. Many a
scene of emotional tension centers on the
final-act entrance of the notary or even just
the expectation of the arrival of this of­
ficial. L’elisir d’amore, Cosi fan tutte, Don
Pasquale, Der Rosenkavalier and Lucia
di Lammermoor count among the popular
works that include a notary in the cast,
though not necessarily giving him words to
sing.
In the Latin nations of Europe in the
18th and 19th centuries, when few people
could write, notaries were more important
than they are now. No betrothal, marriage
contract, will, agreement or record had legal
validity unless it bore the seal of a licensed
notary. In France the king commissioned
Notary’s costume, inspired by a drawing
in European Costume by Yarwood
Don Pasquale the tenor involves other cast
members in a scheme to dupe the Don into
a fake marriage so he will consent to the
real marriage of his nephew, the conniving
tenor. In Cosi fan tutte, the two sisters fall
in love with Albanians while their erstwhile
lovers are out of town and Don Alfonso and
Despina concoct . . . but, wait, this is an
opera. I’m not supposed to be able to sum­
marize its plot inside a paragraph. Let’s just
say that the servant, Despina, dresses as a
dithery notary in order to entrap the women
in a demonstration of their unfaithfulness.
She drones, in an annoying nasal voice,
“the stipulated contract with the normal
provisions in judicial form. By this contract
drawn up by me, the following are joined in
matrimony,” stating the names of the ladies
o, we cannot eliminate the notary from
the plot. This works well until the
production staff decides to set the opera in
a different time and place than the com­
poser did. Last year I attended a staging of
L’elisir d’amore, written in Italy in 1832,
now taking place in a diner on Route 66 in
the 1950s. A few months later San Fran­
cisco mounted the same opera in the Napa
vineyards circa 1914. These are amusing
productions, with vintage cars, blinking
neon signs and Elvis impressions, and it all
seems plausible until the notary enters, now
in a modern suit but definitely a creature out
of time and out of place. No one in the op­
era house objects. After all, it’s an opera—it
doesn’t have to make sense.
It just makes for a memorable evening,
and the music takes care of that, transform­
ing dull, ordinary facets of life. Music le­
gitimizes the inconsistencies, anachronisms
and irrationalities. Add elegant costumes,
atmospheric lighting and a larger-than-life
backdrop for improbable action, and the
magic of opera transforms even a notary.
Jane Merryman lives in Petaluma and is a
regular RCR contributor.
Summer 2010
The Redwood Coast Review
Page 7
Biblioteca
News, Views, Notes, Reviews, Reports and Exhortations from Friends of Coast Community Library
President’s Desk
Cool, Calm
Collections
Committee
Alix Levine
pHIL sTILES
C
reating and maintaining a well-bal­
anced collection of materials for
library patrons’ use is an important
part of any library’s mission.
Since its founding Coast Community
Library has depended largely on donations
of books and audiovisual materials from
the community to build up its collection.
Partnering with Mendocino County Library
brought in more money for buying new
materials, though, sadly, budget woes have
closed down that source this year. Fundrais­
ing efforts by Friends of Coast Community
Library provide a modest budget for us to
buy new books.
How do we choose which donations to
add to our collection and which to sell for
the library’s benefit?
How do we decide which items to buy?
Coast Community Library is fortunate to
have several former professional librarians
among our volunteers who are the heart
and soul of our Collections Development
Committee.
Collection development involves not just
determining what to add, but also regular
weeding of the existing collection. A book
that hasn’t been checked out for years is
a candidate for withdrawal, although not
everything that rarely leaves the shelf is
weeded out; some classics are more impor­
tant to have available in the library than the
latest bestseller.
Donated books or prints that are very
old, or finely produced, or seem to be rare
or collectible go to librarian volunteer Ruth
Cady, who researches the market value.
Sometimes the special value may be only
enough to price the book at $5; once in a
while we hit the jackpot with a book worth
hundreds.
Juvenile and young adult books are
passed on to Marilyn Alderson, another
librarian volunteer, and branch manager
Terra Black, who oversee our collections for
young people.
The rest of the books and videos and
DVDs and so forth go to Judy Hardy, yet
another retired librarian volunteer, who
researches to see if we have it already,
would like to use it as a replacement copy,
how many other copies are available in
other libraries in our three-county system,
how often they go out, and how many
requests are made for them. The ones that
make the cut may be added because of
extreme popularity, but popularity is not the
only criterion for inclusion. Some subjects
have proven to be of special interest to our
patrons, and we may add in some definitive
work that is highly regarded as a desirable
resource rather than a frequently borrowed
one. Similarly, a mix of popular and serious
literary fiction is the goal, including keeping
up with genre fiction such as mysteries and
fantasy.
When it comes to buying new books or
audiovisual materials, the committee tries
to fill gaps in the collection. In the recent
past the juvenile and young adult collections
have been increased, and teen magazines are
a new attraction. We were able to add to our
large-print collection by taking advantage
of a very good bargain offering. A bunch of
DVDs of classic movies to take home and
enjoy are now on order. We are always glad
to receive donations of books and other ma­
terials in good condition, which benefit the
library either by joining our collection or by
earning income to keep the library operating
smoothly.
Thomas Farber
Pause
Buttons
Zara Raab
Hesitation Marks
by Thomas Farber
Andrea Young Arts (2009), 60 pages
C
heck out this little book by
Berkeley writer Thomas Farber.
Hesitation Marks is a collec­
tion of epigrams, which, if it
weren’t for Woody Allen, might
be a lost literary art in America today. But
for Farber’s combative, acerbic wit the
epigram is the only thinkable form. The
real pressure and meaning of his utterance,
time and again, is shaped by the epigram,
which, Samuel Taylor Coleridge tells us, is
“a dwarfish whole; its body brevity, and wit
its soul.”
Satiric, witty, sarcastic, laconic, Farber’s
epigrams poke fun at himself, old age,
hypocrisy, envy, masturbation, trust funds,
hypochondria, support groups, obesity,
misanthropy, George W. Bush, pornography,
monogamy, poets, suicide, pedophilia, mi­
sers, writers, love, and other things I haven’t
mentioned.
“Skilled writer, vivid imagination, but,
still, unable to conceive there’s a writer as
good as himself.”
In some cultures, the ability spontane­
ously to produce aphoristic sayings at
exactly the right moment in a social context
is a mark of social status. By this standard,
Farber maintains his social status as an
educated Brahmin, the son of Sidney Farber,
world-famous medical pioneer and cofounder of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
in Boston, and the Boston poet Norma Far­
ber. Epigrams, it bears noting, were elegiac
He’s a realist, he’s
curmudgeonly: he can
be as nasty as he wants
to be without fear of
litigation. These are
reasons enough to
whittle his word count
from the 150,000 of a
novel to the five or ten
of an epigram.
couplets in ancient Greece—that is, a poetic
form. Farber may not have his father’s
knack for curing disease, but he certainly in­
herited his mother’s preoccupation with and
love for word play and language: “Silent
about inherited wealth, this capitalist. Much
gain, little venture.”
His sensitivity to contradiction and para­
dox, together with his absolute economy
and coherence, engaged this reader’s wits
repeatedly, beginning with his double defini­
tion of “hesitation mark.” In its first sense,
a hesitation mark is punctuation of the kind
used frequently by Emily Dickinson—a
dash “used to denote a sudden change in
the construction, a suspension of sense, an
unexpected transition in the sentiment, a
sudden interruption, or hesitation.” In its
second and less well-known sense, a hesita­
tion mark is, Farber tells us, “any cut or
wound that is self-inflicted after a decision
is made not to commit suicide, or . . . before
the final cut that causes death.”
Farber’s earlier short story collections
and novels include The Beholder, A Lover’s
Question: Selected Stories, and Who Wrote
the Book of Love? He began writing in the
late 1960s, just when the American art and
literary scene began to burst at the seams
with the sheer quantity of work produced
and published. Hesitation Marks is his third
book of epigrams, the first two being Truth
Be Told and The Twoness of Oneness. The
epigram is a good antidote to exponential
reproduction. As Nabokov quipped, “A good
laugh is the best pesticide.”
From the start, Farber’s stories and
novels shunned the confessional mode of
Philip Roth. In Compared to What? On
Writing and the Writer’s Life, published in
1988, Farber used “the writer,” instead of
the first person, thus giving himself a proper
distance from both his subject and his
readers, and refusing to “implicate others.”
(Howard Nemerov conceives of the writer
as perhaps no more than “the weak criminal
whose confession implicates the others.”)
Epigrams are expressive yet intrinsically
reserved, although Farber, in Compared to
What?, was well aware of the irony inherent
in the notion of privacy, when so much of
our lives—where we shop, what we eat and
how much, our esthetic ideas and tastes—is
an open book. “Too clever by half,” Farber
says in Hesitation Marks, “his essays
revealed character flaws his poems managed
to obscure.”
E
arly on, Farber had no truck with half
truths, exaggeration, hyperbole. In
Hesitation Marks, he quips, “Only the dead
can be sure their love will never die.”
He’s a realist, he’s curmudgeonly: he can
be as nasty as he wants to be without fear
of litigation. These are reasons enough to
whittle his word count from the 150,000 of
a novel to the five or ten of an epigram. Giv­
ing almost every epigram its own page, Far­
ber writes: “Misanthropy: overexposure.”
It may be, too, as he suggests in
Compared to What?, the sheer, relentless,
unyielding work involved in planning and
writing a novel finally wore him down.
Perhaps in epigrams he is able to close the
distance between idea and story. If, as Far­
ber says elsewhere, the story is only in the
telling, the epigram is mainly in the idea.
Some items in Hesitation Marks are
more properly aphorisms, written in the la­
conic, memorable form used on occasion by
Woody Allen, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar
Wilde, Dorothy Parker and, I’m told, Yogi
Berra. In Compared to What? Farber quotes
his poet-mother: a writer writes because he
must. As the author of more than 20 books
of fiction and creative nonfiction, Farber
does appear driven to write, and seems just
as driven to write these witty, argumentative
and engaging epigrams as the reader is to
read them. There’s no hesitation here.
Zara Raab is the author of The Book of
Gretel. Her Swimming the Eel is due out
next year. She lives in San Francisco.
www.zararaab.com; zara.raab@gmail.com
Library lines
Libraries’
Caped
Crusaders
Lori Hubbart
T
hey’re in your corner. They’re
watching your back. They’re the
men and women of the Mendocino
County Library Advisory Board.
Don’t dismiss this low-profile group as
some minor arm of distant, multilimbed of­
ficialdom. That may have been the original
intent, but things turned out differently.
Library advisory boards were formed
to provide advice to local governments on
library policies and services, while giving
the public a voice in these matters.
Surely the originators of the idea had
in mind simple, routine tasks, but that was
before troubled times descended upon us.
Now our local LAB (so nicknamed) finds
itself defending libraries’ very existence.
One LAB member is appointed by each
of Mendocino County’s four incorporated
cities, and one for each of its five supervi­
sors. With all these voices speaking as one,
no individual gets singled out for reprisal.
Over the years, LAB members have
included schoolteachers, engineers, local
officials and others with strong ties to local
library branches. They personify diverse
backgrounds and belief systems, united by
their passionate belief that libraries matter.
The LAB aims to promote high-quality,
free library services for all county residents.
Working closely with the county librarian,
LAB members identify opportunities and
strategies in support of that goal, as well as
obstacles to achieving it.
These days the obstacles are many and
formidable, as Mendocino County flails in a
quagmire of debt. In some quarters, severe
library cutbacks or even branch closures
might be seen as a way to help balance the
budget.
Why deprive our residents, many of
them already struggling, of library services
that can help them improve their lives?
Cutbacks are touted as temporary, but once
these services are eliminated, it would be
very difficult to re-establish them.
Still, opportunities glow like hidden
gems amid the fiscal bleakness. County
Librarian Melanie Lightbody applied for
a grant through the US Department of
Agriculture (!) to fund a new, computerized,
energy-efficient Bookmobile.
Her proposal has been accepted, and
these Recovery Act funds will allow the
county to retain its Bookmobile branch.
LAB members consulted with Lightbody
during the process, and will help in finding
additional funding to clinch the deal.
Library advisory boards are supposed to
be active in the political process at local,
state, and national levels. The LAB has
written its share of library advocacy letters
to officials in all these levels of government.
Last year the Mendocino County Board
of Supervisors met to discuss the possibility
of curtailing or closing libraries. Library
supporters packed the county chambers, and
some of the most eloquent, impassioned
presentations on behalf of our libraries were
made by LAB members.
As advocates, LAB members may lobby
the supervisors, or request information
from county departments. The LAB is now
exploring ways to make our library system
more financially secure—for now and for
the long term.
They may not look like caped crusaders,
but I am proud to serve on the LAB with
such an informed, articulate and motivated
group of individuals.
Page The Redwood Coast Review
Summer 2010
moore from page 3
Let us consider
An unfocused
a wordless Plato
to live
the cat’s pajamas
word sieve
a wish
I think
“I share Eliot’s idea
that a poem deserves
all the attention that
a lawyer would give to
a serious legal document,” says Moore.
There are prose poems in Writing the
Silences, too, such as “Columbia 1960,”
in which Moore explains his underlying
approach to poetry. In 1960, in New York,
he began to study Ludwig Wittgenstein’s
philosophy, and Wittgenstein became a lifelong influence on his work. “It seems to me
that the new poem will not come out of the
soul’s loneliness,” Moore wrote in “Colum­
bia 1960.” He went on to explain that it will
come “out of a concern for language: i.e.
what can be said that will not lead us into
the same alienation that our previous lan­
guage—the whole store of images that we
call civilization—has produced for us.” The
word “alienation” seems to leap out from
the page, and so does the word “new.”
Indeed, in his poetry, Moore has fol­
lowed Pound’s injunction to “make it new.”
He also often embodies Eliot’s idea that the
best way to discover one’s own individual
talent is precisely by following tradition.
Almost all his life he’s been a traditional­
ist, though he’s also been a rebel who has
broken away from tradition and has made
his own writing new. The apocalypse is a
part of Moore’s poetry, as it was for Eliot
and Yeats and for so many Modernists. In
“A History Primer” (1946)—one of the last
poems in Writing the Silences, and also one
of the oldest of his poems—there are echoes
of Eliot and Yeats, especially in the last
three lines:
B
ack at The Redwoods, Moore explains
he’s concerned about reading in public.
“The older you get the less control you
often have over your voice,” he says. “To be
effective you have to engage listeners right
away so they give their fullest attention
to the reader.” At the launch for Writing
the Silences at University Press Books in
Berkeley, the audience is with him every
step of the way and his voice is that of a
man who has lived to the fullest all his life.
Paul Ebenkamp, who co-edited Writing the
Silences with Hillman, says that Moore’s
voice reminds him of recordings of Dylan
Thomas. Hillman asks him questions and Moore
answers them precisely, taking as much
care with words when he speaks in public
before an audience as when he’s at home
alone writing a poem at his computer. And
yet Hillman doesn’t hear the specific answer
she’s hoping for.
“I’m still baffled why he kept his poetry
so secret for so long,” she tells the audi­
ence. Then she turns to Moore and says,
“You’re going to have to be less of a Bud­
dhist. You’ll just have to get used to being a
famous poet.” Ida Maye Zapf
Move on. From room to room. From
chaos to chaos to chaos
To complete illusion, of partial beauty,
of partial resurrection,
At last, in the slow, heavy, lovely,
image-riddled mind.
Richard Moore at Duncans Mills, 1945 (top), and in Berkeley, 1954
Jonah Raskin is the author of American
Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and The
Making of the Beat Generation.
Book Box
Some Recent Arrivals at Coast Community Library
Adult Books
Akpan, Uwem. Say you’re one of them
Angelou, Maya. Letter to my daughter
Baldwin, James. Giovanni’s room
Barber, Kimiko. The Japanese kitchen:
a book of essential ingredients with
200 authentic recipes
Bennett, Alan. The uncommon reader
Bronte, Anne. The tenant of Wildfell Hall
Buckley, Christopher. Supreme courtship
Burroughs, Augusten. Magical thinking:
true stories
Carey, Peter. Theft: a love story
Chang, David. Momofuku
Clinch, Jon. Finn
Dawson, George. Life is so good
Donald, David Herbert. “We are Lincoln
men”: Abraham Lincoln and his
friends
Drake, David. Some golden harbor
Edge, Laura Bufano. Locked up: a history of the U.S. prison system
Evanovich, Janet. Fearless fourteen
Library Hours
Monday 12 noon - 6 pm
Tuesday
10am - 6 pm
Wednesday
10am - 8 pm
Thursday
12 noon - 8 pm
Friday
12 noon - 6 pm
Saturday
12 noon - 3 pm
Coast Community Library
is located at
225 Main Street
Point Arena
(707) 882-3114
Evans, Richard Paul. The last promise
Flynn, Vince. Separation of power
Gelles, Edith Belle. Abigail & John: portrait of a marriage
Heller, Anne Conover. Ayn Rand and the
world she made
Heyer, Georgette. Why shoot a butler?
Howard, Linda. Ice
Idzikowski, Christopher. Learn to sleep
well: a practical guide to getting a good
night’s rest
Iles, Greg. The devil’s punchbowl
Karr, Mary. Cherry: a memoir
Keillor, Garrison. Love me
Kluckhohn, Clyde. Navaho witchcraft
Knight, Erika. Simple knits for cherished
babies
Larsson, Steig. The girl with the dragon
tattoo
Leon, Donna. About face
Macomber, Debbie. The shop on Bloosom
Street
Mah, Adeline Yen. China: land of dragons
and emperors
Maron, Margaret. Uncommon clay
McCall Smith, Alexander. Heavenly date
and other flirtations
McCarthy, Mary. Making books by hand: a
step-by-step guide
Moody, Joseph. Arctic doctor
Muller, Herta. The passport
Nafisi, Azar. Things I’ve been silent about:
memories
Nightingale, Suzan. Electric bread
Olsen, Herb. Painting the marine scene in
watercolor
Paterniti, Michael. Driving Mr. Albert: a
trip across America with Einstein’s brain
Picoult, Jodi. House rules
Raphael, Ray. More tree talk: the people,
politics, and economics of timber
Rawicz, Slavomir. The long walk: the true
story of a trek to freedom
Reddi, Rishi. Karma and other stories
Rice, Anne. Christ the Lord: the road to
Cana
Roberts, Ann Victoria. Morning’s gate
Schiller, David. Guitars: a celebration of
pure mojo
Shields, Carol. The orange fish
Smith, Starr. Jimmy Stewart, bomber pilot
Spindler, Erica. Breakneck
Stein, Sara Bonnett. Silent spring
Stewart, Amy. Wicked plants: the weed that
killed Lincoln’s mother & other botanical
atrocities
Stockett, Kathryn. The help
Villasenor, Victor. Rain of gold
Walker, Cami. 29 gifts: how a month of giving can change your life
Wingate, Lisa. The summer kitchen
Wodehouse, P.G. The world of Mr. Mulliner
Wolff, Geoffrey. The edge of Maine
Wood, Barbara. Sacred ground
Juvenile Books
Baker, Liza. I love you because you’re you
Brown, Margaret Wise. The runaway bunny
Brun-Cosme, Nadine. Big Wolf & Little Wolf
Burns, Charles. Black hole
Carle, Eric. The very busy spider
Cleary, Beverly. Socks
Davis, Katie. Who hops?
De Paola, Tomie. Pancakes for breakfast
Eulberg, Elizabeth. The Lonely Hearts Club
Faller, Regis. Polo and the magic flute
Ghigna, Charles. Mice are nice
Hampton, Wilborn. Babe Ruth: a twentiethcentury life
Henkes, Kevin. My garden
Karlin, Nurit. The fat cat sat on the mat
Kato, Chitaka. Steamboy. Vol. 2
King, Stephen. The stand. Captain Trips
Kipling, Rudyard. How the leopard got
his spots
Kirkwood, Jon. The fantastic book of car
racing
Lewison, Wendy. Raindrop, plop!
McGee, Marni. Wake up, me!
Nyeu, Tao. Wonder Bear
Omota, Katsuhiro. Akira. Book four
Osborne, Mary Pope. Favorite Greek
myths
Oxenbury, Helen. Clap hands
Patricelli, Leslie. Higher! Higher!
Patterson, James. Witch & wizard
Peck, Robert Newton. Cowboy ghost
Pratchett, Terry. Wintersmith
Rosenthal, Amy Krouse. Duck! Rabbit!
Rylant, Cynthia. All in a day
Smucker, Emily. Emily
Solga, Kim. Art fun!
Soman, David. Ladybug Girl and
Bumblebee Boy
St. George, Judith. The duel: the parallel
lives of Alexander Hamilton & Aaron
Burr
Traig, Jennifer. Fun and games: things to
make and do
Vincent, Zu. Katherine the Great: Empress of Russia
Willems, Mo. The pigeon wants a puppy!
Wood, Audrey. Moonflute
Yang, Gene. American born Chinese
Yee, Patrick. Winter rabbit
Summer 2010
The Redwood Coast Review
Page books
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Madman
Valerie Ross
S
tephen Kessler’s novel The
Mental Traveler is a psychedelic
odyssey. On one level the book is
a fictional yet radically personal
journey through an unusually
lyrical psychotic break. On a more profound
philosophical level, it is the story of a bril­
liant young man’s attempt to make sense of
an increasingly meaningless world by way
of his own poetic powers. As an admirer of
Kessler’s shrewd critical essays and elegant
poetry for over 20 years, I found myself
easily absorbed into the familiar sensuous
texture of his writing and effortlessly trans­
ported into the world of his novel. Loosely
based on the author’s life experiences, The
Mental Traveler captures the confluence of
counterculture events in 1969 in hip, jazzy
language that encapsulates the Beat genera­
tion mindset. At the center of the story is
Kessler’s protagonist, young Stephen K, an
epic antihero who serves as a nexus for all
the intersecting forms of madness around
him.
Stephen K, whose name resonates with
full Kafkaesque irony, is a 22-year-old
graduate student of literature at the Univer­
sity of California, Santa Cruz, living a dark
bohemian rhapsody that is beginning to
unravel at the edges. Hiding out in a rustic
cabin in the Santa Cruz Mountains, moving
reflectively through a haze of marijuana
smoke, the shifting figures of multiple love
interests and the thrill of driving fast cars
on winding mountain roads, Stephen K’s
disillusionment with graduate study builds,
along with his rebellious impulses to drop
out and join the revolution.
I was immediately drawn into the vulner­
ability, humorous warmth and occasional
wide-eyed wonder of Kessler’s often con­
fessional narrative. Young Stephen K longs
to be a cool Casanova, wearing his suede
fringed jacket, carrying his hashish pipe
and styling himself as a serious writer, but
he has to continually restrain his eager ef­
fusiveness and the manners of his privileged
background in order to blend in with the
strange stoners around him. Upon leaving
a hippie Thanksgiving dinner, and awk­
wardly bidding his tripping hosts a polite
good night, “‘Well, thanks for everything . .
. I need to take a little walk. Good meet­
ing you all,’” he has the following inner
dialogue, chastising himself for being un­
cool: “Betraying my upbringing. Too many
words. Too courteous, formal. Somebody
cooler would have just walked. Or stayed,
just sharing the space.” The appropriately
nonchalant farewell, he decides, would have
been simply to say, “Later.”
However, our hero is far from noncha­
lance; he is passionately questioning his
life, and as his inner turmoil and longing for
liberation accelerates, we see that he is mir­
roring the fever pitch of Northern California
counterculture. Rumors fly that there’s LSD
in the drinking water supply, he joins a mass
exodus of freaks making their way to the
Rolling Stones’ free concert at Altamont,
and just as all hell is about to break loose,
Stephen K’s psyche breaks, cracking under
the strain of serious drugs and the forgivable
delusions of a young poet. In his altered
state, he sees the dysfunction of society
too clearly, and imagines that he has been
chosen to serve the revolution as its bardic
spokesman, the one man—in fact—who can
make sense of all the madness.
Reading Kessler’s syncopated, densely
imagistic prose, the reader is drawn in
viscerally to the mindset of his charismatic,
if troubled, young narrator. Jailed briefly
in San Francisco, stripped of his clothing,
and convinced that the entire experience is a
staged test of his candidacy for the position
of poet laureate of the rising counterculture,
Stephen K raves in pages-long streaming
sentences of eloquent madness: “I was the
medium, strenuous tongue cut loose with
Keats’s cherry, Shelley’s cloud pouring
storms of romantic locusts over the illusion
mongers soon to be swamped in torrents of
truth and beauty, I was unstoppable, turned
on, coming into my own as a dummy for
literally on the edge of consciousness and
the continent, evoking images from The
Graduate or Harold and Maude—two of
the greatest California driving movies ever
made. In this way, The Mental Traveler
joins the ranks of the many love songs to the
liberating California Dream, even though
in this case the dream is undergirded by a
nightmare. Stephen K’s mind has crossed
the line between freedom and anarchy and
taken him to a place of pure poetry: “All po­
ets were part of the same conspiracy. Even
though I was here I was there also, wherever
one of us engaged others in the improvisa­
tional drama we were all living. Our job
was to remind the civilians that everything
was poetry . . . that inside and outside
people were equally crazed, that being in
here was part of the creative continuum, my
work continued on all fronts, there was no
stopping the process.”
Ultimately and ironically, poetry is not
only what drives Stephen K’s madness,
it is also what saves him. After enduring
months of institutionalization and experi­
mental pharmaceutical therapy in a variety
of mental hospitals, the threat of lobotomy
looms ominously large. Just in time, our
hero encounters a poem called “Anarchists
Fainting” by Robert Bly, which teaches him
the lesson every visionary must learn in or­
der to survive: “Your anarchy could be acted
out unpunished if you confined your tactics
to language and language alone, holding
your fire for the right moment instead of
just shooting your mouth off whenever the
muses moved you.”
Bly’s words have a cathartic effect
on young Stephen, and provide him with
the liberation he has been seeking for the
entire novel: “Lines leaped off the page,
grabbed hold of me, dragged me around the
room, shook me upside down by the feet
till my brains fell out, made hash of my
hash-induced hallucinations, reconstituted
and documented my drooping odyssey . .
. It struck me that I could be as crazy as I
pleased as long as I didn’t make an issue
of it in public, didn’t act out every image,
restrained my responses, contained my
spontaneous creation, conducted myself
with subdued propriety, resisted becoming a
spectacle.”
Newly fortified with a theory of madness
as “art that escapes the frame,” our narrator
ends this episode in his mental travels better
You’re never certain if
Stephen’s breakdown is
the “psychotic episode”
the rest of the straight
world thinks he’s having,
or if he really is tuned
in to some higher perceptual plane.
bill elliott perry
The Mental Traveler
by Stephen Kessler
Greenhouse Review Press (2009), 250 pages
Stephen Kessler
some ventriloquist, saying whatever came,
leaping logical chasms, pirouetting on my
own pinhead, evoking hoots and groans of
awe and approval from my captive audience
. . .”
Whether it is his idealistic, impression­
istic youth, or the very real need he feels to
be a meaningful participant in the zeitgeist,
Stephen K’s adventures on his Homeric
quest for identity and truth resonate as a
bildungsroman for everyman.
The reader is never entirely certain,
however, if Stephen’s breakdown is in fact
the “psychotic episode” that the rest of the
straight world thinks he’s having, or if he
really is tuned in to some higher perceptual
plane. There is an intoxicating, vicarious
high to this story that is mostly created
by Kessler’s evocative prose, but is also
simply due to the fact that it is a great —if
occasionally harrowing—ride. Fate and
the forces of conformity keep smacking
the protagonist around, but he rises back
up again every time, and the reader cheers
him on through every getaway, every nearly
averted disaster.
A
s our hero ricochets from woman to
woman, from one psych ward to the
next, he is also repeatedly hurtling up and
down California in his sports car, from San
Francisco to Los Angeles and back to Santa
Cruz, caught in a vertical holding pattern,
equipped to brave the trials of everyday life,
but no less determined to stay true to his art.
Throughout and after the conclusion of
this journey, what stays with me, besides
the central cautionary tale of what our
poets and artists must endure in order to
sublimate their visionary truth and “pass”
in oppressively normative society, are all
the rich, vibrantly real characters who fill
the book with their absorbing dialogue and
their passion for life from which Stephen K
drinks deeply and fuels his own inspiration.
There is Julie, his beautiful yet confused
young bride; Nona, his landlord, who is
emerging from middle-class complacency
into a newly raised consciousness; April, his
mercurial, seductively intellectual lover; and
Ike, his special nurse on one psych ward,
who ends up being the most trusted, healing
presence in the book.
I
f there are any drawbacks to The Mental
Traveler, they are likely to have more to
do with the individual reader’s proclivities
than with the novel itself. Kessler has a
tendency to indulge in occasionally Maileresque descriptions of sex scenes with the
apparently obligatory cockiness of the time.
He also takes us, often unsparingly, into the
darkest moments of Stephen K’s break­
down, as when he madly holds a knife to the
face of his loyal young wife in a deranged
“ceremony of innocence.” But the latter is a
crucial moment in our understanding of the
degree of his illness, and the former is an
essential ingredient of the male mentality of
the Beat generation. If a reader encountering
this book is just not interested in the way
1969 changed the world, our country, or at
least California, and if psychedelic free-love
culture is not to his or her taste, then the
content may seem somewhat dated.
Even so, the experience of a mental
breakdown has not, to my knowledge, been
narrated before with this level of philosoph­
ical or poetic insight. So for those readers
who have themselves lived on the edge
of a world gone mad, and especially for
those who have known the madness more
intimately, Kessler’s novel is both a power­
ful journey and a cultural landmark that
deserves wide recognition and acclaim.
Valerie Ross is a writer and teacher living
in Palo Alto. The Mental Traveler is available at Coast Community Library.
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Page 10
The Redwood Coast Review
Summer 2010
curtis from page 1
A
Alternating chapters with the tale of Clara’s and Edward’s
rocky romance is Wiggins’s own saga: she gets a call that a
man bearing her father’s name is dying in a Las Vegas hos­
pital when in fact he died on the East Coast thirty years ago.
Intrigued, she drives from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, where
she discovers an elderly and rapidly failing African-Ameri­
can man in a hospital bed. Quickly, she pieces the mystery
together: her father hung himself in the woods thirty years
ago, and this other man came along and, perhaps shocked
out of his senses by observing what looked like a lynching,
took his wallet and assumed his identity. He left behind a
ten-year-old son, who is stationed at a nearby Army base and
who is named, in one of those neat turns of complementarity
that reminds us we are in a fictional world, Curtis Edwards.
Wiggins’s meeting with Colonel Edwards is the denouement
of the book, as the two of them reminisce about the early
loss of their fathers.
In the hospital corridor, Wiggins comes across Mr. Shad­
ow, a Navajo man who is in possession of an actual shadow­
catcher, a sacred object his father owned. His father, named
Owns His Shadow, was photographed by Curtis. The story
of this photo, its rediscovery, and that of the shadowcatcher
itself ties the threads of the narrative together, as revelations
about Curtis’s life follow that of Wiggins’s own father.
hat are we to make of all this? Certainly to some,
Wiggins’ easy relationship with a native American
and an African-American will grate, with its assumption that
their struggles are all the same. However, a subversive and
profound point is subtly driven home: Owns His Shadow,
Mr. Shadow’s father, has kept the Shadowcatcher; he defines
himself, whether with Curtis’s help or in spite of it is up
to the reader to decide. Wiggins’s title is apt in more than
one way: the shadow of a great man’s achievement is the
litter he leaves behind, the wreckage of his personal life, the
neglected wife and children. The novel functions as indeed a
kind of catcher of this kind of action.
I was prepared to dislike Curtis, then, when I walked into
the Grace Hudson Museum exhibit of his work last fall in
Ukiah. Wasn’t he a ruthless exploiter of the natives he pho­
tographed, not to mention his own wife and children? Wasn’t
he just out to conquer his subjects, much as Audubon killed
birds in order to stuff them, to appropriate their image for his
own purpose? Yet this wasn’t at all what the exhibit brought
forward. Rather, it displayed photos of members of various
tribes in all their diversity and partic­ularity. It documented
the photographer’s meticulous and often herculean efforts to
find and familiarize himself with his subject. It showed him
as an advocate of native groups, struggling to assert their
humanity in the face of a massive assault on their culture.
For example, photographs of sacred ceremonies were meant
to counter the government’s outlawing and banning of these
same ceremonies, not to tread on hallowed ground with­out
permission. The exhibit told how Curtis, exhausted and
demoralized after years of grinding travel, unceasing labor
and diminishing funds, broke down in court when Clara had
him arrested for lack of payment of child support in Seattle.
Here is movie material indeed, although it is an exchange
Wiggins did not include: the judge, bewildered, asks the
weeping man why he chooses to pursue this work when he is
not making any money. “Your Honor,” he responds, “it was
my job, the only thing I could do that was worth doing . . . a
sort of life’s work.”
Here, we are reminded that natives were jailed for at­
tempting to speak their own languages or perform their
religious ceremonies. In this view, Curtis was a hero who
recognized the validity of their culture and attempted to
document it. He died poor, a fact Wiggins acquiesces to as
Sunset in Navaho Land by Edward S. Curtis
Edward S. Curtis
W
Edward S. Curtis
He himself is a marvelous photographic subject. His expression is jaunty, daring, defiant
even; he possesses a stare at
once haunting and haughty.
well. I also learned facts which modify some of Wiggins’s
claims, such as that Curtis did enjoy close relations with
a couple of his children (there were four) later in his life.
One of his sons accompanied him on his later photography
expeditions and was present when he died.
Before Clara could be awarded custody of her ex-hus­
band’s studio and all its assets, two employees smashed all
of Curtis’s glass-plate negatives. No one knows for sure,
but it’s commonly thought that their daughter Beth was
responsible. Wiggins reads the destruction of Curtis’s plates
as an example of how children abandoned by their fathers
idealize them and blame the mother for their absence. I see it
as a tragic instance of how unhappy fami­lies tend to destroy
what is best in them. After all, smashing the plates damaged
several things—Curtis’s work, Clara’s maintenance of the
studio, and the children’s legacy. It is a shocking act, which
reverberates throughout the whole exhibit.
The fluidity and conditionality with which we “read”
events, as well as books and photographs, may be the most
interesting subject of all. Like many artists and innovators,
Curtis emerges a cipher, a liminal figure posed between the
domestic and the wild, the native and the white world, the
ancient art of portraiture and the new one of photography.
nd what of the subjects of these photos themselves?
How do they feel about it? A corner of the Grace
Hudson exhibit bore testimonials from present-day native
Ameri­cans who found a grandparent or other ancestor of
theirs in the photos, and thus renewed their sense of history
and pride. Curtis is seen as a visionary, preserving photos
of a way of life that was rapidly dying due to European
encroachment. Yet not all natives or their allies feel the
same appreciation. They point out that Curtis, an outsider,
still controlled the image. He decided what to photograph,
how and when; he took liberties, faked con­texts (removing a
wristwatch, for example), falsified data in order to achieve a
particular effect.
In a revived environment of self-assertion and ethnic
pride, members of oppressed groups claim a right to shape
their own identity. Having it foisted on them even by wellmeaning outsiders is more and more seen as passé. When I
visited a museum of contem­porary Native American art in
Santa Fe, for instance, I saw a vital and fascinating blend
of old and new. “Indians” were not images in a museum,
unchangeable icons on which we could project our longing
and pity. They were evolving, owners of their destiny, busy
creating a fusion of tradition and innovation. We have to be
aware of this as we approach photos, that is as we approach
images, which is pretty much what we do all day. A snap
shot is just that, a moment come and gone. The subject has
already changed by the time he or she moves out of the
frame. We are alive, vital, indefinable.
Then why take photos? Robert Frank wrote, “There is
one thing the photograph must contain, the humanity of the
moment.” There is an undeniable frisson of contact one
feels in Curtis’s finest photos. Several of them, close-ups
of older men and women, bear a remarkable humanity and
pathos. The expres­sion—defiant, struggling—bears a close
resemblance to Curtis’s own. Their bare appeal goes beyond
the liberties he took in making the photographs. They hint
at a genuine affinity established between photographer and
model.
We would do well to remember that photography was
a relatively new medium which its practitioners were still
learning to master. Photography was still the domain of spe­
cialists and those with a particular artistic sensibility in the
early twentieth century. While there were early forays into
the candid photo, the idea of taking a sponta­neous snapshot
was not part of popular culture in the time Curtis was travel­
ing the West. Photography still modeled itself upon portrait
painting, where a subject gazes often stiffly at the camera.
Iconic objects which represent their status or important
aspects of their life are arranged about them. Likewise,
Curtis got natives to dress in clothes meant for special occa­
sions while they were going about everyday functions. He
had members of one tribe wear the clothing of another. He
removed wristwatches and other attributes of modern living.
He was very careful about what went into his frame. He was
a documentarian, not an innovator.
Photographers always wrestle with the question of how to
remain true to their subject. Are they manipulating reality or
just capturing it as it is? Yet the more they strive to remain
objective, the more they end up portraying themselves. It is
inevitable. For the more true you are to yourself, the better
you can see others.
This principle is crystal clear with Curtis, and makes
for a fascinating comparison. He himself is a marvelous
photographic subject. His expression is jaunty, daring, defi­
ant even; he possesses a stare at once haunting and haughty.
It’s hard not to like him, even as you are exasperated with
him—which is pretty much the stance Wiggins takes in her
novel. He is an Old West Don Quixote, tilting at windmills,
trekking vast distances under severe conditions in order to
meet and photograph an embattled people.
Images are presumptuous. That is the purist objection. In
modern culture, the image is our coin of currency, modicum
of exchange. This is never more obvious than now, when
people make avatars of themselves online and post pho­
tos to represent their life in cyberspace. Images are more
ubiquitous than ever, but they are getting farther removed
from reality. Altering images is accepted and common. We
assume ownership of what we see. This, after all, is what
image-making was about, from earliest times: the hunter
magically capturing his prey in a drawing. It is also one
reason that both Islam and Judaism forbid forming images
of the divine. But is it always motivated by a simple effort
of control? There is something else going on here: a form
of reverence and expres­sion. We draw pictures of what we
want to understand. We sketch it, in both senses of the word,
traces of longing and attempts at meaning on a tabula rasa
as wide-open as the West itself.
We are becoming more and more aware that our minds
are themselves great image-makers. We can become trapped
in the products of our thoughts, or we can share them, put
our cards on the table, so to speak, and negotiate a shared
reality. Marianne Wiggins opens up the novel form so that
photographed as well as verbal images simply play across
the field of our mind. The Curtis exhibit was set on a more
fixed point of view. Still, we are left to walk around, shake
our heads at the beauty of the old Western landscape and the
brutal fate that one people dealt to another, allowing the im­
ages of this brave, foolhardy and misunderstood photogra­
pher to enter our eyes. If we can accept the contradictions of
his life, perhaps we will be better able to tolerate our own,
and won’t have to raise an arm to sweep away whatever
doesn’t fit into our frame.
Roberta Werdinger is a writer, editor and teacher living in
Ukiah. This is her first appearance in the RCR.