Tomatoes

Tomatoes
by Stephen Dobyns

A woman travels to Brazil for plastic
surgery and a face lift. She is sixty
and has the usual desire to stay pretty.
Once she is healed, she takes her new face
out on the streets of Rio. A young man
with a gun wants her money. Bang, she’s dead.
The body is shipped back to New York,
but in the morgue there is a mix-up. The son
is sent for. He is told that his mother
is one of these ten different women.
Each has been shot. Such is modern life.
He studies them all but couldn’t find her.
With her new face, she has become a stranger.
Maybe it’s this one, maybe it’s that one.
He looks at their breasts. Which ones nursed him?
He presses their hands to his cheek.
Which ones consoled him? He even tries
climbing into their laps to see which
feels the most familiar but the coroner stops him.
Well, says the coroner which is your mother?
They all are, says the young man, let me
take them as a package. The coroner hesitates,
then agrees. Actually, it solved a lot of problems.
The young man has the ten women shipped home.
then cremated them all together. You’ve seen
how some people have a little urn on their mantel?
The man has a huge silver garbage can.
In the spring, he drags the garbage can
out to the garden, and begins working the teeth,
the ash, the bits of bone into the soil.
Then he plants tomatoes. His mother loved tomatoes.
They grew straight from seed, so fast and big
that the young man is amazed. He takes the first
ten into the kitchen. In their roundness,
he sees his mother’s breasts. In their smoothness,
he finds the consoling touch of her hands.
Mother, mother, he cries and he flings himself
on the tomatoes. Forget about the knife, the fork,
the pinch of salt. Try to imagine the filial
starvation, think of the ravenous kisses.

Karen Blixen: The Kenya-Wisconsin Connection

When I was growing up in Nairobi, the name of Karen Blixen naturally came up quite often. The neighborhood in what used to be her old farm, at the foot of the Ngong Hills, is to this day called Karen, and everyone, of course, had read Out of Africa (even before the movie came out). My violin teacher, Anna Martin, was the wife of Remy Martin, who had bought Blixen's farm. I read Out of Africa and Shadows in the Grass and her cook Kamante's memoir Longing for Darkness when I was twelve or thirteen, and enjoyed them (though they weren't nearly as evocative as Elspeth Huxley's The Flame Trees of Thika). In 1982, Judith Thurman's wonderful biography Isak Dinesen: Life of a Storyteller came out, and  in 1985 the movie with Meryl Streep and Robert Redford, and suddenly she epitomized the romantic notion of Africa. Her house remains a massive tourist draw.

Partly because I was tepid on Out of Africa and partly because of her new fame, I ignored Blixen's other writings till I was in my twenties. Then I discovered Seven Gothic Tales on a bookshelf in Atbara, Sudan. What a revelation! "The Roads Round Pisa" and "The Monkey" are, in my opinion, the two finest, strangest stories ever written. I reread them every year - they're like a little holiday to an exotic country.

When we moved to Wisconsin a couple years ago, I remembered that Blixen's father, Wilhelm Dinesen, had lived in northern Wisconsin. He'd spent a year or so with the Chippewa, had a relationship with his cook, Nesuw-wge-zhicqo-quay (later "Kate"), fathered a daughter, Emma "Denson," by her, and contracted syphilis. His cabin has recently been restored, and is open to the public. You can see a picture of Joseph Ackley, Wilhelm Dinesen's great-grandson, and Blixen's ... what? half-grand-nephew? here. I think he looks a bit like her!

Review of The Book on Fire

One of my favorite sites, the wonderfully named Biblioklept, has posted a nice review of The Book on Fire:

"Balthazar, the hero of Keith Miller’s agile and trippy novel The Book on Fire, is a biblioklept. He comes to Alexandria to rob the famous library, a cavernous, labyrinthine complex that still exists—under heavy guard—in Miller’s mystical version of that ancient Egyptian city. Miller’s Alexandria is a byzantine maze, humming with a turn-of-the-century buzz, a kaleidoscope world that strongly reminded me of the strange cityscapes of William Gibson or William Burroughs. . . .

"For Balthazar, books are a drug, and the Library of Alexandria is the heady nexus point for his addiction. . . . While The Book on Fire does have the strong, page turning plot of a thriller, that plot exists mostly as the bones for Miller to hang rapturous descriptions of reading and books and, best of all, his strange Alexandria, a city of marvels." 

Nneka - Lost Souls

With Ink the Ocean Fill

Last Sunday at our local Mennonite church, we sang "The Love of God," a hymn I've always enjoyed for the wonderful third verse, with its convoluted syntax: 

Could we with ink the ocean fill,

  And were the skies of parchment made;

Were every stalk on earth a quill,

  And every man a scribe by trade;

To write the love of God above

  Would drain the ocean dry;

Nor could the scroll contain the whole,

  Though stretched from sky to sky.

By a weird coincidence, I got an email from my dad the next day, commenting on the origins of the verse. He'd learned about it from my uncle, who goes to church with Jeremy Nafziger, a writer interested in church music. Here are Jeremy's comments (used with permission):

Frederick Lehman, the author and composer, sounds like he should be a Mennonite, but alas, he was a Nazarene minister. Early in his ministry (around 1900), he heard a preacher end his sermon with lines similar to the third verse of this hymn. The lines had been found scribbled on the wall of an insane asylum after the inmate’s death; Lehman says that "the general opinion was that this inmate had written it in moments of sanity."

Lehman later used the words, slightly altered, years later as the third stanza of "The Love of God."

It turns out, however, that the lines from the asylum wall came from a long poem written in Aramaic in the 11th century by a Jewish rabbi in Worms, Germany. (Note—the author was Rabbi Ben Isaac Nehorai, in a poem called "Hadamut," written in 1050.)

And that may not even be the original—the Koran, written in Arabic four centuries earlier, contains this passage: "And were every tree that is in the earth (made into) pens and the sea (to supply it with ink), with seven more seas to increase it, the words of Allah would not come to an end; surely Allah is Mighty, Wise" (XXXI:27).

And you can go further back than that, to the Gospel of John, to find another similar passage. In the last verse of the book, we read: "Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written."

So in this one hymn, we see the story of all God's children signing the covenant that "shall forevermore endure."

Airman!

A hoax, unfortunately!

Book on Fire reviews

Couple nice reviews from Reading Envy and Beyond the Stacks:

Reading Envy

A book thief lands in a fantastical version of the legendary Alexandria to steal from his ultimate library, and falls in love with a librarian working there. I’m not sure if the author loves libraries or librarians more, considering that his previous book, The Book of Flying, was along similar lines, but I have to admit it works for me. I almost feel embarrassed to say how much I enjoyed reading this book, but I can’t really explain why. I was already enamored with Alexandria after reading the Durrell quartet, and this made it so much worse! 


The writing is very descriptive, and I’m tempted to say overly so, except I don’t feel it is. Most of the time if I pick up a book that spends half its time describing smells and food, it reads like filler, but here it serves to place the reader into his vision of Alexandria. I found myself drawn in and living in the world as I read, which doesn’t happen often as an adult. (I also ended up hungry!) 


There are elements of the writing and of the storytelling that are the same elements I love in Catherynne Valente’s writing, and anyone knows me knows that is high praise indeed. After reading a little more about the author himself, I feel like you can see glimpses of his real life experiences tucked into this book, as far from reality as it seems. 


Beyond the Stacks

There is a book out there for everyone. A book that speaks to your very soul, that can make you weep in utter heartache and cry tears of joy and amusement. For me, this is the book. This is my book. I found myself reading slower, rereading passages again and again, just to savor every last morsel from this exquisite feast of the imagination.

Alcohol Drunk in Hemingway's Fiesta

Above, l. to r.: Hemingway, Harold Loeb (model for Robert Cohn), Lady Duff Twysden (model for Lady Brett Ashley), Hadley Hemingway, Don Stewart, Pat Guthrie

The page numbers below are from the the Jonathan Cape edition of Fiesta (below), which was Hemingway's favorite. Fiesta was Hemingway's original title, much better than The Sun Also Rises, which was used in the States because his editors felt American readers wouldn't know what a fiesta was.

"several fines" - p. 6
"whisky and soda" - p. 11
"apertif" - p. 13
"pernod" - p. 14
"bottle of wine" - p. 16
"liquers" - p. 19
"beer" x2 - p. 20
"cognac" - p. 20
"fine a l'eau" - p. 21
"brandy and soda" - p. 33
"beer" - p. 38
"Jack Rose" - p. 42
champagne - pp. 61-63 (3 bottles)
"brandy" - p. 64
"pernod" - p. 75
"whisky and soda" x2 - p. 77
"fine" - p. 78
"another" - p. 85
"beer" - p. 92
"plenty of wine" p. 97
"bottle of wine" p. 101
"wine of the country" - p. 105
"wine-skin" - p. 107
"drinks" (4) - p. 109
"hot rum punch" - p. 114
"wine" (several bottles) - p. 114
"wine" (2 bottles) - p. 132
2 bottles wine - p. 132
"another bottle" - p. 133
"poisonous things" - p. 150
"much wine" - p. 151
"too much brandy" - p. 154
"vermouth" - p. 156
"sherry" - p. 158
"wineskins" - p. 162
"a drink" - p. 162
"absinthe" - p. 170
"fundador" (amontillado brandy) - p. 181
"fundador" - p. 186
"fundador" p. 188
"cognac" - p. 194
"fundador" - p. 197
"beer" (6 bottles) - p. 209
"beer" - p. 211
"beer" (6 bottles) - p. 212
"fundador" - p. 212
"beer" - p. 213
"another beer" - p. 213
"wine" - 219
"several bottles of beer" - p. 230
"absinthe" - p. 231
"another absinthe" - p. 231
"bottle of fundador" - p. 238
"whisky and soda" - p. 238
"whisky and soda" - p. 239
"another round" - p. 239
"another drink" - p. 239
"another drink" - p. 240
"bottle of wine" - p. 243
"vieux marc" - p. 243
"second marc" - p. 243
"whisky and soda" - p. 246
"two martinis" - p. 255
"two martinis" - p. 256
"two martinis" - p. 257
"rioja alta" (3 bottles) - p. 257
"rioja alta" (2 bottles) - p. 258 (Following this last spree, which starts on p. 255, during which Jake drinks six martinis and five bottles of wine, Brett tells him: "Don't get drunk.")

Some Literary Humor

G.K. Chesterton (pictured) was an enormous man. A woman once asked him why he wasn't out at the Front. His reply: "If you go round to the side, you will see that I am." On another occasion, he told George Bernard Shaw: "To look at you, anyone would think there was a famine in England." Shaw's reply: "To look at you, anyone would think you caused it."

Oscar Wilde on George Bernard Shaw: "An excellent man: he has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends."

"Meredith is a prose Browning, and so is Browning. He used poetry as a medium for writing in prose."  — Oscar Wilde

"I love Americans, but not when they try to talk French. What a blessing it is that they never try to talk English."  — Saki

"In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language."  — Mark Twain

"I was sorry to have my name mentioned as one of the great authors, because they have a sad habit of dying off. Chaucer is dead, Spencer is dead, so is Milton, so is Shakespeare, and I’m not feeling so well myself."  — Mark Twain

"An Englishman wouldn't bother to attend a reading even if the author in question was his favorite living writer, and also his long-lost brother — even if the reading was taking place next door."  — Martin Amis


Headline of a review of Exit Ghost by Philip Roth: "Do Not Go Gentile into That Good Night."

My wife, on finding I'd eaten all the Doritos: "Is this the face that munched a thousand chips?"

Ernest Hemingway in Midnight in Paris

Marilyn Reading Ulysses

Eve Arnold, who died last week at 99, took this photograph of Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses, one of the most erotic images ever. I'm guessing Marilyn's reading this:

"... and the wineshops half open at night and the castanets and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his lamp and O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."

Last year, after haunting eBay for months, I finally found an affordable copy of the Franklin Library Ulysses I'd coveted since spotting it in a used bookstore. It's so pretty I could munch it up, with gilt-edged pages and illustrations by Alan Cober:

Authors Card Game

The other day we were at a potluck with some fellow Mennonites. We mentioned, for some reason, that we had started playing Authors with our kids. Authors, along with Dutch Blitz, is one of those tribal games that few outsiders seem to have heard of (I'm going to shrug off my congenital Mennonite humility for a moment and state here, for the record, that I kick major ass at Dutch Blitz, and have even, on occasion, toppled the mighty Pete "Fleetfingers" Dula and Steve "Quickhand" Weaver). Ordinary card games were frowned upon by conservative Mennonites. These tame alternatives weren't associated with gambling, drinking, or loose women.

Authors is basically Go Fish. The Authors set we use (it's at least thirty years old) has the following authors: Mark Twain, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Walter Scott, Washington Irving, Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, James Fenimore Cooper, and (the lone woman) Louisa May Alcott. When I was a kid, I naturally assumed that these were the giants of Western literature, and placed them on appropriate pedestals. The size of these pedestals I adjusted according to their appearance on the cards. Thus, I assumed that the dashing Hawthorne, with his flowing, strawberry-blond locks, was the pinnacle of literary greatness, while the wan and sickly Scott, with his thin damp hair (we used to call him "Fishface"), I relegated to a minion. Cooper's war-reporter looks and list of manly titles (The Pathfinder, The Deerslayer, The Spy, The Last of the Mohicans) suggested deeply compelling thrillers similar to The Eye of the Needle. Boy, how wrong I was! Cooper, when I finally got around to reading him in high school, turned out to be a dreadful writer. Hawthorne was similarly unreadable. But when, during one stay at my grandparents' Lancaster County, PA house, I ran out of Guideposts and Reader's Digests, I was forced to pick up the only novel on the shelves - Ivanhoe. It was wonderful!

From this distance, of course, Longfellow and Irving look a bit silly in that list. At the potluck, we were trying to decide who should inhabit an updated game. Here's my stab at it: Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Ernest Hemingway, Yeats. Hmmm. Maybe Faulkner in place of someone . . . Frost? And what about Nabokov? Is he allowed in, even though he was born Russian?

Authors has undergone various metamorphoses. Sets have varied from eleven to fourteen authors, and have included  Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, James Russell Lowell, Victor Hugo, Robert Burns, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Cornelia Meigs (WTF?). The picture below shows the strange inclusion of John Greenleaf Whittier, second row, second from right:

Here's another version, aimed at children (Hans Christian Andersen, A.A. Milne):

Here's an antique version:

These days, there are a number of Authors games on the market, including American Authors and Women Authors. The quality of the artwork, unfortunately, is shoddy.

Writers Who Were Artists

In the last week, I came across articles on Tolkien's art for The Hobbit (above) and Sylvia Plath's ink drawings (below).

There is a deep connection between writing and visual art, just as there is between music and math. Here are some other writers who were artists:

Wyndham Lewis - Lewis, like Dante Gabriel Rossetti (see below), was perhaps better known for his painting than his writing. That's Ezra Pound in the painting above.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti - Rossetti's poetry has fared less well over time than his paintings.

D. H. Lawrence - Toward the end of his life, Lawrence started doing oil paintings.

Mervyn Peake - Peake, the author of the Gormenghast novels, was a wonderful illustrator. Above is an illustration for The Ancient Mariner.

Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen) - Dinesen trained as an artist. Her beautiful paintings have been used on the covers of several of her books.

William Blake - Blake's prints are hugely influential. More than any other writer, his art and writing are deeply entwined.

Kurt Vonnegut - Breakfast of Champions is full of Vonnegut's lively drawings. He developed an interest in silkscreen printing, samples of which may be seen here. Note the flavicon! 

Rudyard Kipling - Kipling's father was an artist, and Kipling did the illustrations for Just So Stories (Wikipedia says they're woodcuts, but they look like ink drawings to me).

William Makepeace Thackeray trained as an artist. His illustrations for Vanity Fair are wonderful. 

Bruce Chatwin - Chatwin's astonishing photographs may be seen in Photographs and Notebooks, as well as on the covers of several of his books. 

Hans Christian Andersen - Andersen made delightful paper cut-outs with which he entertained children and adults while telling his stories. 

I can't find any examples online, but Lawrence Durrell did wonderful watercolors, reminiscent of Raoul Dufy. Annie Dillard studied art (the handsome little shrub on the frontispiece of Teaching a Stone to Talk is hers). John Updike attended art school before he switched to writing.

Tomas Transtromer

Tomas Transtromer, the Swedish poet, has won the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature. Here's my favorite of his poems:

Breathing Space July

The man who lies on his back under huge trees

is also up in them. He branches out into thousands of tiny branches.

He sways back and forth,

he sits in a catapult that hurtles forward in slow motion.

The man who stands down at the dock screws up his eyes against the water.

Ocean docks get older faster than men.

They have silver-grey posts and boulders in their gut.

The dazzling light drives straight in.

The man who spends the whole day in an open boat

moving over the luminous bays

will fall asleep at last inside the shade of his blue lamp

as the islands crawl like huge moths over the globe.

Sofia Samatar blogs!

My beautiful and hyper-talented wife, Sofia Samatar, has started blogging.

New Edition of The Book on Fire

The second edition of my second novel, The Book on Fire, has been released by Immanion Press. It has a new cover, and includes a long bonus story, “City of Bones,” about a sojourner in a post-apocalyptic Alexandria. It is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble, as well as select brick-and-mortar bookstores.

Strange Gifts

My mother (who's on a roll - see this post) has just put out a book of vignettes entitled Strange Gifts: Reflections on Aid in Africa. It is available for purchase on Amazon. I put together a little website for her, where you can see all the books and calendars she's produced, and read a few of the occasional papers she put out in her career as a music educator.

A Life on Paper Review

My wife, Sofia Samatar (whose first novel, A Stranger in Olondria, recently sold to Small Beer Press - more about that later!), has written a nice review of French Borgesian-fantasy/slipstreamish writer Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud's A Life on Paper.

I Am Because We Are

For a number of years, my lovely mother, Annetta Miller, has collected proverbs from around Africa. She now has over a hundred thousand, neatly arranged by category on her desk. She has put the collection to use in interesting and creative ways. Her themed calendars, which are put together by street children at Don Bosco Press in Kenya, are perennial best sellers at Ten Thousand Villages. Proverbs also complement the vignettes in her book Sharing Boundaries.














My mother and her photographer friend Betty Press have put together a book entitled I Am Because We Are: African Wisdom in Image and Proverb, published in partnership with Books for Africa. You can learn about the book, and buy it, here.

Longonot and Naivasha

photo: Kalense the Kid

My family and I spent the month of July in Kenya, where I grew up. One of the things I wanted to do (besides eat murg makhanwala and nyama choma!) was climb Mt. Longonot, a dormant volcano, with my kids.

I went to high school at Rift Valley Academy, which is on the side of the escarpment. Longonot dominated the landscape, and I used to draw it constantly. Its slumbering form has inhabited my dreams.

Longonot, which last erupted in 1863, is a classic caldera. It took about two hours to climb with the kids (aged five and eight). My son basically had to be dragged up the steeper sections, and a couple times I didn't think he was going to make it. But it was all worth it for the stunning experience of reaching the top and peering over the rim, which is only a couple paces across. The floor, several hundred meters below, is carpeted in bush. Sulfuric steam rises from a fissure in the wall. On the outer slopes, one can see very clearly where the lava spilled over the edge and pooled.

photo: Tambako the Jaguar

From the top of Longonot, we could look over at Lake Naivasha, which is just an hour and a half from Nairobi, and used to be a favorite vacation spot when I was a kid. The lake is now surrounded by huge greenhouse-type structures, where flowers are grown for export to Europe. Planeloads fly out daily. This generates a lot of cash, but growing flowers requires a huge amount of water, and the lake is rapidly shrinking. When I was young, we used to take boats to Crescent Island. As you can see in the satellite photos below, the island became a peninsula about ten years ago (though, amusingly, it's still called "Crescent Island").

But now the open end has almost closed up, creating another, smaller lake. One effect of this shrinking is that there is now about a mile of new, pristine parkland beside the lake, where giraffe, impala, zebra, and waterbuck gambol. It's lovely to stroll there in the late afternoons. But in a few years, unless some sort of action is taken, Lake Naivasha will be no more.













photo: mckaysavage