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APRIL 2012
01/04/12 13:56
Jeanette Winterson. Poet, Hero, Veg Vendor!
Jeanette Winterson has sparkly eyes and a house in Spitalfields. She sells organic vegetables to Pearly Kings and Queens. A poet-hero, she has fought and won many battles with words and stories – the taking in and the giving out of them. Jean Genet once said, To escape from horror, bury yourself in it. Vanquishing your demons is not for the faint of heart, and *Wintersonworld is a brave world where you write-on-the-body… you suit up, show up and commence the battle, with compassion and poetry as the weapons you wield on your demons. Not that the battle is ever final. Demons have a way of behaving like ducks at a carnival stall; shoot one down and three more pop up in its place.
No matter how dark the journeys or countless the ducks, Jeanette emerges victorious and never fails to bring us the elixir.
Literature and music can save you. Art can save you, no matter how deep the water you find yourself swirling in. You need merely reach. Ask Jeanette.
Jeanette gave a reading at my local bookstore Skylight recently during her tour of the States to promote her new book, Why Be Happy When You Could be Normal? It was her first time in L.A., and I wonder what she thought of it? She stood on a wooden box to reach the microphone, without embarrassment (I empathize, being a shorty too). She was warm, intimate, funny. Giving of herself and vulnerable, speaking about her dark nights of the soul. She talked about writing, memory and art, and the flux that is life. And love of course. As she read from her new book, she changed certain words in her text to accommodate the Yank audience; for instance, phone box to phone booth. I think she even changed pips to money. (A small thing, but the mark of a giver.)
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit was published in 1985 when Jeanette was 25 years old and is a fictionalized account of her growing up, featuring many of the same stories as her new book, which is memoir. An interesting fact that she used her real name as the protagonist in Oranges, and her publishers backed up her choice and called it fiction. I understand the fiction of Oranges... that sometimes a journey can be so rough, you make up people to help you along the way, especially when there were none. Here in the U.S. we have such finite (and absurd) lines drawn around what is what in the world of writing and memory (memoir), which does an enormous injustice to literature overall and works only to sever it from art. But I shall not rant, aside from saying that with the success of Jeanette’s new book and a renewed interest in her writing, one can hope publishers here might begin to open themselves to a more poetic female voice in today’s American literature.
And so, Oranges was one version of the story. In Why Be Happy Jeanette comes around to a new telling of that story and so much more, stripped of all masks after a prodigious journey of 17 books. Adopted at birth by a somewhat unhinged Pentecostal mother, Jeanette only recently came to know the identity of her biological mother. The psychic battle with the mother might be the most fragile and dangerous duel of our lives, one that must be conquered if we are ever to individuate and become complete within ourselves, and it takes as long as it takes. In WBH, Jeanette faces the shadows of two mothers; one a phantasm until near the book’s conclusion, the other ominously larger than life. It is a brave, sometimes humorous and extremely moving account of coming to terms with the past, ultimately through forgiveness and love. Some readers will think Jeanette’s childhood worse than most. Was it really? How does one measure and compare the hurt of a childhood? The crucial question here is, how do we face our past and shake the fear that it will barricade our future from love? Not the many mad, amour fous of our youth which recklessness and a broken-heart can easily lead us to, but the love that stays. The love that can be, to quote JW, “as reliable as the sun”.
Love may be the most fear-inducing of all.
As Jeanette observes in WBH,
“It is never too late to learn to love. But it is frightening.”
Rather this fright, this learning, than the perpetual fear of facing our dark.
Another reason to admire Jeanette; her refusal to be defined by her sexuality, or have the books fixed as such. The universality of our experience as humans, no matter what stratum culture might assign us to is either in a work or it is not. In Wintersonworld, sex often lives in the realm of the shapeshifter. Open her fiction books and you may enter a vault filled with magical skins and dreams one can slip in and out of. The Passion, which I think of as Jeanette’s Orlando, still brings a catch to my throat. To romance language like that. To love like that; can it only exist in the dreaming? And love is the point, not the sex, the gender, the tag. To paint love with words that can levitate the spirit to a poetic ecstasy… into the mythic. This is the power of our greatest writers. And the greatest writers are always our greatest poets.
Do not pass up the opportunity to come to know this greatest of poets, Jeanette Winterson. Read her story in Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? If you have children, read them The Battle of the Sun, The King of Capri, The Lion, Unicorn and Me, and Tanglewreck (my personal fave).
Loving any lit that has to do with the warping of time, I also adored her novel Lighthousekeeping. Go to her WEBSITE where you can read about all the delicious books she’s written. That is, if you don’t know them. She mentioned starting a new novel soon… thrilling! And her website is fantastic. I go there to read the poems she posts, and her journal... and for suggestions on books to read (Alain de Botton’s Religion for Atheists, for one) and to pick up a few gardening tips in the bargain. I told you, she’s a giver. Find a copy of the BBC production of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, adapted for the screen by Jeanette, directed by Beebon Kidron. It has one of the sexiest seduction moments ever filmed, perfectly set in a Pentecostal church. The character Jessica sings the hymn 'He Touched Me' to a girl and, unbeknownst to the rest of the congregation, it isn't Jesus who is touching either. But then again, if Jesus is love, why wouldn't it be?
* For the purpose of this piece, I’ve referred to Wintersonworld as ‘all that is Jeanette’. I poached this from her twitter tag: Twitter@Wintersonworld.
No matter how dark the journeys or countless the ducks, Jeanette emerges victorious and never fails to bring us the elixir.
Literature and music can save you. Art can save you, no matter how deep the water you find yourself swirling in. You need merely reach. Ask Jeanette.
Jeanette gave a reading at my local bookstore Skylight recently during her tour of the States to promote her new book, Why Be Happy When You Could be Normal? It was her first time in L.A., and I wonder what she thought of it? She stood on a wooden box to reach the microphone, without embarrassment (I empathize, being a shorty too). She was warm, intimate, funny. Giving of herself and vulnerable, speaking about her dark nights of the soul. She talked about writing, memory and art, and the flux that is life. And love of course. As she read from her new book, she changed certain words in her text to accommodate the Yank audience; for instance, phone box to phone booth. I think she even changed pips to money. (A small thing, but the mark of a giver.)
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit was published in 1985 when Jeanette was 25 years old and is a fictionalized account of her growing up, featuring many of the same stories as her new book, which is memoir. An interesting fact that she used her real name as the protagonist in Oranges, and her publishers backed up her choice and called it fiction. I understand the fiction of Oranges... that sometimes a journey can be so rough, you make up people to help you along the way, especially when there were none. Here in the U.S. we have such finite (and absurd) lines drawn around what is what in the world of writing and memory (memoir), which does an enormous injustice to literature overall and works only to sever it from art. But I shall not rant, aside from saying that with the success of Jeanette’s new book and a renewed interest in her writing, one can hope publishers here might begin to open themselves to a more poetic female voice in today’s American literature.
And so, Oranges was one version of the story. In Why Be Happy Jeanette comes around to a new telling of that story and so much more, stripped of all masks after a prodigious journey of 17 books. Adopted at birth by a somewhat unhinged Pentecostal mother, Jeanette only recently came to know the identity of her biological mother. The psychic battle with the mother might be the most fragile and dangerous duel of our lives, one that must be conquered if we are ever to individuate and become complete within ourselves, and it takes as long as it takes. In WBH, Jeanette faces the shadows of two mothers; one a phantasm until near the book’s conclusion, the other ominously larger than life. It is a brave, sometimes humorous and extremely moving account of coming to terms with the past, ultimately through forgiveness and love. Some readers will think Jeanette’s childhood worse than most. Was it really? How does one measure and compare the hurt of a childhood? The crucial question here is, how do we face our past and shake the fear that it will barricade our future from love? Not the many mad, amour fous of our youth which recklessness and a broken-heart can easily lead us to, but the love that stays. The love that can be, to quote JW, “as reliable as the sun”.
Love may be the most fear-inducing of all.
As Jeanette observes in WBH,
“It is never too late to learn to love. But it is frightening.”
Rather this fright, this learning, than the perpetual fear of facing our dark.
Another reason to admire Jeanette; her refusal to be defined by her sexuality, or have the books fixed as such. The universality of our experience as humans, no matter what stratum culture might assign us to is either in a work or it is not. In Wintersonworld, sex often lives in the realm of the shapeshifter. Open her fiction books and you may enter a vault filled with magical skins and dreams one can slip in and out of. The Passion, which I think of as Jeanette’s Orlando, still brings a catch to my throat. To romance language like that. To love like that; can it only exist in the dreaming? And love is the point, not the sex, the gender, the tag. To paint love with words that can levitate the spirit to a poetic ecstasy… into the mythic. This is the power of our greatest writers. And the greatest writers are always our greatest poets.
Do not pass up the opportunity to come to know this greatest of poets, Jeanette Winterson. Read her story in Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? If you have children, read them The Battle of the Sun, The King of Capri, The Lion, Unicorn and Me, and Tanglewreck (my personal fave).
Loving any lit that has to do with the warping of time, I also adored her novel Lighthousekeeping. Go to her WEBSITE where you can read about all the delicious books she’s written. That is, if you don’t know them. She mentioned starting a new novel soon… thrilling! And her website is fantastic. I go there to read the poems she posts, and her journal... and for suggestions on books to read (Alain de Botton’s Religion for Atheists, for one) and to pick up a few gardening tips in the bargain. I told you, she’s a giver. Find a copy of the BBC production of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, adapted for the screen by Jeanette, directed by Beebon Kidron. It has one of the sexiest seduction moments ever filmed, perfectly set in a Pentecostal church. The character Jessica sings the hymn 'He Touched Me' to a girl and, unbeknownst to the rest of the congregation, it isn't Jesus who is touching either. But then again, if Jesus is love, why wouldn't it be?
* For the purpose of this piece, I’ve referred to Wintersonworld as ‘all that is Jeanette’. I poached this from her twitter tag: Twitter@Wintersonworld.
Check out the fabulous Michael Silverblatt interviewing Jeanette on KCRW's Bookworm, April 5th. <----click here
To Jeanette and to the future of her next novel,
may her duende be given full reign once again!
Remember, click pink for links!
© Adele Bertei, all rights reserved
DECEMBER 2011
18/12/11 12:29
Katherine Bertei
August 21st, 1933 – December 9th, 2011
My mother was magic. She loved music, dancing, and glamour, and she loved the movies most of all. I was recently told that until very close to her passing she continued to dress in her finest, putting on red lipstick and sunglasses to sit in the dayroom of her nursing home, where the attendants called her Miss Hollywood.
She called herself Kathy later in life, but until she was well into her forties, her nickname was Kitty. Kitty Ballou. The Italians on my father’s side came up with that one; a synthesis of Jane Fonda’s characters in Walk on the Wild Side (Kitty Twist) and Cat Ballou. Kitty. A name that suited her energy and her charm. Ballou was onomatopoeia. Bal-lou!
As a child, she held tight to the leg of a piano while her mother played honky tonk with a heavy left hand on the rhythm. She grew dreams to match the music in her blood. I want to describe for you what it was like for her, a woman in the 1950’s who imagined a life of movies and magic and poetry, stuck in a suburb of Cleveland with three children to raise and no father money to do it with. I want to tell you of her inner life transforming into something uncontrollable that separated her from her children. I want to describe to you how she struggled through most of her days and nights with a terrible illness. I want to pay her tribute, but today my voice is a leaky boat, in the air, on the paper.
I found a book by her favorite poet amongst her things, a book I had given her. I found a note in the book. The note poked another hole and now I'm in the flood with this photo of Kitty at 16 holding her step-brother and sister.
My mother, my movie star.
Play Me, for Katherine
NOV./DEC.
10/11/11 23:19
St. Thérèse of Lisieux
&
St. Teresa of Avila
Grandma Jo was raised a Catholic in French Canada but after my mother was born, she married a stern plank of German Lutheran piety who hated her piano. He knocked the notes and the saints right out of Grandma Jo. Or so he thought. She was a grand actress. When he went off to work, she’d bring me to her rose garden, into the secret of her worship and love of the Little Flower. He can’t see who the roses really are, or what they mean, and she’d shake her head in a sad gesture, fondling a velvet petal while she spoke. If you pray and devote yourself to St. Thérèse, the saint will send you a rose and your prayers will be answered.
When you behold a rose, what do you see? Everyone you meet will see that rose in a different light.
Can you imagine living only in the dark?
St. Teresa of Avila was another kind of saint who understood ecstatic union with God through self-mortification and suffering. I came to her when I was older, through a poet I knew whose devotion to her was more intellectual. She loved St. Teresa for her writing, her ecstatic poetry. The order of Carmelites that St. Teresa reformed in the 15th century was the same order that St. Thérèse of Lisieux would join at a mere 15 years old. Teresa of Avila knew God in a most intimate, mystical way, and her meditations turned her body into an ecstatic pulse of divinity. Entombed forever in Bernini’s statue, the heat of stars flooding her veins.
Do we honor the dead? Do we stop to think of all we’re forgetting? Do we write our own histories into all that we love, no matter the separation?
For Edith, Johanna, and Katherine, Teresa and Harry and Laura K. For all the children who've lost their mothers, for all who break free into the ecstacy of divine love, if only for a moment.
For You, tonight, the Little Flower of Lisieux lets fall a shower of roses.
Play Me
JUNE 2011
01/06/11 13:06
To a Bridge, and Another and On
The Ponte della Maddalena, also known as Ponte del Diavolo (the Devil’s bridge) crosses the Serchio River in Provincia di Lucca, Italia. It is alleged that the mason who built the bridge (around 1100 AD) was having great difficulty completing the construction when the Devil appeared to him as a businessman, offering to finish it in return for the soul of the first to cross. The cunning mason heartily agreed, the bridge was completed overnight, and the mason made good on his deal – he sent a pig over the bridge. This did not make for a happy Devil.
The roots of my dna are entwined with this bridge. My grandmother, Maria Maddalena, crossed the bridge (once presided over by a a statue of her namesake saint which stands no longer) from Borgo a Mozzano on her way to meet my grandfather en route from Sant’Anastasio. When I was little, my grandfather spoke of the Ponte del Diavolo née Maddalena in near reverential tones. Perhaps uncle Caeser and maybe my father too were conceived on this bridge, which would explain how the Devil broke into our bloodline. Yet this may have occurred a generation before when drunken stevedore grandfather Ange thought wings were his birthright. Devil be damned he leapt angelic into the sea, the Phare de Sainte Marie his only witness.
I have yet to see the Ponte della Maddalena and may just combust from excitement when I do because I am practically an anachronism, a shameless history-hussy.
Several men on my father’s side of the family emigrated to America when Mussolini came to power. They all ended up in Cleveland, which few think of as a City of Bridges yet thus it is known; there are over 330 bridges in the Cleveland area. Jackknife bascule, Roman arch, beam buttress and cantilever, the lexicon of the bridge has its own percussive poetry, and there has been no greater interpreter of bridgian lingua franca than 
Hart Crane.
Fellow Ohioan and high school dropout, Hart spent many formative years in Cleveland, whose bridges nourished the roots of his inspiration to write The Bridge. I uncovered a great essay by Olivier Alexis about Hart in Akron and Cleveland as part of the wonderful Cleveland Memory Project, where I also found this image of the Detroit-Superior bridge which connects Cleveland’s east and west sides over the Cuyahoga River.
To bridges, to crossings, to connection. To the industry of imagination which can unite over tricks of light, of near-impossibly breached chasms, I pass on this quote from Hart Crane, who fell in love and walked his Brooklyn Bridge:
“And I have been able to give freedom and life which was acknowledged in the ecstasy of walking hand in hand across the most beautiful bridge of the world, the cables enclosing us and pulling us upward in such a dance as I have never walked and never can walk with another.”
Girls on the Brooklyn Bridge, from the National Archives
© text 2011, Adele Bertei except where noted, all rights reserved
The Ponte della Maddalena, also known as Ponte del Diavolo (the Devil’s bridge) crosses the Serchio River in Provincia di Lucca, Italia. It is alleged that the mason who built the bridge (around 1100 AD) was having great difficulty completing the construction when the Devil appeared to him as a businessman, offering to finish it in return for the soul of the first to cross. The cunning mason heartily agreed, the bridge was completed overnight, and the mason made good on his deal – he sent a pig over the bridge. This did not make for a happy Devil.
The roots of my dna are entwined with this bridge. My grandmother, Maria Maddalena, crossed the bridge (once presided over by a a statue of her namesake saint which stands no longer) from Borgo a Mozzano on her way to meet my grandfather en route from Sant’Anastasio. When I was little, my grandfather spoke of the Ponte del Diavolo née Maddalena in near reverential tones. Perhaps uncle Caeser and maybe my father too were conceived on this bridge, which would explain how the Devil broke into our bloodline. Yet this may have occurred a generation before when drunken stevedore grandfather Ange thought wings were his birthright. Devil be damned he leapt angelic into the sea, the Phare de Sainte Marie his only witness.
I have yet to see the Ponte della Maddalena and may just combust from excitement when I do because I am practically an anachronism, a shameless history-hussy.
Fellow Ohioan and high school dropout, Hart spent many formative years in Cleveland, whose bridges nourished the roots of his inspiration to write The Bridge. I uncovered a great essay by Olivier Alexis about Hart in Akron and Cleveland as part of the wonderful Cleveland Memory Project, where I also found this image of the Detroit-Superior bridge which connects Cleveland’s east and west sides over the Cuyahoga River.
To bridges, to crossings, to connection. To the industry of imagination which can unite over tricks of light, of near-impossibly breached chasms, I pass on this quote from Hart Crane, who fell in love and walked his Brooklyn Bridge:
“And I have been able to give freedom and life which was acknowledged in the ecstasy of walking hand in hand across the most beautiful bridge of the world, the cables enclosing us and pulling us upward in such a dance as I have never walked and never can walk with another.”
Girls on the Brooklyn Bridge, from the National Archives
© text 2011, Adele Bertei except where noted, all rights reserved
MAY 2011
01/05/11 00:14
1950 - 2010
“You make some beauty Miss Talbot, out of this dark river country.”
- from The Fugitive Kind, Tennessee Williams
I met Honey in New York City while working on Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames, and I liked her immediately. She reminded me of the girls I’d been in reform school with… a veteran, having made it through the kinds of wars I knew. Tough, yet with a tremendous sweetness just beneath, and a voice any choir would be proud of.
In Born in Flames, Honey played the character who ran the subversive black radio station, I the white. She played the gentle spirit of passive resistance, I the raging bull___ of radical revolution. Although she remained a gentle spirit, she could never give up drinking and when she drank, she imagined she gained control enough to become one with the demons who haunted her. She scared me when she drank, and she drank a lot. So did I, drank and chased dragons and breathed white light white heat, watching nights on end go by without sleep or solace or thought of future.
After the filming I went into a very dark period in NYC. Drugs nearly buried me. I found myself walking the street barefoot, all the money I had in the world in a brown paper lunch bag. Somehow I was able to make a call, to Lizzie’s loft. Honey answered, and asked, “Where are you?” I told her, and sat down on a stoop to cry. Running from so very much had me finally hitting the wall as it ran back toward me, and when we collided, all the pieces flew. I couldn’t gather them up. I could not feel my fingers, or the ground beneath my feet.
Honey came to collect me.
She took me to Lizzie’s loft, stroked my head and drew me a hot bath. This was not romance, this was medicine. She took out a book and read to me by candlelight and I heard the call, soft and beckoning, like velvet in the room come to cloak me. Like a mother. The book was Science and Health, by Mary Baker Eddy.
Eddy believed thought created good or evil conditions, including disease, and that through faith and right belief, one could be healed. Honey believed Eddy, and in a God who I knew had forsaken me long ago for no reason I could fathom. And if I were to judge the circumstances of her life, He had forsaken Honey too. Yet she did not feel the same as I. And as she read to me, my having no belief in anything and only her voice to hang on to, I felt a growing buoyancy, a life raft building there, and I hung on. I came to trust that I could be healed by faith in something I’d felt had abandoned me and I replaced the name of God with Love. It was just that simple. Because Honey chose to love me in that moment, I chose to love everything, including life, when I felt utterly empty, alone, worthless. Her words, Eddy’s words becoming one filled me with light and I broke down into the embrace of their promise. I became like the man in his fifth year of epiphany, the man in the Carson McCullers story, A Tree, A Rock, A Cloud. I surrendered to a force much bigger and infinitely kinder than my own hurt. And I began to heal.
Lizzie had an old upright piano in her loft, worse for wear, but it still held a tune. During that week as I grew stronger, Honey and I would sit at that piano and sing harmony to a song she wrote called Tropical Storm, a song about the sky falling on a world of fantasy… we must have sang that song a thousand times, and one afternoon we were singing at the top of our lungs when the loft door flew open and a tiny nun, a NUN! in full regalia was standing there grinning at us like the Cheshire Cat. We howled with laughter and so did the Sister, as if it were a staged walk-on blessing, and she disappeared just as quickly as we’d conjured her.
I’ll always be grateful for the woman who gave me the time and the choice to see through a different prism. The goose-bump resonance of our voices together in song lifted me. Made me able to choose this, and this again. Honey had a beautiful voice, as strong and as steady as a church bell tolling the hour. I imagine that when she sang, Honey felt healed too. Music can do that.
Honey died in June of 2010. She suffered from congestive heart problems and was 60 years old when she left. Although she lived alone in a Y in Springfield, Mass., the last year of her life wasn’t lonely, for she had fallen in love and her love was returned. I wonder if the loss of control that walks arm in arm with falling in love led her to drink more than she usually did. The night she passed, she drank. A sailor floating in her own warm boat of sweet oblivion, her heart gave out while she slept, and she passed away from this world without knowing the seam had been gently torn asunder.
An audio prayer by Honey.Honey in Paris, photo courtesy Lizzie Borden
© 2011 text by Adele Bertei, all rights reserved