Sue Katz: Consenting Adult

Review: ayiti by Roxane Gay

Gay’s short stories – some very short, some traditional – are compact, hard-hitting, spare, and strong. This debut collection ayiti is quickly read, but stays with you, clinging to your nerves and your heart. Written from the perspective of a woman in the Haitian diaspora, it introduced me to an intimate glimpse of Haitian life. One of the longer and more formidable tales, “Of Ghosts and Shadows,” reminded me painfully of my own experience of teenage girl love. I only knew of Gay’s essay collection Bad Feminist and her social commentary, but now I am going to consume all of her fiction and memoir.

Gina Ogden: August 9, 1935 – November 2, 2018

My friend Gina Ogden has died at age 83 of stage IV lung cancer at home surrounded by her long-time lover Jo Chaffee, her daughter Cathy and son Philip, and her close friend and nurse Tina, who came from Sweden to care for her.

After her diagnosis in January, Gina consulted a variety of medical and healing folks and decided to forgo traditional Western treatment, so that she would live out the time she had left as joyfully as always. She used complimentary medicine to build herself up for this last period and palliative care to get her through it. We went swimming this summer at Walden Pond. We met for our traditional bi-weekly teas at the Porter Square Independent Bookstore. She gifted me her most sparkling shirt so I’d have a new outfit to wear to the holiday party we always went to together.

Gina and I were writing buddies: she did close readings of my manuscripts and I did the same for her. We met through a mutual friend, a very successful writer, the late Sarah Wernick. We were all in a writers’ union together, although I did not then know Gina. Sarah and I had an additional connection: she was a student in my senior fitness group. Sarah offered to help me with my proposal for a non-fiction book in exchange for my working privately with her husband, who had Parkinson’s Disease. Even after he no longer wanted to train, Sarah continued to mentor my proposal, right through her diagnosis and treatment for cancer. When she became too ill, she asked Gina to take on me and my proposal for the last round. Gina read the entire proposal and sample chapters that very night – she was a super-fast reader – and we immediately began a tradition of mutual support.

Although we both wrote about sex, our approaches were as different as our personalities – but somehow it all worked brilliantly for us. Once we finished getting out her last book, just weeks before her death, she told me that she had said all she had to say and was ready to go. 

Gina was an award-winning pioneer in the field of sexology and a tireless advocate for everyone’s right to sexual well-being. For her 1994 (blockbuster) book Women Who Love Sex, she conducted qualitative instead of quantitative research. What that means is that instead of asking, as male sexologists always had, How many orgasms did you have? Gina asked, What gives you the most pleasure? Even Oprah Winfrey was curious about Gina’s groundbreaking work and hosted her on her show.

Gina went on to publish 13 books and countless articles, and to create a unique therapeutic system called the 4-Dimensional Wheel. She built a large international community that supports its teaching and growth, the 4-D Network (www.4-DNetwork.com).

As soon as she died, her closest people performed a ritual that Gina had arranged with them in detail, and then several others of us were invited to come break bread, listen to the gentle drumming of her drumming circle, and look at her body. She was wrapped in the expensive linen sheets she and Jo had splurged on decades ago, only to discover that they weren’t comfortable. Jo pulled them out of storage for the occasion and the linen wrapping was closed with several of Gina’s favorite scarves. This was the first time I was ever in the same room as a dead friend, chatting with others who loved her, and it seemed just right.

To learn more about Gina and her work, visit her website here: www.GinaOgden.com

Brief Book Review: A Whole Life by Robert Seethaler

A Whole Life is not at all the type of book I usually read – I’m a 19^th Century literature freak. Set in the mid-20^th Century, it was written by the Viennese author Robert Seethaler and translated from the German by Charlotte Collins.

Dark, humid, dank, it tells the story of one man’s life as he lives it – mostly alone – in a wooded mountain valley. He is a man both simple and profound. Despite physical disabilities and injuries, he is strong and resolute, always finding ways to support himself, no matter the obstacles.

The language is unpretentious and rich, dripping with hard labor, and yet the narrative succinctly describes a whole life in just 151 pages. With empathy and benevolence, we meet a man who chooses an utterly solitary life, who adapts to each new impediment, and who teaches us how to face an unwelcoming world. The word in my head as I read the book slowly and over a couple of weeks was “Deep.”

Postscript: Thanks to whoever it was who talked about this book on Facebook. I have a running list of books that have randomly been recommended and this was on that list.

Rembrandt van Rijn Made me Cry

Happy Birthday Rembrandt van Rijn (July 15, 1606—October 4, 1669)

As a high school junior in a tough inner-city school in Pittsburgh, we were given a choice of three topics for a final essay. The topic I picked was “Does the light in Rembrandt’s paintings come from an internal or an external source?”

For a teenager, that sounded awfully deep. The problem was that there were no Rembrandt paintings in Pittsburgh’s public realm. I’m sure there were some in the private homes of such local ruling class figures as Andrew W. Mellon, Charles M. Schwab, Henry Clay Frick, Henry John Heinz, and Andrew Carnegie. But our museum was more blessed with dinosaur bones in the early 1960s than classic paintings.

And so I pored through art books at the Carnegie Library and deduced that in fact the light came from an internal source. I was completely captivated by this first immersion in great art and converted to a loyal admirer – to this day – of Rembrandt. I am dazzled by his paintings of his Jewish neighbors, his memoir of self-portraits, his biblical scenes, and his culinary still-lifes.

That summer I was one of six poor whites and six poor blacks (poor being quite a relative term in this case) to win a full scholarship to the ruling class Phillips Exeter Academy’s summer school. Among the other outcasts was the daughter of the wealthy UN ambassador from India. She should have been welcomed by the others of her class (Westmorland’s granddaughter among them – this was when he was running the war on Vietnam), but she was neither white nor American. At the end of the term she invited me to go home with her to New York City, where the Nanny was holding down the fort. She taught me how to use Tampax, and I thought of her every time I used one in the subsequent decades.

One day she took me to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and I rounded a corner and came upon a room full of Rembrandts. I was ambushed by awe and love and brilliance. There was a round couch in the middle of the room and, body trembling and senses overwhelmed, I sat down and burst out in tears. A uniformed museum worker, an old man, came over to me. “I’m sorry,” I shuddered. He patted my shoulder, “Don’t worry. This happens all the time in this room.”

Once I pulled myself together, I was able to understand his use of chiaroscuro, the light and shadow that had prompted my high school essay question. As I became an adult, I pursued Rembrandt van Rijn. When I was a college student, I fell in love with the little 1633 painting that seemed so out of character: The Storm on the Sea of Galilee. It was one of my go-to thrills when I would drop acid and explore the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston while tripping. Years later, when I was living abroad and heard that it had been stolen in 1990 (never to be found), I took it quite personally.

I have since seen many Rembrandt van Rijn exhibitions, including Rembrandt’s Amsterdam house from 1639 to 1656 and the major works exhibited in that city’s Rijksmuseum. Once in Germany I saw a collection of his etchings that blew my mind all over again. As a kid writing about this marvelous painter, I don’t think I quite understood that I wasn’t alone in my extreme admiration. I didn’t realize that millions of people wondered if the light in his paintings came from internal or external sources.

Mini Book Review: Anything is Possible by Elizabeth Strout

I read these nine interconnected stories with my ears as a CD book in my car, and they made me want to scarf up every book this adroit writer has written. Apparently, this novel-in-stories was written after Strout’s My Name is Lucy Barton and gives context to the village from which Lucy came. We meet adults who came up through poverty and bullying and abuse. As adults, they have their hang-ups but they also have no small dollop of empathy and perception. Each story creates a complete world around a nuanced character and they all made me give a damn – for they give a damn.

You might know Elizabeth Strout’s other books: Amy and Isabelle and Olive Kitteridge. Oh, did I mention that Strout is a Pulitzer Prize winner?

REVIEW: Ken Wachsberger’s Puns and Word Plays for the Job Seeker

Ken Wachsberger comes by his agility with puns via a culinary route: from around his childhood dinner table. This early immersion in the culture of word play has qualified him to give us this hilariously punderful volume. I knew I was on to a good thing when I read: “I tried working at a French restaurant but it bored the crepe out of me.”

With complementary graphics by popular Ann Arbor artist and cartoonist Tom Petiet, this little volume gives us just the break we each need in our day during these tough times. The theme of work and jobs reflects Wachsberger’s progressive pedigree.

I have the same nasty cold so many of us got this winter and Puns and Word Plays for the Job Seeker has been the perfect entertainment as I wait for my chicken soup to simmer today. It’s short, witty, and punchy. 

Here are three of my absolute faves:

• I was offered a job as a ceramicist but the offer was a crock.

• I said I wasn’t happy that men and women were not paid equally at the humor magazine. The editor promised me they were working to achieve parody.

• I made a noble effort to be a knight watchman but it was feudal. 

At just $10, I can afford to gift a giggle and a groan to my besties, employed or not. Check it out here:

 

Book Readers & Writers: Can You Explain this to Me?

I did a reading of Lillian in Love and of some of my flash fiction at a life-long learning center for seniors, about a 40 minute drive from my home. There are many of these in the Boston area: some are connected to universities; some of them specialize (such as the wonderful Rainbow Lifelong Learning Institute for LGBT seniors). Often Brown Bag lectures or events are scheduled for the lunch break, in between their course classes. That’s when I’m usually booked to do a reading.

I had about 30 folks in attendance who were mostly from middle and upper-middle-class communities with a large Jewish component. My reception was lovely. They laughed, they sighed, and most gratifying, they got all my jokes. They were attentive and complementary, even though they were eating their lunch, and they asked questions eagerly. It felt great.

I wrapped up about 10 minutes before they were to return to their classes. An author always leaves time at the end for the selling and signing of books. That is the point, of course. That is the reason one schleps to the outer suburbs or the next town with a heavy bag of volumes: to sell books. I brought plenty of copies of Lillian’s Last Affair ($10) – my short stories – as well as the novel Lillian in Love ($13).

I ended with an admonition that people support the writers and artists in their community, and sat down with pen in hand, ready for the crowd. Two people eventually wandered up to buy Lillian’s Last Affair. And that was that.

Later the very nice paid administrator also bought a copy, after having been subjected to my aggrieved grumbles.

Can you explain this to me? A mediocre event outcome might be that I only sell 5 or 6 books. At a good one I’d sell 15 or 20 to a crowd of this size. What just happened?

What I’m Going to Do with My Lottery Winnings

My friend’s plane is being held up on the tarmac waiting for permission to “cross the lane” for what turns out to be 90 minutes. I’m curbside but a state trooper chases me away. “I’ll go,” I tell him in all my elderly whiteness, “but first I have to know two things: how do I get to the cell lot to wait for a passenger, and where can I go to pee?” It turns out that the one and only bathroom is at a gas station that is not only at the end of this terminal road, but also on the way to the cell lot.

I’m not the only person who knows this secret and it takes me a long 10 or 15 minutes to find parking at the gas station. Once there, having had my tinkle, I loiter in the hopes that my friend will text me to circle back to the terminal to pick her up. I examine the potato chips (they don’t carry Wise, my favorite); I look at the proliferation of Slim Jim flavors and wonder what they’re made of; I fail to locate a cold drink under 99¢.

Then I realize that the real action is around the check-out clerk who is surrounded by various lottery tickets and scratch cards and all manner of money-wasters. Numerous customers who clearly have experience in these matters are calling out for “Three of number seven, two of number fifteen, and five number thirty-ones please!” It is a foreign tongue. In front of the cash register are various cards that look like a curious combination of old computer punch cards and the ballots we get to vote. I find one that only costs $1 and is titled with the appealing words: Mega Millions.

I fill it out using my birth dates and those of a best friend and hand it to the woman behind the counter who spots me as a know-nothing. “This one dollar can win you $215 million,” she tells me. I am astonished. I note her name tag – Hondo – and tell her, “If I win I will be back to give you a check for $1 million.” Although I do really mean it, she nods her head wearily and I get a hint that I’m not the first person to make this promise. And yet she’s still behind that cash register.

It is clear to me that something magical has just happened and I begin to plot what to do with the money. No, I don’t want to found and set up and manage a foundation. No, I don’t want to hire others to do it for me. I figure that I’ll get about half of the money if I take it in cash – turns out I will get $133 million – so I decide that I will identify 100 people I admire. Those who have enough to get them through life will each get $1 million. Those who are themselves in need of some old-age insurance will get $1million for themselves plus another equal sum. All will be instructed to distribute the money in a way that would do the greatest good, and to do it within a year and be done with it.

I myself will give $1 million each to Black Lives Matter, to Southall Black Sisters (London), to Code Pink, to Jewish Voice for Peace, to the Palestinian BDS movement, to SAGE (LGBT elders), to Joan Nestle’s Lesbian Herstory project, to Stan Eichner’s Disability Law Center, to the ACLU, to Reverend William Barber, to the filmmaker Campbell X, and more. The 100 other people (you know who you are) will pick their own recipients.

As for my own indulgences, I’ll get a two-bedroom – no wait – a three-bedroom penthouse rental flat with a view of the sunset, plus another two-bedroom guest flat in the same building, and then send plane tickets to all those loved ones from around the world who can’t visit me now because I have no place to put them up in my present cramped two room rental. I will pay some enthusiasts  to start an indie press to publish all the non-mainstream writers, including me and Brian Broome and Donna Gottschalk, who are too often dissed by the know-nothing big presses. And then I will spend the rest of my life publishing the several books sitting on my hard drive – from an historical novel (1982) about the first Israeli draft resistance movement which started during the Israeli incursion into Lebanon to my non-fiction work about the involvement of people over 50 in alternative sexuality communities to my collection of flash fiction. And I will write a bunch more books, including the story of Lillian and Sarah from Sarah’s point of view and my political memoir.

However, a terrible error has been made. The next night, at the drawing, my numbers were not picked. I still have the ticket propped up in front of me and I’m awaiting word of a correction. With such a spiffy plan, it is surely meant to be.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks – The Book vs the HBO Film

I finished Rebecca Skloot’s mesmerizing best-selling book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks two days ago, just in time for all the hype surrounding the HBO film of the book being shown last night. Here is imdb.com’s brief summary of the film: “An African-American woman becomes an unwitting pioneer for medical breakthroughs when her cells are used to create the first immortal human cell line in the early 1950s.”

(Practical tip: I don’t get HBO so I called Comcast. I was assured that I could sign up for HBO and cancel after one day and only pay for that day  - which I have done.)

The most gripping narrative thread in the book (I listened to the audiobook in my car) is the element of forensic detective work by the tempestuous partnership between the author/narrator and Henrietta Lacks’s daughter Deborah. Together they teach themselves enough cell science to really figure out what happened to Henrietta’s cells. It is that journey of self-education, their exposure of shady ethics and insidious racism among many scientists working with the cells, the role of profit and exploitation in science, and the clarification of obfuscating scientific concepts that make the book so riveting. I thought it was fitting that HBO premiered the film (probably unwittingly) on the same day as the Science March.

It is through that journey that Rebecca and Deborah build an alliance and then a close friendship, which in turn brings Rebecca further into the Lacks family where she can both increase and share her knowledge.

HBO, however, decided to use their distinguished cast – Ophra Winfrey as Deborah, Rose Byrne as Rebecca, Courtney B. Vance, Leslie Uggams, and others in supporting roles – to focus on the human emotions by filling in so many family narrative gaps that the film seems to fictionalize a non-fiction book.  Although the acting was excellent across the board, HBO chose to shortchange both the science and some of the context in favor of the drama. They did so in a superficial way, as well.

For example, Deborah’s changing moods, her jubilance and her despair, were functions (according to the book) not only of the tragedies and barriers she experienced in her life, but also of the pills she took when self-medicating. Poverty kept the Lacks family in the wretched category of the medically uninsured – despite the uncounted millions of dollars scientists and industrialists made off Henrietta’s immortal cancer cells. Even Deborah’s grandchild understood the correlation between one drug or another and the resulting mood. Another example is the absence of the back-story of Deborah's troubled brother Zakariyya (played brilliantly by Reg E. Cathey), who was brutally abused as a boy. By airbrushing the story, HBO’s film delivers a somewhat distorted and unclear emotional picture - one in which this Black family appears inexplicably dysfunctional.

My recommendation is that you read the book first – of course that is always my recommendation. Form your own sense of the key relationships and of the central themes. I’d love to hear from others who knew the book before they saw the film. Was this a somewhat missed opportunity for HBO?

Here is the film trailer:

 

Ask Me About…

My friend Eleanor and I hopped into Panera, knowing we could grab a booth and a nibble for a long-awaited visit. I have a home-made button on my backpack that says “Ask Me About My Book.” It’s been there since my last book, and I never remember until some says, “So tell me about your book.” Which happens not infrequently.

It’s a low-cost marketing strategy that relieves me from approaching people and lets them ask if they’re interested. The guy behind the counter is interested and so I give him a little leaflet about Lillian in Love I keep in my bag. We get our food and settle in, when the guy comes around and says that the whole staff wants to buy a copy together – how much does it cost? He leaves and comes back with $13 and I inscribe it to the “Panera Staff.” When Eleanor goes up to order a cup of coffee, they give it to her on the house.

A minute later a young woman who works in the back comes out and says she wants to buy two copies – one for her and one for her best girlfriend. I run out to the car where I keep some in my trunk. We get to talking: she’s half Brazilian, half Dominican but says her Portuguese isn’t all that good. She says she finds the topic very interesting – and I wonder which topic she means – old lesbians? senior housing? She asks me if I’ve written other books and Eleanor mentions Lillian’s Last Affair. She wants a copy of that too. I get one out of the trunk of my car and when I return she’s got another tenner for me. We hug.

It reminds me of my friend at dance, who’s just in the midst of doing an advanced degree and who is a fantastic dancer, who astonished me one night when I had the thrill of leading her in a dance. She said that having read my book, she feels like she’s dancing with a celebrity. An actual author. I realize that not everyone hangs out, like I do, with a lot of writers. These exchanges all made me feel so good. I’m desperate to feel good because otherwise, with fascism looming, I don’t feel so hot.