“It’s 9:00 AM in the southern edge of the Sierra Nevada, eighty-five degrees and rising. The water in our bottles is almost gone, but I don’t panic. I suck my tongue. I lick my hot teeth. Allison, my girlfriend, stirs in her sleeping bag.”

Pacific Crest Trail hiker and memoirist Dan White grounds his travelogue in earthy reality through direct language, short sentences, and the constant awareness of physical needs. Hunger, thirst, cold, heat, exhaustion, fear, and boredom accompany him and his girlfriend throughout the wilderness, allowing for a realistic, tough-minded exploration of nature’s effects on humankind.

White intersperses natural history and facts about the creatures he and Allison encounter on the trail throughout the narrative. For example, unlike grizzlies, black bears are not pigeon-toed, and can head towards potential prey in a straight line. And lizards’ brains weigh a fraction of a gram, yet the animals are able to locate water in dry desert environments.

We also see the larger story of the history of humanity’s relationship to that particular land area, as anecdotes of explorers, developers, and political figures intertwine with Dan and Allison’s individual journey. We read of how wilderness enthusiasts Rogers and Clarke envisioned and set aside the Pacific Crest Trail over decades in order to strengthen and improve Americans’ moral and physical stamina, of President Jefferson’s speculations concerning wildlife west of the Mississippi, of the Lewis and Clark expedition, of water conflicts in the Owens Valley.

The Cactus Eaters’ greatest strength as a narrative is this carefully crafted balance, where Dan connects his own story to greater outside realities without losing sight of the piece’s central focus on his own specific journey.

White also interjects plenty of self-deprecating humor into this book. He spends an entire early chapter deliberating whether to speed up the pair’s journey by discarding some of their water supply. “Something was getting on my nerves, a hollow slop sound coming from inside our backpacks. Slip, slap, slop, what the hell was it? Water, that’s what it was…suddenly a plan rose to the surface of my thoughts…and it was pure genius.”

Later on, thirsty and possibly lost within the Mojave Desert, White rethinks the wisdom of his plan. But not after biting into a cactus without fully removing the spines, in the incident giving the book its name. As a novice hiker, White often bumbles through the trail, losing equipment such as his waste shovel and getting lost. He invites readers to laugh along with him, to experience the confusion of many in our society who have more ‘book-learning’ than common sense as we have become increasingly isolated from nature and its gritty realities. This humor gives the book a fresh perspective, a new slant on the adventure/self discovery genre.

We meet a cast of eclectic characters on the Pacific Crest Trail right along with Dan and Allison. Including the Gingerbread Man, a wise, friendly vegan gentleman with a grudge against the USDA food pyramid, Doctor John, a serious, mathematically minded, but socially awkward and overly frank companion, elegant day hikers who lose their bouquet of organic cheeses to a tree-climbing black bear, and legendary ‘trail angel’ Milt Kenney, who earned a justified reputation for showing small-town hospitality to the occasional PCT hikers who ventured across his path. Shown with all their kindnesses, warts, and quirks, these folks become real people, part of the trail’s culture without losing their individuality. We observe the culture which develops around wilderness, where human interactions become less complicated and frequent as physical survival requires a greater proportion of time and energy.

Dan also describes the mental transformation he and Allison undergo while on the trail. They experience physical reality more directly without the filters of internal or external verbal narration we normally impose upon our lives due to the need to communicate with others. To paraphrase, he relates how they went from saying something akin to “May I please have some of that nice organic granola bar?” to more of a Pleistocene grunt, but could still understand each other’s meanings through gestures. This brings up some interesting questions about the role of words in terms of facilitating – or defining/limiting – human communication.  

The pair does choose to fill the long hours on the trail and retain some level of normal humanity through constant singing and storytelling. From revised rap lyrics (‘hikahs’ instead of ‘gangstas’) to Alison’s penny-dreadful amateur horror tales, they entertain themselves with language.

The long period of mutual isolation, complete with periods of total isolation when Dan and Allison drive each other crazy and ignore each other, also provides him with time and space to reflect on how the trail is changing him as a person. Dan wonders whether his journey is truly maturing him, making him less selfish and neurotic and more aware of life’s priorities, or whether the hiking is simply another form of escapism from his adult responsibilities in the modern world.

The question is never fully answered – and perhaps The Cactus Eaters suggests that how one chooses to respond to and engage with life experiences is more important than the nature of those experiences themselves when it comes to personal development.

How will Dan and Allison take what they have learned from the trail and translate it into their ordinary lives? Can some lessons transfer into such a different world? I found it poignant and interesting that White devotes the last third of his narrative, not to the hike itself, but to his psychological journey of attempting to find his place once again in normal society afterwards. This inclusion seems to suggest that the return from the wilderness, from the heroic journey, can become a difficult undertaking in itself. Sea captain Ernest Shackelton’s biography Endurance, which White references in this book, relates much about the man’s excellent seamanship, self-sacrificing leadership, and wisdom and courage in the face of physical danger. However, the last chapter mentioned that he was never as successful or functional back on land, with attempting to work and earn a living after his adventure ended.

Sadly, the couple’s differing expectations for life after the trail and capacity to adjust to the return home drove Alison and Dan apart. She returned stronger, more confident, and enthusiastic about restarting her professional writing career, while he, more romantic to an extent, found he had left much of his heart and soul back on the trail.

Eventually he returns for shorter solo journeys after working a variety of jobs and meandering his way through Santa Cruz, before finally marrying, developing his career, and relegating lengthy survivalist hikes to nostalgia.

In the book’s final pages, White relates how he has learned from his wilderness experience. He no longer expects the same degree of ease/comfort from life, welcoming and accepting logistical challenges and complaining less about inevitable ups and downs. Perhaps he has finally completed the last leg of his journey…taking his trail adventure and integrating its lessons into a balanced, workable life. The book ends with a beautiful, reflective observation of another young couple enjoying dinner on the trail at sunset.

“They look through me as if I were made of Saran Wrap…then it gets too cold for me to stay out here any longer, so I leave them be and retreat down the ridge alone.”

Better read as a personal memoir/adventure narrative than a how-to hiking manual, The Cactus Eaters provides much in the way of fascinating historical and natural information as well as a compelling story.

Dan White supports independent bookstores and encourages you to purchase The Cactus Eaters from one near you. Also, he is available online through his blog at www.cactuseaters.blogspot.com

“Why buy the cow if the milk is free?” 

At first glance, Kristie LeVangie’s poem collection Libidacoria: In a Plain Brown Wrapper seems to portray a self-satisfied, empowered woman content to successfully live out this attitude. However, through subtle, telling hints, LeVangie (or K- as she is often known) reveals her speaker’s growing desire for emotional connection and romantic love. And the author’s ability to subtly illustrate gradual emotional development through metaphorical interactions among various parts of the speaker’s psyche becomes the piece’s greatest strength.

*This review concerns a piece with graphic depictions of intimacy that is intended for mature readers. You may feel free to read further or skip to the next featured work as you wish. *

In Libidacoria’s preface, the speaker refers to sexuality as simultaneously her ‘greatest adventure’ and her ‘abhorrent curse’ and describes a process of embracing its ‘unrelenting’ nature.  She expands upon this complex relationship to her physical and emotional drives by separating herself into multiple ‘selves’ throughout the work. We see a ‘beast’ who seems primarily concerned with physical gratification, who at times wields control over the rest of the speaker’s psyche. There is also a ‘little girl’ who hides, sobs, and must be sheltered, who fears relationships and appreciates reassurance that no particular man plans (or will be allowed to) stay very long. The poetry itself cycles through the voices and emotions of these varied characters. Some pieces show liberated female sexuality as a source of empowerment: ‘loyal to myself/I will remain,’ while others convey violation and pain: “gang bang style, vultures entering without permission/feasting on the innocence.”

And, there is the speaker herself, the sole user of the first person, who consciously attempts to mediate among the various surface and hidden desires. In the second poem she wishes to ‘find a way to sate’ her inner beast for ‘only a few hours’ so she can focus on other matters. Later on she strives occasionally to protect the ‘little girl’ while going back and forth concerning romance and commitment.

About a third of the way through Libidacoria, she criticizes a man for bringing feelings into their series of sexual encounters. If his ‘eyes, still cloudy/want more than that,/I am simply incapable to give.’ In the very next poem, she laments another man’s inability to remember her name with the lights on. She seeks human connection while still consciously denying a desire for anything but short term encounters on her own terms.

Will romantic love remove the control the speaker asserts over her own destiny, the empowerment she repeatedly celebrates? Perhaps…but living without love, denying her own increasingly real desire for connection, confining herself simply to casual encounters, seems limiting in its own way. She reflects how sex with one man ‘turned her back to whore/the only type she knew how to be’ and on how she ‘longs to be dominated/although she seems to dominate.’ Her nostalgia for some kind of idealized romance increases throughout the work, as she writes of a long-ago prostitute/milliner who whispers to her clients and blows them kisses as they leave, and remembers her own youthful wish to be whisked away by a man to faraway places. As time passed, she laments, it became too scary to dream and men and women ‘forgot how/as they grew old.’

This internal struggle/journey motif has a long history within Western literature, harking back to Sir Gawain’s legendary battle with the Green Knight. The color green represented unredeemed, uneducated, and uncivilized nature and wilderness, the difficult-to-control and not always socially presentable aspects of societal and individual nature. The very idea of conveying these themes through a cycle of rhymed poems also harkens back to medieval and Romantic tradition. Through expressing direct, physical action and un-prettified words and concepts (cum, pheromones, grinding, etc)  in short rhyming couplets and verses, K- at once parodies traditional and commercial greeting-card love poetry while aligning herself with, reinventing, and perhaps expressing some subtle nostalgia for certain aspects of the past.

K-‘s speaker communicates with a definite rhythm, stressing the syllables at the end of her poetic lines. The writing becomes memorable and belies its complexity at first glance. The rhyme occasionally varies from an exact match of sounds (dead/instead, need/plead) to a slant rhyme with similar vowel sounds and intonations (object/deposit, release/please) to add interest and color to the work while suggesting the difficulty of conveying mixed sentiments in brief pop-style lyrics. In a sophisticated manner LeVangie appropriates and critiques the poetic forms we use to communicate love. Romantic poetry becomes at once timeless and meaningful, and limiting because of the difficulty of getting across so many conflicting thoughts in a few simple couplets.

The concept of maturing female sexuality (and the social constraints to which it has been subjected) also goes back many years in literature. Christina Rossetti’s long poem The Goblin Men is a tale of two sisters where one rescues another from the grip of sensual pleasures which excite but ultimately become an addiction and drain her energy for other aspects of life. Rossetti  stresses the need for women to resist and protect themselves from the temptations represented by the demonic male fruit hawkers, in keeping with her era’s Victorian morality. Yet she acknowledges female physical desire to a much greater extent than other writers of the day – women lie awake yearning for ‘fruit’ – and allows the ‘fallen’ sister to get rescued and return to her hometown and family without apparent permanent damage to her reputation.

The Goblin Men also emphasizes the value of female friendship, which is noticeably absent from Libidacoria. While Rossetti’s sisters exist in a world of perpetual sexual innocence seemingly without normal, healthy physical relationships (Joyce Carol Oates has remarked upon the absence of any mention of the women’s husbands although both eventually have children) K-‘s speaker seems to exist in a world full of sexual opportunity and explicitly detailed desire but without any female friends, parents, or role models. What she learns from life, she observes from her own complex desires and experiences and from the men with whom she becomes involved. This could be due to the brevity of Libidacoria (100 pages of very short poems) or perhaps a reflection on the greater anonymity and isolation of our modern society.  While K-‘s speaker finds empowerment through selecting and seducing a variety of men, she remains alone, without even a platonic friend.

My personal experiences watching myself and friends grow from teenagers to young women, several decades since the sexual revolution and with technology creating both a larger and a more anonymous dating pool, kept coming to mind while reading K-‘s poetry.  Despite major changes in terms of gender roles and what is and is not considered acceptable dating behavior, we (both men and women) faced the same perennial issues of heartbreak, loneliness, insecurity, jealousy, searching for lasting love, wondering if we were ready for it or would recognize it, etc.

Libidacoria, and the four-book series of which it will soon become a part, explores and illustrates the emotional complexity of the feminine psyche and suggests that some aspects of human nature may not have changed. ‘Free love’ may have brought a degree of gratification in some ways, but it has not replaced or eliminated our need for meaningful human connection.

For the May Queen, another book recently reviewed in Synchronized Chaos, also chronicled a modern, independent woman’s emotional and sexual maturation. Its author, Kate Evans, presented a heroine working to reconcile various personal and socially suggested desires:  personal independence/adventure and committed love, the idealized romanticism of wedding ceremonies and casual fun and freedom. Evans integrated Walt Whitman’s poetry throughout the novel, particularly his use of the word ‘and,’ to suggest the possibility of the heroine discovering happiness through accepting the different parts of herself and finding a healthy balance among the different ideals rather than viewing them necessarily as mutually contradictory.

Along the same lines, Libidacoria’s speaker contemplates both traditional romance and new models of female sexual freedom and works towards a balance. Near the end, she suggests the possibility of a relationship where she can find rest for and make peace with her physical drives (described as her ‘special gift/and curse) and where the romantic connection helps her understand herself better rather than disempowering her. The very last poems in Libidacoria celebrate the physical and emotional passion in this relationship, and the speaker finally openly, consciously trusts the readers enough to acknowledge her own vulnerability, past emotional pain, and desires as herself rather than relying on indirect alter egos. Her ‘sanity is saved/by the promise she gave/that one day she’d quit/when her match was made.’ And it is that journey towards wholeness, towards self-acceptance, healing, and meaningful connection with others that draws readers in and makes Libidacoria relevant to a wider set of readers.

Libidacoria is available for purchase on the book’s official website, www.libidacoria.com – and author Kristie LeVangie is accessible through her blog and MySpace page.

How to Schmooze your way into the Literary Hipster World without even trying!

1. Come up with a spicy, classy pen name. Either something with four or five syllables, or simply two initials and a foreign symbol for a flourish.

2. Set up a blog online, separate from your personal one. Call up any friends who once created zines, wrote poetry, even who got published in their school paper. Ask for copies of their work and review it using at least five multisyllabic words you haven’t seen since high school or college English. Transcendence, Gestalt, Post-Structuralist, Absurd, and Postmodern Social Critique are all good choices.

3. Grab a clipboard and a stack of books from your room. Preferably ones without covers or visible titles so they’ll be whatever’s most faddish at the moment. Or anything in a foreign language, even comics or popular fiction.

4. Print business cards for yourself. Title yourself a Freelancer or Manuscript Consultant. Deduct the printing costs as a business expense.

5. Cruise on by any signing or event in the Castro, Valencia Street, or anywhere in a college town. Make a point of introducing yourself to the author and remembering his/her name and pen name. This will come in handy when later on you meet editors and publishers and can name drop. Or when you’re comparing acquaintances with other schmoozers!

6. Coffee is your friend! A cup or two goes a long way to keep you awake during any and all interminable discussions of someone’s perenially unwritten heartfelt personal tale of navigating the complexities of postmodern society. Drink it black, like the Beatniks, to show your fortitude, or Irish. Frappuccinos are for amateurs.

7. Make friends with agents’ and editors’ cats. People may have heard of your book idea a million times by more experienced authors…but a lot can be overlooked when they remember that Fido or Fluffy came to you and let you actually pet him or her!

8. Adverbs and adjectives are not your friends. Reduce your writing down to the bare essentials, kill any darlings you may have left. Even if it means breaking with syntax and grammar. Incomprehensibility is often only a step away from profundity.

9. Locate an exotic research topic. Something which has never, and will never again, exist within the entire pantheon of world history, and which can only properly be studied by yourself on an expenses-paid grand tour of Tuscany, the French Riviera, and the Caribbean.

10. If all else fails – or even if you succeed beyond your wildest dreams – come here and comment and participate with the Synchronized Chaos community! This site is a virtual free open-source writers’ conference, where you may ask writing-related questions of other writers and editors, request and offer manuscript and proposal mentoring and critique, provide writing instruction and advice, advertise local writers’ groups, and locate talent for representation and publication. Always designed to be more about the interactions among people here than our behind-the-scenes showcasing and publication work.

Came across someone who works with the organizations putting on these free poetry and writing workshops at a reading event this week in the city. Would love to pass on the word to the SC family and friends.

Youth Speaks Writing Workshops –

Teen Slam Poetry Preparation in San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley. All held from 4 pm to 6 pm.

Wednesdays – Oakland Museum of California, 1000 Oak Street, one block from Lake Merritt BART. Starts Wed. January 28th. With performance artist Meg Day.

Thursdays – Berkeley High School, Room C335. With slam champions Isaac Miller and Terry Taplin. 2223 Martin Luther King Way, starts January 29th.

Fridays – Glen Park Library, with San Jose slam champion Kim Johnson. 2825 Diamond St., San Francisco, one block from the Glen Park BART station. Starts the 30th.

Free writers’ workshops:

Thursdays at the SF MOMA – with Katri Foster. 151 Third Street, San Francisco. Breaking the Rules. This workshop will draw from many different inspirations and ideas to help tell the story of our dreams and realities.

Fridays at the Downtown Oakland YMCA with Lauren Whitehead. 2350 Broadway, Oakland. Any Other City…let’s explore the places we call home and come to appreciate what they are and what they stand for in a broader social and political context. Explore the stories of other cities to look at your home base in a more critical/artistic way.

http://www.youthspeaks.org

Would be glad to pass on the information about any other similar events anywhere else, please comment and let us know! Also, writers who are stuck on any aspect of a story – who need research help, fact checking, are stuck on a plot point, need a new idea, new word, etc please also comment and we’ll make a post for you and all the other writers and artists of our community can help you get un-stuck!

Also please save the date for a nonpolitical/nonsectarian benefit concert for civilians in the Gaza Strip, somewhere in San Francisco probably on Feb. 21st. Will keep you updated as I hear more from the organizers and the bands – gave them a Synchronized Chaos business card (as we do with all upcoming artists we meet) with contact information.

This may be useful to the freelancers out there who need extra income – link to hot new telecommuting-friendly careers which have growth potential and high salaries: http://education.yahoo.net/degrees/articles/featured_seven_surprising_stay_home_salaries.html