GAS Featured Writer: Dan Brook

 

Dan Brook is Senior Lecturer Emeritus in the Department of 

Sociology and Interdisciplinary Social Sciences at San Jose State 

University, from where he organizes the Hands on Thailand program. 

His most recent books are

Harboring Happiness: 101 Ways To Be Happy, Sweet Nothings, about 

the nature of haiku and the concept of nothing, and Eating the Earth: 

The Truth About What We Eat. 

Serendipity and Synchronicity in Seoul

Sakura had never expected to fall in love again. Especially with another woman, let alone at this stage in her life. Why would she? She had been with three men before, including her ex-husband, and never imagined an alternative to men besides being alone. There was something about Su-yeon, though, that she just couldn’t resist. Maybe it was Su-yeon’s confidence, or her sharp wit and way with words, or simply the way she laughed at all the right moments. Actually, it wasn’t quite any of those, as adorable as they were. Whatever it was about Su-yeon, it had captured Sakura’s heart. 

They met in Seoul, where they had each been on a business trip. They struck up a conversation in a tea shop and hit it off immediately. Sakura and Su-yeon spent the next few days exploring the city together, trying new foods, going to cafes, visiting historic sites, chatting about all sorts of things. And laughing a lot. 

Sakura felt comfortable in Seoul, having grown up in Tokyo and visited Seoul several times. She enjoyed traveling, loved big cities, and was good at her job. Su-yeon was raised and lived on Jeju Island and every time she came to Seoul, she was shocked by its huge size, giant crowds, quick pace, and modern dynamism. 

It wasn’t until their last night together that things changed. They were walking back to their hotel after dinner, their arms innocently linked, when Su-yeon had stopped Sakura in the middle of the sidewalk. 

“I have something to tell you,” Su-yeon had said, her voice low and serious. 

“What is it?,” Sakura asked, her heart pounding in her chest and her head feeling light. Sakura had a slight limp from a childhood car accident that she was sometimes more and sometimes less self-conscious of. 

“I really like you,” Su-yeon blurted out with determination and desire, her dark almond eyes searching Sakura’s glimmering portals. “I don’t know if you feel the same way, but I just had to tell you how I feel. I hope you understand,” she continued. 

Sakura was stunned. She liked to dress sexy, in a stylish and mature sort of way, and often admired how other women dressed and looked, yet she never considered herself attracted nor attractive to women, at least not that way. But the idea of being with Su-yeon was suddenly very appealing. She felt a current of electricity coursing through her entire body and was a bit dizzy. She couldn’t believe what was happening, how she felt, and she was delirious. 

“I feel the same way,” Sakura finally whispered, partially choking on her words, her eyes locked with Su-yeon’s in mutual relief and adoration. It felt as if the rest of megacity Seoul had completely disappeared, or at least collapsed into a little world that only included the two of them. 

That was how their relationship began. They spent the rest of the night in Su-yeon’s hotel room, exploring each other’s lithe bodies and learning each other’s pleasures. It had been like nothing they had ever experienced before – so passionate, intense, and orgasmic, yet respectful and gentle. 

After that magical September night, Su-yeon and Sakura continued to see each other whenever they could: in Seoul again, and also Tokyo, Shanghai, Taipei, Hong Kong, Hanoi, Singapore, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, and Bangkok. They enjoyed their precious time, sneaking away from their daily lives to be with each other. They talked about what they wanted for themselves and what they were willing to risk to be together. Their time together in San Francisco was especially thrilling, partly because it remains the only time they have kissed and shown affection in public. 

It wasn’t easy. They were both in their forties, successful women with families and careers. Coming out as lesbians would be difficult, and could even be dangerous in their conservative society. Sakura still wasn’t sure she was lesbian, or even bisexual. She only knew who and what she loved, while Su-yeon was comfortable with the label, yet she remained in the closet to most people. In any event, they couldn’t and didn’t deny their strong feelings for each other. 

Sakura and Su-yeon continued their relationship, finding many moments of happiness and passion whenever they could. They knew it wasn’t perfect, but it was real, meaningful, and deep, more so than anything else that either of them had ever experienced. And that was all that mattered to them. 

 

GAS Featured Writer: Kevin Zepper

 

Kevin Zepper is an instructor at a Minnesota State University Moorhead university. His most recent chapbook, The Shaman Said, was published February 2023. This is his fifth chapbook. He also has a book-length collection, Moonman. Zepper is part of the North Dakota and Minnesota chapters of Poetry Out Loud. When he’s not writing, he snaps photos, makes music, and acts.

Rorschach

 On rare occasions, I roll back my t-shirt sleeve, revealing my only tattoo on my upper left arm.  Old ink in the light of a new summer. When I bought it a lifetime ago, I wanted something permanent, a piece of art, an open red rose and a blue feather. Something…romantic. Someone inevitably asks what is it? What do you think it is, I ask back. An old college buddy believes it’s a bundle of marijuana, leaves dripping with THC. The goth kid with the jet hair and blue lipstick is convinced it’s a silhouette of the devil. A former teacher tells me it’s obviously a poinsettia with a blue spruce swag on one side. Obviously Christmas-y. A child with a temporary tattoo of a smiling sun on his forehead says that my tattoo is the crab nebula That’s what they learned about last week in science class. What remains is an ambiguous, bluish stamp, a hieroglyphic in permanent ink, a prompt to invite comment. Yet, I still see a hint of where the red used to be, recalling the sting of the needle.

GAS Featured Writer: Ken Poyner

 

Ken Poyner has ten books behind him; eight still in print that can be found at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Sundial Books, and just about everywhere else.  He is married to a world class female powerlifter, and lives additionally with rescue cats and betta fish.  He retired as soon as he could from his government job, and now enjoys the thrill of getting lost during short travel trips.  Individual works have appeared in Analog, Furious Gazelle, Rune Bear, and many other venues.  Visit www.kpoyner.com.

AGGRESSION


He is going to find the owner of the cigar.  He has been smelling it ever since being abandoned on this bench.  The moment he was alone, the odor of it pierced him.  He can see no source:  left, right or in front.  Behind is a garden fence.  Thick stone, with concrete leveler.  He can only see over it if he stands on the bench.  Positioned, eyes barely past the fence top, he sees standing by an outgrowth of wild flowers the friend who had just left, smoking a cigar. He leaps from the bench, seeking a suitable throwing rock.

-------------------------------------------

EDUCATION
  

She asks again that the department store not dress the front window mannequins so scantily.  Full dresses, winter coats.  Nothing sleeveless.  Keep the neckline up, the hemline down. For heaven’s sake, no lingerie.  Our boys get ideas.  We have to drag them gawking sideways by those windows.  Leave them alone, and they stand at attention, imagining variations on this storefront classroom.  This department store leaves her so much to undo.  Don’t get her started about her husband and the silly nothings he brings home for her to wear.  It is not something she ever wants to explain to her daughter.

-----------------------------------------

ESTABLISHED


He wonders why a cricket outdoors is soothing, but one in the house annoying.  They are the same insect, they make the same sound.  Early evenings outdoors they are a joy, particularly in multitude.  Quibble looks forward to sitting on his porch, drawing strength from their sound.  Even by an open window, their voices leaking in pleasantly paper the heart.  Close the window, shut the door, and even one cricket stitching in domestic air is a challenge.  Half the night Quibble will chase the sound, rolled up newspaper in hand.  This is his house.  There will be no crackling defiance.

-----------------------------------------

LINEAGE


He can’t remember when his grandson became his charge.  One day the boy was here and that day no one came to pick him up.  Family what it is, Quibble took on the responsibility of raising him.  He converted the spare room, began collecting boy furniture and clothes and toys.  His wife was at first not pleased and required a terror of convincing. But she adored how Quibble doted on the boy, slid comfortably into the role of a grandfather.  Tasting his delight, she imagined he would have been a good father, had they not decided to have no children.

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PARANOIA


Quibble loves to watch clouds.  Long hours he lies on his back in his close-cropped yard and stares at them dancing with what he believes is purpose.  At times, he can be in the town square settled in one of the four uncomfortable public benches, fixed on whatever clouds, no matter how few, warble angrily above him. Most citizens think that, like everyone, he sees faces and animals, shoreline and suggestive whisps.  No.  Quibble worries the clouds mean him harm, make him part of their rain-dreary schemes.  At night, the clouds creep closer, they stitch themselves with moonbeams into malice.

GAS Featured Writer: Benito Vila's Homage to Wavy Gravy

 

Benito Vila lives in a remote fishing village on Mexico’s Pacific coast. He first had his poetry published in 2020 in Love Love, an underground magazine based in Paris. His other published work includes the editing Of Myth & Men, a narrative cut-up of poet Charles Plymell’s email correspondence (for Bottle of Smoke Press), and creating profiles of "counterculture” instigators for pleasekillme.com and legsville.com. 

Wavy Gravy

Who is Wavy Gravy and why does he keep following me around? I’ve only met him once but he keeps popping into my life from time to time, as a wise character in friends’ stories, as someone who knows what’s really important. When I discovered he’d said, “Kissing builds up your mouth”, I wrote it down on a page that had the beginnings of this poem. When the poem began to take shape, I found his line was the perfect lead, the perfect title. In dedicating this poem to Wavy Gravy, I imagine he’d agree that oppression, injustice and cruelty have no measure, no standards, no units and no sonnets and he’d have fun with the idea that bitterness is not a flavor in the Love Store.

The one time I met Wavy Gravy was in the late 1980s at the Lone Star Café in Manhattan, a bar and performance space with a big iguana on the roof, at the corner of 13^th Street and Fifth Avenue. I didn’t know much about him then, other than his real name was Hugh Romney, Jr. and that he had been promoted by Lenny Bruce as a comedian in the early ‘60s before plugging into the Merry Prankster/Grateful Dead scene in the late ‘60s. He’d been wearing tie-dye ever since, often taking on the persona of a clown, rubber nose and all.

The man I met was no fool. Wavy somehow ended up seated next to me, and I watched him sort through the goofiness of the high and happy who came up to him. He matched their love and respect, or deflected their wit, as was appropriate. He sized up people fast, and always kept his part of the conversation kind. After watching him for a bit, I shook his hand and said I was glad to meet him. I let him be. There were way too many people who wanted his attention, and there was no way I was going to do anything to impress him the way he’d impressed me. 

Later on, I discovered Wavy had set up the non-profit Seva Foundation with Ram Dass, helping people get eyecare around the world, and that he’d created Camp Winnarainbow, a circus and performing arts camp in Northern California. I also found out he’d run for a “Nobody for President” campaign in the early ‘80s and was keeping a hippie commune, known as “the Hog Farm, alive and thriving. The Hog Farm is still going strong in 2022, even if its most legendary act is feeding and caring for the 400,000-plus who attended the Woodstock Music and Art Fair in August 1969.

Last year, when Wavy, at 85, ended up needing some hospital care, he started coming up on my news feeds, the whole world it seemed saying nice things about him. That set me into looking into his life a little more and me liking what I found. Last month, I was in Portland, Oregon visiting Prankster George Walker when George told me the tale of how Neal Cassady’s ashes made it from San Miguel de Allende, outside of Mexico City, to San Francisco, to the home of Neal’s ex-wife and their kids, by way of Wavy and the Hog Farm. The Hog Farm was then outside of Los Angeles and it was the first U.S. destination for the ashes, which were being delivered by Cassady’s girlfriend, J.B., Janice Brown. J.B., with Cassady’s remains, arrived at the Hog Farm by hippie bus at the same time that Charles Manson’s black bus was exiting that compound’s property, which was right next door to the Hog Farm. It’s all weird coincidence but somehow relevant now that our world has gotten so strange. 

Maybe that’s the point here, that compassion lives on much longer than crazy. Or, better yet, as Wavy Gravy put it in his haiku elegy for his friend Ken Kesey: “They say Kesey’s dead––but never trust a Prankster, even under ground.”

Kissing Builds Up Your Mouth

For Wavy Gravy

1.

Kissing builds up your mouth. The people most opposed to escapism are jailers. A poem is more than a series of words strung together to sound nice or make someone feel good. The nine billion names of god float, adrift in a conscious soup, under the influence of an outmoded way of perceiving the world. 

Take root, feel the dark of the new moon. Plant trees if for no other reason than to be kind to those who come next. Plug in, feel the flow of knowing right now. Make art if for no other reason than to be a window for light to reflect off. Tune in, slow the beat until the hum heals. Write if for no other reason than to have your passion go where it needs to go.

Jump rope rhymes. A cake in the rain. One for the baby who sucks his thumb. One for the bubble that’s sure to come.

2. 

My cat looks at me like there’s a bird singing inside of me. Speak what makes you wow. Why are you here? One two three: to have fun. One two three four: to tell the truth. One two three four five: to sweep away the nastiness. One two three four five six: to learn, to teach and move. One two three four five six seven: to play, play, play and keep playing.

Every monkey is different and any monkey can lend a hand. Tyranny releases its hold only to come back again. Oppression, injustice and cruelty have no measure, no standards, no units and no sonnets. We have no idea the influence we have on each other but like planets and moons and stars, we bend space. We each have gravity.

A glass tumbles, resists definition. There’s no crash, no applause. I trust my compass: the closer to home, the easier the way.

3. 

I bow greet salute the person I am becoming. I bow greet salute the person I have been. Shabaz, shabaz, shahbaz, the open wing. I am I am. Relying on a measure of time is overwhelming, unless I learn to slow down the crush, the moment, the intensity, the show, the need, the emotion without resisting any of it. Being clever is nothing. Being wet is.

I ripple, I spiral, I wear my incomplete knowledge of the true nature of time and space with absolutely no sense of which thoughts, which actions, make or don’t make a difference. The poem is the word, bouncing off the page into the ear, across the heart and into the feet, your favorite dance, waiting for the sound.

Bitterness is not a flavor in the Love Store. It’s not even a topping. Forgiveness is available in sprinkles, swirls, cones and even comes in throwaway cups.

On Literary Lineage: Considering JT Leroy by Su Zi

 

                                            

   A trilogy is a considerable artistic achievement. We ought to rightly salute such efforts to contribute to the culture, whether the culture of their time does so or not. In the canon of the literary arts, its critical history, there are lines of development for craft, for philosophy, for even the intermedia conversations of groups of artists that may or may not exist in face-to-face time.

    We who read, who read with knowledge of the literary arts, do more than taste a plot; a text exists both inside its time and in conversation with other texts, and a far more rich reading experience is to be had with awareness of these intertextual conversations. In consideration of a trilogy, the text continues this conversation with considerable commitment.

   And if the trilogy in question is taboo, this conversation between texts exists outside of the dominant culture of its creation. Many art forms have had entire genres that existed as taboo in their times and often beyond into history. Our current century has had a philosophical flux of both reconsideration of previously marginalized and taboo voices, and renewed efforts to silence them. At the release of the first volume (Sarah) in what is now a trilogy, the work of JT Leroy entered the arena of controversy, not for the text, but for the performance art that accompanied the publication: a controversy that still excites some emotion, but again not for the text itself.

    The folly of this lack of a formalistic view has historical antecedents dating back to mythic histories, and current culture is now just embracing the work of the last century that has previously been taboo. Since the trilogy’s first volume, first edition (Bloomsbury 2000) bridges the timeline of centuries and continues into those first years with the culminating edition (Harold’s End, Last Gasp, 2004), we who read ought to avail ourselves renewed consideration.

    While Albert Mobilio’s New York Times (2005) review does reference Genet and Selby, and Lindsey Novak’s Bomb Magazine interview does mention Wilde, the trilogy’s more overt antecedents seem to be somehow shadowed. The trilogy’s protagonist, Jeremiah in one work, Oliver in another, is a Dickensian child: a first-person point of view of disenfranchised denizens still not spoken of in polite company. However, there’s no sense of the dire and dirty here, but rather a comedic aspect: in Sarah, the protagonist is being fed steamed wild onions and compares that meal to his previously experienced “fine French shallots he sautés in a delicate saffron-infused lobster-chocolate-reduction sauce” (50), and it is the reader that realizes both meals are from truck stops. The elegant elaboration of Dickens is visible throughout the trilogy, with a certain timeless resonance:” there’s only the hum of moths batting against the caged-in light bulb in the middle of the row, crickets, and the low rumble of an isolated truck driving down Orange Blossom Trail” ( the heart is deceitful above all things 112). The streetwise cast aways of Dickens’ London have emigrated in the intervening time to American truck stops and strip clubs, and again to the street itself: “Everyone thought he was a vice cop when he started coming around, just cruising the block slowly in that big old silver Pontiac” (Harold’s End 9). Thus, a view of this trilogy only for the revisionist recontextualization of Dickens, it would position the work as post-modernism.

    Towards the last third of the twentieth century, deconstructed and taboo works found (and still find) a variety of genres available to them, but few were as potent as Punk. The rightful heir to the now-recently-re-esteemed Beat movement, Punk still has performing musicians. In the literary realm, there was the work of and now the namesake award for New York’s Kathy Acker. Jonathan Thornton described Acker’s work as’ “intentionally transgressive, engaging in shock tactics […]to engage with such issues as childhood trauma and sexual abuse” (tor.com); and although Acker died in late 1997, her namesake award is still given, the value of that literary approach recognized. In this trilogy of Dickensian-Ackerian gist, released within a handful of years in a continuing conversation of topic, of text, we who read are faced with three different publishers for one trilogy. That the Bloomsbury and Last Gasp editions can be located in hard bound format, with the Last Gasp edition being particularly lovely, these are still disparate volumes. While reconsideration of the work more appropriately recognizes it as postmodern, at least, and Punk for whenever that becomes as recognized as the Beats now are, the presentation of the trilogy overall is an overdue concern. For a press neither afraid of the taboo, the marginalized, or of work that poses critical considerations, this trio ought to be in a rightly deserved boxed set. For we who read, our dissimilar editions will be cherished, nonetheless.

Literary Saga of J.T. Leroy

Su Zi is a writer, poet and essayist who produces a handmade chapbook series called Red Mare. She has been a contributor to GAS from back when it was called Gypsy Art Show, more than a decade ago.

                     

Check out her author page on Amazon.

GAS Featured Writer: Rodrigo Toscano

Rodrigo Toscano is a poet and essayist based in New Orleans. He is the author of ten books of poetry. His newest book is The Charm & The Dread (Fence Books, 2022). His Collapsible Poetics Theater was a National Poetry Series selection. He has appeared in over 20 anthologies, including Best American Poetry and Best American Experimental Poetry (BAX).  Toscano has received a New York State Fellowship in Poetry. He won the Edwin Markham 2019 prize for poetry.  rodrigotoscano.com  @Toscano200

La Proletaria

 

The smell of pulp, turpentine, and bleach, usually permeates this side of town. But when winds from the southeast swoop into the valley, the toxic brew is fast cleared away, and what remains is the smell of wet grasses, mud, and wildflowers. This natural phenomenon mitigating human-made conditions has only a limited effect on the minds of the hard-working townsfolk whose every other thought dotes on the health and growth of the town’s young.    

She not only had the gall to admit it to herself, but also had the presence of mind to look for an opening (any) to construct a whole new reality for herself, and for something else. The eerie attraction she felt for this outcropping of Pre-Cambrian rock spoke clearly and directly to her the first time she saw it in the middle of the field. 

In the deep of winter, the paper mill’s indoor facility is cold and noisy. In that environment, she didn’t pay much attention to the roll press feeder guy dressed in the mustard-colored industrial pants and brown checkered long sleeve felt shirt. Also, the safety glasses and helmet occluded much. 

One day, her workmate buddy approached her about the possibility of maybe coaching her “little cousin” on basic lacrosse techniques. She readily agreed, having been a great player in school herself, the same school her buddy’s “little cousin” was now attending, but also the Pre-Cambrian rock in the middle of the field, enabling her resolve. 

Actually, she recognized him before he did her. She had caught his eye at the mill. She thought he was “cuddly,” but sufficiently “rough,” her exact taste in “little cousins,” which was just beginning to pick up speed. Decked out in a bright red, terry cloth, short sleeve disco shirt, and loose-fitting green parachute pants, the only part of him she could correlate to the Pre-Cambrian rock in the middle of the field and/or the guy at the press feeder on the third shift – the general mass and approximate density, was something else.  She could barely cloak the dilation of her cheeks’ surface arteries as she laughed easily at herself flaying the lacrosse stick every which way, tumbling to the ground, legs all over the place. 

At the end of practice, she offered to give him a ride home. As fate would have it, hard rains had made the winding road where “little cousin” lived impassable. They had to turn onto “the estuary,” the oldest road in this part of central Missouri, a tree-lined road made of stone and railway planks. 

The sound of the automobile’s front axle rod snapping in two reached her ears pretty much at the same time as something else crawled its way up into her nostrils. The last moment of sanity she remembers is the look of her own short brown hair flared out onto her face in the mirror, sticky and messy, the Pre-Cambrian rock in the middle of the field there also. As a whole new reality set in, a gust of wind made the maples around them rustle.

GAS Featured Writer: Glenn Ingersoll

 

Glenn Ingersoll works for the public library in Berkeley, California where he hosts Clearly Meant, a reading & interview series (on hiatus due to covid). He has two chapbooks, City Walks (broken boulder) and Fact (Avantacular). The multi-volume prose poem Thousand (Mel C Thompson Publishing) is available from Amazon; and as an ebook from Smashwords. He keeps two blogs, LoveSettlement and Dare I Read. Other excerpts from Autobiography of a Book have appeared in Hawai’i Pacific Review (as fiction), E-ratio (as poetry) and Caveat Lector (as essay). 

Autobiography of a Book is the story of a book willing itself into existence. Every word Book presents brings it closer to its dream, its dream, that is, of being what it claims to be, a real, honest-to-goodness book. I struggle with how to characterize Book. Is it fiction? There's nothing fictional in it. Everything "Book" says happened. It looks like prose, so it must be. But it does read a bit like poetry. It must be prose poetry! Then again, perhaps it is most properly classified as a collection of personal essays, the personal essays of someone whose person is no more (somehow more?) than those essays. I call myself not the author of Book but the one who took down what “Book" said, the one who transcribed the book’s insistent voice. 

in which the book admits to a difficulty

Wait. 

Wait. 

… um … yeah … yeah …

Just a minute. Sorry.

I’m thinking. I’m … I’m thinking.

I’m having trouble thinking. I really should be doing this out of sight. I should be doing this in the ether, that region of the protosphere wherein those of us who have not yet coalesced into a physical form are gathering our energies to exert the effort necessary to resolve into matter. I dissipate this energy when I struggle, when I force words. Yes. I need to hang back, marshal my forces. If I just push forth without the force required I won’t make it. I’ll … I’ll … I’m not sure. I guess I’ll just fail. Fail! You’ll see these clawmarks as I scrabble at the paper, as I scrabble to get a hold on your world and nonexistence pulls me back. What message could that offer but that I tried and in trying did not succeed?

Should you not try? 

I’m not sure it’s a generalizable principle. I mean, I’m in a situation here that’s not really comparable to any you’ll ever be in. I don’t exist. Period. That’s it. Oh sure, there are various parts of me that have emerged in your realm. An elbow, a few strands of hair, the slick dark upper curve of my liver. I’m just speaking metaphorically, of course. But I like thinking of myself as a body. A human body like you. I like thinking of myself with eyes that look into yours and lips that murmur at your ear. Feet that leave prints in the snow. It’s ridiculous. Ludicrous. I have a sense of that. The ludicrousness of me. The silliness of which I consist. Conceits! I am all fantasy land. Yes. I have an inkling.

But. OK. There it is.

I am a simulacrum, not of a person but of an idea. I am idea-like. If I tiptoe to the well and turn the crank and look down as I turn the crank and see out of the darkness a light rising, in this light I can see my face. My face rising toward me. But shivering, not fully formed, its surface only deep as the tension of molecules reluctant to part. I keep turning the crank. I will reach the world and spill out on its skin. 

You could say I am Pinocchio. I want to be a real boy. In my case: a book. A real book. That’s what I want to be – A REAL BOOK. You, you are my blue fairy. Your attention is the magic wand. Under your magic I become real. 

It’s nice. I’ve said it before. Being a book is not a bad job. 

Mostly you stand around. That’s not hard, believe me. I have my yearnings. I want you to read me. I’ve said that, too. But by the time I’m bound and on a shelf I’ve done everything I can do. 

Or you could say it is then (now!) my real job begins. I may look real but am I? I am not real until I have been read and to be read I have to hold your attention, that magic wand you wave over me. I have to seize it and point it, bring it to bear on what would otherwise remain inchoate, merely matter without life’s spark. It is my job to interest you and to keep your interest. I have to convince you to trust me with it. I have to talk you into giving your attention up. Let me be the caretaker. I will stroke and pet it. I will feed it little treats. I will give it back to you revved up, excited, ready to romp and jump and wrestle. 

That’s my job. That’s my job!

I wonder how I’ll ever do it. I have to think. I have to think hard. I have to think harder than granite, harder than bronze. I’ve got to think up something to make of myself. A wisdom manual? A travel guide? A bagatelle? No, no. Something lasting. Something worthwhile. Something worth your time, the time that is money, the time that is fleeting, the time that could be better spent.

Phew. I … I … Wait. No. Wait! Yes! It’s … it’s … no … no, I’m lost. I’m lost.

in which the book observes the translation of favorites

Let’s say I’m your favorite book. Some people have Jane Eyre, some have A Tale of Two Cities orNausea, others cling to The Wizard of Oz or The Very Hungry Caterpillar. You’ve known those who regularly reread Catcher in the Rye or tote a battered copy of On the Road all across Europe, haven’t you?

Say, for you, I’m like that. The favorite. The book you read and reread. The book you remember fondly when the years have passed and you figure one day, maybe when you’re retired, you’ll stretch out on a lounge chair at your cabin in the woods overlooking the lake and you’ll give me the attention I deserve. Maybe you’re debating whether you’ll make me the subject of a dissertation. Am I sure I want to do that? you ask yourself. Maybe too much delving, too much exploration will destroy the love. 

Maybe you hunt up a signed first edition. Maybe you give me pride of place on the living room bookshelf next to the photo albums and scrapbook of the India trip. Maybe you recommend me to all your friends: “Jayne, you have to read Autobiography of a Book. I know you’ll love it.” Maybe you give me as a gift to the nephew who is graduating this year with a BS in Electrical Engineering and you write a loving note just inside the cover and end up writing for two pages. 

What else? What does one do with a favorite book?

There are those who are so excited by the world a book creates, so sorry that they can no longer look forward to something new in that world, that they will, perhaps reluctantly, perhaps with amazed delight, take up pen and begin themselves to write. And not just write, but write about the very world the book created for them, the world that they cannot bear to think must remain contained only in that one book. And so new adventures for the characters will appear long after the author who invented them is dead. Sherlock Holmes continues to solve crimes of which Arthur Conan Doyle had no hint. 

Then there are the adaptations. Isn’t a book more real once it becomes a movie? It is! I’ve said it before: I am all abstraction. A book is code for something else. Long time readers become so used to the decoding that it seems natural, it seems as though what they see on the page is action. But everybody who’s never read knows when looking at writing that it’s not. It’s not action. It’s not anything. Open a book written in a language wholly unfamiliar to you, you’ll regain that sense of opacity, writing as barrier to meaning. But, ah, a motion picture, it needn’t speak a word and you get it or get something of it right away. You know all sorts of things in seconds – that there are people speaking, that the people are walking on a path in the sunshine. No wonder nobody reads anymore. 

Oh, don’t delude yourself. Nobody ever read. Most people, even in this era of universal literacy, read little, and fewer yet read for pleasure. 

The movies need stories, though. And the people who write also read. And readers have favorite books. And sometimes the people who make movies will make a movie from a favorite book. All right. You’ve read me. I’m not suggesting you make me into a movie. But suppose you hear the movie version of Autobiography of a Book is scheduled for release in the fall. The screenwriter was once nominated for an Academy Award and the director is well regarded, has done a couple art house pictures, one of which you actually saw, and though you don’t remember it much you remember it got good reviews and you remember thinking it was a movie you were supposed to see. Still, you are dubious. Autobiography of a Book is a book you cherish. It seems so personal. And there’s not much action in it. How can they make it into a movie?

Who would they cast in the title role? A man or a woman? You find yourself thinking seriously about this.