Review : The Boss

The Boss

Author: Victoria Chang

Publisher: McSweeney's

Date: 7/2013

64p

When the world breaks apart beneath you there are only a few choices available – to pick it up and carry it with you – or to throw it away, abandoning the mess. That mess exists either way. The question is about who and when it gets dealt with.

Victoria Chang’s new book dredges the rubble of both kinds. That of family. And that of society. The family plays out in an examination of her father, suffering from dementia. In the study of her own life in terms of who is boss and who is not. Her actual boss at work, herself vs. her daughter, her father.

Society enters in the form of 9/11. In strange, subtle ways, the event creeps in. The experience of an emigrant in America. Of a family integrating into the culture.

The poems begin in a place of thought. A cascading train that opens quickly into nature, aging, and death. The progression is one of language to senses. The words drill down the page. A sort of cultural tunnel-making. They start from a sense of now and dig quickly into pasts personal and public as they work down the page.

The form is ballad-like. The strong sense of meter and internal slant-rhyme drives the words quickly. There is little time to think, to absorb. The drive to go from start to finish is almost oppressive. Chang is the boss here. The control is astounding.

The healing power of voicing a broken history is important. One of reconciling the past and present. Talking seems central to the process.

my four-year-old daughter still listens to me I am the boss and I like it I see why the boss likes it

Conversations with an ailing father. Where he confuses her for her sister. The forgetting of time. Thinking he is still working. The conversation as her boss comes back to work after having a baby. Each moment seems to be a way into a wound. A filling.

When 9/11 first shows up it is sudden, it is a question to be answered. But the answer is never given. We watch as it happens. We see pilots merging with bosses on the 54th floor. We ponder children being too young to save parents.

Chang uses acrostic poems built around Edward Hopper’s paintings of offices and urban streets to discuss the ambiguities of human interaction. To point out the many interpretations of a frozen scene. The ambiguities in every day life. Here the question of boss melts, each time a different person is given the title. Americana is reinterpreted as the immigrant experience.

The Boss concludes with a recount of the Tōhoku earthquake on March 11, 2011. We are left at the mercy of a higher boss. Nature. And the concerns of man seem to dwindle. The problem of an ailing father is left in that space. Nature does as it will. The concerns of the office and who is in charge when are abandoned finally. The earth cracks open and water rises. People fade, people rise. They lead, then everyone, everywhere falls.

A final unavoidable breaking.

Waiting

I've been teaching.

Which sounds like a confession of some kind.

Today we watched the 2001 film version of Waiting for Godot. I am always suspect of film versions of plays. They are rarely good. Theater translates poorly to film. Almost worse than fiction does.

When it works it's because one of two things have happened in the process. Either the film has managed to cover up the stage origins of the work or it embraces them and allows the film to be 'stagey'.

Can we talk about how Julia Roberts stopped
smiling like this sometime in 1997?

Let's talk about Steel Magnolias.

Which I bet most people don't even know is a play.

I'll start by saying that the movie is real good. In a specific late 80s way. A big hair Olympia Dukakis Pretty Woman era Julia Roberts Dolly Parton in 9 to 5 way. Think about Beaches. That's what I'm talking about.

The play was written by Robert Haling, who adapted the work into the screenplay. It is based on his own sister's death from diabetes. He wrote a short story version first, then changed it into a play within 10 days.

It is a rare example of a work moving quickly form one stage to another. The play premiered in 1987. The move in 1989. Though it never went to Broadway until 2005.

It is most certainly an example of a plays origins being masked.

But it is also a very rare example of a playwright being responsible for the film.

On the other end of the spectrum is another Julia Roberts movie, 2004's Closer.

That film is also written by the original playwright. In this case, Patrick Marber. He also wrote the screenplay for Notes on a Scandal FYI. A film you need to see now.

The play actively refuses to be solid. It is one of roughly drawn character and scene. Things are implied. Plot is left out until afterwards, then only mentioned. Scenery is sparse. It is very post-modern.

The movie takes a note from this. It leaves the characters broadly drawn. It keeps the settings simplistic. And it feels stagy. In this case it makes the whole film feel wooden. Awkward. Distant.

Like it's all being kept from you. This is where the translation from stage to film can go wrong.

The Godot film we watched was basically a stage production with good close-ups. In this case it works. But this is because the play is already strange enough to hold up to the glare of cameras. And the film makers wisely decided to make it a stage production filmed with nice close ups.

And it draws you in like a stage production. Steel Magnolias pulls you with melodrama and sweeping southern town charms. Closer pushes you away. It's hard to say which is better. I prefer to be reminded of the format. I like the disconnect of knowing it's a production. But there still needs to be connection. And sometimes a screen keeps that from happening.

Warsh

I often think about the ways languages change.

Over time standards move.

The Guardian spent some time running down the ways English evolves.

The one that stands out to me is Epenthesis. This is when a consonant appears where there isn't one. The examples given are 'thunder' and 'empty'. These words used to be 'thuner' and 'emty'. The example of a word that this is in the process of happening to is 'hamster'. Most people insert a 'p' in there.

This brings to mind the word 'wash'. In central Pennsylvania you will hear it pronounced as 'warsh'.

A lot of people get really caught up being bothered by this.

Say the word 'balm' out loud. If you pronounce the 'l' you are a part of this shifting language. That 'l' was left out. Until very recently.

I can't. Language is beautiful because it isn't a pure thing. We change, borrow, and steal to make it what it is. And I'm happy to see it living and breathing and becoming something new.

Think about people 100 years from now not understanding our spelling and syntax. It's a trippy thought, but take a look at syntax and language from the late 1800s sometime. It will explode your view of how quickly language shifts.

I've recently begun teaching a class on contemporary North American plays. We were reading Jose Rivera's Marisol. We began by talking about the early 90s. The kids in the class are all int heir early 20s so they were babies in the 90s.

Babies.

We talked about the weirdness of that time. The L.A. riots, the Tailhook scandal, the first World Trade Center bombing, abortion clinic bombings, the mere fact that Nirvana became #1 and a week earlier Michael Jackson was...

There was a sense that culture was in upheaval.

It made me realize that culture shifts quickly the same way language does. That what matters in 1992 will be strange and hard to explain in 2014.

That time and place are impermanent.

))))mind expands((((

Room

Life Edited

I've been thinking of space.

Rooms within rooms.

The idea of a room. What it is.

Beyond four walls.

I've been writing on it. Thinking through how I deal with space.

From the base idea of a room not existing before it is seen. A sort of classic koan-like thought experiment. From that idea up to the idea of entering a painting and leaving behind the 'real' world.

The mutability of space.

Floor plans.

Think about entering a room. A car. A forest. For the first time. And the wonder of that moment.

It's like looking at a word for the first time.

lighght

That is a poem by Aram Saroyan. The question is inevitable. Why?

Because when you look at it you begin to question the nature of light. The nature of language. The nature of everything.

How many gh's could you stuff in there? Infinite? Because the 'gh' is silent you can slide over them. They approach the infinity of light. The speed of it. The beauty.

Ian Daly talks it out at the Poetry Foundation:

"(The poem) is something you see rather than read. Look at “lighght” as a poem and you might not get it. Look at it as a kind of photograph, and you’ll be closer."

Saroyan himself says: “The difference between “lighght” and another type of poem with more words is that it doesn’t have a reading process...Even a five-word poem has a beginning, middle, and end. A one-word poem doesn’t. You can see it all at once. It’s instant.”

I think of a poem as a room. A space you must enter. Thinking about spaces we see and deal with on a daily basis allows us to reconnect to the magic of life. Beyond the space we have created for ourselves.

Fighting for Life

If you walk around a city, any city, avoiding the tourist spots and purposefully heading down small back streets you will eventually become aware of how close together everything is. How on top of each other the spaces are.

Today you can look at these spaces, especially on the nights when trash is piled and rats are hovering, and easily think of them as hotbeds of illness and crime.

Lower East Side today

You will not be surprised that at one time these spaces were deathtraps.

In the 1890s the Lower East Side was the most densely populated square mile on earth. 1/3 of children in the area died before they were 5. Typhus, smallpox, and diarrhea were rampant enough that many wrote off the entire area and the people living there.

Of course this part of the city and those tenement buildings are pretty fashionable these days. But in 1908 the area was still referred to as 'the suicide ward'. That same year S. Josephine Baker became the first director of New York's Bureau of Child Hygiene. By 1911 she had more than halved the death rate of children.

New York tenements 1910

Which is amazing.

And she did it with simple education. Teaching mother's how to properly make formula. How to keep babies protected from the sweltering summers and freezing winters. Basic things, like clothing, and checking in with health professionals.

And it was all a public work. All for free to the woman and children.

In America.

Baker's memoir of that time, Fighting for Life, is a fascinating glimpse into the very recent history of our country. And of the very recent problem of health and living conditions in our cities.

And the whole thing has the air of relevance today.

I couldn't help while reading this to be overcome with a sense that Baker's fight to get poor, immigrant mothers the help they needed with child rearing is akin to the fight over health care today.

It is expensive, unwieldy, and clearly taken for granted by a lot of the country.

The implementation of the Affordable Care Act has been rocky. But no more so than any other government program going into effect. In the end it will help a lot of us to be healthier. It will aid our future generations in the same way social security has.

In the same way Baker was able to lower the death rate of children, the ACA will eventually make us healthier people.

The fact that we seem to not see the benefit of this is shortsighted and depressing. But unsurprising. As a country we react to things, we do not pro-act. And we tend to be shortsighted. It is rare that we gaze generations ahead and attempt to set ourselves up to succeed long term.

The New Deal was one of the times we attempted to reach into the future and fix it before we got there. The space program was another. The ACA is yet another.

We just need to not get in our own way.

Inspiration : Paling

Paling 10/2/09

This is a poem about the fall. About the loneliness of the city. The sudden confrontation with nature that a cold, wet leaf on the floor brings in the middle of the night.

1.
Again trees

2.
Rounded hills
covered
A yellow blanket, its
shock
colors cause the eyes to
dart

3.
Body remembers waking

3am naked toe touches

First fall leaf, first rain

The fall is my favorite season. It crops up again and again in my writing. Call it a love of the death/rebirth cycle. A fascination with entropy. Whatever you like.

4.
yellow
drops
the sky is busy being orange

everything is mulled wine
spices over butternut squash

mostly
everything looks ending
a deepish bruise

The other night J and I hosted a wonderful holiday party. We made this recipe for Wassail. It has apple cider and cranberry juice. And a bunch of spices. You then add a bunch of bourbon.

It was a delicious deep purple. Like liquid plums.

5
All of this is cliched
Cycles, colors, seasons.
Death, death, death...

But -

When leaves start their jumping,
like baby birds from the nest,
it is hard not to think about
a slow darkening.

The way soil turns
smooth, black.

That damp smell,
subtle chocolate,
parts around leaf veins.

6.
You pull up the blankets.

You pray for smoothness.

Picture the way earth looks after worms have had their way with it.

New.

Fresh.

Blank.

Review : High-Rise Stories

High-Rise Stories

Editor: Audrey Petty

Publisher: McSweeney's/Voice of Witness

Date: 9/15/13

256p

If I could breathe in that dust when these buildings coming down, why not let me breathe in the dust of something coming up?

Housing projects.

The phrase elicits immediate responses in people.

Images of poor people. Probably not white people. Large, grey, high-rises standing in the worst parts of cities.

America's great social experiment of the late half of the 20th century. Starting in the 1930s New York City's First Houses, the US was trying to deal with the great populations of poor.

The intentions were good. Clean, affordable, subsidized housing. Get people off the streets, into homes, moving in the right direction.

Over time these developments would deteriorate. They would be left to fall apart. The people, forgotten.

Voice of Witness has teamed with McSweeney's to present a new series of oral histories of people affected by contemporary injustices. The organization has recently won the Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award for Social Progress.

I've never lived in a project. I know people who have. But I've never been inside one, so my thoughts on them are purely intellectual and hypothetical.

Those buildings scare me. They are designed to scare. They are the worst in utilitarian mid-century construction. The low of brutalist architecture, they are meant to be large, imposing, and shut off from the outside world.

Or, to be more accurate, to shut those living there in from the rest of us.

In High-Rise Stories editor Audrey Petty has brought together 11 stories of people who lived in the Chicago Housing Authority's various complexes prior to the mass demolition and rebuilding projects that started in 2000. 17 of the 27 housing projects have been demolished. Only 6 of those projects have been directly replaced.

Started in 1937, CHA oversees more than 50,000 households. Over 21,000 apartments and over 37,000 Section 8 vouchers. Petty's book focuses on the lives of those displaced in the wake of CHA's Plan For Transformation.

Each of the stories is told in direct, diary style. Each tells the story of how these buildings filled with life, were loved, and then how it all began to crumble under the weight of too many residents, too little funding, and little civic support.

It's hard to not feel like these people have been abandoned. That they do not see the city as a source of support. That they don't understand how the new living options are any better.

Many of the stories end with the people relocating to some of the new mixed income housing that CHA has built. Many are faced with suspicion and horrible 'one-strike' laws where even family members being in trouble with the law can lead to eviction.

This book fills a need in the study of what these housing projects were. Over time these histories will be important to help cities move into a more equitable direction with housing.

I do wish that Perry had spent a little time connecting the dots. Explaining the context of the projects in the larger US housing experiment. And then also discussing the current attempt to 'do away' with them. The oral histories are visceral, are direct, and are vastly more important than academics debating theory. But I wonder if it's trading bad for bad.

A little more academics would have been nice. A little more of the issues. The connective tissue between these stories.

The 2011 movie The Interrupters deals with the violence side of this issue. Focusing on the work of Cure Violence (formerly CeaseFire), the movie follows the work of people trying to break the cycle of violence in Chicago. Where High-Rise Stories tells individual stories of growing up in the CHA projects. The Interrupters does heavy lifting to show the work being done to change the neighborhoods for the better.

The premise of the Cure Violence work is that violence is comparable to an air born virus. It is catching. Moving. Alive. That there are anti-bodies. Immunizations. Like the over-crowded poor sections of old cities that were overrun with disease. Our modern versions are overrun with violence.

Each of these works tell half the story. One is the housing and separation problem. The other is of violence.

The final line of the book, spoken by Lloyd 'Pete' Haywood, sums up this sentiment:

It's the dust of something new. It's still unhealthy, but I breathed that in, so let me breathe this in.