My Misogyny by Mary Miriam (Kindle Edition)

by Mary Miriam (Author)

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Much of this work takes place in the Sonoran Desert in and around Tucson in the 1940´s and 50's when the sky was a lens magnifying the stars, mountains and clouds. My narrator passed his childhood in that idyllic place. But his intense religious preoccupations led him as a teenager to take a vow of celibacy. As an adult he found he couldn't keep his vow. He became disillusioned and bitter. He blamed women. This is the story of the creation and anger of a misogynist.

My Misogyny Preview

My uncle Richard died in WWI. He fell out of a plane while dropping leaflets over France. No one knows what the leaflets said or how he managed to fall out of the plane. He fell through a fluttering snow of leaflets. His name appears on a marble plaque in a chapel in Harvard. He is listed there as one of several Harvard students killed in the war. These pages are a little like his leaflets: I don’t know who will read them, if they are read at all; they are propaganda, the kind that accompanies violence; and they are the prelude to an absurd death. Unlike a leaflet, the present composition may turn out to be quite long. That’s one reason why it may never be read. Another reason is that it can only be read on the Internet where authentic readers are rarely found. It’s just as well. I can imagine that the embarrassing aspects of it will die with me. On the other hand, I can imagine that the worthier parts will find a reader and that I am leaving something of myself behind.
. . .

Aside from the fear, I had a remarkable and wonderful upbringing. I grew up in Tucson when it was a town of thirty-five thousand people. The surrounding desert reached into it and through it. During summer storms, water flowed down out of the eastern mountains, the Rincons, through the arroyo forty yards from our house. The arroyo overflowed, turning the whole flat landscape of the desert floor into a rushing sea. Our house, adobe in stained white stucco, was always in jeopardy. We had to wedge stones under the garage door to keep the water from entering.
The sirens started, always about ten minutes after the flood peaked, as people throughout the city began to be rescued from the various places where arroyos crossed roads and car engines drowned. The city was never prepared. The rains only came once a year for a very brief period, after all.
After a storm, when the flood subsided everywhere but in the arroyo itself and when we were still too young to be allowed in the street or anywhere near the rushing arroyo, we found water to play in at the end of the driveway in the grooves created by the tires of exiting cars. There, where the black gravel had been dispersed or crushed, a fine gray silt settled under a perfectly clear puddle. When we stepped in it, the silt swirled through the layer of clear water, but would quickly sink, leaving a deepening transparent sheet if we left it alone for a few seconds. Stepping into it again, the silt squeezed through our toes, thrilling the skin between them with its fine viscosity.
The rest of the time the desert was dirt with stalks and cactus and bushes sticking up out of it. Desert dwellers have an affinity for dirt. Back east, where they don’t see dirt, certainly not the pale, dry kind, they’ll sooner or later miss it. For this mentality to work, it is, or at least was, important that homes and other structures be made out of dirt, out of adobe, that is. Where my three brothers and I wandered, before we qualified for school, the stalky, pale brown desert, from time to time, sprouted a bench or part of a wall, a whole portico or steps or a dry fountain with basin, all popping up, like mushrooms out of the ground, the same color as the dirt. These things were inexplicable and beautiful. They made the desert home. I discovered later they were WPA projects.

Product Details

• Format: Kindle Edition
• File Size: 697 KB
• Simultaneous Device Usage: Unlimited
• Sold by: Amazon Digital Services
• Language: English
• ASIN: B001CJPQE8
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #150,218 in Kindle Store (See Bestsellers in Kindle Store)

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Disobey Television, July 20, 2008

By	Robert E. Kimball "broken dreams" (Washington, D.C.) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I think this is a novel in the guise of a ghosted autobiography, but I'm not entirely sure. It may truly be an autobiography. It tells the story of Robert Clayton, dubbed a misogynist. Whether he is a misogynist or not, Clayton is decidedly politically incorrect. He is also very opinionated. He values children but makes the case that modern American culture increasingly and cruelly devalues them. Much of his life is a quarrel with that culture. He is extremely angry, but with much humor, especially when he is railing against sex. Some of his political views are hilarious. He is not a material success. However, he is as interesting a literary character as I have come across in several years. The 'autobiography' is interwoven with a work of fiction, supposedly written by Clayton himself, about the exploits of a psychotic mass murderer of women. Unlike Clayton, the murderer does achieve material success and happiness. Clayton speaks of "disobeying television." He certainly disobeys it. He is at least successful at that. In the end the reader is left wondering "Is it real or is it Memorex."