Louisiana Catch Book Review By Sweta Srivastava Vikram

Louisiana Catch 

By Sweta Srivastava Vikram

265 pages

Modern History Press

Ann Arbor, MI 48105

April 2018 Fiction

ISBN 9781615993543 (ePub, PDF, Kindle, ebook)   $5.35

ISBN 9781615993529 (softcover, acid-free paper)      $21.95

ISBN 9781615993536 (hardcover, acid-free paper)    $30.09

Caught by surprise, reading about a young lady living and working in New Delhi, I wondered why was Louisiana Catch the title. This became clear later when Ahana visited New Orleans to be with family and to work.  I was glad to become reacquainted with New Orleans through Ahana’s eyes. Through the narrative, I came to know and understand Ahana. I didn’t always agree with Ahana, yet, I always liked her. Ahana comes from a very privileged family, yet that is not enough to protect her from marrying an abusive man, and attracting another man, who at first, she regards as a friend from an online therapy group. 

The subject is very timely with all the “Me Too” today in the news and everyday comes someone new with new accusations. Every day we see people who we thought we respected, arrested and going to jail. Men with money and power have always been keen to use their power to control the women in their professional and personal lives. This book is about women and the power we wield when we stand up for what is right and help others. It is about human rights and also about losing people we love, suffering and finding love. 

Ahana is likeable and a bit naïve. Broken, from a first abusive marriage, she allows herself to fall into paranoia, wondering if he is in touch with her ex-husband and that’s how he knows so much about her. At first, she takes his friendship as a gift and the more he demands and pounds at her emotionally, the more she makes excuses for him, and the more she cajoles him and becomes afraid to confront him, suspicious he may be following her. What woman who has escaped abusive relationships doesn’t know this feeling? Here, I see and say, “me too,” having gone though an abusive marriage myself. And like the “me too” movement shows, when we open ourselves up to the truth, we can finally let go of our fears and our history. 

I think the part of Ahana that needs healing is so wound up and traumatized that she is blind when she meets Jay at an online therapy group for members who have recently lost a parent, after her mother suddenly passes away. She simply takes Jay at his word, and accepts him for who he says he is, someone too who has suffered through a mother’s loss. Every time Ahana asks Jay about himself, no matter how simple, for example, is he dating or where he lives he rebukes her as to why, as his best friend, she is hassling him which results in her feeling guilty and unworthy. Ahana makes excuses for what he says and why, and centers the blame on herself. I assume that this is where the cycle of abuse comes in, and Ahana is unable to see that she is repeating history by letting Jay speak to her in ways that demean her. 

When her household cook and her cousin point out the inconsistencies in Jay’s behavior and more importantly, the negative effects on her, at first she is not ready to listen. Eventually she gets to the point where she clearly sees his game but by this time, she is fearful and paranoid that perhaps Jay knows her husband and has learned about her from him. 

At one point I wanted to yell at her, “Ahana, why are you giving this Jay guy so much importance in your life and why don’t you just cut him out?” At that point I totally identified with Ahana’s cousin, Naina. And why wouldn’t I, since Naina is a mental health professional like myself.

Throughout the novel, Ahana is fighting her demons and has left a high paying position to coordinate a women’s conference to raise awareness about violence and abuse of women, which is part of how she overcomes her own trauma. The other part of how she overcomes her trauma is through her relationship with Rohan Brady, who Ahana must work with on the conference, called NO EXCUSE.  I’m not sure how cell phone service works in India, however I do have an online poetry friend in India who has called me occasionally and he assures me when he calls me I don’t pay, and I never have! 

At one point, early on in the communication between Ahana and Rohan, when Ahana is still in New Delhi, Rohan calls Ahana, and Ahana says she has to hang up because she doesn’t want to pay international fees. There were also a few typos I hope they fixed in the final version. 

Ahana has misjudged Rohan as misogynist because of his online persona.  As for Jay, and his abusive and baiting behavior, it is well past the middle of the book when she finally begins to see through his gameplay, and after everyone around her and even two women in her online therapy group have warned her repeatedly about him. Ahana finally asks her cousin’s husband for help and since he is a police officer, it comes to light that Jay has criminal history. 

In all, the novel is very personal and readable, a quick reader for me, once I got into the details. I was also glad that there was a list of characters in the beginning for review since Indian names are foreign to me, this list made it easy to follow the characters in the beginning. I recommend this novel, to women especially, as this is book is about women and love, violence towards woman and clearly makes the point – that all violence and verbal abuse is always unacceptable. The other important insight is to always tell and not keep abuse a secret. This step is by far, the most important in overcoming tendency to allow abusers or toxic people into your life. Ahana makes this point very clearly in her work. 

George R.R. Martin - reading and writing

Since Summer I've been spending a lot of time with George R.R. Martin. I read all 5 of his Game of Thrones series, because I was so fascinated with the HBO show, Game of Thrones. Each book was over 1000 pages, easily more than 6000 pages total at the rate of about 100 pages per day - sometimes, more - sometimes none if I was extremely busy. I usually always read on the train too. After reading all these books, I became curious as to Mr. R.R. Martin's other novels and there I began with The Armageddon Rag. I will be moving on to his other novels now.

George R.R. Martin mixes fact, fantasy, and fiction into a delicious cocktail made to spur and goad our insides to believe and question humanity and our purpose. Dialogue and inner conversations portray several levels, superficial, exploratory bestows significance on more subtle references or hidden meanings, devices and triggers that move us.

It is our choices that define us. All humans have these. Our alikeness internally ends here. We all think we know certain people but everyone of us can be surprised because we can only, after all, interpret others behaviors through a screen of our own experiences combined with birth circumstances and living, which normally infants have no power except their tears or laughter, which indeed, moves most of us to console or play with them. I don't need to tell you about the sick few - either perverts or crazies but they exist too - everywhere. Sometimes we too, if we choose, can be one of the perverts, or crazies who enjoy inflicting pain. Strangely, sometimes someone who does not enjoy inflicting pain on others may do it as a means of self-defense. We easily excuse trespasses done in defense on one's person or mental status, or those of us who defend weaker, like our children and friends we wish to help. Mr. R. R. Martin reminds that these truths exist on various levels. Usage of subconscious levels combines with using things we can't understand yet see, serve to emphasize this point.

Good read and I love the music quotes! Worth reading if only to see R.R Martin's creativity in weaving 60's and 70's lyrics from musicians so flawlessly into the plot. His weaving style and ability to do this is truly amazing and entertaining. I certainly wouldn't expect any less from him. 

:) I have been having a great deal of fun reading his entertaining writings!

Love-Ism Volume I: A Critical Mass and Other Poems

I am still mulling through Love-IsmVolume I: A Critical Mass and Other Poems.  This is not an easy-to-read book. It is similar to a college text in that the reading is slow going - not because it is not interesting but because the content is so rich and varied and one must really have their mind ready to concentrate. You know what I mean if any of you can remember being in college or post grad school. Coorough's books are very dense with information and packed with historical details including but not limited to the history and development of the United States Government and the history and development of other governments worldwide. 

Coorough incorporates all this information and brings it home when he shows specific example of how particular governmental techniques and regulations travel from one leader to another and more specifically, how these techniques have been used world wide to capture audiences and create working agendas in addition to controlling the populace.

The density of information and history combined with the intensity of Coorough's emotions bring this text home. His interpretations of world events put into perspective current events and also provide an alternative for the direction of current governments worldwide. Coorough's agenda is to raise awareness to show how we (the worldwide we) can be part of creating a new world that will be sustainable for our offspring. In general people have been like puppets and in scientific studies and has been proven people are very easily manipulated to hurt one another. This has led to our current situation where we have put the planet's sustainability in danger as well as harming many species. For example, current farming practices have become a travesty where animals suffer from birth to their short death.

I strongly recommend this book and his others - especially to spread the "occupy" message and clarify the realization that our world needs change and it is overdue. If Castro could bring back coral reefs to Cuba, we can force change if we think and move together altruistically. I shudder to think about what will happen if we let things go and act like the robots we've become, just letting the world happen to us instead of participating in creating a new world meant to benefit humanity.

I strongly recommend this book and his others - especially to spread the "occupy" message and clarify the realization that our world needs change and it is overdue. If Castro could bring back coral reefs to Cuba, we can force change if we think and move together altruistically. I shudder to think about what will happen if we let things go and act like the robots we've become, just letting the world happen to us instead of participating in creating a new world meant to benefit humanity.

I very much appreciate Coorough's descriptions of John Lennon and Yoko Ono's "Bed In" as examples of how all of us can collaborate to create change.

Review of 39 Poems

Article first published on Blogcritics.org as Book Review: 39 Poems by Charles Butler

39 POEMS by Charles J. Butler

ISBN 978-0-9772718-8-7

Publication date 2010

74 pages

No Shirt Press, Brooklyn, NY

Reading through the 39 Poems brought to mind Hitchcock’s movie, The 39 Steps because each poem stretches the reader and the page towards the next poem and set of steps without explaining where he is going. Also the poems on the pages of the book are laid out in emulation of climbing up and down steps so that while reading I felt like I was skipping steps. Each poem relates to life’s struggles; the various ways love affects us and how meaningful respect is. He writes about everyday things moving us up and down steps lyrically and emotionally.

Butler describes how one can be oblivious to a murder and walk across bloodstains on our big city streets without recognizing them in the book’s first poem, Crimson Stroll. Suddenly while stepping over the red brown stains, the author recognizes it for what it is, seeing a stark vivid beauty of someone’s life bled out on the streets.

Someone’s life bled out

At your feet

              Think on it

                             Times you bled

Times you made others bleed

            Look on it

            Big dark path on 8^th ave

            Brooklyn side

                                    in your way

look on it

the fuel that moves us all

dried out on a dirty sidewalk

who bled …

are they dead

                        look at it

a dark stain

                        it’s almost…

beautiful

            a bit of Canada                         flashes up your neck

and ears

back in the world you move around it

and move on

                        wishing for cold rain

to wash away the stain   human sin

most of all

                           your own

We’re all here – all human and suffering –  and this is the grist for this author to describe how we’re all the same and different at the same time, but he wants to show us that we have the capacity to be and do more that drives us and of course this is what drives this poet to create poetry. The stains our lives create must contain beauty otherwise why do we exist? Butler’s struggle is to align himself with the humanity in all of us, despite the murder the chaos, the beauty the differences between rich and poor, black and white, and he struggles with it all, climbing up and down, retreating and coming to terms with wrongs and rights and even the grays and imperfections.

The problem is that our climbing stretching and reaching is never done. You go up you descend and then you begin all over again because that’s the way life is, it’s never done until you’re done - or dead and gone - is more like it - or if you’re a quitter. Butler is no quitter and no matter how far down he’s gone – he bounces back to reexamine his roots and the course of his life, fighting to stay in touch with his spiritual side. This spiritual side is at the root of Butler’s talent, as he controls his anger hurt and humiliation when he’s experienced racism. For any of you who have never experienced racism, normal is a good place to start to understand what it’s about when you get stopped on the street because of the color of your skin.

                                    nature of the beast

now

            I’m not gonna say I’ve lost

count o’the many times I’ve been blackstopped

but

            it’s more than a few

remember

                        I’m 16

walkin’ on a bed-stuy street

goin’ noplace fast

            blue n’ white rolls up on me

unis pile out …

            nicely they ask me if I’m carryin’

a gun

            nicely I say no

nicely

            they  ask if I would submit

to a search

                        mind you             they don’t have

to ask me

                        a goddamn thing

and they know it

I know it

                        An’ the brother

watchin’ this

                                    who wishes right now

he was            

            someplace else

knows

            it

nicely

            I say

                        go ahead

I can relate to this struggle and suffering. All my life as a Jew and especially in my childhood I was called a Christ killer. The recent advent of the Mel Gibson movie and his ensuing drunk arrest and slurred comment about Jews brought it home to me again. But this is a tactic of the upper echelon. They want to keep us all at each other’s throats so we will keep our busy bee status and keep making the rich richer. It’s a means of control and humiliation and it makes us hurt. Mr. Butler knows this hurt intimately and writes about it poignantly.

           

39 Poems cover a range of experiences; awareness of the haves and have-nots, racism, love, hurt, abandonment and loss, and more importantly the urge to understand and come to terms with it and explain what it’s all about. After all this everyday stuff is the mesh of our lives. The ability to sublimate sets humans apart from other species, to take our hurts and pain and transcend them for the greater good – to create beauty in ugliness is the work Mr. Butler attends to.

In DMV rag, Butler speaks for all of us who have ever been to the DMV.

We’re in the dmv now

                        Hundreds of black

And brown faces

                        some whites

all of them wanna be someplace else

but here we are …

                                    it’s all mad

gotta be

            half the world is on fire            an’

the other is on line waiting for their number to be called

lookin’ for a place t’ sit

an empty seat

is like

            fool’s gold

Don’t we all feel like this when we visit official offices, public school registration, social security, Medicaid, even the closed down US passport passport bureaus, and welfare’s the worst. I have a poem about it called, “Welfare’s Still A Bitch!”

The searching and questioning never stop just like in the movie The 39 Steps, there is always another side to examine to analyze understand and conquer. His poems speak to maturity and growth and show how youth and mistakes although unavoidable are only part of climbing and descending those steps, a poem for each step.

In word one baby, Butler explains why a writer writes.

why 

write?

writing                         since he was eleven

thru                        good days

                                                and dark times

the pain of living

                                                the come hither call

of death

            and madness inbetween

even hung                        ‘em up for a time

didn’t last

why write?

he’s free

Is the author describing himself here or is he speaking for everyone? We all know writers write about what they know and well, … if they write about what they don’t know … everyone knows that doesn’t work. Artists from time immemorial have been known to describe angst which often spurs their creative urges. Does every writer experience angst? I can’t speak for every artist. Many writers have spoken and written about their angst yet angst alone doesn’t make a man an artist. There is some other indistinguishable indefinable something that inspires a writer to create, that makes his writings stand out among others, something that prods him to spend his time writing while others commune, have sex, watch tv or do other things while writing remains a lonely task which takes time.

Words don’t miraculously appear on the page. Writing is what gives Butler the freedom he speaks of above. His words create a freedom that exists nowhere else around in our world and he helps the reader to feel it too. Through that freedom we see what he sees; a stark world filled with fertility and barrenness that provides us not only with a place to survive but a place to grow and thrive. The growth in Butler’s poetry and words inspires me too. I recommend 39 Poems sincerely and without any reservation.

new book review posted - hey o!

Review of Yamrus’ latest book New And Selected Poems, reviewed by Joy Leftow is up at bookstove.com.
I hope you'll visit and even if you don't want to read at least click on it as I will get paid pennies for each hit. Please come back and let me know whether or not you like it. I think you'll like it because Yamrus' poetry is hysterically funny. I plan to post the interview shortly too. After I read his book and laughed all over the planet, ... ok - only my little small universe - I wrote and asked was he up for a phone interview, and you know how us sluts are, anything for attention.

Folks, peeps, whatever - go and take a look and let me know if you enjoyed.

Mwah! That's me throwing you a big wet one!