Louisa May Alcott as a Detective

This is a reissue, in trade paperback, of a book originally published in 2004. Upon rereading the book I see that my original opinion has not changed, in fact I enjoyed the book even more the second time around when, knowing the plot, I could concentrate on the author's rich prose style. The new format makes the book even easier to read, and the new cover design is more appealing than the previous one. The publisher is still Penguin but the book is now out under the Obsidian imprint. Alison Lurie writing in the The New York Review of Books calls it: "A historically accurate and entertaining mystery series." The two other volumes will be reissued in the coming months.

A new sleuth has arrived on the scene, the author Louisa May Alcott. Ms. Alcott was known to have written a few thrillers herself when not writing things like "Little Women." Anna Maclean has gone back and recreated this aspect of Louisa's life with amazing fidelity; however Ms. Alcott does not just write mysteries, but also solves them.

Written with the precision and skill of her historical novels, Jean Mackin creates a minor masterpiece in her debut as Anna Maclean, mystery writer. The plot winds itself in and around pre-Civil War Boston with the beauty and complexity of a Medieval tapestry. The story is entangled with numerous characters functioning on many levels, often seeming to contradict themselves, leading us down many blind alleys. I must admit I could not put this book down. Just when I thought I had figured out who the guilty party was I discovered some new reason why they did not do it. The ending is quite a surprise. If you are looking for an entertaining historical mystery, and value good writing, I give this book my highest recommendation.

ISBN 978-0-451-23324-0 $14.00 U.S. 16.50 CAN. 319 pages

COLORS: Passages through Art, Asia, and Nature

A Review
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Sarah Sutro’s book, COLORS: Passages through Art, Asia, and Nature, can perhaps be described by Bill McKibben’s words from the preface: “This book is quite literally about local color—about where color came from, or came from before it was synthesized and globalized in the same manner as food and music and pretty much everything else. When that happened much of the meaning drained out of color, just as it drained out of everything else.” However, the book also is about much more.

COLORS is about the life of an artist, and how art grows inside of a person. It is about how an artist can see art in the most insignificant of things, and how, once that art has been discovered, it must be brought out, despite all obstacles set in front of its creation.

In this book we learn of the author’s, who is also a visual artist, quest for beauty and truth in Nature. Sarah Sutro is an “artist’s artist,” as well as a teacher, a wife and mother, an intrepid traveler, and a cancer survivor. In her travels to many places exotic and mundane, all described in the book, Sarah is always looking, and learning, and making art. Hers is a pure and precious cultural quest, producing work that reaches a wide audience.

COLORS is a fine book, well written and filled with interesting stories, history, memories, observations, morals, and recipes for dyes as well as food. If you have never thought about why things are certain colors, or how this affects your life, you should read this book.

Highly Recommended

BLUE ASIA PRESS
N. Adams, MA (USA)
Paperback, 129 pages, ISBN: 9781456373337

AND YOUR BIRD CAN SING

A 1966 VILLAGE VOICE listing describes Stephen Poleskie’s The Bird Film as “allegorical slapstick.” That’s half right. While the comical chaos of the film certainly is slapstick, it’s hard to find much in the way of allegory, and this is to the film’s credit.

The Bird Film opens with an American flag, then a figure in binoculars and a funny hat (the “birdwatcher”) rises into the shot. The political viewer, aware that this film was made in a famously turbulent era, might be tempted to begin reading allegorically at this point, but would find that reading stunted, probably less than a minute later when the birdwatcher is attacked by an actor in a bear mask, who is in turn attacked by the Indian, who wears a box on his head that is painted in the “exotic” colors you might expect one of any number of cartoon Indians to wear. Instead of allegory, The Bird Film gives us something much more valuable: a short work made by young artists who are clearly enjoying experimentation with the form

The Bird Film is an 18 minute chase scene. Troublesome narrative components such as plot and character are left out, though to say that the chase simply serves to move the film forward wouldn’t be true. There is a certain order being followed here. After all, the film begins with a birdwatcher, who chases after the bird (played by Warhol superstar Deborah Lee). A bear chases the birdwatcher. An Indian chases the bear. As it turns out, the birdwatcher, the bear, and the Indian, all end up chasing the bird.

Scenes range from an imaginary environment constructed in a Manhattan loft to a creek, where the bird lady performs interpretive dance in the water, to a pretty pasture that was the farm of Elaine de Kooning (the film’s associate producer).

Deborah Lee plays the bird with the aloof grace of a dancer performing for no one but herself. She pauses from time to time to pose and reflect. As a director, Poleskie indulges himself by letting Lee poetically extend her arms, bend her legs, and arch her back, imbuing the short with a dream-like quality to break up the slapstick of the chase.

Watching The Bird Film once through, you enjoy it for its levity, strangeness, and photographic beauty. A second time through, you begin to notice things you didn’t notice the first time around. A man in a wheelbarrow reads a Daily News with the headline, “Gangs Raid 2 Subway Trains.” The next time we see him, about 20 seconds later, he is reading a New York Post with the headline, “Break In Miss.” Go ahead and watch it a third time. Your enjoyment is likely to increase with each viewing, but if you want to find out what it all means, you may want to take your business elsewhere. The Bird Film is a celebration more than it is a statement.

My favorite scene in The Bird Film occurs at about the 13 minute mark. After dodging the birdwatcher, the bear, and the Indian, the bird pauses on a rock to pose before a spring. The soundtrack at this point turns from hectic chase scene instrumentation to ethereal vocals. Deborah Lee turns to the camera, smiles, and lifts her arms in a gesture that says “Is this what I’m supposed to be doing?” In the same way the newspaper headlines hint at a world somewhere on the outside, Lee’s gesture, a shot that would have been edited out of a more “serious” film, speaks to the youthful chaos and joy that beats at this work’s center.

Stephen Poleskie, director and writer of The Bird Film (1966), is an Ithaca based artist, writer, and photographer. His artwork is in the collections of numerous museums, including the Metropolitan Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Tate Gallery in London. His writing has appeared in journals such as American Writing and Essays & Fictions, and he has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Poleskie wrote and directed The Bird Film. The Bird Film will be showing this Friday, May 6, at Arcades Project. The film will be looped continually throughout the night.

David Nelson Pollock is a founder of Arcades Project and a co-founding editor of Essays & Fictions.

Tagged as: Arcades Project, Bird Film, David Nelson Pollock, Stephen Poleskie, The Commons

ACORN'S CARD: a review

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ACORN'S CARD is a novella and two accompanying short stories. In the title novella an AWOL soldier returns to the downstairs after thirty-three years of hiding in his mother’s attic to find the old woman dead. But what should he do with her body? He can’t just call an undertaker—he is supposed to have died years ago. And how will he provide for himself, as his mother has left little money in the house? By chance a pre-approved credit card application arrives in the mail. John Acorn fills it out and a card is issued to him. Now he can buy whatever he wants, with no thought of how he will pay when the statement comes. He decides to buy a used hearse and drive his mother to the cemetery and bury her. But first John will take his mother on a ride, during which he finds the world considerably changed from what he remembered it to be. Meanwhile, the hearse has a plan of its own. You will be surprised by the ending of this strange and fascinating story.

In the first of the short stories an immigrant plumber bribes a policeman into not giving him a traffic ticket with a loaf of bread; while in the other a plastic garbage bag flies around the sky looking for a new beginning.

Poleskie’s plots are brilliantly conceived and original. He is a skillful writer with a brilliant sense of the language, at times probing, yet glorious and magical, much in the manner of Bruno Schulz. If you prefer your reading a bit out of the ordinary, and you still understand what a metaphor is, Acorn’s Card is an excellent choice.

Highly Recommended

Acorn’s Card

Onager Editions, 2011, ISBN 978 -1- 60047 – 558 – 0

Paperback, 125 pages, $12.00 USD

http://www.amazon.com/Acorns-Card-Stephen-Poleskie/dp/1600475582/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1304216133&sr=1-1

HAYWIRE: a review

Having grown up in northeastern Pennsylvania, in a time before "bullying" had become a hot topic for TV talk show hosts, I can relate to the plight of the narrator of Thaddeus Rutkowski's latest novel HAYWIRE. Back then to be different: shorter, smarter, reads books, makes art, and doesn't play sports, was a good reason to be beaten up, or have your head split with a rock. Rutkowski's hero has all of the above, plus he is biracial The boy grows up, despite a repressive father, and gets on with his life in this witty and sometimes sad novel.

Written in a deadpan manner, the reader is pulled along at a fast pace. Alison Lurie has called Rutkowski, "one of the most original writers in America today. Author Ned Vizzini says: "HAYWIRE aims high and succeeds brilliantly. Fine writing and hilarity were to be expected -- what surprises is the underlying message of hope in a unforgiving world."

At times giddy and slightly surrealistic, HAYWIRE is highly moralistic, providing us with a look at the recent past, while posing questions about the future. This can clearly be seen in the books last paragraph: On my way up the mountain, I find that the slope is not only steep, it's vertical. There's a steel ladder I can hold on to, but even when I'm holding on, I'm afraid of falling. I look for a place to rest, a flat area where I can get off the ladder. But I don't see any ledges wide enough to stand on. Moving sideways would lead to empty air. So I keep climbing.

Highly Recommended
~Sidney Grayling

HAYWIRE Thaddeus Rutkowski Starcherone Books, Buffalo, NY, ISBN 978-0-9842133-1-3 298 pages, USD $18.00

PRISM

JEANNE MACKIN

Wherever chiaroscuro enters, colour must lose some of its brilliancy. There is no shade in a rainbow, nor in an opal, nor in a piece of mother-of-pearl

– John Ruskin

LIGHT CAN BE SLOWED DOWN, can be made to reconsider its own path, its own desire for velocity. When light passes through glass, moving from thin air to that other more substantial material, it slows and makes a slight detour we call refraction. Refraction is matter’s way of saying: “Let’s rethink this.” Shine light through a diamond and it slows its speed by almost half because of the density of the crystal. If you lived inside a diamond, you would be twenty-five when your peers were fifty; you would live twice as long, and twice as slowly.

That Thanksgiving Day it was warm, and humid, so after dinner we went outside, full of a strange energy. In the western sky over the new-growth forest, we saw a triple rainbow. A double happens once in a while, but there were three in the sky that day after the storm, one inside the other, and we looked at them, knowing we would never see such a thing again, no matter how long we lived. The rarity of it locked us into silence; we grappled with the event the way medievalists must have contended with comets or halos around the moon, with wonder and fear as well. Wonder and fear refract our direction, bend it into new paths. The wonder takes hold of us and says “I have caught you. The fear says “I am going to change you whether you wish it or not. From now on, up will be down, and inside will be outside.” But wonder cannot last. Colors fade, especially in a rainbow.

After matter emerged from chaos, the first miracle was the creation of light, and with light came time. With time, came shadows. When the triple rainbow began to fade, we came to ourselves, the way sleepers awake, slowly and with confusion. We went back indoors carrying new desires with us and I wished I had seen the triple rainbow when I was a child, not a grown up. I think somehow things would have been different. I cleared the table of our dirtied dishes and glasses and the vase of yellow garden mums.

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Author’s biography

JEANNE MACKIN is the author of several novels and has published short fiction and creative nonfiction in journals and periodicals including American Letters and Commentary and SNReview. She was the recipient of a creative writing fellowship from the American Antiquarian Society and is an award-winning journalist. She teaches creative writing in the MFA Program at Goddard College in Vermont.

“Prism” is an excerpt from a text to accompany photographs by artist Steve Poleskie. The text and photo exhibit, titled “Light and Shadow” will be exhibited at Bright Hill Literary Center in Treadwell, New York, in June 2011.

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Did Lindberg Have a Secret Copilot?

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A Review

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In his latest novel, “Vigilia’s Tempest,” author Stephen Poleskie confronts history as it has been written by posing the question: What if Charles Lindbergh had a secret copilot with him to keep him from falling asleep on his famous flight from New York to Paris, and what if the man who flew with him was still alive? If he could be found, what would he tell us? And why has he kept hidden all these years? Poleskie, an aviator himself, constructs this complicated and perplexing story with a virtuoso display of practical expertise, compassion, and poetic vibrancy.

When John Vigilia, a well-known American stunt pilot, and university professor, lands at an abandoned air base in Canada to avoid a thunderstorm he meets a strange old man named Caliban who tells him the story of his twin brother, Ariel, who as a young boy flew with Charles Lindbergh as his secret copilot on his famous solo trans-Atlantic flight. The copilot was supposedly picked up in Nova Scotia and dropped off on a beach in Ireland, while Lindberg went on to Paris, and to fame, alone. Seeking a diversion after his wife’s sudden death, John Vigilia travels to Europe to explore the truth behind the Lindbergh story he had heard. Unexpectedly, John finds himself in the middle of a decades-old international intrigue. Has John discovered the conspiracy of the century, or is it just the old man’s hoax? And why is John Vigilia now being followed everywhere, and has had an attempt made on his life? One might be tempted to call “Vigilia’s Tempest” a “literary thriller.”

Poleskie takes Vigilia through a series of adventures in Ireland, Rome, Como, and Munich, before finally allowing him to catch up with the alleged copilot, Ariel Angelucci, in Locarno, Switzerland. Ariel reveals that he was indeed in the airplane with Lindbergh when he flew across the Atlantic. Not sure if he believes Ariel’s story, Vigilia takes the man up for a flight in a biplane to see if he really knows how to fly. The old man wants to do some “stunts,” but has a heart attack at the top of a loop, jamming the controls and causing John to crash.

John Vigilia wakes up confined in a private clinic on an island in the Lago Maggiore. He is told that, despite what he believes, there was no one in the airplane with him when he crashed. When his injuries heal, but he is not released, John realizes that he is being held prisoner at the clinic because of what he now knows.

Does Vigilia ever get off the island? I am not going to spoil it by telling you. Suffice it to say that he has a few more adventures, and even a love affair, yet to go before the end of the book. The conclusion is both tragic and uplifting, as are all Poleskie’s endings, confirming the author’s strong sense of the continuity of life.

Poleskie, who writes with a rich and full vocabulary, in the manner of such European authors as Bruno Schulz and Witold Gombrowicz, and with the dark praise of obscurity and failure found in Fernando Pessoa, also manages a tip of the hat to William Shakespeare. “Vigilia’s Tempest” is filled with numerous storms, an island, and character names and chapter quotes from Shakespeare’s play “The Tempest.” At 500 pages this is the longest of Poleskie’s novels to date, but the plot’s many characters and interesting twists will keep the reader engrossed until the very end, and then even wanting more.

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Sidney Grayling

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Trafford Publishing, Victoria, BC, 2010, ISBN: 978-1-4269-2946

To view the video trailer click link below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JY5eCVRnDw0

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Available from www.Amazon.com