PIF Magazine editor, Derek Alger, has posted his interview with Greg Herriges, author of JD: Memoir of a Time and a Journey and The Winter Dance Party Murders at http://www.pifmagazine.com/SID/917/

Two Wordcraft of Oregon titles struck gold in separate book award contests.

Katherine’s Wish, a novel by Linda Lappin, won a 2009 IPPY Award in the category of historical fiction. 2,000 independent authors and publishers entered 4,090 books in a total of 85 categories for national and regional honors, of these 3,380 books were entered in 65 national categories. Katherine’s Wish was entered in the national category. In its 13th year, the IPPY Awards were founded to recognize excellence in independent publishing.

Crazy Love, stories by Leslie What, won the 2009 Next Generation Indie Book Award, taking a gold medal in the short fiction category. Crazy Love was also a finalist in the science fiction category.

Katherine’s Wish was also Honorable Mention for an Eric Hoffer Award in the general fiction category.

We hope you’ll read these books and judge for yourself.

Wordcraft of Oregon received notice that two of our titles published in 2008 have been selected as finalists for the Eric Hoffer Award. 

Between Desert Seasons by Ellen Waterston is a finalist in the poetry category and Katherine’s Wish, a biographical novel based on the last years in the life of Katherine Mansfield, by Linda Lappin, was selected in the fiction category. (See listings on Wordcraft homepage for title descriptions). 

For more information please visit the website: www.hofferaward.com

Quidquid recipitur ad modum recipitur recipientis (whatever is received is received according to the mode of the receiver) is essentially restated by the character of Einstein in “Picasso at the Lapin Agile” as “Here’s the way I look at it,” or “depending on where you’re standing” or one might say “from where I stand.” Feldmeier, in his essay, “Sex and Spiritual Transformation,” says the Latin dictum quoted above has a twofold meaning:

First, it means that God moves and transforms us according to our own capacity and our own way of being. Second, it implies what we know of God has to correspond to who we are…

In short, the reflection of God in a cracked mirror might well be a cracked reflection. The mirror we hold up to society might be the imperfect mirror of one’s own humanity and the process of making a more perfect mirror is akin to the alchemical process of transmuting a base metal into gold. The process cannot be completed without beginning with a base metal. I see this as something of a parallel to the idea in many mystical traditions of the spirit descending into flesh. Once in the flesh, the God-in-man, the potential of gold in the base metal, tends to be forgotten. It is the crucible of life that makes the transmutation possible as the idea of becoming gold enters our consciousness. In Mayan terms, one might say this is the promise of the Fifth World in which the perfect juncture of spirit and flesh, mind and matter, sits at the center of the equilateral (Quetzalcoatl) cross, where base nature can be elevated to the sublime through a union of opposites. It is with the Christian cross that the union of opposites is unbalanced by shifting the emphasis to the spiritual, moving the juncture upward and causing up to look up instead of to the center, then essentially substituting the Church for Christ.

From where I stand, the subtext of Steve Martin’s contemporary absurdist comedy is much more subversive than superficial references to Picasso’s being a shameless libertine. The characters of Einstein and Picasso represent a momentous bridge into a modern sensibility from which we cannot go back. The bridge has burned behind us.

The path human knowledge has chosen as the result of breakthroughs represented by these two central figures has forever changed our role from that of disconnected objective observers to that of active participants entangled in the very fabric of the universe. Perceptual relativism and abstraction whether it is in the form of the deconstruction of an image as in cubism or a differential equation as in quantum physics requires active awareness rather than programmed response. By extension, moralistic reactions are replaced by a kind of situational ethics from which one makes constant choices, or as Carlos Casteneda’s Don Juan says, requires us to become impeccable warriors. If you have chosen the right path, then all your choices must be impeccable. If your path is wrong, then regret would most likely pull you into living either in the past or future, making you unable to respond to Now.

It follows then that the next question we must ask is when do we become responsible for our choices? And here lies the rub. One of the guardians of the threshold we confront in any journey is what Trebbe Johnson calls “the monster of grim prospects.” Trebbe Johnson is a poet, essayist and director of Vision Arrow, a guide service that leads spiritual trips into the wilderness. Johnson refers to our two sides — one ready to leap into destiny and the other holding us back. In folktales, this internal conflict is often depicted by parent and child. She talks about the stories of Rose Briar, Balder and Percival where loving parents attempt to shelter their children from all that is potentially dangerous. This is also the story of Buddha. The fear many parents have of their children’s “moral decline” falls into this age-old conflict between the parent wanting to keep their child safe within the walls of the city and the child’s desire to strike out into the great unknown. If carried to an extreme, this desire to protect can result in the parent becoming the “monster” that must symbolically be defeated so the child can answer the call and begin their journey.

Every journey begins once we are facing the right direction and we might seek guidance in learning to face the right direction, but once we take the first step, we go alone – though we discover along the way that we are never alone.

In a relativistic world of situational ethics we are confronted with such questions as “When is it the right time? What is age-appropriate?” Traditionally, in mythopoetic journeys, the hero is most often quite young — sometimes only a teenager. We understand when teenagers answer the call and decide to enlist in the Marines to serve their King, yet deny them, right up to the engagement in battle, any opportunity to become responsible for their own choices, controlling what movies they watch, what music they listen to, what galleries they visit or plays they attend.

A paradigm that opens the possibility of observers/participants determining for themselves where they stand in relation to their own inward experience undermines not only classical physics and traditional forms of art, but any number of models of materialistic reality that emphasize form over essence, or mandate a black and white response to a more complex and multi-dimensional world. As Norris has noted above, rather than viewers in the gallery being able to fall back on a programmed response, abstract art or any new form of experience might require that we “find the meaning” – which is an act of participation or co-creation.

A consequence of a transformational process leading us to a worldview in which we are the co-creators of our own lives (and possibly even the universe-at-large) is that we must then assume responsibility for our creation. This can be painful and time-consuming, as such a process requires constant self-assessment and an on-going effort to remain awake — in the sense intended, I think, by G. I. Gurdjieff when he says “Man lives his life in sleep and in sleep he dies” — that is, our great journey is always towards self-knowledge, toward removing the barriers so the light of consciousness can illuminate and ultimately elevate us to the sublime. But when there are so many forces all around us day after day promising to relieve us of all our pain and all our burdens if only we will accept their control, and we allow ourselves to be pulled by their gravity into a dark habitual life of unconscious conformity, we will never gain the soul strength to face the consequences of our actions or test the flexibility of our “psychic grid” through extension, expansion and the experience of Other – all necessary functions if conscious intention is ever to intervene in the easy predisposition of “following the path of least resistance.” If we do not conquer the fear at the threshold, we will never attain the character to bring back the boon of human compassion – which cannot be attained without flexibility, tolerance and power of imagination.

Einstein brought our attention to the dual properties of light – wave and particle – in that our perception of light as a wave disallows our perception of light as a particle. We might intellectually understand that light has both properties but we can never experience them both at the same time. This has often been illustrated by optic illusions such as the silhouette of the faces and the vase. Remember this? You can see the silhouette of two faces facing each other or the silhouette of a vase, but not both simultaneously. Your perception can jump back and forth from one to the other, but the image cannot be both faces and vase at the same time. This mechanics of human perception as we understand it and the question of “reality” behind the perception is a basis for the artwork of many modern artists such as M.C. Escher and Salvador Dali.

In addressing the trend toward fundamentalism in our time, Patrick Laude says this:

Religion could be defined as a sacred form that frees us from all the outward forms that imprison our soul… Today, …the role of traditional spirituality is to remind people of the true sources of religion. Fundamentalism is a caricature of this search for sources, as is often manifested by its ambitions to “purify” or “restore” an original state of affairs.

The “world of forms” of any sacred tradition serves the purpose of a finger pointing to the moon, taking us beyond the world of forms, to the unseen reality behind the forms, to what David Bohm calls the “implicate order,” a hidden order in which our notion of space and time is enfolded. Thus to worship the forms would be to worship the finger that points to the moon instead of the moon itself – or, would be, in a word, idolatry. In the words of a Sufi teacher, The only way to become detached from form is to become attached to essence.

Clarissa Pinkola Estes says “obscenity as an aspect of sacred sexuality, is vital to the wildish nature.” And a wildish nature is needed for the journey. One of the ways we gain the confidence to face the monster is to remember who we are, remember the gold inside of us, remember the stories of those who went before and the challenges they faced and the monsters they had to conquer. Even though every journey is new and our experience is unique, we are never alone.

Trusting enough in your guide – the artist, the author, the scientist, the teacher, the director, or a spiritual guide – enough to let go of a need to control the outcome of every experience is the door that opens long enough for us to be taken somewhere new, into some alien or profane space that may well be the first step toward finding the sacred.

As Trebbe Johnson says:

The monster makes us forget that we are anything but ordinary, and convinces us that an insulated fortress of our own making is safer than the mystery that beckons beyond the gate.

We match this monster not with weapons, but with self-knowledge.

In my 1992 essay, “For the Moon Itself,” I said, “The creative artist is obligated to explore new forms, find dynamic new expressions which nurture and sustain our wonder with the world, our sense of surprise and the newness of experience…our cultural lives require diversity, multiplicity and cross-pollination or our culture will be reduced to cliché and dull repetition, non-offensive muzak and greeting card verse which are unable to liberate any living energy from dead matter.”

So if you choose to pull up the drawbridge and remain in the fortress, I will respect that as long as you don’t stealthily follow me into the forest just to slay my dragon.

When James Hillman was asked to give the inaugural address for the first Festival on Archetypal Psychology in 1992 at the University of Notre Dame (a good Catholic school), he chose to give his talk on pornography. According to Hillman, the word “obscenity” in the United States is now linked by legal definition to depictions or descriptions of objectionable sexual acts, themes or activities. So as much as toxic waste dumps, AIG bonuses, the bombing of civilians and torturing suspected terrorists are offensive to most of us, they cannot be legally labeled as “obscene.”

Hillman reminds us that without expressions of Eros, the world would become sterile and static (note eros is the root of erotic and connotes an impulse that is beyond social control). Hillman’s idea of “image” is at the root of imagination, finds its wellspring in Eros and applies equally to a poem, a play or a painting. Every attempt by the State to control the “image” has historically and inevitably failed. These acts of official repression have generally ruined more lives than they helped with a greater cost to freedom than any threat of hearing ribald stories or viewing of pornographic magazines or lewd art shows might justify.  Hillman warns us that the State and/or Church’s desire to control expressions of Eros is a thin disguise for controlling the “body” and whenever State/Church controls the body, you essentially create a State of Slavery. He further warns that whether the repression is personal or social, it usually results in manifestations of Eros that are even more base, distorted and twisted as this natural energy ultimately finds its way into negative forms if not given a positive outlet, possibly even erupting into aggression. So rather than censor or repress all these natural expressions of Eros, Hillman instead suggests we learn to recognize and honor those instances where Eros can be elevated to the “sublime” – in a word, through art and science.

In her essay, “Degenerates,” Kathleen Norris (in Volume Two of The Best Writing on Writing, 1995) talks about visiting a gallery exhibit called “Degenerate Art” at the New York Public Library. The exhibit consisted of artwork produced during the Nazi regime, those officially approved and those labeled “degenerate.”

As I walked the galleries it struck me that the real issue was one of control. The meaning of the approved art was superficial, in that its images (usually rigidly representational) served a clear commercial and/or political purpose. The ‘degenerate’ artworks, many crucifixes among them, were more often abstract, with multiple meanings, or even no meaning at all, in the conventional sense. This art—like the best poetry, and also good liturgy—allowed for a wide freedom of experience and interpretation on the part of the viewer.

I have control over my choices, not over other people’s choices. 

At the very heart of any discussion of the paradigm shift from Newtonian physics with its clockwork model determinism to quantum indeterminism with its implied role of the observer as co-creator is the idea of free will. And I find it something of a tribute that the man whose Special and General Theories of Relativity laid the necessary groundwork for the development of Quantum Theory (which he found inelegant at best even when acknowledging the proofs were undeniable) but then challenged what became the standard model of the Copenhagen School of Quantum Physics. With an open mind and in a friendly manner, he directed a serious challenge to his friend and colleague, Niels Bohr, commonly recognized as the father of the Copenhagen School. Bohr rose to the task and answered each challenge by applying some new interpretation or proof using the very model Einstein could not fully embrace. Their exchange popularly came to be known as the Einstein-Bohr debates, but it wasn’t so much a debate as a dialogue. It is from these dialogues that the term “thought experiment” came into our language—an experiment that could only be conducted in the mind because we did not possess the necessary conditions to conduct the experiment in a lab. I mention this because Einstein was very distressed by indeterminism as it threatened the more classical model of time and space, of cause/effect, but he did not lack the imaginative power to consider its many implications and question it, while quantum theory brought Bohr a kind of re-enchantment with the universe, reaffirming the idea of free will but without Einstein’s challenges he would never have been pushed to strengthen the model, to perfect the “image.” So what may be most instructive in light of the issue of censorship is that Einstein and Bohr both had their own perception of what model/image was “beautiful,” yet did not attempt to censor each other or in any way limit the other’s range of imagination and thought, rather engaged each other in a dialogue that elevated the “image” to a higher level, to the sublime.

In “Picasso at the Lapin Agile,” Martin uses a wonderful device of the drawing contest between Einstein and Picasso in which Einstein finishes first because he only needed to write a few letters. This is a brilliant treatment of the complementary nature of art and science, which I will come back to later.

In her book, Women Who Run With The Wolves, and again in her audio lecture recorded by Sounds True, The Creative Fire, Clarissa Pinkola Estes makes reference to the “goddess of obscenity,” Baudo. Estes draws upon the Greek myth of the abduction of Demeter’s daughter, Persephone, by Hades. Persephone’s being dragged into the underworld is (among other possible meanings), according to Estes, an allegory for the creative cycle. What happens in a personal and collective sense when creativity is “abducted” by any of the negative complexes that prevent us from playing creatively and joyfully on the fertile plain of Eleusis. I find her re-interpretation of this ancient myth most insightful as a whole, but her understanding of the important role played by Baudo cannot be overstated here. After searching and searching for her daughter who has vanished because she now sits sorrowfully beside Hades on his dark throne in the underworld, Demeter nearly gives up, feeling broken, all the joy gone from her life. She withdraws her fertility from the world. The once bountiful dries up. All life shrivels and dies. Demeter is sterile and stiff with grief. Then Baudo (bawdy, body?), a headless goddess with nipples for eyes comes dancing seductively towards her, singing through her vulva, and Demeter finally cracks a smile. Baudo tells Demeter ribald jokes until she finally chuckles, then laughs a belly laugh. As a result of Baudo’s irreverent antics and uncensored expressions of Eros, Demeter loosens up enough to receive the information she needs from Hekate and Helios to solve the mystery of her daughter’s disappearance and to finally recover her–even if lovely Persephone must be shared in the end with Hades.

Estes says “obscenity as an aspect of sacred sexuality, is vital to the wildish nature.” This is what Kevin Cahill is defending in his selection of Steve Martin’s play, when he assures us “laughing at sex isn’t the same as endorsing it.” One laughs at the Nez Perce Coyote tales in Jerome Rothenberg’s anthology, Shaking the Pumpkin: Traditional Poetry of the Indian North Americas (1972, Revised 1991), “Coon cons Coyote, Coyote eats Coon, Coyote fights Shit-men, gets immured in a rock-house, eats his eyes, eats his balls, gets out, cons Bird-Boy for eyes, loses them to the birds & gets them back” and “Coyote borrows Farting Boy’s asshole, tosses up his eyes, retrieves them, rapes old women, & tricks a young girl seeking power,” as Coyote is not a very evolved figure and, though he often cons other Animal People and tricks Indian maidens into having sex with him, he really has no control over his body, no control over his appetites. He finds himself in one fix after another as his tricks at some point always seem to backfire or someone smarter than him turns the tables. The beauty of the Coyote cycle is that the silly trickster gradually matures, growing up along with the children who are taught his stories not only so they won’t become Coyote, but also to respect his powers of creation. I somehow doubt that the storytellers in native cultures could be coerced into editing their Trickster Cycles so they might more readily fall into a more acceptable PG13 rating.

As far as I can see, Steve Martin’s Picasso at the Lapin Agile fails to actually deliver on the true comedic potential of Picasso as Baudo in his play. Perhaps this is because he just didn’t see it, or maybe because of a sincere desire to avoid controversy, or to gain more commercial acceptance. So when his character, Germaine, points out Picasso’s limitations in a relationship, intimating that the artist suffers from much the same male complex as that discussed by Rollo May in The Cry for Myth, using the character of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, we haven’t really been given enough evidence of the artist’s obsessions or any habitual infidelity.

May says:

…the Peer Gynts in life never solve the paradox of freedom by giving oneself. Their freedom is not even a freedom from something: it is a simulated freedom, with mother always in the wings. Hence their compulsive activity: they must always be trying to prove something to the woman, whether she is present or fantasied, and at the same time they are always running away from her.

This is perhaps the most insight we get into Picasso’s character from any other character in the play.

The character of Picasso is much less developed than that of Einstein. Martin uses what we know of Albert Einstein and his Special Theory of Relativity to good effect–good for laughs and to inspire the witty use of language, and for grounding the dialogue in relativistic situations, leading to a mutual regard for the complementary nature of art and science. But the exaggeration of Picasso’s personality for comic effect, making it even more ribald with some profoundly profane wit of a Lenny Bruce of a Red Foxx would have had me rolling in the aisle.

Final segment: Relativity, situational ethics and critical thinking versus black and white moralism and blind obedience. Interpretation, imagination and judgement as factors in determining where you stand in relation to Other. What are community standards and whose community is it anyway? Censorship in the marketplace…how the market establishes control and limits free expression. The age-old parenting problem of knowing when your children are able to make choices and think for themselves. Who decides what constitutes obscenity and what really contributes to moral decline? A final word on the complementarity of art and science. 

PART ONE

Controversy flared recently in my small town of La Grande, population 12,000, nestled in the Blue Mountains of Northeastern Oregon, over the banning of a high school production of Steve Martin’s play, “Picasso at the Lapin Agile.”

From what I’ve learned, the play was carefully selected by long-time La Grande High School English teacher, Kevin Cahill, approved by the principal, Doug Potter, and the cast had already begun rehearsing for an April/May production when a substitute teacher at the high school, Melissa Jackman, also the parent of a 14-year-old interested in a part, found excerpts of dialogue (not surprisingly from the character of Picasso) to be objectionable and believed production of the play would contribute to the moral decline of La Grande’s youth.

Jackman presented a petition with 137 signatures — which according to some accounts were garnered from members of her church — and the superintendent of La Grande schools, Larry Glaze, banned production of the play. The decision was appealed to the school board and, in spite of what some have described as a majority in support of the play, voted 4-3 to uphold the decision by the superintendent and the play was banned as not being age-appropriate for La Grande High School students. Jackman and those recommending the play be banned did suggest they might be more accepting if the play could be edited to delete the objectionable material (more on this later when I discuss themes of the play). Of course, Cahill, whose experience in theatre and writing provided him with perhaps a better-than-public understanding of the implications of violating copyright law declined this offer and attempted to assure the moralists that if the play were to be rated it would warrant no worse than a PG-13 and was more appropriate than most primetime television shows. Cahill also pointed out that “laughing at sex isn’t the same as endorsing it.” I think anyone who has watched a situation comedy would concur with this. Humor has been a common device in storytelling to educate youth about the consequences of socially unacceptable behavior since the advent of trickster cycles (and Coyote tales).

The high school thespians and their director turned to Eastern Oregon University to host the play as a potential relief valve so they could proceed with the production offsite and independently from the high school. They understood that without the high school’s patronage they would have to raise the necessary funds to assume responsibility for production costs. But Dixie Lund, the university’s interim-president, initially turned them down, not wanting to go against the will of the school board and wanting to maintain a good relationship with the school’s administration and board. This could have been a potentially embarrassing stance that reverberated as a much bigger story far beyond the region as universities in America are considered seats of academic freedom particularly since the parents of the student actors did not object to their involvement in the play. Thankfully a college student organization, EOU Democrats, stepped in and reserved the theater for the production and the university was forced because of a state non-discrimination law to honor the organization’s use of a public facility with the caveat that they assume responsibility for the costs, etc. Then in a further development, Steve Martin learned of the controversy and the EOU Democrats courageous intervention so offered to cover costs of the production, noting the play had been produced by other high schools without any such controversy and he wanted to defend the play’s reputation.

Now Kevin Cahill, from my own personal perspective, is not an ego-driven maniacal director looking for any limelight which might come from this controversy. He’s a much-respected teacher who over the years has taught a small army of grateful students, students who have benefited from his intelligence and his commitment to teaching as much as from his strong background in literature and writing. And many of us in the community have been enriched by his contributions to the local culture through his various roles on and off the stage. He’s a graduate of the local university where he played basketball and contributed to the literary magazine while attaining his teaching degree. He has been honored on numerous occasions for his excellence in teaching and his teaching experience, which includes a year in France through the Fulbright Teacher Exchange Program, is deep and profound. His rootedness in the region and his focus on putting his students first only underscores his laudable desire to find and produce a contemporary comedy with mature themes and intelligent content to gently nudge students into serious thought and discussion revolving around significant breakthroughs in both the arts and sciences in the 20^th century — subject matter well-served in Martin’s symbolic meeting between Picasso and Einstein at a tavern in France, the Lapin Agile (Nimble Rabbit).

I’m reminded by this controversy of a joke I heard many years ago about the psychiatrist who, as part of his treatment, shows his patient a series of Rorschach inkblots and the patient, presented with each abstraction, describes some sexually-explicit scene or erotic act after which the psychiatrist, having heard enough to present a diagnosis, informs the patient that he has an obvious fetishistic obsession with sex. The patient looks totally perplexed for a moment then says, “What do you mean, me? You’re the one showing all the dirty pictures.”

Obscenity, as well as beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Or quidquid recipitur ad modum recipitur recipientis (whatever is received is received according to the mode of the receiver). In the words of Peter Feldmeier, an associate professor of theology at the University of St. Thomas “In the end, what we discover about ourselves informs our knowledge of God, even as the keyhole tells us about the key.”

Jackman and those advocating for the ban repeatedly bring up the argument of being denied access to the play by virtue of its content. They’d like to be able to take the whole family. Surely, you’ve heard this argument before. A number of years ago when VHS videos was such a craze and people were able to enjoy movies in their own homes, there was a video rental in our area whose proprietors took it upon themselves to edit VHS movies to make them more family-friendly. Now this was not even a legal activity and violated copyright law but video-editing did make it possible to simply cut out anything that might be perceived as objectionable. Of course, who decides what gets cut? Usually the one with the editing capability. This practice was condoned by many families in our county as a means of allowing parents concerned about the moral corruption of their children to watch the same movies as their peers without having to see or hear anything objectionable. Thus their virtue could be protected. However, this is akin to saying you’d love to visit the Cistine Chapel but you’ve been denied access because The Vatican will not cover up all those naked bodies Michelangelo was so fond of painting.

A friend of mine had a small gallery for awhile in La Grande. We originally were going to be partners until I decided to withdraw in order to avoid an inevitable conflict over what should or should not be exhibited in the gallery. I became aware of this potential conflict when I recommended he check out a website for the Museum of Digital Art (MODA), www.museumofdigitalarts.com (check for yourself) as I was very excited about the range of digital imagery presented and the possibilities of this new technology as a tool for artists. I was just getting into exploring digital art myself so welcomed all ideas in this new creative arena. My friend typed in the web address but the site was blocked, identified as having nudity on it, so he casually informed me that he couldn’t look at it. I was both confused and saddened by this – confused because I had looked at the site and any nudity was hardly objectionable and I knew he was computer-savvy so had set the blocking parameters himself, saddened because someone who professed a love of art had denied himself the experience of viewing some remarkable cutting-edge art because one or two pieces might have nudity – something he could have moved beyond with a simple click of the mouse if he chose not to dwell on it. This seems to me to border on the absurd – this lumping of artwork exhibiting exceptional digital graphic skills into the same category as sites where women are having sex with farm animals. This was like judging whether or not taypayer dollars should go to artists all over the country based on the controversy over the photography of Robert Mapplethorpe or Andre Serrano’s Piss Christ. [What’s incredibly ironic here is that my computer software just now alerted me to the fact that Mapplethorpe as two “ps.” So my Microsoft Word program even knows who he is, but I doubt if it would recognize the name of say Tom Morandi, a former Eastern Oregon State College sculptor/art professor whose public art sculpture for the City of Pittsburg recently had to be reclaimed after sitting neglected for years in a public works warehouse.]

If a small minority of those who object to nudity and sexual imagery or anything that offends their sensibilities can determine funding for the National Endowment of the Arts, why can’t a large segment of the population who find Pentagon spending and contracting practices obscene make the decision to have their tax dollars go elsewhere?

My next blog will continue a discussion of Martin’s play as well as some broader themes of censorship, pornography, sex and spiritual transformation and my own gut feeling that the adult themes in “Picasso at the Lapin Agile” provides perfect cover for a deeper, maybe even unconscious, resistance to the play for its modern ideas — relativity (Einstein) and deconstruction of the image (Picasso).

A recent email from Portland poet, Dan Raphael, shared the following information. In an article in last Sunday’s Oregonian, nominations are being sought in a joint effort between the Oregon State Library and Poetry Northwest to compile a list of 150 Oregon poetry books as part of Oregon sesquicentennial. Send your nominations to  editor@poetrynw.org in the following format: Name of Poet, Title of Book, Publisher, Year of Publication.

“Disciples of Paradox,” a long poem by David Memmott, dedicated to theoretical physicist, Stephen W. Hawking, and first published by Strange Horizons in Spring 2008, has been nominated for the Rhysling Award in the long poem category.

The Rhysling Awards recognize the very best speculative and fantastic poetry published during the previous calendar year. This is the 32nd year the Rhyslings have been awarded. Memmott was a Rhysling Award winner in 1990 in the long poem category. This is his fourth nomination. “Disciples of Paradox” is also published in Memmott’s new collection, Giving It Away. For more information on the Rhyslings, please visit www.sfpoetry.com/archive.htm

Katherine’s Wish, Linda Lappin’s novel about the final years of Katherine Mansfield’s life, has been selected as a finalist for ForeWord Magazine’s Book of the Year Award in the category of general fiction. Congratulations, Linda.

In the next six-eight months, Wordcraft of Oregon will be releasing three new books.

Giving It Away, a collection of poems by Wordcraft of Oregon editor and publisher, David Memmott. (See info posted on website).

A Democracy of Ghosts, a novel by John Griswold. The love story of four couples, set against the backdrop of the Herrin Massacre of 1922. This clash of miners and strikebreakers in Bloody Williamson County, in Southern Illinois, resulted in the deaths of 21 men–19 of them the “scabs” tortured and murdered by average men, women, and even children in what was once considered the most radical community in America.

John Griswold has drawn from contemporary eyewitnesses and news accounts, an ethnography of the area, histories, and his own grandfather’s letters to create the lives of four fictional couples whose ambitions, self-doubts, and social and sexual jealousies contribute to this great American violence that still echoes down through time.

The Procession of Memories: Harry Martinson Poems (1929-1945) translated by Lars Nordstrom. A new edition of the Nobel Laureate’s early poems in a bi-lingual edition with an Introduction by the translator.