-
The Beach at Two Rivers, Wisconsin
“Without the wind, he thought, the sun would burn out a man’s brain on the open beach. But the fresh, constant breeze off the lake washed over them like cool water.”—from Fisherman’s Beach by George Vukelich. Lake Michigan beach at Two Rivers, Wisconsin. Photo: Thomas J. King.
-
Make it Stay
Make it Stay
Joan Frank
The Permanent Press 2012Reviewed by Bob Wake
Joan Frank’s Make it Stay is a brief novel, but it skimps on nothing under the sun, particularly the lush sun of Northern California where the story is set. This tale of aging Boomer marital discord is so thoroughly embedded within the sensuality of the natural world that it seems sprouted rather than written. In Frank’s lovingly rendered vineyard town of Mira Flores (“the fresh sharp smell of pines in the warm sun, the drifty morning fog, heavy sweetness of roses spilling over fences in Popsicle colors, faint salt scents of ocean”), impulsiveness and passion are as intuitive as the Pacific Coast tides forty miles away.
Impulses, like stories, are renewable resources that can turn destructive if we refuse their lessons. It seems appropriate that Rachel, the narrator of Make it Stay, is a writer. Whether or not this better equips her to deal with the serial adultery of her husband’s best friend is not so easily answered. “Why must this be the story, over and over and over,” she laments in italicized dismay. Rachel, we discover (somewhat to our discomfort as readers), is not so much an unreliable narrator as a recognizably flawed one overcome by self-doubt and jealousy. “Lord,” she confesses to us after making one of several breathtakingly cruel observations about others, “what an unkind thought.”
The first half of Make it Stay is a stylistic tour-de-force with chapters alternating between dinner-party preparations overseen by Rachel’s husband, Neil, a Scottish-born legal aid attorney and amateur gourmand, and the backstory of Neil’s friendship with the adulterous Mike and his alcoholic wife, Tilda, both due for dinner that evening. In Joan Frank’s energetic telling, this set-up becomes a page-turning psychedelic Wayback Machine as we’re transported to Mira Flores in the 1970s: Mike, a marine biology dropout, owns an aquarium shop in town called Finny Business; Neil, waiting to pass the California bar, interns two blocks away at the Legal Aid office. There are diving excursions to the Polynesian Islands in search of rare tropical fish for Mike’s shop. A near-drowning bonds their friendship for life.
The novel takes a decidedly darker turn in its second half. Joan Frank refuses to judge her characters even when her characters are quick to judge one another. Rachel’s wisdom, by novel’s end, is real and hard-won, but it is also world-weary and not necessarily built to last. Like the marriages splayed and dissected with such scalding precision in Make it Stay. Readers whose sympathies fall in one direction early on, may be surprised to find their hardened hearts reversing course as Frank skillfully and tough-mindedly overturns our expectations and rattles our complacency. Rachel’s writerly indignation is as up-to-date and CNN-ready as it is timeless and universal:
Crazy shit—and I don’t mean pissy little Jamesian drawing-room slights, but atrocity—bombards folks with no warning every day; decent, forthright, shoelace-tying folks. If they have shoelaces. Look at Neil’s clients; look at the news. Anything that’s functional, that’s actually been good for us? Passable health, freedom from pain? Something to eat, clean water? Nobody pull a weapon today?
When the phrase “make it stay” is finally spoken—haltingly, painfully—by one of the characters, it is a cri de coeur not of nostalgic longing but of something deeper, an animating force submerged and mysterious, seldom glimpsed, as elusive as the rarest tropical fish, but most assuredly captured in the pages of Joan Frank’s memorable novel.
-
African-American Classics
W.E.B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, and Langston Hughes in illustrated form on the cover of African-American Classics. Congratulations to editor Tom Pomplun, whose Graphic Classics Vol. 22, African-American Classics, receives a glowing full-page review by critic Rob Thomas in The Capital Times (week of Feb. 15-21). Thomas writes:
The 22 pieces in this terrific collection, all by African-American illustrators, bring to life short stories and poems by America’s earliest African-American writers, some famous, others largely lost to the shifting winds of time and brought back to life here. As a collection of fine writing and illustrating, as well as a window into the mind of the African-American artist of generations ago, the collection is indispensable.
Tom Pomplun was for ten years the graphic designer for Rosebud magazine before launching Graphic Classics. I had the pleasure of reviewing Graphic Classics: Mark Twain (2004) and Graphic Classics: O. Henry (2005) in Cambridge Book Review. (Tom also designed the memorable cover for Walk Awhile in My Autism, published in 2005 by CBR Press and still selling briskly.)
-
Fisherman’s Beach: The E-Book Cover
Cover design: Dan Parent. Photo: Thomas J. King. Here’s Dan Parent’s sharp cover design for Fisherman’s Beach, an ebook coming this spring from CBR Press. Originally published by St. Martin’s Press in 1962, the new ebook edition will mark the 50th anniversary of George Vukelich’s potent novel about a struggling Two Rivers, Wisconsin fishing family. The Milwaukee Journal said at the time, “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 ebook edition features a new Foreword by Doug Moe, columnist for the Wisconsin State Journal and colleague and friend of Vukelich’s. Also included are photos of Two Rivers by photographer Thomas J. King. Watch for excerpts from Fisherman’s Beach forthcoming in Rosebud #52 (March 2012) and Madison Magazine (May 2012).
-
Stephanie Bedford on “Redshift: Greenstreem”
Book critic Stephanie Bedford in The Capital Times (week of Jan. 4-10) pens some wonderfully trenchant remarks about Rod Clark’s Redshift: Greenstreem (now a CBR Press ebook):
Cambridge’s CBR Press has just reissued the short, punchy and funny sci-fi “micro-novel” Redshift: Greenstreem by Cambridge resident Rod Clark. First published in 2000, it’s an unapologetically geeky piece of futuristic sci-fi set in 2093 Los Angeles, in a world where what we quaintly refer to as “the 99 percent” have been enslaved by debt and inflation. These consumer drones inhabit “Redshift,” an area where their whimsical desires, fanned by a constant stream of advertising, can be transformed against their will into binding agreements to purchase. Redshift presents a satirically exaggerated dystopia, but one that pointedly resembles our own here and now. Wonky appendices hark back to other sci-fi classics like 1984 and A Clockwork Orange, but Redshift is more intent—if only slightly—on tickling your funnybone than giving you nightmares.
-
Fisherman’s Beach: The Ad
Here’s a first look at our print ad for Fisherman’s Beach, the 1962 novel by Wisconsin author George Vukelich that Cambridge Book Review Press is bringing out in an ebook edition in the spring of 2012. Big thanks to graphic designer Dan Parent for creating the ad, and to photographer Thomas J. King for the photo of the lighthouse tower at Two Rivers, Wisconsin (the setting for Fisherman’s Beach). More of King’s striking Two Rivers photos will be included in the ebook. The ad will be appearing in the next issue of Rosebud, due out in March, along with an excerpt from the novel.
Ad designed by Dan Parent.
-
Brett Alan Sanders on “Redshift: Greenstreem”
We’ve been alerted to some incisive remarks about Rod Clark’s Redshift: Greenstreem (now a CBR Press ebook) from writer and literary translator Brett Alan Sanders. The latest issue (51) of Rosebud includes an excerpt from Sanders’ translation of Passionate Nomads by Argentinian novelist Maria Rosa Lojo. Here’s what else Mr. Sanders found in Rosebud 51:
It also contains Appendix I and Appendix II from Clark’s science fiction “micro-novel” Redshift: Greenstreem, originally published in 2000 and just re-issued by the Cambridge (WI) Book Review Press. (It is available from the publisher and from amazon.com.) The book is being touted as “a minor cult classic,” and having just purchased and read a copy I can see why. It has much to say about the present economic crisis (about which it is highly prescient) and about the need for something like the Occupy Wall Street movement that is currently sweeping the nation. Say what you will about the merits of these occupations, the need for concern that they highlight—over the wildly increasing gap between rich and poor both at home and abroad—seems hard to seriously question. Maybe, by some creative mix of rhetoric and protest, we can still save our children and grandchildren from the ill fate prophesied in Clark’s dystopian narrative.
-
Clark Street Rag
Sketch of poet John Lehman by artist Spencer Walts, from the back cover of Shrine of the Tooth Fairy. We’re celebrating the release of the ebook edition of John Lehman’s poetry collection, Shrine of the Tooth Fairy, first published by Cambridge Book Review Press in 1998 with illustrations and cover art by Spencer Walts. John stopped by for coffee this morning and we recorded him reading from the collection. Here’s “Clark Street Rag”:
Clark Street Rag / John Lehman
On a night that shadows make tents
of backrooms a streetcar strums
past the cemetery
on the corner of Clark and Wilson
as Harold the Upholsterer
eyes a 1911 D penny,
the air in his shop suffocating
as a worn cushion—
dusty, warm, smelling of mold.“I lost this,” he says and points
to a left ear chewed past the lobe,
“in a fight to a guy
who vomited so hard he died …
with the help of a pen knife.”Floorboards creak in the vacant
apartment above.
Harold runs his thumb along the
counter’s glass edge.
He is a Pharaoh with a jeweler’s lamp
and the moon’s rays trapped
in his tomb.“Four dollars.”
It twists from his mouth, a sound
like dry leather,
to the boy with an envelope
clutched in his hand.And my heart plays banjo
to a city of small deals!
-
Del’s Supper Club
Spencer Walts illustration from Shrine of the Tooth Fairy. John Lehman stopped by this morning for coffee and audio. We’re celebrating the release of the Kindle ebook edition of John’s poetry collection, Shrine of the Tooth Fairy, first published by Cambridge Book Review Press in 1998. The ebook includes Spencer Walts’s wonderful illustrations. Here’s John earlier today reading “Del’s Supper Club”:
Del’s Supper Club / John Lehman
They used to sit on car hoods
along the beach
or turn radio knobs and cigarettes
and watch the coil
of sun go out
and wait
for distant rumblings,
for the smell of lightning
from across the lake.Now they applaud
tumbles
of liar’s dice
in a leather cup—
white shirt, short sleeved men,
who might sell appliances or tires
their wrist hairs coil
so smoothly
over chainlinked bands.
Laughter barks
from gesturing hands.
They caress a party glass
with a pin-up in a dress
that disappears
behind ice and gin
as the incandescent sign
through an open window’s screen
blurs
into a lipstick blot,
red taffeta,
eye glass frames of plastic bone.
They drift to midnights long ago
when bodies slid from clothes
and in the river glided over rocks,their fingers slipping into moss,
while pines reeked, overripe
as rotting cantaloupe.They hesitate,
alone,
at urinals,
with feet raised on rails at bars,
and in parking lots
at the door handles of their cars,
listening
to a green strand of neon
snap.
-
Santa discounts Tooth Fairy
Spencer Walts illustration from Shrine of the Tooth Fairy. Happy Holidays from Cambridge Book Review Press. We’ve dropped the price on Shrine of the Tooth Fairy, John Lehman’s wide-ranging collection of poetry, first published in 1998 with illustrations by Spencer Walts. For a limited time, the $8.00 paperback will be available for $2.99. John’s stopping by the CBR studio this week to record some Tooth Fairy audio that we’ll be posting soon. Plus, a Kindle edition is on the way!
~
Survey of Teachers’ Sexual Fantasies / John Lehman
Phys Ed
When we moved away
from our old house
I left a magazine
of naked women
with pillowy breasts
hidden in the attic.
We stopped at a motel
with an indoor pool
that smelled like warm semen.
My parents stayed
in their room,
drank bourbon.
I dove again and again
through clouds.Home Ec
Once she had a boy
in her classroom.
He sat slouched in the corner.
“His eyes glowed,” she said,
“like that back left burner
I just turned off.”
She thought his bare arm
looked like baking sponge-cake.
She touched it.
It was greased metal.Assistant Principal
It tastes so good
don’t ever try it
even once.English
The fish’s belly—
slippery smooth,
whiter than the neck
under a girl’s long hair—
is kissed
purple, red, yellow,
and blue
by the lamprey’s bite.Metal Shop
I love a good truck.Art
I was married to a man
who once was my student.
He, not I, could have been
another Auguste Rodin.
I loved the way he listened
to my words when I talked,
and when he did
I listened to them too.Mathematics
I’m going to drive
to Ann Arbor for a convention.
I like to go kind of slow
in my ranchwagon,
watch those women go by
alone in their cars.
I like the ones
with short black hair,
eyes bulging behind wire glasses.
Not cool blondes,
but new housewives
with buckteeth
who won’t look back.
Sometimes I’m late.
I forget, go too slow.History
My young man died in Vietnam
pouring the foundation for
a village school by himself.
Shot. From bushes. His rifle
wrapped in plastic to keep it
clean, against a tree.
At nights—his lieutenant
was kind enough to write—
he had been digging a well
by hand with a shovel.
The officer wondered if
it weren’t a sort of grave.
But I know. Stripped, sweating,
breathing hard in the dark,
he is burrowing home to me.Janitor
Lock your doors and windows.
We don’t want trouble here,
if you know what I mean.
Coffee Spew 