The woman pictured at right is an imperfect, and so perfectly, well, perfect (!) cartoon version of the rival real estate agent vying for the existential attention, weird affection (sort of) and, of course, clients of the unlikely anti-hero you will meet if you are smart enough, brave enough, eager enough to read the short, wildly funny, indeed perversely perfect new novel by Louis B. Jones of Nevada City, California by way of Chicago, UC Irvine and the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, where he co-directs the Fiction Program. Unshyly, perhaps drolly titled Innocence--for all kinds of reasons--I'll try to provoke you further by offering that this book is the bastard love child of characters in a Preston Sturges screwball comedy and William Golding's Lord of the Flies.  Audacious without trying too hard to be, deeply clever while others are often neither, engaged at every opportunity with words, sentences, patterns, Jones (author of four previous novels including, most recently Radiance) should be read aloud, to children and to dying people, of which we are all both of course, simultaneously. 

This photograph of retired stacked-up Pacific Electric "red cars" makes me sad, as it should you, especially if you are a native Southern Californian.  Yet its arrangement offers a kind of visual poetry, so much resembling the mission of Peggy Hesketh's debut novel Telling the Bees and at the same time, serindipitously, a honeycomb, that I will make this intro short so that you can move to the next page of this morning's blog review and see the close-up photograph of an actual honeycomb, that perfect arrangement of arithmetic harmony that is the default totem of the book and a metaphor for the difficult and sweet place of the mystery of memory, and of local history, self-deception, love and loss. 

I am this Sunday morning postponing my terrific and much-anticipated (by me, at least!) reviews of a first novel by OC's own Peggy Hesketh, the new short-story collection by Gary Amdahl of Redlands, and Gold Line chapbook award winner Alisa Slaughter's short stories to offer--completely unsolicited--a modest public service.

I confess to a chillingly unfamiliar, if welcome, shiver of sentiment a few weeks back, standing in sight of San Diego's County historic Administration Center on the waterfront, a gorgeous 1938 Works Progress Administration complex bearing the unshy motto, "The noblest motive is the public good."  So, blame FDR for this week's post, my public open letter cum critical evaluation of the rhetorical offerings of my pathetic congressman, above with -- yes, of course, naturally -- the flag. 

Some small books suggest big ambitions and demand disproportionately urgent attention. Understatement isn't always what is appears to be, important writing arrives in small packages, the medium really is sometimes the message. Like that. William Kotzwinkle's perfect little novel Swimmer in the Secret Sea, or John McPhee's nonfiction meditation, Oranges. Campbell McGrath's Spring Comes to Chicago. Just to name, as they say, a few. These present with the authority and voice of something so much more, and yet so complete in their economy as to challenge expectations and demand, almost naggingly, provocatively, more. Yet it is in their quiet, small completeness that they achieve so much, and just enough.    

The late Maurice Sendak's In the Night Kitchen is a story of dreams, childhood rebellion, baking children (a la Grimm), heroism and, yes, love and freedom, featuring male frontal nudity, big Jungian themes (ditto) and excellent illustrations in the realm of the gently and instructively surreal. It was a bedtime story staple at our home until only very recently, and for the "until only very recently" I am a little sad. Sendak died last year, and I was gratified at the celebration his long and creative and subversive life garnered, not the least from Terry Gross, the goddess of National Public Radio, and host of Fresh Air. She had maintained a friendship with Sendak, and her final interview with him made me cry, made him cry, seemed to have moved her, and is worth listening to again, perhaps before going along to the Bowers Museum to take in its mini-retrospective of one of the century's great writers, illustrators, teachers and revolutionary cultural workers.

This week's post pretty much writes itself courtesy of the nice Communications Director at Chapman University, Facebook, novelist and short story writer Richard Bausch, Maxine Hong Kingston and the vigorous engagement of the community of sincere and serious OC writers who know what's what. The pithy offering affixed to a brick wall over at the tiny campus in Orange delights Mr. Bib, and seems to have organized all of the above--even Facebook--into yet another conspiracy of good moodiness on a Sunday morning. Using your knowledge in the pursuit of truth begs the question of knowledge and truth, I know, but Mary Platt at Chapman, Bausch's serendipitous Fbook note, the free community creative writing workshop he's teaching, and Kingston's upcoming reading together make this Chapman Appreciation Day at OC Bookly.

The City of Berkeley, California will honor poet and writer, teacher and essayist, screenwriter, singer and professor Al Young next week. Tuesday, February 5 is Al Young Day in the progressive burg on the East Bay, which is a start, and a great one, for all the guys listed above. Indeed, Young was also Poet Laureate of the State of California, has worked as an editor and activist and musicologist, and so probably deserves at least a week. Poets, said Shelley, are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, so it's good and right that Berkeley is acknowledging one of our most important, a legislator of careful articulation, exuberant celebration, urgent historical and cultural memory-keeping and an all-around life force whose voice has shouted, hummed along, led the chorus and yet always sung its own story.  

 

"Your children are not your children. They are the sons and the daughters of life's longing for itself. They come through you but they are not from you. And though they are with you they belong not to you." Sweet Honey in the Rock, the great a cappella Civil Rights-lovin' all-woman, all-African American singing ensemble (led for years by my hero, Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon), taught me this song-version of the poem by Kahlil Gibran. Honestly, just reproducing it above with this anti-draft, anti-militarism illustration is almost about enough for the Bibliofella this morning, but there is so much more to say if one wants to (and I do) by way of "officially" welcoming women into military combat and my wife's trip to the United States Post Office, where she picked up a Selective Service Registration Form.