Filming at Duke University: Volker Schlöndorff's Adaptation of 'The Handmaid's Tale' (1990)

Volker Schlöndorff focuses consistently on such themes as explored in The Handmaid's Tale. His Der junge Törless / Young Törless (1966) is concerned with how social psychology works as a psychic battleground between mass contagion and individual choice. His other movies, all exacting, include Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum / The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (1975),  Der Fangschuß / Coup de grâce (1976),  Die Blechtrommel / The Tin Drum (1979), Un amour de Swann / Swann in Love (1984) and Diplomatie / Diplomacy (2014). 

Schlöndorff takes a few liberties with The Handmaid's Tale (1990), but the gist remains. Fascism or plain old authoritarianism, patriarchy melded with pseudo-religious ideology, cults of macho personality -- gang's all here. In 2018, one can see variants of the same in Islamic State, Saudi Arabia, Boko Haram, Orthodox Conservative Christianity and Orthodox Conservative Judaism, Putin, Duterte, Trump, Erdoğan, and so on -- enemies all to cosmopolitan egalitarianism, equality and diversity, and thereby enemies all to my own sweet sensibilities! 

Today's Rune: Flow.

Volker Schlöndorff's Adaptation of 'The Handmaid's Tale' (1990)

Volker Schlöndorff's 1990 adaptation of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (1985) was filmed at Duke University (pictured above) and elsewhere around Durham (one scene looks like the rail line behind Brightleaf Mall, a cluster of converted tobacco warehouses), Raleigh and the mountains of North Carolina. It's colorful, harrowing in parts and yet also salted occasionally with wry, dark humor. 

Volker Schlöndorff focuses consistently on such themes as explored in The Handmaid's Tale. His Der junge Törless / Young Törless (1966) is concerned with how social psychology works as a psychic battleground between mass contagion and individual choice. His other movies, all exacting, include Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum / The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (1975),  Der Fangschuß / Coup de grâce (1976),  Die Blechtrommel / The Tin Drum (1979), Un amour de Swann / Swann in Love (1984) and Diplomatie / Diplomacy (2014). 

Schlöndorff takes a few liberties with The Handmaid's Tale (1990), but the gist remains. Fascism or plain old authoritarianism, patriarchy melded with pseudo-religious ideology, cults of macho personality -- gang's all here. In 2017, one can see variants of the same in Islamic State, Saudi Arabia, Boko Haram, Orthodox Conservative Christianity and Judaism, Putin, Duterte, Trump, Erdoğan, and so on -- enemies all to cosmopolitan egalitarianism, equality and diversity, and thereby enemies all to my own sensibilities. 

Today's Rune: Fertility. 

Four More from Germany / Deutschland, 1990

Germany, 1990. If every picture tells a story worth a thousand words, what's going on here?

Soviet T34 tank. «тридцатьчетвёрка»

Germany: fun with a rifle. 

Pergamonmuseum, Berlin. 

Today's Rune: Possessions. 

Germany / Deutschland, 1990

More digitized slides from my parents' adventures in Germany. On October 3, 1990, the Day of German Unity / Tag der Deutschen Einheit (reunification of East and West Germany), the international Photokina began another of its bi-annual trade fairs in Köln / Cologne. These shots are from this trip, taken around Cologne and elsewhere in Germany. The picture above is spectacular when enlarged to a massive scale. 

Photo-related advertisements - pre-digital age. 

Big pretzels (Die Brezel)!

Riparian mystery reminiscent of a Bruegel painting. People painting murals on open sections of wall?  Strange days in Germany.

Today's Rune: The Mystery Rune. 

Wallace Fowlie's 'Poem and Symbol: A Brief History of French Symbolism'

Wallace Fowlie, Poem & Symbol: A Brief History of French Symbolism (University Park and London: The Pennsylvania State University, 1990).

I love international interplay, and among those French poets broadly termed symbolists, we have Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) inspiring Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) and Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898), who in turn have inspired T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison, Patti Smith, Dum Dum Girls and onward.

But let's get back to Baudelaire via Fowlie: "The word associated with Baudelaire in the new aesthetic credo was bizarre. In announcing in his salon of 1855 that 'le beau est toujours bizarre' ('beauty is always strange'), he indicated that the artist's attraction to the strange is an element of . . . personality and separates [the artist] from [the majority of people], who submit easily to the conventional and the traditional, who prefer not to be startled by originality . . ." (p. 5). Exactly.

"[I]mpulses that often manifest themselves in the subconscious -- fantasies, hallucinations, and sentiments of fear -- and which in most . . . are not allowed to develop represent the sources of experiences in [humanity's] moral and physicial life. The artist, for Baudelaire, feels a desire to know and explore such fantasies that border on dreams and nightmares." (p. 5). Absolutely.

In a section on René Char (1907-1988), Fowlie continues: "The poetic act is a finding of a form for things that otherwise would never emerge from their abyss or their silence or their possibility . . . The risk of poetry is precisely this responsibility of the poet in the action of drawing poetry from the poet's sleep and from his [or her] subconscious." (p. 146).

"There is a price to pay for feeling deeply and for writing as a poet. That price is the daily assumption of peril." (p. 147). Indeed. 

Today's Rune: Growth. 

Wong Kar-Wei: Days of Being Wild

Wong Kar-Wei: Days of Being Wild (1990). Retro (1960-1961). Atmosphere. People. Lonely. Lost. Pining. Wet Streets.

Wong Kar-Wei: Days of Being Wild. Interior Spaces. Smoking. She wants this, he wants that. Telephones and clocks. 

Wong Kar-Wei: Days of Being Wild. Image. Music. Groovy style. I dig. Can you?

Today's Rune: Harvest.

Zen in the Art of Writing (Take I)

Ray Bradbury's Zen in the Art of Writing (1990, 1992) provides an entertaining and energetic primer for just about any interested party. It's infectious. Read a handful of pages and you come away brimming with ideas, rearing to go.

Try this one for size: "You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you."  Amen to that!

Q: "What are the best things and the worst things in your life, and when are you going to get around to whispering or shouting them?"

And, apropos of the Martin-Zimmerman encounter: When was the last time you were stopped by the police in your neighborhood because you like to walk, and perhaps think, at night? It happened to me just often enough that, irritated, I wrote 'The Pedestrian,' a story of a time, fifty years from now, when a man is arrested and taken off for clinical study because he insists on looking at un-televised reality, and breathing un-air-conditioned air. . . (page 6).

Finally, there's THE LIST, an unfolding group of nouns (sometimes with modifiers) -- providing a lifetime of evolving ideas . . . not unlike Twyla Tharp's "pretend you're a verb" strategy for the longterm.

Here's to staying drunk on writing. Huzzah!

Today's Rune: Fertility.   

Mike Leigh: Life Is Sweet

Mike Leigh is an odd one. I go back to his films from time to time for more hidden gems. Fortunately, the Criterion Collection recently re-released Leigh's Life Is Sweet / Life is Sweet, which I hadn't before seen again since it came out in 1990 (UK) / 1991 (USA). 

Leigh's style is an unforgettable combination of totally low-key and seemingly over-the-top. People are like real people in real situations, some of them slightly odd, most of them microcosms of entire lifetimes. 

Hard to believe that no one else thought to call a movie Life is Sweet, eh? Somebody had to do it . . . 

The soundtrack and Édith Piaf tend to stick in the head over the years as much as the characters.  

Which reminds me, the US Post Office is selling combo sheets of Édith Piaf and Miles Davis stamps. Get 'em while they last! Life is sweet!

Today's Rune: Fertility.       

The Medium is the Message: Cassette Tapes

". . . an environment becomes fully visible only when it has been superseded by a new environment; thus we are always one step behind in our view of the world. Because we are benumbed by any new technology — which in turn creates a totally new environment — we tend to make the old environment more visible; we do so by turning it into an art form and by attaching ourselves to the objects and atmosphere that characterized it, just as we’ve done with jazz, and as we’re now doing with the garbage of the mechanical environment via pop art. . . -- “The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan,” Playboy (March 1969).

As an influential medium, the cassette tape took off in the 1970s, overcoming reel-to-reel and the 8-Track and challenging vinyl LPs. But behind it emerged the CD, and behind that, digital downloads. What next?

According to Kara Rose in "Cassette Tapes See New Life after MP3s," USA Today (October 3, 2011 - updated), cassette sales peaked in 1990 with over 440 million sold. New "herds" were "killed off" as quickly and brutally as the American Bison after the American Civil War, but like the Buffalo in the 20th century and with care and consideration in the 21st, cassettes have made a modest comeback. It's worth noting that cassettes cost about one tenth of what vinyl did to produce -- though they certainly were not priced that way in the 1980s. Nowadays, cassettes and CDs can be produced in small batches by musicians and their associates -- and priced competitively. The not quite "old environment" has become, as Marshall McLuhan phrases it above,  "more visible" with the passage of time. Now we have so many options that a person can barely know where to turn at any particular moment -- or so it would seem by daily observation. 

Today's Rune: The Mystery Rune.       

Andrei Codrescu: The Disappearance of the Outside

Andrei Codrescu's The Disappearance of the Outside: A Manifesto for Escape (Ruminator Press, 2001, with new preface; original edition, Addison-Wesley, 1990) does a lot of things at dizzying speed. For one thing, it discusses a lot of literature, particularly Romanian, but also Eastern European in general, and Latin American, with some on North American, too, including from the perspectives of Walt Whitman and William S. Burroughs. There is a lot about Dada, Surrealism and the Beats, about authoritarian society, communist dictatorship and also advertising, technology, propaganda and globalism.

Hopefully, more on this in the future. But in the meantime, one of my favorite lines in this dazzling text is also one of Codrescu's simplest: "Here were books."

This copy signed on March 13, 2002, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. That was a real cool time. Anne Waldman was there, too.

I've been co-reading Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space / La poétique de l'espace, translated by Maria Jolas (1994 edition; orginally published in 1958). Right now, it's as if The Poetics of Space is having a conversation with The Disappearance of the Outside -- right down to "the dialectics of inside and outside" (Bachelard, page 84). A nest, a space, a house, a place -- go, dream cats, go!

Today's Rune: Signals.     

Stephen Frears: The Grifters

Stephen Frears The Grifters (1990) stays true to the spirit and many of the specifics of Jim Thompson's 1963 noir novel of the same title. It is a lesson in human psychology and the freakonomics of grifting (swindling). Essentially, grifting only works with economy of scale: corporate size grifting. Smalltime grifting will get you nowhere and is a dangerous, self-destructive pursuit. It is too small to succeed over the long run. Corporate-size grifting, on the other hand, is more often "too big to fail," making millionaires of its psychopathic avatars; its destruction is aimed at everyone else but the perpetrators.

In The Grifters, Anjelica Huston, Annette Bening and John Cusack are superb as unlikeable protaganists, smalltime mental cases who overestimate their grifting skills. Their characters are relatively small bit players going nowhere.  Secondary players -- all good -- include Pat Hingle (the judge in Hang 'Em High, 1968); Henry Jones (Leroy the halfwit in The Bad Seed, 1956); J.T. Walsh (The lawyer in The Last Seduction with Linda Fiorentino, 1993) Stephen Tobolowsky (Deadwood, Californication); plus Jeremy Piven before hair implants as a sailor (Ari on Entourage). Director Stephen Frears has presided over the creation of many excellent, thoughtful films ranging from My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) to The Queen (2006).   

Finally, the "period" details in The Grifters show just how much has changed in the past two decades. There are several payphones, primitive computers, large cars, no SUVs, no cellphones. It is most apparently a different world, though human nature remains the same.

Today's Rune: Harvest.

Czechoslovakia: Orphan of The Great War, 1918-1992

Czechoslovakia is one of the countries that emerged from imperial disintegration in the wake of the Great War of 1914-1918. Another was Armenia. A conflict as large as the Great War has reverberated down through the present, and Czechoslvakia, which came to being in 1918, broke in two in 1992 after the collapse of the Soviet Empire, another child of the Great War. But enough of war. What about Czechs and Slovaks and Moravians and Bohemians and the cuisine and culture they brought to America?



Well, I've eaten at Czech places in Illinois and Iowa and Texas, at Moravian places in Pennsylvania and Norh Carolina; and I've lived like a Bohemian, at least in the adopted sense of the word. You can get koláče / kolaches in many bakeries, Czech and German (stuffed pastries); a lot of the food seems like a hybrid of Germanic and Slavic, which makes sense given the geographic origin. Let's not forget Czech beer, which is among the best in the world (especially when it's on tap and close to the source): Budweiser Budvar (Budějovický Budvar) -- so much tastier than current watery American Budweiser it's off the charts -- and Pilsner Urquell (Plzeňský Prazdroj), "Original Pilsner." There have been breweries in the Czech old country for 900 years, maybe more.

Above poster: Contemporary Czechoslovak Posters, February 23-April 8, 1990, The City Gallery of Contemporary Art, Raleigh, North Carolina, USA.  Synchronicity being what it is, I "broke up with" a Czech American in 1992/93, the same year as the so-called "Velvet Divorce" that split Czechoslovakia into the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic.   

Today's Rune: Breakthrough.

Keep it Simple: Petrol That Emotion

A salute to That Petrol Emotion, back in the saddle again after a fifteen year hiatus.

Albums:
Manic Pop Thrill (1986)
Babble (1987)
End Of the Millennium Psychosis Blues (1988)
Chemicrazy (1990) -- featured above.
Fireproof (1993)
Final Flame Live at the Grand and the Tivoli Ballroom 1994 (2000).

Name alone is worth the price of admission.

An American in Saudi Arabia, Early 1990s

Photos taken at Half Moon Bay, Saudi Arabia, 1990-1991, by Camela, who was stationed in the region during the period of the Persian Gulf War. From her accompanying description, sent via email and re-posted by permission:

The fish are kiosks at the beach, male on one side, female on the other. Half Moon was a resort where the military could go to for R & R. Every time the bus took us there it had to stop and tell some person how many women were on the bus; I asked the driver why and he had no answer.

If a woman wanted to swim in the pool she had to wear a cover up because if a young male waiter saw her skin and got a hard-on, it was the woman's fault. This has been the Muslim train of thought for centuries.

When we first got to Saudi and were walking to town with a couple of guys who'd been there for some time, we passed a man and he was scratching his genitals, a normal man thing, but the next one we passed was actually jerking off. When we got back to our hooch, retelling our experience, one of the girls said that since we didn't have our heads covered, we were whores to them and that is why they acted the way they did. After that episode, we wore scarfs to cover up when we went out.

It's been eighteen years since Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm; many civilian and military veterans have written about or told me stories from then (including dozens of community college students), but Camela's take has the added twist of a woman's wartime point of view. Many thanks to her for permission to post.

Today's Rune: Initiation.

Devil's Night And Other True Tales of Detroit

Just finished Devil's Night And Other True Tales of Detroit (1990), an interesting book by Pontiac-born Israeli author Ze'ev Chafets. There's not much in it that I haven't absorbed from ten years of observing and listening to people of all sorts of ethnicities and backgrounds, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. It's a time capsule back to the Coleman Young days, when the fiery black mayor ruled the roost, with background going back to the 1950s.

Detroit and its environs are endlessly fascinating. Conflict has always reigned here, which makes it a great continuous serial narrative with many dramatic installments. First there were competing Indian tribes, then the French entered the mix, followed by the British and Pontiac's Uprising, then the fledgling United States; surrender by General William Hull to an Anglo-Indian-Canadian force in the War of 1812; riots during the American Civil War; industry and car production, assembly lines and Fordisms; the 1943 race riots sparked around Belle Isle; the post-WWII boom and the 1967 riots; Coleman Young and white flight; and the casino and other urban development project years through the present. How many cities besides Detroit and Baghdad have been occupied and patroled by the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions?

Race, ethnicity and economics pretty much steal the show, though charismatic personalities sweeten the pot.

I strive to foster empathy for all parties and serve as a sort of netural observer, but I've been more irritated with the suburbs than with Detroit itself. I suspect that says more about my personality than anything else.

Chafets can't really answer why Devil's Night fires began in earnest in the early 1980s. What is evident, though, is the swath these Halloween period arsons have cut through much of the city, so much so that it appears more like rural Georgia or North Carolina than a northern urban center. Which is amazing.

Chaftets wrote from a perspective of twenty years' experience living in the Middle East, and he saw many similarities in the conflict of vision, desire and means. In this, he was clearly on to something.

A good quote representing white suburbia in the 1980s: "It's a war zone across Eight Mile[Road] . . . They[?] should put up a big wall, like in Berlin. I'm afraid to go back there -- it's like going into some Russian-held city. You don't know if you're coming back alive" (p. 137). How dramatic! And exactly as my ex-wife's extended family talked in the late 1990s before I cut them all loose.

A black Detroiter's perspective: "This is a strong city, although it appears weak" (p. 107).

Either way, I love spending much of my off-time exploring Detroit -- it's not only interesting, but I also know that most of the people I don't want to see won't be there, ever. And that's certainly a good enough reason for me, everything else being equal.

Today's Rune: Wholeness.

A Slice of Cherry Pie: Poems Inspired by Twin Peaks

Tasmanian* poet Ivy Alvarez edited and Shanna Compton's Half Empty/Half Full published A Slice of Cherry Pie (September 2006), a classy archival quality limited edition chapbook composed of eleven poems by eleven poets, all inspired by David Lynch's Twin Peaks (1990-1991).

The poems range from very tiny to quite extensive, but all evoke the eerie quality of Lynch's series. As with the show, there's sometimes a mix of humor with bizarre. Great idea, well-executed.

The only poet I'm somewhat familiar with in this collection is Jilly Dybka, and that's mainly through reading her Poetry Hut blog. Jilly, originally from Michigan, now lives in Tennessee. Her contribution, "The Log Lady's Log Whispers to Her," is very cool, six lines in all, reminding us how David Lynch taps into the primal visions of a thousand generations.

For more about the adventures of globe-trotting Ivy Alvarez, see her blog.

Shanna Compton, originally from Texas and now living in Brooklyn, has a fascinating website that contains a goldmine of links. A micropublisher, she is a veteran of Soft Skull Press.
(A great, if sometimes harrowing, example of Soft Skull is Lisa Crystal Carver's memoir, Drugs Are Nice: A Post-Punk Memoir, 2005)

Contributors to A Slice of Cherry Pie:

Emilie Zoey Baker, "[#'s 1-13]."
Jilly Dybka, "The Log Lady's Log Whispers to Her."
Collin Kelley, "Sometimes Her Arms Bend Back."
Elena Knox, "Palinpoem for Pete's Sake."
Jared Leising, "Diane Dreams of Dale's Voice."
Daniel Lloyd, Untitled (first line: "I feel like a wild person").
Siobhan Logan, "Traffic Light Girls."
Eileem Tabios, ";The Collapse of the Last Log" (punctuation intended).
Maureen Thorson, "Sayonara, Cherry Pie."
Andrew J. Wilson, "Haikai-No-Renga for Diane."
Maike Zock, "Life's Little Secret."



Today's Rune: Wholeness.

Sayonara at the Cherry Hut from another Temple Owl.

*see clarifying comment from Ivy Alvarez.

David Lynch: Twin Peaks

David Lynch's INLAND EMPIRE will hit the big screen in November, 2006. Between that and receiving copy number 57 of the first edition of A Slice of Cherry Pie (September 2006), "the first volume in a series of chapbook anthologies inspired by the work of director David Lynch, to be edited by Ivy Alvarez," I can't help but remember Twin Peaks, the stylishly spooky and sardonic TV series that originally aired in 1990 and 1991 and was followed by Fire Walk With Me (1992), the even creepier movie version. I haven't seen any of it since I moved from Philadelphia in 1995, but images and dialogue resurface intermittently like recurring dream sequences.

After anxiously waiting from week to week during the two years when Twin Peaks ran, I watched the whole thing one weekend, something I'd recommend to any fan for the sense of continuity and discontinuity. I remember seeing the pilot afterwards, before Agent Cooper was fully developed and honed with his slice of cherry pie and talk of Tibet. I also remember Season One as being far more compelling then Season Two.

Twin Peaks was one of the best shows in the history of television before 2000, without doubt.

Writing this post brings to mind one more thing: the chill of seeing the grave of a Laura Palmer in Philadelphia, in an urban cemetery right next to a diner near Manayunk, after a damn fine cup of coffee.

Today's Rune: The Blank Rune.

Hasta La Vista!

Anne Lamott: Operating Instructions

Here's something I wrote several years ago, the draft of something since edited and published for a library reference volume. Thanks, Cheri, for reminding me:

Anne Lamott

Erik France, Critical Essay on Operating Instructions in Nonfiction Classics for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.

France is a librarian and teaches history and interdisciplinary studies at University Liggett School and writing and poetry at Macomb Community College near Detroit, Michigan. In the following essay, he discusses ways that humor, faith, family, and friendship fuel her resilient approach to life as a first-time mother and persistent writer.

In Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year, Anne Lamott employs a mixture of humor and pathos, witty observation, remembrance, and anecdote to carry the reader through her first year as a mother. She tells a compelling story that highlights her complicated life issues and resilient faith. Equally, she makes evident the charity and support of a wide variety of friends and relatives that help console and sustain her through many ups and downs. The calendar structure adds drama to the often exhausting life changes inherent in the first year of a mother-child relationship. Each sporadic entry is dated and usually includes a brief account of baby Sam Lamott’s growth and development that is written in a way that allows the reader to gain considerable insight into Anne’s ever-changing feelings and responses. Anne learns how to develop and protect her personal boundaries, especially how and when to say no to distractions and when to say yes to people who can and do truly help her.

Anne Lamott, at age thirty-five, painfully but successfully faces the challenge of sustaining her life as a writer while becoming a single parent. Her decision not to have an abortion, to rather follow her pregnancy through, results in Sam’s birth and her own increasing sense of responsibility to herself, her son, and to others. She is not alone in this transition. By this time in her life, she has developed a sense of faith; having already given up alcohol and drug addictions, she now turns more energetically to a network of healing people, a sort of mutual aid society. Anne Lamott’s willingness to ask for and receive help represents one of the main themes of Operating Instructions. She refers to the people closest to her as her “pit crew” (race car terminology for the people who maintain and repair a driver’s car and who look after the well-being of the driver, most crucially during the stress of actual races). She also uses the more general term “tribe,” a largely religious and anthropological metaphor for people bonded and responsible for helping each other at a deep level, to include other friends and acquaintances from her church and elsewhere. To appreciate how far Anne Lamott has come by the end of the book, one may usefully consider where she came from. She herself reflects in many journal entries about her past: this is part of her process of healing and living in a healthier, more hopeful way.

When the journal begins, Anne finds herself pregnant and utterly abandoned by the man who helped make her that way. This unnamed man, more than fifteen years older than her, is the latest and (she hopes) the last in her long string of relationships with men who she characterizes as “crummy.” But Anne’s complex set of problems and issues go further back than any of her boyfriends. They originated from her complicated and difficult family milieu. Situated in the San Francisco and Marin County area, Anne and her brothers John and Steve lived in a somewhat dysfunctional household with their parents, Dorothy and Kenneth Lamott. The children were exposed to a mix of left-leaning politics, intermittent Bohemianism, alcohol, drugs, and interesting people. Anne experienced many discussions and parties among her parents' friends and acquaintances, including a substantial number of people like her parents, agnostic and atheist thinkers and artists with social consciousness who believed in political activism. Anne retained the social consciousness, but, feeling a void without a sense of religious underpinning, she became, gradually and after years of stubborn resistance and self-abuse, a practicing Christian. This latter development played a major role in the raising of Sam, and many members of the St. Andrew Presbyterian Church of Marin City, California, helped and encouraged her along the way.

Still, despite the complications, Anne did benefit in two very lasting ways from her parents. Kenneth, a writer, provided a singularly positive attribute for Anne to learn from: as role model for her as a writer. He kept at his writing regularly, a disciplined habit that Anne picked up and, despite various addictive distractions and many years of self-sabotage, adhered to. During Sam’s first year, All New People, a novel she had completed reached the point of publication and distribution; she wrote a regular column for California magazine, she kept at the journal that became, in published form, Operating Instructions; and she was contracted for another magazine column, as well. Probably as much as her father, Anne’s mother also provided a strong role model in one particular way: Dorothy Lamott refused to place herself second to anyone. She had gone to law school and had eventually left the family and moved to Hawaii for a while to pursue her own dream. By the time of Anne Lamott’s 1989-1990 journal, Kenneth Lamott was long dead from a brain tumor, and Dorothy was back in California helping with Sam. In the meantime, Anne had increasingly turned to the rest of her tribe and pit crew to help her find her own way through life.

For many years, Anne had turned to addictive behaviors to deny the sense of grief and loss brought about by her offbeat upbringing, her parents’ divorce, and her father’s death, and to avoid having to deal with internal loneliness and longing. Since a teenager, she “tried everything in sometimes suicidally vast quantities—alcohol, drugs, work, food, excitement, good deeds, popularity, men, exercise, and just rampant obsession and compulsion—to avoid” facing herself, alone. Finally, when she is pregnant, she does face herself and somehow manages to go on. Though she must do the heaviest work herself, she is truly consoled and helped by her many disparate friends, one of whom, John Manning, is also a mutual friend of the man who abandoned her as soon as she told him he was pregnant.

Three remarkably important members of Anne Lamott’s tribe and pit crew described in Operating Instructions include her therapist Rita, her brother Steve, and her long-time friend Pamela Murray. Rita helps Anne come to terms with herself and discover forgiveness, including the ability to forgive herself for past excess. A recovering alcoholic and addict, Anne relies on Rita “mostly because I had so many variations on the theme of low self-esteem, with conceitedness marbled in, the classic egomaniac with an inferiority complex.” Between sessions with Rita and the demands of raising Sam, dealing with money issues, and continuing at her writing, Anne learns how to develop and protect her personal boundaries, especially how and when to say no to distractions and when to say yes to people who can and do truly help her. Anne’s brother Steve helps in practical ways, provides some comic relief, and serves as a reminder that not all men are “crummy.” Of Pamela, her best friend, Anne writes: “I could not have gone through this, could not be doing it now, without Pammy.” When Pammy is diagnosed with cancer during Sam Lamott’s first year, Anne is devastated; still, because of Sam, she persists. Though these three people stand out, there are many others who help Anne Lamott keep going, as well.

Finally, in addition to faith and the familial community of her tribe and pit crew, Anne Lamott keeps herself and others going with her biting jokes and general sense of humor. When not making fun of herself and her neuroses, she devotes many of her sarcastic quips to belittling a range of “crummy” men, including ex-sexual partners, a potential Republican boyfriend (she is a lifelong Democrat) from whom she decides to spare herself the poison, and even George Herbert Walker Bush, the standing president during Sam Lamott’s first year of life. Anne describes Bush as reminding every woman of their first “ex-.” Her passionate rage against Republicans is humorous as much for its excess as anything else. The diatribes against Bush also provide historical context for Operating Instructions. The San Francisco earthquake of 1989 does as well. Anne is able to see humor even during that disaster, for she recognizes and satirizes her obsessive concern for good reviews and sales of All New People even in the midst of the initial major earthquake and its aftershocks.

Reflecting on her son’s first year, Anne Lamott realizes that one cannot and need not be in control of all of life’s details. It is enough to have a grasp of the important things in life; beyond that, each day is a new adventure to be taken in daily terms. She paraphrases writer E. L. Doctorow’s night driving analogy about writing, adapting it to life: at night, one can only see as far as a beam of headlights permits, but if one is careful, that is enough to permit one to successfully drive all the way to one’s destination. Though it stands on its own, Anne Lamott further contemplates and explores the main themes of Operating Instructions in two subsequent nonfiction works: Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, and Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith.

Lamott, Anne. All New People, North Point Press, 1989.

——, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, Pantheon Books, 1994.

——, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith, Pantheon Books, 1999.

Ciao!

Latin America: "Born in Blood and Fire"

A few years ago, I had the opportunity to create and teach a one semester course called Latin American Studies. The last word gave me freer rein to take a broader, more flexible cultural approach than straight-out history (which is my nature). If in the beginning I knew little in depth about the subject, the first round of students in the class knew next to nothing. On the first day, I had them do a free association exercise about their understanding of anything south of the United States, and they came up with things like the drug trade, smuggling, dictators, illegal immigrants, jungles, poverty, tacos, music and dancing. I kid you not. Clearly, there's always the need for more education! Luckily, by the end of the first semester, these kids did learn something more, and so did I. Most importantly, I came upon a better core text than the dense, British-authored Penguin history we first used: Born in Blood and Fire: A Concise History of Latin America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001) by John Charles Chasteen, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is (as far as I can tell) the best one volume study of Latin America available in American English. Also, there's a newer edition now out that brings things closer to the present. The first edition is divided into nine sections: Encounter, 1492-1600; Colonial Crucible, 1600-1810; Independence, 1810-1825; Postcolonial Blues, 1825-1850; Progress, 1850-1880; Neocolonialism, 1910-1945; Revolution, 1945-1960; Reaction, 1960-1990; and Neoliberalism, 1990-present. Each section has an interesting coda that Chasteen calls Countercurrents, adding to the richness of coverage. The introduction gives a nice overview and includes population statistics and other vital data. He lines up every Latin American country by area/physical size, then gives population estimates as of 1999. In order, largest-sized country to smallest (from p. 26):

Brazil 168 million
Argentina 36.6
Mexico 97.4
Peru 25.2
Colombia 41.6
Bolivia 8.1
Venezuela 23.7
Chile 15.0
Paraguay 5.4
Ecuador 12.4
Urigiay 3.3
Nicaragua 4.9
Cuba 11.2
Guatemala 11.1
Honduras 6.3
Panama 2.8
Costa Rica 3.9
Dominican Republic 8.4
El Salvador 6.2
Total Latin America 491.5
USA 276.2

Aside from history, we looked at art and architecture, listened to music, watched a few movies, and read some literary works. I tried to focus on Latin America in its own right, not merely in relation to the USA. It was great fun, and fascinating, and one student ended up going to Buenos Aires and reporting back. Hence, I'm delighted to have linked up with Luma of Brazil. Though there's a permanent link in the sidebar, here's another internal one to her lively and thoughtful blog: http://luzdeluma.blogspot.com/

Not sure for everyone else, but when I go to Luz de Luma over the internet, I can right-click on my mouse and then click on a command that will translate (roughly) into English, a cool feature, indeed. You may have noticed that I added a "Babelfish" Systran translator to my sidebar, as well. Of course, I welcome international traffic and am always delighted to hear from non-English speakers.

While I am advocating for Luma, I'd also like to point out three other very active, insightful and witty fellow Michigan, USA blogs. Jim, this one's for synergy! Let's see if we can really get something cooking here.

Michelle's Spell:
http://michellespells.blogspot.com/

Mme Cheri's Open, Remove, Swallow Dry:
http://shimmeringcheri.blogspot.com/

Jim's JR's Thumbprints:
http://jrtomlinson.blogspot.com/

Adios for now, Erik el Rojo

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Looking for Mary

Today in Detroit it’s been warm and casual; with Good Friday off from work, I took a long walk, did my taxes, and kept my eyes and ears open. The federales, it turns out, owe me a little special something – usually I end up having to pay them. Now, if credit card companies would follow suit and start sending me high interest payments, I’d be much obliged. . . . .

During my afternoon outdoors adventure, I dropped by Judy’s Lunch at Kercheval and Maryland. It’s a tiny old school diner with a U-shaped counter; smoking is not only permitted, but most certainly dominates the long parts of the U. Overall, Judy's looks and feels like a diner from some long-ago decade: the New Age has not yet come scampering though the door. The short order chefs tend to be biker mamas with gruff demeanors, but they are efficient and tend to add an extra garnish to the food they serve up. There are newspapers all around, so I skimmed the Free Press. A front page article suggests that Detroit could become the murder capital of the USA again, with 106 recorded homicides as of last Tuesday vs. 374 for all of 2005. Even before the latest round of shootings, that’s a 22 percent jump from this time last year. While pondering these little facts, I palmed the “57” on the back of a bottle of Heinz ketchup to get it flowing; to my right, a woman with wild orange hair talked nonstop to a an old Italian man, who sat listening with quiet politeness. I caught something about the incorruptability of the bodies of saints, and some saint being dug up after two years to prevent vandalism – completely intact except for “one ear starting to decay.” I was almost sad to see them leave.

After Judy's, I walked down to St. Ambrose, where I converted three years ago, and listened to the bells toll. I love the sound of church bells – so otherworldly, so anything but usual. Same goes for rustling chimes and breezes along the way.

In any case, I hope you all are doing well. There may be a large public memorial service for Proof tomorrow; details pending.

The book pictured above is a very good one. It came out in 2001, though it seems like yesterday. I think Looking for Mary gave me a little extra impetus to become Catholic. It's a really sweet (and sometimes dark) memoir by Bev Donofrio, who also wrote Riding in Cars With Boys: Confessions of a Bad Girl who Makes Good (1990). One of the things Donofrio recalls is how she began finding images of Mary and placing them around her living space. I can appreciate that, for sure. Thanks to friends who "get" the Catholic outlook, my apartment is practically filled with crucifixes, images of Mary in several incarnations, and all sorts of religious inconography. It's all very mysterious, certainly, but permits and encourages a great deal of quiet contemplation and faith-strengthening solitude.

Tomorrow, I'll write about the rosary, among other things. Until then, peace be with you on this Good Friday.