: Inese Heinzel argues for a new visual vocabulary. –>

Inese Heinzel’s crusade to reunite words with images

By Jordan E. Rosenfeld

Words and images have been duking it out for dominance in human social interaction since the first cave-painting pictographs. Even in its “primitive” days, beneath the images of early man hunting buffalo or the Egyptian symbols engraved on sandstone, the abstraction known as language has been fighting to emerge from a sensory cocoon of images–those representations of the world that our eyes assure us are real, and therefore, safe.

Once the word broke free, it began carving out social classes and creating a hierarchy in academics where it assumed a higher status and banished the image to a baser form of existence.

Now, in an increasingly visual culture where reports show that reading is on the decline, Sonoma State University extended education teacher Inese Heinzel would like to change the way images are treated in academia. In our bustling information age, Heinzel feels that trying to ignore the upsurge of the visual world is “like rejecting half of one’s brain.”

She stumbled across the concept she terms “visual rhetoric” as she was teaching English to undergraduate students. Heinzel’s line of inquiry into the rhetoric of images began as a way to answer the question of why her students were less interested in reading, and whether or not images–and particularly the offspring of the digital age (she cites the Internet, photo-cell phones and interactive home-video software)–were really the culprits.

“We need to learn to read visual texts the way we read verbal texts,” Heinzel says, seated in the University’s Media Center Library. “Visuals have a grammar; they communicate through perspective, color, arrangement, etc. We have to treat the pervasiveness of images as an invitation for critical reflection, not an invitation for hypnosis.”

To illuminate what she means, she describes her own “seminal moment” of understanding that visuals, when paired with text in particular, have a different impact than either medium on its own.

“I had read an article in the New York Times by Nicholas Kristoff,” Heinzel explains. “A few days later, I stumbled across the same article, though I didn’t know it at first because it was laid out differently and was accompanied by a photograph. It seemed familiar to me, but I realized that the picture set me up to expect something else than the text alone. I read it differently.

“Images have been marginalized, and yet in so many ways they’re much more democratic than language,” she continues. “Pictures have some sort of relation to the physical world; they’re our first cognition, and in that sense, images are easier than words. But even when you read a book, you’re looking at images of lines and squiggles. The brain has to take what are completely arbitrary referents–letters, which are just sounds, represented by a certain shape–and reconfigure them and relate them to something in the real world.

“On the other hand, a reader has to become very intimate with a book, because it’s a more challenging process.”

Heinzel is interested in promoting the pairing of visuals and words together in a classroom setting, which she feels is more likely to increase a student’s potential to truly learn something as opposed to merely memorizing it. Of course, that depends on coaxing students into reading in the first place.

“Statistics show that more than 50 percent of all adults have not read a book in the last year. Among them were teachers,” she says. “That is just frightening to me.”

The answer, Heinzel believes, is not simply to ram more reading down the throats of an unwilling audience, but to better understand visual imagery and to engage more reading by supporting it with visuals.

“Is it wrong if someone sees the movie first and then reads the book? I don’t think so,” she says.

In her view, the idea that the word and the image must forever be foreigners standing on opposite sides of a fence is a part of the problem. She calls for a reintegration of words and images beginning in the world of academia, the very place that has rejected their joining for so long. And she is of course practicing what she preaches.

“Both [words and images] are forms of self-expression,” she asserts. “The problem is that too much of anything becomes background.”

To counteract the numbing affect of too many visuals, she suggests, we must learn to distinguish when it’s time to “turn it off” and when we need to become more involved with the medium we’re viewing.

“Passive viewing needs to be altered. The key to literacy of any kind is engagement. Neuroscientists have started to believe that the eye and the brain work together.”

Whether this means peppering in foreign films with subtitles among regular cinema viewing, discussing the art, magazines and other images which compose a person’s visual diet, or simply turning off the television, Heinzel believes that visual literacy is possible and necessary.

“What I’m advocating is that we take the same care looking at images that one would with news information. You don’t rely on one source, ever!”

From the October 20-26, 2004 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

: Shedding some light on women’s lives of yore. –>

Hysterical women of historical fiction

By Hannah Strom-Martin

In the fallout of a post-Hillary society, it is no coincidence that heroines are hot again. Reese Witherspoon currently dazzles as Becky Sharp in Mira Nair’s cinematic adaptation of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, imbuing her character with all the complexity that Paris Hilton and Jessica Simpson just don’t have. Anna Karenina has turned up on Oprah’s book list like a red flag in a sea of milk-water chick-lit. And while the world of reality TV continues to bombard us with images of svelte yet mockable babes, the bookshelves are filling with a new crop of female authors reimagining femininity in novels that look to the past to provide a starving modern audience with such vital historical characters as Anne Boleyn and Lucrecia Borgia. Is it literature? The results vary, but this season there is a wide-ranging selection to choose from.

The Serpent and the Moon: Two Rivals for the Love of a Renaissance King (Touchstone; $29.95) by Her Royal Highness Princess Michael of Kent is actually nonfiction but strives for the same sense of high pageantry and sexiness that have made historical-fiction authors like Philippa Gregory such a hot read. The title refers, respectively, to Queen Catherine de Medici and the French noblewoman Diane de Poitiers, both ancestors of Princess Michael, who vie for the love of the French King, Henri II, against a backdrop of war, courtly opulence and the ratifying of some really boring treaties.

At first, Her Royal Highness’ cast of characters (literally everyone and their mother) threaten to overwhelm her obvious dearth of knowledge, but her vividly drawn descriptions of champagne fountains, picturesque chateaux and staggering courtly dress soon distract from the confusion of papal, political and family names. The world of the French court circa 1500 comes to ripe, sensuous life, disclosing the kind of minute details (a lady’s toothpaste was made from crushed coral, peach stones, cuttlefish bones, tartar of white wine and cinnamon) that would make Philippa Gregory swoon with envy.

This same minutiae, however, is never quite in evidence with the characters. Her Majesty’s focus point, Diane de Poitiers, fails to intrigue the imagination. Well-born and beautiful, Diane has everything handed to her, including the love of the dashing Henri II, who takes her as his mistress following the death of her elderly husband.

Older than Henri by 19 years, Diane’s mature-woman status seems a unique point from which to explore the notorious love triangle of Henri, Diane and Catherine. But though Her Highness pours on the descriptions of her heroine’s famed beauty and sensitivity (Diane helped Catherine conceive Henri’s children when all hope of an heir seemed lost, and had more of a hand in their raising than Catherine herself), it is with the homely, marginalized Catherine de Medici that our sympathies finally lie.

A merchant’s daughter, maneuvered at the age of 14 into a political marriage with Henri when grander plans went awry, Catherine–with her unrequited love and secret plans for vengeance–is by far the more fascinating third of the triangle, an underdog worthy of S. E. Hinton. In one particularly wrenching anecdote, Catherine watches through a self-made spy-hole as Diane and Henri make love. Scorned by the court, used as a brood-mare by a man whose heart lay eternally with the beauteous Diane, Catherine’s psychology warrants a series of fictionalized novels more than Mary Queen of Scots and Queen Elizabeth I combined–but again, Her Highness barely scratches the surface, her prose never allowing us to get closer than descriptions of Catherine’s ugliness.

When it comes to character, Her Highness trades in broad, seductive strokes, the hints of rivalry (Catherine bars Diane from seeing Henri on his death bed after 20 years of intimacy) are painted over by descriptions of more clothes, more food, more wine. One emerges from the book tipsy with a feast of detail, still wondering when the main course will be served.

Overabundant detail is also a thorn in the side of Susanna Moore’s One Last Look (Knopf; $23), a heady, fictionalized account of three thirty-something English siblings on a six-year trek through 1840s India. Based on the real-life journals of several English women, the story centers around Lady Eleanor Oliphant, her vivacious younger sister, Harriet, and her elder brother–and occasional lover–Henry.

One Last Look unfolds like an opium dream: a wash of rich colors and solid, striking details that don’t always add up to something coherent. The plot, such as it is, is told episodically through Eleanor’s journals, the events not so much building upon one another as floating free and open to interpretation, much in the style of the time period. Is Eleanor really sleeping with her brother? The prose teases you with suggestion, making the revelation of “who’s doing who?” impossible to anticipate.

Characters you didn’t know were connected break up, break down, father children and kill one another, and the prose is so dense, you never know why. No matter, the prose itself is the most vital character: descriptions of Indian monsoons (“The servants, convinced that the fish fall from the sky, rush about the lawn catching them with their hands”), Regency balls (the jewels so abundant that “even the far edges of the room sparkled with fire”) and Eleanor’s slow awakening to an alien country are enough of a reward.

Eleanor’s voice holds a longing and voluptuousness sure to tempt any reader who dreams for transport of the Merchant-Ivory kind. If her motives and development are somewhat buried by her existential posturing (“Harriet said that my dreams come from my deepest part–a place without boundaries where women are kept alive”), she is still a heroine who sticks in the mind long after the journey is over.

But the true heroine of this season–hopefully of many seasons to come–is not a character, but an author: Susanna Clarke, mastermind of the delicious Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell (Bloomsbury USA; $27.95), a rollicking tome of a novel that combines the best aspects of high fantasy, fairy tale and historical fiction into a bubbling witches’ brew of storytelling.

The daughter of a minister, Clarke once supported herself by writing cookbooks, making for an anecdote as droll as anything she writes about. Among her influences, she cites Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Neil Gaiman (of The Sandman comic-book fame) and Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator Joss Whedon. In an amazing feat of cross-genre pollination, her story combines elements of all four: Austen’s wit, Dickens’ social sensibilities, Gaiman’s juicy menace and Whedon’s irreverent dismantling of cliché.

At the heart of the story are the dashing Jonathan Strange and the fussy Mr. Norell, the first magicians to grace England in several hundred years. With Regency England in full swing (among the book’s many delights is a cameo by Lord Byron), Strange and Norell grapple with the problem of Napoleon and the fate of the newly restored “English magic.”

Strange advocates the use of the most extreme magic available (at one point, he moves the entire city of Brussels to America to hide some of Wellington’s troops). Norell, barely able to lend his fellow magician a book without suffering a nervous breakdown, wants to keep things regulated, even as he makes a diabolical pact with a fairy to solidify his position as the No. 1 magician in the world.

We are in territory both comic and sober, where nothing evolves or pays off in a way expected of either historic or fantastic genres. True, some readers will wonder exactly what Clarke is about and flounder when an ending comes seemingly out of nowhere. But in the case of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell, as with the fairy roads traveled by its characters, the discovery is the thing.

Fairies, historical figures, mad prophets and a host of sublimely silly aristocracy cavort through landscapes Romantic and real, with Clarke’s prose switching effortlessly from social satire to sly comedy to darkly sensual musings on the nature of the fantastic. Her concept of the fairy is one of the most original takes in fantasy today: a realm where maidens’ footsteps fill with blood, the sky speaks and an ancient sorcerer, known as the Raven King, casts his presence in every shadow.

But lest one think this is simply Harry Potter for adults (Clarke, while rightly stating that one could certainly do worse, has dismissed such a direct comparison in interviews), rest assured of Strange‘s immense literary value. One would be hard-pressed to find another book that incorporates the grittiness of Waterloo or the poignant subplot of a black servant in London, imprisoned by more than just prejudice, with the light touch of Austen at her Pride and Prejudice best.

Clarke will be justifiably compared to the great Regency authors, as she will be compared to Tolkien and Rowling–but this is a double-edged sword. The most amazing thing about Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell is its originality, a unique mix of darkness, madcap humor and emotional connection that trumps convention and makes it the entertainment to beat this side of the millennium.

Now that, dear reader, is heroic.

From the October 20-26, 2004 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Exquisite Jive

Our annual writing contest

Big fun! This year, we invited you to play an odd type of Exquisite Corpse game with us. We provided the introductory sentence, larded with sly nuggets that we hoped you’d groove on, and you provided the ensuing 500 words to flesh out the story. This succeeded beyond our wildest dreams, the editorial team sniping over beers as we hashed out the five we felt shone brightest from the 40 or so excellent submissions received.

Not included below but well worth mentioning are Wulf Rehder’s dolphin-faced goodness, Jenne Kaivo’s hilarious recounting of the oh-so-many brief tragedies our dyslexic couple endured–including selling their souls to “a Stan”–Tessie Share’s delightful difficulties, the straightforward humanity of Kay Ramsbottom’s sting and Ric Escalante’s “monetary messages.”

Thanks for playing. We think you’ll enjoy these as much as we did. And the enjoyment isn’t over. We host our annual Jive party on Wednesday, Oct. 27. It’s free, but you must reserve a spot by calling 707.527.1200, ext. 215.

Until next year, when we cook up another batch of tomfoolery!

Gretchen Giles

Chico

When, on the fifth day of their honeymoon, Gianna and Harry swerved to miss a porcupine, jolted upside down onto the road’s hot, sandy shoulder and smashed the funerary jar entirely, there were those who said they deserved it. . . .

Harry’s previous wives, for instance, felt this sort of animosity toward the newlyweds. Gianna was number four. At one of their recent dinner parties, while stuffing in slices of low-carb pizza, the ex-wives didn’t hold back.

“You know they’re implants.”

“She’s a real fixer-upper.”

“Dumb as a post.”

To Harry, divorce came naturally. As the owner of a chain of car dealerships, he saw a lot of trade-ins. After a few years with the same car, or wife, most men that Harry knew were ready for a new model–it’s just that most of them couldn’t afford the upgrade.

“I can’t believe this shit.” After the airbag deflated, Harry discovered the Jeep’s door was bent shut, and wriggled his sweaty body out the window onto the baking sand.

“What did you expect me to do?” Gianna demanded over her limp sack. “Run it over?”

Harry knew better than to argue with her. Gianna’s response to bickering was to withhold sex. Naturally, she had taken the porcupine’s side. Her obsession with animals wore on Harry. Why had he agreed to bring that damn urn along on their honeymoon in the first place?

Earlier that day, they’d been driving around the desert, looking for the right place to sprinkle the ashes. “He says we’re getting close.” Gianna’s eyes squeezed shut in concentration. She clutched the urn to her breasts with one hand. A five-carat diamond ring sparkled below her pink nails. Harry winced. The ring had set him back more than the boob job, and she was turning out to be a real piece of work.

Gianna’s door opened easily, and Harry grabbed her elbow, guiding her out into the furnacelike heat. “Just relax a minute, everything’s gonna be all right.” He punched the AAA numbers into his cell phone, explaining through a curtain of static that they were about 15 minutes outside of Alamogordo.

The connection died quickly and Harry found Gianna sitting cross-legged in the shade of the overturned Jeep, sobbing. She cupped a piece of the broken urn in her palm.

“I loved him so much,” a thin line of snot ran down over her lips. “I really did.”

“I know, baby,” Harry sat down beside her. He hoped the tow truck would find them soon–he could use a Corona.

“Chico was only 12.” Gianna’s blonde head dropped disconsolately.

“At least he found a resting place in the desert,” Harry said.

Gianna brightened. “That’s true!” She gave him a brave smile, which Harry hoped meant they would have sex tonight. “Maybe it was meant to be this way.”

Christ, that Chico had been so annoying, always yipping and trembling with those bulgy eyes. Even after his death, he still managed to make Harry’s life hellish.

“Goodbye, Chico!” Gianna stood and threw the shard of urn into the desert.

“Goodbye,” said Harry, checking his watch. That damned Chihuahua.

Dawn Thomas

Oedipus Wrecks

When, on the fifth day of their honeymoon, Gianna and Harry swerved to miss a porcupine, jolted upside down onto the road’s hot, sandy shoulder and smashed the funerary jar entirely, there were those who said they deserved it . . .

. . . the very first being the startled porcupine. Swearing angrily, it waddled indignantly off into the surrounding forest.

Harry came to first, suspended upside-down in his seatbelt. Groggily turning to Gianna, likewise suspended by hers, he muttered, “Sweetheart, what did we say about suddenly bracing yourself against the dash, jamming your feet into the foot well and screaming, ‘Look out!’ while we’re driving?” There was no response from Gianna.

Looking about the topsy-turvy vehicle, Harry’s eyes fixed on the shattered remains of the ornate funerary urn that had contained his deceased mother’s ashes, which were now mixed with the detritus of prior road trips below him.

“Mother! No!” he cried in anguish. “And when we were so close!”

Reaching with difficulty to his left ankle, Harry pulled up his pants leg, unsheathing the ritual dagger he’d prepared from melted-down coffin nails and a piece of the ulna of an executed murderer, and, in a moment, cut himself free. Kneeling, he took up a handful of ashes, sobbing, “Oh, Mother, it’s not fair!

“Just another few miles to the Ring of the Old Ones and I’d have brought you back from the dead with the blood of a freshly despoiled virgin!” Harry looked over toward the still-unconscious Gianna. “So close!”

Harry forlornly scraped up what he could of his mother’s ashes and, taking up an empty plastic water bottle from the debris, funneled them into it. He then kicked out the driver’s side window and, with the capped neck of the bottle grasped between his teeth, crawled out the overturned vehicle, bloodying himself in the process as bits of safety glass tore at his palms and kneecaps.

Close by lay one of Harry’s suitcases, sprung open. And there among five days’ worth of soiled clothing, lay the thrice-cursed Book of N’hrweltet. No doubt due to Harry’s having studied that particular section for several months, it had fallen open to the page with the incantation for resurrection of the dead. As Harry unthinkingly laid his bloody hands upon it, there was a loud, thunderlike clap, and out of a fiery hole that suddenly appeared in the middle of the road, a huge hand lunged out and grasped the terrified Harry.

“Whelp,” rumbled a disembodied voice from within the flaming hole. “Not the best-looking recently despoiled virgin I’ve ever seen, but, eh, you’ll do.” With another thunderous explosion, the hand and a now madly gibbering Harry disappeared, leaving a sulfurous stench behind them.

And there in the road, sitting uncomfortably upon the melted fragments of a burst and flattened plastic water bottle, was Harry’s wrinkled, old crone of a mother, stark naked and about two-thirds lifesize, as Harry had not managed to get all her scattered ashes collected. “Harry?” she rasped weakly.

Inside the overturned vehicle, Gianna suddenly came to and shrieked, “Look out for that porcupine!”

Rich Jones

Fire in the Belly

When, on the fifth day of their honeymoon, Gianna and Harry swerved to miss a porcupine, jolted upside down onto the road’s hot, sandy shoulder and smashed the funerary jar entirely, there were those who said they deserved it . . .

. . . for stealing the Town Car in the first place. They would say, “What sort of heartless, evil losers would steal a hearse from a funeral parlor during the middle of a funeral?”

But Harry never did care what “they” said or what “they” thought, and lived according to what he called keeping “the fire in the belly” burning. Sometimes that meant getting drunk on hairspray and rocketing his cousin’s IROC down I-5 at midnight and flicking off the headlights. But since Aug. 11, 1985, his belly had been burning thermonuclear hot.

On that day, he’d gone to the Evergreen Mall to buy the new Iron Maiden album. Stopping by the Hot Dog on a Stick to get an order of cheese fries, he first laid eyes on Gianna, squeezing lemonade. It was magic: Gianna’s hair so carefully tucked under the hat of her Hot Dog on a Stick uniform and coming steadily unfurled with every pump of the lemonade squeezer, the beads of perspiration collecting on her barely revealed clavicle and flickering like prisms under the fluorescent lighting of the mall’s food court and the smell of hot pork in the air mystically transformed another anonymous lead-colored Tuesday in Kent, Wash., into something Harry would describe to his cousin two days later from a pay phone in Crescent City, Calif., as “Totally radical, dude.”

Gianna looked up at Harry and did not need to ask what he wanted to eat; his eyes were locked on her like those of all the other prepubescent mall rats, lunch-hour Radio Shack salesmen and geriatric pederasts stopping by after their circuit of mall power-walking. But unlike the rest of them, Harry reeked heavily of a freshly burned doobie and sported a Cheshire Cat grin that she could not resist. She wanted to get out of the mall. She wanted to get out of Kent. She wanted to rock on. She wanted to get high. And Harry was already there.

And so, three days, two Greyhound bus tickets to Reno and a quarter of Mexican brown later, Gianna had become Mrs. Harold Jack Dupree. Seeing the idling Lincoln parked outside the drive-up wedding/funeral chapel, Harry said to Gianna, “Hey babe, let’s steal the dead man’s car and drive it down to Colorado. He ain’t using it no more.” Gianna agreed and five days later she and Harry were being pulled out of the overturned Town Car by the jaws of life, kept alive only by well-trained Denver EMTs and the benevolent power emanating from the crushed funerary jar–the soul of a cursed shaman trapped in the cremated incarnation of a middle-aged stockbroker dead of his third cardiac arrest.

Now freed from his broken vessel, the shaman was able to roam the world again as Porcupine, spirit of the pines, whom the Paiute Indians pray to as “the one who gnaws through winter to reveal spring”–freed by the only things that keep the spirit world spinning on its axis: passion, youth and rock ‘n’ roll.

Steven Waldron

Ibuprofen

When, on the fifth day of their honeymoon, Gianna and Harry swerved to miss a porcupine, jolted upside down onto the road’s hot, sandy shoulder and smashed the funerary jar entirely, there were those who said they deserved it. . . .

The former inhabitant of the ashes that lay scattered among the shards of the urn would certainly have expressed that opinion had he been in any condition to do so. It was a sentiment he’d voiced often in life–“Damn fools! Only themselves to blame”–whenever misfortune befell anyone of his acquaintance, and he would not have hesitated to express it now, regardless of any resulting hurt feelings. Other people’s hurt feelings never bothered him, least of all his son Harry’s.

Harry blamed himself. He’d been brought up that way; by now it was second nature.

Gianna tended to blame the porcupine–weren’t they supposed to be nocturnal? So what was this one doing waddling across the road in the middle of the afternoon, for God’s sake? Gianna loathed nature, although she was willing to put up with a certain amount of it for Harry’s sake.

Just like she’d been willing to put up with Harry’s dad, a foul-mouthed reprobate with a bad toupee, who made a point of mispronouncing her name. “Gee-ann-uh,” he’d say, watching her face for signs of annoyance. He loved to annoy people, and being monstrously rich, he generally got away with it. Of course, she never referred to him as a foul-mouthed reprobate in conversations with Harry. “A real character,” she called him, although she suspected Harry knew how she felt.

Honestly, she thought, Harry’s dad was the one who was mostly to blame. If he hadn’t had that coronary while drunkenly flapping and clapping his way through the “Chicken Dance” during the reception, and if his will hadn’t specified, as a condition of inheritance, that his ashes be scattered amid the scree at Devil’s Postpile National Monument within a week of his demise, none of this would have happened.

Now here they were, and there the car was, and there were those damned ashes. Gina noticed Harry kneeling among them, scrabbling around. “What are you doing?” she demanded.

“Uh, do you have a little bottle or anything?”

“A bottle?”

“It doesn’t have to be a bottle. Any little container would be fine.” He looked up at her sheepishly. “It’s just . . . we’ve come this far, and if we could get even a few of the ashes . . . it’s such a lot of money . . . Wouldn’t that count?”

Gianna choked back the furious tirade rising in her throat. He looked so pathetic kneeling there, though he had a point about the money. She dug in her purse till she found the ibuprofen bottle, emptied the remaining tablets into her hand and gave the bottle to Harry. Then she carefully stashed the tablets in a clean pocket. She would need them before the day was over.

Chris Garland

Marsha

When, on the fifth day of their honeymoon, Gianna and Harry swerved to miss a porcupine, jolted upside down onto the road’s hot, sandy shoulder and smashed the funerary jar entirely, there were those who said they deserved it. . . .

Gianna and Harry were curious, interesting people who had curious and interesting friends. The type of friends who would quite naturally be drawn to something like the funerary jar. Such a handsome jar, made of ceramic that was pit-fired black and carved with some sort of Native American-looking design. Very Native American. Very attractive. They would pick up the jar and turn it around. Then, while Gianna or Harry were busy in the kitchen putting the last touches on dinner, something sort of ethnic, something with some complexity, they would lift the lid and look inside, just to see what was making the jar so much heavier than expected.

Human ashes, to the naive innocent, look very much like some sort of gray, gravelly potpourri, and so it wasn’t uncommon for Gianna and Harry’s visitors to lower their nose a bit closer for a sniff, just to nail down the substance. “What’s this?” they would say, after failing to identify it.

Then they would have to endure the shame, the mortification, of Gianna or Harry, who would be reentering the living room at this point, usually brandishing a glass or two of wine, saying, “That’s Marsha.”

To be caught sniffing Harry’s mother’s ashes was a tough place, even for Harry and Gianna’s type of friend, and though this awkward moment never actually interrupted a budding friendship, Marsha did become a point of angst for many of their compatriots. “Those damn ashes,” they would say. Because Harry brought them everywhere. To beach parties. To pot lucks. Out to dinner.

“Mom never liked to be left behind,” Harry said, and his friends would smile a bit wanly because a smile was expected of them, but, truth be told, Marsha gave them the fucking creeps.

Marsha had a front seat at the wedding. On the plane, she traveled wrapped in bubble wrap, tucked into a duffel bag in the overhead compartment. In the honeymoon suite, she was set in the bathroom on the back of the toilet because, though Gianna was all for being supportive of Harry’s Marsha thing, she didn’t like the idea of Marsha being in the same room with them when they made love. Even Gianna had her limits.

When the porcupine waddled in front of their rented jeep, Harry swerved. The tires skidded out on the sand. Marsha, the only one not belted in, flew from the car, her jar smashed to bits against the trunk of a tree. Harry and Gianna dangled there for a moment, upside down in their honeymoon jeep, both of them stunned. Gianna was the first to speak. “I’ve never seen a porcupine before,” she said.

“Me either,” Harry said. “It was bigger than I would have expected.”

Gianna de Persiis Vona

From the October 20-26, 2004 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

: ‘Tomales Bay with Eel Grass’ is among the glorious glimpses of Pt. Reyes to be had in the new ‘Guidebook.’ –>: The women of ‘Pearl Necklace’ pull no punches. –>

Our highly subjective list of the new and locally written

By Gretchen Giles

‘Point Reyes Visions Guidebook’ by Kathleen Goodwin and Richard Blair (Color and Light; $21.95)

Following up their drop-dead gorgeous 2002 self-published collaboration Point Reyes Visions, West Marin couple Kathleen Goodwin and Richard Blair now publish a pocket-sized companion, replete with excellent map, that reads like the personal notes of a very good friend.

Rich with Blair’s sharp black-and-white photography and Goodwin’s commonsensical prose, the Guidebook is intended to be dropped into a knapsack before taking off for a day exploring the Pt. Reyes National Seashore. It answers such on-the-spot questions as where to picnic, where the best overlooks are for sunset watching, where to catch sight of the area’s tule elk and how to get from the Bolinas ridge to Mt. Tam and back again (hint: take two cars and walk only one way).

Goodwin explains where you can park for free and still bike into Samuel P. Taylor park, named, she lets us know, after the industrialist who turned San Franciscans’ castoff cotton clothing into paper and who left massive piles of ancient unwanted buttons in the creek bed to prove it. While fearing the wrath of the holiday gods in this last stretch before the commerce commencement of Halloween, we nonetheless pronounce Point Reyes Visions Guidebook a perfect stocking stuffer for that favorite outdoor lover.

‘Images of America: Santa Rosa’ by Simone Wilson (Arcadia; $19.99)

In serial to her two other books under the Images of America banner–focusing on Petaluma and the Russian River, respectively–West County writer Simone Wilson has mined the wealth of archival photos to create a visual history of a small town once so perfectly American that Alfred Hitchcock naturally saw its malingering shadow.

Beginning with images of the Pomo peoples indigenous to the Santa Rosa plain, Wilson slowly takes the reader–or looker, as the photos are intensely interesting–through Santa Rosa’s growing pains from native lands to Mexican rancho to bustling county seat to picture-perfect city of just 17,000 souls by the late 1940s.

To those of us with short memories and shorter lives, it’s of particular interest to come to greater intimacy with the founding fathers (and mothers) of the city. There’s developer Hugh Codding in the mid-’50s, looking like a beatnik, rakishly holding a martini at a dress shop’s opening. In addition to Coddingtown, the developer also built Montgomery Village, named in honor of young Billy Montgomery, a native son killed at Pearl Harbor. There’s longtime radio vet Jim Grady, in sideburns and Wayfarers, interviewing a local man at a football game, circa 1972. Charlie Traverso’s store didn’t look that much different in 1934 than his grandkids’ does today, and he used to own it with the Arrigoni brothers. Ernest J. Finley not only founded and edited the Press Democrat, he also owned KSRO. And Exchange Bank founder Frank Doyle cut the chain on the opening day of the Golden Gate Bridge.

While there’s a creamy glamour to the black-and-white shots collected here, the book leaves us far from the end of the 20th century, just a page or two past that time in 1976 when the freeway came through town and ended Santa Rosa’s cohesive charm.

‘Pearl Necklace: Gritty but Pretty,’ Vol. 1, Issue 1. $5. www.pearlnecklacezine.com

Not a book but certainly worthy of note, Pearl Necklace is the brainchild of smart Napa women Caetlynn J. Booth, Amy Gallaher, Cheryl Laube, Manda Moon Prendergast and Ann Trinca. Deciding to name their zine in honor of “the power of femininity, the purity of the creative process and the symbiotic nature of the art world,” they also move to reclaim a sexual euphemism in order to “play with it in a positive light.” The result is a thoughtful piece of brilliance that features washable tattoos, an “easy” Japanese cookbook, an ode to necks complete with a rather horrifying do-it-yourself choker, a giddy rave about cutie-boy-group the Bionic Band, paintings and stories and a riff on the cool freak of menstrual art–all hand-bound with string and a rubber band. “She has cut me out of rough fabric,” reads a graffiti scrap on Pearl Necklace’s back cover–and that turns out to be excellent news.

‘Swami for Precedent: A Seven-Step Plan to Heal the Body Politic and Cure Electile Dysfunction’ by Swami Beyondananda (WakeUpLaughing; $14.95)

A master punster, Santa Rosa author Steve Bhaerman has made a syndicated career for himself as a self-styled medicine man whose main medicine is laughter. A product of the spirituality movement of the ’70s who has taken the tenets of Eastern religions and recodified them for smart-thinking, politically motivated people everywhere, Bhaerman is on to something. Perhaps a bit too much to take in large doses (“Are we ready to drive a new karma and trade in that old Dodge for an Evolvo?” is merely one of thousands of similar sentences), Swami reads like a bathroom book, in short illustrated tidbits. As such, it should be required reading for everyone who suffers irony deficiency and truth decay.

Bhaerman appears on Tuesday, Oct. 26, in a pre-election event that should bring some levity to the proceedings at the Harmony Community Room, 400 Morris St., Sebastopol. Neal “the Kernel” Rogin accompanies. $15. 707.861.2035.

From the October 20-26, 2004 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

: Even something as inocuous as birding can have its death-defying moments. –>

‘The Big Year’ captures the thrills, adventure and drama of birdwatching

By Jill Koenigsdorf

They come from Aspen, from the Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant in Maryland and from Fair Lawn, N.J.–three men, all burning with the same obsession. Their ages, incomes and physical conditions vary wildly, yet still, in the throes of the El Niño year of 1998, with weird weather and flukes of nature thrown in their path, they tarry on. After all, the Big Year is no place for sissies.

They endure seasickness, snow where there should not be snow, the dizzying stench of garbage dumps, mountain lions that suddenly appear on deserted Texas roads, and countless storms in Attu, Alaska. Often subsiding solely on Jolt and pretzels, they tramp through volcanic muck with 20 mph headwinds just to chase a rumor and survive run-ins with fire ants in fierce competition with one another. Yet this is no ordinary sport and these are no ordinary men. They are a breed apart, known as “extreme birders,” and their adventure is delightfully chronicled by Mark Obmascik in The Big Year: A Tale of Man, Nature and Fowl Obsession (Free Press; $25).

Mark Obmascik has written a wonderful book chronicling the dreams and adventures of three men competing for the highest number of bird sightings in one year on North American soil. In doing so, he has portrayed three intriguing, complex characters whom we care about and cheer on in their quest. And while The Big Year is a work of nonfiction, it reads like a saga.

Obmascik gets the reader situated with some background on the contest: “Every year on Jan. 1, hundreds of people abandon their day-to-day lives to join one of the world’s quirkiest contests. Their goal: spotting the most species of birds in a single year. Most contestants limit themselves to the birds of their home county. Others chase birds only within the borders of their home state. But the grandest birding competition of them all, the most grueling, most expensive and occasionally the most vicious, sprawls over an entire continent. It’s called the Big Year.”

The three contestants are reigning champion Sandy Komito, a colorful, often obnoxious fellow from the Bronx who only rents Lincoln Town cars and will fly anywhere, anytime, to get his bird; Al Levantin, a well-traveled engineer, strapping outdoorsman and Mr. Nice Guy-type from the Elk Mountains in Colorado; and, finally, an astonishingly determined nuclear power plant worker named Greg Miller, the only one who has to work during the Big Year, as his responsibility for keeping the once-dreaded Y2K virus from getting into the plant’s systems remains paramount. We follow the suspense as these unlikely rivals pursue their birds, remaining neck-and-neck for most of the story.

The Big Year unfolds in a straightforward manner, skipping back and forth between the men and their often simultaneous quests for rare birds. The folks they encounter and the misadventures that transpire in various remote locales, as well as the camaraderie of other birders, keep the pages turning at a lively clip. Plus, there is a true thrill when the men do sight whichever elusive winged number they have been so dauntlessly tracking.

Relying on the North American Rare Bird Alert’s (NARBA) frantically updated website, this trio is one day pointed toward a trailer park in Bentsen, Texas, and the next sent scurrying to Hammonasset Beach, Conn. But as the book points out, most of the world doesn’t quite get birders.

“Over the years,” Obmascik writes, the town of “Bentsen had grown on Komito. These trailer people weren’t birders, but they had learned to help. Now, most had nailed up half an orange (to attract orioles) or tossed out seed (to attract everything else). . . . NARBA reported that a clay-colored robin was feeding reliably on a marshmallow at Trailer Space No. 19.”

As the reader gets to know these three fellows, the victory is almost secondary to the adventures. The Big Year accomplishes that delightful feat of educating a reader about a world foreign to most without making her conscious of said education. Suddenly, battling mosquitoes in the swamps of Florida, seeing only roseate spoonbills when the goal that day was simply one pink flamingo, doesn’t seem like such a crazy proposition. In fact, after finishing this book, birding–novice or advanced–seems like a perfectly wonderful, even appealing, pastime.

From the October 20-26, 2004 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.