Coffee Spew

Cat People(s): 2 Anniversaries

By Bob Wake

I. Cat People (1942)

The original Cat People (1942), directed by Jacques Tourneur, is both an acknowledged classic of suggestive horror and one of the most famous Hollywood B-movies of all time. First in a series of low-budget RKO fright films produced by Val Lewton, Cat People became a surprise hit that saved the studio from near-bankruptcy following the failure of two iconic films that in their day were costly flops—Citizen Kane (1941) and The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)—directed by the mercurial boy-genius, Orson Welles. Lewton, while unpretentious by Wellesian standards, was no less hungry to make movies.

Cannily, Lewton found a creative path within the system by working fast and cheap. (And finding an economical use for abandoned sets like the ornate staircase from The Magnificent Ambersons that shows up in Cat People.) He’d been a deadline-driven journalist and pulp novelist. And before being offered his own production unit at RKO studios, Lewton worked his way up at MGM as an ambitious story editor and researcher. Cat People’s disquieting atmosphere of Old World otherness combined with New World dislocation can be traced in part to the European backgrounds of Lewton, born in 1904 in what is now Ukraine, and Tourneur, born the same year in France. The film evokes a haunted American melting pot of primitive mythologies and new-fangled superstitions (i.e., psychoanalysis) ill-equipped for securing one’s safety or survival in a modern impersonal cityscape. It should come as no surprise that after working with Val Lewton, director Jacques Tourneur (along with Cat People cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca) went on to make the influential film noir, Out of the Past (1947), which helped define the genre as doom-laden and populated with psychologically crippled outsiders and social misfits.

Cat People’s Irena Dubrovna (played by French actress Simone Simon) is an aspiring fashion designer of Serbian heritage living in New York City. Introspective and melancholic, she believes herself descended from a devil-worshipping were-leopard who survived an Eastern European witch-hunting pogrom in the 16th century. Irena finds herself drawn to the caged leopard in the Central Park Zoo. Her impromptu marriage to a marine engineer (Kent Smith) remains unconsummated because Irena fears that her own unleashed passion will destroy her husband just like, it’s implied, her mother may have killed Irena’s father in a sexual frenzy when Irena was conceived.

Val Lewton wrote a short story, “The Bagheeta,” published some 12 years earlier in Weird Tales magazine, about medieval villagers hunting a black leopard believed to be a were-beast capable of transforming itself into a beautiful woman of taunting, deadly sensuality. Which is to say, a kind of origin myth for Cat People’s folkloric equating of arousal with bestiality and bloodlust. The screenplay is credited to DeWitt Bodeen, although Lewton contributed heavily to its thematic construction and rewriting. Biographer Edmund G. Bansak, in his book Fearing the Dark: The Val Lewton Career, points to passages in “The Bagheeta,” such as the following, that clearly presage Cat People’s distinctive conjuring of fear and eroticized anxiety through the unseen:

Again he rode through the wood. Again he peered right and left for some sign of the beast, fearful always of seeing golden eyes glow at him from the pitch blackness of the night. Every rustle of the wind, every mouse that scampered on its way, flooded his heart with fear, and filled his eyes with the lithe, black bulk of the Bagheeta, stalking toward him on noiseless paws. With all his heart he wished that the beast would materialize, stand before him, allow him opportunities to slash and thrust and ward. Anything, even deep wounds, would be better than this dreadful uncertainty, this darkness haunted by the dark form of the were-beast.

Simone Simon in Cat People (1942).

Simone Simon’s complex portrayal of shapeshifter Irena Dubrovna is sympathetic in a manner not unlike that of Lon Chaney, Jr.’s bewildered lycanthropist Larry Talbot in The Wolf Man (1940), which had been a recent entry in the long line of lavish Universal studio horror hits that RKO wanted Val Lewton to replicate at a fraction of the cost. No time-consuming elaborate monster make-up for Simone Simon. Instead, characters are stalked by … something. Branches rustle. Shadows loom. Sinister growls echo from the locker room of an indoor swimming pool. Paw prints in the park appear to segue into high-heel shoe indentations.

Concerns that Lewton may have gone too far in substituting shadows and sound effects for in-your-face literal scares caused studio bosses to insist that a leopard be shown during the climactic mauling death of the psychotherapist (Tom Conway) who sexually assaults Irena in his office. Nevertheless, the film’s most frightening jump-in-your-seat moment—still effective 70 years later—is the oft-copied sudden lurching into the film frame of a city bus with its air-brakes hissing.

II. Cat People (1982)

The cult status of Paul Schrader’s 1982 remake of Cat People rests largely on a couple of tangential aspects of the production. First, the David Bowie/Giorgio Moroder theme song, “Cat People (Putting Out Fire),” endures as a great Bowie track and gained further pop culture permanence with Quentin Tarantino’s wildly effective use of the song in a climactic sequence of Inglourious Basterds (2009).

Second, director Paul Schrader’s cocaine-fueled obsession with the film’s star, Nastassja Kinski, as recounted in Peter Biskind’s guilty-pleasure history of 1970s Hollywood, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ’n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood, rivals the stories of Alfred Hitchcock’s creepy abuse of Tippi Hedren on the set of The Birds (1963). Schrader shot more nudity of Kinski than the actress was comfortable with. He then spitefully added much of it to the film in retaliation for Kinski quitting their turbulant relationship during production. After finishing the movie, she fled to Paris with Schrader in pursuit. Kinski reportedly told him: “Paul, I always fuck my directors. And with you it was difficult.”

The 1982 Cat People relocates the story to contemporary New Orleans, where Kinski’s character Irena Gallier arrives at the film’s opening to be reunited with her brother—a shapeshifting minister played with menacing brio by Malcolm McDowell—whom she hasn’t seen since childhood. Unfortunately, before we meet Kinski and McDowell, we’re treated to a turgid 6-minute prologue of cat people “mythology.” The film never really finds an effective juxtapositional tone between its gruesome modern-day tale of sexual violence and the primal symbolism of the prologue (and a later scene set in the same blood-red dreamscape). A not dissimilar film from the same era, Ken Russell’s Altered States (1980), found a way to integrate this kind of Jung-on-acid material so that the border between waking reality and the unconscious seemed radically porous.

There are compensatory pleasures to be found in Schrader’s Cat People, to be sure, beginning with its high-toned production design and sensational cast. In addition to Kinski and McDowell, there’s John Heard’s shy zoologist whose obsession with Irena brings out his inner fetishist; Annette O’Toole as Heard’s spurned love interest; Ruby Dee as McDowell’s Creole housekeeper; and Ed Begley, Jr. as the affable zoo-employee sidekick whose arm is graphically torn off in a memorable blood-spurting shock moment.

Nastassja Kinski & Malcolm McDowell in Cat People (1982).

Paul Schrader’s films have suffered somewhat unfairly in their critical reception over the years because his reputation as the brilliant screenwriter of two classic Martin Scorsese films—Taxi Driver (1976) and Raging Bull (1980)—has raised unfulfilled and probably unreasonable expectations for his own directorial efforts. Cat People was not a box office success. This resulted in Schrader being pushed out of studio-financed work and toward the rocky shoals of independent filmmaking. (He has grabbed a lot of attention and raised some eyebrows for his latest project, The Canyons, a Kickstarter-funded mock-exploitation film due out next year, with a script by Bret Easton Ellis and starring Lindsay Lohan and porn star James Deen.)

Further complicating any clear-eyed appraisals of Schrader’s work is his vaunted renown as a trenchant film critic in his own right, in particular as the author of Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer, a remarkable examination of the “Holy” in the filmmaking styles of the three European directors addressed in the book title. The study grew out of a thesis written at UCLA Film School, where Schrader received an MA after studying theology at Calvin College. He’d fallen under the spell and personal mentorship of famed New Yorker critic Pauline Kael. Because Schrader’s intellectual background precedes him, film scholars have sometimes been misled in their desire to find deeper layers of philosophical intent to his movies. (To which one wishes to add: Good luck deconstructing The Canyons.)

October 28, 2012

Alfred Hitchcock, Annette O’Toole, Bret Easton Ellis, Cat People (1942), Cat People (1982), Citizen Kane, David Bowie, DeWitt Bodeen, Ed Begley Jr., Edmund G. Bansak, Fearing the Dark: The Val Lewton Career, Giorgio Moroder, Jacques Tourneur, John Heard, Lindsay Lohan, Lon Chaney Jr., Malcolm McDowell, Martin Scorsese, Nastassja Kinski, Orson Welles, Paul Schrader, Pauline Kael, Peter Biskind, Raging Bull (1980), RKO, Ruby Dee, Simone Simon, Taxi Driver (1976), The Bagheeta, The Birds, The Magnificent Ambersons, The Wolf Man (1940), Tippi Hedren, Val Lewton, Weird Tales
Because You Have To: A Writing Life

Because You Have To: A Writing Life
Joan Frank
University of Notre Dame Press 2012

Reviewed by Bob Wake

Joan Frank poses a stark riddle in Because You Have To: A Writing Life, her disarming and candid collection of literary essays. She asks, “What do you call a state of mind which anticipates its own recurring annihilation?” For many of us, whether writers or not, this is a chillingly accurate description of compromised serenity. “In usual fact,” Frank states, “few of us have the money to buy necessary pockets of stillness.”

The struggle to write becomes the struggle to wrest clear-headedness from the anxious bread-and-butter strivings and obligations that demand our attention throughout the day. As the author of three novels (most recently, Make It Stay), two short story collections, and an earlier volume of essays, Joan Frank is one of the clearest-headed writers working. Because You Have To shows us how she gets the work done. The roadblocks, sometimes self-imposed, are legion and Frank fearlessly exposes them:

I have long wished to dissect envy, in a naïve yearning to be rid of it. Writers like to peer at the forbidden, to tease out components of the monstrous; why not spotlight envy, turning it like mildew toward the noon sun to banish it? Heaven knows envy’s democratic enough; old and young, published and unpublished do their time on one or the other end of the strained congratulatory remarks, the sharp reconfigurations of the face. A writing teacher I admire once mused to a class: “Writers are some of the least charitable people there are.”

Acerbic insights are a hallmark of Frank’s fiction. Her essays are no less uncompromising. She shares with us her writer’s life of exhaustive day jobs and economic hardship. In an epochal election year when the widening chasm of class disparity haunts so many of us, her essay “Never Enough” has the righteous fire of an Occupy manifesto. Comprising 173 numbered paragraphs mixing autobiography and her own hard-boiled aphorisms on the themes of money and inequality in America, “Never Enough”—to put a price on it—is worth the cost of the book:

10. I disdained wealth, distrusted wealthy people. They seemed to prove my private theory: big money—though it gets things done—really, really fucks you up. Wealthy people wore a manner: the gleam of distaste in the eye, the lean-meat-and-white-wine body. I found them pitiful. I felt sorry for all they did not comprehend, for all the life they were missing.

There is also good-humored encouragement to be found in these essays. “For My Brothers and Sisters in the Rejection Business,” for example, offers Frank’s hilarious deconstruction of a form letter rejection. More to the point, she advises us not to fear the world turning its back on us: “Rejection, then, is like the wake of a boat: proof of motion. No action from the writer means no reaction from the world. To risk rejection is to risk reaction and, as such, a courageous step.”

Joan Frank

Threaded throughout Because You Have To are warm and sometimes conflicted reminiscences of her father, a humanities professor, whose death came too early from a heart attack at age 54. (“He was searching desperately, recklessly. As if liquor and sex were large, clumsy keys he kept fumbling with, trying to fit them into a stubborn lock.”) Her own marriage to a college English professor comes under similar laser-like scrutiny, although it appears her husband was granted vetting privileges over occasionally unflattering anecdotes and recounted arguments. (“He has read these words and raised no objection.”)

Frank unabashedly shares her vulnerabilities with us. A scene of the author trying to read uninterrupted at the kitchen table is pointed and funny but also captures the awful tension between solitude and companionship that makes marriage (and, Frank is suggesting, the art of writing) a precarious balancing act:

I am trying to read a short Sunday newspaper piece at the kitchen table. My husband also reads across the table, but he stops his reading to comment to me. I make acknowledging noises and smile and refocus on my page, hoping he will be drawn into the section before him. He speaks again. I make the same noises and resume the same sentence I am reading. We have so little time together I cannot bring myself to utter, “Sweetheart, please, I need to finish this.” Because if I had my way I would always need to finish something, always need to be alone. If I achieved that—and the option to live alone again is always available, after all—I could not bear it. I love my husband, my family. Therein, the paradox.

Authors and books are name-checked and quoted frequently in these 23 essays as if part of the air Joan Frank breathes. Her enthusiasms are infectious and readers may find themselves wanting to revisit or visit for the first time some of the writers that inspire her: Martin Amis, Charles Baxter, Sven Birkerts, Robert Bly, Raymond Chandler, Thaisa Frank, Bonnie Friedman, Gail Godwin, Shirley Hazzard, Anne Lamott, William Maxwell, Frank McCourt, Edna O’Brien, Katherine Anne Porter, and Jane Smiley, to name a few.

“I wrote these essays in the grip of them, as serial obsessions,” Frank writes in the Preface to Because You Have To. A serial obsession to read these essays and share them with friends is sure to grip lovers of literature and seekers of time well spent.

September 8, 2012

Anne Lamott, Because You Have To: A Writing Life, Bonnie Friedman, Charles Baxter, Edna O’Brien, Frank McCourt, Gail Godwin, Jane Smiley, Joan Frank, Katherine Anne Porter, Make it Stay, Martin Amis, Raymond Chandler, Robert Bly, Shirley Hazzard, Sven Birkerts, Thaisa Frank, University of Notre Dame Press, William Maxwell
Every Love Story is a Ghost Story

Every Love Story is a Ghost Story
D.T. Max
Viking 2012

Reviewed by Bob Wake

D.T. Max’s solid biography of American writer David Foster Wallace (1962-2008), Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, portrays with emotional force Wallace’s successful struggle to stay sober for the better part of his adult life. From roughly 1989 up until his 2008 suicide (resulting from a recurrence of severe depression that plagued him on and off since his Midwestern adolescence), we learn that he worked a rigorous recovery program, attending regular support group meetings (even when on the road in unfamiliar cities), and befriending and helping fellow recovering addicts. The importance of sobriety to his life and work cannot be overstated. His career-making 1996 maximalist novel, Infinite Jest, can legitimately be considered The Great American AA Novel.

Wallace honored recovery group tenets by not divulging his personal involvement in one organization over another (and the biography never directly links him with any specific twelve-step program by name). Max quotes from a Newsweek interview in which Wallace was asked about Infinite Jest’s verisimilitude and insight regarding Alcoholics Anonymous and halfway-house living conditions. The author replied at the time:

I went with friends to an open AA meeting, and got addicted to them. It was completely riveting. I was never a member—I was a voyeur. When I ended up really liking it was when I let people there know this and they didn’t care.

Michael Pietsch, his editor at Little, Brown, recognized early on that the recovery material was the heart of Infinite Jest, what Pietsch called a “huge roiling story about addiction and recovery, their culture and language and characters, the hidden world that’s revealed when people come in and tell their stories.”

Less impressive to the editor was the novel’s “ornately bizarre-to-goofy superstructure” of dystopian Canadian terrorist cells and the hunt for a lethal video cartridge that induced addictive stupor and even death in those who watched it. The manuscript was cut and reshaped, a process during which Wallace devised his soon-to-be-iconic solution of off-loading some of the novel’s pile-up of political and cinematic arcana and narrative tangents into 100 pages of small-print endnotes, 388 in total.

Max situates the development of Wallace’s nascent writing style (a mixture of Thomas Pynchon’s digressive erudition with the experimental playfulness of Donald Barthelme) within the polarized scene of mid-1980s American literary fiction. When he enrolled in the University of Arizona MFA writing program in 1985, the “dirty realism” of minimalists like Raymond Carver, Jayne Anne Phillips and Richard Ford was in vogue. So was the bestselling “brat pack” fiction (defined by Max as “minimalism with attitude”) of Jay McInerney, Tama Janowitz and Bret Easton Ellis. Wallace found himself butting heads with writing professors who championed above all else “the well-made realist short story.” The dynamic with his teachers shifted, however, with the 1987 publication of his antic 500-page first novel, The Broom of the System. The book had been written as his undergraduate thesis at Amherst College before enrolling at Arizona. (Remarkably, he wrote two Amherst theses for a dual-degree. The second was in philosophy, published posthumously in 2010 as Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will.)

Wallace would later disavow much of what he considered the metafictional games of his pre-Infinite Jest fiction. Some critics, like A.O. Scott in a perceptive 2000 NYRB piece titled “The Panic of Influence,” believed the writer was kidding himself. As Max summarizes it, Scott “emphasized Wallace’s anxious relationship with postmodernism and also his expectation he could have things both ways, pursuing the questionable tactic of writing cleverly to assert the superiority of sincerity in a world wedded to cleverness.”

The growing ranks of Infinite Jest fans felt otherwise, of course. More than a few flocked to sign up for classes taught by Wallace in the English department at Illinois State University, where he was employed when the 1,079-page novel was published to near-instantaneous notoriety:

Students had begun applying to the graduate program specifically to study with him. He was becoming a beacon for a kind of writing, not the postmodernism of the rest of the department and not the realism of Iowa and everywhere else, but a third approach, uncomfortable but sincere realism for a world that was no longer real. Making the head throb heartlike had the potential to become a literary movement. Different names were bruited for it, from the New Sincerity to Post-postmodernism. Occasionally one heard Grunge Fiction.

Every Love Story is a Ghost Story steers clear of hagiography by maintaining a thoroughly researched journalistic tone. The substance abuse, repeated suicide attempts and institutionalizations filling the first half of the biography make for harrowing reading, especially given that the scope and magnitude of some of this information is new.

Certainly the heretofore unreported womanizing documented in the book, with Wallace cavalierly sleeping with female students in the manner of Philip Roth’s Professor Kepesh in The Dying Animal, is far from flattering. His borderline stalking of married poet and future influential memoirist Mary Karr (The Liars’ Club), whom he met during the early stages of his halfway-house recovery in the Boston area, is disturbing and dark. If nothing else, we perhaps now have a little more context for judging novelist and friend Jonathan Franzen’s cryptic allusion (in a 2011 New Yorker essay) to Wallace’s brutish 1999 short story collection, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men:

I will pass over the question of diagnosis (it’s possible he was not simply depressive) and the question of how such a beautiful human being had come by such vividly intimate knowledge of the thoughts of hideous men.

The biography grew out of a well-received profile that Max wrote for The New Yorker in 2009. Wallace, it seems, was a compulsive letter writer, most notably to Franzen and the novelist Don DeLillo (a formative literary influence and someone from whom Wallace appears to have sought a good deal of working-writer advice, sometimes in dire desperation). Never a fan of the Internet—“He was wise enough,” writes Max, “to see a snare in it for an addict like himself”—he only began using email after 2000. Generous quotations from his correspondence with Franzen and DeLillo, his life-long agent Bonnie Nadell, and Little, Brown editor Michael Pietsch (whose posthumous assemblage of the author’s unfinished novel, The Pale King, was widely admired) add immeasurably to the portrait of Wallace and his writing process.

September 3, 2012

Alcoholics Anonymous, Bret Easton Ellis, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, D.T. Max, David Foster Wallace, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, Infinite Jest, Jay McInerney, Jayne Anne Phillips, Jonathan Franzen, Michael Pietsch, Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, Tama Janowitz, The Broom of the System
Summer of the Cinetherapist

My story “Summer of the Cinetherapist” was a runner-up in the 2011 Wisconsin People & Ideas short story contest and subsequently appeared in Rosebud Magazine (Autumn 2011). Now it’s a CBR Press ebook single. And for a limited time it’s a free download from Amazon. (Otherwise, 99 cents.) I’ve outfitted the text with a handful of public domain film stills courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Curious fact: While films and publicity photos typically fall under copyright law, pre-1964 movie trailers often don’t, nor do trailer screenshots. Wikimedia, to my surprise and delight, has public domain trailer screenshots from movies that are integral to “Summer of the Cinetherapist,” such as The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Mildred Pierce, and Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye. Voilà: an illustrated edition of “Summer of the Cinetherapist.” Enjoy!

August 28, 2012

Bob Wake, CBR Press, Rosebud Magazine, Summer of the Cinetherapist, Wisconsin People & Ideas
Ben Armstrong’s Strange Trip Home

Ben Armstrong’s Strange Trip Home
David Allan Cates
Novelas Americanas 2012

Reviewed by Bob Wake

Among many things that novelist David Allan Cates does with unnerving skill in Ben Armstrong’s Strange Trip Home is capture a quality we all recognize from dreams in which personalities and situations inexplicably shift and mutate with dizzying speed through layers of time and memory. The challenge for both author and reader is to bring shared meaning and coherence to jumbled time frames and private metaphors. Middle-aged Ben Armstrong, returning to his Midwestern boyhood home and finding himself roiled in disturbing fever dreams, begins to wonder with alarm, “Was there any other way home besides the strange way?”

His brother is turning into a fish. The landscape shimmers with Indian ghost villages sprung to life and pioneer trails bustling with holographic ancestors. Such are the CGI special-effects that the unconscious seems to have perfected long before Ovid’s Metamorphoses reminded us that “everything must change,” or Christopher Nolan’s Inception announced that, “When we’re asleep, we can do almost anything.” Cates’s bold narrative uncannily mirrors the seemingly arbitrary and at given moments terrifying attributes of dreaming with which we’re so intimately familiar. More ambitious still, almost crazy ambitious, the author wants to construct a collective unconscious for us that links Ben Armstrong’s personal shame, as well as our own, to some very large themes on the dark side of American history.

Ben Armstrong has returned home with tons more baggage than just a suitcase. It’s been 25 years since he fled the family farm burdened with guilt over a six-year affair with his brother’s wife, Sara. Compounding the sadness is the family tragedy that Ben and his brother Dan share: the death of their parents in an automobile accident when the siblings were children. Now 50 years old, Ben feels that he has “spent his entire adult life hiding from desire and regret.” Where Ben Armstrong’s experiences and hallucinations might differ from our own in the particulars, they rarely stray from universal psychic wounds like familial grief and romantic longing and loss.

The narrative obsessively circles and picks at formative events in Ben’s life with the persistence of a nagging conscience. “I’m on a journey of self-forgiveness,” he recognizes, although no one warns him it will involve blood-soaked history lessons and willful spirit-guides like his dead mother and an especially feisty dead grandmother. “Now hush and stop shaking,” his grandmother admonishes as she escorts Ben to the suddenly very real site of an impending Indian massacre. He will huddle for warmth among the corpses and phantoms of slain Native American families. “It was a place he knew,” we’re told, “but he couldn’t remember how.” The locale, a Tom Sawyeresque “cave on a bluff above the river,” is the same charged place where a teenage Ben will lose his virginity and where, later, he will regularly meet Sara for adulterous sexual encounters.

Never mentioned by name, the region encompassing the Armstrong family farm strongly resembles the sharp cliffs and forested valleys of southwestern Wisconsin’s Driftless Area (Cates, now living in Montana, is originally from Madison, and spent time on a family farm near Spring Green):

Later, he would remember how everything seemed normal until the car left the main road for the narrow blacktop, winding into the hills where the continental glacier hadn’t quite reached, where hundred-thousand-year-old gullies had become deep hollows between steep wooded ridges. The hollows turned and forked, turned and forked again, and the sky itself narrowed, and he lost track of direction. He drove through barely familiar lowlands riddled with springs and spongy with marsh, past abandoned farms, crumbled cabins, towns with a tavern, a gas station and a church, past rocky ridges casting shadows different from any he’d ever seen before.

David Allan Cates

The landscape—beautifully evoked throughout—literally “grounds” the novel and provides a sturdy platform for the Hieronymus Bosch-like follies and depravities that greet Ben Armstrong during his night journey toward grace and self-absolution. Also like Bosch, Cates’s material can sometimes feel hermetic and inscrutable. There’s a mercifully brief, memorably grotesque episode, for instance, when Ben reaches above his head and pulls from the air “a flying hunk of meat” which he proceeds to eat and which turns out to be his own unattached anus. Whether or not this is Cates’s representation of, say, the Ouroboros self-reflexivity symbol of a serpent devouring its own tail is, well, anyone’s guess (at least it’s my guess).

Does it really matter in a novel as inventive as this one that the weirdness occasionally erupts in a kind of homegrown psychedelic surrealism that’s as outrageous and funny as it is baffling? (For example, a roving news van from which steps a young female TV reporter with Tourette’s whose mic check consists of, “Testing, testing! Do me, do me! Do me like a doggy!”) Some reality-principle elements are perhaps left too tantalizingly vague, such as Ben’s job in “our nation’s capital,” where he’s an engineer working on a laser security system called “The Project.” The shadowy career seems more a product of an underdeveloped narrative thread than sinister ambiguity.

To be sure, this is a story with a lot on its mind and much of it is buried where impulses and childhood trauma take center stage in the guise of symbols and ciphers. Ben Armstrong’s Strange Trip Home is David Allan Cates’s fourth novel (his 1992 debut, Hunger in America, was a New York Times Notable Book) and it showcases a writer with an assured style stretching his talent in directions that in all likelihood are as thrillingly uncharted for the author as for the many readers who will respond enthusiastically to this dream of a book.

June 26, 2012

Ben Armstrong’s Strange Trip Home, Christopher Nolan, coyote mythology, David Allan Cates, Driftless Area, Hieronymus Bosch, Hunger in America, Inception, Madison Wisconsin, Metamorphoses, Native American folklore, Ouroboros symbolism, Ovid, Spring Green Wisconsin, Tom Sawyer
Split Personality

Split Personality
Karla Huston and Cathryn Cofell
sunnyoutside 2012

Reviewed by Bob Wake

You have to admire a poetry chapbook whose self-contradicting opening line trumpets, “Now is not the time to begin …” The poem, “Digging in the Fat Box,” a kind of encomium to failed diets and body fat as symptoms of spiritual longing (“wanting / to be filled”), and the chapbook (Split Personality), are the collaborative work of Karla Huston and Cathryn Cofell, two contemporary Wisconsin poets much esteemed for their forceful individual voices. (Check out, for instance, Huston’s “Anti-Rapunzel” and Cofell’s “Opulent Copulant: Scenes from the Musical.”) Their melded persona is a hypersexualized Candide named Thigh:

Thigh straps on a rubber penis,
learns to dance the hustle with Ray
from receiving, wrapping him in strapping
tape and pushpins, she wills herself
to squeeze, release, squeeze
release those burning yearnings for Ho Hos
and cheese …
+++(“Thigh Master”)

Emphatic eroticism and clever sexual punning (“Ray / from receiving”; “strapping / tape”; “Ho Hos”) are the central driving forces throughout Split Personality. The luridness works as a comment on the desperation of sexual desire as well as a parody of pornographic imagery:

She once had a bikini wax in Brazil,
a woman with long nails and eucalyptus
made her take off her Maidenform, get down
on all fours, arch her naked back
like an XXX movie queen.
Something in this position made her drop
her guard, made her want to squeal,
spank me hard, chica …
+++(“She Contemplates the Venus de Milo”)

This approach is wildly funny at times, but also, as in the final lines of “She Contemplates the Venus de Milo,” may shift abruptly to something dark and destructive within the human heart: “Cut off my hands, she whispers to the mirror, / the enormity of her own bare self.” Indeed, one of the strongest poems in the chapbook is the haunting “Makeup Girl,” which begins by illustrating the chasm between working-class reality and the photoshopped fakery of Hollywood and the fashion world. It’s a well-trod theme, but Huston and Cofell don’t stop there. They extend the metaphor into thornier territory, where we are startled to recognize our own complicity in the manufacture of self-negating fantasy:

I’m the girl you never think about,
the one you don’t know,
unless the star is vexed or perplexed
or missing a lens or dressed
in the wrong shade of glue.
Without me, she cannot be the part,
and without her, I am translucent.
+++(“Makeup Girl”)

The twenty-two poems in Split Personality never take their explicitness for granted, nor do they collar us merely for cheap thrills. The poets raise serious questions about perception and the fracturing of our selfhood:

If everyone in the dream is a version of you,
then what difference does it make who shows up,
holds a gun to your head, plays
tic-tac-toe with your animus, runs
a slack tongue up your thigh?
+++(“She Dreams About Being Jung”)

Smart and razor-sharp, Split Personality is a surprisingly rich collection that functions both as playful erotica and a critique of our worldly culture of impulsivity and instant gratification.

June 12, 2012

Cathryn Cofell, Karla Huston, Split Personality, sunnyoutside
cbr 19 / summer 2012

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cbr 19 / summer 2012

The Pale King
David Foster Wallace
Reviewed by Dwight Allen

the eelgrass meadow
Robin Chapman
Reviewed by Gay Davidson-Zielske

Unexpected Shiny Things
Bruce Dethlefsen
Reviewed by Gay Davidson-Zielske

Make it Stay
Joan Frank
Reviewed by Bob Wake

Ann Prayer
A short story
Elli Hazit

Men without Meaning
A short story
Gerald Fosdal & Jack Lehman

Fisherman’s Beach
An excerpt from the novel
George Vukelich

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June 1, 2012

Ann Prayer, Bob Wake, Bruce Dethlefsen, David Foster Wallace, Dwight Allen, Elli Hazit, Fisherman’s Beach, Gay Davidson-Zielske, George Vukelich, Gerald Fosdal, Jack Lehman, Joan Frank, Make it Stay, Men without Meaning, Robin Chapman, the eelgrass meadow, The Pale King, Thomas J. King, Unexpected Shiny Things
Coming June 2012 from CBR Press

Autism: Sensory-Movement Differences and Diversity
Martha R. Leary and Anne M. Donnellan

First Time in One Volume:
Leary and Donnellan’s influential works on
autism and sensory-movement differences

“If we follow the lead offered here we will not only have a model of the discipline we must cultivate, we will also have the support of people with disabilities as full partners in the difficult search for better understanding. Leary and Donnellan carefully note anomalies, irregularities likely to be ignored or explained away in routine practice: irregularities such as the many accommodations people with disabilities and those who care about them have invented beneath the notice of the professionals who ordinarily control their treatment. The authors rigorously deconstruct the myth of mental capacity.”—John O’Brien, author (with Connie Lyle O’Brien) of Members of Each Other: Building community in company with people with developmental disabilities.

“The trend of our best work in behavioral difficulties has been to move from coercion and control to understanding and accommodation. Martha Leary and Anne Donnellan have made a crucial advance with their groundbreaking research.”—Herbert Lovett, author of Learning to Listen: Positive approaches and people with difficult behavior.

About the Authors

Martha R. Leary, MA, CCC-SLP, is a Speech and Language Pathologist who has learned from people with autism and their supporters and their families for over 30 years. She has lectured extensively in the United States, Canada, Ireland, Australia and England. Her highly acclaimed writings with David Hill, Jodi Robledo and Anne Donnellan, present alternative ways of viewing the symptoms of sensory and movement differences which may affect our understanding of people with communication differences and unconventional behaviors. Martha continues to learn from people with unusual support needs. She consults with people and their teams through organizations that focus on personalized positive supports.

Anne M. Donnellan, Ph.D., is a Professor in the School of Leadership and Education Sciences at the University of San Diego as well as Professor Emerita at Wisconsin-Madison. A long-time member of the Professional Advisory Panel of the Autism Society of America, she is also on the Board of the Autism National Committee and active with TASH. She has published some 100 books, articles, chapters and monographs and has lectured throughout the world. She is currently co-host of the Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience special issue, Autism: The Movement Perspective. Her career spans over 40 years of training, research, and advocacy work on behalf of children and adults with communication and behavior challenges.

Book cover design: Dan Parent

May 8, 2012

Anne Donnellan, Autism: Sensory-Movement Differences and Diversity, Cambridge Book Review Press, Connie Lyle O’Brien, Dan Parent, David Hill, Herbert Lovett, Jodi Robledo, John O’Brien, Learning to Listen, Martha Leary, Members of Each Other
Fisherman’s Beach publicity tour

Two great opportunities to read excerpts from our CBR Press 50th Anniversary ebook edition of George Vukelich’s Wisconsin novel, Fisherman’s Beach. First, you can read an excerpt from Chapter Eight in the Spring 2012 issue of Rosebud, available in bookstores or for purchase online. It’s one of our favorite chapters from the novel: 12-year-old Reuben LeMere receives a .22 caliber rifle for his birthday and quickly graduates from tin-can target practice to irresponsibly shooting at seagulls on the Lake Michigan beach. He earns the wrath of an irate lighthouse keeper and, worse, a stern lesson from his father, the book’s central moral force, Old Man LeMere.

Next, you can check out the May 2012 issue of Madison Magazine, now on newsstands and online. In addition to Wisconsin State Journal columnist Doug Moe’s Foreword to Fisherman’s Beach, you’ll also find (exclusive to Madison Magazine online) a lengthy excerpt from Chapter Ten. It’s another one of the novel’s highlights: 34-year-old Germaine LeMere, home from the Second World War, joins three of his brothers on the family’s fishing tug for a day of harvesting lake trout. Sibling tensions mount between Germaine and his brother Roger over hot-button topics like who’s better suited to run the ailing Old Man’s fishing business and, perhaps the hottest hot-button topic of all: Germaine’s former sweetheart, Ginny Dussault, who’s now dating Roger.

April 21, 2012

Cambridge Book Review Press, CBR Press, Doug Moe, Fisherman’s Beach, George Vukelich, Madison Magazine, Rosebud Magazine, Wisconsin State Journal
Fisherman’s Beach ebook goes live

Cover: Dan Parent. Photo: Thomas J. King.

CBR Press is proud to present this 50th Anniversary ebook edition of Fisherman’s Beach, the masterful debut novel by the late Wisconsin author and long-time Madison newspaper columnist and radio-host George Vukelich (1927-1995). Originally published in 1962 by St. Martin’s Press, Fisherman’s Beach charts the postwar struggles of a Catholic fishing clan in Two Rivers, Wisconsin headed by a dying patriarch, Old Man LeMere. Often at odds with his Irish wife, his five sons, not to mention his doctor and his priest, LeMere represents a tradition and moral force that seem to be breaking down around him. The enhanced 2012 ebook edition features a Foreword by Wisconsin State Journal columnist Doug Moe and photos of Two Rivers by photographer Thomas J. King. Bonus ebook supplements include biographical and critical essays on George Vukelich and Fisherman’s Beach by August Derleth and James P. Roberts. There are also discussion questions for book clubs and classrooms.

“I couldn’t be happier that on this, the 50^th anniversary of the original publication of Fisherman’s Beach, Cambridge Book Review Press is bringing it to a new generation of readers.”—From the Foreword by Doug Moe, columnist for the Wisconsin State Journal, and author of Lords of the Ring: The Triumph and Tragedy of College Boxing’s Greatest Team.

“One of the best family novels of our time—not the family novel that moves from one generation to another … but the novel that is the portrait of the family seen at a time of crisis.”—August Derleth.

“This impressive first novel by George Vukelich has all the turbulence, surge, ebb and, sometimes, serenity of the great body of water which is its setting—Lake Michigan … Every character is as true as life.”—The Milwaukee Journal.

March 28, 2012

August Derleth, CBR Press, Dan Parent, Doug Moe, Fisherman’s Beach, Fisherman’s Beach ebook, George Vukelich, James P. Roberts, St. Martin’s Press, Thomas J. King, Two Rivers Wisconsin