Love Among the Orphans

Despite being titled All the Living, I find C. E. Morgan’s novel about finding love on a poor Kentucky tobacco farm to be about a man and a woman who are emotionally scarred from being orphans.

Aloma’s parents died when she was two; she lived with her aunt and uncle, where she perceived herself to be an unwanted burden, until she twelve and shipped off to a residential school. The only subject she excelled at was music, where playing the piano became her fantasy of escaping the dark, poor mountain hollows where even the joys of sunlight are curtailed.

Orren’s father died leaving his small tobacco farm to be operated by his widow and two sons. Orren’s mother and older brother are subsequently killed in a horrific car accident, leaving Orren determined to make a go of the farm all by himself.

Orren meets Aloma at a career day kind of event at the boarding school where she has stayed on to teach. They meet before the accident and see each other for over a year. When left alone after the funeral, he asks her to move in.

Both characters are trailing dusty clouds of pain and frustrated ambition. Orren is badly in debt, having to sell off the horses and bull, and moving into a smaller house to avoid looking at the rooms where he lived with his mother and brother. Aloma goes to the farm still believing she will ultimately take Orren away from their as she makes a career out of music somewhere else.

He withdraws farther and farther into the pressures of farming during a drought; with only a broken-down, untuned piano in the house, Aloma secures a job playing for a local church where she eventually becomes attracted to the pastor. The silences of Aloma and Orren living together and their tension and coldness they foist on each other as they grow into adulthood and self-sufficiency hardly seem to be fertile ground for an enduring love. They both seem to value more their individual motives rather than setting mutual goals as a couple.

So they story seems to be less of a red flame story of lust mellowing into a blue flamed marriage than it is one of demarcation and compromise. I almost feel like this book would have been the perfect book for Kentucky for the 2009 50 States blog list. It is the rhythm and beauty of the land, its very dustiness and isolation, the image of a blooming tobacco field that must be “deflowered” before the leaves can develop properly. That one image stays with me the longest and is a wonderful symbol of Aloma’s maturation: however brief and infrequent the beauty of her life and surroundings, she can take human satisfaction in contributing to it.

Deadly Obsession

Joseph Bosco compiled a huge body of evidence researching a true crime, known as the baseball bat murder, outside of New Orleans in 1984. The story's prinicipals are the victim Janet, married to Kerry and his closest friend Bill. After 560 pages, several grand juries and two trials, the reader is not so much left with the question of "whodunnit," but where did the passion and fury come from to inflict such brutality.

These characters are not upper crust Louisiana but lower middle class, struggling to buy a house and keep a job. Although all three went to college, they never made any use of their talents. Janet was the youngest child in a strict home and went wild from her first day on campus. Kerry never met the expectations of his father and resented him for divorcing his mother. Bill was just too cool and too slick, with a schtick for attracting girls and keeping score.

There was domestic violence in Janet and Kerry's marriage but friends who noticed that pattern since college described it as almost foreplay. Admittedly Bill added Janet to his tally and Kerry must have discovered them together and gone beserk. But the main tension and mystery of the book is why he stayed at the scene of the crime for hours, why he had blood splatter patterns more extensively on his clothes, and the biggie -- did the two guys conspire to cover for each other.

This book is sordid, not for any sex or lust, but rated X for violence. Bosco piles up mounds of taped interviews, chapters of opinions from friends, family members and fellow workers. Court testimony is quoted verbatim. Back office discussions from both defense and prosecuting attorneys lay out their plans for presenting their side of the case. No one cracks, no one explains what really happens.

In his introduction, Bosco says he writes to leave it to the reader to decide who is guilty. As hard and inconclusive as that is, I am left thankful that I was not a juror. My steady diet of murder mysteries has trained me to believe that motive will be as apparent as physical clues. And aren't I searching for "motive" anyway this year, reading why people fall and stay in love? There is no mystique in this book, and as a result, Janet, Kerry and Bill are all less than human.

Love With An Agenda

Naomi Harris Rosenblatt's book, After the Apple, is subtitled "Women in the Bible - Timeless Stories of Love, Lust, and Longing. Not.

Rosenblatt, good girl that she is, was brought up on Old Testament stories, longing to find strong women in a document written by men and extolling their role in the history of religion. Sometimes, I feel like she is clutching at straws. Rosenblatt is also a psychotherapist, one who never lets an example of male / female relationships go to waste. Granted Old Testament women are archtype heroines and there is nothing in their stories that is not repeated daily in today's graphic newspaper headlines. But nonetheless, it is quite a stretch of the imagination to conclude these women are lusty.

The women Rosenblatt writes about excel in verbal skills rather than in the art of seduction. They are advocates for their children's birthrights and for their place in history. They are vessels to pass along the religious DNA.

Sure Rosenblatt describes more interesting deviant, that is non-Jewish, women like the Queen of Sheba and Delilah, but one senses that they are merely foils to point out the sexual failings of their male counterparts. To the extent that her more normative women, be they Eve the first rebel or Sarah or Rebecca or Bathsheba, are religious prototypes, they appear less fleshy, women of words not senses.

Maybe Two out of Sixteen Pleasures

The Sixteen Pleasures by Robert Hellenga has almost sixteen separate themes and they are not tightly woven together. After finishing the book and asking myself, what was his point or his message, why did he write it, I have to give equal if minimal weight to: the importance of art as life-defining; the attraction of a contemplative life over an erotic one; the false love of a foreign country (read Italy); the geographic dispersal of the American family leaving it rootless versus the generations long home in Abruzzi; etc., etc.

Hellenga is clever and reaches a couple of peak writing experience. I particularly liked the parallelism between peddling the Renaissance pornographic book bound into a religious tract and the Rota annulment trial, steeped in voyeuristic marital relations or the lack thereof. Especially when Postiglione buys fake decades old post cards from a store that caters to making forgeries specific to the requirements of Catholic law. At that point, the theme of religion vis a vis sex played its strongest.



But Margot, the female lead character, is wimpy, a mediocre bookbinder, lured and tempted more by the nuns she lives with while restoring artifacts destroyed by the flood of the Arno in Florence than she is by her series of men. Like the manual labor of drying soaked folios and resewing bindings, Margot seems more comfortable in the mechanics of sex, the sixteen illustrations, than in the emotional aspects of lust or love.

Both Margot and Postiglione are overaffected by trivial events: she "falls in love" seeing him bringing her a bouquet as he walks across the Plaza; he falls out of love when she takes him to a Chinese restaurant and he cannot master chopsticks. They part, he returns to his wife, she returns to her doldrums.

Which Was More Painful: Justine's Abuses or Reading Justine?

Ultimately, I did not care about what agonies Justine was subject too. Centuries of distance made all her inflicted atrocities seem mundane and believable, if still distasteful and against the moral majority's view of sex. Justine is more than wimpy. She never learns from her experiences which dooms her, almost rightly so, to repeat them.

My only lodestar for plodding through the 300 interminable pages of the story was to see if there was any redemption for virtue. Or any morale that de Sade appears to promise to his dedicatee. I'm roundly disappointed.

But the context is universal ... what with the IMF head being charged with rape, A-nold getting kicked out by JFK's niece and the Vatican commissioning a John Jay study that concluded that the Age of Aquarius was the root cause of pedophile priests. Justine is as real, or more so, today than ever. Unpleasant, but all too human.

"If you love someone, set them free"

It's quite atypical for my face to face book club to suggest a book that overlaps with my blog themes but it happened quite serendipitously for June. One member suggested we read Just Kids by Patti Smith to commemorate Gay and Lesbian month. Being a somewhat acquiescing member, I reserved it at the library ...especially since the group's selection for May was so awful.

Anyway, I loved Just Kids. We have new flash cards for our project meetings at work, and one says "my bias is showing" and I readily admit it. Left to my own devices, I would read nothing but murder mysteries and minor biographies, looking to find famous people popping into the lives of the second or third ring of celebrity. Patti meets everyone who's anyone in the late 60's and 70s in NYC ... a time when I haunted the City as well, but never in the same circles.

Another bias or two of mine are not liking punk rock or Mapplethorpe's sexually infused photographs. I wasn't expecting much except voyeurism in Just Kids and was blown away. Patti can write!! Phenomenally well, poetically, lyrically, with a good story thread and so, so many interesting people, and minute attention to detail. But making that detail so much more personal and relevant than The Museum of Love, or is my American versus mid-Eastern bias now showing.

Not only does Patti and Robert live through the seminal tragic events of culture from 1967 onward, but she marks all the days of her life referencing who was born, died or had some other historic significance on any day she recollects as a marker in her experience. She haunts museums and book stores looking for art materials and bargains. She seems so female and like me, despite both Robert and Allen Ginsberg finding her attractive for her most masculine of features.

My time then in NYC was split between political protest and a need for physical refinements. What art I craved was theatrical not musical, museum not gallery. But she captures the freedom and fluidity of the era. Her and Robert's moving definition of sexual traits does not ring false to me. We all dressed funny, experimentally, and talked on end of what it meant to adhere to stereotypes. We all wrote. We acted in college adaptations of Hair to hide behind theatrics in order to disclose our personal truth or dare.

So, after this praise, how does Just Kids rate on the passion meter for 2011? Patti is Victorianly discrete when it comes to sex and passion. She no more lets the reader into her bed with Robert than with Sam Shepard or Blue Oyster Cult. Her husband lands in the story like an extraterrestrial, lending credence to the excuse that she married him not to have to change her last name. But her love of Robert and his in return is tremendously, achingly passionate. There is a love that is artistic, between muse and artist ... and even when Robert's migrates to Sam and his money, Patti remains top in his Pantheon as the first.

The book is romantic and passionate if not an expose. That intrigue and guise ennobles it.

Superficial and Shallow: A Natural History of Love by Diane Ackerman

I first read about this compendium when Ackerman's latest book was reviewed in the newspaper, her account of her husband's recovery for a stroke. Never heard of her before and thought I'd add her Love book to the lust list. Definitely, she too is on a quest to understand and contribute to the understanding of love. Now on reflection, this book is similar to the 2009 list capstone, the book with some short entry for each of the fifty states. Some takes on what a place meant to a particular author were memorable, most were the equivalent of a Corn Palace or other tacky tourist traps.

Not to suggest there are no quotables in ANHOL, about they do not string together to mark an author-improved perspective. One look at the content page, and the reader sees a scatter-shot approach: from history, literature, famous men, chemicals and mores. Too broad, too shallow.

But I will cut and paste those more poetic snippets from Ackerman's love almanac:

On courtly love in medieval times as described by troubadours: "the lying awake at night, the devoured glances, the secret codes, the fetishes and tokens, the steamy fantasizing, the moaning to one's pillow, the fear of discovery, the agony of separation, the torrents of bliss followed by desperate hours."

On Tristan and Iseult: "Can one excavate the past? Is it possible to become acquainted with our forgotten selves? At what point should one allow them to be castaways? Never, if what we really seek is ... the most intense excitement, receptivity, and awareness ... Without hurdles, the mind doesn't take wing, and there can be no flights of passion ... When we hear the Tristan myth ... we crave the lover's fire ... we could use ourselves in every pore and cell, feel breathtakingly alive, be rocketed right out of our skins and hurled into a state of supernatural glory, where we feel as lusty and powerful as gods.?

On Proust: " ... point about live is that it doesn't exist in real time, only in anticipated time or remembered time. The only paradise is the one that's been lost. Love requires absence, obstacles, infidelities, jealousy, manipulation, outright lies, pretend reconciliations, tantrums, and betrayals. Meanwhile the lovers fret, hope, agonize, and dream. Torment whips them to a higher level of feeling, and from that mental froth comes love. Love is not a biological instinct, nor an evolutionary imperative, but a feat of the imagination which thrives on difficulty."

Her variation on red to blue flam is all biochemical: " ... The infatuation chemical: PEA phenylethylamine, a molecule that speeds up the flow of information between nerve cells, whips the brain into a frenzy of excitement, which is why lovers feel euphoric, rejuvenated, optimistic and energized ... and the attachment chemical: endorphins... infatuation subsides and a new group of chemicals take over, the morphine-like opiates of the mind, which calm and reassure. The sweet blistering rage of infatuation gives way to a narcotic peacefulness, a sense of security a belonging. Being in love is a state of chaotic equilibrium."

Finally, Ackerman can write strongly when she is on her own and not trying to personally interpret all of love's domain. For example, this is almost poetic: "The towns in upstate New York are like railway stations, where at any moment hundreds of lives converge --people carrying small satchels of worry or disbelief, people racing down the slippery corridors of youth, people slowly dragging the steamer trunk of a trauma, people fresh from the suburbs of hope, people troubled by timetables, people keen to arrive, people whose minds are like small place settings, people whose aging faces are sundials, people desperate and alone who board a bullet train in the vastness of nothing and race hell-bent to the extremities of nowhere."