Generation Gaps

Was the phrase ‘generation gap’ invented in the Sixties? I suspected so and found confirmation online. I had started wondering about that and other, more complicated questions after a brief but unusual conversation a few mornings ago in my bookstore, when a man younger than my son remarked to me, after we had found we had similar views on many current issues, that he thought, “no offense, but I think your generation screwed up our country.” I didn’t argue but have been reflecting on his opinion since our encounter. 

First, it’s important to remember that my generation, that of the 1960s, felt our parents’ generation and those before it had screwed up the country! We didn’t want to grow up to be men and women in grey flannel suits, selling our souls for big, shiny automobiles and houses in the suburbs and turning away from problems that didn’t affect us personally. We certainly didn’t want to see our world destroyed in senseless atomic war, a possibility the “Greatest Generation” invented and we inherited.

So hippies followed postwar existentialists in seeking lives of authenticity. Some went “back to the land,” and some sought spiritual enlightenment in music and/or meditation and/or drugs. Many fell for the dream of “free love,” finding that idea more honest than unhappy marriages they saw their parents suffering through and imagining foolishly that jealousy could be overcome with reason (a lesson it seems every generation has to learn for itself). But there was much more. Idealistic Peace Corps workers went abroad to other countries, the Black Panthers set up idealistic projects in urban neighborhoods, the American Indian Movement was born, and passionate kids from the North went South to sign up black voters. There were marches and demonstrations against the war in Vietnam, a war we now know was started by accident and criminally pursued for years.  

“If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem,” we said, and I still believe that, but then the question is, was our generation part of solving any of the problems we faced? 

Here’s another question: Did our children’s generation do any better? 

And another: How will our grandchildren’s generation do? 

Except for laundry I’m taking a day off today, so I’m going to cut this short and leave my questions hanging. If you have thoughts or answers or opinions or experiences to share, I welcome them right here. You can leave a comment as ‘Anonymous,’ if you like, and that’s fine, too.

Book Review: DE FACTO FEMINISM

De Facto Feminism: Essays Straight Outta Oakland

by Judy Juanita

Paper, 227pp, $19.95

In Virgin Soul, a novel set in the 1960s, the protagonist shared many of the author’s own experiences in terms of family, education, participation in the Black Party Party, and social activism in general. But a novel, even as it draws on an author’s own background, is fiction. De Facto Feminism: Essays Straight Outta Oakland is something different. This time we met Judy Juanita directly, face to face.

The essays in this book span the time period from the late Sixties to the present and include stories from Juanita’s life, her hopes and dreams, her strong opinions, and her unstoppable determination. There is honesty and humor here, along with bits of polemic, making for a complex mix that deserves to be read through more than once. Here are the first lines of Juanita’s introduction:

I’m a woman. POW! Black. BAM! Outspoken. STOMP! Don’t fit in. OUCH!

That tells a reader right from the get-go that no punches will be pulled in what follows, and no punches are pulled.

Juanita begins, easily enough, by recounting her growing-up years in East Oakland, a safe, friendly, middle-class neighborhood of unlocked houses inhabited by Portuguese immigrants, Mexicans, Mormons, and two black families, of which hers was the second on the block. (Her family was first on the block, however, to visit Disneyland.) Her parents were both readers, and her childhood world was a quite ordinary one of household chores, TV (all white faces, though, in those days), comic books, music, hide-and-seek, and backyard camping sleepovers, with occasional family expeditions to San Francisco. Despite the little heartbreaks that come to most young people in time, these memories read like a fairly idyllic American childhood, although as a child she took her family and neighborhood completely for granted, as fortunate children usually do.

I would not realize how fully, peculiarly and tightly loved I was until I left California – the state and the state of mind.

Growing up, of course, is only the beginning. There followed heady days of student radicalism and Juanita’s membership in the Black Panther Party. She served as editor-in-chief of their newspaper when Eldridge Cleaver went to jail.

My friends and I dropped out and worked in the BPP full time. We eventually returned to campus too, armed, not only with actual weapons, but with a new consciousness about education, service, the poor, the police and the military, oppression, and civil and human rights.

Along the way, Juanita had begun to write poetry, and when she quit a New Jersey job in straight journalism, she says, “I came to poetry when I was out on a limb.” She joined a group of others poetry writers and soon found herself reading in public and having work published. “Through contemplating my navel,” as she puts it with self-deprecating sarcasm, she won a fellowship and then, over a period of six years, enjoyed a series of short-term funded gigs teaching writing in New Jersey public schools. It was a stop-gap solution. But the inclusion of some of her poetry enriches this book of essays and helps us follow her development as a writer.

For a time, Juanita took on a job offered by a friend, cleaning condos, although her initial response to the friend’s offer had been,

Moi? A black woman with degrees, fellowships, travels abroad, a library of dictionaries within my library – a cleaning woman?

At one point she quit and took a temporary office job (for one-third the pay), but after four days she went back to cleaning, “where nobody called me Bertha, Beulah or Bessie,” and began to see her life and her strength more clearly than she ever had before.

Juanita’s evolution as a writer is an important theme developed in these essays. Through the years she pursued poetry, drama, and fiction, and when her agent asked why the humor he found in her conversation wasn’t evident in the novel she was writing, she decided to try for “funny” by attempting stand-up comedy. Approaching her comedy club gigs with the same strong work ethic she brought to writing classes, she learned what worked and how, but most importantly she learned about herself and the place of humor in her life and her writing. I’m not going to put a spoiler in here, though, to tell you what she learned! It’s in the essay, “Putting the Funny in the Novel.”

Blackness is another important theme. “The Gun as Ultimate Performance Poem” is guaranteed to stop readers in their tracks. Juanita had liked guns, she tells us, but “The Gun” is something else. Another no-holds-barred essay, “Report from The Front, i.e. Berkeley, CA,” makes clear the great racial divide all-too-alive, recounted in a series of maddening incidents.

The last ‘essay’ in the book stretches the meaning of the term pretty far, but by then I found myself going right along with it, in spite of the subject matter (Ghosts? Really?), thanks to the author’s dramatic skill in telling her story.

As I said in the beginning of my earlier review of the novel, Judy Juanita and I are of the same era. We both came from middle-class backgrounds, were both spelling champions -- and also suffered social trauma that same sixth-grade year. Inevitably, our paths diverged, as Illinois has never been California, and white and black Americans live in two different countries, anyway, in a lot of ways.

Personal essays, however, by writers of any era in any country, can invite readers into a writer’s life as effectively as autobiography or memoir. Temporarily inhabiting other lives is part of the magic of reading. That magic also, one hopes, can build bridges of understanding between people whose experiences of the world have been dissimilar.

Having read this book, I now want to read Judy Juanita’s plays, and I also want to read Carolyn Rodgers and Ishmael Reed. Multiple doorways beckon.

Another thing. I’m thinking of my own grandmother, my mother’s mother, in a slightly different way. Wasn’t she a de facto feminist, too? I feel strongly that she was, and I thank you, Judy Juanita, for coming up with this term. I hope you don’t object to my applying it to a dead white woman. Believe me, if you’d known my grandmother's life, you would agree that she deserved the title!

The World Has Always Been Turning

Our country today is politically polarized. The gap is widening between the haves and have-nots, with the middle disappearing. Is this the worst time in American history? How can anyone say? This is where we are now. A hundred and fifty years ago, none of us living now were yet alive.

A younger friend asked me once, “What were the Sixties really like?” Well, the answer depends on the person you ask. High school students and college students had very different experiences, military families quite different again, and the rich and powerful, as always – well, they live on a different plane from the rest of us, don't they? 

How old are you? Where did you grow up? Are you black or white, yellow, brown or red?

In the United States at large, we enjoyed great music in the Sixties -- and mourned terrible assassinations. The decade brought Black Power and the Black Panthers, a story told in the novel Virgin Soul, by Judy Juanita, but urban and rural dwellers knew the Sixties in very different ways, as Anne-Marie Oomen reveals in her memoir, Love, Sex, and 4-H.

Across the United States and elsewhere in the world, there were protests against the war in Vietnam until American troops were finally pulled out. But in southeast Asia itself, life in warn-torn Vietnam brought years of terror that did not end when the Americans left, or as the Sixties bled into the Seventies, because it’s one thing to have your country involved in an overseas war and quite another to have a war in your backyard.

Andrew X. Pham, author of Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam (1999), has just given me an unforgettable reading experience. His father, an engineer and “a man of regrets,” also a former Nationalist, was a prisoner of the North Vietnamese Communists following the American withdrawal. (An and his mother, highly enterprising and deeply superstitious, lived near the prison camp to watch over the head of the family, while other children lived with grandparents.) One of six children, An (his Vietnamese name) was the second-born. After his father was mysteriously released from prison, and before he could be recaptured and executed – the fate he expected, had the Communists learned of his background as a Nationalist propaganda director -- the family escaped from Vietnam.

An was eight years old when his family came to America, but growing up in California he remembered his Vietnamese childhood. Those memories were the inspiration for his return visit as a young adult, to explore by bicycle (on a limited amount of money difficult for native Vietnamese who never left home to believe is all he has) the country he left so long ago.

For Americans and for Vietnamese, the Sixties were a world-changing decade. One friend of ours volunteered for the draft with a buddy, right out of high school. His buddy never came home, and our friend still asks himself what his life would have been like “if I hadn’t gone to Vietnam.”

During his often difficult travels, Andrew Pham asks himself again and again, what his life would have been like had his family stayed in Vietnam. He realizes that his good fortune was very much an accident of birth. Different parents, different life. Seeing firsthand terrible poverty and corruption in the country that might still have been his home, he is grateful for his good fortune, despite resentments and prejudice he encountered growing up in the U.S.

The Sixties were a long time ago, an era sanctified in retrospect by some and reviled by others. If you weren’t around then, this obituary for Daniel Berrigan will give you some idea of what you missed during that period in the United States. There was a lot more to it than tie-dye and drugs, beads and funny clothes.

Rest in peace, Daniel Berrigan. You got your work done.

If Books Were Spices, What Would These Be?

Sometimes a cliché can give rise to fresher thoughts. The cliché that came to me this morning, as I looked at the three thoroughly unrelated new books I’m featuring this week in my bookshop, was “Variety is the spice of life.”

Should I be ashamed that my first thought was such a trite reflection? Next into my head came a personal statement I can make very truthfully, so it may mean more or again it may not, which is that one of the things I love about books is their infinite variety. Books give us a variety of subject matter and writing style as great as the number of human minds who have written books in the past, write books today, and will write them in the future -- lives and thoughts and fantasies and observations – worlds and perspectives we would otherwise never know, available to us in this simple, as-yet-unsurpassed, durable hand-held technology. Wow!

Well, but then I thought more literally about spices and, by metaphorical extension, how one might link spices and books, and I may have gone too far afield with my third thought. Would Nuts and Buried be nutmeg, or is that too simplistic? Would The Mare be coriander because of the Dominican connection? What about Nineteen + Conversations with Jazz Musicians? Soul food? Maybe red pepper? But wait, where’s the cumin, and how can I attach it to one of these featured books?

Sometimes one gets carried away by a metaphor, so okay, let’s forget that one. At least it got me started writing about my Books-of-the-Week.

Michigan readers will remember Elizabeth Buzzelli as the author of the Dead series: Dead Dancing Women, Dead Floating Lovers, etc. I hope you also remember that she is now writing murder mysteries as Elizabeth Lee and that the new series takes place in East Texas on a pecan ranch. Want to go somewhere warm for the winter? Enjoy a vicarious getaway!

Lindy Blanchard is the first-person narrator of these funny, lively stories. With her strong university background in research science, she’s come home to develop a pecan tree that will be resistant to drought and pests, as well as to help out in the family store, the Nut House. When murder occurs, however, she and her intrepid Meemaw are right there in the thick of it, investigating and interviewing and putting their lives in danger to find the killer. Nuts and Buried is the third book in this irresistible series and a very affordable self-indulgent purchase at $7.99. Impossible to go wrong! Yea, Elizabeth!

Of my second featured book this week, The Mare, by Mary Gaitskill, I’ll refer to you my last blog post, where I wrote about it at length. (You have to scroll down through the weather and stone stuff to get to the book review.) The Mare is a hardcover novel and not cheap at $26.95, but if ever a new book was worth its full cover price, this is that book.

And now for something I’d love to call my own discovery, except that I learned about the book when a friend who is also a friend of the author sent me a copy. Garth W. Caylor (he actually goes by “Bill”) interviewed New York jazz musicians in the 1960s. He interviewed them in their homes, sometimes with interruptions by children or the telephone, so that the reader has the sense of being there in the room, and conversations ranged from music and dance, painting, literature, i.e., creativity in general, to the nitty-gritty of making a living in New York at that time, pros and cons of living in one part of the country or another or in another country altogether, to the deepest meaning of life as these creative individuals found it. These interviews are extraordinary, even to a reader (like myself) without a deep jazz background.

Here’s what makes me a little crazy, though. The author of this extraordinary book, nothing like which is available anywhere, could not find a publisher in the Sixties, after he had carefully secured permissions from all the musicians he interviews (can you imagine how disappointed they must have been?) and even after a book reviewer for Little Brown, one Ralph J. Gleason, music columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, contributor to the iconic Downbeat (now online), and cofounder of no less than Rolling Stone, “urged” the publisher “with every ounce of conviction I have to publish it.” Little Brown sent a copy of Gleason’s review along to the author with their own rejection letter. What were they thinking? Caylor goes on to quote from Gleason’s letter (and who can blame him?)

...I have read it twice, and both times I have found it fascinating, but more than fascinating, I have found it illuminating. I would recommend it to my class and to my readers as I would recommend it to you.

And they passed it by. The mind boggles, does it not?

So now, decades later, the author has been driven to self-publishing to get his baby out into the world, and thanks to a friend in Tulsa, Oklahoma, I learned about author and book and was able to obtain copies of the book from the author and now have it for sale in Northport. I take great pride in offering it here.

But I should give you a taste of the book itself. Here’s a bit from the interview with Bill Evans, whose music I’m listening to as I compose this post. Caylor has just asked if Evans has become more “objective or detached” in his playing from early work to Little Lulu.

No—I don’t know. I still have to feel that I really like something for some reason or another. Like Little Lulu, I think, is a keen little melody. It’s not a matter of taking something which is a challenge—it just happens to be something we can work with, and happen to like. That’s the only thing. We simply enjoy it; I take it entirely seriously. It’s a humorous sounding tune, but that doesn’t mean I don’t take the humor seriously—I take it as seriously as anything else, and I try to make as much music out of it as I can.

I would love to quote the whole long section here but am refraining. Evans goes on to say that music too abstract to have a frame of reference is not satisfying to him, and both of those thoughts are important, I think, coming from a musician – the idea that enjoyment and fun are not divorced from taking music seriously and that, for this musician, some traditional frame of reference is crucial, however much freedom is introduced.

And here’s someone else, drummer Milford Graves, talking about looking at objects and needing the environment (as opposed to only looking inside himself) to build his mind:

I really enjoy the subway. Well, I’ve had to make myself enjoy it, since it’s been my only transportation; at one time it was a bad thing to me, but I can’t have anything like that causing a mental disturbance, because if that happens I can’t play the way I want to. So I try to take whatever it is that disturbs me and balance it out, so that nothing outweighs anything else. The subway is like a happening, there are so many things to see and hear, the people and the tension, it’s something to let me know where people are. Then the train itself, too. Everything caused by friction of one kind or another, and you can’t say it’s ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ You can only say it’s good if at any given moment it is satisfying a need, and you can it’s bad if at a given moment it disagrees with you.

Graves goes on to speak more and more abstractly about sound in general being without shape or style, but also insisting that music is “just sound.” Reality, illusions of reality, transformations – it’s heavy but, as Gleason recognized fascinating stuff. It's life perspectives from some of the most creative individuals in New York in the Sixties

Nineteen + Conversations with Jazz Musicians, New York City: 1065 1965 is a small book and expensive for its size. It’s less than 5”x7” side to side, and top to bottom, but there are 248 pages, with illustrations, bibliography, and index. More importantly, you just won’t find these musicians’ words and views on art and life gathered together anywhere else. You needn’t call yourself a jazz aficionado (I certainly don’t deserve the name) to find this very special, unique little book worth $32.95. Maybe for yourself, maybe for someone on your holiday gift list, but here’s something for the music lover who has everything, because it’s a sure thing they don’t have this book!

Those Were the Years That Were

 

I’ve been living a secret life this week. Along with my home and bookstore, husband and dog, and books and yard, I’ve been reliving the 1960s, only this time not in the Midwest. No, I’ve been living those years in the place we in the Midwest longed to be: Greenwich Village.

It was, of course, a book that made my time travel possible. How could I not pick up A Freewheelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties, by Suze Rotolo, with its cover of the author when young, arm in arm with young Bob Dylan, the very photo from the cover of the “Freewheelin’” album released in 1963, the first Dylan album I ever bought (although not until 1965 or 1966)?

The book is Rotolo’s memoir, her memories of the Sixties as she lived them, not a tell-all of her love affair with Bob Dylan, and that was fine with me. Since her parents, both Italian, were Communists and activists, her growing-up years in the 1950s were heavily affected by McCarthyism and the fear that one or both of her parents might be hauled off to jail. 

We lived on the ground floor.... My father set up an electric saw in the basement ... and made nearly every piece of furniture we had.  

...We had bookshelves filled with books, a record player, and a collection of treasured 78s and 33-1/3 long-playing records. We listened to the radio; we didn't own a television. The other apartments were carpeted, had curtains on the windows, not Venetian blinds, and no bookshelves in the living rooms. 

Growing up in a family of readers, in a neighborhood where most other families did not have books, I understood that feeling of being different, of not fitting in. My parents had opera records, too. We did not have homemade furniture, and my parents were far from Communists, but the differences between the author's growing-up years and my own were as fascinating to me as the similarities.

After her father died and her mother’s plan to take Suze to Italy came to naught because of a freeway accident, the teenage girl found a job working for CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) in New York City. “It was 1961, the year of the first Freedom Rides....” It was also a time of cheap rents and musical ferment in New York. I recognized so many names in the crowd Suze and Bobby hung out with -- and was amazed at how many times people changed apartments, moving their few possessions (for whatever reason) apparently no big deal.

As the author notes, early 1960s American life had much in common, socially, with the 1950s. Only in Greenwich Village did the ordinary rules not apply. Ties for men, high heels for women – no rigid dress code like that in the Village. Interracial friends were common. Rotolo came on the scene when folk music was at its height, when even “famous” people’s names were not yet household words, and before drugs had a big part in the Counterculture. She was 17 when she met Bob Dylan, who was only starting to get attention from established musicians.

At one point, Rotolo traveled to Italy and spent several months studying art, soaking up European culture, and trying to figure out what kind of life she could make – if making a life together were possible – with someone as famous as Bob Dylan was becoming. The two came back together after that time apart, but the eventual break was inevitable. In following years, she married an Italian and had a family. Dylan has had a famous life, but Suze had her own life, too. I'm glad.

In view of their very public relationship and breakup (she writes how difficult it was to have her private life invaded by journalists and curiosity-seekers), I appreciated the author’s even-handed description of the boy she had loved and their youthful time together. (He spoke well of her, also, years after their relationship ended.) In this book, she does not treat him with kid gloves, but neither does she detract in any way from his musical genius, and she allows that he handled fame at an early age as well as he possibly could. They were so young! In writing of that time, the author remains true to her first love and their integrity.

...Bob was assaulted by many forces, most of them good, since he was gaining the success he always sought; but some were bad, because there was a new kind of complexity to everything going on around him. It was tough going for someone who underneath all the ambition and drive was very sensitive. I was equally sensitive and so overwhelmed by circumstances that I had trouble seeing how hard he was trying to hold things together.

When she writes of emotional struggle and awkward silences, I remember my old Sixties adolescence. I also recognize the idealism of the times:

The sixties were an era that spoke a language of inquiry and curiosity and rebelliousness against the stifling and repressive political and social culture of the decade that preceded it.

Civil rights, integration, freedom to travel, freedom of expression, artistic innovation – even the sexual freedom of the Village had an innocence and a purity about it in the early Sixties, as was true, I think, in most of the rest of the country. Certainly, I would say, it was true of my summer between high school and college. Stagestruck, hanging out with art and music and theatre people, my boyfriend of that year an art student, I felt very bohemian, as did my friends then, but we still took fairly seriously the barriers we transgressed (and there were many we did not transgress). Back then, what we considered “daring” could not yet be taken for granted. The freedom was all too new. And, of course, we were so very young!

When I finished the book, I searched online to learn what the author might be doing today and was saddened to learn that she had passed away four years ago at the age of 67. Here are the last lines from her New York Times obituary:

She remained politically active. In 2004, using the pseudonym Alla DaPie, she joined the street-theater group Billionaires for Bush and protested at the Republican convention in Manhattan.

In other words, clearly, she remained true to herself and to the spirit of the Sixties. I hope I have also, in my own country way. 

I've always said I want Bob Dylan's "When the Ship Comes In" sung at my funeral. David says no one will know the words. Okay, friends, start memorizing! I hope you'll have years to learn the words before you need to sing them for me.

France in Three 20th-Century Books

The Horrors of Love, a novel by Jean Dutourd, trans. Robin Chancellor. NY: Doubleday, 1967; orig. Paris: Gallimard, 1963.

Pluche, or the Art of Love, by Jean Dutourd, trans. Robin Chancellor. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970; orig. Paris: Flammarion, 1967.

Algerian Chronicles, by Albert Camus, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, edited and with an introduction by Alice Kaplan. Harvard University Press, 2013; originally published Paris: Gallimard, 1958.

Tuesday, 7 January 2014

How many of you have seen the film “My Dinner with André”? In an interview in the Paris Review (summer 2012), Wallace Shawn tells how it came about that Louis Malle directed the unusual film, which consisted of Shawn and André Gregory sitting in a restaurant, having dinner, and talking. “You’ll be you,” Shawn had told Gregory beforehand,

--you’ll tell about all these amazing things that you did while you were not working in the theatre—and I will be sort of the way I really am, somewhat skeptical, and that will be funny.

The two men talked and taped, Shawn wrote a script based on the conversations and sent it to Louis Malle, who agreed to do the film. It was shot in three weeks and became something of a cult classic.

Jean Dutourd undoubtedly took much longer than three weeks to write The Horrors of Love. The similarities are striking, however, and I always introduce Dutourd’s novel to people in terms of the Shawn-Gregory film. First published in France in 1963, the novel describes at great length (665 pages in its American edition), with only short breaks taking note of the setting, time of day and weather, in bare, unadorned dialogue between two characters, “I” (the narrator, a novelist) and “He” (a story-telling friend), a primary drama concerning a second cast of characters who never appear directly, as it were, onstage. “He” and “I” walk and talk and stop to rest on benches; they begin at lunch one day, talk all afternoon, through dinner, and on through the night, winding up finally the next morning. They interrupt, digress, theorize, speculate, and argue – about everything under the sun but eventually exhausting the convoluted tale of a middle-aged French politician, married with children, and his affair with a younger woman, still living at home with her parents and brother. Despite having only two conversing characters before one on the page, in the mind’s eye, the reader is focused on that second cast of characters, fascinated by their story and anxious for its outcome.

Two men talking. A film? A novel? Done well, yes. A tour de force.

The second Dutourd novel, published four years later in Paris (1967), is much shorter (278 pages in our translated version) and more conventional in style, although again we have a first-person narrator, this time a painter. Suffering a bout of artistic “sterility,” he turns to “literature,” i.e., keeping a journal, in hopes of kick-starting inspiration or at least riding out the unproductive stretch of time without too much despair. Social commentary and criticism of the state of art in France reveal the painter’s state of mind and the disdain he feels for his brother-in-law, a more successful painter, as well as his best friend, gifted but “lazy,” as in the narrator’s judgment. 

Both Dutourd narrators defend the selfishness of the creative ego. In both novels the narrators are bachelors with generally chauvinistic views of women. Social class and fashions in art are the narrators’ (and so presumably the author’s) preoccupations, while major political events of the times are referred to glancingly, if at all. And yet I manage to re-read these novels – and not for the first time, either – with equanimity towards the views expressed, reveling in their Paris setting and fascinated by the characters who come alive on the pages.

But I’d begun reading the Camus essays in 2013 -- searing journalism, frank political statements, and heartbreak penned in the years1939-1958 on the subject of Algeria -- and only set them aside for reading that demanded immediate attention. Following the end of the holidays and homebound days as the subzero temperatures and deadly wind gusts caused by the polar vortex kept us indoors, I pulled Dutourd off the shelf to give myself a literary vacation, but then on Tuesday morning Camus resurfaced. No time like the Arctic present, I thought, before reading group assignments plunge me into Richard Wright and Marcel Proust for the rest of the winter.

Dutourd’s fiction and Camus’s nonfiction are related in being unrelated. Is that a paradox? Of these two French novels published in the 1960s, the main story of the first – that which is the main subject of the novel’s lengthy dialogue -- takes place in the decade past, the 1950s, an era marked in the United States by prosperity and complacent materialism. American military action in Korea was very much in the background of our national consciousness. Not so for France the Algerian conflict during the same period. Algeria was for the French what Vietnam was for Americans, with deep divisions and irreconcilable differences. One might argue that “the Sixties” began for France in the 1950s, bringing about the fall of the Fourth Republic in 1958.

I’ve written before of a young friend asking me, “What were the Sixties really like?” and it occurs to me that one could ask the question of any decade and that the answer would be the same: What a decade was “like” to you depends on how old you were, where you were living, the people around you, and what engaged your time and concern. And so, astonishingly, in The Horrors of Love, the protagonist’s love affair was much more important to him than his duties to the government or those who had elected him, and he goes to his tragic end completely indifferent to the much greater tragedy of Algeria and the many lives made miserable and even destroyed by France’s lack of political will to seek a just solution. It is only by its complete absence that the Algerian crisis appears in Dutourd’s novel. In the lighter and delightful Pluche, we find a similar absence of Vietnam, of sex, drugs and rock-and-roll, with a single reference to teachers being on strike marking the great social upheaval in 1960s France.

Let me be clear. I am not criticizing the author for failing to write political novels. Clearly, to do so was not his aim. As his narrators make clear, he is focused on the contributions of art to culture, that which will last for centuries. But I begin, perhaps, to see what made my old friend Hélène dismiss Dutourd contemptuously when I raised his name.

Then, too, recall that Camus was also a novelist of the highest rank, besides being a clear-eyed journalist. And yet there is no odor of propaganda in his fiction. Values, yes. A point of view, yes. But never set forth pedantically with finger-shaking speeches. In fact, what strikes me about the articles, letters, and speeches in the nonfiction collection titled Algerian Chronicles, besides their searing honesty, heartfelt passion, and consistency of principle, is the lucidity of the writer’s thought and, subsequently, his language.

We resign ourselves to fate too easily. We too readily believe that in the end there is no progress without bloodshed and that the strong advance at the expense of the weak. Such a fate may indeed exist, but men are not required to bow down before it or submit to its laws.

It was in his refusal to see the world as “determined” by a fate prepared in advance by history that Camus clung to hope for the future of his birthplace, Algeria. In acknowledging his freedom to speak and to act in the name of freedom for others, he can be called an existentialist, but unlike some others known under that banner, he was not blown this way and that by political or ideological winds. He loved both Algeria and France and refused to oversimplify the conflict by labeling one evil and the other innocent. More than once in these essays he writes that only the dead can be called innocent. Questions of what response to make to terrorism and when a state of emergency exists that excuses or demands curtailment of individual freedom are two general questions Camus raises that remain relevant today. Specific global hotspots come to mind as well, places where groups divided culturally and economically must, it seems, learn to live together or ultimately exterminate each other.

As the polar vortex swirled around our old farmhouse, David’s reading took him to France, also. Deep into The Hare with Amber Eyes, he kept telling me that it’s “right up my alley.” I tell him I’m in the 1950s. He tells me he’s in the 1880s. We come up from our books for air and enjoy oatmeal muffins and cups of hot tea. With heat, hot water, electricity, and plenty of books, three days at home are no hardship at all.

Book Review: VIRGIN SOUL (or, "What were the Sixties really like?")

“What were the Sixties really like?” When a younger friend asked me this question, in a moment I suddenly felt many years older, realizing that what was “just yesterday” to me was a historical period to my youthful friend. But how to answer her question? I’ve been thinking about it for years now (haunted by the question still, obviously), as another two decades have slipped past. Here's an overview from Wikipedia to get you started, if you were "born too late" to be one of us, but --

There can be no single answer to what the Sixties were like, because they were different for everyone who lived through them, even if only American experience is considered. How old were you in the Sixties, for starters? A little child, a college student, part of the workforce, or someone “over 30,” one of those the young were told not to trust? Male or female, black or white or yellow or red or brown? Living in San Francisco or Chicago; Selma, Alabama; Aberdeen, South Dakota; or in the wilds of Maine? Rich or poor or in-between?

Student, lawyer, secretary, grocery store cashier, factory line worker, teacher, or Peace Corps volunteer? A draftee in Vietnam, conscientious objector in El Paso, refugee in Toronto, or a protestor at Berkeley? Singing and playing in a rock-and-roll band? Member of the Black Panthers or Students for a Democratic Society, or Young Republicans, or the Country Club?

There were peaceful demonstrations, and there was violence, and there was the undeclared war, and there were drugs, and there was also the continuation of American suburban life, with big weddings and brides in white. Toward the end of the Sixties there was the Pill, but all along there were pregnancies (planned and unplanned), abortions, and young families, some hippies, others mainstream. And for those in their ‘teens and 20s, there was exciting music, poetry everywhere, plenty of available sex and drugs, a lot of lofty ideals, and a minefield of dangerous pitfalls.

That's why I say there is no telling what the decade was “really like,” except in terms of individual lives, but if you weren't there and want a close-up view I just read a new novel that presents a convincing picture through one particular window.

Virgin Soul

by Judy Juanita

NY: Viking, 2013

$26.95

We meet the novel's protagonist, Geniece Hightower, in Oakland, California, in the summer of 1964. Just out of high school, she enrolls in Oakland City College, “City,”

. . . a raggedy, in-the-flatlands, couldn’t-pass-the-earthquake-code, stimulating, politically popping repository of blacks who couldn’t get to college any other way, whites who had flunked out of the University of California, and anybody else shrewd enough to go for free for two years and transfer to Berkeley, prereqs zapped.

Geniece is a journalism major. Right away meets Huey Newton. Right away she loves sitting on the campus lawn, listening to the “black intellectuals and the white boys from the W.E.B. Du Bois Club talk.” Quickly she learns that light-skinned black students (“yellow, high yellow, sandy yellow, mellow yellow, sandy mariney, light brown, peach, or caramel skin; the line stopped there”) had one hangout, darker-skinned blacks like herself another. She lives at the Y (10 p.m. curfew) and works 20 hours a week at the county welfare department in Oakland. She’s launched into life but still has her aunt and uncle’s warning in her head:

“We want you to be a virgin until you graduate from college. If you’re not a virgin, you won’t graduate. Once you have sex, you can’t think about anything else.”

Judy Juanita’s novel is divided into four main sections, one for each of Geniece’s four years of college. Sophomore year she is introduced to Black Muslims and has her hair cut into a natural: “Sleek, short, very African.” She wonders what “being in love” feels like and if she is in love. No longer living at the Y, she allows a boyfriend to hold political education classes in her apartment, and she cleans and cooks for those who attend.

I knew I was becoming militant. I just didn’t know if I wanted to become a militant. Malcolm X, Betty Shabazz, the protesters, the sit-in demonstrators down south were my heroes. I loved them from a distance and on paper. But the militants I met, mostly the guys on the soapbox on Grove Street, were harsh and abrasive and condescending to everyone, not just white people. And they made people do things. . . . I didn’t want that kind of power over people. I just wanted it over myself.

Huey Newton isn’t the only real person readers encounter in the pages of this work of fiction. Bobby Seale is there, and Stokeley Carmichael, too. The war in Vietnam is audible always in the background.

Junior year is a turning point for Geniece, as one black group goes one way and the Black Panther Party (BPP) for Self-Defense another. She enrolls at State and lands a work-study job in Admissions, date-stamping application entries from all over the world.

Lives came out of the words: how little money one’s father made; the off-the-wall place one had traveled to; family crises; serious illness defeated; political activity noted like a badge of honor – “I belong to the W. E. B. Du Bois Club.” They weren’t afraid: “I participated in the freedom rides.” Stuff I never mentioned: “The protest changed my whole life.” State was a destination for radical students: “I’m a child of a union family.” Dissidents. The streets of Berkeley were the pull for people bucking the system. Nonconformists. State was pulling people like me. I was not an in-between. I was a junior facing a cast of thousands wanting to be right where I was, a part of something big, essential, swimming in the big ocean.

In the course of her college career, it is not until her junior year that Geniece sees herself at the center of social change taking place across the country. Before that she felt like “an in-between”; now she is, as people said in the Sixties, “where it’s at.” But she is not yet where she will be at the end of her senior year. . . .

I don’t want to give away too many details of this story, because it’s the details that make the central character’s life a real one and make that time period come alive. Her social and sexual and romantic relationships are important to her development as an adult. Her feelings for journalism wax and wane, but editing the Panthers’ newspaper is an important job she takes very seriously. Also with the BPP, she confronts the question of guns for self-defense, and a volunteer job through the Tutorial Center introduces her to two young, self-sufficient black girls neglected by their battered mother. Education is not limited to the classroom. (It never should be.)

But Geniece Hightower is determined to graduate in four years, so she wisely avoids serious involvement with drugs. While music is part of her life, it also remains, like Vietnam, in the background. Race, class, and gender relationships – politics within and beyond the university – the future she will have as a Black American woman – this young woman maintains ties to her family at the same time she is finding her own way in the world.

Personal, political – political, personal – yes, this was the Sixties. Judy Juanita gives readers a very real look at that exciting and turbulent time through the eyes of her strong, questing protagonist. There are pages when the prose lifts into lyricism, so it should be no surprise that the author’s writing has for years encompassed poetry as well as reporting. This is her first novel. I’m glad she wrote it and hope it won’t be her last.

Will They Just Think I’ve Lost My Marbles?

We certainly would have looked crazy if Lisa and I had followed our original plan to decorate Northport this morning with cornstalks and scarecrows. Wind and pouring rain! Here it is in a few different places north of M-204, which was my second destination this morning after coffee at Stone House Bread. But that's not what I'm talking about.

Leelanau trial lawyer Dean Robb, his wife Cindy Robb and I have finally, you see, set a firm date for Dean’s appearance at Dog Ears Books. The party is for his memoir (release date: Oct. 1), Dean Robb: An Unlikely Radical, actually written by Dean and Cindy’s son, Matthew, after he and his dad took a road trip together through the South and visited many places where Dean had done civil rights work back in the Sixties.


I’m reading the page proofs now, while waiting for the book to arrive from the printer, and while I’ve only gotten to Dean’s high school years I’m already enthralled. He was born in a farmhouse in a place called Lost Prairie, Illinois. There wasn’t even a town, but isn’t that a great place name? Lost Prairie! And he had very much the kind of rural, interdependent, kids-contributing community growing-up I just blogged about the other day in connection with a couple of youth novels, one from the Forties, the other from the Sixties. At age seven, Dean was driving a team of mules pulling a haywagon! Well, I don’t want to give away too much, even of the early years. The important date, before I forget, is Saturday, October 9, and the time is from 6-8 p.m. That’s at Dog Ears Books, 106 Waukazoo Street in Northport. We’ll have the books, we’ll have refreshments, Dean will be there to sign books, and if we’re very lucky Matt could be on hand, also, but he’s teaching downstate, so his presence is not yet certain.

So, anyway, I went to the office of the Leelanau Enterprise this morning to arrange for advertising, and Joy was very helpful, as always, but she did look askance at some of my wording, the part where I begin the ad with “Dean Robb, appearing as himself....” Even after I reminded her that Dean has had a sideline for years as an entertainer, impersonating Mark Twain, no smiling gleam of recognition broke over her face, and now I’m wondering: Will anyone get it? Is it too obscure? Will I just sound and look like a fool? It’s an allusion, it’s an allusion! Or is a delusion, a self-delusion, and I my own victim?

Well, as Dean says on his answering machine message (still an old message from August, telling people to come see him impersonate Mark Twain at the Port Oneida Fair), “I’ll probably make a fool of myself, but I’ve done it before.” Not necessarily true for him, it’s certainly true for me.

Without giving away any of the book’s content, I want to share some of the quotes from the book’s cover, testimonials to the fact, if anyone needs reminding, that Dean really is a Leelanau Legend and more:

Jim Harrison: “...a thoroughly amazing book about a thoroughly amazing man I’ve known for over thirty years.”

Helen Milliken: “A powerful insight into the last half century of our tumultuous times.”

Gerry Spence: “I find true heroes hidden where true heroes reside, engaged endlessly in their need to fight for justice without the clamor and pomp of publicity. Dean Robb is a true hero.”

Geoffrey Fieger: “...the humanitarian and trial warrior for the damned, the lost, and the forgotten I have always aspired to be.”

Michael Moore and Kathleen Glynn: “Dean Robb was and is fearless, relentless, compassionate and the Great Defender of the people who otherwise have no voice.”

The book is 336 pages, hardcover, priced at $24.95. Payment to Dog Ears Books is by cash or check.