LIBRARY SALVAGE YARD
Every year thousands of new books are published, sold, reviewed,
read, and discarded, and others go out of print, disappear into obscurity, or
lie semi-forgotten on library shelves. We’re lucky to have libraries,
great repositories of culture whose services are free. Library Salvage Yard
is about books—and maybe some records and movies too—that we’ve
come across and would like to share. Not the latest releases, but things you
might find gathering dust somewhere--at a used bookstore, garage sale, thrift
store, or your local library. Check them out if they sound interesting, and
let us know what you think.
 Books
for Kids:
Dizzy by Jonah Winter
Arthur A. Levine, 2006
Like a lot of families, Xochitl and I bring
home plenty of books from the library, and though we don't always agree
(she insists on an Arthur book every time, and also likes Dora and others
that are more than likely to be adapted from teleplays by hired hands
rather than their original creators), the really good ones resonate with
both of us. One of our favorites was Jonah Winter's biography of Dizzy
Gillespie, illustrated by Sean Qualls. Unlike authors of kids' fiction,
Winter has to incorporate some hard truths into his biographies. In this
case, young Dizzy is beaten up by his father as well as the neighborhood
bullies, and soon starts to become a bully himself. Luckily he finds the
trumpet, which he picks up for the first time and blows out a stream of
hot red anger. From then on there's no turning back, he leaves the podunk
town where white folks put you down, moves to Philly and New York City,
and after a while, busts down the house of jazz and builds a new house,
the house of cooooool jazz, just by doing the thing that got him in so
much trouble for so long: being himself. Winter and Qualls tell this in
a great way that is easy to understand and fun to read--after only a couple
of times your kid will pronounce jazz with a long zzzzzzzzzz and know
just when to jump in with the exclamation "bebop."
Winter also wrote about art as catharsis
in Frida, his biography of Frida Kahlo (Scholastic, 2002), another
favorite that we read in Spanish though it is available in both languages.
Again, some hard facts are explained in simple terms and Frida's strong
will shines through. Ana Juan's illustrations look to Kahlo for inspiration
without trying to imitate her style. We look forward to checking out Winter's
books on Diego Rivera and Benny Goodman soon!
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The
Stranger, by Albert Camus.
Vintage, 1946.
I read this years ago, but when I recently came across it on a shelf, I realized
that the only thing I could remember about it was that once-controversial song
by the Cure that went “I am the stranger/killing an Arab.” Seeing
as how the senseless killing of Arabs is kind of on the national agenda lately,
I thought this might be an interesting read. It was.
One great thing about The Stranger is its perfect length—short
yet complete and full of insight. Another is how it works on two different levels.
On the one hand, you sympathize with the narrator’s indifference to the
beliefs and expectations of those around him, his complex reaction to his mother’s
death, and the arbitrary motivations guiding his actions, up to the absurd murder
that eventually decides his fate. It is understandable that he would overreact
to the heat and end up shooting someone for no good reason, for his entire existence
is arbitrary and absurd. On another level, however, there is the absurd logic
of colonial society itself, in which the Europeans, out of place, must inevitably
go crazy with the heat and kill Arabs, who in their eyes are anonymous, interchangeable
and disposable. (Abu Ghraib, anyone?) The narrator’s refusal at the end
to accept the Christian idea of redemption, though powerful, was less interesting
to me than the overall bleak picture painted throughout the novel. We are all
strangers to one another and to ourselves—this existentialist notion may
not be new anymore in 2005, but the precision and beauty of Camus’ writing
are transcendent.
Resuscitation
of a Hanged Man, by Denis Johnson.
Perennial, 2001 (orig. 1991).
A novel by successful contemporary author Denis Johnson doesn't really qualify
as a salvage yard item, but I picked this up right after I read The Stranger,
and was amazed to find that it was in some ways an updated version. A lot longer,
as contemporary fiction tends to be (Johnson's brilliant Jesus' Son
being an exception). But Johnson's protagonist, Leonard English, is similarly
estranged as he staggers down the convoluted path that culminates in his own
senseless act. Arriving in Provincetown from the Midwest, he takes an insane
job, pursues a quixotic relationship with a lesbian, and seeks comfort in the
arms of a Catholic church that has little room for his kind of devotion, in
spite of its embrace of Joan of Arc and Simone Weil, two figures with whom English
becomes increasingly fixated. How can you be sure, he wonders, that the voice
you hear in your head is that of God and not simply madness? Whereas the absurdity
of existence leads Camus' hero to proclaim his radical disbelief, Johnson's
character strives ever harder for redemption-which he finally seems to find
in a jail cell, where the impossible burden of free will has at last been removed.
It's kind of a complicated story, and very funny, even if it might not sound
like it from this description. But what I love most about Denis Johnson is his
ability to express muddled states of mind with poetic clarity. Episodes of drunken,
hallucinatory irrationality are rendered as if Johnson were recording directly
from the character's mind, yet somehow without losing control himself. I don't
really know how he does it, but he is surely one of the great writers of our
time.
The
Clown, by Heinrich Böll.
Avon Books, 1965.
The Clown is a classic story of postwar Germany, but also of every place
where hypocrisy and self-interest is the order of the day. Its protagonist is
a mining heir turned clown, whose rebellious attitude (reminiscent of the Stranger
and Leonard English) keeps him at a distance from polite German society. The novel
opens when he's just lost his longtime girlfriend and, as a result, taken to drink
and thrown his clowning career out the window; we watch as he sinks further into
despair and at the same time offers a scathing indictment of the society that
condemns him. What is really great about Heinrich Böll is how he knows that fascism
didn't begin and end with the Nazis, but rather lurks within common, everyday
attitudes and interactions. In postwar Germany, former Nazis eagerly embrace "reconciliation,"
yet on a personal level their fascism-that quality which once led them to eagerly
turn in classmates of suspicious racial origin, or enlist their children in the
"defense of the sacred German soil" against the "Jewish Yankees"--remains intact.
"They failed to grasp that the secret of the terror lay in the little things.
To regret big things is child's play: political errors, adultery, murder, anti-Semitism-but
who forgives, who understands, the little things?" Hypocrisy is rampant, especially
among the bourgeoisie; but the clown's critique is not ideologically restricted,
for when invited to East Germany to perform his satirical sketches about capitalism,
he instead looks for targets among the institutions of state socialism (and is
quickly shown the door). Of course his clear analysis of his social environment
produces intransigence, melancholy and self-destructiveness in his own life, and
of course his girlfriend leaves him, and not only because of her concern for religious
values and respectability. The ending-not involving a jail cell, but rather another
kind of sentence that only a clown could devise-is both bleak and hopeful, for
in breaking his last ties to "respectable" society, a certain kind of clownish
redemption becomes possible.
Dharma
Punx: A Memoir, by Noah Levine.
Harper Collins, 2003.
Noah Levine was a punk in Santa Cruz in the early 1980s, so
basically I picked this up to check out what he had to say about the old scene.
Sure enough, there's Club Culture and B'last and all the rest... However, whereas
my friends were primarily into bands and zines, Noah and his friends got heavy
into hard drugs, fighting, and crime. Unsurprisingly, this led to many premature
deaths and in Noah's case, a few too many trips to juvenile hall. Luckily for
him his dad was a new age spiritual teacher with many prominent friends in the
Buddhist community; when Noah hit bottom, he was able to draw on his father's
teachings (formerly dismissed as "hippie shit"), get into meditation
and recovery, and eventually become a spiritual teacher himself.
What is interesting about the book (which is otherwise a classic
tale of a drug addict's fall and redemption) are Noah's views on punk and Buddhism.
When he becomes a Buddhist, he doesn't leave his punk roots behind--in fact,
on a trip to Asia on which he hopes to become a monk, he finds that traditional
monasteries remind him a bit too much of the cells at juvenile hall, and ends
up fleeing in despair. He's more at home practicing out of tattoo parlors and
in prisons, and he feels that punk and Buddhism share the same fundamental critical
attitude: life is suffering, society's values are superficial and unimportant,what
counts is your inner strength and conviction. For Noah, the punk rebellion is
exterior and thus violent, whereas the Buddhist rebellion is interior and is
based on conquering the enemy within. In developing these ideas, Noah both recovers
a lot of what was important about punk to those of us who grew up in the scene,
and at the same time frees Buddhist doctrine from its California new age trappings,
making it more accessible to the kids who perhaps need it most.
An interesting facet of Dharma Punx has to do with
the hippie parents who populate Noah's world and our part of the planet in general.
Noah and his friends get their first drugs from their parents' stashes, and
beyond that, there is something strange about these people who, from the 1960s
on, tried so hard to find new ways of living, yet who in so many cases were
hopelessly inadequate as parents, or at least hopelessly unable to deal with
their children's own form of rebellion. My friend Aaron explored this phenomenon
in an issue of his Cometbus magazine called Back to the Land, in
which one interviewee talked about how in the hippie community where he lived,
the adults' unwillingness to deal with "the man" led to them essentially
tolerating a child abuser. On the lighter side, there are tales of parents walking
around naked, etc.--things that seemed normal at the time, but now show how
much times have changed.
Overall, Dharma Punx is full of an evangelical zeal
that will be a turn-off to some, but I enjoyed his journey and appreciated his
insights.
(For more, check out Noah Levine's
Dharmapunx.com.)
Poems
of Humor and Protest, by Kenneth Patchen.
City Lights Pocket Poet Series No. 3, 1966.
I found this for a quarter at a thrift store, and Patchen’s weird blend
of hallucinatory acid-trip language and political disgust turned out to be pretty
compelling. Poems of Humor and Protest is a pocket-sized edition put
together by City Lights a while back from some of Patchen’s previously published
books. A lot of the best poems (“The Body Beside the Ties,” “Street
Corner College,” “The Hunted City,” “Eve of St. Agony”)
seem to come from First Will and Testament, published in 1939. Sixty-five
years old and the anti-war stuff is still depressingly current, as is Patchen’s
contempt for the literary scene. "I GOT THE FAT POET INTO A CORNER"
is one of my favorites:
I GOT THE FAT POET
INTO A CORNER and
told him he was writing
shet and couldn’t get
away with it
Now it is night and time
for sleep. Everyone is
tired
from garbage-glutting
lifting their snouts
from the trough
long enough
to ease their gut—
I won’t urge the point.
Gold-plated poems
to stuff up
their mind’s ass
or politics watered down so as
not to scare the blue bloods—
Boo! You well-fed bastards!
The
Selected Poetry of Vicente Huidobro.
Edited by David M. Guss. New Directions, 1981.
Vicente Huidobro was a Chilean avant-garde poet from the early decades of the
twentieth century. He went to Paris and Madrid in the ‘teens, hung around
with Juan Gris and other Cubists, wrote poetry in French about the Eiffel Tower,
started a literary movement called Creationism. In the 1920s he went back to Chile
and got involved in radical politics. In 1931 he published the great avant-garde
epic Altazor: The Parachute Voyage. Around 1938 he proclaimed, “I
am poetry!” However, an intense rivalry with Pablo Neruda—though both
were men of the Left—along with other factors contributed to his eventual
obscurity.
It was a surprise to find this elegant trilingual edition of Huidobro’s
selected works on the shelves of the Pacific Grove library. The Pacific Grove
community is probably close to 100% literate, but it is hard to imagine anyone
here—among the New Agers, tourists and Silicon Valley weekenders—being
interested in the early-20th-century Latin American avant-garde. Indeed, the library
copy shows almost no sign of use, and has no date due sticker on the front—although
the library’s recently-instituted self-checkout system means that someone
could take it out, as I did, without making a mark. Anyway, there’s a card
in the pocket left from the old checkout system, with the date stamped on it.
Apparently on various occasions in 1982, 1983, 1985, 1986, 1987, 1992, and 1994,
someone was reading, or at least taking home, Huidobro. Maybe somewhere in this
town, then, there is someone who, when you say “the parachute voyage,”
will think of cool lines like these: “I opened my eyes up in the century
/ That Christianity died out / Contorted on its agonizing cross / About to cough
up its last breath / What will we put there tomorrow in that empty space?”
Down
and Out in Paris and London, by George Orwell.
Harvest/HBJ, 1961 (orig. 1933).
Like everyone else my age, I read Animal Farm and 1984 in
school. Later I also picked up Homage to Catalonia, Orwell’s
great account of the Spanish Civil War. But until recently I didn’t know
much about Orwell’s life or career. Down and Out in Paris and London
was his first published book, and some say his best. In the first half, he’s
in Paris, broke, pawns his stuff, and gets two unbelievably shitty dishwashing
jobs. His description of sanitary conditions is amazing; according to him, eating
at a high-class restaurant in Paris was something like eating at the city dump,
or worse. In the second half of the book, he moves on to London and experiences
an even more insane way of life: that of homeless men who live, marginally,
off religious charity and the government welfare system, which provides minimal
food and shelter yet makes it as miserable an experience as possible to discourage
people from using it. At the end, Orwell—who was soon to become a Socialist—proposes
some interesting ideas like having homeless shelters be productive small farms
where people could work to raise their own food. But his main goal is to show
his middle-class British readers that homeless people aren’t another species,
just men and women who have run into misfortune and deserve to be treated with
dignity. These lessons, or course, are still valuable today, and for that and
many weird, pathetic, and entertaining moments, this is an excellent book.
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