The New Yorker

For anyone who loves The New Yorker ... About Town (2000) by Ben Yagoda.

Explains some of its frustrating aspects and instills admiration for its purity, focus on an elegant, sophisticated, though quirky and very ivory-tower-ish art for art's sake iron-grip perspective.

After 50-plus years of existence (founded 1925), the magazine had become decorous to a fault, largely because the long-time editor William Shawn (1952-1987), over decades, slowly wrested power into a dictatorial kingdom at the magazine: suspicious of detractors, afflicted with the intriguing aging monarch condition of seeing the end of power and not wanting to let it go. Yagoda writes, "But now [the early '80s] the talents of contributors new and old were unable to transcend the essential dysfunctionality of the magazine. It was simply a creepy place" (404).

Even the hallowed New Yorker writer title seems tenuous with the revelations untomed in Yagoda's book; contributors would write and submit pieces and would not be guaranteed publication or payment, and if a piece was accepted, all too often it took months/years of limbo and had to deal with sometimes amazingly arcane and peculiar edits. How does it work now?

I went to the 2008 Nieman Narrative Journalism Conference (ran by Harvard and I just found out it's being discontinued; horrible) in Boston and Dan Baum, a former New Yorker staff writer, lamented, disgruntledly, that his contract did not get renewed for the next year. He had written extensively on Hurricane Katrina's aftermath for the magazine as the man-on-the-ground for the mess, but, surprisingly, he emoted the gut-wrenching frustration of what appears to be (post-reflection) The New Yorker's edit machine of his long Katrina piece. He called it the "New Yorker deflavorizer," and afterward I noticed it all over the magazine, more so in some places than others. Art critic Peter Scheldjahl's, a climactic exception, always. Have to give him a shout out! Probably my favorite staff writer, and not for subject matter, of the magazine. (Aside - I just met a former good friend of his daughter's. Ah! the glory of a tenuous one-degree of separation).

-- interlude/flashback (Nieman Narrative) --

Me and Anne Hull. Cool!

Nieman Narrative: the main reason I went was to meet/see Anne Hull, an amazing national beat writer for the Washington Post. She might be the best newspaper writer working. It's a shame there's not a wider outlet for her. (I first encountered her as I prepared to be a teaching assistant for Cross-Cultural Journalism in J-School; her piece was featured in the class's somewhat-mundane textbook. Her 2002 piece: Rim of the New World. See the popping, alive first article in the series here. It reads as a poetic, off-the-cuff freestyle (in the freeing sense of her voice and perspective) exposé of changing demographics in the Atlanta metropolitan area evidenced by the 2000 census. A snippet:

Cisco gives the man his ice cream cone, mocha-colored fingers wrapped around the white napkin that covers the cone, and into the outstretched knuckles that spell S-K-I-N.

As soon as the man puts the car in gear, Cisco whirls around and spits out a rap.

I represent the South

where the niggas stay scared.

red mouth, nobody mouth as red as mine

down south affiliated with that Georgia pine.

Anne and I corresponded before I arrived; I asked to sit down with her. She gave me her cell number and we texted back and forth at the conference to coordinate (I'm not typically star-struck, but that was cool). And more cool: we (two J-school colleagues and I) were staying in the conference hotel and one of us had got bumped up to the special penthouse breakfast privileges. We all showed up for breakfast the morning of the keynote address and there were Anne Hull and Dana Priest eating breakfast, before their keynote address (within a few months they would win a Pulitzer Prize for their story exposing the pathetic operation of Walter Reed Hospital, run by the U.S. military in D.C.). And there was Roy Peter Clark (a professor's, Berkley Hudson, good friend) who is a big player in journalism, writing, etc. Anyhow, on the way downstairs, guess who was in the elevator? Me and Anne Hull and Dana Priest. Dana was talking about the mundanity of leave-town chores; they were gossipping like any girls would (of course). It was just cool.

When we talked, I asked Anne why she wasn't writing books or writing magazine pieces. Read the story that caught my attention back in 2007 and see why I asked the question. She said she was going to take some time off. A few months later I saw a piece by her in The New Yorker! Her first in the magazine. Didn't have her characteristic freeing voice or spirit (but was good) - maybe because of the deflavorizer?

Note: I looked on Washington Post's website yesterday to read some of Anne's recent stories and there were none for about 15 months, so I emailed her. She responded. She's on sabbatical, working on a book. Thank goodness. It should be a great book with her clear intelligence and her great, clear, free, open, fun writing style.

-- Interlude over --

In 1985, The New Yorker was bought out by Advance Publications, which ended its heavenly, skewed bubble-life; and Shawn was subsequently pushed out, but his farewell letter to the staff indicates the absolute high charm of the magazine and what made/makes it so special:

"Dear colleagues, dear friends:

My feelings at this perplexed moment are too strong for farewells. I will miss you terribly, but I can be grateful to have had your companionship for part of my journey through the years. Whatever our individual roles at The New Yorker, whether on the eighteenth, nineteenth, or twentieth floor, we have built something quite wonderful together. Love has been the controlling emotion, and love is the essential word. The New Yorker, as a reader once said, has been the grandest of magazines. Perhaps it has also been the greatest, but that matters far less. What matters most is that you and I, working together, taking strength from the inspiration that our first editor, Harold Ross, gave us, have tried constantly to find and say what is true. I must speak of love once more. I love all of you, and will love you as long as I live" (416). [My emphasis] Truth and love!

Interestingly, the magazine began to "bleed red ink." After Roger Gottlieb, an interim editor, Si Newhouse, the new owner, hired Vanity Fair editor British Tina Brown, then 38 years old, in 1992, and she moved the magazine, extremely, into photography and timeliness. David Remnick, the current editor (since 1998), took it down a notch, but the magazine still frustratingly covers the exact same topics that spread through the media: The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and NPR's Fresh Air. It really feels like there's a weekly manifesto sent out to the "cultural elite" about what to cover. Come on! Can we do something about this please? I'll add some specific examples later, hopefully. Back to the red point ... between 1994 and 1998 the mag ran a $60.6-million deficit (424). How can that be/be tolerated? It's too good of a product. Is this public knowledge? I'll report back its current economics, if so.

Anyhow ... Regardless ... Look forward to my pieces in the magazine!

Some ridiculous quotes (from the fashion designer Tomas Maier profile "Just Have Less," by John Colapinto in the Jan. 3, 2011, issue), illustrating the "too-elegant" (a friend's criticism of the magazine) realm of The New Yorker:

Maeir [Tomas, "creative director and head designer of the Italian fashion label Bottega Veneta"] asked Longo [a fashion photographer famous for developing, in the 1980s, the modeling pose of reacting to the impact of gunshots] to reproduce the series himself, using models with Bottega Veneta clothing and bags. The proofs had no credit line identifying Longo as the photographer. When I asked Maier about this, he said that anyone who couldn't distinguish the difference between a real Longo and an imitation was not the customer he was after (37). [!!].

and

As Maier finished lunch - a salad - I asked him about the ethics of creating astronomically costly things when many people are having trouble meeting their food bills. Maier insisted that his prices reflected the cost of materials and labor ... He insisted that Bottega's goods were not beyond the reach of middle-class people, who have simply been trained to want too much stuff. Anyone, he said, could afford one five-hundred-and-fifty-dollar hand-painted cashmere scarf. "Just have less," he said (37).

The Meadow: a novel-poem

A friend lent me The Meadow (1992) by James Galvin a few months ago. I didn't realize it would be such a masterpiece, but poets have been outside of my sphere, unfortunately.

It is a devastating work set in the Colorado/Wyoming borderland, a region where Galvin himself was raised. Only a living intimacy could create the work, a 100-year history of the area depicted through the lives of several interconnected generations of families. Part of the charm is the omniscient narrator's perspective; Galvin dances in and out of his characters' lives and thoughts - both contextualizing them and allowing the characters to express the searing, what appears to be one slow-drawn, wagon-through-mud-consistent drama of their harsh-landscape life. The revolving perspectives and simple, rugged intimacy recalls, strongly, Faulkner's As I Lay Dying.

When the moment ebbed and the horses stilled and the situation bespoke itself in the silence that followed (even the creek's roar was a silence now), the silence issuing from the old man overwhelmed it, and the creek became a noise again, and the roaring in App's ears came out of it, and all the sounds together became the sound of his father's wrath building. App knew what was coming so he just sat there waiting, still as granite, not from fear but from a calm prescience of the inevitable. Without turning he heard the old man's breathing and the crunch of his boots punishing the gravel. He felt the back end of the wagon lift perceptibly, which was not what he was expecting, so he craned around to see the old man squatted down behind the wagon, heaving-to in a carnival-like attempt to lift the impossible back onto the road (51).

Tempering different grades of steel is a subtle art that can't be explained in any book. People see colors differently, so that the relationships of colors as they shade down a metal rainbow from red to purple to tan, can only be hinted at. It takes years and failures to learn (123).

He scoured the desert for agates and jade. He made a saw to cut slabs out of stones. He filled several boxes with the cut and polished jewelry he made. Some of the agates are like tiny landscapes with trees and a river or distant mountains under dawn. All women's jewelry - pendants, brooches, earrings - never given or worn. Put away in boxes in a drawer (126).

In the spring the new grass grows in standing water. At sunset the white mirror-light shines through the grass. That's when the beaver ponds light up, too, and the rising trout make bull's eyes on the surface.
A doe that has been drinking lifts her head to listen. Done irrigating, Lyle heads home across the shining field. He has a shovel on his shoulder that looks like a single wing (142).

A heartbreaking lament of a stolen bike

Fussy note of the day: *** Not from the bicycle's perspective as the title may suggest (though that would be degrees more poignant and desolate); title has the right rhythm/cadence/feeling as is, so it's there, though misleading ***

Bikes should never be stolen, especially ones that take on the intimacy of pain, self-reliance and companionship that accompanies a simple existence made concrete by muscle-pedal-chain-wheel transportation.

Of course, who's to blame? The victim or the thief? Most often the victim probably. In this case for sure - a beautiful, hot bike cable-locked to a tree in the heart of midday Cal-Berkeley's campus. Tragic ignorance.

Walked around the Oakland Flea Market the next morning: cars, a blue, aching god-knows-what machine, bicycle tires, more than a few disabled, rough armoires, a restful chaos of perhaps useful things - just focus on one rusty or semi-tattered item at a time. Dance along the miraculous, apparently straight paths through the junk, the piled, ramshackled Toy Story despair of usefulness in a hopeless borderland.

I arrived a little after opening time, a guy in a semi-nice VW pulled up and looked to get in. We talked for a second, re-determining the opening time, now 20 minutes past. "It's one of those places where that's fluid," I said, with a slight glance to the junk in the open-air, and then I walked back down the street to the corner "not just another wifi shack" cafe to not-contemplate the soul-crushing reality of a beloved, used-everyday bicycle, stolen, gone, vaporized into the blue, sunny sky of the East Bay, dissipated through the red-green-gold redwood trees of Cal-Berkeley's grand entrance, just down-slope of one small, perhaps justified, tyranny.

It's the second life-altering stolen bicycle: the first was worse, just because a 10,000-plus logged miles and four-year, cross-country relationship is more like losing a partner than an item. Okay have to stop here ... RIP GF Paragon.

Hope, a useful endeavor? Craigslist, the Berkeley flea market, the absurdity of any immediate-action faultless despair.

"Ayaaaa..."

Yoga

Note: Sorry for the post. Who doesn't love yoga? Ok, maybe some. With that, though, here's a post:

I started doing yoga when I was 19 as a sophomore and an NCAA Div. II basketball star (I wish :); should've been). But, I was on the team and performed the consequent bull-headed, meat-head, intellect-dominated training regimen of muscle-by-muscle training. I do biceps now, I do my stomach now, I do my chest now, I do my shoulders now, I do my legs now. Consequently, I couldn't sit cross-legged or touch my toes, etc.; I was a tight, muscle-bound person.

I started doing yoga because of my girlfriend at the time taught it; I thought it was a joke, for a while - until the day someone pointed out, when watching me sit in pain, that my body was a wreck. There was nothing overtly wrong with it, I just couldn't sit on the ground without pain. A flash-of-light realization occurred: I have to change this, this is not right. I started doing yoga everyday at age 21 and have continued until today, age 32.

I slowly got more flexible and better at yoga, and eventually I taught several yoga classes at the University of Missouri while I attended journalism school there, and the aphorism: "to master something, teach it," I found to be absolutely true. I wasn't the greatest teacher though I tried. I never systematic, long-term training; I just had an experience with a series of exceptional teachers, and a desperation to change my body. And I had a very solid grasp of the absolute basics: alignment, state of mind, attitude, which help create a successful session. Some of the absolute keys (this is gold):

• Always relax the face and breathe into whatever position you're in

• Shoulders always relaxed, dropping away from the ears. Shoulder blades reaching back toward each other, opening the upper chest and aligning the spine such that the body is supported so you feel the your flesh draped off and the energy/framework of the spine by grounding from the floor/feet through the hips up to the crown of the head. A light, free sensation

• Engage the lower back slightly, slightly; be aware that it's the absolute key between the two halves of the body, the nexus that once activated, stimulates balance and an amazing surge of energy, releasing all the power of the solar plexus (the spot two inches below the navel and our center of gravity/source of being). Gets on another level, but that's where you are

• Be aware of the hips' position relative to the shoulders, feet. In general, they will be even, horizontally speaking, and working to be either square, both hip points facing the same direction, or open, hip points spreading 180 degrees away from each other, following the knees

• Relax/spread the toes; it's surprising how this relaxes the face immediately and lets you sink deeper into whichever pose you're in

• Activate an interior line of energy; find the dynamic tension that remarkably anchors and energizes each pose
  

This post is inspired by a great yoga teacher I've been fortunate to study with in the Bay Area. Good teachers, in anything, are so rare. Jessie Holland is calm, confident, knowledgeable, thoughtful in the layout of her classes, and gives amazing, ever-changing, insightful body cues: spread the energry starting from your core outward to the hands and back toward the feet. Wow! It feels like the body floats away and supports itself.

Anyhow, excellent teachers are rare; it's a treat.

Hasta luego.

The Natural World of San Francisco by Harold Gilliam and Michael Bry (1967)

A great book, at times a little overwritten, that gives a great, detailed perspective to almost all the elements of San Francisco's natural history, from its geology to its seasonal climate to its trees, fog, physical evolution ... . Great photographs by Michael Bry illustrate the text by Harold Gilliam, former environmental writer and San Francisco Chronicle columnist.

An example of the natural history insight the book offers: did you know that the 1017-acre, three-mile long, lush, green, amazingly treed Golden Gate Park, which anchors the city's northwest end, was sand dunes in the 1860s and took decades of cultivation to get plants to even take root?

And, the ubiquitous California tree, the eucalyptus, is not native - though this is a fairly well-known fact. But still shocking nonetheless for any of us who hike, ride through the stands of the tall, iconic tree of today's California. It was brought here for timber from its native Australia, but by a key oversight the wrong species, the blue gum (one of 600 Australian species), was picked and broadcast, and before the nascent Californians knew it, they had established a thriving area tree that was useless for anything but its being.

The eucalyptus light is not the bright metallic luster of the Lombardy poplars and the cottonwoods of the arid regions or the dazzling mirrorlike glitter of the quaking aspens in the high mountain passes; it is rather a muted scintillation like late afternoon sunlight on the blue-green waters of an ocean cove as seen through the filtering boughs of pines. This special quality of light is partly the result of the arrangement of its leaves ... Look upward from a point near the base of a one-hundred-and-fifty-foot eucalyptus and you see terrace after terrace of foliage, each with its clusters of leaves shimmering with a different vibration as they are stirred by any slight movement of air. It is as if your eyes were moving upward from the base of a Gothic tower as the sunlight illuminated, one after another, successive rising arches and buttresses, spandrels and spires (82-83).

Gilliam spends an admiringly large portion of the book contextualizing the Great Bar, a curving, thin, underwater sandbar that spans the Golden Gate and, in many respects, is inexplicable. Theories swirl around the nearer geological history of the bay; for instance, when a lot of the current seawater was locked up in Ice Age glaciers, the current coastline was 25-ish miles further to the west at the Farallone Islands. One theory suggests that as sea levels rose, the Golden Gate forced the growing ocean to deposit its in-bound sand, forming the Great Bar. Later, when the overall forces of water through the Gate reversed, the sandbar took on its current seaward-bulging shape. The Bar must be dredged to maintain a shipping channel and is not an important feature in and of itself, but offers distinct, physical evidence, laden with concommitant theories of the area's particular natural history.

The most compelling chapter of the book, "The Sky," discusses the Bay Area's weather patterns, in particular the subtle changes in types and timing of seasonal fog with its attendant causes. Gilliam describes how he can, amazingly, wake up in the morning and tell what the weather forecast holds for the day just by sniffing the air from his one-time Telegraph Hill home:

The aromas drifting in the window were sure signs of things to come. If the odor was salty, we could expect cool, breezy weather off the ocean and probably fog. But a pungent aroma from the coffee roasters near the Ferry Building would be borne on a south wind, a reliable indication of an approaching rainstorm. An odor of burning or an acrid tang in the air meant the breeze was coming from the industrial areas northeast of the bay, particularly the oil refineries at Richmond and beyond. The day was sure to be sharp, clear, dry, and extraordinarily cold if the season was winter, or equally clear and dry but unusually warm at any other season (203 - 204).

SF in five movements:
1. The Land and the Waters
2. The Trees
3. The Parks
4. The Wildlife
5. The Sky

Chocolate Croissants!

Who knows how it started, but it definitely began. Somewhere along the way chocolate croissants became a part of my identity. As a staple in bakeries, I must not be the only one. I don't know if that's a consolation? I really would like to go back to my formative pre-7-year-old days and count how many times my mother brought me to the bakery, with me as an excuse (who can say? :) ), when the chocolate croissant situation started via a weekly (or bi-daily) titration of butter, filo dough and chocolate. As a young adult and as a growing-older one, it's become a routine to sample cafes', bakeries', boulangeries', etc. chocolate croissants of any area I happen to land, if even for a little while. Honestly, it is not just an excuse to eat multiple chocolate croissants day in and day out. I swear.

Paris! And your chocolatines! How disappointed I was. The birthplace (I assume(d)) of the chocolate croissant. I sampled them everywhere, all over the city. Near Notre Dame, Sacre Coeur, Museo de Picasso, Latin Quartier? Nothing.

There've been many heartbreaks.

Having recently moved to the East Bay, I continued my sampling. It's unconscious, I swear. For the first time, however, I made the tasting systematic by recruiting some people (analysts).

Here's the deal. A research program was designed loosely after another, albeit plain, croissant-off; the top four bakeries in the eastern north-Oakland/Berkeley area were sampled: La Farine, Market Hall Bakery, Masse's Pastries and Semifreddi's. La Farine, Market Hall and Semifreddi's were somewhat in-the-know spots for the analysts before the test, but Masse's Pastries in north Berkeley was off the radar. In the croissant-off linked above, Masse's wins, and after reading some of the comments I thought they might dazzle on the chocolate croissant frontier, too. While I was at Masse's Pastries, the last bakery on my chocolate croissant run on the day of the analysis, I asked the baker why chocolate croissants are rarely made into real croissant shapes. It's rare, as you probably know, to see an actual chocolate croissant (croissant, from the French: "crescent"); typically, its representation is a folded-over mess with chocolate stuffed inside. One bakery around the corner from where I work in Berkeley simply makes a flat bread roll and stuffs chocolate in to it (to be fair, it's called a "pain au chocolate" - but what's the point of that?. Needless to say, they were not included in the croissant-off). The baker at Masse's said that it's simply easier to make the folded-over version because the chocolate for chocolate most often comes in sticks of a length convenient for folding in - it's a little more, or a lot more, complicated to croissant them in.

-- interlude --

On a Mexico trip, I found a great bakery in Barre de Navidad, Jalisco, run by a French-Canadian (if I remember correctly) and his wife. They got up everyday at 3:30 a.m. to make the day's croissants - plain, almond and chocolate - all about half the size of regular croissants. I got up early one morning to bake with them, and while the husband lamented, sadly, that his parents would not visit or respect him because they thought he was on vacation and not really working in Mexico (though he was!), we talked about and made croissants. To get the traditional form, the filo dough is buttered and cut into triangles, and the triangles are then, surpringly, simply rolled up from one point to make the characteristic, texture-laden croissant shape. I learned something important that enlightned much of my croissant experience, too: many bakeries don't use butter, but margarine, because it's much easier to work with, but a lot less tasty. Isn't it the blending of butter and chocolate and flaky dough that make choclate croissants great?!

-- back to the contest --

Two croissants were purchased from each bakery and then cut up into two or three pieces with the ends removed and then placed on four plates. The five reviewers had no idea which croissant came from which bakery.

-- a note --

I had been blown away by Market Hall Bakery's chocolate croissants - buttery, chocolate-y and flaky. A rare combination. And, they dame in completely off the map; no blogs or food sites mentioned them in the little research I did for the taste-off.

-- back to the contest --

The results (listed in order of favorite):

Analyst K: La Farine, Masse's Pastries, Semifreddi's, Market Hall
Analyst M: La Farine, Market Hall, Masse's Pastries, Semifreddi's
Analyst N: Market Hall, La Farine, Semifreddi's, Masse's Pastries
Analyst Ra: La Farine, Masse's Pastries, Market Hall, Semifreddi's
Analyst Re: Market Hall, La Farine, Masse's Pastries, Semifreddi's

Obviously, La Farine won, but Market Hall is clearly the second favorite. After tasting both one after the other, and vice-versa, it was clear that they were very similar but differed in the taste of their chocolate. La Farine's was less sweet, mor dark; Market Hall's more milk-buttery. Surprisingly, the heavily touted Masse's Pastries didn't do so well. Maybe an off day.

Regardless - a very one one for a chocolate-croissant addict!

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

A wonderful, devastating book. I had no idea that the fantastical beginning, "GhettoNerd at the End of the World," would turn out so soulful. I stopped reading after 10 or so pages assuming that the boasting of Dominicano young Oscar was leading to some self-indulgent, self-esteem-building work about a niche life. Couldn't have been more wrong. The seams of the book tore apart, the words ached with tragedy, a multilayered profile of a country raped and beaten by a tyrant - the effects beading through time and a space and landing on a young, awkward boy, one that we, in melting-pot America, have likely encountered growing up (I know I did, intimately, in the public schools on the poor side of the tracks in Austin, Texas). The weight of history, the subtle karma of trenchant tragedy.

I never would've finished the book if it hadn't been for the chance encounter with a Berkeley undergrad work-study student who had to tour me through the Berkeley Art Museum because I wanted to photograph the building for the first blog post; some angles in the museum require permission for some reason. Her (Jennifer's) thesis has to do with the book and its unusual use of footnotes. We didn't go into it in depth in the short time we talked, but maybe (hopefully) this post will be expanded if we get to meet about it. It would be a great book to talk about. I randomly saw her at the corner of Ashby and College, big sunglasses that swallowed her eyes and cheeks, Frenched-out (she lived in France for awhile), thin, skirt, leggings, big boots, a cigarette coming and going from her mouth, dangling, during the nonchalant movements, between her middle and index fingers. The way she leaned into her hip standing on the curb looking downstreet at the busy intersection, she brought Paris and the beautiful fashion-flowers of Madison Aveenue as they wait in the brief light for their car concretely into the day. I said hello not sure it was her; it was. We talked a bit and said we should talk about Oscar Wao, and her eyes, after she brought down the huge, dark glasses had the harried, overworked, stressed look of the passionate undergrad (N O T E N O U G H T I M E T O D O W H A T S E E M S L I K E R E A L L Y M A T T E R S, C O N S T A N T L Y I N S P I R E D A N D T R I P P E D U P B Y E C O N O M I C S O R S O M E O T H E R S U R V E Y C L A S S; Little do you know then that this is the problem of life: keep the fire burning strong in the midst of the (seeming) mundanities of living. I did a biography for the University of Missouri Journalism School's centennial celebration of probably the most all-star dean in the school's history (outside of founder Walter Williams, of course (blasphemy); note: he was scandalous; he married a younger student. In the archives during my research, I came across a handwritten note by her to a friend describing his come-ons, and her confusion and disappointment because she respected him - they eventually married) Pulitzer Prize winning magazine historian, Frank Luther Mott. His great life's motto was "Time Enough": there's always time enough to do what you want to do! Great to hear and true!).

Junot Diaz's footnotes, for the most part, fill in the reader on the central aspect of the story, the nonfiction core of the fiction - the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic.

The joy of the book was the poetic power-punch adrenaline of the prose. It reminded me of Kerouac's in On The Road; it was like Junot Diaz entered some entranced zone and let the story go, rife with Spanish slang words and phrases and inspired, random inter-chapter divisions. Some of the story is from an omnipotent narrator, some from the characters themselves (at least one).

Some inspired passages:

But that's not what I wanted to tell you. It's about that crazy feeling that started this whole mess, the bruja feeling that comes singing out of my bones, that takes hold of me the way blood seizes cotton. (Page 72): The way blood seizes cotton.

Before there was an American Story, before Paterson spread before Oscar and Lola like a dream, or the trumpets from the Island of our eviction had even sounded, there was their mother, Hypatia Belicia Cabral:

a girl so tall your leg bones ached just looking at her

so dark it was as if the Creatrix had, in her making, blinked

who, like her yet-to-be-born daughter, would come to exhibit a particularly Jersey malaise - the inextinguishable longing for elsewheres. (Page 78).

Shuffling back through the book what stands out is not the prose itself, but the underlying force and power and inspired telling of the story. This is obviously Diaz's soul exposed in a high form of art. Pulitzer Prize 2007. Indeed!

Note: just read James Agee's A Death in the Family, his semi-autobiographical, supra-mundane, 1958 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Published posthumously (not a finalized manuscript by Agee), the prize must have been a life-award, because the book is remarkably bland, though it has some concrete-crushing-skull tragic overtones. It's about a sensitive 4-ish-year-old boy, Rufus (the story encircles his perspective, though told using adult language and perception, but we never lose the boy's heart)), losing his gentle, loving (to him), wonderfully loving, father in the mountainland of rural early-20th-century Knoxville, Tennessee, and his/life's intimate impressions of the event. The greatest, amazing, scene occurs near the end of the book when Rufus (or the book) flashes back to the whole family, father included, traveling to visit his great-great-great-grandmother in the rural mountainland in a loaded-down-with-family car, his uncle standing on the running boards guiding (somewhat) the way. The old woman, on a porch chair, Rufus remembering her wrinkled, minute, square-cracked, channeled skin, and after a few Rufus-gestures of hugging-hello, kissing, gloriously, her smile. And pee.

Anyhow, as disappointing as A Death in the Family was, Agee deserved every award possible for it or anything else he did, for his amazing Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). One long prose-poem characterizing the Depression Era of the deep South via the intimate portrait of a couple of families. A quote:

Huge thunderheads were barely lifted on the horizon, their convolutions a scarcely discernible brain-shape of silver in the strength of the light. They were no use; they were a trick a drought sun likes to play; and get away with over and over again. They ride up looking rich as doom, and darken; the look of the earth is already dark purple, olivegreen and wealthy under their shadow and the air goes cold and waits (Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, 337).