AUTHOR: Joel Sax DATE: 7/29/2002 11:15:30 PM ----- BODY:

Surrealism as Definition


Style Dictionary: A visualization -- exploration -- transformation -- mutation -- documentation -- classification -- free-association -- interpretation AND exact quotations of fashion terms and a collection of past works by Ruben Toledo


Those who think of a dictionary as a collection of words defined by short articles and, perhaps, illustrated with some small, exacting pictures will be surprised by this book. Those who expect a reference book to give them concise definitions that leave no doubts (and yet plenty of doubts) about the nature of the thing defined will probably not consider this a useful addition to their "knowledge base". Such people who shiver when they see skyscrapers turn into women, vegetables transmogrifying into models, or wooden mannequins wearing bras made of skin will shun this book. Dull people who just see these combinations as weird, uninformative, and not the least bit funny probably best not crack the covers.


Labeling this work as a "dictionary" might seem misleading and heretical to some. coverThe odd pictures that borrow from the traditions of Bosche and the Surrealists don't define in the style to which we have become accustomed. The book is only half a dictionary, or rather half an abecenary and half a collection of drawings by the artist. It's filled with a lot of "silly things" that don't allow us to do with a dictionary what we think a dictionary should be used for. Nothing here is neat and measured out. Lots of things are ambiguous and downright bizarre. If you look to put things into orderly words, you will feel lost and, perhaps, that you have wasted your money. I know I am attempting to describe this thing you have never seen before by saying which of the usuals it is not. It's like describing a gharial by saying it is not a crocodile or an alligator, not a snake, not a lizard, a fish, a toad, a mammal, or other kind. I can say "crocodile and alligator" come closest to describing what a gharial is and, when you first look at it, you will be struck by the similarities, but there are things about gharials that do not match either of these creatures. And likewise, "dictionary" comes closer than a lot of terms in describing what Toledo has done here. But it is not really a dictionary. Not in the usual sense. Toledo doesn't show just show the things and name them. He plays with them and it is in his play that you start to learn something about fashion. As Richard Martin says in the introduction "Toledo is the artist who gives us the vocabulary and unforgettable images that meld fashion at its most ephermeral and impressionable with style at its most abiding."


To recapitulate: lexicographical despots will despise this book because it is not neatly laid out in pigeon holes and includes a long, psychotic second half arranged in no decent order by the standards of dictionary writers. Hunters of tropes like myself will love this book. It shows more than just the things named by such words as merkin, drag queen, S-curve, high heels, bikini, and dress: it grants insight into the creative minds that are constantly trying to create the stuff that we consumers will buy. It dares to comment on trends in the tastes of designers in the language that is not a language that designers use themselves to create the things they drape over anorexic models. This is a book that will entertain many and ennervate the poets to make new associations, new visions, new meanings.

-------- AUTHOR: Joel Sax DATE: 7/12/2002 09:56:50 PM ----- BODY:

Zoo of the Damned


A Gap in Nature: Discovering the World's Extinct Animals by Stephen F. Flannery and Peter Schouten


Lighthouse keeper David Lyall was lonely, so he brought a cat to live with him. Lyall's post, Stephen's Island, lay in the Cook Strait, the oceanic fracture that splits New Zealand. Many species of flightless bird -- moas, kakapos, kiwis -- lived on the islands before the the successive invasions of the Maori and the British. Hunting by humans and their pets exterminated all but a few of these.


Stephens Island was the last stand of a relic of the days before the humans brought their dogs, their pigs, and rats to the island, covera tiny flightless bird that scampered about "like mice" on the remote rock. Lyall's cat enjoyed the sport of hunting them. Every few days, it would bring one of the avians home to Daddy, who sent seventeen of the less ravaged carcasses to distant museums. After a year of its predation, this cat single-handedly pushed the Stephen's Island wren into extinction. No other feline has served in the exclusive capacity as death angel for a whole species.


Flannery and Scouten have written a marvellous, tear-provoking coffee table book. Schouten's pictures recreate the living semblances of some 103 creatures of land, sea, and air, many of which are known only from skeletons, skins, or pickled cadavers. Flannery's accompanying text tells the stories of egg plunder, habitat destruction, over-hunting, and species invasion that killed off the Dodo, the Stellar's Sea Cow, the Great Auk, the Labrador Duck, the Thyalacine, and many other creatures we will never see again. "[T]his has been one of the most exciting projects I have ever been involved in," Flannery writes in the preface, "because it has allowed me to capture....a tiny flicker of the wonder of the lost world."


Not so long ago, I paid a visit to the San Diego Wild Animal Park where three of the last northern white rhinos spend their last days. Visitors stood up in the tram to get a glimpse of the distant beasts. In a few years, all we will have of these are photos, bones, skins, and tissue samples. A Gap in Nature does achieve Flannery and Schouten's aim of making us think about the legacy of biological diversity that our rapacious ways have cost us. Will books like this save what is left? Alas. The northern white rhino appears to be doomed nonetheless.

-------- AUTHOR: Joel Sax DATE: 7/5/2002 12:19:28 PM ----- BODY:

A Ranger in The Glove Compartment


Roadside Geology of Arizona by Halka Chronic


Roadside Geology of Utah by Halka Chronic


No person in their his or her right mind visits Arizona or Utah in the middle of the summer. The best season, Spring, is already past, and the next best season, Autumn, comes around in mid-October. Plenty of people who do not check temperature charts will go there heedlessly. May their air conditioners not fail them as they drive from visitor center to visitor center!


Given that a healthy hike or a four wheel drive trip amid the scenic wonders of the region is probably out of the question for the sane, coverthe next best thing is to stay in the car, stick to the main highways, and place one of the Roadside Geology Series handbooks on the dashboard. These guides cover all the main-travelled roads of the states that they describe.


I've used the two guides reviewed here and my experience with them gives me confidence enough to recommend the whole series to you. Segments of the major highways are described in detail down to the last butte. Appendices in the back describe special places off the main roads like national parks or Utah's Goblin Valley. You can either enlist a car-sick resistant reader to call off the entries as you hit the signposts or you can stop at the junctions named in the book and read ahead, noting for your own amusement the sights to come. Each book begins with a chapter about geology basics that you can review preparatory to your encounter with the massive land forms of the desert southwest. Each concludes with a lucid glossary of geological terms.


In between, you will find richly illustrated text, featuring maps, tables, cross-sections, and photographs designed to help you visualize where you are both spatially and temporally. coverThis book will doubtless not make those who subscribe to the Old Farmer's Almanac estimate of the age of the earth very happy, but anyone who wants a true perspective on the gargantuan forces that made the land what it is today will love this book. The Arizona book does a better job of linking geologic features to the signposts along the highway. The Utah book misses some good major roads and has not caught up with the development of the Escalante/Grand Staircase National Monument. Nonetheless, this is the guide to have for those long hours between places, when the land roars and coughs in technicolor without the helpful interpretative signs you find in the national and state parks.


Having one of these along for the trip is like packing your very own ranger in the glove compartment. Mountain Press Publishing Company has issued more books for other states such as Alaska, Pennsylvania, Texas, northern California, and New York, to name a few. See the earth as you have never understood it before. Make one of these handbooks your personal expert for scenes along the highway.


Other Roadside Geology Series Books

-------- AUTHOR: Joel Sax DATE: 6/29/2002 12:15:39 PM ----- BODY:

Parallel Journies to Hedonism and Holiness


Route 66 A.D. : On the Trail of Ancient Roman Tourists by Tony Perrottet


The Romans were surprisingly like we are today. They were mostly a moral people whose women, Tony Perrottet reports, covered their breasts while making love. There existed, however, an upper class that dedicated itself to hedonistic pleasures of the most carnal order, a class that attracted the rebuke of middle class Empire citizens such as the apostle Paul. Evidence from sites such as Pompei and Ephesus reveal that upper class Romans would have formed something very much like certain sectors of the InterNet. Instead, however, they had to walk, ride, or sail places. It took longer and a journey into pleasure could take years. Still, with one's copy of Pausanias in hand, you could spend this time well-occupied, either in prayer at the various shrines along the way or in joyful debauch.


Perrottet both describes the life of the Roman traveler of 66 A.D. and the modern covertourist of today who tramps over the same roads that toga-clad philosophers and bacchanalians took. This, Perrottet claims, is the most heavilly touristed part of the world today, as it was in the beginning. Tourists go to the same sites for pretty much the same reasons: to Pompei to enjoy the pornography; to Athens to look at the ancient ruins; to the Peloponnese to visit the notable shrines such as Olympia and hidden monasteries in the mountains; to Ephesus to marvel at the city; to Troy and nearby Gallipoli to remember dead forebears; and to Egypt to see the pyramids. He compares and contrasts things such as lodging, dining, the problem of booking ship passages, the problem of being sick on the road, and the purchase of souvenirs inscribed or engraved with mementos of the sites seen along the way.


Though most of the places he mentions are in ruins, Perrottet sees them as living still. We walk, ride, float, and ride with him through all the magical places that the Romans loved to see and to some new ones bearing the imprint of Christianity and wars in the centuries subsequent to the original travelers' accounts. We meet men who are pilgrims, others who are patients, and others who are simple bohemians seeking variety. We follow the Emperor Nero among the Greeks (the only people, he felt, who knew how to appreciate him) and get to know them today. We get a taste of the cocksuredness of young Julius Caesar taken in by the pirates (he made them quintuple the ransom they were asking for him because he felt it was too low for a man of his quality) and we get to see his modern versions, the ugly Americans, Israelis, Koreans, Japanese, Australians, Englishmen, and what ever else he falls across along the way.


This book has caused me to revisit my own experiences along the part of the road that Tony Perrottet and I shared. And it has rekindled in me a long dormant love for the Roman and Greek classics, those prototypes of the modern novel, short story, travelogue, and poem rescued for us by monks from the book burnings of the Middle Ages or simply laid to rest in an impromptu archaeological cemetery. As I read Perrottet, I often found myself being back in Greece, my memories projected against a marble cliff face part-overgrown with struggling cypresses. I'm not quite so crass about the Greek people, but then I have also visited some of the places that foreign tourists seldom go. Perrottet is often dead on in his descriptions of Greece today. And though sometimes he becomes disgusted with the commercialism of the tourist stops and the people who inhabit them, he retains a sense of fondness, both for what was and what is today. It's a true book, an honest book about a man in time and trying to see between times, a journey full of the pleasures both of the flesh and of the spirit.


At the time of this writing, the hardcover edition is selling at 30% off. It's a good read to take along as you face the crowds of summer in those secret places that everyone knows about now.

-------- AUTHOR: Joel Sax DATE: 6/24/2002 01:36:42 PM ----- BODY:

Two unique helps for the Writer


Here are a pair of books for journal keepers and other creative writers that I think will prove especially useful. I use both, constantly these days. Both of them are in a style that might be described as "books written along side books". In other words, you have more than one useful chain of thought to prompt you in your creations.

The Describer's Dictionary: A Treasury of Terms and Literary Quotations by David Grambs


If The Describer's Dictionary were only a dictionary, I don't think it would be a very special book at all. David Grambs has coveraccumulated some excellent word lists in this "reverse dictionary" (he is also the editor of Bernstein's Reverse Dictionary, 2nd edition) -- currently out of print) and I've dog-eared my copy using them. Sometimes the words may be a little too erudite and technical for the average writer to use except as an occasional gem: How many of you are excited and informed by the word scaroid for example? (It refers to creatures that are "parrot-fish like".) Other sections are dedicated to colors, shapes, species adjectives, walks, eye color, and other aspects of the physical world. Useful to me is a brief, if incomplete, summary of modern architectural styles. But this alone does not make for a versatile work.


What distinguishes this work is it's double format. Opposite each page of word lists are quotations drawn from literary sources that pertain directly to the word list. Grambs shows you ways not to be trapped by the adjectives he lists on the facing page. He gives you a sense of the broader possibilities for description and reminds you that your job is to create your own image, not just present a technical description. I've dog-eared my copy of this as I've used it as a prompt for my personal writing projects.


A Writer's Book of Days: A Spirited Companion and Lively Muse for the Writing Life
by Judy Reeves


I don't think I would have discovered the other great books of prompts if I hadn't flipped through a Cal State Fullerton extension course catalog and taken the "Fictionalizing Real Life" course given by coverSan Diego author Judy Reeves. The book is pretty much like Judy is in real life: it sends you off many different paths in search of your true writing self with quick takes and deep inner searches. The crudest description of this book is that it is a calendar, a list of "meditations" you can pursue in your writing each day. Today (June 24), for example, Judy suggests the subject "This is what you can see by starlight". She readily admits that any half-way dedicated student of writing can do the same thing and while I have found her prompts useful, this isn't why I recommend this book.


Though this book calls itself a "book of days", the subtitle tells more of the truth. Judy has assembled a wondrous clutter of articles, topic lists, quotations, and writing trivia. In this month's chapter, for example, she gives examples of how various writers have used dreams to drive their work, how we can turn on and turn off "the muse", how you can tell if your writing is improving, what you might write about on the road, and a guaranteed, writer's block-busting tip for getting out all the details before you even think about inviting your inner editor to reshape the material.


A good sign of a book for writers is that you want to carry it everywhere you go. I haven't owned A Writer's Book of Days as long as I have owned The Describer's Dictionary, but the two books are becoming pretty much alike in that both are stained, muddied, and dog-eared. Both Grambs and Reeves will undoubtably be happy when the pages of their books begin to fall out (the binding for both is excellent) because the first thing I will do is get online and buy new copies. If you write, you should, too. --------