Tennessee 1

Our steps down to the the Little Pigeon River

Eastern Tennessee, near a village called Townsend.  Special trip, friend’s 70th birthday.  The idea was to escape the city, any city, all cities.  Total success.

The dirt road to our spectacular two-story log “cabin” is barely wide enough for one car and you have to drive through a creek.  We were warned that the black bears are emerging from hibernation and that one, probably a two-year-old, has been seen in the woods surrounding the cabin.  “Just don’t walk around in the woods with a bucket of fried chicken,” we were told.  Well, okay.

(Two hours after writing the above we’re back from town, I sit down at my laptop on the table facing the deck and there he is!  On the deck, not fifteen feet away, a young black bear!  Friend is cooking something with a lot of onions and the scent was apparently irresistible.  I grabbed my camera, but he took off into the woods before I could snap a shot.  We’d been leaving the deck doors open, but they happened to be closed right then or he would have come on in.  Black bears (except moms with cubs) aren’t ferocious and this one’s just a hungry kid, but still… what does one do with a bear in the house?  Probably better keep those deck doors closed.

We’re in the Smoky Mountains; the national park boundary is about 200 yards from the door, which means wi-fi access is almost nonexistent since no towers are permitted on national park grounds.  I’ll have to drive into Gatlinburg or someplace to post these blogs, but that’s the trade-off for limitless natural beauty, quiet and a bear.

Also for a cultural experience I’m still trying to figure out.  Scots, English, Welsh and Irish settlers made their way through

Melungeon boys

these mountains centuries ago, and their descendants are still here.  But another group, mysterious as the song that is their anthem, also struggled to survive in secret valleys and hollows, until they were driven out and moved to different valleys and hollows.  They were the Melungeons, mixed-race people of European, Native American and African genetic stock, whose name some linguists consider a bastardization of the French word melange (mixed).  However, my favorite among the theories is that the term reflects a now obsolete Elizabethan word, “malengin,” that meant guile, deceit or ill-intent.  Spenser, in The Faerie Queen, named an evil sprite character “Malengin,” and those early English settlers would have known and used the word.

In any event, the Melungeons were often shunned in primitive mountain settlements where survival might depend on mutual effort.  Dark-skinned and “different-looking,” they seemed demonic to the predominately white and culturally British mountain settlers.

I’d never heard of Melungeons until yesterday when I bought a CD of local bluegrass songs at Cade’s Cove, an old settlement the last descendant of which died in 1999.  One of the songs, “Wayfaring Stranger,”  I’ve heard many times but never thought about.  This version, with its haunting Dobro guitar, auto harp and mandolin, was so compelling that of course I had to research it to death and discovered that its origins are simply unknown.  Here’s a link with an orchestral version – http://www.manhattanbeachmusic.com/html/wayfaring_stranger.html.  There are countless lyrics to “Wayfaring Stranger,” which sounds as if it should be an old negro spiritual, except it isn’t.  Its origins are lost in the weary footsteps of long-dead Europeans who moved westward into the Appalachians, only later to become associated with the even more weary, outcast Melungeons.

Later I will conclude that the Melungeon thing has some current resonance.  Around here, I and literally everyone I know would qualify, at least insofar as seeming demonic!

To be continued….

Now It’s Time to Say Goodbye… Well, Maybe Later

When I walked out of my dance class yesterday, Bart was as usual sitting at one of the tables the Y puts out there.  Bart, a very recently retired Professor of English, always has something interesting to say.  I was betting on a quip about Margaret Thatcher, the news of whose death was all over the place that morning.

“Bad news,” Bart said, looking oddly doleful for someone I was sure had been no fan of Margaret Thatcher.  “Annette Funicello died.”

My heart sank.  The shock was real and scarcely related to the actual person of Annette Funicello, whom of course I’d never met and hadn’t thought of in over fifty years. I didn’t have to think about Annette because she existed perpetually, never changing, in my own history.

I’m in Jr. high and my first boyfriend David has walked me home from school, carrying my books and my Conn cornet in its clunky case.  David is not allowed to come inside, since my parents are still at work, and that’s fine with me.  Adolescence is a slow and patchwork affair in the 1950’s; I’m not really clear about why he insists on walking me home but understand that it’s expected of both of us.  When he leaves I can go inside and turn on the TV (which has to warm up), and what’s on both of the two stations available?  The Mickey Mouse Club!

And I watch.  Annette, the most popular Mouseketeer, is twelve and so am I.  By current standards we’re way too old for this juvenile stuff, but I don’t know that then.  In my late-afternoon living room, surrounded by my mother’s collection of Wedgwood miniatures (green, not blue), it’s okay to be a child, or at least childish, again, and I revel in it.  When the show is over I sing the closing song with Annette and the cast, alone in the final moments of both childhood and an era.  I will never forget the song.

Bart and I analyzed the source of our reaction to Annette’s death.  She was an icon in our history, a remembered symbol of something akin to innocence.  Bart said he, like every other American boy, fell in love with her even before she got the famous boobs.  He said she always seemed deeply wholesome in some way far surpassing the corny All-American Girl Next Door image.  I remembered wanting to look like her, not realizing that I’d have to become Italian. It didn’t matter; she was us.  Annette was an ideal, somehow embodying a goodness peculiar to that time, outgrown long ago but cherished in memory.

Bea, Bart’s wife and retired teacher, and Bonnie, an about-to-retire grade school teacher, straggled out of our class.  Bart gave them the news; their reaction was the same.  We stood around in the sun talking about Annette for a few minutes and then wandered toward our cars in the parking lot beneath a small shopping center.  It’s all slab cement and girders in there, dim and echoey.  Then somebody started the song and we all joined in, belting it out, the words bouncing off cars and cement, filling our world for one last time.  M-I-C…K-E-Y, M-O-U-S-E…  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWH9HGS7SvQ

I won’t forget that, either.

My Book Is Banned!

Every author dreams of this day but I never thought it could happen to me.  In nine novels I’ve never managed a sex scene that wouldn’t earn the imprimatur of the Holy See, Catharine MacKinnon and my first-grade teacher.  The School of Peripheral Detail is my choice for those moments – lavish descriptions of the wallpaper, his charmingly crooked front teeth, her concern about a possible allergic reaction to feather pillows.  Fade to the next day and something else entirely.

The Paper Doll Museum lacks even those lightweight hints at passion.  It’s totally lacking in passion, at least that sort.   In the sequel, yeah, probably.  But not yet.  So the likelihood of its being banned was zero.

But it was banned.

When doing a freebie, a span of a few days in which a book is free for Kindle, authors sign the title up with many, many sites that alert readers to free books.  Most are gratis, a service to readers, but one is expensive.  It’s also effective and highly regarded by authors, so I signed The Paper Doll Museum up with it, credit card in hand.  Two days later I received an email stating that my book was inappropriate for the entire community of people who read books and had been rejected.

Whaaaat!?!?  More to the point, why?

Thrilled as I was at having joined the ranks of To Kill a Mockingbird, Of Mice and Men and The Catcher in the Rye, I couldn’t help analyzing my good luck.  No sex, no racism, no politics, just a story about a retired high school English teacher who suddenly has magical powers, sort of.  Any high school English teacher will tell you in three seconds that the tale is an allegory, but maybe the nihil obstat gatekeeper didn’t get that and thought it was a work of satan.  Wow.  Or could it be that single word, “retired”?

“OMG, this is a novel with retired people in it – ycchh!  The reading world must be spared exposure to the experience of anybody over fifty, which would have to be both boring and unspeakable, damned and anathema!  This title is banned.”

I’ll never know, but my money’s on the latter.

Here’s the link to a free Kindle copy of The Paper Doll Museum,  February 15, 16 and 17, if you’re into banned books.

 

Literally Unbelievable Boomer Book Reviews

These are exciting times for Boomer Literature, since nobody’s quite sure what it is.  But how difficult can this be?  Boomers exist in that heady realm between fifty and the onset of something debilitating, enjoying decades of adventure, love and unprecedented philosophical growth.  Check out these as-yet-unpublished prototypes of Boomer themes in popular genres!

Dead Fall by H. Humbert  (mainstream)

In this fast-paced look at mid-life crisis, orthopedic surgeon Dr. Brad Street leaves his wife of thirty-five years for perky, gamin, twenty-two-year-old coffee barista Mandy Fox.  Mandy openly reads Essentials of Musculoskeletal Care when not crafting exotic espressos, and captured Brad’s heart when she confided her secret dream of traveling to photograph bones unearthed in Peruvian archaeological digs.  Brad, who is still paying off the half-million dollar debt incurred by the education of his three adult children, is shocked when, two days after his wedding to Mandy, she happily reveals that she’s pregnant with twins.  In celebration, Brad takes up sky-diving.  Warning: contains graphic descriptions of blunt trauma impact injuries.

The Cupcake Angel by Madeline Coy  (women’s lit)

When savvy, gorgeous “Kip” Kipton retires as CEO of an international fashion empire to care for the ailing mother she’s always hated, readers are in for a multi-tissue family saga!  Returning to her ancestral three-bedroom tract house behind a John Deere dealership, Kip cradles a copy of Thomas Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again as her mother incessantly reminds her that she’s fat (at 52 she still wears a size 4) and will never get a man (Kip is gay and happily married.)  But when Kip discovers, hidden in a box of confetti sour cream cupcake mix, a secret birth certificate revealing that her real mother was the illegitimate niece of Eleanor Roosevelt, all is forgiven.  Before returning to her spacious Park Avenue apartment, or the one on the Champs-Élysées, or the villa outside Otranto, or whatever, Kip joyously bakes and ices the cupcakes, leaving them on the ancestral Formica kitchen counter with a note saying, “Try Echinacea for that cold!”

Labyrinth of Hell, by Damien Escher  (horror)

Jim and Angie Peterson, recent retirees with big plans for travel in their like-new Airstream, are about to vanish into a world of unspeakable terror!  It all started when Angie tried to download a coupon for fat-free butter on the new tablet pc purchased for their upcoming trip to Dollywood.  Unknown to Jim and Angie, the coupon code held an imbedded link to madness and soul death.  Comparable to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw and anything by Stephen King, this novel strips bare the hidden nightmare of our time, as the couple struggles to survive in an alien realm where nothing makes any sense and every click of a virtual keypad can obliterate all sentient life.  Readers will shudder with horror as Angie trips on a Symmetric Digital Subscriber Line and falls into the savagely cruel Hypertext Preprocessor.  Even more ghastly is the Kafkaesque 404 Error of which Jim is accused.  Stuck in a Modal Box, he cannot speak WATFIV and senses the ominous loathing of the jury, a Redundant Array of Independent Disks.  (Spoiler Alert)  Only the last-minute arrival of the couple’s eleven-year-old granddaughter, who quickly does a Bare Metal Restore, saves Jim and Angie from eternal damnation.

Destiny’s Throat, by Francesca Bellisant  (Erotica)

Bored after thirty years as a Dallas investment banker, Cynthia Nightingale is intrigued when she suddenly inherits a quaint cottage on the Maine coast from a now-dead aunt she’s never heard of.  It’s time for a change, but Cynthia has no idea how exciting change can be until she’s swept into the arms and back seat of Dirk, the taxi driver at the Bangor Airport, whose little tree-shaped air fresheners remind her of Pine-Sol.  Or Jarek, the muscular exterminator who croons the Mickey Mouse Club theme as he deftly sets traps no woman can resist.  And then there’s Connor, or Conall, or something Irish, the mail carrier with merry eyes and a deliciously Gaelic technique.  And what’s-his-name, the septic tank guy with a Ph.D. in Medieval Studies who calls her Eleanore and likes to do it outside during thunderstorms.  And then somebody who came to the door selling cable, and that to-die-for handsome gynecologist whose bedside manner was so promising but, alas, too late.  Exhausted and laden with seventeen pounds of suppositories and salves, Cynthia, who is hardshell Southern Baptist, nonetheless joins an order of cloistered Roman Catholic nuns who make $200/bottle pomegranate brandy at a pristine convent in upstate Iowa.  There she wisely begins a new career writing inspirational novels for women.

Look for these must-read titles, or not, wherever fine, nonexistent books are sold!

 

Boomer Book Review

A Hook in the Sky  (Claude Nougat) is a hair-raising coming-of- (Baby Boomer) age story, but an exclusive focus on that dimension may obscure its delicious complexity.  Anne Korkokeakivi, writing for The Millions, notes that French novels tend to be “… dark, searching, philosophical, autobiographical, self-reflective, and/or poetic (without being overwritten).”  Author Nougat isn’t French (she’s Belgian), but her protagonist is, and the novel’s style fails none of these criteria.  Indeed, it reads like the haunting, subtitled movie you discuss with friends for months!

The principal narrator, Robert, casts light on a heretofore uncelebrated stage of life – the third.  He is retiring from a career at the U.N. and painfully unsure of his next step.  Kay, his American wife, is twenty years his junior and deeply involved in her work as the owner of a trendy New York art gallery.  The couple is childless, a decision made years earlier by Kay without Robert’s knowledge or consent, the revelation of which decision causes the couple to separate.  Robert is abruptly alone, trying to recapture an abandoned version of himself – the (traditional) artist he wanted to be before choosing a more practical career.  He may stay with that career as a consultant, but instead dives headlong into the unknown.

His story is direct, seemingly honest and never “overwritten.”  He describes exotic Italian locales, his loathing for Modernist art and details of his affairs with an old friend and the friend’s troubled daughter in a seductively boundaried style.  The reader, while mesmerized by the written proximity of sunlit Italian villas, the inner workings of the U.N., heady discourses on art and the palpable disintegration of a marriage, is nonetheless aware that much remains mysterious, unsaid.  Robert is a quiet man, and yet his story is borne forward with an impossible-to-put-down momentum.  Something is about to happen, and it does.

What happens is a fascinating shift, reminiscent of that in Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog.  Once a straightforward, uncompromising tale of one (admittedly privileged and cultured) man’s transitional crisis, the novel suddenly blossoms into a sort of conceptual magic show.  It’s a wild ride into symbolic territory that may jar readers who were expecting either consistency or a sweet, comfortable ending.  After bitter confrontations over Kay’s passion for Modernist art, Robert uncharacteristically agrees to create a huge Modernist installation, a towering, dangerous, Escheresque maze of aluminum ladders rising to… a hook.  Unreachable but omnipresent, the hook both looms above and incites the conflicting struggles of the lives below.  Robert and Kay’s conflict over art reflects both their personal discord and a larger philosophical perspective from which Kay emerges monstrous, a shallow, desperate pawn in the capitalist game.  But neither does Robert emerge a hero.  He chronicles, but does not alter, the horrific/fantastic concluding events (unreported here to avoid spoiling their effect on readers).  Robert is Everyman, but an Everyman who can tell a story!

Digital publishing is still a chaotic undertaking and the text has some missing commas and an odd use of “news” as a plural noun (“The news today are promising.”), but these typographical glitches are few and subsumed in the multilayered intelligence of the book.  Ideal for book groups, A Hook in the Sky poses questions for which there may be no answers, but about which endless discussion will be compelling.

Boomers and Amour

Amour, a French movie directed by Austrian Michael Haneke, is nonetheless a French movie.  These are traditionally so understated and filled with lingering shots that have no known relevance to the story that American viewers may be forgiven for thinking, “Tell me I didn’t just pay ten dollars to watch a parked car for two hours!”  Amour, despite its adherence to this protocol, has either won or been nominated for nearly every film award on the planet.  Among the many, it won the 2012 New York Film Critics Best Foreign Film Award and the Palme D’Or in Cannes and has been nominated for five Academy Awards.  And deservedly so.

The film unsparingly documents the realistic, humiliating and frighteningly tender end of a cultured, articulate and elegant life.  Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant, whom we remember from A Man and a Woman) and Anne (Emmanuelle Riva, whom we remember from Hiroshima Mon Amour) are an elderly, middle-class Parisian couple, music teachers living quietly with books and a grand piano.  Anne has a stroke, then a failed off-screen surgery, then another stroke.  Her decline and Georges’ determination to care for her in their home until she dies comprise the story, and it is told with subtle mastery.

However, Georges and Anne have a daughter, Eva, played by Isabelle Huppert.  Viewers learn in a few (easy to miss if you don’t read the subtitles quickly) lines of dialogue that Eva, also a musician, travels professionally with a group that is still shaken after the suicide attempt of one of its members.  The suicidal woman was inconsolable after the end of her affair with Eva’s husband, Geoff.  Eva is also the mother of a young son.  Clearly, Eva is up to her teeth in the concerns of adult life – career and financial issues, children, marriage difficulties.  There is also a vague, never-explained breach between Eva and her parents, but she does intrude (she has to intrude, as her presence is not wanted) to offer support and is clearly concerned about her father’s decision to assume the complete burden of care for the partially paralyzed and increasingly incoherent Anne.

And this is where Eva’s Boomer identity assumes significance, although more within critical reaction to the movie than in the movie itself.  Eva is routinely maligned in reviews. Two examples:  New York Times critic Manohla Dargis calls Eva, “…wildly self-centered,” and feels that her offers of help “sound hollow.”  The Guardian states that Eva’s advice is “shaped by her own needs,” as if her suggestion that professional care for Anne is necessary somehow embodies a distasteful selfishness.

Amour is not about an adult child’s response to the decline into death of a parent, and most reviews merely mention that the part of Eva is played by Huppert.  However, the vitriol regarding Eva in reviews that do address her role in the story is so skewed as to demand attention.  Eva tries to establish involvement in her parents’ life with phone calls that are never answered and visits in which she is treated as an unwelcome guest.  This is a tangential dimension of the film, highlighting the natural isolation of the dying, but is overlooked in analyses of Eva’s behavior.

She’s nervous and frightened by her mother’s pitiful condition, and in one scene chatters on and on about the sale of a house and the difficulty in finding another one, as bedridden and cognitively lost, Anne struggles to respond, managing to pronounce only two words – grand mère and maison.  Grandmother, house.  It is a last communication between adult child and dying mother, incomprehensible but not empty.  Eva has offered news of her life, however superficial it may seem in comparison to Anne’s condition; Anne has made a bridge of understanding – she is the grandmother, and she understands that the conversation is about houses.  The scene struck me as powerful and touching; critics saw it as evidence of Eva’s self-absorption.

There are a number of these events throughout the movie, involving potential for wildly divergent interpretations of the adult child’s (the Boomer’s) role in the lives of aged parents.

After her first stroke, when both are aware that she will decline and die, Anne forces Georges to promise that he will not hospitalize her, that he will allow her to remain at home.  Georges acquiesces to her demand.  The request is almost universal and haunts both spouses and adult children who, in the end, may not be able to keep the promise.  But is the request realistic, or is it a version of “selfishness” that no one who is not dying dare name?

The journey of death is by definition “selfish,” as it must be traveled alone.  Those facing that journey are frightened and cannot be blamed for wanting familiar surroundings.  And we all live proximate to a communal “memory” of earlier times when people did die wherever they were when the time came, ideally at home amid supportive extended family, pets, livestock and neighbors.  But those days are no longer the norm.  Adult children often live thousands of miles from aging parents, often have (and need) work that cannot be abandoned, and children.  Eva’s urging her father to place Anne in hospice care is met with flat rejection, which is Georges’ right.  He has chosen to keep a terrible promise and no one, not even his daughter, may violate it.  But is Eva’s suggestion merely the self-absorbed cop-out of a superficial and cowardly Boomer, or does it reflect a current, and not necessarily unkind, strategy for death?

At the end, Eva is shown silently contemplating her parents’ now-empty apartment (Georges having also vanished after Anne’s death under magical/hallucinatory circumstances that, again, may not satisfy the narrative expectations of American viewers), presumably awed, confounded or horrified by the drama that has transpired there.  She may not know, may suspect, may not want to know the details from which she has been excluded all along.  What she does know, as we all do at this time, is that her parents are gone.  Orphaned, nothing now stands between her and the inevitable moment when she will undertake the same journey that has led them away.

Her philandering husband seems an unlikely candidate for the depth of devotion that gives the movie its name, Georges’ not-always-lovely devotion to Anne, itself an ambivalent ideal experienced by few.  Eva is alone on an empty stage where a drama unavailable to her, and to most, has transpired and is gone.  We know that her parents’ story is not hers.  That she is aware of another, different, contemporary story does not make her “selfish.”  It makes her an adult in her own time.

Baby Boomer Books

Oh joy, a controversy!  78 million people now comprise, and millions more are close to, a demographic category several million others wish would just shut up.  The 78 million-plus are Baby Boomers.  Late forties and up.  The third stage of life.  Some Boomers are insisting that third-stage experience will give rise to its own literary genre, while detractors are certain that nothing interesting can possibly happen after 46 and thus no literature can emerge from the Boomer demographic.  Stories, after all, require conflict, drama, interesting stuff about which to write.  Hmmm.

All literature is about change, about transition.  A king dies, conflict ensues, new king happens.  Boy meets girl, conflict ensues, both are changed (usually into parents).  Aliens/serial killers/heartless corporations threaten, conflict ensues, salvation lies in characters who change under threat in order to slay the beasts.  Transition, which cannot occur without conflict, is the first cause and beating heart of stories.

Life involves four major transitions, of which two (birth and death) do not produce literature.  These two are silent, since we cannot remember our births and cannot write books while dead.  The second transition, child-to-adult (innocence to experience), has given us countless myths and the currently wildly popular YA genre.

Claude Nougat, a Rome-based novelist and economist, notes that sheer Boomer numbers created YA forty or fifty years ago.  Those same numbers, now mature, are creating a new genre reflecting the third transition – adult-to-sage (experience to wisdom).  But is the third transition sufficiently rife with conflict and drama to make literature?

Oh boy, is it ever!

It always was.  While a failed child-to-adult transition results in nothing more than a large, lumbering child whose existence is both puzzling and tedious, a failed adult-to-sage transition is a profound and hideous disaster!  Remember the nasty Boomer so obsessed with maintaining her youthful allure that she tried three times to murder her beautiful stepdaughter in order to remain “the fairest in all the land”?  Time, of course, cannot be stopped, and all attempts to do so are doomed.  But the punishment for failing to make the third-stage transition is dire.  Snow White’s stepmother must dance, screaming, in red-hot iron shoes until she dies.  In a more recent story, a Boomer named Willy Loman (Death of a Salesman) commits suicide rather than relinquish his now-delusional adult-stage images of himself and the world.

We are only too familiar with the agonizing penalty for failure at the third-stage transition because there is already an archetypal body of literature documenting it.  But these archetypal tales aren’t Boomer Literature.  The genre is new, largely because although there have always been individuals who lived long and well, only now have medical advances, diet and a non-scarcity environment allowed enormous numbers to approach the third-stage transition bright-eyed, healthy and looking for roadmaps to successful navigation of these heretofore uncharted waters.  IE: “Wow, I’m not dead!  I’m not even sick.  Apparently I’m going to live quite a bit longer than popular ideas have led me to expect.  What now?”

Boomer Lit is about making it, about defining that shadowy divide and crossing it with style.  Boomers are beginning to write and read books about themselves in every genre, although Hollywood, ever sensitive to sources of impressive profit, got there first.  The Descendants (George Clooney), The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (Maggie Smith, Judi Dench) and Hope Springs (Meryl Streep, Tommy Lee Jones), to name only three of about fifteen in 2012, are box-office hits.  Many more Boomer movies are in the pipeline, Boomerism is a hot topic in the media and there are too many Boomer blogs to count. But Boomer Literature is the turtle in this race, scrambling to catch up.

Why?  Not because young people think older people are hopelessly stupid and out of it; that’s perfectly normal.  Every generation must define itself in opposition to what has (recently) gone before.  The life-threatening leap to wisdom from the precipice of experience cannot interest those still trying to accumulate experience.  The attitudes of the young are of no significance here, and cannot be blamed for the dearth of good Boomer literature.

What can be blamed is a two-headed sloth.  One head is a publishing industry that somehow managed to overlook the tsunami of readers in an age demographic Hollywood is only too happy to please.  Heads of literary agencies, senior editors and publishing CEOs are themselves Boomers-and-up, but the dissolution of the traditional publishing world has shaken them so badly that they can’t read an actuarial table.  The other head belongs to an army of interesting, educated and articulate Boomer writers who (a) have internalized the concept that their stories aren’t interesting, and/or (b) are unwilling to dive into the admittedly trying realm of digital publishing technology.

That’s changing, slowly.  An early phalanx of Boomer authors has launched itself.  So, savagely trashing the convention that authors may not write book reviews, I’m going to devote a bunch of subsequent blogs to reviewing, or at least listing, new Boomer novels.

Stay tuned…