Amy C Collins

book review: The Book of Genesis Illustrated by Robert Crumb

The Book of Genesis Illustrated by Robert Crumb
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Confession: I have not read the Bible cover to cover. I was raised Episcopalian, maybe not the most adamant in bible story memorization, but of course the stories are all swimming somewhere in my subconscious. I'm not an avid R. Crumb fan either, though I’m no stranger to Mr. Natural and, perhaps more so, the legend of R. Crumb. The combination leaves a lasting impression.

Crumb followed the King James Version and Robert Alter's recent translation The Five Books of Moses for text. To see the stories unfold in detailed, literal visual expression has made the stories very real to me, lodged them more firmly in my readied memory.

My friend Bryan left this great comment on my Goodreads page:

"Youth these days are much more visually stimulated than we were. Visual argument, like Crumb's spin on Genesis would be a great eye opener in class if taught with the notion that pictures are arguments."

Bryan teaches High School English. I have to disagree with him that the younger generations are more visual than we were. They just have more access to it. Bryan is only a few years older than I, but we did not grow up with the Internet in our homes. We did not have immediate access to the world the way children do today. Human beings are and always have been visual creatures, probably more so in the “early” days, before the written word, before language, and many of us still learn more easily with a visual aid. And yet the concept that Crumb's illustrated Genesis is a visual argument is an angle I had not considered. The Bible is the most controversial and disagreed over text on the planet, interpreted and argued between versions, across denominations and within parishes. Duh, Collins, of course Crumb’s visualization of Genesis is another interpretation!

And here it is:
The images in this book are not of white Anglo-saxons but the nubians of the Middle East, Egypt and what today is Pakistan - historically accurate and a point of contention for many, and at the very least, discordant with much of the western hemisphere’s depictions of life in Biblical times. And the images are explicit. Very little is left to the imagination, balancing a line between art and porn, naked and nude. Crumb has taken the mythology of the First Book and presented a tangible story, human beings in the flesh; faulted, desirous and selfish.

The illustrations are superb and beautiful, detailed and extensive. As a cartoonist, I am awed by his dedication - a five year project - and accuracy from panel to panel. His distinctive style, where all the women have large man hands and feet, bodacious breasts and bulbous bottoms, could be offensive to some. The sensitive might want to pass on this reading experience. The open and inquisitive should find a copy and read it slowly and attentively, careful to appreciate the tremendous effort and execution of very stunning artwork.


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book review: Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays

Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays by Joan Didion
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I can't remember how I came across this collection of essays but I picked it up because the contemporary pieces were written in the 1960s and I'd been furiously watching Mad Men, also set in the 1960s, and I felt a little something intellectual might balance my rare obsession with a television series, though I still wave the flag for the show, gently cerebral in its own right.

This is the first of Didion's work I've read. She covers the 60s counter-culture, mostly in California, writing about Howard Hughes and Joan Baez's School of Non-Violence, American film and the backward sliding of Hollywood. She reveals in the collection-titled "Slouching Towards Bethlehem", Haight Street for the sloppy drugged-out scene it was; lost souls dubiously parading for change but buried in a thick mud self-deception. Her passages are expert and perfectly executed, her language an occasional challenge that had me reaching for the dictionary, another aspect I love to find in author's work, that desire to use every bit of our extensive language.

The second section of essays are of a personal nature and my favorites. In "On Self-Respect," which I've read four times, at least, she writes, "although to be driven back on oneself is an uneasy affair at best, rather like trying to cross a border with borrowed credentials, it seems to me now the one condition necessary to the beginnings of real self-respect." Didion was roughly my age when she wrote these pieces between 1961 and 1967, all published in magazines now out of print, save for "The Saturday Evening Post."

The final essay, "Goodbye to All That," lights on her eight years spent living in New York, sentiments for which I am very familiar. Funny, I've been thinking a lot about writing on New York lately, of course, in total honesty, I have thought about doing that all along. Perhaps, in Didion's shadow, a simple essay would suffice instead of the again-submerged collection of perspectives I keep dreaming about. We both spent our twenties in the Enchanted City , youth and energy and the unwavering belief that opportunity waits around every corner may not be specific to New York living, maybe it's only a city thing, maybe it's simply grander in that city. Or maybe it's simply, as Didion writes, "one of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before." In any case, she's got me wanting to write more, and that's always worth five stars.

There is a darkness, a sadness that pervades every piece, an element of anxiety about the future, which will hold me from rushing into reading more of her work, though a copy of The Year of Magical Thinking sits presently on my shelf. Her sober stare into reality, one reality, has me thinking and considering - bravo. But life is short and I prefer it sweet, so I will savor these few essays for a time before moving further into Didion's oeuvre.

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book review: The Borrower

The Borrower by Rebecca Makkai
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

OK, so I admit I loved this book before I even read the first page. I've read several short stories by Rebecca Makkai in the last few years in various publications and on her website and, truth be told, I can't remember how I first discovered her, just that I fell instantly for her story lines, her prose, her startling truths about life (always my favorite!). And so it was that I had forgotten all about her forthcoming first novel and happened across it one day in the library, when I needed nothing to read, just to use the facilities and burn a few minutes before a job interview.

Thank you, Rebecca!

The Borrower is about a 26 year old children's librarian with a deep, Russian streak of self-righteousness and fight, which she inherited from her father and his illegal, illicit ways. She's also, like so many of us at that age, dissatisfied with her life, gently flailing, if you will, and unsure what to do next. Naturally, she follows the instructions of ten year old Ian Drake on a fictional grandmother goose chase from small town Hannibal, Missouri to the upper reaches of Vermont, along the Canadian border. Poor Ian has runaway from home, from his oppressive, narrowly religious parents who are sending him to gay rehab classes - all of this Lucy knows about and feels she must rescue him.

Makkai writes humor into this wonderfully fictional tale - I could never see it going down like this in real life but love the what if and why not of such a premise - and captures the silliness and energy of a ten year old boy with just enough cute to make you fall for him. Of course, there is the matter of Lucy's father and his heroic tales, a very literary horn reference to a facial imperfection, and an inner battle for good over evil, truth over lies, direction over running away.

I love this book for it's beautifully concise sentences - which I know Makkai spent hours combing through despite the ease with which they read, giving me the feeling that she knew exactly what she was doing when she wrote the first sentence - and it's humor, it's truths, it's fun. Bravo!

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book review: The Last American Man

The Last American Man by Elizabeth Gilbert
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Thank you, Keely for introducing me to this book - a nonfiction account of Eustace Conway, founder and director of Turtle Island nature preserve outside Boone, North Carolina (where I went to college) and where my roommate learned, from Eustace, how to skin a goat, among other things, and subsequently left said goat head in our freezer for six months. The personal connection peaked my interest. And I've actually been to Turtle Island, seen "Everybody's", the communal sleeping barracks, and the outdoor kitchen, though I never slept there (too busy planning a move to NYC).

I was also interested in this book because it's the story of a contemporary man who lives completely off nature, wears buckskin clothing, which he makes, slept for seventeen years in a teepee, and eats only what he can grow, forage or hunt. That's impressive enough, but add a shrewd business sense, one that acquired 1,000 acres of prime mountain top real-estate in late 1980's North Carolina, by touring schools and selling nature as a way of life, and you've got a pretty complicated man.

Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love, exercises her professional journalism skills and talks to everyone from Eustace's family and former Turtle Island apprentices (lots of them) and his many, many ex-girlfriends to paint a picture of what a passionate, enthusiastic, talented, egotistical, impossible man Eustace Conway is. Gilbert's frank and self-deprecating voice, as in Eat, Pray, Love, is endearing and conversational as she explores, above all, the dysfunctional relationship Eustace Conway has with his father, Eustace Conway. To be dismissive, they're both assholes. But life is never so simple and Gilbert demonstrates exactly that, in succinct, if not polished, prose.

Eustace Conway is an idealist, a dreamer, a believer with a partial blindness to his own faults, like so many of us, and an inability to get around himself. It was a roller coaster for me - I liked him, then I didn't like him. Gilbert spends a lot of time justifying Eustace's behavior because his father was such an asshole, to which I want shake them both (author & subject) and tell them, get over it, forgive the man and work on your own self! She also spends a lot of time delivering Eustace's sermons on the crisis we Americans are in, namely, that we've lost our common sense, that we are too emotional, too entitled, and have become something very close to milquetoast (agreed).

And in the end, I like Eustace Conway. I like what he represents. I like that he makes me want to learn to hunt and skin a deer, to be completely self-sustaining, that I could survive if I needed to, without the burdens of material things. I like that he's trying to figure out how to be truly happy.

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