Eugene weekly., October 21, 2010, Page 37, Image 37

books
Risky Business
Guy Maynard’s first novel looks back
E
ugene journalist and Oregon Quarterly editor Guy
Maynard has turned his considerable skills to novel
writing, and his fi rst book takes us back to a not-so-distant
time when America was at war with itself. The revolution of the
late 1960s was fed by war, injustice, bigotry and radical politics
and infused with rock music, long hair, drugs, sex and love. It’s
all mixed together in The Risk of Being Ridiculous: A Historical
Novel of Love and Revolution (Hellgate Press, $19.95).
The scene is Boston in the winter of 1969-70, and 19-year-old
Boston University student Ben Tucker is infatuated with Sarah
Stein, but like the times, his relationship is complicated. He’s
broke and sharing an apartment with a wild bunch of friends, and
he’s in trouble for protesting on campus. He’s outraged about the
injustices he sees everywhere, from the streets of Boston to U.S.
foreign policy. What can he do about it? Is violence the answer
when peaceful politics are not working? Sarah is also in love
with him but skeptical of Ben’s radical ideas and attitudes. Can
they reconcile their differences?
Maynard draws on his years in the Boston area to paint the
scene for us in great detail, and we suspect this book is his
personal exploration to better understand his youthful experiences
and emotions. He injects fascinating historical facts in the book,
his characters are memorable and sympathetic and the dialogue
fl ows easily. His account of being in a protest mob facing angry cops is gripping, and his description of an LSD
trip is the most transporting we’ve read anywhere. The tale builds to an unpredictable ending.
The quandaries Maynard’s characters face still haunt us today. And as with Eugene’s more recent history of
eco-sabotage, protests and abusive police crackdowns, the underlying issues remain unresolved. — Ted Taylor
Guy Maynard reads from The Risk of Being Ridiculous at 7 pm Monday, Oct. 25, at Gerlinger Alumni Lounge, UO.
A Past More Perfect
The work of Oregon, in poem form
T
he anthology New Poets of the American West
(Many Voices Press; $24) thudded onto my
desk like the largest paperweight or laptop
desk I’d ever seen. I promised to review this why?
True, I like poetry even though I read too fast for
much of it; I have to force myself to slow by reading
it aloud, which serves a much better purpose — to re-
imbue poems with their rhythmic, musical, language-
play satisfactions. If you think you don’t like poetry,
try reading it to someone else, or even your pet. You
might change your mind.
For our purposes, I only needed to read the Oregon
poetry section, which turned out to be a mixed
pleasure. Book editor Lowell Jaeger (who, along with
an all-volunteer staff at Flathead Community College
in Kalispell, Mont., put the book together — a true
labor of love) says in his preface that “as a reader, I’m
most pleased by poems made from the stuff of this
world, the nuts and bolts of our daily existence.” That
means a lot of the poems contain concrete imagery,
much of which concerns the work of the working-
class: logging, specifi cally, or other timber-related
jobs; and for some of the poets, being a logger’s wife
or daughter.
Ginger Andrews’ poetry kicks off the Oregon
portion with the gritty poetry of North Bend — not the
airport where business folks fl y to get to the Bandon
Dunes, but the North Bend where the fi shing business isn’t so great, where the mills fail and people go to war
and go to alcohol and put their dreams into church or the calendar hanging above the workbench. That feel
of the West, instead of the feel of the Pacifi c Northwest with its rains and progressives and eco-warriors, runs
through many of the poems.
Other themes emerge, especially those of aging, making choices that can’t be unmade, loss. Eugene poet
Ingrid Wendt’s “Benediction,” about washing her mother’s dead body, strikes deeply into the heart of physical
loss and love. There’s talent in this state, poets’ eyes seeing and sifting and understanding. Read the anthology
to see into their worlds. — Suzi Steffen
Oregon poets Ingrid Wendt, Maxine Scates, John Witte, Jenny Root, Joy McDowell, Harold Johnson, Pamela Steele and M.E. Hope read at 5 pm
Saturday, Oct. 23, at Tsunami Books.
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Funny Guy?
Mike Birbiglia puts his pain
on display
S
elf-deprecating comedian Mike Birbiglia’s new
book, Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully
True Stories (Simon & Shuster, $24), is a slim little
volume with a deceptively casual voice. Birbiglia writes
like he talks; some of the pieces in the book clearly began as
bits to be performed, and it helps to have some familiarity
with Birbiglia’s stand-up (or off-Broadway show, or CDs, or
late-night talk show appearances). It’s like a cheat sheet for
knowing just how to hear the stories in your head: the tone
is unpretentious, gentle, slightly baffl ed. Birbiglia is a dry
observer of life’s most awkward moments, which he twists
into stories that are never unkind in their honesty. Most of
the more brutal honesty is directed at Birbiglia himself: His
fi rst memory of getting “widespread attention” involves
shitting in the yard at the age of 5; his fi rst kiss results in the
girl proclaiming him “the worst kisser she’s ever kissed”;
and then there’s the everyday, consistent rejection of trying
to become a successful stand-up comedian. His time on the
college circuit makes for a fascinating read — the “nooner”
performances in inappropriate spaces, the forced travel, the
unreceptive audiences — especially once, near the book’s
end, Birbiglia gets to the story that gives the book its title.
He’s a sleepwalker, prone to waking up in a karate pose
on the bed, convinced there’s a jackal in the room, and
in a La Quinta in Walla Walla, Wash., the sleepwalking
takes a notably dramatic turn. It’s painful, not funny, but
that’s Birbiglia’s thing. Plenty of comics mine the horrible
and transform it into humor, but Birbiglia leaves the pain
right there, wrapping the awful stuff in a sort of distantly
affectionate regret that things played out the way they did
— except that if they hadn’t, he wouldn’t have gotten a
story out of it
Sleepwalk With Me begins and ends with Birbiglia’s
dad’s constant refrain: “Don’t tell anyone.” It’s a good
thing Birbiglia, like the rest of us, didn’t always listen to his
parents. — Molly Templeton
Mike Birbiglia performs at 1 pm Sunday, Oct. 24, at the Eugene Public Library.
EUGENE WEEKLY OCTOBER 21, 2010 37