Book Talk

The High Desert Journal recently released its 12th issue. This biannual literary magazine continues to focus on its mission statement of “dedicating itself to further understanding the people, places and issues of the interior West” though in my opinion, the journal is going off in new and exciting areas that may have seemed absent in earlier issues.
When I spoke with editor Elizabeth Quinn about the surprises contained in the glossy, full-color pages, she highlighted several authors, both local and regional, that help make this issue more forward moving, and thinking. One of our state's favorite poets, Oregon Poet Laureate Paulann Petersen, has two poems in this issue. Her work always contains that surprise or turn-of-phrase that demands further readings. The poem “Speak, harsh land” by 18-year-old poet Nathaniel Dunaway, who was discovered through The Nature of Words, also appears in issue 12.

They say things are done for the majority.
Don't believe half of what you see and none of what you hear. It's a lot like what my painter friend Donald said to me, “Stick a fork in their ass and turn them over. They're done.”

(This column is for some of Bend's medical practitioners – and for any of you who have experienced insulting behavior as a patient. If you recognize yourself in this story, be you patient, client, nurse, physician's assistant or doctor, consider the implications – and the Hippocratic Oath.)

My life is a whirligig. It is symptomatic of the plague of busy busy busy that has seized so many of us. Nonetheless, my daughter and I decided to write a two-woman story. Hers is hers, but mine is yours. We chose the theme Peach Pie. Here is what emerged from the multiple whirligigs of my childhood, my love for my mom and daughter, and my Now.
My mom died 15 years ago. She wasn't afraid to die. She told me so in her room in a little Finger Lakes, New York, hospital. She'd been drifting in and out – peacefully drowsing when she was out, lucid and tender when she returned.
A few years earlier, we'd come out the other side of decades of conflict – caused in part by circumstances over which neither she nor I had control. It was a joy to be with her in the peaceful room, to give her the small gifts of a shoulder rub, a fresh cup of tea, time for her to tell me the last remaining secrets she'd held a long time.

Hardcover Fiction 1. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest
Stieg Larsson, Knopf, $27.95 The stunning third and final novel in Larsson’s best-selling Millennium Trilogy. (*11) 2. The Help
Kathryn Stockett, Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam, $24.95. This wonderful debut set in the rural South of the 1960s is a February 2009 Indie Next List Great Read. (78)3. Star Island
Carl Hiaasen, Knopf, $26.95. Hiaasen’s hilarious spin on life in the celebrity fast lane. (2)

Jim Lynch is no stranger to the Northwest. He grew up in the Puget Sound and while his career as a professional journalist took him around the country, he returned seven years ago to the Northwest where his two recent and critically acclaimed novels are set. The books are lyrical meditations on the geography of Northwest and the people who inhabit a landscape that is pinched between the mountains and the sea on the edge of the continent. In his most recent novel, Border Songs, Lynch focuses on the imaginary line that separates America from its hockey and health care loving neighbor to the north. It's an imaginary line that seems to be growing more hard and volatile in our age of immigrant insecurity and post 9/11 boogeymen.

You can’t really know the poppy by its photo – how the blossom holds the last of sunset, how the pollen is silky on your finger. You have walked along the shining river. You are tired and a little lonely. When you discover the poppy glowing against its dark leaves, you stop. A man walks by with his dog. “Gorgeous time to walk,” he says. The smoke from his cigarette drifts back.
I had breathed deep and imagined writing about life after Facebook, about all of it: the loneliness, the poppy, the sweetness in the stranger’s voice, the harsh scent of his smoke. I took myself off Facebook because my daughter had been exploring the privacy violations she and so many others found outrageous. But there was more. I can’t think of a time in history when it has not been dangerous for one institution to hold huge amounts of information about so many. Consolidation of data is consolidation of power.

DreamWorks was monstrous, misfit, and idealistic. The upstart studio was the progeny of three industry giants: director Steven Spielberg; record company mogul and billionaire David Geffen; and Disney animation head Jeffrey Katzenberg, the driving force behind the idea to make a new studio from scratch.
DreamWorks began building on a lofty foundation. At the Oct. 12, 1994 press conference announcing the partnership, Spielberg said, “Together with Jeffrey and David, I want to create a place driven by ideas and the people who have them.'' The studio was to champion works based on merit, not commercialism. Like the founding of United Artists in 1919 by Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, and D.W. Griffith, it was to be an artistic haven amid Tinseltown's money-grubbing rabble. It was to be different.

Sounds like the title of a horror movie, maybe Dudley and a gang of teen-age buddies are drawn to a giant vampire plasma TV sitting in the desert. Or some crafty beyotch who thinks that environmentalists caused the Gulf oil disaster and gets the word out through her minions as thousands of terrified brainwashed Americans gather at her side. This Gathering is not a horror movie – though it began with a desperate call for help. This gathering is the opposite of vampire television or a cold-hearted political calculation.
This gathering happens every day at Dudley's, a downtown independent used-book store whose owner, Terri Cumbie, has a deep commitment to community – not hypothetical community, but hard-work community. Language groups, including my own writing circle, book clubs and free writing classes for kids meet in the store for modest or no rent. Every Friday local bands play for free. She pays them and hopes the audience will buy enough books and drinks to give a profit. Too often her customers tell her they treasure what she has created – and buy nothing. Two weeks ago, Terri sent out an e-mail to her list saying that the bookstore was in peril of closing the day after Memorial Day. She had run out of money.

Beatrice and Virgil
By Yann Martel
Spiegel & Grau
When boiled down, Beatrice and Virgil is a play within a semi-autobiographical novel within an extended metaphor. Oh, and it's basically about the Holocaust. Yann Martel's follow up to the wildly successful Life of Pi (which is half-assedly referenced in this book) is ultimately intriguing and easily digestible (it's barely 200 pages), but is also equally confusing and hardly as memorable as one might expect.