This is one of the most fascinating Ted talks I’ve seen.  It’s about internet porn.  One of the wild things it covers is how they can’t find “control groups” for studies about the effects of internet porn on men, because there are no men who do not consume internet porn.  There’s an emerging contingent of ex-users, and that’s as close as they can come.  My son is four years away from the average start-age of consumers.  My son, for the record, is six.  Wow.

Dawn Raffel’s The Secret Life of Objects, reviewed.

Wondering what to read next?  This list on Flavorpill of May picks couldn’t steer you wrong.

I’m in the process of reading correspondences between famous lovers right now.  De Beauvoir’s letters to Algren; the first volume of the roughly twenty million letters exchanged by Georgia O’Keefe and Alfred Stieglitz.  The thing about love letters is the limited language at our disposal.  If you’ve ever written or received a love letter in your life, there will be a line in one of these books that is identical to something you once experienced as singular to your love.  Actually, I’m being generous here: there will be more than one line–if there isn’t, you should publish a volume of your love letters; if there isn’t, you’re really onto something.  Another thing: love letters are prone to extoling that love will never end.  Maybe it depends on the definition of “end”–O’Keefe and Stieglitz remained deeply connected until Stieglitz’s death, despite betrayals and a waning of romantic passion; DeBeauvoir was buried wearing Algren’s ring.  Still, what I’m talking about is the way everyone promises forever–the way no one ever wants to cause pain–but forever proves a slippery thing and pain almost always results, even if it wasn’t “caused,” per se.  It’s hard not to find this (pick one: depressing/demoralizing/downright-alarming).  But hindsight is always 20/20, so when considering the letters of the dead maybe what’s important is that they’re intoxicating enough that none of this matters in the reading–that they’re inspirational despite any body count.  They circle around and stab intensely, if with wild futility, at why we live.  DeBeauvoir also wrote hers in English, which is both hilarious and impressive.  Watching her try to express the inexpressible in her second language is a bit like reading the Cliff Notes of a great mind, yet absurdly humbling too.  I went on a date with a French waiter once in 1990, managed to communicate with him for a few hours straight, and felt foolishly proud of myself for the next twenty years.  DeBeauvoir makes fun of the insularity of Americans when it comes to language.  She’s so right about this that she can make you blush all the way from 1947.

Elissa Wald is back on The Sunday Rumpus today with her short story, “Real Men.”  I really like Elissa’s work.  She’s a pervy idealist; she’s also funny.  She writes eloquently about way so many people experience the opposite gender as fundamentally, even if desirably, Other.  The fragile space around disparate capacities for intimacy is where Elissa’s stories live.  The level of intimacy that one person views as a base-line starting point in any relationship might be so overwhelming to another that it causes them to flee . . . or to pine forever.  That can be powerfully sexy, but also powerfully sad.

There’s a Midwest Writers Conference.  I didn’t know.  It sounds pretty good.

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Newly appointed Washington State Poet Laureate, Kathleen Flenniken, recently released a second book called Plume, part of the Pacific Northwest Poetry Series of University of Washington Press. I will admit, as a reviewer I was fascinated by the idea of the book before I even read it, because Flenniken, like me, studied science before poetry; her father, like mine, worked at a nuclear site – hers at Hanford, mine at Oak Ridge National Labs; and her childhood, like mine, was spent in a small town supported almost solely by the dollars brought in by said nuclear site. Her language in this book, of dosimeters, Geiger counters, and unstable ions and their disturbing biological impact is heartbreakingly familiar to me. Her two degrees in engineering led her to work at Hanford as an adult, before she moved to Seattle.

What might be surprising to readers is how different this book is from Flenniken’ first book, Famous, a book of personal narratives about life in the domestic sphere – a quiet book almost modest in scope. If you enjoyed that book, you might not be really prepared for this second book, which is sweeping in terms of trying to capture a history, personal, political, and scientific. While the personal narrative poems still maintain a steady voice here, they are interwoven with lyric landscapes, fragments of historical documents and redacted government files turned into clever erasures, and meditations on the dangers of scientific hubris. The other difference is a palpable sense of threat, of lives at stake, of a dramatic story unfolding in the poet’s capable hands.

One of my favorite poems in the book is one in which she writes to the father of a childhood friend who died of a radiation-related disease, describing an event where her town had a televised event where she, as a small school child, dresses up to deliver the letters she and her classmates had been asked to write to President Nixon to prevent the closing of Hanford. “To Carolyn’s Father” illustrates how she makes the larger movements of the sixties – anti-nuclear sentiment, President Nixon’s soon-to-happen disgrace, and the treatment of children by schools as instruments of government propaganda – happen in the crystallized focus of a little girl nervous about appearing on television:

On the morning I got plucked out of third grade
by Principal Wellman because I’d written on command
an impassioned letter for the life of our nuclear plants
that the government threatened to shut down
and I put on my rabbit-trimmed green plaid coat…
at the same time inside your marrow
blood cells began to err…stunned by exposure to radiation…

In another poem of Flenniken’s childhood, she recounts how the children in her school were asked to lie in a whole-body radiation counter “and do a little for their country.” “Whole-Body Counter, Marcus Whitman Elementary” displays her (and by extension, all the people of the area around Hanford) chilling trust in the system: “I shut my eyes again and pledged/ to be still; so proud to be/ a girl America could count on.”

I was impressed by the variety of forms Flenniken used to capture different aspects of her story. Two lovely lyrics, “Plume” and “Green Run,” are concrete poems that reflect each of the environmental disasters that the poems refer to. A series, “Augean Suite,” referring to both the cleanup of the stables of mythology and to a statement of health physicist Herbert Parker’s to Congress about the ways to define the quantities of radioactive exposure, contains the piece, “IV: Augean Gray,” disturbing and beautiful at the same time in its vatic voice and the way the poem is broken over the page:

Women,
        take off your
                    dresses
                                    and undergarments.
        You babies,
                crawl naked
        in the grass.
                Lie down all of you
        under the August sky,
                and nobody ask.
…Lie down, patriot.
        Don’t ask.

Though the book brings together a personal memoir combined with the history of Hanford in an evocative way, Flenniken maintains an almost neutral tone, avoiding inflammatory statements or direct political commentary. She even jokes a little about her history in her poem “Again I’m Asked If I Glow in the Dark.” She does highlight interesting historical notes, such as how different Presidents, from Obama to Nixon and Kennedy, appear naïve in their quotes in the book – at times, dangerously so – about the powers harnessed at Hanford nuclear site. In her lack of condemnation, there seems to still be condemnation in statements of fact, in stories of workers dead from various radiation-related ailments. Yet her tone remains sympathetic towards the men making decisions, her neighbors, her father, her friend’s fathers, aware of the financial and political pressures they were under as well as the limited science about radiation exposure available to them. The awakening of the poet’s skepticism is one of the many stories that unfolds within the book.

Recently, for research related to my own work, I was reading a memoir by a radiation health physicist, Karl Ziegler Morgan, who had worked at Oak Ridge during the Cold War period, and his descriptions of the experiments they conducted there, including taping radium to the wrists of some of the nurses, thinking they might endure nothing worse than a mild skin irritation. It reminded me of the innocent, almost playful attitude people had towards nuclear power in the early days of its development. Reading Plume is not only an education about Washington State and its role in the Nuclear Age but of an awakening in the American public as well as the poet herself to the peculiar dangers of invisible poisons and of trusting too much the authorities of science and government.

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In Vanishing-Line, Jeffrey Yang writes, “But the birches of Yennecott/ recall his word-spirits.” Rather than using lines or stanzas as the basic unit of expression in this collection, Yang writes with something more fluid, more abstract, at a different level of reading. These “word-spirits,” delineated by tildes, congeal into an amorphous work; a floating world of art and poetry. Many readers will enjoy floating along, reveling in the unique ability of poetry to generate experiences and emotions beyond the logic of language. But I look for something solid to start from, a center of gravity that helps me organize my own thoughts and reactions, even if I eventually to decide to drift.

In “Harma Hissarlik,” Yang writes, “each form/ following its intention,/ each carving/ a hidden glory.” From that image I saw the work as a sculpture garden. You can wander through the “word-spirits,” focusing on what catches your eye, skimming over what doesn’t, enjoying the accumulated atmosphere of artistic experience and expression. In “Lyric Suite,” Yang writes, “…I walked with her/ thru the lattice streets of the island/ feeling lost but safe/ …streets where people/ read and cooked, played/ chess, elders watched children,/ commerce spilled into/ conversation, her neighborhood at the city’s/ brink.” From this, I imagined being lead around a village by an elder who shared the old names and old words, telling the histories and stories that defined the village.

Ultimately, Vanishing-Line is more focused and more coherent than a sculpture garden or a village tour. In “Elegy for Ling,” he shows us, “old men sorting thru rubble, brick by brick/ rebuilding the ancient walls/ while the ring roads expand/ while machinery explodes/ the celebrity architects multiply/ ignorant of the original design.” Vanishing-Line is a work of archeology. Yang examines places, people, and cultures in time, exploring their context, their causes and effects, their implications and consequences. He displays ancient words like Clovis points; “Izdubar,” “Zagros,” “(Manittuwond then Plum/ stone, Pluym or Pruym plume Patmos)” “qayaq.” He discovers quotes like potsherds, finding value and context in lines by great poets, historical records, and direct descriptions like those of the explorer Gertrude Bell. Finally, language itself is like a geological record. A culture describes itself through the words it uses and the words it doesn’t; “Lying and deceit are unknown among them because they cannot say it.”

This act of archeology culminates in “Yennecott,” a sprawling, ambitious, brilliant exploration of the discovery, colonizing and exploitation of North America by Europeans. Yang is trying to preserve not just the events of history, but the process of those events, discovering the emotions and ideas of today in the words and stones of the past; “From the ancient base of Piraeus passage/ wharves crowded with trade, sea wine-dark// West to the ‘final stop’ of Olson’s Pacific, Ahab/ ‘END of individual responsible only to himself’// Up to the moonlandings, rockets opening prospective,/ space, secret silo sites below, disgrace, Guantánamo, Bajram.”

But we already have archeology. We have museums and history books. Why apply poetry to a problem which appears solved. In “Yennecott,” Yang writes, “Bierstadt’s stereoscopic expedition/…His Rocky Mountain Lander’s Peak/ the ‘consumable landscape,’/ …Shoshone ideal, 1864/ staged tableau painting, among one/ hundred artifacts…/…today, in the museum gallery,/ mountain grass lake bathed/ in saintly sunset, figures/ of romance concealing/ a history of devastation.” (p111) For all its aspirations of fact, history is a form of storytelling, once used to romanticize as often (or perhaps more often) as it is used to reveal. Poetry has always been one of our primary romanticizers, making it uniquely able to strip conquering historians of their romantic veneer.

Yang’s poetics of archeology continue in the “Bibliographic Note and Acknowledgments,” which is more a manifesto than the usual boilerplate citation of sources and thanking of family. Yang argues for poetry as a technique and expression of history; a compartmentalizing of human events, as all works of history are, that does not sever the inherent connections of event to event, culture to culture, person to person. Though Yang doesn’t go so far as to argue traditional history is inherently inaccurate, Vanishing-Line is an attempt to fill in what is excluded by the rigors of fact and the structures of prose. In history as we understand it, “There was a before and after/ the during consumed.” All past was once “now” and poetry speaks to “now.” To Yang, poetry is capable of communicating the consumed during. It is a “library tablet found underground,” whose immediacy is not buried by the passage of time.

Different readers will have different experiences with Vanishing-Line. It can be devoured in one sitting. It can be picked at over time. Many will enjoy it as a sculpture garden or a village tour. Others will enjoy an even more transient interaction with it, drifting from “word-spirit” to “word-spirit,” content to soak up the artful arrangement of words on the page. But because so much of our poetry today seems to be focused on those isolated moments of emotion, I would urge readers to work with the harder more sustained themes in -Line. Yang is making a statement, something solid that can describe the world, and perhaps even change how we understand and interact with it. Though many readers and poets prefer to drift, to Yang, a poem is to dig.

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I remember a woman, a researcher from Brazil, who took my hand and said our shared name was for strong women who thought what they wanted and were good at school, remember when the tall man brought me a little tamed mouse, somehow carried from Colombia through customs in his handkerchiefed pocket. As I read The Cat’s Table, the latest novel from Michael Ondaatje, it these strangers I think of, who first built my ideals of beauty and independence and passion.

In his sixth novel, Ondaatje writes of the people we meet as children, the people who direct our gaze even late in our lives. The main character, a Sri Lankan boy also named Michael (who the author admits shares many experiences and similarities with himself, but calls fictional) narrates from adulthood the three weeks where he and his two friends learned “our lives could be large with interesting strangers.”

In 1954, he boards an ocean liner bound for England. For those three weeks, he eats at the cat’s table, the 76^th, placed farthest from the captain’s, among a vibrant group of characters—a flamboyant pianist who has “hit the skids,” a silent tailor whose ever-present red scarf hides a serious wound, a retired ship dismantler, and the two boys, Ramadhin and Cassius, who would become his companions for this journey, whose friendship would follow him far into his life.

This novel, part coming-of-age story, part mystery, part elegy for lost friends, takes place on the Oronsay, a ship resurrected from history and from Ondaatje’s previous novel, Anil’s Ghost, which becomes a sort of microcosmic circus for the three boys navigating its maze. Michael meets a wild array of passengers—a cultured thief (the Ondaatje staple), a high-security prisoner, a gracious, tentative scholar who becomes a teacher to him and his friends—and through the eyes of his eleven year old self, weaves each of their stories into a larger, sometimes diffuse but never disjointed, narrative about how we become what it is we become.

The structure of the narrative keeps even restless readers from feeling constrained to the ship, as Michael floats from 1954 to present and to many years in between, finding those he’s lost touch with, detouring to break our hearts with the short life of Rahmadhin and giving us both the tragedy of his failing heart and the redemption and loss in Michael’s marriage to Rahmadhin’s sister.

Here, as in his 1992 Man Booker Prize winning novel, The English Patient, Ondaatje’s prose is, sentence by sentence, some of the most luminous, remarkable writing I’ve read. He writes with a musicality that is never over-studied, that can brighten the dim corners of a place like a flare, or can break across the page with such force that I have to read that page, that paragraph, that sentence again and again, before I set the book down to breathe.

With equally steady hand, Ondaatje paints the “lush chaos of Colombo’s Pettah market, that smell of sarong cloth being unfolded and cut (a throat-catching odor), and mangosteens, and rain-soaked paperbacks in a bookstall” and a storm the boys are caught in that “pulled the air out of our mouths. We had to turn our heads away from its rush in order to breathe, the wind buckling like metal around us … Lightening lit the rain in the air above us, and then it was dark once more. A loose rope was slapping at my throat. There was only noise.”

While arguably Ondaatje’s most accessible novel, as the only one narrated in first person, The Cat’s Table retains that essential mystery Ondaatje is known for, like Miss Lasqueti, the spinster who carries pigeons in her coat and tosses her thrillers overboard when they fail to be more interesting than her secretive life. It is in this woman, in the thieving count, in the silent daughter of a convict, in the mysteries that drift like smoke through our grasps at closure, that we find the familiar Ondaatje, the author who delights in lovely hands, a twist of the mouth, the hints of inner, unexplained lives.

The narrative can be dizzying at times, but it works because Michael’s young self is naturally skeptical and self-aware. Having been “trained into cautiousness” at boarding school, he keeps a log of strange and interesting occurrences aboard the Oronsay. And yes, the never-ending new acquaintances can be tricky to remember by name, though Michael’s careful observance of their habits makes them easy to recall. Some of the characters are briefly sketched, and serve as background details to an already colorful group of people, but we see the author’s careful hand reflected in that of the botanist, Mr. Daniels, who is transporting an Asian garden across the two seas, whose collection of exotic plants amazes even the skeptical Cassius.

This “field of colors,” loudly crowded betel leaf, snapdragon, star fruit, pencil trees, black calabash, even strychnine blossoms, eventually becomes not only a gathering place where the members of the cat’s table eat together before the journey’s overcast end, but also a vibrant image of the parti-coloured variety of the strangers—some lovely, some fragile, some dangerous—who the boys watch with unblinking stares.

In the decades after this voyage, Michael admits “It would always be strangers like them, at the various cat’s tables of my life, who would alter me,” and it’s this realization, this recognition of my own strangers that keep this story blooming in my head.

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As its title suggests, Compendium, poet Kristina Marie Darling’s second book of poetry, is a short collection of poems compiling an incomplete history. Calling the book experimental, fails to tell the whole story. For unlike some experimental poetry, that shirks narrative, abandons traditional forms, and leaves an emotional distance between reader and text, Darling toys with traditional syntax, but leaves the reader curious, hungry, longing to restore the faded portrait that she keenly leaves unfinished.

Compendium has five untitled segments, the first containing a single poem, “Palimpsest.” This is the first of many poems in the collection that seeks to document the history of people and objects. “Palimpsest” is comprised of six prose stanzas, each subtitled Chapter One, demonstrating a dismissal of linear time in the succeeding narrative. The story told in the following pages is incomplete. In these pages, history, like the palimpsest, has been rubbed away, erased.

So, what then of the story that emerges? How do these poems communicate a narrative with so much missing? Darling’s deliberate choice of words in the second section’s six prose poems gives the reader equal parts music and silence. Here we are introduced to the heroine, Madeleine, as well as her nameless companion, the connoisseur. We aren’t sure about the nature of their relationship: lovers? former lovers? master and submissive? Perhaps. Darling’s nonlinear narrative avoids answering much, but the catalog of objects appearing and reappearing throughout the book give weight to the absence of plot structure. In the first poem, “The Box,” we are dropped into an unknown place and time:

That evening, the connoisseur presented
Madeleine with an usual box. Despite its array of
glass buttons and sheet music, he explained, one
must ever open the smallest compartment.

These window-shaped poems frame the repeated images texturizing the book’s themes of deliberate solitude, unfulfilled longing, and willful containment. Objects such as lockets dangling from red silk ribbon, countless rooms, silk gloves, music boxes, distant soirees, and black taffeta gowns, become clues that attempt to bridge the gaps between the reader the narrative.

While most of these objects’ specific histories are left unaccounted, Madeleine’s inaction in the poem “The Lockets” lends the objects their emotional significance. When the connoisseur dangles the locket’s photograph in front of her, Madeleine can, “do nothing but mumble before it’s sepia glow, her own blurred image, and the tiny pinhole from which the connoisseur had painstakingly suspended it.” This simple interaction hints at the connoisseur’s control over Madeleine through objects, thus layering the feeling of haunted containment. The items catalogued here are feminine in nature: silk gloves, embellished gowns, veils and broaches. Madeleine’s frustrating lack of agency is expressed through the objects she has some control over. She specifically chooses the “most somber gown” for the rustling noise it makes as she walks. A tiny slipper adorned with ribbons contains “within its past an elegy.” Curious rituals surround each object, the specific meaning of which has long been forgotten.

Darling’s focused use of punctuation and syntax deepens the pervading sense of restriction. Each poem is roughly six sentences, give or take one, and tightly ordered and structured. We enter each poem mid-scene or often following an event, as in the poem “The Homage” which begins, “It was only after the soiree…” leaving us to wonder who was invited and what they were celebrating. Each poem also contains a line of past or future dialogue, along with at least one fragment. These poems and their mysterious tone leave the reader longing for order, story, time, setting. Fragments are incomplete vessels; quotations marks act as containers for each character’s own words. On this deep linguistic level, these poems hold back. More specifically, the poems are not capable of offering more and that is quite the point. Mystery is not merely for mystery’s sake; this purposeful lack of context allows the reader to feel lost along with Madeleine in this house of endless rooms filled with faded portraits.

A series of six, small and untitled poems in the third section initially evoked frustration before a realization emerged: the poems were created from the prose poems of the second section. The effect is satisfying. The poems’ economy of language reduces the story to only the most significant words, while paradoxically opening the tightly-contained world of the previous narrative. Collected again are trinkets, accessories, and garments: “her sanctimonious blue / ribbons” “The lockets,” “tiny bells,” and “starched skirts” float in a sea of white space. The white space on each page says just as much as the handful of carefully chosen words; history also lies in what’s missing.

The penultimate section is entirely composed footnotes for missing texts, containing historical information, definitions, and unattributed quotes. Each begins at least halfway down the page, leaving a glaring mirror of white space. By now, we know we won’t have all the answers, but we accept this fact and allow these poems to assemble new, incomplete vignettes. Much like in real relationships, what is not said becomes just as, if not more important, than what is.

Kristina Marie Darling’s Compendium is a shadow box collection of antiques, each holding other worlds and histories. Darling achieved what she set out to do: write a concise and poetic compilation of a body of knowledge. In history, as in these poems, exact truths are impossible to attain. If, as Darling suggests, language fails to tell whole truths, perhaps experimental is a just word to describe Compendium. Darling has assembled a purposefully incomplete history filled with desire, mystery, music, and silence.

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This week’s Letter In The Mail is from Rumpus founding editor Stephen Elliott.

Stephen is the author of seven books, including The Adderall Diaries and Happy Baby. His first feature film, About Cherry, premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival earlier this year and will be released theatrically in North America by IFC beginning September 21.

His essays and short fiction have appeared in the New York Times, Esquire, Tin House, The Believer, and many anthologies.

Recent letter writers have included Padma Viswanathan, Claire Bidwell Smith, and Janet Fitch.

More about Letters In The Mail.

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“Life is darkest before the dawn or whatever,” etched on a fancy mirror to mount on the ceiling above your bed.

“Life is a gift. Sometimes a shitty one but a gift nonetheless” lavender-scented bathroom candles.

“There are footprints in the sand, maybe it’s a spiritual force but also you have feet, so you could be alone” lilac bath mat.

“I will choose my destiny but given that I don’t have control over a lot of stuff in the world, this may or may not work out and I guess I’m okay with that” butterfly mug.

“This is not the end of your happiness” plug-in fresh scent room deodorizer.

“Fuck it! But in a positive, letting-go way and not in a sad way. Right?” canvas shopping bag.

“We’re still here and somewhat functioning human beings, so I guess we can take solace in that” personalized stationery.

“I become better each day in every way. Unless there’s a Golden Girls marathon on, then I’m probably not leaving the house. But I’m a grown-ass woman who’s allowed to make that call” oversized pajama shirt. On the back is an image of a squished cat, like you sat on it, but don’t worry, it’s on there ironically, and not as a comment on your size. In fact, it’s to show you’re comfortable enough in your own skin to rock that kitsch.

“It gets batter! (as in, I feel like eating cookie dough today)” cookie dough.

“I am beautiful. ‘Cause, seriously, there are millions of people in the world, and surely I’m more attractive than a lot of them. I’m not saying that to put other people down. I’m just being realistic” wicker footstool.

Items will be sold on Etsy because that’s where things made by a lesbian are legally required to go.

***

Please submit your own funny writing to funnywomen AT therumpus dot net. See first: Funny Women Submission Guidelines.

To read other Funny Women pieces and interviews, see the archives.

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And if you’d like to become a member of the Poetry Book Club–we’re talking about Rowan Ricardo Phillips’s collection The Ground right now–click here.

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Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of everything in the world. Today I am reviewing the Invisible Man.

No one knows for sure if the Invisible Man exists or not because no one has seen him. One time I saw a mummy in a museum and I thought it might be the Invisible Man taking a nap. I pulled out my camera to get some evidence of his existence, when I saw a sign that said no photos were allowed. Then I saw another sign that said it was a mummy.

The Invisible Man gained his powers from a science experiment gone wrong, but I kind of envy him. Now he doesn’t need to worry about his appearance. No more bad hair days or having to brush his teeth. He doesn’t need to wear clothes, so fashion is no concern and he must save a ton of money. If he gets cold he can just wear a blanket.

He doesn’t have to pretend to be happy when he’s not, because no one can see his expression. If the Invisible Wife asks him if he liked dinner, and he hated it, he can lie without the disgusted look on his face betraying him.

It must be liberating to live a life where no one can see or judge you, but also pretty lonely. No one smiles at the Invisible Man as they pass him on the street. If he waves, he is ignored. If he says hello, he is met with only a startled look of confusion. I don’t know what he looked like before he turned invisible, so maybe invisible is a step up.

Please join me next week when I’ll be reviewing sperm.

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