The Clean House and Other Plays by Sarah Ruhl
Theatre Communications Group, New York, 2006
Let me tell you something about the Midwest. The Midwest is hardcore. You grow up there, like I did, you end up either hardcore normal or hardcore weird.
So when I read the recent New Yorker piece about Sarah Ruhl, who falls into the latter category, I actually put down the magazine halfway through the piece to run to the bookstore to buy a collection of her plays -- the last copy on the shelf. I was drawn to the gentle absurdism described in the article -- wackiness to amuse, instruct, make a point. Absurdism you can relate to.
The collection did not disappoint. In The Clean House, others clean house while the maid tries to think of the perfect joke. In Late: A Cowboy song, a man, a woman and a manly woman move at a horse's pace to a few important realizations. In Melancholy Play, which I think is my favorite so far, melancholy is sexy and tears are meant to be saved. I haven't read Eurydice yet -- I may wait until after seeing it produced by ACT Theatre in Seattle later this year.
Ruhl's first intent was to be a poet, and this comes through in her plays as well. There is a musicality about the dialogue, a lilt. The stage directions are like little presents stashed throughout the play, sweet, suggestive: "It would be nice if the actress playing Red could play the guitar." "Virginia has a deep impulse to order the universe." "An intermission, or not. Preferably not."
In the New Yorker piece, Ruhl talks about the importance of lightness, yeah. Her plays are often described as comedies, and there is a comedic element to each one, but they are too earnest to be dismissed as whimsical jokes. When someone turns into an almond, there is a reason.
March 18, 2008
February 17, 2008
Wilderness Alps: Conservation and Conflict in Washington's North Cascades
by Harvey Manning
ed. Ken Wilcox
foreward by David Brower
published by the North Cascades Conservation Council
2007
Wilderness Alps is a history of the conservation efforts in the North Cascades. I am not an expert in Northwest history by any means, but this seems like a thoroughly researched, detailed account of the years leading up to the formation of the national park and recreation areas in the North Cascades, focusing mainly on the second half of the 20th century. Please note that the NCCC has a stake and some strongly held positions in this issue. Don't read the book looking for an unbiased approach.
Really, though, this is the fun of and genius of the book, which drew me in despite my initial impulse. I am going to come right out and confess to you right now that I am not a nature girl. The only times I have left the city limits in the past six months were to go to meetings or shopping. I live by the lake but I mainly observe it through my front window. I get really cranky if I don't get a shower each day or if someone innocently suggests I should go for a hike that does not involve a really good bakery on the other end.
So . . . when I first received this book to review, I eyed it warily. But it's a beautiful book, physically. The cover photo and design is really lovely -- not too granola-ish. It's got a nice heft. Although it's a paperback, the cover has front and back inside flaps (I love it when this happens! Every book publisher should do this!). There are two substantial sections of color photos, with black and white photos and maps throughout. Mountains are pretty! The book begs to be read.
And it turned out to be an enjoyable read because of its tone and scope. The author, Seattle native Harvey Manning, who died in 2006, was a well known author and conservationist. He successfully manages to combine his passion for conservation with both a sense of humor and a serious call to action. All of this is just seasoning; the bulk of the book is a thoroughly detailed chronicle of the history of the conservation efforts of the region.
Clearly this is a must read for all of you nature kids out there. But I think it can be a really valuable book for those of you coffee shop dwellers who are just trying to understand the nature kids too, who listen warily to those stories of climbing Mt. Baker or spending weeks under the trees, or who, like me, simply marvel at the beauty of the place where we live when you get those glimpses of mountaintops when turning the final corner on your Metro Bus route each day.
ed. Ken Wilcox
foreward by David Brower
published by the North Cascades Conservation Council
2007
Wilderness Alps is a history of the conservation efforts in the North Cascades. I am not an expert in Northwest history by any means, but this seems like a thoroughly researched, detailed account of the years leading up to the formation of the national park and recreation areas in the North Cascades, focusing mainly on the second half of the 20th century. Please note that the NCCC has a stake and some strongly held positions in this issue. Don't read the book looking for an unbiased approach.
Really, though, this is the fun of and genius of the book, which drew me in despite my initial impulse. I am going to come right out and confess to you right now that I am not a nature girl. The only times I have left the city limits in the past six months were to go to meetings or shopping. I live by the lake but I mainly observe it through my front window. I get really cranky if I don't get a shower each day or if someone innocently suggests I should go for a hike that does not involve a really good bakery on the other end.
So . . . when I first received this book to review, I eyed it warily. But it's a beautiful book, physically. The cover photo and design is really lovely -- not too granola-ish. It's got a nice heft. Although it's a paperback, the cover has front and back inside flaps (I love it when this happens! Every book publisher should do this!). There are two substantial sections of color photos, with black and white photos and maps throughout. Mountains are pretty! The book begs to be read.
And it turned out to be an enjoyable read because of its tone and scope. The author, Seattle native Harvey Manning, who died in 2006, was a well known author and conservationist. He successfully manages to combine his passion for conservation with both a sense of humor and a serious call to action. All of this is just seasoning; the bulk of the book is a thoroughly detailed chronicle of the history of the conservation efforts of the region.
Clearly this is a must read for all of you nature kids out there. But I think it can be a really valuable book for those of you coffee shop dwellers who are just trying to understand the nature kids too, who listen warily to those stories of climbing Mt. Baker or spending weeks under the trees, or who, like me, simply marvel at the beauty of the place where we live when you get those glimpses of mountaintops when turning the final corner on your Metro Bus route each day.
December 15, 2007
Slow Time
Two major things happened to me in 2007 -- I got a promotion at work and a new couch at home. I spent the year going from work to couch, couch to work. This from a person who spent a major period of life going to school full time, had both a full time and part time job, read in open mics a few times a month, and spent every evening at a rock and roll show when not doing one of those things. Yes, in the past I have made the classic workaholic mistake of taking on too much, burning out, melting down, picking up the pieces, starting over.
2007 would be different. I would survive. So I worked and rested. I did not write, purposely. Outside of the cubicle and the couch, there wasn't much other than the occasional happy hour or dinner out, maybe a movie from time to time. I read The New Yorker every week. I watched a lot of E!. Books and magazines piled up around me, unread. Entire friendships have taken place through text messaging and Facebook. It felt kind of good in a slovenly sort of way. And I survived . . . better than survived, actually.
I completed a major project at work, I kept my marriage healthy, and I even managed to move to a new apartment and get a new job, an ideal job for me at the place in my career where I am right now. I survived 2007 and am in a good place to start 2008 . . . except I have this nagging feeling something is missing.
I haven't done any writing or crafting for a while, and I would like to do both. I'm totally out of shape from sitting on this couch all the time. I'd like to have friends I know in person, because LOL is not actually the same as laughing out loud. I feel I've swung in the wrong direction a little. I need to find a better balance.
So I decided to restart things, one at a time, see what sticks, one thing being this blog. I put out a call for books. Through the mail comes Slow Time: Recovering the Natural Rhythm of Life by Waverly Fitzgerald. I'm not a self-help kind of girl, and my initial reaction to the title is kind of like, eh, sounds like a hippie thing. But I am familiar with Waverly's voice a little, just from a listserv we are both on, and she has never come across as too hippie to me, so I decide to give it a go.
It's a twelve week course designed for "anyone feeling starved for a more spacious and meaningful relationship with time," including "exercises [which] explore different dimensions of time, from the moment to the lifetime." Huh? My original intent is to give it a few hours on a Saturday morning then write it up book review style and move on with my day . . . but wait. I read the introduction, earnest, sincere, straightforward and down to earth. It hooks me. It's relevant to me right now.
And you know what, I'm in charge here in my little corner of the blogosphere; I have no deadlines other than my own. I started this blog so I could read what I want and not have to cater to the whims of some editor who REALLY REALLY wants me to (and will pay me $75 to!) like the new book from the latest greatest who's managed to squeak out a novel in between rehab and graduate school, where she will write a series of short stories about how alienated she feels while in graduate school in my home state, obligatory mentions of cornfields as the epitome of loneliness, no thanks (FYI, there is a lot going on in those cornfields, people, which you would know if you ever got off of I-80 before the campus exit). Go write an article about cigarette butt litter as the next great urban social crisis or something and leave me alone, dear editor.
So here's my first blog back, and you'll hear more about Slow Time in twelve weeks. I've got some other great books to review in the meantime; keep sending them in. I'm excited about the great self-published and small press stuff out there. And I am excited about 2008. It's good to be back.
2007 would be different. I would survive. So I worked and rested. I did not write, purposely. Outside of the cubicle and the couch, there wasn't much other than the occasional happy hour or dinner out, maybe a movie from time to time. I read The New Yorker every week. I watched a lot of E!. Books and magazines piled up around me, unread. Entire friendships have taken place through text messaging and Facebook. It felt kind of good in a slovenly sort of way. And I survived . . . better than survived, actually.
I completed a major project at work, I kept my marriage healthy, and I even managed to move to a new apartment and get a new job, an ideal job for me at the place in my career where I am right now. I survived 2007 and am in a good place to start 2008 . . . except I have this nagging feeling something is missing.
I haven't done any writing or crafting for a while, and I would like to do both. I'm totally out of shape from sitting on this couch all the time. I'd like to have friends I know in person, because LOL is not actually the same as laughing out loud. I feel I've swung in the wrong direction a little. I need to find a better balance.
So I decided to restart things, one at a time, see what sticks, one thing being this blog. I put out a call for books. Through the mail comes Slow Time: Recovering the Natural Rhythm of Life by Waverly Fitzgerald. I'm not a self-help kind of girl, and my initial reaction to the title is kind of like, eh, sounds like a hippie thing. But I am familiar with Waverly's voice a little, just from a listserv we are both on, and she has never come across as too hippie to me, so I decide to give it a go.
It's a twelve week course designed for "anyone feeling starved for a more spacious and meaningful relationship with time," including "exercises [which] explore different dimensions of time, from the moment to the lifetime." Huh? My original intent is to give it a few hours on a Saturday morning then write it up book review style and move on with my day . . . but wait. I read the introduction, earnest, sincere, straightforward and down to earth. It hooks me. It's relevant to me right now.
And you know what, I'm in charge here in my little corner of the blogosphere; I have no deadlines other than my own. I started this blog so I could read what I want and not have to cater to the whims of some editor who REALLY REALLY wants me to (and will pay me $75 to!) like the new book from the latest greatest who's managed to squeak out a novel in between rehab and graduate school, where she will write a series of short stories about how alienated she feels while in graduate school in my home state, obligatory mentions of cornfields as the epitome of loneliness, no thanks (FYI, there is a lot going on in those cornfields, people, which you would know if you ever got off of I-80 before the campus exit). Go write an article about cigarette butt litter as the next great urban social crisis or something and leave me alone, dear editor.
So here's my first blog back, and you'll hear more about Slow Time in twelve weeks. I've got some other great books to review in the meantime; keep sending them in. I'm excited about the great self-published and small press stuff out there. And I am excited about 2008. It's good to be back.
October 17, 2006
Recovering the Sacred by Winona LaDuke
published by South End Press, 2005
If the only way you have heard of Winona LaDuke was through her run for the Vice Presidency on the Nader ticket in 1996 and 2000, pick up this book right away. In fact, I will forgive you if you drift off of my blog completely to run out (or click out) and buy it right now.
Recovering the Sacred is a collection of narratives about various instances when Native Americans have reclaimed traditional lands, practices, and perhaps more importantly, food. LaDuke, a member of the Anishinaabekwe (Ojibwe), is involved in The White Earth Land Recovery Project, a Minnesota project involving Native Americans recovering traditional food production. She was the first, and remains the only, activist/radical politician that I have seen on the Food Network, where she appeared to discuss Ojibwe practice of harvesting wild rice.
Like anyone else who recently went to graduate school for literature, I have read my fair share of activist writing of all stripes, usually pedantic and academic crap that takes a subject matter of great interest and importance and sucks all the life right out of it. However, what struck me the most about Recovering the Sacred was the incredible tone and the craft of writing displayed here. There are a lot of writer-activists out there who are much better activists than they are writers, but in LaDuke manages to both amuse and engender a passionate response both by how she writes as well as the subject matter.
LaDuke uses a dry humor throughout the book as she picks apart the arguments of those who oppose Native Americans' efforts, as when in response to a Vatican Observatory pronouncement (about Native opposition to a large observatory being built on sacred land in Arizona) that they "would like to learn about any such genuine concerns of authentic Apaches" she grabs you with a little mockery, opining, "Ah, the problem of finding 'authentic' Indians," and then follows it up with cold hard facts: "Not that anyone looked very hard. No formal attempts were made to meet with the Apache until four years after the project was had been proposed." Even her subject headings are kind of cute: "Raising Arizona;" in an entry about mining, "Sucking the Mother Dry;" or invoking the aura of classic Western movies, "A River Runs Through It."
So you're drawn in a little by the humor and the clear prose, but what keeps you are the stories. When reading a lot of Native non-fiction, or just thinking about the history of Native Americans, one can easily be left with a sense of hopelessness. But here, LaDuke deals out hope. Each well-crafted, well-researched story is one of Native peoples reclaiming something sacred they have lost, small victories acheived through peaceful, legal means -- quite differently than the way they lost it. It's good writing about activism at its best and most productive.
If the only way you have heard of Winona LaDuke was through her run for the Vice Presidency on the Nader ticket in 1996 and 2000, pick up this book right away. In fact, I will forgive you if you drift off of my blog completely to run out (or click out) and buy it right now.
Recovering the Sacred is a collection of narratives about various instances when Native Americans have reclaimed traditional lands, practices, and perhaps more importantly, food. LaDuke, a member of the Anishinaabekwe (Ojibwe), is involved in The White Earth Land Recovery Project, a Minnesota project involving Native Americans recovering traditional food production. She was the first, and remains the only, activist/radical politician that I have seen on the Food Network, where she appeared to discuss Ojibwe practice of harvesting wild rice.
Like anyone else who recently went to graduate school for literature, I have read my fair share of activist writing of all stripes, usually pedantic and academic crap that takes a subject matter of great interest and importance and sucks all the life right out of it. However, what struck me the most about Recovering the Sacred was the incredible tone and the craft of writing displayed here. There are a lot of writer-activists out there who are much better activists than they are writers, but in LaDuke manages to both amuse and engender a passionate response both by how she writes as well as the subject matter.
LaDuke uses a dry humor throughout the book as she picks apart the arguments of those who oppose Native Americans' efforts, as when in response to a Vatican Observatory pronouncement (about Native opposition to a large observatory being built on sacred land in Arizona) that they "would like to learn about any such genuine concerns of authentic Apaches" she grabs you with a little mockery, opining, "Ah, the problem of finding 'authentic' Indians," and then follows it up with cold hard facts: "Not that anyone looked very hard. No formal attempts were made to meet with the Apache until four years after the project was had been proposed." Even her subject headings are kind of cute: "Raising Arizona;" in an entry about mining, "Sucking the Mother Dry;" or invoking the aura of classic Western movies, "A River Runs Through It."
So you're drawn in a little by the humor and the clear prose, but what keeps you are the stories. When reading a lot of Native non-fiction, or just thinking about the history of Native Americans, one can easily be left with a sense of hopelessness. But here, LaDuke deals out hope. Each well-crafted, well-researched story is one of Native peoples reclaiming something sacred they have lost, small victories acheived through peaceful, legal means -- quite differently than the way they lost it. It's good writing about activism at its best and most productive.
September 26, 2006
When You are Born: poems by Sarah McKinstry-Brown
Sarah McKinstry-Brown's poems always strike me as being essentially female, and female in a way that is obvious to women but quite different from the way women are often portrayed in poetry. The Sarah of poems is bold, insistent, connected to other women, as in "Letter to Frida," when she says:
I'm a hunter
stalking heartbeats
[. . .]
I mistake myself for God,
for Mary,
for Sunday nights,
then for nobody;
As far as I can remember, no male poet has ever mistaken a woman for God in a poem, and the nameless, faceless women in so many poems by men are the hunted, not the hunters.
So, who's perfect, right? An adoring poem from a clueless man is better than no poem (or maybe no man) at all, I guess. But I'm glad Sarah is out there speaking the truth for women, as she also does in "1001 Loads of Laundry," contemplating the work her mother does to keep the family together, or "In the Sixth Month" or "When You are Born," considering her own impending motherhood in a lovely low-maintenance, calming kind of way, genuinely focusing on the togetherness she feels with her child. The voice in these poems is a strong, confident and warm woman's voice, unimpaired by any kind of false femininity.
I'm a hunter
stalking heartbeats
[. . .]
I mistake myself for God,
for Mary,
for Sunday nights,
then for nobody;
As far as I can remember, no male poet has ever mistaken a woman for God in a poem, and the nameless, faceless women in so many poems by men are the hunted, not the hunters.
So, who's perfect, right? An adoring poem from a clueless man is better than no poem (or maybe no man) at all, I guess. But I'm glad Sarah is out there speaking the truth for women, as she also does in "1001 Loads of Laundry," contemplating the work her mother does to keep the family together, or "In the Sixth Month" or "When You are Born," considering her own impending motherhood in a lovely low-maintenance, calming kind of way, genuinely focusing on the togetherness she feels with her child. The voice in these poems is a strong, confident and warm woman's voice, unimpaired by any kind of false femininity.
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