On Being Apart, or A Part (after Catherine Taylor)

Catherine Taylor's Apart: the devil's in the preposition. Apart from; a part of. Or: we play a part, or we play apart. She's writing about the aftermath of South African apartheid. I'm thinking about Hawai`i. This is an inexact analogy, but it is one.

She quotes George Oppen: "We are not coeval / with a locality / But we imagine others are" (108). Or we imagine that some of us live at a point of origin that can be found through imagination and an archive.

My colleague told me that some graduate students want "to move into identity-based work," which means away from what I offer them. I work in identities falling apart. A part of identity work, but apart from it. My mother lost her culture; almost everyone I know at the university here is trying to find theirs. As an eighth grade teacher of mine said, you can't simply undo what you did; these are two different processes, that of putting together and falling apart. One is historical, the other medical. But both base themselves on the notion of identity, that there is one, that it is somewhat stable, that you can acquire or lose it.

Judith Butler, again quoted by Catherine Taylor: "Are there modes of belonging that can be rigorously non-nationalistic?" Butler writes about Hannah Arendt, who wants to belong, but abhors nations (for reasons utterly apparent): "she poses that question: what would non-nationalist modes of belonging be? I'm not sure she is describing reality as it is, but making use of language to invoke, incite, and solicit a different future" (108).

Taylor, whose family left apartheid South Africa when she was a child, knows guilt, parses it from shame, seems to favor shame. Guilt is white, though she also understands the instabilities of racial positions, either when she encounters a "colored woman" or when she remarks on her family's skin colors, which range from pale to dark. She wonders about her brother's racial make-up, until she reads Nadine Gordimer on how finding a drop of black blood becomes yet another power play for whites.

Her mother joined a group called the Black Sash, which tried to intervene against apartheid not by overthrowing it (who could?) but by manipulating its rules to help individuals in their daily lives. To subvert the institution by treating individuals it mistreats with humanity. Taylor is ambivalent about this group. It was bourgeois; its members led otherwise comfortable lives. Did they not recognize themselves as individuals, then, self-worthy in a barbaric regime?

I am not coeval with my location in Hawai`i, though I do live here, work here, have extended family here, love the place I inhabit. There is an inherent difficulty to not belonging, a deep anxiety to it. I felt another version of it growing up in northern Virginia, where I appeared to belong, but did not feel as if I did. For my nearly 25 years here I have watched as newcomers and long-time residents of Hawai`i wrestled with this problem. Here everyone suffers it, and it's often marked by one's color and by one's culture. Usually, these are plural, though the plural also foments anxiety. There's safety in the one, the singular, the pure, or so we think.

Here are some claims to belonging that circulate at the university I work for, if not the community at large: "My family has been here over 80 generations; my family worked the land as contract labor and speaks Pidgin." Only that first claim seems to hold water now, after a couple of decades during which the latter mode of belonging held brief sway. If you are a newcomer (and feel that you always will be, no matter how long you live here), there is no way in. So many (mostly white) colleagues work to belong by allying themselves with and for those whose claims seem better. They aim to make this "a Hawaiian place of knowledge" as the University's strategic plans calls it. As allies, they belong, if only metonymically, perhaps. As allies, they have power they would not have as "haole" or as outsiders.

These actions honor a terrible history. These actions also ignore other histories, and the present. To honor the present, I would argue, we need to respect everyone who lives here, whether or not they "belong." This category of belonging, while in many ways historical, in many ways psychological, is also a wedge to wielding power. If I belong, or if I work with someone who does belong, then I can control the narrative. In an intellectual community, the narrative is all. And it becomes curriculum, syllabus, arc of a course, a student or faculty career.

And so at UHM we rehearse the past; we try to parse out settler from native, as if so many of us are not both at once. We try to make right a terrible wrong by creating an echo chamber in which what happened in 1893 (the overthrow) also happened in 1959 (statehood) and happens every day now and so makes us perpetually angry. A former student tells me her professor said she would leave the islands if she were asked to do so by native Hawaiians who attained sovereignty. "But what about those who are mixed race, or who cannot afford to leave?" this student asked her. Such ideology does not coexist with common sense.

My fear is that we will remain angry as the sea levels rise, as storms get more violent, as the drought on the Big Island intensifies, as development covers all of O`ahu with condominium towers, suburbs by Gentry, as the military continues to control 20% (is it?) of O`ahu's land. Our anger over past wrongs cannot get in the way of our need to make allies to overcome the wrongs of the present.

Our anger can also make us weaker, less inclined to act in the world as it now exists. Taylor quotes Breyton Breytenbach on apartheid: "I have come to the stage where I don't want you to talk about Apartheid unless you also recognize how it flows from our shared history, how it dovetails with elements of your ideologies and sentiments, and how talking about it can morally neutralize the unimaginable horror of it. I refuse to continue being a party to the condemnation of Apartheid, which leads only to moral posturing. We are fattening the monster on our outcries of shame" (114).

In the past year, my department has voted for the following: a) to reduce the teaching load of tenure line faculty from 3-2 to 2-2, while releasing tenure line faculty from teaching freshman composition once every four semesters; b) to slash courses from the catalogue, because we don't have the personnel to teach them; c) to require anyone who teaches the course required of English majors to include "indigenous texts" on their syllabus, and to consider them in cultural and historical terms; d) to separate out what used to be Asia/Pacific into Asia and Asian diaspora (after an earlier attempt to make that Asian/Asian American) and indigenous Pacific and Hawaiian. And more. The courses that were slashed were almost all in literary studies, namely the traditional literature offered in English departments. The courses that were added were in indigenous Hawaiian and Pacific. The end result is to segregate fields by race, rather than join them by theme or aspiration.

When asked why we ought to require faculty members to teach indigenous texts, we are told that "we are teaching on stolen land." End of conversation. Or, we are told that "this is the only ethical thing to do." End of conversation. Or we are told to "do the hard work of retooling." End of conversation. As Laura Murphy writes in a review of Taylor's book: "She suggests that the privileged are envious of the irreproachable position of the oppressed. They long to identify with a position that is ethically indisputable. They long for the right to speak from a position not sullied by a legacy of hatred and oppression." How does one both agree with the force of these statements (yes, we are in Hawai`i and the Pacific and we really ought to teach those literatures), while arguing against their totalism? Are we not also in a larger Pacific, one that includes the Philippines, the Pacific Rim, the west coast of the north American continent? Does the trash that washes up on our shores not come--of late--from Japan's tsunami? Does the military presence not affect us all, no matter our race or ethnicity?

This is all food for conversation, but I fear we will not, can not, have it. Where "the only ethical thing to do" is something I do not agree with, clearly I do not belong at the table. Where the intensity of location as defined by original inhabitants completely overcomes any notion of location as where we are now, there is no dialogue. It just is.
 
These issues leach out of the department's public life, its intellectual life (as it were), into the personal. Many colleagues refuse to attend meetings because they are so painful. Others do not speak up because they fear being called racists. There's an excess of emotion at the meetings, but it bleeds into the conversation as a wedge, becomes persuasive in the ways that rhetoric are meant to be in our line of work. We cannot talk to one another. What to do about this immediate problem, the interpersonal? The one that causes us to take circuitous paths through the corridors, to avoid eye contact, to suffer simply for being at work? I'm reminded of Thich Nat Hanh's remark in his recent book on communication, that diplomats in a peace process should not start cold. They should, he writes, spend some time on a silent retreat, preparing to listen to one another, to deal with each other as individuals rather than as enemies. I doubt this would happen in my department, but that doesn't mean it would not be a good idea.

So what do we do now, those of us who want to belong-without-belonging, who want to expand the notion of location beyond what Barrett Watten calls "bad history," who are fascinated as much by the dissolution of identity as by its recreation, as much by family as a cross-genetic, trans-racial grouping as by who got what from the Webster line? Two recent conversations with friends provided some hints as to what is still possible, even at a university where much of what I've been describing above is written into rules that govern more departments than English.

One friend, Michael Epp, who ran a Pacific health organization for years, suggests that it's in the teaching practice, as well as publications (aka Tinfish Press), that alternatives can be posed. "Teach widely," he suggests, "offer a version of the Pacific that is expansive, that gestures toward a larger economic vision essential for the survival of Pacific cultures, if they can come together as a Blue Continent and exert more control over the resources and destiny of the Pacific. This will require a more cosmopolitan, more inclusive understanding of identity and belonging." Another friend, Murray Edmond, a poet and dramaturge from New Zealand/Aotearoa, wants to investigate what he calls "Pacific Modernism." Across the Pacific there have been writers who combined the interests of their location with methods aligned with Modernism: I suggested the work of Wayne Kaumuali`i Westlake to him, and he had several other figures he wants to work on. I don't want to steal Murray's thunder, so I'll leave it there. But this imaginative bridging of indigenous and Asian and European and American literary works strikes me as very promising. It won't change the world--no study of literature seems to do that!--but it might set our students to thinking about the very real complexities of not-belonging in the Pacific, or anywhere on this globe. There are other, more overtly political, ways to address these issues, too.


I was at a memorial service recently on the beach near the surf spot "Publics." The minister delivered the Christian service in English and Hawaiian. When the man's friends came up to talk story about him--a man in his mid-40s who had been very active until he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage--they began hesitantly, formally. Then they wen bus' out the Pidgin, brought themselves and their friends to life. The communities gathered to mourn were many: family, surfing buddies, work buddies, dirt bike buddies, members of his step-daughter's soccer ohana (I was in that group). After the canoe with his remains went out past the reef, joined by dozens on surfboards and even boogie boards, and then after the ceremony there ended, paddles and hands hit the water, which splashed high in the air. Those of us still on the shore clapped. He was home.

This was our present, and might be our future, if we can keep imagining. As Taylor quoted Butler writing of Arendt (a lovely female intellectual genealogy, that):" I'm not sure she is describing reality as it is, but making use of language to invoke, incite, and solicit a different future." Let us not fatten our monsters on outcries of shame, as Breytenbach wrote, but turn ourselves toward that future, in whatever model of togetherness we can muster.

Catherine Taylor, Apart. Brooklyn: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2012.

Local Literature is Dead. Long Live Local Literature! R. Zamora Linmark, Janine Oshiro and new writing from Hawai`i

I used to torture my students by asking them to define the word "local." They would quickly realize the pitfalls of talking about the word, especially to someone like me who, by virtue of her monolingual standard English and her pale face, was resolutely not local. For "local" usually referred to someone of Asian or Hawaiian descent who grew up in Hawai`i and spoke da kine Pidgin English (more properly Hawaiian Creole English). It was also a class marker, indicating someone who was working class, rather than the wealthier haole (outsider, white person). But I'd ask the question because we'd be reading "local literature," or poems, stories, novels, plays, by writers like Eric Chock, Darrell Lum, Gary Pak, Marie Hara, Lois-Ann Yamanaka and others. Knowing the definition allowed us to explore the ways in which these writers used local culture and language, sometimes pushing against its boundaries, but usually referring back to the plantation days, when locals and haole were set apart. Bamboo Ridge Press was the primary purveyor of local literature; the term grew to be defined by a certain style, content, and manner. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, this was a revolutionary move; by 1990, when I arrived in Hawai`i, it was still seen as suspect to teach the stuff. It just wouldn't fly in New York, which was how you defined "universal."

Lee Tonouchi was once a budding local writer, the rightful descendant of Eric Chock, Joe Balaz, Rap Reiplinger and the other comedians. Tonouchi burst on the scene in the 90s as a funny writer who insisted on writing only in Pidgin; he famously got his M.A. in English at UHM writing only in Pidgin and then taught at KCC and HPU in Pidgin and then wrote essays about being a Pidgin speaker and a dictionary that archived Pidgin words and phrases. He was a second generation Bamboo Ridge writer. They published his book Da Word, which took local literature from the plantation to the local mall, where most people had gone after statehood and the demise of agriculture in the islands. His Pidgin was infused with phrases like "it's da bomb," whose origins seemed more continental than Hawaiian. But still, here was the local, transmogrified.

Tonouchi's new book is called Significant Moments in da Life of Oriental Faddah and Son (Bess Press). He will launch the book this Wednesday. I've read the book, as I was asked to write a blurb for it (it seems dozens of us were!), but it's been a while. I'm not going to use this space to review the book's content, but to remark on the way it's being publicized. The local is dead. Even if Lum begins his remarks with the word "local," as in, "Locals know that we are Orientals, not Asian Americans which is why we could never speak of ejaculation, losing a mother, or enemas to our Oriental Faddah. Tonouchi speaks what we never said but wished we had to our own father, mother, and grandparents." But then the vocabulary shifts; even though Lum will end his blurb with an assertion that Tonouchi "speaks for us all," most of his blurb refers to Tonouchi's Okinawan roots: "His work is more than a confessional, a treatise on Okinawan pride, or just a tribute to his ancestors. This crafty humorist captures the innocence and wonderment of our youth trying to explain the world in the kind of twisted logic that seemed to make so much sense at the time. Check out his explanation of why Spam is the SUPER Okinawan food." In the "About This Book," we read that, "it's the essence of being an Okinawan in Hawai`i." In the brief bio, we read that Tonouchi is "one full-on 100 percent Uchinanchu yonsei."

This is not really news. The term "local" was always problematic, never as inclusive as its proponents claimed. Furthermore, some of Hawai`i's writers did not want to be included in it. After a mid-1990s confrontation between Bamboo Ridge and critics who claimed (with justification) that the journal published mostly local Asian writers and largely ignored Hawaiian and Pacific Islander writers, Bamboo Ridge began putting out issues devoted to local Korean literature, local Filipino literature, and--finally--Hawaiian drama. The Hawaiian journal `oiwi was born, and Hawaiian language and culture really took off at the UH and elsewhere. Since then, Bamboo Ridge has published local Asian, Hawaiian, and white writers (Ian McMillan, at least, though not as white) in recent years. McMillan, oddly enough, may have entered the field as one of the last "local writers," since there is as yet no "white writer" category here. If "local" was not a pie that everyone wanted to claim, this new pie was sliced relentlessly. But Tonouchi had been Da Pidgin Guerrilla for so long, so strong an advocate for the language that marked the local as the local, that it's hard to see him breaking out the ethnic marker. He's now Okinawan.

While the breaking-up of local literature was perhaps necessary, the way it happened is not without its own problems. And so what becomes of "local literature," now that it's something of a dead (or at least somnolent) metaphor? As one local writer said to me once, it's not entirely a good thing to take a category that created a cross-ethnic group and defined writers according to where they were born and raised and what language they spoke, and to chop it up into so many new segments, defined by nationality, ethnicity, blood. Where did local literature go? Might we want to recuperate some of its power to the world we're living in, which is not tied to the agricultural plantation, but to the tourist plantation and to international capital (as the APEC summit showed us recently)? I think it may be possible, if we re-frame the local as something more like glocal (awful word) or at least as a literature that looks off-island for inspiration and--yes--for content, argument, and audience. Something like Linton Kwesi Johnson's work (hardly cutting edge at this point!), which addresses itself to the world in a local language, or like some of the slam poets in Hawai`i, who address world issues like global warming and violence from their perch in Honolulu. Many, if not most, global problems exist here--are often magnified by our isolation and small size--so why not take on globalization, climate change, linguistic and species extinction across the boundaries we so easily assign ourselves? There are also those "universal" issues that have taken such a beating, like existence, old age, dying, death, survival.

I have two very different books on my desk. One is by a prominent writer who grew up in Hawai`i, wrote an important book while a student at UHM, and then moved away. The other is by a lesser known writer (this is her first book) who grew up in Hawai`i, left for many years, and has now returned. The first writer, R. Zamora Linmark, writes about culture, language, queerness; the second writer, Janine Oshiro, writes about loss, death, the ecstasies or discoveries that trauma makes possible. Neither one is a local writer, according to the old definition. And yet they offer what might be termed the global-local, or the diasporic-local, in the case of Linmark, or the spiritual-local, a place-bound wisdom writing, in Oshiro's case. I do not want to make too grand an argument based on poetry found in these two books, but I'd like to suggest that they may point us in a direction that is neither "local" in the old sense nor "ethnic" in the newer one.

Linmark's writing contains the higher quotient of the (old) local in it. He writes in Pidgin, often, and about growing up in Hawai`i. He offers us Manoa graveyard and Thomas Square, the UH Warriors (ne Rainbows), their coach, Filipino plantation workers. [That link is to a blog post I wrote on Linmark's response to Coach McMackin's slur against homosexuals in a press conference at Notre Dame.] He translates Frank O'Hara's encounter with the sun on Fire Island into an encounter with a coqui frog near Hilo, Hawai`i. He plays with Lorca, but sets the poem in Hawai`i. He also writes about the Philippines, often in verse that more resembles Robert Browning's writing than Lois-Ann Yamanaka's; his dramatic monologues have a lot of the Last Duchess in them. There's something old-fashioned about many of Linmark's poems, not so much in their content as in their craftedness; he makes his poems well. But Linmark's new book, Drive-By Vigils, published by Hanging Loose Press in Brooklyn, New York (ah, he's made it to New York City, after all!), as were his first two volumes of poetry, is not an instance of local literature. It is something else. It's also a book that includes Hamlet, Montgomery Clift, Charles Bukowski, meditations on growing older (turning 40), Anderson Cooper, world travel, and many many other topics. We could frame the Hawai`i poems using the global ones as markers, or do the opposite, but neither direction quite works. Linmark lives in all these locations, actual places and identities and languages, and he's hardly alone in that. If he hears Lorca in the voices of local boys, then Lorca is there.

Janine Oshiro doesn't name her places in Pier (Alice James) but Hawai`i is one of them, Iowa another. Portland is in the mix, too. There's an oblique reference to Hawai`i's plantations in "Intermission," which is more about peeing than about relations between ethnicities or classes. Her uncle speaks to her as she pees in the cane field.

"Say excuse me, girl,
before you go in these fields.
You never know what came
before, you never
know who's there." (42)

Here, Hawai`i's agricultural, economic history is not fact, or story, but a haunting. Instead of making the move much local literature did, that of recounting just what DID come before, just who WAS there (even if it exists in the imagination of those too young to know), Oshiro moves into the realm of spirit. Her poems come out of the death of the poet's mother when the poet was a child. The house in which they lived is appropriate to the subject of haunting, spirit, because it's set in a climate in which everything comes apart, no matter how material it might be. In "Relic," she writes about the impermanence of her mother's life in terms of the impermanence of the things in her mother's house:

An astonishing number of
harmful things can happen
to objects made out
of paper: foxing,
excreta of insects,
lux--that is to say,
our bodies rust. (31)

She reverses the field of metaphor. It's not that engines are like us, but that we, like engines, come apart. Oshiro grew up in the back of Ahuimanu Valley (here she is on the porch of that house) where I often take bike rides. It's an area where everything is always moist with humidity, rain. Mold, mildew, these are cousins. If they're not cared for, houses sink into the earth, their single-wall wood constructions precarious as thought, as the categories we invent, consume, and then throw away. They become relics, which means they no longer serve practical purpose, are rendered holy.

Neither Linmark nor Oshiro is a local writer; Linmark's roots are in Honolulu, Manila, and San Francisco, while his shoots spread to Spain and elsewhere. Oshiro's roots may be here, but her poems do not name this place, do not speak its local vernacular, seem more interested in its spirit than its substance. These are not critiques but possibilities. Hawai`i is at once a location--one fervently self-attached, at that--and the nexus of many other locations, actual and spiritual. What Linmark and Oshiro show us, in very different ways, is how we might begin from Hawai`i to include other locations, other languages, other ideas in the frame this place offers us. It's an exciting move away, and yet back, exclusive and then in- . In another, similar, context (and with more polemical force than I can muster), Stuart Kelly writes, "Scotland might be about to enter the world. Hopefully its newest writers will want to see what the world has to offer." Substitute Hawai`i for Scotland and you might be onto something.

My hunch is that Lee Tonouchi's new book, while seeming to re-define him as Okinawan, will prove more expansive than the PR promises. While Tonouchi is moving into narrower ethnic territory, his work is gaining in emotional force. Where he used to write about going to the mall, the difficulties of speaking Pidgin, and made fun of local foibles, he is now writing--for the first time, I think--about his mother's death when he was a child. In that, and in other ways I look forward to discovering at Wednesday evening's reading, I suspect his work has more in common with Janine Oshiro's than one might think. The after-life of local literature may be something more akin to world.

Lisa Linn Kanae, _Islands Linked by Ocean_ (Bamboo Ridge, 2009)

[Lisa Linn Kanae & Kimo Armitage]

This past Thursday, Bamboo Ridge Press launched (and the word is entirely appropriate in this context) Lisa Linn Kanae's book of short stories, Islands Linked by Ocean at UHM's Campus Center. Before I get to this new book of hers, let me say a few words about her previous book, Sista Tongue, which Tinfish published in 2001. Sista Tongue remains one of our most important titles; the book is taught in Hawai`i, Australia, England, and the continental United States. It combines the history of Pidgin English in Hawai`i with memoir with story telling with the aggressive design work of Kristin Gonazalez (now Lipman, who also designed Lisa's new book, albeit with more subtlety). I have always considered the chapbook to be an experimental essay, but a colleague once told me that her class had knocked their heads together for over an hour on the question, "why is this a poem?" When I asked why ask that question, she noted that Tinfish had published it, and Tinfish publishes poems. So be it. It is also a poem.

In Sista Tongue, Kanae celebrates a generation of Pidgin writers, most of whom flourished in the 1980s and 1990s, everyone from Eric Chock and Darrell Lum to Lois-Ann Yamanaka and Zack Linmark. These writers gave credence to a language that, as Kanae explains so patiently in her book, was considered much more impediment than speech, more impoverishment than song. Their work in Pidgin enabled her to write about Pidgin as a subject; her book joined theirs as a significant work of local literature. At least a generation of students since has found Sista Tongue an enabling text, poring over it for the history of a language some of them are still ashamed to speak.

With this new book of short stories, Kanae joins those who have used Pidgin not simply as subject, but also as medium for their work about Hawai`i. Most of the stories keep to the convention of narration in English, dialogue in Pidgin, though "Luciano and da Break Room Divas" does not. This story chronicles an office conflict between the high and mighty new secretary (well educated, standard English speaking) and her new office mates (working class Pidgin speakers), one of whom is trying to deal with the first anniversary of her husband's death. The characters encounter one another outside the office at a Luciana Pavarotti concert, where the one character, Hattie, exiles her demons in the wash of the singer's voice.

Many of Kanae's stories take on a comedy of manners theme; there are stories about a wedding shower (with condom contest, notably replayed by some of Kanae's friends and colleagues before her reading), about the paddlers in a canoe, and several about love gone wrong. The stories take place at Ala Moana shopping mall, Barnes & Noble, in front of the television screen (where UH takes on Vegas) and other remarkably ordinary Hawai`i places. The first story, a long exposition about paddling that has little of the intro to fiction conventional climax and denouement about it, is full of wonderful voices and characters, from the foul-mouthed Cyril, who keeps the stroke, to the haole paddlers who somehow fit in. Each story tackles a serious subject, but treats it with ostensible lightness. A story about a Hawaiian couple trying to come to terms with his contentment with American consumer culture and her resentment of it ends by suggesting that a next generation might provide them with a fresh way to deal with the conflict.

But my favorite of the stories is the final piece, "Islands Linked by Ocean," an autobiographical account of the death of Kanae's father in Vegas (surely another island in the Hawaiian chain). This essay finds as its center the appearance of fish in odd places (a picnic bench, a sidewalk at Kapiolani Community College), fish that comes to symbolize a family member's safe journey. In this case, it is the journey of Kanae's father, a man who delivered bread, did not believe in higher education, yet is proud of his daughter, the English teacher. There is something about the way Kanae searches for a meaning outside the story here that I find especially compelling. Her approach to a world not simply of the here and now but also of spirit is crucial, and moves the book from the realist world of Honolulu to a realm understood best through Hawaiian cosmogony. Having read a number of Master's theses recently that appear to mock attempts to reach for meaning outside the daily muck, I was poised to appreciate this ending to Kanae's book. I wish there were more stories and essays like this one in the canon of local literature; this one suggests fresh possibilities for writing in and about Hawai`i.

A couple other notes:

--One of my students who attended the reading asked why Kanae wept at the end of "The Steersman" when she got to the end:

"Long before the image of a moon above Diamond Head had become the darling of aloha shirts, postcards or ninety-nine-cent calendars sold at Longs Drugs, long before there were enough hotels to create a Waikiki skyline at night, there was the ocean and the Hawaiian outrigger canoe. I knew what I saw from where I was sitting was as rare as beauty, truth and magic combined in a single moment. I knew why Cyril Poepoe had us take the long way home."

Kanae's tears gave the listener access to the way in which words are allegorical, mean more than they say. "Mahealani" is at once the moon and Mahealani Dudoit, founder of `Oiwi journal, and inspiration to Kanae and her group of writer friends, including Michael Puleloa, Kimo Armitage and others. Read alone, the passage might seem nostalgic, but when Kanae performs it, opens up as elegy. The moon is the moon, but it is also a mentor.

--Kanae clearly cares about sentences, as well as plot. Much of the fiction I read, here and elsewhere, seems to so fetishize plot elements that sentences get dropped in like coins in a slot machine; if they work, it's because the writer hit a jackpot. When they don't work, it's because the game was chance, not work. Kanae's sentences are worked, and work well.

--I love the homage to Allen Ginsberg in "In the Customer's Hands." Another visiting spirit to Kanae's book, "His ability to transform disillusion and cynicism into lyricism made me look around the stores and wonder if Ginsberg would enjoy observing the crazies roaming the aisles. I think he would." If Ginsberg saw Whitman in a supermarket fondling the vegetables, then how appropriate that Kanae find Ginsberg at home in a bookstore the night of his death.