What Really Happend in the Catholic Church?

"The Little Girl and the Cigarette", Benoit Duteurtre & Charlotte Mandell, 2007

Hey, child molestation is sick. Disgusting. Wretched. Those molestors, they're the fucks who get beat down in prison first, before any other of the hardened criminals, all of whom did terrible things in their lives. Taking advantage of the helpless...despicable. Yes.

Just as despicable as thoughtless child-worship. Yes.

I have to admit that there was a time that I, now a teacher, fell into that group who placed children on a pedestal, the future, and so on. But thankfully your first year of teaching brings you back down to Earth -- these are little human beings, as beautiful as a 55 year old obese, pasty white man, with hemorrhoids. We marvel at their potential, but really, they're just going to grow up to be just as diverse and interesting and hopeless as the rest of us grown folks...or worse. Worse if we keep putting them on a pedestal.

I know that sounds like me going on a rant, but it's a rant inspired by the magnificent and harrowing "The Little Girl and the Cigarette", a book much more eloquent and thought-provoking than what I have typed so far. Also much deeper, delving into many ironies of society, from bureaucratic contradictions, to people's pathetic ability to empathize with a killer so as long as he's a killer who can put on a show of conscience when his back's to the wall. Benoit Duteurtre, a French author incapable of putting up with the nonsense any longer, puts forth this mind-shaking novel to caution us all.

The conflict to watch here is that of a middle-aged man working for the city, who goes through a daily routine that by many standards is hedonistic -- he cares not for having kids to raise or extra responsibilities to have, but to enjoy his life outside of his menial (but seemingly well-paying) job in Adminstration City -- going against not just the word of a child who sort of claimed (led by adults, contrary to the truth) that she was molested by the man, but a city who unquestioningly believes the word of the child. A city who belives the word of children, the innocence and purity and wisdom of children so much, one of the clinching episodes of the story includes children putting the man on blast in their own mayor-approved court run and overseen by them. This man stands no chance.

On the other side of town, another man, on death row, well-suspected of murdering a police officer, goes free. How does he manage this? He buys himself time and the area in which to make a public spectacle of himself by asking for a cigarette as his last wish and engaging a conflict in rules: the prison rule which explicitly states there is no smoking allowed, and a law which declares that smoking is a right of a person on death row requesting their last wish. Eventually, with the help of Big Tobacco, and incompetent warden and, yes, the Supreme Court, there is a garden and smoking area created for such a special request. And the man milks it, and makes an arrangement of flowers spelling "Long Live Life", a show that will pull at the world's heart strings and make him a media darling.

A killer an idol. A decent if not quiet and harmless man a reprehensible human who "attacked a child".

And if you question any of the absurdity, you are as disgusting as the awful man himself.

Sound like any place that you know of?

In a mere 187 pages, Duteurtre exploits much of the illogic of the current first-world human mind-set. He does not only attack child-worship and bureaucracy, but our fundamental willingness to deceive ourselves. Frequently he picks apart even basic environmental policies set forth by his characters to show how they are actually creating more pollution. Yet, the people celebrate Pure Air days, driving en masse to the celebrations and increasing the amount of greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere on these occasions where traffic goes sky high. He spares no one, and especially aims the dagger at bleeding hearts with sparse brain capacity. He begs for logic, even in the places it seems he knows it will never arrive.

And somehow, in all of this, he manages to make you laugh. Not just cynical giggles here and there, but this book is actually ridden with ironic humor that evokes real laughs. The incredulity of the warden faced with the ever-growing, ridiculous situation of whether or not to let the convicted killer have a cigarette; the counter-cultural mindset of a man, completely irritated, who cannot stand kids, especially when they become a fixture of the place he works at for reasons of seeming "ambiance"; the hilariously nonchalant manner of a less-than intelligent prisoner who becomes a "people's champion" for all of his trite and endearing antics. He builds situations that are dark and haunting, but manages to inject a good laugh into it all.

Reflecting on the episodes of this book, I realize that yet another strength is in Duteurtre's ability to paint scenes that stick to your brain (with the help, in this case, of English translator Charlotte Mandell). Nearly every place you go here is memorable, with a few sticking out, those being any place that children have invaded. His imagining a world where children are invited to spend time after schools running rampant through the mayor's offices/compound, doing as they pleased while the workers were expected to stay out of their way created a magnificent discomfort in your's truly. Accompanied with the Children's Court scene, the author is able to paint the danger of child-worship by extrapolating their presence into crucial parts of the adult world of which many of us, I think, agree that children have no place. Also, the isolated garden in which our convict picks the flowers to send his life-loving message to a mass of receptive souls, this isolated, caged environment that was truly a stage for a performance that would sweep the sheep off their feet was vividly alive and shameful. And they are places you won't soon forget.

And I've managed to tell you all of this without giving away anything about "A Martyr Idol". Ooops. I did it. Well, you still have so much more to discover here.

An all-around memorable and frightening account, there is no one I wouldn't recommend "The Little Girl and the Cigarette" to. It's dystopian, but not dystopian in that "future, probably never really, you know, going to happen" sort of way. It hits close to home. It exaggerates where it needs to, for effect, but there is no ridiculousness to what Duteurtre's getting at. Illogic is the new logic. Come and get some.

"'All I did is smoke a cigarette.'"

Primates Unite in Unreality!

"Welcome to the Monkey House", Kurt Vonnegut, 1998

In his novels, master of simple and pointed satirical and science fiction prose, Kurt Vonnegut, is usually piecing together the seemingly-trivial happenings to point to something huge. He is as humble as they come, though there is a great daring in his major works, like "Mother Night", where a simple playwright becomes an American double-agent during WWII, tried as a Nazi, sentenced to death, and, well, his demise is something legendary to me. That's heavy stuff, but there are the light-hearted commentaries, the yearning for a simpler time, the famous Vonnegut examinations of Nihilism through unlikely encounters that really help give form to the heavier commentaries of pretending to be what you are not until you are no longer pretending. He is able to mesh, throughout a book, the delicate parts of the soul, the seemingly meaningless meetings and events of life, and tie them into something enormous.

So it is that I couldn't resist a collection of short stories from the great American author. "Welcome to the Monkey House" contains 25 of'um, published primarily in the 50s, stories Vonnegut used to fund his bigger works (as he says). They range from sentimental little wisps of words ("Long Walk To Forever", "The Kid Nobody Could Handle") to more weighty experiments in human nature and ever-evolving technology that are shockingly relevant 50 years later ("Report on the Barnhouse Effect", "EPICAC"), and so on. It is pure Vonnegut, really, in shortened form, with the usual pinch of bitterness toward a world that never looks back, but a lot of optimism for the true souls of conscientious human beings.

It is the little bits of romantic angst and simpler sentiments that I shouldn't be so surprised about, but completely am. "Long Walk To Forever" is but seven/eight pages of a young man, who just went AWOL, tracking down the woman he had loved forever, who was about to be married. She denies, he persists, he relents, she desires. And in a sea of profoundly affecting final lines that Vonnegut is so perfect at, "She ran to him, put her arms around him, could not speak," is lovely, yet indeed, bordering on tacky. It's still so Vonnegut, though, and he was a man without caring for the concept of "guilty pleasures", after all, his most famous recurring character, Kilgore Trout, was the king of writing guilty pleasures, and Vonnegut adored him, I assume, as much as nearly any living person. Other stories, such as the commentary of reserving judgement and working to see through to someone's happiness, no matter how crazy it may seem, such as "More Stately Mansions", or the angst-ridden criticism on selling-out with "Deer in the Works" (with the most beautiful picture of man walking back into the woods with the deer caught in an enormous industrial park, as was he) are a bit less sappy, while still painting the poignant picture of what life was all about according to Vonnegut.

There is still quite a bit of sci-fi in Vonnegut's shorter works, too, as he constructs scenarios of technological progress and its undpredictable results. "EPICAC" may be my favorite of the collection, as man creates a monster computer, then our protagonist, lovestruck, tries to get EPICAC to write him poems for this woman he is courting. Then EPICAC, in a great turn, falls in love with the woman and thinks she is to marry him, and when he is taught the concept of fate in love and his limitations in this realm as a machine, he shorts himself as his final act. It's twisted, off-the-wall, and oddly touching. Poor guy never asked to learn about love, he was just supposed to crack equations. "Harrison Bergeron", on the other hand, is a cautionary tale of what equality really means, as well as another twistedly moving scene of free expression in the face of fascism. "Unready To Wear" may be the most beautifully striking of Vonnegut's sci-fi short compositions, where we see people advance in a positive way, to the point some have shed their burden of a body to just exist as a psyche whipping from place to place. Of course, they are under attack by the rest of human beings who view this progress as elitism, a condescension on what you are supposed to be as a human, a dissent from greatness. But those people, with their wars and limitations, cannot conceal, nor near understand, liberation.

Yes, Vonnegut had some ideas, and I had no idea to expect "Welcome to the Monkey House" to be a virtual notebook of stunning concepts in a shorter form. Everything here is fully developed and reaches its intellectual and emotional target. His prose are on-par with the likes of his best and most famous works. I can't help but to still feel more fulfilled with the likes of "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater" or "Slaughterhouse-Five", because you get to be with the characters longer and Vonnegut can draw up the most out-of-leftfield parallel narratives and make them work to magnificent heights, but that is not what "Welcome to the Monkey House" is all about. These works are 20-page-or-less hit-and-quit pieces of Vonnegut that every fan of his cannot do without. Forget Mr. Rosewater, God bless you Mr. Vonnegut!

"'I don't want to be a machine, and I don't want to think about war,' EPICAC had written after Pat's and my light-hearted departure. 'I want to be made of protoplasm and last forever so Pat will love me. But Fate has made me a machine. That is the only problem I cannot solve. That is the only problem I want to solve. I can't go on this way.'"



PS -- I picked the image that would probably have had Kurt Vonnegut on the floor in tears. That is, you know, if he didn't see it before he died. I have no clue. Here's a joke: Maybe I'll ask him when I see him again!

Look man, a TREE GROWS in BROOK-LAN

"A Tree Grows In Brooklyn", Betty Smith, 1943

In the face of what is considered such a monumentally moving work of literature such as Betty Smith's "A Tree Grows In Brooklyn", I'm sure it's silly to quote a mere millionaire musician such as Jay-Z in the reflection title. Or is it? From those impoverished in pre-WWI, Great Depression Brooklyn to those still in the grind, few making out, many succumbing to the streets, there are many impressive and diverse stories to be told from the dirt. And I have to give Jay-Z his props, because when I saw the book title as I searched for more classic literature to dig my teeth into, the line to end out his amazingly poignant "Some How Some Way", one of the few redeeming moments from the otherwise drab "Blueprint Volume 2: The Gift and the Curse", stuck with me: "Still I grew, somehow I knew that the sun would shine through / And, touch my soul, take hold of my hand / Look man, a tree grows in Brook-lan". And so my adventure with Francie Nolan was stimulated into action.

My heart still feels sore from finishing the book. This has been months coming. I picked this book up last spring, but found no time to really read it. It was my first year of teaching, and not much reading got done. I made it through the first two parts and then some, about 200 pages, then abandoned it because I didn't have the attention span for a beautiful, sprawling book that had very little in the way of a traditional tension, a build toward a climax. It was just life, which also lacks the traditional plot, which makes one wonder, where did the idea of the traditional plot come from in the first place?

I digress from my ramble to go into the book, of which I read the last 300 pages in the last five days or so, the last 250 in the last two days.

This novel surrounds the life of the Nolan family living in an impoverished Brooklyn neighborhood in the 1910s. Johnny, the patriarch, a loving father, and an irresponsible drunk. Katherine, the mother, a stable, pretty, and quiet woman who's the family's glue and stability. Neeley, or Cornelius, Katie's favorite child, a curly-haired boy who reminded everyone of Johnny's better qualities. And then there's Francie, the book's protagonist, a year older than Neeley, introspective, observant, wise beyond her years, and with a true inner-toughness. You see the story primarily through her eyes despite the omnisicient narration. And through her eyes there is a somber world with so many options, but would she ever rise up like those trees in Brooklyn, the ones that popped up only in poor neighborhoods, the ones that liked poor people?

Her trials and tribulations are set forward, and I had a profound connection to the text as a teacher. I wondered quietly and out loud why the poor kids I teach day in and day out don't have the resolve of Francie Nolan. But then I realized, she had a mother who stressed education at all turns, and even though she had to pull her from school once the going got so rough that it was either charity, starvation, or one of the children working, she still reinforced that Francie would be, had to be, a completely educated and successful woman. This vow her mother held up, despite a strained and vastly unaffectionate relationship between the two of them, was the only strand of hope to hold onto throughout, and it's a hope many of my kids don't have, despite the fact that nearly all of them are more well-off than Francie would have ever dreamed at 12 or 13.

Outside of that, the sheer doggedness of Francie's character despite facing the extremeties of poor living was just inspiring. She genuinely found a way to enjoy life and have fun in the face of starvation, and not a bit of it rang false. There was no taking granted of the world. She was living truly what Thoreau had set out to create for himself in the wilderness. He divested himself of worldly possessions because he wished to, and she had no other alternative. As the book draws near its closing, Francie and Neeley admitted to one another that their new baby sister, Laurie, who was now set for the future as Katie prepared to remarry to a man of wealth, would never have the fun they did.

Truly, if this book is about anything, it is about the beauty of the struggle.

And the beauty of words. I have never, could never even conceive, painting a picture like this with words. For nearly 500 pages, Betty Smith uses the power of simplicity to paint with beautiful, multi-colored strokes of the life of her protagonist and family. There is no pretention to her prose whatsoever, it's just elegant. To prove it, I shall now open it up to a random page and find beautiful prose. Wait for it, wait for it...

Oh, oh, the description of Francie, what made her up, page 72-73...observe....

"She was made up of more, too. She was the books she read in the library. She was the flower in the brown bowl. Part of her life was made from the tree growing rankly in the yard. She was the bitter quarrels she had with her brother whom she loved dearly. She was Katie's secret, despairing weepingly. She was the shame of her father staggering home drunk."

There is much more to that section, that's just its dark side, but I think it's absolutey heart-breaking and stellar. It's hard to show in just a quote, but these words, these actue and deep observations twist you into this life of a girl growing up, and you just want to believe she makes it so badly, from being a little girl scraping up junk on the streets to buy candy and reading books on the fire escape, to the introverted book and writing junkie of pre-adolescents, to an adolescent learning the definition of truth and beauty and also the hardship of real work in the face of starvation, to...to...

Well, my heart is still sore from it all, as I've said. You don't become sympathetic for Francie ever, you don't weep for her struggles. You find that they are brilliant and necessary and you find a piece of yourself within them, and once you have connected at the deepest level, you feel that her successes and failures are your own. That's what good fiction of this nature does, and as far as coming of age stories go, well, what can I tell you? There's a reason The New York Public Library made it one of the Books of the (20th) Century, ya'know? But that's neither here nor there. Let's just say that many have been touched by this story, I'm the latest, and there are many more who are waiting in the wings, unknowingly, to be turned inside-out by Francie Nolan's somber yet triumphant story, "A Tree Grows In Brooklyn".

"It was the last time she'd see the river from that window. The last time of anything has the poignancy of death itself. This that I see now, she thought, to see no more this way. Oh, the last time how clearly you see everything; as though a magnifying light had been turned on it. And you grieve because you hadn't held it tighter when you had it everyday."

open your wounds and let them bleed on mine

"Woman Hollering Creek", Sanda Cisneros, 1991.

If I know one thing from reading Sandra Cisneros's pristine "The House On Mango Street", and now "Woman Hollering Creek", I know that she is a writer whose combination of stream-of-consciousness prose and Latina feminine (and at times, feminist) subject manner are impervious to easy absoprtion. Some episodes stick out more than others, but you know the ones you barely remember somehow played a role in refining or putting into context the more meaningful segments of work. So it is, with "Woman Hollering Creek", a book it took me just a few reading sessions to take in, a quarter of the short stories/episodes/monologues can I recount with any accuracy, however, knowing that there is a whole there that is completely fragile and withering with every word I write about it.

It bears mentioning that "Woman Hollering Creek" is a much more adult story than Cisneros's most popular and widely-read "The House On Mango Street", a teen coming-of-age story accessible to multiple crowds (is, in no way, strictly a teen book). The stories of childhood contained in the first two sections ("My Friend Lucy Who Smells Like Corn" and "One Holy Night") take a sometimes-nostalgic, sometimes-brutal look at the pre-adolescent and adolescent perspective on life (and the limitations for a younger person) and love (for the budding woman), but only, it seems, with the way this book is organized, to put the heart-busting let-downs of adult love into context of what was. And they only make up 1/4 of the book, leaving us to "There Was a Man, There Was a Woman", the tales of grown love, fractured and unforgiving.

The most striking of the stories in the latter third of the book are the ones who feign love story writing in search of something more revelatory. The story that bears the collection's title, "Woman Hollering Creek", takes a simple enough premise of a woman loving a man, dropping everything to join the man, only to see time expose him, as she is abused, emotionally and physically, and put in a situation of poverty and sadness. The story lacks the conceptual innovation of some of Cisneros's most interesting episodes, but she can get away with it because of the authenticity she writes with. She paints the soul with words, and she paints it in settings and contexts she knows intimately (or, at minimum, the state of humanity she knows intimately). She takes places we've never been to, such as the creek the story is named for, and makes it dramatic, piercing, and we see it parallel the mayhem this woman in the story has been through. Then, when she does sew together an anthology of prayers written for a variety of reasons ("Little Miracles, Kept Promises") with the wishes of a young non-conformist who seemingly brings the author to such amazing revelations in the progression of possibilities for the young minority woman (while also beckoning some understanding for the traditions of the past), the stories begin to lean on each other. Where one woman falls, another realizes her potential.

But mostly, the stories lean on each other in their sense of survival and loss and loneliness. Where "There Was a Man, There Was a Woman" is a snippet of two people scared of their own voices, destined to never meet, is a picture-perfect scene of profound aloneness, "Eyes of Zapata" -- though the piece that drags and lulls in a wallow of self-pity for the narrating lost lover of the popular/infamous Mexican revolutionary, and the least memorable story of the lot -- is such loneliness from someone you knew too well. The shorter bits such as "Bread" and "Los Boxers" provide sweet and bitter interludes between the more major stories, and if the longer stories leave you off with more severe emotional reactions, the little bits and pieces between are shots straight to the cardiac. As a whole, you are left feeling quite fulfilled, especially with the extraordinary "Bien Pretty" going from stinging story of the artist paving her own path and having her love unexpectadly jet for Mexico in the midst of her uncertainty as to the direction of their relationship, to coming with a fierece resolve to live the fuck out of life, no matter what. A sentiment that will break you down and fill you up with flames, if you're open.

Then again, Cisneros's work demands you're open. Open to its beauty, and to the salt it throws in wounds, demanding you feel and feel strong. You may not absorb it completely and wholly in a completely literate sense, like you won't remember every single line, or the creepy man's name in "One Holy Night", but you better remember to feel. Dream, be agitated, love, be motivated. Whatever you feel.

"We're going to right the world and live. I mean live our lives the way lives were meant to be lived. With the throat and wrists. With rage and desire, and joy and grief, and love till it hurts, maybe. But goddamn, girl. Live."

for the love of life

"The Future Of Life", Edward O. Wilson, 2002

An after-the-hype viewing of Academy Award winning "The Queen" has left me with a shitty cynical grin on my face this Labor Day Weekend. As I sat back in my pin-striped pajama pants and oversized t-shirt enjoying the freedom of another day off of work, I couldn't help but to be bewildered by many members of our specie's unfailing love for a dead former-princess (or, see: popular culture icon), and how such a love was rekindled on screen via the PR struggles of Britain's queen. Not that people's superfluous diversions and obsessions with larger-than-life personalities is at all surprising, after all, everyone wants to identify with someone important so as to affirm their own importance in this world. But seeing such a display of banality shortly after reading Edward O. Wilson's discourse on the future of our species and the very real dire situation that this precious life-giving world faces, "The Future of Life", I have to chuckle at the self-indulgence we allow ourselves as a species.

Now Wilson's book is nowhere as attacking as my opening paragraph. No, he would rather not alienate in his prose, but give us all a purpose to preserve the wonders that still exist on this planet. He expertly brings us into the world of a variety of species, with passion falling wisely (and barely) short of sentimentality, affirming the worth of everything on this planet and how we all benefit from the existence of all species economically, scientifically, aesthetically. He empathizes with all sides of the plight, from the conservationist to the economist, from the first-world entrepreneur to the third-world struggler. He finds a stake in it for everyone, and he does so without having to force any issues or forge any bridges that seem unnatural.

As a biologist and conservationist, Wilson does clearly have an agenda, but that agenda is apolitical, which is refreshing and productive. He does not mock any one type of person, but does aim to agitate the apathetic. As the book goes from background lessons on the biodiversity of Earth, to how we must pass through what he considers a "bottleneck" in order to preserve all species for the further benefit of human beings and everything else on this planet, to our dubious legacy as destroyer of ecosystems, to our grand opportunity to heal (the final chapter, number seven, entitled "The Solution"), Wilson shows how people from all walks of life can benefit from preserving biodiversity. He even manages to show the economist, the hardcore money-maker, how biodiversity will ensure success for them and their future. He pushes for a future of democracy, private enterprise, and science and technology, including conservation, creating a book that should work to mobilize people from all lifestyles.

The organization of "The Future of Life" is sensical, though with seven chapters in 189 pages, and Wilson's penchant for a passionate rant on an endangered species or our ruining of Hawaii's once-majestic biodiversity at any given time, you may find yourself at a moment feeling touched, and then exhausted at the next. There are no breaks to be found as Wilson leaves one topic for another, nor does Wilson want to be bothered with smooth transitioning, though he does repeat his key points throughout various chapters frequently enough so as to drive the main ideas home. So the reader does have to work a bit to synthesize the information, but when you do, the piece is more evocative than its sometimes-difficult analytical prose may lead you to believe. And that's probably because by the time you are done, you feel far more connected to the natural world than you did before this book was part of your life.

Then, that's what Wilson wants. In a world where we mourn the death of a single person of our species, I think Wilson wants us to look beyond our own noses into the importance of this entire world, to the extreme in which it is being degraded, and to the consequences this will pose to future generations of human beings and other species alike. He will give you, perhaps for the first time, the opportunity to ponder all the opportunities this natural world holds for us in many realms, from admiring its beauty, to mining it for scientific and economic gains. And then he holds out a hope that we can do something to save it. It's hard to tell how likely he thinks this is -- the reversal of destructive human activity -- but it's obvious he sees no point in playing the cynic when such an outlook would serve no good. So he holds onto the hope many good turns in conservation has already given him, and now sits back to watch the human response unfold.

"It is not so difficult to love nonhuman life, if gifted with knowledge about it."