Whereas Bishop is soberly enterprising in her compilation of losses, Lindenberg is prudent. Her poems cautiously interact with memory: “I do not believe I remember any of this wrong, but there is reason I have left bits out.” One might say she is a curator and a synthesizer of experience, a specialist rather than a generalist, for she chooses particular scenes, times, places, and poets who give voice to her emotions. Lindenberg effortlessly creates an egoless world, full of feeling yet devoid of melodrama, in which she plays sidekick to the more famous Arnold.

This is not diffidence, as Lindenberg’s poems demonstrate enormous range, formally, spatially, emotionally, and with regard to content. The collection’s tripartite division is an exhibition of the poet’s vast reach, which creates room for her to fully commemorate Arnold’s particularity of being, and to infuse the relationship they had with emotion and expectation and thorough-seeing. Simultaneously, it shows the need to compartmentalize experience.

In the book’s first part, Craig is “beautiful as a telephone, colors / of bone, rocket ship, and cocktail lounge,” and he is a “Tall, tall, tall, tall, tall man” and “seduction” and “unfinished argument” and “brooding,” a man whose heart is “a trapdoor.” These poems are the heartbeat of the titular poem, which—situated dead center in the collection—is the heart of the book. The last part, then, involves quiet acquiescence, for the poet must learn to release “ ‘our beloveds kindly into [death’s] care’.”

Lindenberg, meanwhile, situates herself in a solitary and elegiac place that nevertheless seems omnipresent, and encompasses the duration of her relationship with Craig. She is a reservoir of restlessness, bereavement, and reaching. Reaching, for everything, and ultimately, for nothing.

Reading Love, an Index, a question that kept coming up for me again and again was, What is pain to someone whose lover is not just lost but also nowhere to be found? The lover is a constantly appearing mirage, an overlay over reality that makes grieving excruciating, and turns conversation into a raw reminder of one’s aloneness: “at times I want to ask you if you remember this the same way but when I try to imagine what you’d say I find it’s like trying to play both sides of a chessboard.”

Lindenberg so scrupulously handles the trauma of unexpected loss and the hollowness of her deprivation that one feels the full impact of that disappearance and the haunting silence in that grinding halt. But there is intimacy and humor, too, and revelation. Quoting Breton, she writes, “ ‘What I have loved, whether / I have kept it or not, I shall love forever’,” and elsewhere, “if you can recall how it felt at the time you can grasp that the end changes nothing.” This collection rips the reader apart and makes her angry at life’s furtive encroachments. More, it ensures that Lindenberg is no mere sidekick but a poet of immense power, who moves one to feel her heart break and to be humbled before her endurance.

Adrian Wong's "Untitled (Wall II)" (photo courtesy of the artist)

Adrian Wong’s three sculptural works comprising Orange Peel, Harbor Seal, Hyperreal, now on display at the Chinese Cultural Center in San Francisco, would likely not exist if it weren’t for a bit of stubbornness on Wong’s part: his refusal to own a smart phone.

The accomplished young artist and academic, who splits his time between Hong Kong and Los Angeles, excels at a deliberate kind of urban wandering—one that involves scrupulous attention to a city’s spatial organization, architectural forms, and idiosyncratic stylistic details. It also means frequently getting lost. Having the option to mediate his experience through the two-dimensional layer of a GPS map would ruin things, Wong explained. The city is a layered enough place, culturally and physically, as it is.

Layers make for a good and obvious formal starting point in analyzing Orange Peel, Harbor Seal, Hyperreal. The show’s main works introduce stratified specimens of three decorative motifs—ceramic tiling, carpet, and metal grates—that hold a special place in the stylings of Hong Kong and of San Francisco’s Chinatown alike.

Detail from Adrian Wong's "Untitled (Wall II)"

In the gallery’s first section, two wall-mounted counter-reliefs expose several strata of ceramic tiling. The work has a specific referent; namely, a Hong Kong alleyway, the walls of which have been tiled over again and again in a regular succession of hasty urban renewal efforts. After decades of addition, the width of the passage has narrowed noticeably, placing aesthetics and functionality in humorously overt opposition, as well as creating a public time capsule of sorts. Where weathering has taken its toll on the alley’s already shoddy plaster, Wong recounts, you can literally stick your arm through history.

Beyond this anecdotal significance, the work alludes to a larger cultural interest in peeling back, so to speak, stylistic layers, in hopes of reclaiming a sense of history or authenticity. The appeal of a TV show like Mad Men, for example, lays largely in the series’ detailed excavation of the stylings of the 1960s. On a more literal level, cosmopolitan urbanites have come to prize a partially de-layered aesthetic in interior spaces. Modeled after the exposed brick and rafters of Manhattan’s SoHo lofts, approximations are now produced and exported to outfit trendy restaurants and workplaces the world over.

The grates and tile walls around Kearny Street in San Francisco can be seen as similarly phony simulacra—shiny new replicas of Hong Kong’s distinctive, time-worn aesthetic (which was itself, interestingly, a product of both Eastern and Western influence in the previously British-ruled territory). At the same time, Wong sees the open avowal of this nostalgic intention, a hallmark of the Chinese diaspora, as conferring an idiosyncratic honesty and authenticity to the ornamentation.

Do not expect Wong’s sculptures to articulate all of this conceptual heft; the show is too small for that. The same goes for expecting the works to express their anecdotal significances. Wong’s carpet excavations (similar to the tile pieces, but planted on the floor in what look like archaeological dig sites) are inspired by the tracks his aging grandmother wore into the carpet of his childhood home once she wasn’t strong enough to lift her feet. However, that somber piece of information, important as it is to the work, is not exactly extractable from the object itself.

Hence, a casual visitor who has not been to Hong Kong is most likely to encounter a room of fairly quiet, if formally poetic objects. But with the benefit of Wong’s singular focus, these objects hint at their significance by reflecting certain meaningful but often unnoticed features of the historic streets outside the gallery. At the very least, they are an argument for ditching the Google map, getting lost, and seeing what exteriors an urban space projects, and what may be worth peeling back.

 Adrian Wong’s Orange Peel, Harbor Seal, Hyperreal runs through August 25 at the Chinese Cultural Center, 750 Kearny St., 3^rd Floor (inside the Hilton Hotel).

Michael Curran and Anastazia Louise in "First Breath, Last Breath" (photo by Eric Gillet)

I could tell the performance I was about to witness late last month was extraordinary even before entering the auditorium, just from watching the audience trickle into Z Space in San Francisco. There was a man who had somehow fused his beard with a slinky-like spiral pipe and wrapped it around his neck like a scarf. There were a few women in Betty Page/rockabilly outfits and the attendant shellacked beehive and Winehouse eyeliner. One girl’s hair resembled a Pantone swatch sheet—literally—small squares of dye checkered her shoulder-length crop. One man, who we found out later was the set designer for the production, had sausage links hanging from his belt loops. There were leather and piles of silver, feathers and dreadlocks, tattoos and guy-liner. I’ve never felt like such a square; even before the performance began it had rendered my life meaningless.

As a prelude to Bad Unkl Sista’s latest production, “First Breath, Last Breath,” the performers proceeded into the lobby—slowly, staring at the audience, making gong noises on obscure instruments—before moving into the proscenium theater space. The procession gave the audience something the performance could not. Up close we could see the magnificently bizarre costumes devised by artistic director, choreographer, and soloist Anastazia Louise. It was a head-scratching amalgam of Victoriana, Burning Man, and Steampunk: gas masks, fishbowl mouthpieces, hoop skirts of shredded denim, toreador and Japanese hakama pants, Puritan bonnets, and of course the signature white full-body paint of Butoh.

What we could also see better in the procession than from the stage were the facial expressions of the performers (although they were by no means unreadable from the distance). These expressions reflect an integral characteristic of Butoh, which rejects the dictate of traditional showmanship that a performer must put his “best face” forward. Butoh revels in death and the grotesque aspects of living. The performers walked shivering and hunched over, their eyes rolled back, jaws hanging open and tongues dangling, heads lolling to the side, hands trembling. This overture was particularly powerful when one realized how seldom we witness the human body in this condition: only in the presence of someone very sick, damaged, or deranged.

Though many of the acts showcased skills that only the most hale could execute, this preoccupation with decline remained a motif throughout “First Breath, Last Breath.” Kristen Greco shook and coughed, her white face smeared with fever-strong blush. Michael Curran, a dancer with a Pierrot face and Kowalski body, contorted his limbs and spine in a series of poses which might have appeared as a standard circus act. But his face never lost its expression of melancholy, and this contrast between action and expression nicely complicated his act.

Karl Gillick, whose torso, tragic brow, and beard recall the ancients’ boxer statues, infused his aerial silk act with an emotion that made a beautiful paradox out of what could have been a familiar acrobatics act. Most of us regard the ability to fly as a great “what if?” We associate dreams in which we can fly with bliss and freedom. Garrick’s apparent wistfulness was, in this context, provocative and beautiful.

In perhaps the most narratively straightforward piece of the night, Shannon Gray Collier was wheeled onstage in a wheelchair, feet in casts, pestered and restrained by her cohort assuming roles reminiscent of Nurse Ratched. With a gasp, Collier grabbed onto an aerial apparatus that had been lowered before her, and, clinging to it as it rose, transformed from a suffering, immobile waif to a graceful, ethereal air dancer. As the trapeze again lowered to earth, so did she, and the diminution of her ephemeral but transcendent powers was heartbreaking to witness.

Periodically, the performers employed the Butoh motif of the “silent scream,” and lurched, cringed, and trembled between fits of more robust physicality. There is a debate (or maybe it is merely a Western misperception, likely based on American guilt) whether Butoh—which emerged in the years following World War II, and which its practitioners insist developed as a response to the student protests of the ‘60s—grew out of the horrors of the atomic bomb. Indeed, the emphasis on withered mobility and deformity, the suggestion of physical and mental trauma, even the white body paint (which also echoes images of people covered in the white dust on 9/11), all make a case for correlation, however inaccurate. But even disregarding the spurious connection, it was sometimes difficult to watch the performers enact these vignettes. It wasn’t always clear whether this was a triumph against suffering—art born of devastation—or a fetishizing of the same. Perhaps that ambivalence is part of the purpose.

Other elements were also hard to gauge. It seemed at times, that as with some other Japanese art forms, to appreciate it one had to alter one’s mode of watching, to become a connoisseur of slowness, to develop an eagle eye for the subtlest expressions and movements. By standards of Western stagecraft, certain movements were too minimalistic to justify the spareness of the moments leading up to them—to watch a woman creep across the stage, lift an elbow, and continue creeping requires a threshold for boredom that other performance art forms don’t dare challenge.

To a perception shaped by the more expansive European dramatic arts, certain moments throughout “First Breath, Last Breath” verged on self-indulgent. But this might be a characteristic of the art form that can’t be judged fairly by criteria developed outside the culture that created it. Most of those moments were created by Louise, who was possibly the least “showy” dancer (again, this might be a virtue in Butoh). Other performers would be executing some dazzling feat of acrobatics, and at some point, Louise would attach herself to them like a gremlin, putting the kibosh on their more spectacular movements, and the presentation would suddenly narrow once again to creeping, cringing, grimacing, and hugging. In Louise’s solo piece, it was hard to stay focused on her subtleties while musician Goyo Aranaga accompanied her with kargyraa throat singing, reddening in the face, swelling through his neck, and sounding something like a human didgeridoo.

However, the aspects of Bad Unkl Sista’s production that might require a different sort of viewer to appreciate them did not detract from the overall fascination of the work: visually, musically, and dramatically, “First Breath, Last Breath” offered plenty to enjoy in the moment and to ponder afterward. The sheer wealth of weirdness and invention makes one impatient to see what their next extravaganza holds in store.

Bad Unkl Sista performs regularly at Supperclub.

Read more from Larissa Archer at her blog, larissaarcher.com.

Rory approaches everything familiar with caution. The Calle is her home, but it doesn’t offer the comfort or the safety of one. She is fearful of knocks at the door. She loves her mother, but can’t stand the way she points to the meager artifacts of their home and tells her these are the things to be given to her upon her death. She listens to conversations between her mother and grandmother, detached and wary. In the dark of their trailer, she watches Family Ties and M*A*S*H.

Aside from the occasional one-liner bit of advice from the women in her family, her sole role model is the Girl Scout Handbook, which she has checked out from the library more times than she can count. Being a Girl Scout is all about survival. The book dictates things such as “Finding Your Way When Lost” or “The Right Use of Your Body.” But the Girl Scout Handbook was obviously written with a different sort of girl in mind. Hassman tweaks these chapters to reflect appropriately the weathered life of a Calle girl.

More interestingly, Rory Dawn isn’t a typical Calle girl. She is a sincerely bright, young woman who iterates her capabilities throughout the novel—she can spell anything, she reads constantly, and gets good grades. Her school hints at her college potential, and the faculty rub their hands together, thinking of how much they could benefit from such a bright student. Yet, as in the book’s openings, Rory calls herself the “feebleminded daughter of a feebleminded daughter, herself a product of feebleminded stock,” and there’s the fear that feeblemindedness clings to her, inherited as easily as she might inherit her mother’s teeth.

Like the other folks on the Calle, layers of misfortune and poverty plague each generation of her family. One can’t help but wonder if Rory, as smart as she is, is doomed to this cycle. Her mother seems to be thinking the same thing, holding her daughter at arm’s length, as if afraid of tainting her. Her affection for Rory appears mostly late at night, at the door to her room when she whispers, “Goodnight, girlchild” when she thinks Rory is asleep.

Hassman, whose striking nonfiction piece “Hair of the Dog” appeared in ZYZZYVA’s Fall 2010 issue, relates Rory’s childhood with boldness. We know all too well the glossed-over versions of Rory’s story, the ones in which the character comes from nothing, and where they came from only serves to emphasize where they are now: successful, living the American Dream. Hassman is not interested in telling that story. She explores Rory’s early life – and her mother’s and her grandmother’s lives long before Rory’s birth — on its own terms, without making any promises that Rory will wind up in a better place. She finds the sacred in the love, in the rituals —the bouquets made out of toilet paper — of the Calle. The novel puts to the fore people who might be otherwise relegated to the background.

Feld’s poetry dissects violence and imbues it with drama, provoking the reader to feel the pain of betrayal and the futility of forgiveness for something that is already lost. In “Cascade Raptor Center: Capture,” a boy’s apologies for shooting down a red-tail hawk with his new gun are rendered meaningless, leaving him alone to deal with the shame exacerbated by his father’s fury and with the psychosomatic castigation silence can provoke.

The speaker in Feld’s poems can objectively view the nature of cruelty – which descends from indifference to pain and from the need to maintain power — and see its necessary prerequisite of possession: “our only mutual [agreement] / is the tethering hunger we use to bind our birds // to us and overcome their deep-rooted / abhorrence of the human face.” Here, food is used as a means of control, of transacting with hatred. The speaker understands the supremacy of man over his fellow animals, and intuits the fear they have of him. And though he chooses to ally himself, out of love, with the rapacious birds he tames, he recognizes all the same that his love is not reciprocated, that the love is powerless.

There’s also the speaker’s awareness of his own fraudulence—his guide-talk voice of  “a stranger’s / leading you through the small cell of my self- / consciousness, a voice at odds with its subject, / ingratiating, false.” Under these commercial conditions, not only are there behavioral effects on the birds but also on the tamer. He becomes something other than what he is, someone who has to negotiate between the facts and the feelings. Feld describes a subtle degeneration in the tamer’s relationship to the birds, from human/master to beast/machine. When caged, the birds are rendered helpless, and the small glee the tamer feels before their elegant machinery is reduced to a poignant revelation: he is nothing more than a dispenser of food in the birds’ world. He’s become “elegy’s functionary,” perfunctorily and repeatedly killing small things (asphyxiating mice, etc.) for the birds, the price he pays for a marginal kind of ownership.

Feld casts the falcon (a bird he finds worthy of repeated mention in Raptor) as a symbol of strength, almost deifying it, calling it an “Image of the soul,” and reiterating, “The falcon is the world.” And the world is for the strong. One poem recalls Saint Gorgonius who, in a moment of “historical drift,” becomes prey to Empire’s falcon-like anticipation of error, suffering tremendous physical torment for choosing to ally with Christianity, which extolls the virtues of the weak. One can be sure that the cost of choosing weakness is the forfeiture of one’s survival, but in certain cases, Feld seems to be saying, that this choice becomes an exalted and liberating (if unnatural and terrible) act of self-sacrifice.

We are neither safe from the gory details of Gorgonius’s torture nor, in another poem, the suffering of the victims of Frederick II of Hohenstaufen. They are integral to the vision of Raptor’s speaker: “To see it sharply is all I would ever ask of this world, to show those things that are, as they are.” Which raises the question: does the speaker corroborate the vile Frederick’s vision? Certainly, he seems impressed (as I am), by the nonchalantly itemized hit list of the falcon-obsessed king’s sadism. Conversely, the speaker hates power-worshipping personalities (wanting to kill the candidate who, on the weekends, dons his SS officer getup as part of a “father/son bonding thing”), which gives us some hope about a more redeeming vision.

As Leonard Lutwack notes in Birds in Literature, birds are used as poetic metaphors; as representative of the supernatural; as the trapped, hunted, and killed; and as a link to eroticism. Certainly, Raptor ticks all those boxes. There are poems here mourning the loss of something significant. Ominous lines such as “So long to the great wingèd migration: / Now harbinger, instead / Of spectacle of the world’s renewal” link Feld to Yeats, a visionary who also features a falcon in his poem The Second Coming, which prefigures apocalypse with such verses as “The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned.”

Then, there are other poems that are agonizing in their unflinching examination of postmodern life, featuring “the chthonic thrill / Of apocalyptic porn” in the shape of avian flu; of painfully unsexy rest-stop biker-gang orgies that will inevitably be cast back to the dark recesses of the Internet; of road kills so grotesque they would rival William Stafford’s “Traveling Through The Dark” and Mark Wunderlich’s “Difficult Body” in the special poetic class of animal-death voyeurism.

But there is no redemption here. Raptor is a series of lightning-quick depictions with no time to spare for a casual chat about mercy, and it is made all the more disquieting by its strong undercurrents of moral angst. At the same time, these precise qualities are what hold the attention. They maintain an unyielding clutch on the reader, quietly leveling charges of liability, not only against what we do to creatures of the wild but also to ourselves and to each other as creatures of civilized society.

Elmer Morrissey, at the top of an 80-meter waterfall in San Gil, Colombia, in 2009 (photo by Rebecca Daunt)

April 14, 2012. On the 100th annivesary of the Titanic’s collision with an iceberg , the eight crew members of the Low Speed Chase set off on a day-long yacht race. When the 38-foot boat took a turn near the southern edge of the Farralon Islands, erratic and powerful waves threw the crew from their vessel, into the ocean beyond the San Francisco Bay. Three sailors made it onto the island, where the small yacht crashed, and were rescued. One was found dead in the water. Four are still missing.

I’ve been waking up in the earliest hours of the morning, before sunrise. From my window I can see the distant bay and the bridges that cut across it. It’s almost too dark to see the ocean, but I know it’s out there. And I know that somewhere in it is Elmer Morrissey.

I ask myself if the sea is less beautiful for having taken away my friend. I wonder if I have the energy to be angry at the Pacific Ocean. I try to think of what Elmer might say. I decide that Elmer would see the ocean for what it is: a roiling stage of life and death, a setting, not a being. I decide that Elmer would forgive.

I was a little bit in love with him, in the way you can be with someone you’re not romantically attracted to. Is that just love? It feels more like something in between love and in-love. I might have told Elmer this when he was alive. I might have said, “I’m a little bit in love with you, Elmer, in a platonic way that straddles the boundaries of love and in-love.” A simple “I love you” would also have sufficed. But how often do we really say this to our friends? I never throw out a casual “Love you!” at the end of a phone call. I might have said it to Elmer, though, and meant it fully. But I never did, because I’m too damn awkward with that sort of thing, and so I’m left saying it to my computer in a silent and rambling essay.

We found out on Sunday morning, the day after the accident, that Elmer was missing. Our two friends stepped through our gate and stood on our porch, red-eyed and shaking, to tell us the news. At that point, the search was still on. We measured the day in phone calls and Chronicle updates. We tried to act normal for our son. That evening, we stood on our balcony to watch the sun dim and the sky blush. “Stay with me”, my husband said. The search would continue until sunset. He would keep an eye on the horizon until the light was gone. Elmer was alone out there.

A vapor trail shot up beyond the Golden Gate. It rose vertically, burning orange and  aiming for the sky. “It’s a flare,” we said. “Maybe he’s sent up a flare.” We waited for a phone call. We waited for the news. We stood on the balcony and watched it, our son playing quietly indoors. Nothing happened. What we saw was no more than a fiery finger of cloud, pointing heavenward. We stayed out on the balcony until the evening grew cold and vanished into night.

Part of me, the over-thinking part, thinks that this essay may be self-indulgent, that by focusing on my own experience, I exclude the grief of others. I call this an imperfect eulogy because most eulogies are written to capture a general sense of loss, to bid to the departed an elegant and public goodbye. This is not that. This is my personal and flawed goodbye.

Each of Elmer’s friends misses him in his or her own way. We aim our anger, our confusion, our disbelief in unique directions. When Elmer was alive,the group of us ate together, drank together, worked together, ran together, climbed together; but when Elmer left, we each took on a solitary cocoon of struggle. That’s why we gather for things like memorials and barbecues. Events organized around the death of a friend have an angle of the absurd to them, but they serve a purpose. Not only do they make it more likely that we manage to eat, but they give us a way to pile our sadnesses together. We gather because we understand each other’s long silences, because no one minds when we trail off mid-sentence, or talk endlessly about football because it’s the only thing that will prevent us from thinking about what we’re really thinking.

There’s also the matter of Elmer’s physical absence. Nobody’s found him. He’s missing, and somebody–the newspapers, the rescue crews, the rest of us–have presumed his fate. There’s a minuscule possibility that he’s still alive. Until we know for sure–if we ever know for sure–I’ve considered a few alternate endings. Option A: Elmer has found a hidden cave populated by feral spear-wielding cave children. He is their leader. Option B: Elmer has discovered a sparsely populated island, and founded a city-state of the New-New World. He is learning to cultivate a delicious and highly nutritious fungus. Option C: Elmer was rescued by a Soviet submarine. He’s told its inhabitants about the fall of communism, and they are not happy. To transition them to a new capitalist reality, he’s teaching them to make and play ukuleles. Option D: Elmer is the crown-prince of an underwater kingdom. He has forged an active sex life with a mer-woman in a cockle-shell brassiere, with whom he “feels a connection.” Option E: Elmer comes walking in. He’s alive. He wants to know why everyone looks so glum. We feel foolish. How fantastic it would be to feel like a fool.

Eventually, the concept that Elmer really is gone will settle into my head and stay there. Over the past few days, the idea that he’s died has come and gone and come back again. The immediacy of it can recede for hours, and then, as I’m rummaging for my keys or putting a head of lettuce back in the fridge, it hits me. I brace myself for months of this, for the realization to come at me in sudden, unstoppable waves. I also dread the day when the reality will start to feel comfortable, when the thought of Elmer’s death will not yank my heart into my throat. Before that day comes, I’ll make a mental record of the things I must never forget about him. And because I don’t trust my mental records, I will write these things down.^[1]

Since I found out that Elmer was missing, my days have slowed down considerably. Unable to work, unable to think of much else but him, I’ve started to notice things I haven’t before. I notice people’s ages. I divide people I see on the street into those who’ve lived longer than Elmer, and those who are still catching up. In the garden, I notice a worm with a tapered head. In the kitchen, the cap on a bottle of canola oil pops right off, all by itself, and plinks onto the stovetop. In bed, my cat chews on the knuckles of my left hand–first the pinky finger, then the ring finger. He gnaws gently, like he’s trying to communicate rather than attack.

I look up a picture of the southernmost Farallon Island, the one that holds the remains of the boat that Elmer and his seven crew-mates sailed. I notice that it looks like an upside-down left hand. And I wonder if Elmer was speaking to me through my cat, telling me where to find him. I wonder if Elmer rests at the northeast corner of the southernmost island, between the pinky and ring fingers of rugged brown rock. But then I remember that Elmer was terribly allergic to cats, and I question whether he’d really choose Toady as his medium. I don’t think it’s odd that I’m searching for signals and significance wherever I can find them, to explain a reality that doesn’t make sense.

As the days pass and my sorrow becomes less urgent, I find myself trying to recapture the moment when I found out about the accident, from two friends who stood at my door. I try to feel again the transitional seconds when Elmer went from being unquestionably alive to incomprehensibly lost. This was when I felt most acutely connected to him. Now, just a week later, my memory of Elmer begins to let go, surrenders to the tides, grows smaller and quieter.

As I write this, I look up at my mug of tea. I notice, for the first time, the way the steam curls up and into the room, tending left at first, and then right, pulling itself into mushroom-shapes and jellyfish. On a normal day, a happy day, I would have swigged my tea and seen nothing but the screen before me. I would have missed watching the way steam dances. Elmer talked a lot about living in the present. The idea connected with his meditation practice, but also with his own life story. He was adopted as an infant, and growing up with this knowledge, he learned that interrogating the past can be a cruel and fruitless game, that the only way to live is to live forward.

The final time I saw him, for lunch at the Epicurious Garden, he said this: “The only thing to do is live for the moment, and make the best of it you can.” The logic of this comes back to me now, and hauls into its orbit the gut-walloping truth of Elmer’s death. I think he would like it best if I focused on life post-Elmer, on the things and people who remain. He’d prefer me to push on through the heavy sands of sadness, until pushing on becomes less of a struggle, until the day when the thought of him brings more joy than grief.

Still, when I see an email titled “In Memory of Elmer Morrissey” the words sound ludicrous. They are of another dimension, a farcical dark fantasy. But is it possible that Elmer himself has accepted his reality? What happened the other day at his memorial barbecue, when the dense evening cloud cover gave way to rays of sudden sunshine, and a spray of rain-pellets fell down upon us? This could have been Elmer’s doing. It could have been Elmer telling us that he’s made it to a good place, after all. It could have just been the weather. We take from the moment what we need, and we push on.

Elmer, I love you. Goodbye.

Shanthi Sekaran is the author of The Prayer Room (2009). Her short fiction appears in Best New American Voices, The Chattahoochee Review, The Asian American Literary Review and Canteen (forthcoming). She’s a member of the Portuguese Artists Colony and the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto. She teaches writing at California College of the Arts, and lives in Berkeley.

In Religion for Atheists: A Non-believers Guide to the Uses of Religion (Pantheon, 320 pages), Alain de Botton makes the case that though our weaknesses render us vulnerable to institutions that would exploit them, we nevertheless benefit from having them addressed and catered to, and the secular world has all but abandoned us in this regard. For example, we calendarize every aspect of our external lives—we set aside time and give ourselves reminders and structure our days to address business appointments, birthdays, exercise classes, but leave our inner lives unstructured. We don’t “pencil in” time for meditation at all, let alone define which time slots we will devote to contemplation of specific aspects of our spiritual lives, like kindness, pride, love, etc. As with many goals, chores, and endeavors that we leave to chance, our souls’ exercises not committed to the diary go neglected.

De Botton’s argument is that it is possible to curate the beneficial aspects from religion while leaving the central tenet (the existence of a god) out of it. While he doesn’t believe there is a god or an afterlife to worry about, he makes a persuasive case that elements of these religions that are based in that belief can benefit even the atheistic life, and offers some ideas for their practical application. He suggests we refashion academic programs to include not only training for future employment, but courses on how to navigate our personal lives, with departments dedicated to the examination of relationships, reconsidering work, facing illness, alone-ness, and reconnecting with nature. Borrowing the Jewish “Day of Atonement” ritual, de Botton would designate a day and a ritual for making amends, something he believes gets bollixed up when left to the awkward fumblings of people (or our cowardly refusal to even try). He envisions “Agape Restaurant” where people would be required to dine with strangers and given guidelines on how to behave and suggestions for possible conversation topics beyond, and significantly more pointed, than the usual small talk: “What do you regret?” “Whom can you not forgive?” The “feast,” so integral to many religions for facilitating community and moral education via the social lubricant of dining, would be taken out of the context of religion but would retain the enriching aspects that we lack in our secular celebratory dining, which usually happens with people like us and whom we know well, and where an unwritten code of conduct often prevents people from bringing up the topics that could actually propel greater closeness with our companions.

De Botton, though clearly widely read and particularly educated on the religions from which he nevertheless remains personally aloof, writes in an accessible, elegant style, including enough references to other texts, artwork, and tradition to make his book a mini-education. Possibly more striking than his proposal for an atheist order (elements of which sometimes border on the corny, such as the imagined university’s “department of relationships”) is his ability to express the finest nuances of human frailty, pessimism, and pain: this immediately ingratiates him to the reader wary of polemic or proselytism. A particularly beautiful, devastatingly accurate, passage runs thus:

“As victims of hurt, we frequently don’t bring up what ails us, because so many wounds look absurd in the light of day. It appalls our reason to face up to how much we suffer from the missing invitation or the unanswered letter, how many hours of torment we have given to the unkind remark or the forgotten birthday, when we should have long ago become impervious to such needles. Our vulnerability insults our self-conception; we are in pain and at the same time offended that we could so easily be so….

“Alternatively, when we are the ones who have caused someone else pain, and yet failed to offer apology, it was perhaps because acting badly made us feel intolerably guilty. We can be so sorry that we find ourselves incapable of saying sorry. We run away from our victims and act with strange rudeness towards them, not because we aren’t bothered by what we did, but because what we did makes us feel uncomfortable with an unimaginable intensity. Our victims hence have to suffer not only the original hurt, but also the subsequent coldness we display towards them on account of our tormented consciences.”

Despite the complex subject matter, de Botton writes in a graceful, accessible manner, and the book is easy and entertaining to read. The same gentle wit applied to difficult concepts makes his Twitter feed (@alaindebotton) one of the more insightful and elegant usages of the social media tool. For the religious, Religion for Atheists may illuminate the purposes for rituals and doctrines that can sometimes seem arbitrary or empty. For the irreligious, it addresses the needs of the soul, which the secular world has more or less left to its own devices, and delineates a method for the soul’s cultivation independent of thoughts of god or consideration of the afterlife.

Read more from Larissa Archer at her blog, larissaarcher.com.

As much as Nameless Dame is about life along the Russian River, and Augie and Sabbatini trying to solve the shooting death of a troubled young woman, it’s also about poetry and its vitality – a theme you’re unlikely to come across in any other crime novel (except for the book’s predecessor). The work of the likes of Kay Ryan, Marianne Moore, and Wallace Stevens pops up through the book (as does Augie’s spontaneous haikus), all of it commenting and complementing the story as it unfolds.

Like Augie, Schneider – who is the author of the poetry collection Water for a Stranger, as well as the critically acclaimed novels Blue Bossa (a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize) and Secret Love — has returned to where he was born and raised. After spending 25 years in Minnesota, where he was the founding editor of the much-revered Hungry Mind Review and part of a “very enlightened arts community,” he now runs Kelly’s Cove Press, a Berkeley publishing house specializing in Northern California literature, which it pairs with artwork from Northern California artists.  We talked to him about Nameless Dame, his time in Minnesota, and what it’s like to be back in the Bay Area.

ZYZZYVA: There are a couple of themes that stand out in the novel: the power of poetry and the pall cast over a community by an unsolved homicide. Let’s take the poetry theme first. Was it your idea when you set out to write this crime novel to have poetry play such a major part of its sensibility?  

Bart Schneider: This is the second novel in the series, but I came out of the chute with Bobby Sabbatini in The Man in the Blizzard as a working St. Paul homicide detective who’s become a successful poetry evangelist. He gets FBI agents memorizing it as they search it for code.

So when I moved back to California, I thought it’d be fun to set the thing here, echo my own experience as an outsider. And what could be a better setting for a poetry-karaoke bar than Guerneville? The poetry tavern was Sabbatini’s dream from the last novel, so it was a gas to be able to fulfill it. I really enjoyed trying to imagine a large, spread-out community infected with poetry. One reviewer said the novel existed somewhere between parody and utopia. If the vision of people reading and memorizing poetry is utopian, I say, go for it. Sneaking good poetry into a mystery novel feels mildly subversive.

Z: Is there really such a thing as a poetry karaoke bar, a place where people can get on a stage and recite any of thousands of poems from a karaoke-type machine?

BS: Surely such a thing must exist somewhere. Sabbatini dreamed it up, with a bit of lunacy, in The Man in the Blizzard:

“What this town needs is a poetry bar. I’m not talking that spoken word shit, that’s joined at the hip to hip-hop. What I’m talking about is a bar that has a karaoke machine with nothing but good poems on it. . . I want beautifully letter-pressed broadsides projected onto the screen. I want atmospheric music playing in the background of each poem. I want a place where a guy would feel safe and cozy reading Theodore Roethke poems through the speakers . . . Can’t you see some large-lunged dude coming in to rap a sheaf of Whitman or one of Pound’s Pisan Cantos? And the women, channeling Sylvia Plath, Jane Kenyon, Mary Oliver? Think of the night when a table full of beautiful incest survivors do Sharon Olds. That’s what poetry can lead to—transformation.”

Z: Let’s get to the theme of unsolved murder. The true unsolved homicides of a young couple on the beach at Jenner figures largely in the book.

BS: Unsolved murders cast a ghostly pall over a community. That’s a charged atmosphere to plug a novel into. I’ve always liked the mixing of actual events with imagined ones. But it terms of the murders, I ‘m afraid that senseless murders are so common these days we become numb to them after the dust settles.

Z: You’re a San Francisco native, but spent decades in Minnesota as an author and editor. How would you describe your life out in Minnesota?

BS: Minnesota has a very enlightened arts community with far more funding for individual writers and artists than is offered in California. It operates almost like a Northern European country with its respect for the arts. The Twin Cities writing scene is more cohesive and nurturing in any number of ways than the Bay Area’s. Three major literary presses (Graywolf, Milkweed Editions, and Coffee House Press) have thrived there for decade. It‘s the home of The Loft, one of the country’s largest literary centers  where I worked for a number of years. All the support makes for a much tighter writing community. Writers go to each other’s readings in greater numbers than they do here.

In part, it’s a matter of geography—the Bay Area is so much more spread out. How many San Francisco writers are going to give up their cherished parking space to go to another writer’s reading in Berkeley? As a young writer growing up in San Francisco, I disliked its provincialism in thinking it was the center of the world and didn’t need input from anywhere else. I much preferred the Minnesota inferiority complex, which readily acknowledged the need for writers and artists from all over the country to come in and contribute to the community.

Z: In many ways, Nameless Dame’s narrator, Augie Boyer, shares your personal background: from the Bay Area, moved to Minnesota and worked there for many years, and now suddenly finds himself back in Northern California. Do you also share Augie’s ambivalence about returning here?

BS: No, I’m absolutely thrilled to be back in the Bay Area. When I left in 1983 at the beginning of my thirties, I believed, like Augie Boyer, that California was a difficult place to maintain a work ethic. Maybe due to it’s being laid back and so damn beautiful. I was pleased to find Minnesota, with its long winters and stoic Scandinavian tradition, a great place to work. Coming back to California, I’m a much more efficient worker, and waste no time on angst, which was my primary occupation through my twenties. That leaves plenty of time for the enjoying the pleasures of the place.

Z: Has the Bay Area you knew disappeared or is it pretty much still here? Or maybe it just exists in western Sonoma County and not so much in San Francisco anymore?

BS: I’d always lived in San Francisco, and it feels far less quaint than it did then.  It’s more corporate and slick. I’m not sure how that affects the writers and artists, but I’ve found, then and now, more difficult in the Bay Area to sustain an artist’s community.

Z: Since you’ve returned to the Bay Area, you’ve also set up shop as a publisher. Can you tell me about your new venture, Kelly’s Cove Press? How did it come about?

BS: Kelly’s Cove Press is a bit of a quixotic venture now as traditional print publishing redefines itself. Maybe it’s a way to try and build something small in the community. My idea is to minimize the horror of distribution by focusing on books of local interest, in our case California-based literary writers with cover art and, in some cases, interior art, by local painters. The premise, surely naïve, is that with the aid of a good website and a couple dozen strong independent bookstores, readers will ultimately find us and desire well-designed books of fine writing and art.

Z: Is it any more quixotic than opening up a poetry-karaoke bar?

BS: Yes, I would much rather be a fool with a bit of vision than to lay low for the duration.

Pam Houston is one such writer. As the director of the graduate program in creative writing at UC Davis, she’s sold a lot of books to fledgling writers vying for a place in one of her workshops. I’ve often heard other students gushing about her first collection of stories, Cowboys Are My Weakness, a book that in many ways carved out the themes that would remain central to her work ever since, themes that might have emerged, as one reviewer remarked, “had an intelligent woman followed Hemingway around.”

The central problem for the narrator of Contents May Have Shifted (Norton; 320 pages), Houston’s latest offering, seems to be her lack of a Hemingwayesque archetypal male – at least for the first half of the novel, when the protagonist (also named Pam) is the breadwinner in her relationship with Ethan, an environmental activist. The uncovering of Ethan’s affairs, and the ensuing emotional fall out, is one of the through-lines of conflict that appears and reappears in the novel’s geographically immense landscape, which surveys Bhutan, Newfoundland, Patagonia, Tibet, Tunisia, Iceland, Colorado and of course the campus at UC Davis.

Having heard Pam Houston read from several drafts of Contents as one of her students, I eagerly anticipated the release of the novel. Houston is an excellent reader of her own work, whose biographical nature is great fodder for live storytelling. The structure of the novel, composed of 144 vignettes, also works well for the attention span of a listening audience, who are treated to a glimmer of insight in each tightly crafted section.

Transferred to the page, however, Contents is dizzying in its array of locations and characters. The brevity of each section gives us outlines of friends and family who never quite gather flesh. Rather, the characters speak aphoristically, as the narrator quotes from their conversations, texts and emails, and the language is couched in the New Age spiritualism fostered by forays to Buddhist temples and Calistoga hot springs. At a Zen spa in Sonoma County, Pam and her friend Cinder stand buried to the neck in horse manure, prompting Cinder to muse: “Anything is possible, and I mean that in the very best way.” It is a moment, among many, where the reader feels like an onlooker rather than a participant in the novel’s catalogue of transcendental experiences.

Where Contents is at its most effective is in the unornamented accounts of the tragic history that brought the novel into being. Less than fifty pages in, Pam offers up a numbered list of suicides she has known; among them a parent, a student, and a fellow writer; and so the novel becomes a journey about recovery: an index of the sometimes desperate measures undertaken by Pam in the aftermath of trauma.

While the acupuncture sessions and adventures in globetrotting are a respite, it is the more traditional remedy of a new relationship that brings the novel to its hopeful conclusion. Despite his devotion to an erratic ex-wife, the “high brow hick” Pam meets on her journey seems to have the appropriate Hemingwayesque quality. Rick’s frustration with Pam’s jet-setting coalesces nicely her readers, who probably don’t all keep round the world tickets in their sock drawers. In the final vignette, Houston allows her protagonist’s new partner to wonder aloud “if I will ever grow up enough to realize that everything I’m searching for on the other side of the world I could find just as well at my own kitchen table.” It is a gesture toward a healthier and more rooted future for Pam, even as she imagines the sun rising over parts of the world she’ll never see.

Margaret Weatherford (photo by Mary Weatherford)

When I met her at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1989, Margaret Weatherford was the California girl the Beach Boys never imagined: a black-haired, amber-eyed bombshell with her own professional pool cue and a dude’s tolerance for rail whiskey. I was her fan before I was her friend, because – if the first rule of writing school is to write what you know – it was obvious that Margaret knew things no one else could have possibly dreamed up. Her stories were populated by melancholy children, oracular father figures, animal grotesques and obsolete muscle cars. Like me, she had just graduated from college, but to read her you’d have thought she’d been circling the canyons and freeways of Los Angeles for centuries, honing a hawk’s omniscient view of its dive bars and roadside alliances, its secretive, peripherally glanced creatures and its inexorable undergrowth, which always seems poised for imminent, impersonal takeover.

As it turned out, Margaret was the rare guys’ girl who was also a steadfast friend to a certain kind of woman, and over the years I was lucky to be around to watch her become a bride, a mother, a published author, an artist’s muse, a first-time novelist: a self-deprecating success at everything she put her mind to. Less than two weeks ago I sat beside her in her canyon-top home as she named me her “literary executrix,” a title she’d scarcely pronounced before she dissolved in laughter, dropping her usual unflappable monotone to shout, “I feel like such an idiot!”

It was a job I was reluctant to accept, because even then — in the presence of the oxygen machine she jokingly offered to share when I got choked up, after the diagnosis of end-stage cancer and the transition to hospice care, despite everything I rationally knew about what happens when oncologists abruptly decide to stop treatment — I still envisioned a scenario in which Margaret, in her measured, unblinking way, would outlast the disease that was destroying her physically. I could not – and still cannot, if I’m totally honest – accept or endorse the idea of a world without Margaret in it, in which I (a fallible narrator at best, a chronically blocked writer with a blinkered East Coast sensibility) was somehow responsible for ensuring that her incomparable voice would be heard beyond the confines of my head and the wrecked hearts of everyone else that was losing her.

With her signature combination of grit and grace, Margaret went ahead and died anyway last Friday, March 30, 2012, her athlete’s body lasting long enough to give even holdouts like me a chance to accept that her triumph over cancer would take a subtler, more realist form than miraculous recovery. She is survived by her husband, Paul, her son, Ford, her siblings, parents, in-laws, extended family, her diaspora of friends and admirers and her brilliant, thrilling, singularly Weatherfordian unfinished novel, which it is now my privilege to keep company with until it completes the vision that Margaret spent an improbably rich, regrettably brief lifetime perfecting.

Through the pieces currently in print and still to be published, Margaret remains present for all of us who miss her and awaits discovery for unfortunates who’ve yet to visit the twisting, deathtrap roads and shadeless breakdown lanes of a Los Angeles only she could see. To read her is to encounter something utterly unique and transportingly strange: a neo-noir heroine, master of the meaningful pause and sustained poker face — the unforgettable Margaret Weatherford, 1966-2012.

Hades’s realm offered little in the way of glamour. He could not lunch with nymphs at Lucques or meditate in the tranquil gardens of the Self Realization Center. The theaters played nothing from Sundance. And no one called with Lakers tickets.

But his was a large expanse, the largest of the three, and it came -with mineral rights: gold, plutonium—whatever was down there. Hades methodically obliterated the traces of previous civilizations and watersheds, razed the citrus groves and ranches for trained lions, wrestled the rivers into concrete channels. Then, from Long Beach to Yorba Linda, Inglewood to Fullerton, he planted tireless, mechanical dinosaurs to draw oil from the earth. And when he had pumped out most of the oil, he discovered that the very ground had become valuable. It sold itself many times over at ridiculous prices. People came in droves to live their lives there with Hades —outside the gates, so to speak. And, as he gazed jealously west, his dominion thrived and expanded eastward, into the desert.

Hades’s own ranch lay near the pool of memory and the county line, deep in a canyon of live oaks, sycamores, prickly pears, rattlesnakes, and Volkswagens pushed over the edge. In the Spanish style, a slow fountain gurgled, barely perturbing the meniscus of its bowl. It was the only sound in the dusty courtyard, where no bird lit or sang or craved an audience. Inside, Hades waited for the pomegranates to ripen, for Whittier to become the next Pasadena, and for Oscar de la Hoya to bring glory to East L.A.

As the days elapsed (and he thought of them, coldly, as elapsing—not happening or coming-and-going or even just passing, only endlessly stretching to their allotted length), he found less and less to interest him outside his dark tile halls. No one ever visited. What news he received of heaven and earth came to him only in twisted snatches from the L.A. Times or when mortals tore their hair and invoked him in curses. So his knowledge of humanity, though correct, was of only the worst kind: cars overheating in traffic; convicted felons dragged off in chains, taunting the wives of their victims; homeless men burning to death in the street; and “before” and “after” snapshots for plastic surgery ads. He accepted this picture of worldly life and sank deeper into solitude, emerging from his desolate realm only on business, or when his lust for wealth overflowed his heart, seeped into his hips, and festered.

Zeus, meanwhile, found the innocence and ignorance of his human flock enchanting. He haunted the Dragonfly and Spaceland as the slightly older guy in the guise of youth, buying expensive shots for musicians in shabby clothes. He brought flowers to dirty little galleries in Silverlake, and gorged himself on theory with painters and writers. They were all exquisitely beautiful to him, and he was ready to propel each of them to stardom. Some he did, and then wept with wonder over their puppy snarls on dust jackets and magazine covers. A precious few had even been painted on billboards and the sides of buildings — a hundred feet high, tall as gods —where the multitudes could admire them from the freeways.

Zeus could not arrange such a fate for all of them, obviously, but often he found it just as sweet to watch the ones who struggled and failed, despaired and continued to struggle. And the humans who struggled most courageously and most vainly were the ones from whom he could not bear the slightest distance. Women and men, he took them to bed, to feel their beating mortal hearts against his chest, to touch the fragile vessels that could carry such grief and arrogance and hope.

Not all his lovers were starlets and misanthropes and nymphs with augmented breasts. When he was still quite young, he had begun an affair with Demeter, an earth-mother goddess who had come down from Marin County to teach a composting workshop at the community center on Mt. Washington, and then stayed. She was rumored to be a close relative of his, possibly even his sister. This would not be surprising—Zeus never acknowledged any boundaries for sex.

Demeter herself was open to multiple and alternative possibilities in that regard. At Cadmus and Harmonia’s wedding, for example, on a farm near Calabasas, she drank eight Tequila Sunrises and slipped away with Iasius, one of the Titans. They made love in a thrice-ploughed field about to be planted with strawberries. The band was playing “Seasons in the Sun” when they came stumbling back into the tent, smirking and covered with mud. Zeus went insane and ruined the reception.

No one saw Iasius after that, and a story went round that Zeus had clipped him —or had him clipped. There was another story, though, that his brother Dardanus had killed him for reasons that never became public. And another that he was torn to pieces by his own horses.

It was a wild time. Demeter eventually settled down, and her earthy sensuality aged well. When women in the Valley began to inject their foreheads with deadly poison to smooth the wrinkles, and even potters and poets in Ojai were dying their hair, Demeter let crow’s feet crinkle around her eyes and strands of silver wind through her nutmeg braid. Although she remained an authority on sex, she herself gave it up, at least in excess, to raise native plants, particularly succulents.

It was impending motherhood that had cued her exit from the giddy whirl. Demeter and Zeus had conceived. In the springtime, their child, a beautiful daughter, was born. They called her Core for the green corn in the fields, but her real name was Persephone. Demeter had never expected that the three of them would live together as a family, and she was not surprised when Zeus continued, without the slightest pause, his investigation of human passions. Demeter cherished Persephone, and raised her atop Mt. Washington with flowers in her hair.

By the time Persephone turned 16, it had been many years since orange orchards and strawberry fields had stretched from the desert to the sea. In spring, though, when the wildflowers bloomed, poppies still blanketed the foothills and the high desert. Persephone, with nothing more required of her on Easter vacation than to enjoy nature, organized a flower-gazing road trip with a group of friends —girls from school and from the juice bar where she worked part-time. “We’ll botanize the Southland!” she announced with a thrill. Demeter bought her a flower press and sent her off with blessings, a mobile phone, and a credit card.

Eight or nine of her companions were apparently “blissing out” when it happened: Persephone simply vanished. She did not come home with the others, and her friends could not agree on when and where they had last seen her. They had probably been high the whole week. Persephone might have vanished near Lancaster, at the annual poppy festival. But it might have been far south of that, at a desert rave near Murrieta Hot Springs; or below Idyllwild on the Tahquitz highway, where they filled their ruby Nalgene bottles at a spring of sweet water; or as far east as Joshua Tree’s weird rock cairns. It could even have been much nearer, in Topanga Canyon, where they had stopped for provisions at the general store. In the end, it could have been anywhere —no one had really been paying attention.

Demeter appeared at the police station tearing her hair, and within the hour the FBI had arrived, and the parents of Persephone’s companions were surrendering their bleary-eyed daughters for questioning. Toying sadly with their charm bracelets, the girls repeated their stories, which remained consistent only in their vagueness. Recollections that someone had seen her riding off with this boy or that boy on the back of a Vespa were promising at first, but did not bear scrutiny. Interrogation revealed that it was not a Vespa but a bicycle, not a bicycle but an El Camino — and someone’s college-boy cousin from Boulder. Finally, one girl admitted that she could not be sure it was even Persephone at all. No, she decided at last, it was a different girl.

Meanwhile, law enforcement and vigilante groups had mounted a massive search effort. Despite nearly universal skepticism of the Vespa hypothesis, the FBI took tire impressions at the Topanga Canyon store and knocked on every door within miles. Neighbors and goodhearted strangers combed the deserts and arroyos that Persephone’s addled friends remembered only hazily. Homemade “missing” posters appeared in every store window and on every telephone pole, and all of the Southland studied Persephone’s face—looking away and halfway into a smile —and tried to read her fate.

Demeter herself searched for nine days and nine nights without rest, food, or water. Her friends begged her to go home, to eat something, to sleep, but Demeter would not. She knew that if she could just keep from doing precisely those things—from acknowledging the ordinary needs that mark the passage of an ordinary day —she could suspend time and protect Persephone, wherever she was, from fear and suffering. Someone, somewhere, must know something.

On the tenth morning of her search, with heat wobbling up from the asphalt at the foot of the Grapevine, it struck Demeter that there might be circumstances in which the progression of time was the only possible comfort. She pulled her car off the freeway and wept in the pitiless sunlight. After some time, she wandered east along the Antelope Valley Freeway. She stopped for a glass of water at the home of a retired couple, Celeus and Metaneira. Remarkably, they had no idea that an innocent teenager from the city, a good kid, the daughter of gods, had vanished. But their son, Triptolemus, who had come out of his room to make himself a sandwich, recognized Persephone’s picture immediately. When Demeter told him that the Vespa theory had borne no fruit, a hurt look moved across his face, and he volunteered a piece of information. “It’s probably nothing,” he said, “but maybe it’s something.”

Ten days earlier, said Triptolemus, his brother Eubuleus had been out near Lancaster tending the family’s sheep and llamas. It was a perfect day, one of those elusive spring days before the heat descends. The big clouds looked far, far away, and the tiny orange poppies fluttered like a million butterflies. Eubuleus had climbed a low hill, reclined against a boulder, and indulged, under the llamas’ intent supervision, in a small but well-timed joint. Below, his sheep looked still and contented as a postcard.

After some time, from a great distance, it occurred to Eubuleus that something had caught the llamas’ attention, that at some point they had all turned away from him, that the big black one, the leader, had gotten down on his knees. Then, all at once, the sky came lumbering down on them, roaring, and the earth rose suddenly and then fell away. Below, the sheep panicked, bleating and trampling each other like extras in a disaster movie. Eubuleus tried to stand on the weltering hillside, but was thrown back down. The llamas were kneeling around him.

As he tried again to get to his feet, a chasm opened in the valley floor, and the earth swallowed a great handful of sheep. Eubuleus began to struggle down the hill, thinking he could somehow save the rest, but the earth heaved in great waves, and he fell again and again. The third time he got up, he saw a Cadillac, a DeVille with tinted windows, speeding across the valley floor, raising a cloud of dust as the ground shuddered beneath it. It veered off the road into the midst of the scattering sheep, and, without a flicker of brake lights, plunged into the abyss. The ground convulsed once more, and Eubuleus was again thrown down. Then the air was still, and when he raised his head, the chasm had sealed itself over. Above, hawks rode the drafts as if nothing had happened. The big black llama got to his feet. Eubuleus knew, of course, that a tremendous fault, the San Andreas, runs the entire length of the Antelope Valley. But what had just happened seemed so other-worldly, and so clandestine. He wondered what it was he had smoked.

“But seven sheep were gone,” said Triptolemus, “and when he walked over the spot where the Cadillac went under, he found this.” It was a Vera scarf with bright blurry flowers. Demeter had bought it for Persephone only a few weeks earlier at the Pasadena City College flea market. She stared at it in confusion, then touched it to her cheek.

“But who was it?” she whispered. “Only retirees drive DeVilles.”

Triptolemus gave her a dark look. “And Hades,” he said.

Hades, lord of the Inland Empire. The name sank in Demeter’s chest like a heavy stone. She thanked Celeus and Metaneira for the water and drove slowly back to the city, but not to the police. Instead, she took the 110 to Chinatown, where Zeus had bought a building, renovated the second floor as a loft apartment, and opened a gallery downstairs. When she arrived, he was eating especially good gnocchi, savoring the burst of each tender little dumpling in his mouth. He buzzed Demeter in, and, as he waited for her to mount the stairs, ate three more gnocchi, each more luscious than the last. He knew why Demeter had come. From the moment he had seen their daughter’s face pasted in the window of the Vietnamese noodle shop, he had expected and dreaded Demeter’s visit.

Zeus had actually seen Persephone twice, on what he later realized must have been the eve of her disappearance. Certain aspects of the situation had made him loath to come forward with the information. He had seen her first at the Tiki Hut, in a buckskin miniskirt and little hand-knit camisole, throwing down blood-and-sands. She had not yet begun to undergo the deprivations that would bring on the gauntness of womanhood, and she was wearing some kind of glitter on her chest. A bit startled, Zeus left without speaking to her.

When he arrived at the Dragonfly, Persephone was already there, draped across the bar, delivering her order directly into the bartender’s ear. Zeus was on the verge of approaching her with a jocular accusation, when he saw Hades shove off the wall and navigate through the crowd like a shark. He jostled in next to Persephone and gave her a series of brief glances with blank, button eyes.

Zeus drifted away to watch the band, Swan Bottom. The guitarist and lead singer, a dark, plump boy with a crazed glare and straight black hair hanging in his face, looked better suited to the chess club than to rock ‘n’ roll. His inchoate bleating, though, made Zeus’s flesh tingle, and the insistent bass drum competed painfully with his heart. Zeus slumped against the wall and let the music shake him like a distant, sustained orgasm. After the set, as he shepherded the band to the bar for shots of Jägermeister, he saw that his daughter and brother were still there —Persephone several drinks drunker, Hades affecting a wet plaster-of-Paris smile. Only half pretending, Persephone wavered on her stool, and Hades leaned in to break her fall.

Zeus never actually formed the intention to interfere. Despite her diminishing ability to remain standing, Persephone clearly knew what she was up to. She was in good-enough hands with Hades—better than his own, anyway, and that was the way things went in their family. Besides, placating Hades, who operated under the perpetual assumption that he had just been cheated, was rarely a mistake. Zeus caught his brother’s eye when Persephone stumbled by him toward the filthy hovel of a bathroom. Hades just stared. Zeus gave the demented chess player his number and left for El Coyote, where he was planning to go anyway, to buy margaritas for ordinary girls who’d been rejected from reality TV.

Zeus declined to mention any of this to the police, or to Demeter, of course, even when Persephone’s disappearance was all over the media. He expected that she would saunter home at the end of spring break, hung over and sullenly triumphant, and that Demeter would never know what had ruined their relationship.

Unfortunately, Demeter had put together a serviceable version of the truth, still more unfortunately casting Zeus not as bystander, but as panderer. Hades, after all, had skipped the family picnics at Malibu Creek for years and had never been more to Persephone than a glowering presence in old photographs. But Persephone certainly knew Zeus, and Zeus conducted business with Hades, possibly shady business, on an ongoing basis. So when Demeter stepped into Zeus’s apartment and he opened consoling arms to her, her hands flew at his face like raptors. Zeus dodged nimbly behind a white leather bench, composing his face to feign bewilderment. “She’s out there in hell,” screamed Demeter.

“Who?” said Zeus. “Where?”

“Your daughter,” she shouted. “With Hades! Sucking avuncular cock!”

Zeus recoiled. The phrase brought out a vileness in the situation that he had not quite appreciated. He thrust the image aside. Demeter was being irrational. This was how things went. “Well,” he said. “Hades. Thank god, she’s safe.”

“Safe? I said she’s — “

“I heard you,” said Zeus. He half-turned away and raised a hand to fend off the words. The dismissal flooded Demeter’s brain with molten rage. For a moment, she thought she might die from it. Then she exhaled and started around the bench to kill him. As she closed in, Zeus remembered the dominance exercises that the monks of New Skete had recommended for his Great Dane puppy, Jupiter. He caught her by the arm, pulled her in fast, and immobilized her with his huge arms. Demeter shouted and tried to jerk free, tried again and again, but he pulled her into his lap and then held her still and covered her mouth. She struggled for a long time, but he held her tightly, and eventually she had to stop.

Zeus spoke, quietly, with his mouth on her ear, his lips barely moving. Persephone had been “with relatives” the entire time, Zeus told her. It was all right. It would blow over. No one was hurt. No one would know. Demeter dragged in a ragged breath. Like a child, thought Zeus, not quite willing to abandon her tantrum. “Now, now, now, now, now,” he said. He rocked Demeter in his lap and watched his dish of gnocchi growing cold.

Miles away, in the unincorporated depths of Los Angeles County, Hades had no intention of sending Persephone home. Nor did he see anything illicit or tawdry in keeping her with him. To Hades, plucking Persephone, still living, from the tree of humanity and whisking her by Cadillac to his rancherito had been the most exhilarating and wholly good event of his life. Persephone had, in fact, driven the whole way herself, screaming with laughter. He had never before been in the presence of so vital a creature. It did not matter to Hades that Persephone’s presence and behavior at the Dragonfly had been a charade, a drunken adolescent joy ride. So much the better, in fact. When she awoke naked in his bed the next morning, vomited, and cried for her mama, a strange joy welled up in him, a joy with no reference to having or owning. Watching Persephone crawl like a sick coyote to the window and drag herself up by the wrought iron bars, Hades finally understood that elation and grief are not two sides of a coin that you spend as you choose, whichever way will buy you the most. No, life descends on you in ferocious and beautiful storms, and all you can do is shelter yourself and the ones you love. So this was living! He would keep Persephone forever as his queen.

When Demeter arrived alone at Hacienda del Diablo the next morning to extract her daughter from Hades’s clutches, no one would open the gate. She waited at the end of the driveway, beneath a wildly overgrown bougainvillea, mounds of fluorescent blossoms tumbling over an ugly hump of thorns. She could hear, inside, a slowly overflowing fountain and, from time to time, the chaotic barking of the three-headed dog.

The brilliant, oppressive noon lasted for hours. In the neighbor’s yard, two crows hopped about a persimmon tree, clucking their tongues.

Eventually, a wraithlike servant drifted out and told her through the iron curlicues that Hades was gone and no one knew when he would be back. Perhaps he had gone to Las Vegas again, said the servant. Perhaps he had driven south into Baja to shoot doves.

“Persephone,” said Demeter. “What about Persephone?”

The wraith shook his head.

Demeter drove north on Azusa Boulevard into the mountains, up along the San Gabriel River, where humans had built three tremendous dams to capture and spread the waters. The dams’ concrete faces glared magnificently in the sunlight; the deep blue reservoirs were as calm and limitless as outer space. She would not go back to Zeus. He would do nothing to save their daughter. That was what it had meant when he held her so still in his Chinatown apartment—it was his choice, and he would do nothing. So here they “would part ways.”

Winding out of another tight switchback, Demeter came abruptly upon an unpaved turnout where the ridge widened. As she pulled into it, pea gravel clattered in the wheel wells. She got out of the car. The dust that had risen like smoke was carried down the canyon on the wind.

Years ago, men from the towns below, desperate for work, had come thousands of feet up into these mountains to build a stone wall along this ridge. A small bronze plaque commemorated their efforts. From these modest ramparts, Demeter looked out across civilization and decided to burn the place down.

Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades had, in effect, willed “the Southland” into being. They loved the glittering wealth of the place: the golf courses, the car leases, the truckloads of palm trees coiffed for delivery to another new mall. They loved the stubborn heroisms: the suburbs surging with immigrants forging a better life; the garage tenements packed with immigrants losing hope of one; the low-speed and high-speed desperado chases under helicopter floodlight; the teenage girls selling themselves into slavery; the gang members dodging traffic to rescue children from burning station wagons; the Jet Propulsion Labs, the Church of Scientology, and the Watts Towers! They loved it all! But what they loved most was their stewardship —their roles as distant, benevolent parents, nodding in satisfaction as their human children chose freely to do exactly what had been planned for them all along.

If, thought Demeter, if Zeus and Hades and clueless Poseidon could love all this, and still coldheartedly ignore the love of a real mother for her real child, the truest joy in the universe, then what was their precious real estate to her? And if her own daughter could betray her…?

In the glove compartment, Demeter found a flimsy little book of matches, from the days when books of matches were everywhere. Driving over the Glendora Pass and then down the north side of the mountains, she lit three matches, one by one, and threw them out the window. They did not stay lit. Just above Wrightwood, she got out of the car, lit what remained of the book, and threw it down the slope, into a mass of dry brush. She watched the small flames, almost transparent in the midday sun, eat up one tumbleweed and move on to the next. Then she drove away. As she passed through Wrightwood, she had to pull over to let the fire engines by. Before they could reach the scene, a gust from a rising Santa Ana wind had picked up the flames. By late afternoon, fire was burning hungrily across the mountains.

As night fell over the San Gabriel Valley, the familiar silhouettes of Mt. San Antonio, Mt. Baden-Powell, and Cucamonga Peak were outlined in a corrosive orange that crept steadily downward, an acid devouring the horizon. Every few minutes, the fire surged like a living beast licking its chops, unfurling a tongue of flame high into the sky or far down the mountainside. The full moon, rufous and swollen with smoke, struggled over the horizon.

The next morning, the entire Los Angeles Basin was clad in a sickening yellow haze. Still, the wind blew, and in the moments between gusts, ashes drifted gently onto patios as far away as Torrance. The morning news anchors abandoned all pretense at jocularity. The Wrightwood fire had grown larger, and others had started.

Demeter did not confine her vengeance to Hades’s territory. She held Zeus equally, perhaps even chiefly, responsible. So before morning broke, Griffith Park was aflame, and Altadena was threatened. Nor had she spared Poseidon. In Oxnard, flames tore through fields of artichokes, white asparagus, and heirloom tomatoes. She stood on the beach to watch Malibu burn.

For the humans who lived under the protection of the gods, it was a dismal, hopeless time. Across the Southland, they watched their livelihoods, the places where they lived and worked, picnicked and hiked, the things they ate, going up in flames. Certainly, the wealthy were punished. Their stilt-legged houses came sliding down the hillsides in heaps of embers, their picture windows exploding into the canyons. (The cost of insurance would go up again.)

But ordinary people —the poor, the reclusive, the generous of heart —suffered unutterably as the fires roared through the small towns of the foothills and canyons, incinerating trailers, bungalows, and cabins that represented years of savings, that offered a glimmer of joy in a lifetime of toil. Some owners died of grief watching the fire take their homes. Many pets had to be left behind when the police came around, blaring their horns, with the order to evacuate. The wild animals, of course, had no place to go. Deer came panicking down the mountainsides, sometimes into the very arms of the exhausted firefighters. Helpless against the inferno, the firefighters cradled the heads of the gasping deer, fed them water as they died.

Not all the humans escaped the flames. Some waited too long, or took the wrong road, or just had no way out.

Persephone, shut up in Hades’s canyon hideaway, watched the tragedy play itself out on a very old television with terrible reception. Hades refused to pay for cable, and the ancient antenna moored to the roof turned noisily to no effect. With hills rising up so steeply around the hacienda, only two channels came in at all—both distorted in ways that seemed to identify and exaggerate the grotesque in any image. One anchorman’s eyes were moored several inches offshore from his face, and the reporter on the scene had great fluorescent lesions around her mouth. Worst, though, were the shots of the fires themselves, because fire is nothing but distortion and nightmare—bright snakes leaping into the air and snapping like whips: no degree of clarity could resolve that picture. Before the smoke got too thick, Persephone could actually see the Wrightwood fire, away across the Valley, slithering over the crest of Mt. Baldy. She looked from the mountainside to the television and back again. It was really happening.

Her first morning at the hacienda — after the night of the blood-and-sands and the Cadillac and the earthquake—Persephone had lain on the cold tiles of Hades’s enormous bathroom and begged him to let her go home to her mother. He had insisted she stay until she felt better. Until she was more presentable.

She was sick all that day, the sickest she had ever been, so sick she could not move or think. She just lay there hoping to die. By late afternoon, she could sit up. Hades brought her tea with milk and sugar and sat glaring at her breasts as she sipped it. She felt too sick to be embarrassed. In an awful way, he was sexy.

And so, when morning came again, Persephone awakened to see for the first time where she was. Hades’s bedroom was at the back corner of the hacienda, cantilevered out over the steep canyonside among the live oaks. With the big windows open all around her, it seemed she had been sleeping in the treetops. Fog washed up the canyon. A path of stepping stones ran through an herb garden. A coyote came along the path and stopped to look at her. Then Hades came in with fresh orange juice in a tall glass. Later, they bathed each other in a huge claw-foot tub out on the deck. Ten days passed like that.

When the first fire started, Persephone asked again to go home. “They’re evacuating people from the campground where I said I’d be,” she said. “My mother will be so worried.” Hades looked at her steadily for some time. The shadow of a smile moved one corner of his mouth. “You don’t know, then?”

“Know what?” said Persephone.

“Who started the fires?”

“Why would I know? What do you mean?”

The corner of Hades’s mouth moved again, and then he was looming over her.

It was the next day, on the five o’clock news, that several motorists reported having seen a disturbed-looking older lady, possibly drunk, driving through the Glendora Pass dropping burning matches out the car window. All of the Southland wondered what kind of person would do such a thing. By evening, there was a warrant out for Demeter, and both stations interrupted their regular programming with her picture. It was a lovely picture, really. Persephone remembered when it was taken: at a Thanksgiving dinner; Demeter was laughing at a compliment. But on television, above the caption “mother of the missing girl,” it was the portrait of an arsonist.

Demeter remained at large, the Santa Ana continued, and the fires raged on. A picture surfaced of Persephone dancing at the KROQ Wienie Roast in bra and panties. Someone came with a subpoena for Hades, but he had his wraithlike servant keep the gates closed.

So Persephone achieved notoriety. Letters to the Times pointed out that her name actually meant “she who brings destruction.” Her schoolmates suffered through a weeklong seminar on sexuality and self-esteem and began to call her Proserpina, “the fearful one.” Few people remembered she had ever been anything but a slut.

When the fires had been burning two weeks, the Times printed an opinion piece by Hermes explicitly linking the disaster not simply to Hades’s abduction of Persephone, but also to a pattern of avarice in his management of the region’s energy resources. “If Hades decides to keep Persephone,” he wrote, “we can only expect the situation to worsen. Hades will lose no sleep converting your actual suffering into his material gain. Hades loves this fire!” He called for the citizens who still had electricity—who still had houses! —to turn off their air conditioning. He called for a boycott of gasoline.

Hades, reading the newspaper over breakfast, looked across the table to Persephone, vacantly considering an egg-white omelet. The luster had gone from her skin and hair, and it was more than the drugs. “My dear,” Hades said, “you seem unhappy.” She glared at him and, with violent efficiency, began rapping an unopened box of cigarettes against the heel of her palm. Hades watched her for a moment. Her little demonstrations, even the miserable ones, still thrilled him. But this boycott. He went to the phone.

That night on the news, local meteorologists reported a change in pressure that would end the Santa Ana and bring, they smiled, a hint of precipitation to the region. Overnight, the firefighters broke the back of the Wrightwood fire, and the others were coming around.

Hermes brokered the settlement. Persephone would return to live with Demeter—with no criminal or civil blame adhering to either her rapist uncle or her arsonist mother—provided she had abstained entirely from “eating with pleasure” during her sojourn in the underworld.

Persephone was delighted. After that first night in bed with her uncle, she had barely touched a morsel. She certainly hadn’t enjoyed a thing.

It was well after Persephone’s return had already been arranged, and, indeed, after Chez Melisse had been booked for her homecoming and the menu chosen, that Ascalaphus, Hades’s “house guest,” came forward. Interviewed on Good Day LA, Ascalaphus claimed that near the beginning of Persephone’s visit, he had been sent out by Hades for some Ecstasy and beer, and that, having procured those supplies, he had accompanied the lovers to a water tank perched above Rose Hills Cemetery. There, he claimed, they watched the sun set beyond the Long Beach oil derricks into a mercury sea, and Persephone had eaten seven red seeds of a pomegranate—with gusto. Pressed for evidence of this gusto, Ascalaphus replied that the juice had dripped down her chin, and she had smeared it ear to ear with the back of her hand. When the sun disappeared, they had turned eastward to come down the path, recalled Ascalaphus. It was then that they saw the mountains were on fire.

The Channel 9 investigative crew found the wretched water tank, or anyway a water tank in the Whittier hills, and crushed beer cans lying in the dust. DNA tests, they suggested, would surely prove conclusive.

Following these revelations, the two sides renegotiated —and reached a peculiar agreement: joint custody. Persephone would live with her mother half the year, returning with relief and despair to the knee-sock innocence of girlhood, as do so many young girls rescued from their autonomy. Of course, she would go to private school. Hades would have her the other six months as his sultry queen, if only he would take her out dancing now and then, and not just to senior-citizen karaoke at the Canyon Inn.

Demeter regarded the agreement as a defeat, however, in terms of both her daughter’s lost innocence and her own lost trust, so she took advantage of the renegotiation to clarify her role in the original balance of power. And it is this clarification that affects you and me, and our children and theirs, and all the other hopeful, helpless pawns who make their fragile lives in this opulent, desolate paradise.

Even if Zeus and Hades and Poseidon are the gods we struggle so hard to please, it is Demeter who suffers us to live at all. It is she who gives us food. It is she who lets us build our houses on bluffs eroding into the sea; amidst living tinder; on the flood plains of precariously imprisoned rivers; along huge fractures in the crust of the planet itself.

And so, when Persephone’s time with Hades rolls around again, as it does every year, and the long, unhappy, oppressive, dreary, stifling months of summer stretch horribly toward Halloween, Demeter reserves the privilege under the terms of the renegotiated agreement, to strike a few matches and watch the Southland burn.

In his afterward to the book’s English translation, Hebrew University professor David Shulman writes that “Khirbet Khizeh is a canonical text, a masterpiece of modern Hebrew prose and, in theory, still an optional part of the standard curriculum in Israeli high school.” A lyrical, meditative account of one of the most important and mythologized moments in Israeli history, the novel echoes with sounds of Babel, Joyce, and the prophets. Take, for example, the unflinching honesty of this passage, in which the narrator and his army unit enter a Palestinian village called Khirbet Khizeh.

“The sun grew hotter and the day strengthened its pleasant hold upon the valley. I don’t know why a feeling of loneliness suddenly thickened in me. The right thing would be to leave all this now and go home. We were sick of missions operations and objectives. And all these stinking Arabs, sneaking back to eke out their miserable existence in their godforsaken villages—they were disgusting, infuriatingly disgusting—what did we have to do with them, what did our young fleeting lives have to do with their flea-bitten desolate suffocating villages? If we still had to fight, we should fight and get it over with.  If the fighting was over then we should go home. It was unbearable to be doing neither one nor the other. These empty, godforsaken villages were already getting on our nerves. Once villages were something you attacked and took by storm. Today they were nothing but gaping emptiness screaming out with a silence that was at once evil and sad.”

After strafing the village with machine gun fire and going house to house, the narrator describes the humanity massed at a so-called collection point—“women with babies in their arms,” “a few old men walking silently and solemnly as though towards Judgement Day,” and “a blind man, led by a child, perhaps his grandson, who walked along looking around him in bewilderment and curiosity”—all the while struggling to put his thoughts into words.

“And with all these blind, lame, old, stumbling people, and the women and children all together like some place in the Bible that describes something like this, I don’t remember where—in addition to this bit of the Bible, which was already weighing on our hearts, we now reached an open place in which there stood a wide-spreading sycamore tree under which we saw sitting in a huddle the entire population of the village, gathered in silence, a great dappled mass, all collected together, a single silent assembly following what was happening with their eyes, one of them occasionally sighing, ‘O dear God.’ ”

The narrator finds the words he was searching for near the end of the novel, as he watches his unit load the villagers onto trucks, which will transport them across the newly created border. “All at once everything seemed to mean something different, more precisely: exile. This was exile. This was what exile was like. This was what exile looked like.” A few pages later, the narrator imagines a future Khirbet Khizeh populated by Jews. “We’d open a cooperative store, establish a school, maybe even a synagogue. … Who, then, would ever imagine that once there had been some Khirbet Khizeh that we emptied out and took for ourselves. We came, we shot, we burned; we blew up, expelled, drove out, and sent into exile.” With a conclusion like this, it’s no surprise that Khirbet Khizeh was the source of fierce controversy when it was first published in 1949, and again in 1978, when it was turned into a TV movie.

And one should not be surprised, perhaps, that it took sixty years for the novel to be translated into English. (Kudos to MacArthur fellows Peter Cole and Adina Hoffman, and their Jerusalem-based Ibis Editions, for publishing the novel, and to Nicholas de Lange and Yaacob Dweck for their beautiful translation.) Khirbet Khizeh may be difficult and it may be challenging, but we should not shy away from those things we find difficult and challenging, the messy truths that unravel our mythologies. Whatever you call the events of 1948, if you call them anything, this is an amazing novel, a testament to humanity in the midst of war. It is a war novel whose power derives from the lyricism of its prose and the subtle, very human complexity of the narrator’s response to what he has witnessed. For that alone, Khirbet Khizeh deserves to be placed on a list of its own.