notanotherbookreview

  I recently learned that The Grapes of Wrath , John Steinbeck's 1939 classic, is now a banned book. It is more than ironic that a book celebrating American grit in the inhumanly gruelling time of the Great Depression is banned in 2022, a time of unprecedented national hardship. In Grapes , The Joads, a family of tenant farmers, flee their Oklahoma home amid drought, poverty and bank foreclosures that make survival untenable. There is no hope in the Dust Bowl and, like thousands of others, they've seen handbills advertising jobs in California.   The story begins as Tom Joad, paroled from prison, where he was incarcerated for a homicide in self-defense, is hitch-hiking home. He meets a preacher, who he remembers from childhood, and they travel together. Tom finds the farm home deserted and goes to his uncle's, where the family is staying after the banks evicted all the farmers. Tom's family is loading what possessions remain into a Sedan-truck, when he arrives. The farm ...

3/29 I did this interview with Carla Sarett, novelist, short story writer and poet.  https://youtu.be/bAxQKhTz98c      at SMOL small press fair.  if you have interest. 3/4/22 A Closet Feminist (Unsolicited Press, 2/7/22) is an old fashioned new romance set in pre-Covid New York, Philadelphia and L.A., as a young woman finds herself.  I like Emma Roberts for the role of  Bella, a smart, funny self critical young woman overly aware of being too skinny, demanding, lazy and just weird to attract a man that she might want. She becomes a graduate student almost by default. It's the "almost" that's at issue, since Bella is a woman who doesn't yet know her own strengths. On the far side of twenty, she only knows she needs to be on a path. As the story opens, Bella's got a job she barely does and considers herself without ambition, a person who would rather watch movies all day than work. Her tolerant boss also knows she's not living up to her potential. So B...

 Bamboo Dart Press has done it again, confounded expectations of what they publish with The 909 , a film by Mark Givens and Joel Huschle. David Scott Ewers, a Bamboo publisher and author of Ultimate Resort described the slender book. "Like a plastic mirror, The 909 reflects an image of California life that's both strangely attractive and not easy to look at. Unlike a plastic mirror, The 909 allows an even uneasier image to blossom in the shadow of the first. It is that of a sack being nailed to a shoe, forever. Funny and disquieting." This is a film that needs to be made, now that reality is catching up. It's a road trip where all cars move in straight lines and destinations shift. Shopping malls were once old downtowns. Abandoned strip malls are ghost towns. Starbucks, Best Buy, Apple stores exist, though people are few. Is this terrain related to the changes in area codes?  Why did L.A.'s 213 area code become 714 and then 909?  And why are codes continuing t...

  Peter Wortsman is good company; a raconteur known for his short fiction, stage plays, and translations, such as KONUNDRUM, a translation of Kafka that made me laugh. In EPIPHANY OF A MIDDLE-AGED PILGRIM:  essays in lieu of a memoir (Pelekinesis) , he relates   the trepidation of being middle aged, as well as the mysteries of a life half lived. In ( A forword) , he ruminates:  "The only difference between then and now is an accumulation of doubt. But doubt need not necessarily be debilitating. I dedicate these musings to the defining punctuation mark of middle age: the semicolon, a veritable hallmark of uncertainty." Wortsman can make the prosaic terra incognito, such as  First Memory , where a drawbridge and a child's fear of containing "pipi" merge. In  Rough Cuts , there's humorous swagger about the removal of a skin cancer like "a kind of shoot-out at the O.K. Corral." He also creates strangely beautiful moments that are absurd. In Spirit Tre...

  THIS VIEW HAS NEVER LOOKED THE SAME.   This day has never come before. Forget apocalyptic thinking.   ENJOY YOUR HOLIDAY, Your New Year's mystery. 2022 has yet to take shape in our glorious world. *** A friend read this card and sent me this link to CANCELL THE APOCALYPSE 30 FILMS, alternative versions of how we might actually save the planet and ourselves. https://www.filmsforaction.org/articles/cancel-the-apocalypse-documentaries-to-help-unlock-the-good-ending/ **** With COVID I am no longer buying into the idea of some inevitable apocalypse. Years ago, I wrote Paradise Gardens , a corporate dystopia, where the "business estates" take over government and mankind's destiny. It is a dark cautionary tale. But humans are not the only force on this earth, About every hundred years, nature culls our herd with some plague. Earth is cleansed of human dominance, a cyclical happenstance like much of nature. Take the origins of human illness with this virus. I be...

  Peter Cherches, TRACKS: Memoirs From a Life With Music , published by Bamboo Dart Press. I enjoy Peter's prose, from his early Condensed Book t o the more recent Whistler's Mother's Son and Other Curiosities  (Pelekinesis). Publishers Weekly called him "one of the innovators of the short short story" before the term flash fiction. I also enjoyed his amusing and suprising performances at Cornelia Street Cafe with Lee Feldman, crooning standards of his own. Below is an excerpt from TRACKS . Miles Davis, “Straight, No Chaser,” from Milestones (1958)  One of the first jazz albums I bought as an adolescent, I think when I was 12, was Milestones, by the Miles Davis Sextet. I figured I’d kill two jazz birds with one stone: Miles Davis and John Coltrane, neither of whom I’d ever heard, to my knowledge. I was unaware at the time of the more legendary status of the group’s next album, Kind of Blue. I did know that Miles Davis was possibly the most famous living jazz mus...

Autonomy becomes urgent necessity in a volume of interlocking stories and a novel, Heroines must shed socio political expectations  and  their conditioning to remake their worlds.  GIRL, WOMAN, OTHER  (Grove Atlantic) by Bernardine Evaristo, won the 2019 Booker Prize and I am glad I just got around to reading it.  In our emergence from Covid, it seems more relevant than it might have in 2019.  These intertwined stories are like a musical ronde, each a different aspect of the subject, Black women finding autonomy, despite daily lives that demand conformity. Their voices, unexpected and enjoyable, come from present day Britain, though they extend to intergenerational immigrant experiences in Guam, the Caribbean, Nigeria.  Mothers, daughters, wives, fled wars and poverty, only to face new struggle and danger in public housing and menial jobs, no matter what education they brought. Their children, second generation, are caught in ambitions "to make it" and...