John B. Kean and the spirit of Christmas

One of the places I visited in Ireland back in August was the Kerry Writers Museum. The county of Kerry is an amazing place: ocean views and verdant green lushness. Some people refer to it simply as "The Kingdom." One of Kerry's best known writers is John B. Keane; he has his own room at the writers' museum.
Keane wrote a collection of stories appropriately titled Irish Stories for Christmas. The first story just tickles me with the lovely spirit of Irish Catholicism. It seems a loyal housekeeper has just said goodnight to the hardworking country priest on Christmas when there's a knock at the door. It's two brothers who say their father is dying, and the priest must come immediately to hear the old man's confession. Grudgingly, the housekeeper wakes the priest, who goes out into the snowy night and hears the old man's sins. He returns and is back in bed when the housekeeper hears another knock. The brothers are back: Their Da forgot a sin; the priest needs to come back. And it's not just any sin, it's a serious sin -- fornication!
The housekeeper decides she cares more for the priest's rest than the old man going to hell. So she says to the brothers:

"Didn't I tell ye there was no fear of him," she drew herself upwards and re-folded her arms, "for don't it say in the Catechism that hell is closed for the twelve days of Christmas and anyone who dies during that period goes direct to heaven."
The brothers exchanged dubious glances.
"Tis there in black and white," the housekeeper assured them.
The brothers turned their backs on her and consulted in whispers. After several moments they faced her secondly.
"You're sure?" the smaller asked.
"Why would I say it if it was a lie?" she countered.

The story is titled "Twelve Days of Grace." PS The old man lives.
Merry Christmas!

Books and Music

I often get tempted to blog about music and movies, but then I remind myself that what little focus this blog has is about books, and I should stick to that. So with that disclaimer out of the way ...
The NYT had authors blog about music every so often, and this entry by Joshua Ferris caught my eye -- Joshua Ferris, author of the brilliant office novel Then We Came to the End.
Ferris likes Neutral Milk Hotel. I like Neutral Milk Hotel! (And you've maybe never heard of Neutral Milk Hotel.) They were a lovely '90s band, indie and somewhat experimental. Here's a very hazy YouTube video of lead singer Jeff Mangum singing my favorite NMH song "Naomi."

Except Alex from J-school still has my copy of Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. Why don't you send that back to me, Alex? And send me my Glyn Styler live album back while your at it.
OK, music entry over. Read Joshua Ferris' whole playlist here. With reading suggestions.
(And I'm not kidding about those CDs, Alex!)

Round Up of Reading

We were talking at our book group the other night about how nothing we've been reading lately has really grabbed us -- as if there's some sort of malaise or boring spirit hanging out for the last few weeks. So here's a grab bag of what I hope will lead me out of the wilderness.

• Our next pick is White Teeth, by Zadie Smith. I really liked her more recent novel On Beauty, a comic but poignant novel about two families striving for success in Ivy League academia. So I have high hopes for her debut novel about families in multicultural contemporary London.
• I read the introduction to New Stories from the South: 2007 -- The Year's Best, edited by Edward P. Jones, who wrote the remarkable novel The Known World. As a native Louisianian living in Florida, I like to think there's still some special connection between the South and literature. My fear is the connection is tenuous and loosening; perhaps this collection will renew my hope.
  
• I picked up an annotated edition of Spoon River Anthology. The introduction is excellent, but the notes tend toward the mundane, i.e. "This poem is based on Joe B. Blow, who Master's knew when he lived in ..." . I hate reading literature as secret code to the author's biography, matching up characters to people the author knew. That's got to be the most mundane, trivial way to read literature.
  
• For Christmas, I want a copy of the photography book Atchafalaya. I grew up on the lower Atchafalaya, which we called the Bayou Teche (pronounced Tesh). Hear that, Santa?
  

What makes for a good audio book

A good audio book makes commuting significantly more pleasant. Before my trip to Ireland, I listened to the dark but funny Angela's Ashes, read by author Frank McCourt, and got a big kick out of it. Next I selected Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, by Jared Diamond. This is a sort of environmental social history, looking at how ancient and modern societies manage their limited resources and either flourish or self-destruct. But the narrator was kind of stuffy, and had this kind of Is-it-New-England-or-British-or-what? accent that made me sleepy. So I gave up on that.
Now I have the marvelous Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman. Gaiman is the master of updating ancient myth to contemporary times (see his comic book series Sandman). In Anansi Boys, we meet the two sons of the ancient god of storytelling, Anansi. There's Spider, who inherited his father's godlike powers, and then there's Fat Charlie, who didn't. Fat Charlie grows up thinking he's just an ordinary guy, until his father dies and he meets his mystical brother, who's trying to steal Fat Charlie's girlfriend. Adventure and hijinks ensue! I read that Gaiman called his book a "magical-horror-thriller-ghost-romantic-comedy-family-epic," and that seems about right.
And the audiobook is fabulous. Narrator Lenny Henry can do it all: men and women, young and old, mortal and immortal. And he really savors the language, he sounds like he's having as much fun reading it as I'm having listening.

A Good Newspaper Column on Baseball

The best written newspaper opinion columns are fine things to read -- compact, persuasive, poetic. Check out this column written by Thomas Boswell of The Washington Post about The Mitchell Report, a damning report on baseball's steroids problem that was released this week. It starts:

Now, Roger Clemens joins Barry Bonds in baseball's version of hell. It's a slow burn that lasts a lifetime, then, after death, lingers as long as the game is played and tongues can wag. In baseball, a man's triumphs and his sins are immortal. The pursuit of one often leads to the other. And those misdeeds are seldom as dark as their endless punishment.

Read the whole thing here.

House of Mirth MAJOR SPOILER

Don't read this if you want to avoid knowing the ending of House of Mirth by Edith Wharton!




A new letter by Wharton bolsters the case that Lily Bart actually did commit suicide at the end of the novel. Read about it here.
Well duh! We had this discussion at my book group.
Saying Lily Bart didn't commit suicide is like watching the movie Thelma & Louise and saying at the end, "Well, the car could have landed, and they could have just driven off. We don't really know what happens at the end."
Right!

The Unread List

Last night, I walked around the house with the laptop cataloging all my unread books into LibraryThing. I won't say I captured every book, but I got a lot of them, certainly the recent ones. You can check out my list of unread books via LibraryThing here.
There are 62 books on this list as of this writing. The oldest entry is Saint Augustine by Garry Wills, which I cataloged in July 2006 (and probably bought before that). The most recent book I bought a few weeks ago: The Gathering, a modern Irish novel by Anne Enright that won the Booker Prize that I'm about halfway through.
So I have 62 books of 392 that are unread. That means my non-read rate is about 15 percent. This is pretty good considering the number of already-read books I've given away, the already-read books still uncataloged, etc.
So I feel like I want to make some progress on this list, but it is quite long. Intuitively, I feel like I want to first read Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Sean Wilsey's Oh The Glory of It All.
I also get that very depressing but inevitable feeling of never being able to finish reading everything that I want to. I try to accept that I'll always feel that way and get over it. It's not easy.

This one is for Howellsreader!

I was at the gym on Wednesday and the woman who got on the machine next to me was reading William Dean Howells! The book in question was A Hazard of New Fortunes.
(Why I'm so excited about this is that my good pal R.E. aka Howellsreader wrote her dissertation on Howells.)
So I asked the woman, why Howells? She said it was her book group's pick, and she wasn't so excited about it at first, but now she's into it.
She also said she read the literary introduction and was totally turned off by the introduction, so she skipped to the book itself, and that was much better. (Take that, high-falutin' litscrits!)
She said she liked the book generally. But, she was frustrated by the book because people back in those days never said what they really meant. So the characters have to spend a lot of time figuring out what the other characters really mean and then communicating in code about what they mean. She concluded it was just a different era then.
But she also said it was very readable, and a nice break from "plucky woman overcomes adversity and finds true love."
What do you say, Howellsreader?

Reading for Fun -- not just a good time

The New York Times reports that student test scores have declined as reading for fun has declined.

The data also showed that students who read for fun nearly every day performed better on reading tests than those who reported reading never or hardly at all.

Read it and weep.

On Paradise Lost and Katha Pollitt

Picking up again on the Paradise Lost theme ... I've been meditating on the appeal of Milton's Satan, the ultimate rebel. I submit the literary and (film) offspring of Satan is Hannibal Lector of Silence of the Lambs fame (a great movie and a good book). It's not that we admire Hannibal or want to be his friend. I think it's that, on some dark level we don't like to think about, we want to be Hannibal. Hannibal is god-like in the way he creates his own moral universe -- a place of beauty and terror -- and lives in it. And I doubt I'm the first one to make this point.
I was thinking about these themes after hearing a Katha Pollit interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air about Pollit's book "Learning to Drive." That essay, which appeared in The New Yorker, is one of my all-time favorites. Pollit is a heterosexual feminist, and "Learning to Drive" is about her discovering that her longtime lover has been cheating on her. She dumps him and -- at long last, as a lifelong New Yorker -- has to learn to drive. The essay is funny and smart and bittersweet.
So Pollitt talked to Gross about how her lover had told her he wasn't the monogamous type, and she thought he was speaking in the abstract or whatever, certainly not about her. Terry asked her about how she reacted:

Terry Gross: That's such a staple of American popular culture, you know -- the rambler, the man who can't be tied down, who's heels are a-wandering, and so on. So how did you respond to it?

Katha Pollit: I said, `Oh, well, you know, fidelity is very important to me, and I can understand if that's not the way you want to live, but that's the way I have to live. And the person I live with will have to live like that, blah, blah, blah.' You know? And the fact is that if somebody ever says, you know, `Sometimes I feel I'm not cut out for monogamy,' you should believe them. You should believe them.
But, you know, women have this thing--I don't like to speak in generalizations about men and women, although I do it as we all do--but I do think women have this penchant for ramblers and rovers. A lot of women do. And I've thought a lot about this and I write about this in one of the stories, that part of it is you think you can tame them, and that would be so great. That would show how wonderful you are and also how intense the love must be that could conquer that, right? But I came to the conclusion that there's another reason, and that's that you want to be them. You want to be that person. You want to be that rambler and rover, but, for various reasons, you don't let yourself do that, you repress that part of yourself. But if you can be with a person who's like that, that's, in a way, a way of acquiring that characteristic. So I think that women who are attracted to men like that often have that side of themselves that they've suppressed.

Gross: Are you describing yourself?

Pollitt: Maybe. I don't know. I'll have to find out as life goes on. I'm married again, so I'd better not have that quality.

Listen to the whole interview here. A pal says it's a stretch to equate Satan and serial killers to philandering men. My point here, though, is the way we weirdly and often secretly identify with things that are totally unlike ourselves, things that we find intellectually and/or morally abhorrent. And how that identification creates a dramatic tension. I believe it's better to be aware of that phenomenon and examine it than to go along blithely pretending it doesn't exist.

Mister Pip, a book trip, and making the tough calls

I'm going out of town this weekend, so I'll get some blissful airport reading time. The book is my current book group selection, Mister Pip, by Lloyd Jones. This is about a tropical island shattered by war, where the last Westerner remaining teaches the school children by reading Charles Dickens' Great Expectations.
When I get back from this trip, I need to do a serious catalog of all the books I've bought recently that I haven't yet read. I'll admit that my book buying has momentarily gotten a little bit out of hand. I have some really good books that I need to read. Hopefully I will rank these books to help myself decide what to read next, and I'll post the list here.
I badly need to do this before the annual book sale or things will get completely out of hand and there will be books all over the floor because the book shelves are all full.

Paradise Lost the easy way

I was browsing the children's section at a local bookstore when I ran across The Tale of Paradise Lost. The cover says it's "based on the poem by John Milton; retold by Nancy Willard."
I started thumbing through it, noticing the lovely illustrations by Judy Daly. I was thinking how references to "Paradise Lost" come up often in other books, both high and low literatures. (A cutting edge example would be Neil Gaman's Sandman graphic novel series.) And yes, I studied PL in high school, but not college, and the only thing I remembered about it was that Satan was considered the hero or anti-hero of the work (and why would Milton make it that way?), and that he and his angels fell for nine days before landing in Hell.
So I figured this book would be a pleasant way to catch up on a great work. Being honest about it, I don't see myself going back to the original poem (which you can read on the Internet here) anytime soon, outside of a university class.
Reading the Tale has been interesting, but I'm not sure I'd recommend it for kids. Sample passage:

Now let me tell you about the place God prepared for them. All around them roared floods of fire and whirlwinds of flame that gave no light but made the darkness darker. And there, big as a whale, stretched out on the burning lake, lay Satan. He turned to Beelzebub, his second in command. With the light of Heaven snuffed out of Beelzebub, Satan hardly recognized him.
"All is not lost," said Satan. "We still have the power of our hatred. I shall never bow before the Lord."
"Oh, Prince and Chief, what if God left us our courage only to make us suffer more?"

Nancy Willard has also written a children's book inspired by the works of poet William Blake, one of my all-time favorites. It's called A Visit to William Blake's Inn: Poems for Innocent and Experienced Travelers. I'll probably read that alongside the original, "Songs of Innocence and Experience."

Yann Martel at Sarasota Festival of Reading

As I posted earlier, J and I found out at the last minute that Yann Martel was going to be at the Sarasota Festival of Reading, so we hopped in the car to go check it out.
The following are my notes that I typed up right after we got back. But I should add that I did not take notes *during* the talk, so these are solely my impressions of his talk as a fan. Certainly the phrasing and word choices are my own. Yann Martel was so well-spoken on his points, and this is definitely a lesser rendition of what he had to say, but oh well. If you ever have the chance to see him talk, you should go. With that disclaimer out of the way ...
Yann Martel gave a great talk. First he discussed how Tomas was selected to be the artist for the Life of Pi illustrated edition. Then Tomas talked about his creative process. He said he works with two types of media: he paints in oils, then takes photographs of the paintings and further manipulates them on computer. (You can see some of the paintings here.)
During the course of the talk, Martel said the illustrated edition was the idea one of his professional associates (I think his publisher), and Yann said he immediately like the idea. He said that illustrated books for adults were quite common in the 19th century, and it's sad that in our times illustrated books are confined mostly to children's books. He said he really loved Tomas' paintings because they are all done from Pi's point of view, so we become Pi, and we never see what Pi looks like. Pi is not described in the novel, he said, so that's for us to imagine even in the illustrated edition.
(Beware, SPOILERS AHEAD.)
Then he spoke generally about the book. He said that Life of Pi is essentially two stories. They are both about a boy who is shipwrecked. In one story there are animals, in another there are not. In the end, the reader has to decide which story to believe, which is the better story.
As we read Life of Pi, Yann said he was testing us. You begin with the premise of a boy who is shipwrecked. OK, that's believable. Then we find out the boy is trapped on a life raft with a tiger. The author makes us believe that. Kind of crazy, but we go along. Then we find the boy and the tiger are blind, and they run into a boat with another blind person. Maybe that's not so believable. By the time we get to the island of the carnivorous plants, he's really pushing us to belive the unbelievable. He said the island is the final test for the reader. If we believe the island, then we have suspended our rationality and are proceeding on faith. At the end of the book, we are forced to choose. The story with the animals is less rational, but is it the better story? Are we prepared to suspend our rationality and believe the better story?
He talked about his background as a philosophy student and pondering the big questions. He said that he felt there was a important part of life we needed to perceive that was beyond our rational powers, beyond our concrete senses. He said rationality is a powerful tool, but it is limited, and it doesn't get at that unseen world. The disciplines that help us comprehend the unseen are art and religion, but they have been diminished in contemporary times by science and capitalism.
He also talked about his newest work, which will be about the Holocaust. He said he has no personal connection to the event, except as an artist, and he was gripped by the way the Holocaust resists attempts to deal with it artistically, except for the memoir. There are exceptions (he mentioned Maus and Life is Beautiful), but even those are highly confessional. So he began to write about the Holocaust using metaphor, and the fiction work features a money and a donkey. (He remarked wryly that he would now be typecast as the writer who deals with animals.) As he was working on the fiction, he found that there were issues he couldn't deal with in fiction, so he began writing an essay, and it grew to be the length of the novel. So the essay will be included in the new work. He said it would be packaged as a flip book: On one side of the book, the novel, but if you turn the book over and upside down, that will be the essay. He said the working title is "The 21st Century Shirt," and he hoped it would be done soon.
Then he took questions, and the first woman to ask, asked about the movie. (Argh! I hate that question.) He said a movie was in the works, and he had read the script and was quite pleased. But he also said it was a difficult movie to film -- with a child star, animals and being filmed on the water -- so he wasn't sure when it would be done.
Another woman asked him how he had written Life of Pi, and he talked a little about that, especially about making Richard Parker a tiger. For awhile, he had considered an elephant or a rhinoceros, but ultimately decided he had to go with a carnivore. The idea of Pi drying sea kelp day after day for herbivores just seemed too much.
He answered a few other questions as well, but I don't recall them ...
This is my summary of his talk, but I should add that he spoke very beautifully, in complex nuanced sentences, and he had lovely manners. Some authors I've seen come off as arrogant or annoyed to have to deal with their dumb fans, but he seemed really genial and open. I went to the book signing afterward, and he and Tomas were both lovely.
It was a wonderful day at the Sarasota Festival of Reading. I'm so glad I went!

Sarasota Festival

Sarasota Festival
Originally uploaded by spoonreader

My friend J and I went to the Sarasota Festival of Reading to see Yann Martel speak about the illustrated edition of Life of Pi. I'll be writing more in depth about that soon, but meanwhile, here are some other bits from the festival.
Yann Martel was a headliner, but not the top headliner. That honor would go to CNN's Lou Dobbs and the actor Gene Wilder. (Martel was scheduled after Wilder and before Dobbs.)
Who knew Gene Wilder had so many fans? More than 1,200 people showed up to see him discuss his new novel, "My French Whore." I know it was that many because the volunteers told me that was the venue's capacity, and I watched them turn away many of his disappointed fans because the room was full. I'll say it again: Who knew?
The Dobbs scene was a circus. People wearing shirts and carrying signs that said "I love English," and "Illegal Aliens" with a red "bust" sign over it. Also peace protesters beating on drums and carrying signs that said, "No Person is Illegal," etc.
I brought my new digital camera, but I am no photojournalist. My photos of Yann Martel are pitiful. The best photos I took were of Lou Dobbs, who ended up talking to the people standing right next to me. (I did *not* chase him down for a photo. I'm not a Dobbs fan; I don't even have cable.)
So here's my mediocre photo of Lou Dobbs, for you spoonreader fans who are also avid celebrity watchers

Anne Rice on Her Body of Work

I read Anne Rice's book Interview with the Vampire when I was about 14. My sister had read it after Sting's song "Moon over Bourbon Street," which was inspired by the novel. The book made a huge impression on me, to the point that when the Queen of the Damned came out, my high school friends and I read the introduction aloud to each other, and thought we were the coolest. ("I am the Vampire Lestat," it begins. "I'm immortal. More or less. ...") I was a bit of a Goth during that period, in case you were wondering, and I've still got a good bit of Goth in me. I no longer wear black eyeliner, however.
I was thinking of all this recently because Anne Rice has a fascinating post on her website about her body of work, both pre- and post-vampires. She wrote many, many books about vampires, witches and other occult phenomena. I read a lot of them -- most but not all -- and some of them were really good. But to me, her books dropped off in quality significantly as the years went on, or maybe I just lost interest.
Recently, though, Rice went through a conversion experience, returned to her Catholic faith, and decided to devote herself to writing about the life of Christ -- in the first person. Not an easy task, I'm sure. The first book came out last year, "Christ: Out of Egypt." It was like a wonderful return to form -- gripping and interesting and moving and well-done, just like the old vampire books. So count me in as a fan of both her new and old work.
Interestingly, Anne Rice posted to her web site recently defending her "dark fiction." I'm going to point you to the site and let you read it yourself; it's worth reading in its entirety. She also discusses her conception of art, the way she views her own success, and her defense of plot and action. (Though you'll have to scroll down past her endorsement of Hillary Clinton.) Here's one her key points, to my way of thinking:

Much could be said, and has been said, about all of my works. I would like to say that the one thing which unites them is the theme of the moral and spiritual quest. A second theme, key to most of them, is the quest of the outcast for a context of meaning, whether that outcast is an 18th century castrato opera singer, or a young boy of mixed blood coming of age in ante-bellum New Orleans, or a person forced into a monstrous predatory existence like the young vampire, Lestat. For me, these themes are inherently significant and noble themes. They are worthy of exploration; they are evocative; they can and do reflect the deepest questions that humans face.

Read her entire essay here. (Warning, her web site features music that will start when you click onto her web page.)

Ferris' Then We Came to the End

Then We Came to the End was one of my favorite books this year, now it's been nominated for the National Book Award. It's a novel told in the rare first-person plural -- "we" -- about layoffs at a Chicago ad agency. It's funny and accessible, and I love how it gets at existential questions like: What does it mean to belong to a group? What do people have to sacrifice to fit into the group -- the freedom to do what they want, or to do what they think is right? And what do they gain from the group-- the top two contenders being the comfort of camaraderie and the increased power of group effort?

Ferris was interviewed by the National Book Foundation. He said a couple of things that I thought were really interesting. Read the whole interview here.

BAJ: In a country such as ours, where reading is in such a state of crisis, what is the role of the fiction writer? Does being a finalist for such a prestigious award affect how you view yourself in that role?

JF: I take a cue from Vladimir Nabokov on this question: the role of the fiction writer anywhere is to bring delight to the reader and nothing more. I can do as little—which is to say very, very little—about the country’s woeful state of reading as I can about the country’s woeful state of geopolitics. All I can do is try my best to provide the greatest amount of artistic delight for that reader or two who decides to follow me where my instinct and curiosity take me. I do right by that reader if I do right by myself, and I do that by being attentive to what’s interesting, peculiar, funny, eternal, and by being attentive to words.

I love this answer, and I think it's right on the money. It reminds me of what Flannery O'Connor used to say, that the job of the Catholic writer is to be a good writer. No one is going to attend to your writing if it isn't believable and moving in the first place, she said. (Nabokov is a hole in my literary resume; I haven't read him.) I also like that Ferris adds about doing right by the reader by doing right by himself -- kind of a literary Golden Rule -- so he's balancing the delight of the reader with his own intellectual/aesthetic engagement, which precludes writing in some kind of manipulative way to thrill the masses.

BAJ: What drew you to the story?

JF: Probably the challenge of it. Tell a story with countless characters from the point of view of a monolithic failing advertising agency—go! Also, the challenge of trying to turn an experience—I worked in advertising—into genuine fiction. Not veiled autobiography, but an honest sublimation of mundane experience into something deserving of a reader’s limited time on earth. And finally I was fascinated by the behemoth structure of a corporation—the hierarchies, the coded messages, the power struggles. I thought such a pervasive and inscrutable place merited the sustained attention a novelist has to give to his or her subject. The characters in Then We Came to the End are under the constant threat of layoffs, and that creates a specific group dynamic: the group’s unquenchable scrutiny of itself. I thought it would be fun to watch that group dynamic implode.

I love that he says "deserving of a rader's limited time on earth." I hate to sound like a snoot, but it's very depressing when I read a book and it's only marginally OK. I think, "There's two hours of my life I'll never get back." On the other hand, that doesn't mean I always want to read something ponderous and serious. I like funny books because life is funny.
I'm re-reading "Then We Came to the End" because I'm fascinated by how it handles the idea of community. I grew up in a small town in Louisiana, which I left behind many years ago, and sometimes that makes me sad and sometimes that makes me happy. I have real mixed feeling about small-town life, as a lot of people do. (My beloved Spoon River Anthology tackles the heart of this conflict; see my previous post on this topic here.) But in the modern world, the most pertinent community for educated professionals tends to be the work place, and a lot of literature either ignores that or minimizes it. I like Ferris' book because he takes on the workplace in all its weirdness.

George Saunders and "The Braindead Megaphone"

A lot of books I read are just OK, so it's like a lovely little gem when I read one I really, really love. That was the case with The Braindead Megaphone by George Saunders. Here's my short review for the books page:

Saunders' unique aesthetic carries over to his first book of journalism, The Braindead Megaphone, where he reports on illegal immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border, the awesome greed and friendliness of international tourism in Dubai, and a meditating teenager in Nepal.

Saunders writes about American fiction like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and, quixotically, the young adult classic Johnny Tremain. His conception of narrative is as complex as a difficult fiction writer like David Foster Wallace, but his own writing style is marvelously direct, much like that of Kurt Vonnegut, whom he praises as a model. He describes Vonnegut's books as a sort of black box that readers enter. "The writer gets no points just because what's inside the box bears some resemblance to 'real life.' What's important is that something undeniable and nontrivial happens to the reader between entry and exit."

The nontrivial thing that happens with Saunders is we contemplate the big question he's trying to answer, something along the lines of, How are human beings supposed to live in the world? The final piece is a tongue-in-cheek press release from the organization People Reluctant to Kill for an Abstraction: "At precisely nine in the morning, working with focus and stealth, our entire membership succeeded in simultaneously beheading no one. At nine thirty, we embarked upon Phase II, during which our entire membership simultaneously did not force a single man to simulate sex with another man. At ten, Phase III began, during which not a single one of us blew himself/herself up in a crowded public place."

He concludes: "We, in fact, outnumber you. Though you are louder, though you create a momentary ripple on the water of life, we will endure, and prevail."

I like that the book was published directly to paperback, so it's not too expensive -- $9.80 on Powell's for goodness sake!
My mom asked me recently, "What's Powell's?" Well, it's online bookseller much like Amazon. But in my opinion they are more supportive of book culture than Amazon, so I'm linking to them more. Not that there's anything bad or wrong about Amazon, I just like Powell's better. And actually, I buy most of my books at Tampa's independent bookstore, Inkwood Books. Check out their cute little bookshop here.
So I was browsing at Inkwood and ran across the Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers, featuring an interview with ... George Saunders! So I picked that up and I'm now looking forward to that too.
In fact, I'm looking forward to reading lots of the interviews. I'm surprised at how many I've read: Zadie Smith (loved On Beauty), John Banville (I picked The Sea for my book group before I left for Ireland), Ian McEwan (I read Saturday), Edward P. Jones (The Known World is probably the best American novel published in the last 10 years), Marilynne Robinson (Gilead might give "The Known World" a run for its money) and Haruki Murakami (how beautiful and trippy was Kafka on the Shore?). OK, I'll stop now. You get the picture.
Now I know what else you're thinking. Spoonreader, look at this long post you've created on a Friday morning! Well I've got a new computer with wireless, so la la la la (singing and skipping). Perhaps this will increase production here at spoonreader.com.

My personal library

Every time a new book comes into my house, an old one must go out. Why? I only have three bookshelves. And maintaining a simple, clutter-free home where I enjoy spending my time is more important to me than keeping every book I've ever read.
I accept this, but it's still hurts to say good-bye. I try to avoid it, stacking books on tabletops and even on the floor. This goes on for a month or two before I become disgusted and approach the shelves ready to purge. Which should go? Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky? Lenin's Tomb by David Remnick? Or The Quality of Life Report by Meghan Daum? (All actual books recently purged.) These are good books, so it's not a question of quality. Instead, I use two criteria to decide which books to pitch. Is the book going to be difficult to find at a local library? And do I see myself reading this book for a second time, ever? If the answer to both question is no, then out it goes.
(Obviously, I do not throw these books away. They get donated to the local library or given to friends.)
In this way, I have built my own personal canon. Which books will never be pitched? Hard to say with certainty. But off the top of my head, I would put the following random books high up on the list: East of Eden by John Steinbeck. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. Pretty Birds by Scott Simon. Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris. The Secret History by Donna Tartt. The list goes on ....

More Irish books

Between my latest library school class and writing reviews for the paper (latest one here), my efforts on poor spoonreader have been sporadic at best.
I have been reading though, making my way through some of the books I bought in Ireland.

• Irish Tales of Mystery and Magic: a spooky-funny book about the ancients warrior clans of Ireland, with whimsical illustrations.
• The Playboy of the Western World: a seminal play by John Synge that caused riots when it premiered in 1907 because of its comic treatment of patricide and its mention of women in their shifts (i.e. slips).
• Hellfire: a contemporary novel about the drug trade among working-class Irish, with a female narrator, gypsy fortune-tellers and maybe ghosts. I just started this one so I'm still getting oriented.

I'm also thinking about overhauling spoonreader, maybe changing the focus or shutting it down and starting a new blog? I've been writing this blog for three years, which is kind of hard to believe. I'd like to post more often if I'm going to keep doing it. Maybe I need to just do that. Your thoughts?

Trip to Ireland

Glendalough
Originally uploaded by spoonreader

My 10-day trip to Ireland last month was spectacular, a real book lovers' treat. I'm working on some writing about that and will let you know when I'm done. Meanwhile, email me for my Flickr link if you'd like to see all the photos.
One favorite stop was the Martello Tower at Sandycove, where James Joyce lived for a brief time and the setting for the opening scene of Ulysses. ("Stately, plump Buck Mulligan ...")
Another was Glendalough, the ruins of an ancient monastic settlement founded by St. Kevin, circa 500 A.D. (This one really had me thinking of How the Irish Saved Civiliation.) Here's my favorite photo of the trip from Glendalough.

Elvis is Titanic

Here's a link to my review of Elvis is Titanic by Ian Klaus. It begins:

Ian Klaus' slim memoir of his time in Iraq, Elvis Is Titanic, stands out as one of the few civilian memoirs to come out of the Iraq War thus far. Klaus decided to swim against the tide by going to Iraq in 2005, at age 26, to try to make a difference by teaching English. Klaus also happens to be the former boyfriend of Chelsea Clinton, a fact that is neither here nor there - or even mentioned - until the end of the book.

Read more here.

How the Irish Saved Civilization, and Writing as Act of Service

How the Irish Saved Civilization is a charming valentine written by Thomas Cahill, a tribute to Ireland's history as a book-loving culture. It starts during the Roman Empire, with its heritage of Greek intellectual life and the birth of Christianity. It moves forward to Christianity's spread across Europe and the arrival of the barbarians during the Dark Ages.

There's are splendid diversions concerning St. Augustine, who Cahill claims is the first author to create a psychological self-portrait, and the Irish epic poem Tain Bo Cuailnge, The Cattle Raid of Cooley. Then we come to St. Patrick, the brave nature lover, and eventually the monastic movement with its book-loving monks.

The heart of the book is that the Irish monasteries saved civilization by copying and preserving the great intellectual manuscripts of ancient Greece and Rome while Europe was plunged into the Dark Ages. Apparently the scribes would add their own little comments into the margins:

One scribe will complain of the backbreaking work of book-copying, another of a sloppy fellow scribe: "It is easy to spot Gabrial's work here" is written in a beautiful hand at the margin of an undistinguished page. A third will grind his teeth about the difficulty of the tortured ancient Greek that he is copying: "There's an end to that -- and seven curses with it!"

I particularly liked the chapter on the Tain, as the ancient Irish epic is called, which features a warrior-queen, Medb, who tries to capture the Brown Bull of Cuailnge so that her husband's fortune won't outrank her own.

Medb is fiery and spirited, and offers Daire mac Fiachna all sorts of treasure for the Brown Bull, "and my own friendly thighs on top of that." Another of the poem's heroes is Cuchulainn, a warrior who marries Emer. On meeting her, he declares, "I see a sweet country. I could rest my weapon there."

(If you've read Angela's Ashes, Cuchulainn is the Irish hero that young Frankie idolizes after his father tells him the story by the fire.)

I might add the Tain to my Irish reading list. The public libraries don't have it, but a few of the university libraries in my area have copies.

Thoughts after reading Harry Potter (no spoilers)

Just finished the final Potter book. I don't want to post any spoilers at this point, so I'll just say it was quite good and did a remarkable job of keeping in the spirit of the whole series.
It's not giving away much to say this: I shouldn't have worried about getting enough on the early life of Albus Dumbledore. Thankfully, that was a major plot line -- hooray!

Thoughts before reading Harry Potter

About 2 and a half hours from now, I'll pick up my copy of the last Harry Potter book. I'm guessing I will finish it by Sunday night. What a wonderful trip it's been! My sister introduced me to HP right around the time Prisoner of Azkaban came out in 1999. Seven years later, these books have brought a lot of happiness to my life. There's something so fun about a series, and J.K. Rowling hit all the right notes.
My personal predictions -- no spoilers here, these are just guesses -- are that Harry lives, Voldemort dies, Snape is good, Dumbledore does not return. Harry ends up with Ginny, and Hermione ends up with Ron, and they all live happily ever after. Who will die? I hate to say it but I think it's Mrs. Weasley and Hagrid.
I'm most worried that we won't get sufficient back-story on Lily Evans and Neville Longbottum. I'd also love to know more about Dumbledore's early life, but I'm not holding my breath for it. I also wonder what will happen to Draco Malfoy.
OK, that's it! I've got to get ready ...

Dark but funny childhood memoirs

I wasn't going to read Angela's Ashes for the Irish reading project, because we're not going to Limerick, where much of it is set. But I decided to get the audio book read by the author Frank McCourt from the library, to liven up my commute. It's a pretty humorous memoir of a truly disturbing childhood. Maybe someone should write a doctoral thesis comparing it with similar memoirs The Glass Castle and Running with Scissors.

So here's my favorite part so far. A school master is chastising his students for making fun of the narrator Frank, who has to wear shoddily patched shoes to school, because he's so poor:

He says, There are boys here who have to mend their shoes whatever way they can. There are boys in this class with no shoes at all. It's not their fault and it's no shame. Our Lord had no shoes. Our Lord died shoeless. Do you see Him hanging on the cross sporting shoes? Do you, boys?
No, sir.
What don't you see him doing?
Hanging on the cross sporting shoes, sir.

Then the teacher threatens to wallop them all with a switch.

Librarians in the Press

The New York Times snaps to the fact that librarians are way cool. Here's the nutgraf:

Librarians? Aren’t they supposed to be bespectacled women with a love of classic books and a perpetual annoyance with talkative patrons — the ultimate humorless shushers?

Not any more. With so much of the job involving technology and with a focus now on finding and sharing information beyond just what is available in books, a new type of librarian is emerging — the kind that, according to the Web site Librarian Avengers, is “looking to put the ‘hep cat’ in cataloguing.”

Harry Potter Reading Project Update

Since June 1, I have re-read two of the six Harry Potter books -- Book 1 (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone) and Book 6 (Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince). I am currently re-reading Book 5 (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix). I'm not sure if I will have re-read all six before the final book comes out on July 21, but I'm going to try! (I also have other non-HP books I'm reading, too.)
I'm re-reading for the following reasons:

• 1. for fun!
• 2. to mine for clues to the final ending.

Years ago, I read an opinion piece on an HP fan web site -- sadly I can't remember where. It said we current Harry Potter fans are blessed to be able to read the books as they come out, to be able to savor the anticipation between books. Future readers will probably come at the series differently, reading them in sequence much faster. Some children will no doubt spend a long weekend reading all seven books in one big gulp. And their experience will be quite different from the years we current readers -- we few, we happy few (relatively speaking)-- have invested in looking for clues, contemplating themes and teasing out meaning.
That sentiment hangs on whether you believe the Harry Potter books will be read for generations to come. I think they will -- they are that good, embracing enduring themes, like what it means to live a good life in the face of inevitable death. Time will tell.

Wallace on YouTube

A YouTube user called dazzlecomm has posted a bunch of video on YouTube from a writers conference held last year in Italy called Le Conversazioni. The attendees last year included my favorite David Foster Wallace along with Zadie Smith, Jeffrey Eugenides, and others. (I vow to finally read Eugenides' Middlesex now that it's Oprah's pic.)

Check out the above clip from David Foster Wallace. I transcribed what he's saying, it's just a short couple of sentences. It seems to be a response to a question about whether he belongs to a school of writers, though we don't get the question. So I'll notate it Wallace-style:

Q.
A. One symptom of what you could call the American disease, is that I don't know any writers who think of themselves as like other writers. Critics often group writers together more than writers do.
I would say that there's a group of American writers who tend to use more the techniques of postmodernism and experimentation, and then there's a group of traditional, sort of more realistic writers. Many of the writers I admire, and (unintelligible) whether I'm one of them, are interested in using postmodern techniques, postmodern aesthetic, but using that to discuss or represent very old, traditional human veritities that have to do with spirituality and emotion and community, ideas that the avant-garde would consider very old-fashioned. So that there's a kind of melding -- It's using postmodern formal techniques for very traditional ends.
If there is a group -- and some of whom I think are here this week with me -- If there is such a group, that's the group I want to belong to.

I think that description is right on the money as far as Infinite Jest goes. (Have I mentioned lately that I love that book?) Some of his other writing, I'm not so sure about. The book that continues to vex me is his short story collection "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men" -- I just don't know what to make of it. And they're making it into a movie, can you believe that? I think I need to read that book again. I read it at a point in my life when I was very melancholic, and I have often wondered if I saw it through a dark lens, so to speak.
On another issue, in light of the recent New Yorker article on the Ransom Center's literary archive, how does a library preserve video like this? The reason I transcribed the quote is because the video could go away for any number of reasons (not least of which would be complaints from conference organizers or DFW himself). I think it's valuable from a literary-historical point of view to hear what writers have to say about their own writing, and the fledgling librarian in my instinctively says such video should be preserved for research purposes. I wonder if the Ransom center has multimedia archivists? Hmmm ...
On a related note, the spouse is always hassling me to archive this blog is some way, but I'm lazy, and I have confidence that the Google servers will keep chugging along. From an archival point of view, I should print it out though, on acid-free paper and store it in a fire-proof box somewhere. (The difficulties inherent in digital archives are a post for another day; I'll put it on my list of future posts.)

My Ireland Reading List, Part 1

We're going to Ireland for our fifth anniversary of marriage, yippee!
So here is the start of my Ireland reading list. (I'll spare you my Ireland Netflix list.)

• The Sea by John Banville (contemporary fiction)
• Mothers and Sons by Colm Toibin (contemporary fiction)
• How the Irish Saved Civilization by Thomas Cahill (history)
• Are You Somebody?: The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman by Nuala Ofaolainn (contemporary memoir)
• Dubliners by James Joyce (classic literature)
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce (classic literature)
• poetry by William Butler Yeats (bit of heaven)

The art of the book cover

Love this ... a whole blog dedicated to the design of book covers., with a special attention to the differences between international editions. (The blogger is Canadian and receives editions from both the U.S. and Europe, so this makes sense.)
I particularly enjoyed the recent post on new covers for Vintage Classics like Sense and Sensibililty and Frankenstein. Check out that post here.

Homeless library users

Many homeless people use the libraries in Tampa, and I wanted to talk to some of them and see what they read and what they think of the local libraries. I ended up writing a profile for the paper of a woman I got to know in Clearwater, a nearby city.
You can read my story via this link here.
Just last week, USA Today had a story about how some libraries are offering specific service to homeless people. I didn't find anything like these programs going on in our area, but I sure would like to write about it happens. Read the USA Today story here.

Happy Bloomsday!

Today is Bloomsday, when we honor James Joyce and the novel Ulysses. From RTE:

It is considered to be the greatest novel of the 20th century.

All the events in James Joyce's epic Ulysses happen on a single day - 16 June 1904 aka Bloomsday.

A week's worth of celebrations have been taking place throughout Dublin, but Bloomsday itself is still the one that matters.

Dublin 1904, as Leopold Bloom knew it, comes to life as you can eat, walk, swim, listen to, re-enact, or watch the eclectic mix of Bloomsday events.

Here are just some of the events taking place ...

Read all about it here.

Bloomsday is my favorite literary holiday, along with J. Alfred Prufrock Day and Michaelmas.

Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center

The New Yorker profiles the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, one of the largest literary archives in the world and part of my dear alma mater, the University of Texas at Austin.
It's a fascinating article -- the sheer size of some of these collections of writers' papers; the business of buying collections; the ambition of the center to be the top scholarly archive in the country; and the personality of its raconteur director Thomas F. Staley (a James Joyce scholar, no less -- the center's holdings on Joyce are remarkable). Read the article online at The New Yorker web site while it's still available here.
The story, written by D.T. Max, fills me with admiration for archives and what they mean to literary history and heritage. It also makes me want to read more Don DeLillo, because of his connection Joyce and David Foster Wallace, as this excerpt shows:

One day this spring, I flew to Austin to take a look at the Don DeLillo archive. The Bronx-born writer, whose papers Staley acquired in 2004 for half a million dollars, fits into the Ransom’s collection well: for one thing, DeLillo is part of a node of expansive American fiction that goes back to Philip Roth and forward to novelists such as Jonathan Franzen, Rick Moody, and David Foster Wallace; DeLillo has corresponded with all of these writers. DeLillo counts Joyce as an influence, so he connects to the modernist node. And he has kept engaging, detailed notebooks that shed light on the intellectual foundation of his novels. Most important, he writes on a manual typewriter, producing draft after draft of his work, allowing scholars a chance to see his creative mind at work.

D.T. Max is my new favorite journalist. He also wrote a really good NYT mag piece on Happiness 101, about researchers who study true happiness.
As for the Ransom Center, it's that kind of UT effort that makes me wanna shout "Hook 'em, Horns!"

Harry Potter Read-a-thon

Here's a series of emails between me and my dear book group friend L.

L.,
I want to re-read all the Harry Potter books before No. 7 comes out in July. Do you think I should read them in order, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6? Or do you think I should read them backwards -- 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 ?

It would make sense to read them 1-6, but I was thinking I might detect more clues to the ending by reading them backwards.

What do you think?
--Angie

Angie,
I'm in the process of re-reading the last one. If you have enough time, start at the beginning. What if you burn out though and then stop reading by book 4 and then book 6 is untouched as you are in line to get the new book?

If I were intent on reading them all, I would start with 6 and then 1,2, 3, 4, 5.
--L.

L.,
I think your point about burn-out is a good one! And I hadn't thought of that before, but I think you're right.

I started Book 1 this weekend and I'm almost done. Maybe I'll do 1, 6, 2, 5, 4. Mark jokingly suggested that, but I don't think it's a bad idea!

I have a hunch that Book 2 is more important than we might think, because it has so much of Voldemort's boyhood and the diary was likely a Horcrux, etc. So I want to get that one in if I can.

What fun!
--Angie

What Writers Recommend

What do writers read? It's an interesting enough question that two summer reading news stories have recently asked that question.
In New York magazine, Benjamin Kunkel, author of the wonderful whimsical-yet-serious debut novel Indecision, recommends Mortals by Norman Rush. Mortals is a sequel to an interesting novel called Mating that my book group read last year. Both "Mating" and "Mortals" are about American intellectuals and government workers in Botswana. Kunkel's novel "Indecision" has slightly similar themes of Americans and their place in their international scene, but "Indecision" is more youthful and zany, while "Mating" was serious and a teensy bit pretentious (but kind of enjoyably so). The whole New York package on summer reading is pretty interesting and worth looking at.
Meanwhile, the NYT has a big roundup of what famous authors are reading. I was pleased to see Stephen King recommend Then We Came To The End. I loved that book, I think it deserves a wider audience.

Presumed Innocent sequel

A news report says Scott Turow is working on a sequel to Presumed Innocent, one of my favorite novels:

"I got the idea a couple of years ago when I was working on a serialized book for The New York Times," explained Turow at the Jacob Javits Convention Center. "I had this image of a man sitting on a bed, near the body of a dead woman. And then I realized, 'Wait a minute, that guy on the bed is Rusty Sabich!' And that's how I began the new book." ...

"I've gotten a lot of correspondence saying that `Presumed Innocent' was an epochal event in the reader's life," Turow said, adding that the new novel, currently untitled, would probably not come out before the summer of 2009.

Read the whole news report here.

I would quibble that Burden of Proof was a sequel to "Presumed Innocent." "Burden" is about Sandy Stern, Rusty Sabich's defense attorney, who was so memorably portrayed by Raul Julia in the movie of the novel. I loved that one two. Every couple of years I re-read those novels, just for fun.

Cheever's "The Swimmer"

My spouse wrote a news story about swimming the city's public pools in a single day. (Read it here.) He mentions the short story "The Swimmer," by John Cheever in the beginning. I'd never heard of this short story before the spouse started talking about it, but it's terrific. Neddy Merrill is at a friend's house when he decides to swim home, going from pool to pool in his affluent neighbors' backyards. As he swims he realizes that something isn't right, that his world is changing as he goes along.
The story isn't online, but there's an interesting tribute to it written by Michael Chabon (author of The Yiddish Policemen's Union and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay) in Salon. Read it here. It starts:

I read "The Swimmer" for the first time on my bed in the Maryland suburbs, one winter afternoon when I was sixteen or seventeen. I'd been skimming through a battered paperback anthology my grandfather had passed along to me -- "100 Stories Ruined by English Teachers," I think it was called -- starting one after another worn-out old chestnut, quickly moving on, when I reached the famous, classic, puzzling first paragraph that begins, "It was one of those midsummer Sundays when everyone sits around saying, 'I drank too much last night.'"

Chabon talks about how the story meditates on the inevitability of life's end. That's true, but I think it's also about the isolation of addiction. There's a lot going on there.
I can't find the story to link to; it's still under copyright. So go to your local library to find it; it's well worth reading.

The Moleskine talks back

Here's a quick piece from McSweeney's on what your abandoned journal might say.

It starts:

You say things are "hectic." Then you add that you "don't want to talk about it." And that's all? Nothing else happened to you on April 22, 2007? Well, if I'm to believe that, then my name isn't Moleskine.

Read the rest here

Then We Came to the End

I really adored the book, Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris.
Funny and touching and deeply serious, "Then We Came to the End" is what happens at a Chicago ad agency as the dot-com bubble bursts and the lay-offs begin.
And it's written in first-person plural! (For the most part.) How cool is that?
Because I'm an office worker myself, this book reminded me that there's so much drama and poignancy in everyday life. This point has been made before (most notably by James Joyce's Ulysses), and maybe it's an easy, obvious point. But I still find the phenomenon to be emotionally moving and almost miraculous. Such is the artistry of the novel.
I interviewed Joshua Ferris for the newspaper, which was great. Some authors I've interviewed don't like talking about their work, but Ferris was very articulate, especially about the different characters in his book.
Read my interview with Joshua Ferris here.
Read the first chapter of Then We Came to the End here.
Here's the opening:

WE WERE FRACTIOUS AND overpaid. Our mornings lacked promise. At least those of us who smoked had something to look forward to at ten-fifteen. Most of us liked most everyone, a few of us hated specific individuals, one or two people loved everyone and everything. Those who loved everyone were unanimously reviled. We loved free bagels in the morning. They happened all too infrequently. Our benefits were astonishing in comprehensiveness and quality of care. Sometimes we questioned whether they were worth it. We thought moving to India might be better, or going back to nursing school. Doing something with the handicapped or working with our hands. No one ever acted on these impulses, despite their daily, sometimes hourly contractions. Instead we met in conference rooms to discuss the issues of the day.

What I'm Reading Now

I'm reading The Annotated Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austin, annotated by David M. Shapard. P&P is a classic, but I read it for the first time only a year or two ago. Now I love it, this is maybe my fourth time reading it. The annotated edition has lots of interesting insights about how Jane Austen moves her plot along almost entirely through dialogue -- very interesting. It also explains nuances of vocabulary that might slip by the modern reader, i.e. amiable: "a common term of praise. It had a broader meaning then, signifying general kindness and friendliness."
I'm also reading The Untouched Minutes by Donald Morrill. It's a fascinating memoir by an English professor about how he and his wife were victims of a home invasion. It's kind of a slim book, I would describe it as a literary essay. The home invasion happened around the same time as 9/11 and the murders of Half and Susanne Zantop, two professors at Dartmouth. Morrill weaves those events into his narrative to create a meditation on violence and experience. So far, it's excellent.

My strategic borrowing

If I'm browsing the stacks at a library and I run across a book I like but might not have time to read, I will check it out anyway with the idea that it will improve the book's library survival. Books that don't get checked out for years tend to lose their place on the shelves and end up on the book sale tables, and this is my little way of forestalling that.

But it's hard to tell sometimes when the last time a book was checked out. It used to be, you could flip to the back of the book and check the date due stamp. With the advent of computerized check-out, though, the dates don't always get stamped. So I ask the librarian. They usually can tell me.

Example: I recently checked out a copy of Flannery O'Connor's collected works. The stamp said the last check out date was 1995. But I asked the library assistant to look it up, and the last actual check out date was 2005.

Author letters

Reader No.7 sent me this fascinating link about 300 letters written by Flannery O'Connor that were made available to the public for the first time last week:

By outward appearances, Betty Hester was an unremarkable woman. She never married or had children, living instead with an aunt in a Midtown apartment. She rarely went out for fun. She took the bus each day to work as a file clerk for a credit bureau in downtown Atlanta.

Few people knew that Hester — an avid and insightful reader — was a close friend and confidante of the world-renowned Georgia author Flannery O'Connor, although the two rarely met in person. Over the course of nine years, though, from 1955 until O'Connor's death in 1964, they wrote to each other nearly every week, discussing everything from Catholicism to current events in wide-ranging letters that were "the most personal" of O'Connor's correspondence, according to Bill Sessions, Hester's literary executor.

In an event highly anticipated by O'Connor scholars and fans, her nearly 300 letters to Hester will be opened to the public Saturday at Emory University, where, at Hester's request, they have been kept under seal for 20 years.

The article is mostly about O'Connor, but it also notes that there is a sizable trove of letters by T.S. Eliot that are under seal -- 1,200 letters that will be opened in 2020.

Then there's a follow-up to the O'Connor story, about what happend on the day the letters were released:

Maybe it was just too sunny a day to be spent in the archives on the 10th floor of the Robert W. Woodruff Library on Emory's campus. By 2 o'clock — five hours after the correspondence in two large folders was made public — only five people had signed in and perused the collection of letters written between 1955 and the author's death in 1964.

Larry Hammond, 65, an insurance salesman from Atlanta, was the first to thumb through the stack. "I took a literature class a few years ago and read about this and I was just interested," he said. "I was real surprised by the language — and all the typos."

A closer inspection by O'Connor scholars may yet find great gravity in the missives.

The Movie of Us

I recently reviewed The Movie of Us, a collection of poetry by Kevin Jeffery Clark. The book has an interesting back story; I wrote about it here.
Excerpt:

The Movie of Us captures a cinematic landscape of language. The poems are scenes sketched out in the cool blues and grays of a lake photographed just after sunset or just before dawn.

I attended a poetry reading last night; Clark's brother, Michael Klein, read his poems. It was quite touching.

The Glass Castle and The Road

I read The Glass Castle right before I read The Road, so that's two books about pitiful starving children in a row. Meanwhile, the next book group pick is Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

I also can't stop thinking about a bit from Cormac McCarthy's NYT interview, which I blogged about yesterday:

McCarthy's style owes much to Faulkner's -- in its recondite vocabulary, punctuation, portentous rhetoric, use of dialect and concrete sense of the world -- a debt McCarthy doesn't dispute. "The ugly fact is books are made out of books," he says. "The novel depends for its life on the novels that have been written." His list of those whom he calls the "good writers" -- Melville, Dostoyevsky, Faulkner -- precludes anyone who doesn't "deal with issues of life and death." Proust and Henry James don't make the cut. "I don't understand them," he says. "To me, that's not literature. A lot of writers who are considered good I consider strange."

His is a very purist view of writing. I admire his view, but I'm not sure I share it. It's a great point for debate, though.

More on The Road

So today The Road wins the Pulitzer Prize when I was just blogging about it yesterday. I did some more research on the book today, one interesting piece was from The Chicago Tribune about Oprah picking the The Road for her book club. The writer, Julia Keller, calls Oprah and author Cormac McCarthy "one of the oddest and most unlikely cultural pairings since Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe." She also reports on McCarthy's notorious aversion to the press:

Whatever McCarthy's motivation for agreeing to be on the show, it isn't money, say longtime observers of McCarthy's work. He turns down speeches, awards, teaching gigs and other familiar trappings of the contemporary writer's life, preferring to live in the desert Southwest and do his work. Like literary recluses such as J.D. Salinger and Thomas Pynchon, McCarthy is more familiar through his absence than his presence.

Read the whole article here.

I also found this longer, more definitive profile of McCarthy from when he gave a rare interview to the New York Times in 1992. You can find it via the previous link or on the NYT's Cormac McCarthy page here.

Oprah's Pic: The Road

I read Oprah Winfrey's current book club pic this weekend: The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. I can't remember the last time I read a book this disturbing. A man and his young son are on the road, traversing a post-apocalyptic landscape (nuclear war? meteor strike?) and hiding out from other survivors bent on rape, murder and cannibalism.
If that sounds austere, it certainly is, but the writing is elegant and convincing. I can't get some of the grimmer scenes out of my head.
I would say the pick is out of character for Ms. Oprah, but one of the things I like about Oprah (and I do like her) is that she usually has a surprise up her sleeve. So it's not out of character in that sense.
The Oprah web site says that Cormac McCarthy is going to give her his first television interview. I'm sure the chance to reach the massive Oprah audience is to tempting to pass up. (Only one author ever did, I think.)
Maybe I'll think of something more profound to say upon further reflection, but right now all I can do is shake my head in disbelief over the power of The Road.

Kurt Vonnegut, RIP

Slaughterhouse-Five is one of the great anti-war novels, maybe the best in American literature. My eighth grade English teacher used the book to teach World War II to us Catholic school girls, which seems smartly subversive to me now. I need to find a copy and re-read it.
It begins like this:

Listen: Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time.

Then it tells about Billy's serving in World War II and surviving the bombing of Dresden; his postwar life in the suburbs; his capture by aliens and being taken to another planet.
After reading that book, I went ahead and read all the rest of his books before I graduated high school; I loved them. He was the first adult author who I read pretty much all of his work. The obits (read the NYT one here) have been mentioning Cat's Cradle and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater as his major works, but I always preferred Breakfast of Champions, which has sly illustrations of human anatomy and features the trials of his alter-ego, science fiction writer named Kilgore Trout.
Later in life, Vonnegut defended civil liberties and librarians.
Kurt Vonnegut died yesterday. So it goes.

The dreaded "twee" appellation

My book group is preparing to discuss Eat, Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia by Elizabeth Gilbert. I really liked it -- I've been a fan of Gilbert's ever since I came across her distinctive chatty-but-smart magazine stories in GQ years ago. This book is a memoir Gilbert's emotional recovery from a painful divorce. Her solution is to seek pleasure worldwide by eating in Italy, praying in India and finding balance in Indonesia. It's a clever premise, and in the end the book moves beyond her divorce to her spiritual maturation as a complete woman. Her writing is a joy -- breezy, funny and modern. And I really liked the way she documented the hard-to-describe feelings of silent meditation.
But I fear my dear book group compatriot J. is not going to like it. I can hear her now, she will tag it with the dreaded "twee" appellation. What is twee? Twee is anything that J. considers too cutesy or precious or sweet or clever for it's own good. It's the opposite of J.'s most complimentary adjectives, which are -- can you guess? -- "ironic" and "dark" (and sometimes "sarcastic"). Other books we have read that J. said were twee are Winkie by Clifford Chase (a satirical memoir in which a teddy bear becomes ensnared in a terrorist plot) and The World to Come by Dara Horn (a cross-generational love story celebrating Jewish art and literature, hinged around a stolen Marc Chagall painting).
So I'm thinking up my twee counterarguments now.

Seth Compton

I get new comments on one of my earliest posts, Why Spoonreader?, every so often, which is great. I hope it means that people interested in Spoon River Anthology are finding this blog. One commenter recently pointed out a poem that had never really made an impression on me before, which is kind of funny, since it's about libraries. You'd think I would have remembered it.
Then later, my friend RF and I were talking about our mixed feelings about small towns, and growing up in small towns. (He grew up in Mansfield, population 5,582. I grew up in Patterson, population 5,130.) Calling it a love-hate relationship vastly oversimplifies it. It's more of a combination of nostalgia, affection, respect, frustration, revulsion and rage. It brought that same poem back to mind.
Anyway, here's the Spoon River poem that gets at all that. Thanks, Naomi!

SETH COMPTON

WHEN I died, the circulating library
Which I built up for Spoon River,
And managed for the good of inquiring minds,
Was sold at auction on the public square,
As if to destroy the last vestige
Of my memory and influence.
For those of you who could not see the virtue
Of knowing Volney’s “Ruins” as well as Butler’s “Analogy”
And “Faust” as well as “Evangeline,”
Were really the power in the village,
And often you asked me,
“What is the use of knowing the evil in the world?”
I am out of your way now, Spoon River,
Choose your own good and call it good.
For I could never make you see
That no one knows what is good
Who knows not what is evil;
And no one knows what is true
Who knows not what is false.

'80s Books and Food

I read a poignant, fun memoir of growing up Vietnamese in the '80s in Michigigan, and eating lots of junk food: Stealing Buddha's Dinner, by Bich Minh Nguyen. (Check out the short interview and excerpt I wrote here.) I have a real weakness for '80s culture, since that's the decade I grew up in. This memoir reminded me a lot of a Judy Blume book. In fact, Judy Blume wrote a blurb for the back of the book: "Only a truly gifted writer could make me long for the Kool-Aid, Rice-A-Roni, and Kit Kats celebrated in Stealing Buddha's Dinnner. In this charming, funny, original memoir about growing up as an outsider in America, Bich Nguyen takes you on a journey you won't forget. I can hardly wait for what comes next."
Just in case you possibly don't know who Judy Blume is: She wrote '80s teen classics such as "Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret" (which actually was published in 1970).
Nguyen's working on a novel called "Short Girls" that I'll be interested in reading.

Quality of Reading

After reading interviews with Zadie Smith and essays by her, and being impressed with how sharp and interesting she is, I finally -- finally -- got around to reading On Beauty. I liked it very much; this novel has sophistication and depth. It is the story of two black families -- one mostly American and one British; one liberal, one mostly conservative -- who intersect at a small liberal arts college near Boston. The book takes on the culture wars, black identity, class issues, love and fidelity, and, of course, beauty.
Playing alongside the novel for me, though, has been Smith's essay on the importance of reading. Her analogy of a violinist playing a composer's work haunts me, because I play the violin, and I know there are diligent ways to practice and sloppy ways to practice. It makes me wonder, am I reading sloppily? Am I doing justice to the work I'm reading?
I've often thought that I sometimes read books too fast to really enjoy and even digest them. Books that I find to be clearly and simply written are books that I read fast -- books like Harry Potter and authors like John Grisham and Anne Rice. With Harry Potter, I've noticed myself reading about half of each sentence, getting the gist of where it's going, and skipping to the next sentence. (I suspect that's what most speed readers do.) But even books that are written with a more complex style, sometimes I tear through those, too. So lately I've been trying to consciously slow down, to read a little slower, to savor the language more.
But what else do I do that's bad? How about stopping in the middle of the chapter, or even worse, in mid-sentence? I certainly do that sometimes. Isn't that doing harm to the reading of the work to stop at an unnatural stopping point?
So I've been trying to be more respectful in my reading -- not reading right before bed when I'm exhausted, or when I don't have enough time to finish a chapter. It's definitely slowing me down. But hopefully it's making me a better reader, too.

Harry Potter in 2007

I know I'm super late on posting this, but I am so thrilled that the last Harry Potter book will be published this year on July 21, less than 150 days away as of this writing. (You can check the countdown on mighty Mugglenet's homepage.) I was really worried that it wouldn't come out until 2008.
These books are fanciful and funny, and impossible to put down. Each chapter ends in a way specially designed to irresistibly (literally!) lure you on, until you've fin shed the whole darn thing. In some ways, they are like literary heroin. They get a powerful grip on you.
I made a pact with myself after seeing the third Harry Potter movie (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, which was quite good) that I wouldn't watch anymore of the movies until I had finished reading the whole series. I don't like the movie images in my head when I read the books. So far, so good.

Flannery O'Connor Pilgrimage

The New York Times has a marvelous travel story about visiting the birth place of Flannery O'Connor. It's very much worth reading if like her. Hurray for the writer, Lawrence Downes! I love the way he encapsulates the O'Connor body of work. He writes:

O’Connor’s short stories and novels are set in a rural South where people know their places, mind their manners and do horrible things to one another. It’s a place that somehow hovers outside of time, where both the New Deal and the New Testament feel like recent history. It’s soaked in violence and humor, in sin and in God. He may have fled the modern world, but in O’Connor’s he sticks around, in the sun hanging over the tree line, in the trees and farm beasts, and in the characters who roost in the memory like gargoyles. It’s a land haunted by Christ — not your friendly hug-me Jesus, but a ragged figure who moves from tree to tree in the back of the mind, pursuing the unwilling.
Many people — me for instance — are in turn haunted by O’Connor. Her doctrinally strict, mordantly funny stories and novels are as close to perfect as writing gets. Her language is so spare and efficient, her images and character’s speech so vivid, they burn into the mind. Her strange Southern landscape was one I knew viscerally but, until this trip, had never set foot in. I had wondered how her fictional terrain and characters, so bizarre yet so blindingly real, might compare with the real places and people she lived among and wrote about.

I also got a real kick out of how my friend L. sent me an email about the story, noting that it included our friend J.'s favorite line from a Flannery O'Connor story. She didn't even have to include the line. I knew exactly which one she meant: “She would of been a good woman,” the Misfit said, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”
Read the whole NYT story here.

Introduction to IJ's 10th Anniversary

While I was working on a review of What is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng, by Dave Eggers, I was surfing around the Internet looking for stuff about Eggers. One of the things I found online was the introduction he wrote for the tenth anniversary edition of Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace.
I really love the introduction. It begins:

In recent years, there have been a few literary dustups — how insane is it that such a thing exists in a world at war? — about readability in contemporary fiction. In essence, there are some people who feel that fiction should be easy to read, that it’s a popular medium that should communicate on a somewhat conversational wavelength. On the other hand, there are those who feel that fiction can be challenging, generally and thematically, and even on a sentence-by-sentence basis — that it’s okay if a person needs to work a bit while reading, for the rewards can be that much greater when one’s mind has been exercised and thus (presumably) expanded.

Much in the way that would-be civilized debates are polarized by extreme thinkers on either side, this debate has been made to seem like an either/or proposition, that the world has room for only one kind of fiction, and that the other kind should be banned and its proponents hunted down and, why not, dismembered.

Read the whole introduction here. (And you really should!)

Zadie Smith on the Novel

Zadie Smith has authored a truly wonderful essay on writing novels in the Guardian. She asks what makes a good writer and responds to T.S. Eliot's famous essay, "Tradition and the Individual Talent."
My favorite part of the essay is where she talks about the role of the reader:

A novel is a two-way street, in which the labour required on either side is, in the end, equal. Reading, done properly, is every bit as tough as writing - I really believe that. As for those people who align reading with the essentially passive experience of watching television, they only wish to debase reading and readers. The more accurate analogy is that of the amateur musician placing her sheet music on the stand and preparing to play. She must use her own, hard-won, skills to play this piece of music. The greater the skill, the greater the gift she gives the composer and the composer gives her.

This is a conception of "reading" we rarely hear now. And yet, when you practise reading, when you spend time with a book, the old moral of effort and reward is undeniable. Reading is a skill and an art and readers should take pride in their abilities and have no shame in cultivating them if for no other reason than the fact that writers need you.

Read the whole essay here.
(Thanks to Gangrey for the link.)

Poems for a weekend at home

Here are some good poems for a weekend at home.

For when you need an exterminator:
Me up at does
by e.e. cummings

For when you eat your loved one's snacks:
This Is Just To Say
by William Carlos Williams

For tending tomato plants in the garden:
Hornworm: Autumn Lamentation
by Stanley Kunitz