Mourning and laughter are both valuable

I decided I wanted to cry basically forever so I sat down and reread Maus this weekend.

Look, I know I harp on a lot about comic books but Maus may be objectively the best comic book ever made. It's Art Spiegelman's masterpiece in which he tells the story of his father's experience of the holocaust. Spiegelman does this deftly and touchingly, interweaving his own experience of telling the tale and arguments with his father into the narrative of the horrors experienced by one family during the worst period in human history.

It's the first graphic novel to have ever won a Pulitzer Prize. Maus is the reason I want to make comic books. It's the model that all other serious biographical comics have followed since because it (if it didn't create the genre) tells its story with such honesty and delicacy that NOT attempting to live up to that standard is frankly not acceptable. And in spite of the fact that it's a graphic novel that deals heavily with suicide, digs into the author's strained relationship with his father, and is about the holocaust and literally illustrates cute animals hanging in concentration camps, Maus is often very light and sweet and funny. The book focuses on the human elements of tremendous tragedy, the pettiness that mutual sufferers can exhibit toward one another, the joy found in small respites from torture, the kindness of strangers - all of these things are put on display frequently because they not only make the painful story more bearable, they're what makes the story important. We see silly exchanges between cousins and love affairs and old jokes and goofy misunderstandings because the lighten up a heavy load but they also remind us that this, the simple contact of humans and their relationships, is what was being exterminated.

Maus is painful to read but it's important to read. In a world full of memoirs of pain and biographies of suffering it's vital that the memory of laughter not be lost, because we need those memories to act as signposts to prevent such a terrible loss from ever happening again.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Spiegelman, Art. Maus. Pantheon Books. New York: New York. 1997. (1973, 1986).

A warm family in a cold world

This book took a little while to get into (the first 15 pages or so were hard to push through for me) but once I was involved with the story I was glad that I'd made the effort.

Wole Soyinka does an amazing job of regressing the reader to his childish viewpoint while still telling his story in a way that adults can understand. As the book moves through itself, and as the narrator ages, the memoir moves from a more febrile, magical perspective to a touching recollection of his family during a very frightening time.

I loved experiencing the percolation of knowledge through the narrator as he grew up and began to recognize a world beyond the walls of his family compound and indeed beyond the borders of his country.

Every person described is interesting and complete and touching, even if they are described with dislike they're granted their humanity and the understanding that maybe they're an okay person, just someone with different motivations.

The book is transporting, the language is lush and beautiful and makes you see the streets where Wole walked as a child, and hear the sizzle of cooking and smell the rich foods he so desperately wanted to scrounge from the family pantry. It's a very sensory book for the first two thirds of the story, and then becomes a very intellectual book as Wole the baby becomes Wole the boy and starts to participate in the various intrigues and uprisings around him.

The tale of the Nigerian Women's Movement from this unique perspective is intensely moving and makes you want to charge up and take political actions of your own - makes you want to be something bigger and wholer than you are now.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Soyinka, Wole. Aké: the years of childhood. Vintage International. New York: New York.
     1989. (1981.)

Somewhat insipid but not worthless

This is one of my in-between-books; when I've finished with one novel but haven't decided which one to move on to next I'll read a chapter or two or even just a few pages out of an in-between-book to pass the time. I can't really remember when I started reading Poemcrazy, but I know it's been a long, mostly unpleasant, time.

I have an uncomfortable relationship with poetry. I write poetry, but I hate most of what I write. I read poetry, but I hate most of what I read. But the poetry that I've read that I don't hate is poetry that I love with a terrifying and potentially unhealthy intensity, and the poetry that I've written that I'm proud of tends to be prickly and morbid and really not very helpful to anyone in the long run.

Wooldridge's memoir/instruction manual is full of the kind of poetry that I hate (and yes, a lot of it is hers but sadly even more of the stuff that made me roll my eyes was written by children). It's crammed with exercises that seem too schlocky to take seriously but is so sincere that I've got to look at my own cynicism with a grain of salt.

I guess what really bugged me is that I don't think I'd get along with Wooldridge at all and most of this book is written in a very conversational style. Wooldridge tells you about wandering around in nature and renaming the flowers for the sheer joy of it and deciding what parts of Native American, Asian, and Indian cultures are important for her to use as writing tools - it's exactly the melange of nature-loving cuddliness and appropriation that you'd expect to find at a yoga retreat.

But, for all that Wolldridge's personality sets my teeth on edge, and for all that she spends what seems like an exhausting amount of time anthropomorphizing plants, animals, and the planet, a lot of the exercises and practice plans she has in the book are good ideas. I don't like her idea of word tickets (the cover photo includes a word ticket - a word taped to a raffle ticket that is used to help move poems along) - I think it's lazy and limiting - but making lists of words that have sounds you like, or describing the objects around you in detail, or creating alternate characters of yourself to write from are all fine ideas that I think would be very helpful to someone feeling a bit dried up at their creative fount.

So I'd probably never re-read this book again because there's a credulous description of a Ginko tree (and Wooldridge actually notes that the species is "sacred in the orient" - gag me with a fork, that's some prime '90s white western mysticism) manifesting a miracle to save herself that makes me want to get out a chainsaw and that sort of story happens every few pages, I would be willing to flip through occasionally to find exercises.

Wooldridge, Susan G. Poemcrazy. Clarkson Potter. New York: New York. 1996.

America History F.

I am a Franklin buff. It's something that's relatively easy to be since so much of Franklin's writings survived, he met so many people in his life who wrote about him, and he invented approximately 30% of everything we associate with America. Franklin is the person that people who are lazy about history study - and I am lazy as hell about history.

I had two fantastic Early American Lit classes when I was at Cal Poly, one was a 200 level and one was a 400 level. Both classes required that I read at least part of Franklin's Autobiography, as well as the writings of Cabeza de Vaca, Anne Bradstreet, Roger Williams and a whole host of people who were responsible for exploring, settling, and building America. Franklin was the first part of American history that really stuck with me, and it stuck with me by way of American Lit.

I bought this book as something to cite in a paper I was writing for my 400 level American Lit class about Franklin's Autobiography. At the time I just used the skills our professor had taught us (thanks, Dr. Corley!) and scanned the index and table of contents for material that might confirm or contradict my thesis; once that was done I used a few paragraphs and read one or two chapters pretty well and then proceeded to forget that I owned it for the next four years.

Autobiography is charming and interesting, and like all autobiographies, highly unreliable. Franklin was writing for an audience - he was writing to his newly-estranged son as well as to posterity, and he was well aware that history would be interested in his story, especially in his words.

Brands treats his subject gently (probably more gently than most critics of Franklin can stand to see) but he doesn't tip-toe around the fact that Franklin was a man - even though he was also a savant and a statesman - first and everything else later. Explorations of the founder's sex life are made, questions about his loyalties are raised (and thoroughly examined), flaws are admitted to and explored. Franklin comes out looking good, but human - touchingly so.

What is really fascinating about the book is the perspective that it gives on the conflict between the Colonies and Great Britain and the role that Franklin played in moderating that conflict - Brands seems to have done a uniquely good job of of looking at the motivations of all the players involved and looking at what, from our perspective of 200 years later, appears to have been an inevitable dispute that happened to be marshaled into a revolution by some of the most (and in Franklin maybe the single most) competent humans who ever lived.

The downside of all of this is that it tends to make us look at the "characters" as just that and forget that, while we're getting perspective on Franklin's flaws, Washington, Jefferson and the other super-human-seeming founders were also prone to walking on earth, not above it. One founder does draw significant (and distracting) ire from Brands - Adams' treatment is sometimes funny, but serves to show the statesman as a kind of comic-relief antagonist instead of the very important contributor to history that he was.

In spite of these slight problems, which are maybe more accurately seen as limitations of scope, I enjoyed The First American a great deal. It's a rich and heady read, a deeply immersive and compelling book that is not only a great portrait of a great man, but a delightfully complete landscape of the world he lived in. And it certainly did a better job of explaining the history of the Revolutionary War to me than 20 years of schooling ever did.

Brands, H.W., The First American. Anchor Books. New York: New York. 2002.