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Author Archives: Michael Janairo
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Happy Mother’s Day
Posted at 3:53 pm , on May 12, 2019
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Book review: “Honeymooners: A Cautionary Tale” by Chuck Kinder
Posted at 3:34 pm , on May 6, 2019
This review first appeared in the Albany Times Union (August 11, 2001)Hilarious, loving characters in ‘Honeymooners’
Chuck Kinder’s first novel since “The Silver Ghost,” in 1978, “Honeymooners: A Cautionary Tale” ($24; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 358 pages), is a hilarious, yet unflinching, eyes-against-the-windshield journey through years of booze, drugs, sex, friendships, lies and betrayals in the lives of a pair of promising young writers.
The freewheeling 1970s that Kinder recreates, mostly in the San Francisco Bay area, belong within the literary tradition of the moveable feast Hemingway created out of Paris in the ’20s. Kinder’s writers, Ralph Crawford and Jim Stark, live “like bold outlaw authors on the lam from that gloomy tedium called ordinary life.” Kinder both celebrates and sends up their bravura and recklessness.
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Publication: ‘The Tahamaling’ in Mirror Dance
Posted at 10:13 am , on April 8, 2019
My poem “The Tahamaling” has just been published in Mirror Dance, edited by Megan Arkenberg.
Check it out here.
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Friday Photo: 飴細工 (amezaiku)
Posted at 5:54 pm , on April 5, 2019
飴細工 (amezaiku) goldfish in the Like Sugar exhibition Tang Teaching Museum, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY, April 4, 2019. -
Publication: ‘Inside Infinity’ in Thimble Literary Magazine
Posted at 11:15 am , on March 25, 2019
My poem Inside Infinity: Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Dots Mirrored Room, Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh has just been published in Thimble Literary Magazine, edited by Nadia Wolnisty.
Check it out here.
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Today’s earworm: Radio Ga Ga by Queen
Posted at 1:51 pm , on February 25, 2019
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Friday Photo: View of NYC from a Midtown hotel room, day and night
Posted at 10:45 am , on February 22, 2019
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Today’s earworm: Sucker Punch by Sigrid
Posted at 10:40 pm , on February 21, 2019
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Now listening: ‘Becoming’ by Michelle Obama
Posted at 11:33 am , on February 20, 2019
Michelle Obama describes a scene from her first day of school in which the teacher asks each students to try to read flashcards that have color words on them, such as blue, green, orange, and white. Competitive and proud, the young Michelle reads one after another until she gets stumped on white, even though she knew she knew it. Back at home, she studies up on the color words. The next day, she asks the teacher to test her again. This time, she doesn’t stumble but gets all the words just right.
This story is extraordinary. I don’t think most students would be capable of demanding to be re-tested like that. (At least, I don’t think I would have the wherewithal to speak up like that.) In effect, her act was an assertion of self against the power dynamics of the classroom in order to bolster her own position within those very power dynamics. How was she able to do that? That question hovered over her memoir. Is this an intrinsic part of her character? Or was she taught this? I’m not sure the book answers this questions directly, though Obama also tells the story of how she jumped ahead of her piano lessons to tackle more difficult works, much to the chagrin of her teacher. She also says numerous times about how she is a list-maker and box-checker. That is she believes in herself, is smart, and likes order, and has been that way pretty much all her life. So was asking for the retest an attempt to reclaim that sense of order, by reasserting before others that how she thinks about herself is truly how she is.
A clue to that girl’s tenacity can be found in an episode much later in the memoir, which she describes as having “to use what power I could find inside a situation I never would’ve chosen for myself.” That situation was the media and public’s fixation on her looks when she was First Lady; however, that sentiment could also be seen as the kind of thought process that powered the young Michelle to ask for a new test — her power was to ask the teacher, the situation she never would have chosen was to be seen as less than capable at spelling and color words than she knew she was.
Have you read or listened to “Becoming?” Let me know what you think.
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