James Joyce reference

Last week in The New Yorker was a very charming, very sad personal history, Making Toast (subscription required; Dec. 15th issue). It's about a grandfather whose daughter dies, and he helps raise the grandchildren. (There's that death thing again, sorry.) But it also has a James Joyce reference that makes me laugh every time I read it. Here's author Roger Rosenblatt writing about his grandson.

One evening, he points to the shelf to his left and says, "Book." He indicates "The Letters of James Joyce," edited by Stuart Gilbert. It seems an ambitious choice for a twenty-three-month-old boy, but I take down the book and prop it up before us.

"Dear Bubbies," I begin. "I went to the beach today and played in the sand. I also built a castle. I hope you will come play with me soon. Love, James Joyce."

Bubbies seems content, so I "read" another: "Dear Bubbies, Went to the playground today. Tried the slide. It was a little scary. I like the swings better. I can go very high, just like you. Love, James Joyce."

Bubbies turns the pages. I occasionally amuse myself with an invented letter closer to the truth of Joyce's life and personality: "Dear Bubbies, I hate the Catholic Church, and am leaving Ireland forever. Love, James Joyce."

Wordy Shipmates review

Sorry for all the death and morbidity on this blog lately! I guess that's the literary world for you. A friend told me recently that sex and death are the only appropriate topics for great literature (I think she was quoting someone, not sure who). I'll try to scrounge up some sex then ...
Meanwhile, here's a book review I wrote about the Puritans.

A new-to-me Robert Frost poem

My online Yale course on modern poetry continues. Over the weekend, I listened to the two lectures on Robert Frost and learned about a poem of his I wasn't at all familiar with. It is very different from the more familiar "The Road Not Taken" and "Mending Wall." The poem is called "Home Burial," and it's mostly dialogue between a husband and wife who have buried a child. Although really they're having a fight. It's emotional and intense. Some of it just gives me the chills.

It's a long poem, and I won't copy it all here, but you can read it online via this link.

I'll just note that the spacing of the words on the page is important to reading it, and the above link is better than most others on the Internet. But it does differ a little bit from my copy of the poem in the Norton Anthology. (Anthology of American Literature Volume 2 Fifth Edition in my case -- old! -- not the new Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry that's on my Amazon wish list.) Point being if you have a Norton you might want to read "Home Burial" out of the Norton.

Alright, so our Yale teacher Langdon Hammer has this to say about "Home Burial":

The woman, the mother, wishes to--can't help herself from trying to hold on to the dead child, and she's caught looking behind her as if towards the past, which is also, frankly, a wish to escape her husband who is a frightening force, to escape his will, I think. His will, his force – these are his ways, his resources for responding to death. ...

Well, "Home Burial" is a poem about the limits of work, the inability of the worker to bring a knowable world, a safe world, into being. There is in Frost no God, no transcendental source of guidance or consolation, nothing out there in the world but the material conditions of our circumstances. Over and over again in Frost poems, you see speakers, you see the poet himself, wanting to know; and wanting to know means pressing towards some revelation, towards some sense of the meaning of things, a search for some kind of presence behind the way things are.

The Yale online people are so wonderful, they have posted the transcript of Hammer's lecture online so you can read it all for yourself if you like. I myself prefer to listen to the lectures on my iPod because Langdon Hammer has this wonderfully sonorous voice and his manner is the perfect combination of learned and diffident. Next up: World War I and Imagism.

Twilight and the act of reading

I was tempted to read the Twilight novel series, but I resisted with all my might. There were many things that may have tempted me: It's about vampires, and I love vampires. (Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire is a longtime favorite.) I like to keep my finger on the pulse of the hottest YA. (That's Young Adult fiction for you non-library types.) And it had a strong, Austen-like young heroine.

But no, I said, no. There are four novels and they're all long, potentially sucking me in for a total of 2000+ pages. I just feel like my reading time is very precious and I have to guard it for the best stuff, and 2,000 pages crosses some mental barrier for me.

Then comes Caitlin Flanagan with a fabulous essay on the series in The Atlantic (which is great magazine seemingly at the top of its game right now). Flanagan apparently loved the Twilight series with its tale of Bella, a high school student, who falls in love with a classmate and finds out he's a vampire. Flanagan writes:

The Twilight series is not based on a true story, of course, but within it is the true story, the original one. Twilight centers on a boy who loves a girl so much that he refuses to defile her, and on a girl who loves him so dearly that she is desperate for him to do just that, even if the wages of the act are expulsion from her family and from everything she has ever known. We haven’t seen that tale in a girls’ book in a very long time. And it’s selling through the roof. ...

Then Flanagan medidates on the act of reading itself:

The salient fact of an adolescent girl’s existence is her need for a secret emotional life—one that she slips into during her sulks and silences, during her endless hours alone in her room, or even just when she’s gazing out the classroom window while all of Modern European History, or the niceties of the passé composé, sluice past her. This means that she is a creature designed for reading in a way no boy or man, or even grown woman, could ever be so exactly designed, because she is a creature whose most elemental psychological needs—to be undisturbed while she works out the big questions of her life, to be hidden from view while still in plain sight, to enter profoundly into the emotional lives of others—are met precisely by the act of reading.

I think this is a really astute observation, and if it's a little bit of an overly broad generalization, it's only by a little bit. I particularly think her description of reading -- "to be undisturbed while she works out the big questions of her life, to be hidden from view while still in plain sight, to enter profoundly into the emotional lives of others" -- holds true for adults as well. Though it reading as an emotional escape is something I'm always on guard against. I don't want to be some zombie escaping reality through books. I then wonder if I should be out traveling the world and having extreme experiences instead of reading. But then I argue with myself -- I have only a moderate fondness for travel, I love the home comforts, and reading is not only about entering the emotional lives of others. Reading is also (at least for me) about entering into language itself in an abstact, metaphysical way that I would personally describe as sacramental.
Now that's getting far afield of Flanagan's essay, but it's the kind of interesting thoughts her essay evokes. If any of this interests you at all, the whole essay is really worth reading. (But I still don't think I'm going to read 2,000+ pages of Twilight.)

A book to give your sister

Over the holiday, I picked up a copy of Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds, one of the great Irish novels of the 20th century.
I can't stop laughing at the blurb on the front cover, from the poet Dylan Thomas:

"This is just the book to give your sister if she's a loud, dirty, boozy girl."

Home review

I'm a little late blogging this, but here's my review of Home, by Marilynne Robinson. 

In Gilead, a sleepy little town in Iowa in 1956, the elderly minister Robert Boughton is dying, cared for by his unmarried adult daughter, Glory.

" 'Home to stay, Glory! Yes!' her father said, and her heart sank," begins Marilynne Robinson's latest novel, Home, which is a finalist for this year's National Book Award for fiction.

Interrupting the quiet procession of the pair's days together is a letter from Jack — the black sheep son and brother gone for 20 years. Now in his 40s, he has yet to live down the bad deeds of his youth: cutting classes, stealing and, most grievously to Boughton, fathering an illegitimate child with a girl he doesn't love. ...

These characters will be familiar to readers of Gilead, Robinson's 2005 Pulitzer Prize winner. Not a sequel nor a prequel, Home eerily chronicles the same events as Gilead, but this time told from the perspective of Glory as she muddles through the drama of her brother's sudden reappearance.

This was a tough review for me to write, because I really loved Gilead, and there were a lot of things I found unsatisfying about Home, more for emotional reasons than easily defined artistic and/or critical reasons. Anyway, read the complete review here.

Sad about smoking

I saw an op-ed piece in The Washington Post recently that said to the effect "Let Barack Obama smoke if he wants to."


(Actual headline: "Let the Guy Smoke. Obama Is Probably Fibbing About Giving Up Cigarettes. That's Okay.")


I used to smoke, a lot. It's a depressing, suicidal addiction. It's not good. When you're smoking, you think it's harmless and fun, but that's the addiction tricking you. That's the nature of addiction.


It made me really sad to see that op-ed -- and not because it's particularly about Obama. I'd say the same thing about anyone.


To me, it's like saying, "Let him kill himself, what's the big deal?"


Having said all that, quitting smoking is one of the most personal decisions a person can make. No one can do it for you, and you're not gonna do it yourself until you're 100 percent mentally committed to doing it.

Nonplussed and bemused, followed by meh.

Add bemused to the list of words -- like nonplussed -- that seem to be morphing before our eyes.

The Boston Globe found several instances of political reporters writing that Barack Obama appeared to be "bemused" in debates. The context seemed to mean he was wryly amused. But bemused acutally means confused or puzzled.

Nonplussed also means confused or puzzled or taken aback -- not "nonchalant" or "unperturbed," as it's often used. (And as this blog has noted before!!)

What does this imply? Some deep-seated, society-wide revulsion to being confused? So much so that we must expunge the notion from the very language? Maybe, but probably not.

In other lexiconic news, RF would like me to note that "Meh" has gained a place in next year's dictionaries. It's an expression of indifference or apathy, supposedly originating with "The Simpsons." Homer asks Bart and Lisa, who are watching TV, if they want to go on a day trip. They say, "Meh," and keep watching TV.

I suspect "meh" was in circulation long before "The Simpsons." It sounds to me like it could be Yiddish or Italian, but that's just a gut feeling. I have no linguistic evidence to proffer.

Yeats and the Wandering Aengus

My life is full of things poetical lately. My car pool partner moved away, so to make the commute go faster, I've been searching out audio educational material. Open Yale Courses offers an online class in Modern Poetry, and I started listening to the lectures on Irish poet William Butler Yeats.
Yale has a pretty impressive set-up, and it's free and on the open Web. You can download video or audio of the lecture along with worksheets and other ancilliary materials. I like it better than the ubiquitous, proprietary, complicated Blackboard, which is the educational software of choice at University of South Florida (where I'm in library school), and many other places.

The first Yeats lecture discussed the poem "The Song of Wandering Aengus," (1899) a new poem to me. Here it is in its entirety.

I WENT out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire a-flame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And someone called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done,
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

The teacher of the Yale course, the marvelously named Langdon Hammer, says this is an example of the early Yeats, and we will see Yeats move toward a different aesthetic as we go forward. So this is all very interesting to me. Make no mistake, I think "Wandering Aengus" is a marvelous poem, whether it's modern, romantic or whatever. I find Yeats fascinating.

I strongly suspect Yeat's Aengus is of Dun Aengus of the Aran Islands, a site we visited on our trip to Ireland last year. "Dun" means "Fort", so Dun Aengus is the Fort of Aengus. It's an ancient cliffside fort that looks out over the Atlantic Ocean. It's kind of hard to show from our photos, but look at this one below. People are lying on their bellies looking over the edge of the cliff because it's just too scary to walk up to the edge. There's no fence or anything to keep you from plunging over the side to your death. This photo was taken by me in August 2007.



I'll have some more thoughts on poetry in upcoming posts ...

For the NYT fans out there.

This is only funny if you're pretty familiar with New York Times columnist Frank Rich ... an actual conversation at my house Sunday night.

Scene: Me and the spouse sitting on the couch reading the NYT. 

Me: "Hey, did you read Frank Rich today? Was it good?"

The Spouse: "Yes, I did. Frank Rich is always good." 

Me: "Hmm. Can you boil down this week's column for me, so I don't have to read it?"

The Spouse: (thinks for a minute ...) "The pundits are all wrong. The administration is all wrong. Only I, Frank Rich, can tell what is really going on."

Too much RSS ...

Do you use an RSS reader, like Google Reader? Do you know what RSS is? Basically, it's a way to scoop up all the postings from your favorite blogs and gather them in a single place. Each blog's new updates are called a feed; you use your reader to subscribe to feeds.

I often get carried away subscribing to too many RSS feeds. When my RSS reader tells me that I have "1000+" unread posts, I know things have gone too far.
So every so often , I just give up and delete all the unread posts and start over. In the stock market, there's a term for when the sellers accept the fact that market has bottomed out and stop waiting for an upsurge: capitulation. It's typically associated with with a horrible bear market. That's what the "mark all posts read" button is. Once, I even deleted all my RSS feeds. That's super-capitulation.

There were dozens and dozens of posts made in the 48 hours after the election. Most of them variations on this theme: "Obama won! What does it mean? What will he do now? Maybe this? Or this? Or how about this?"

I'm not trying to make any kind of political statement here -- this being a strictly nonpartisan blog and all -- but this was mostly low-information junk food. The actual news content was very, very low. Political reporting has become like sports reporting, in that reader interest exceeds new content by a significant margin. Hence the massive proliferation of commentary. In my line of work, I'm more of a "just the facts, ma'am" type.

So I junked all my unread RSS posts -- I capitulated -- and started over again. Deep cleansing breath! Ahhhhh ...

The specter of economic meltdown

When the economy goes south, I turn into a business news ADDICT. We may be in heading for the worst downturn since the Great Depression, so you can imagine what I'm like these days. I'm always looking around for the next good stuff.

My favorite sources:

• National Public Radio's Planet Money blog and podcast. Fun, frightening stuff: It's got a casual, shooting-the-sh*t-over-beers vibe to it, cool music and interviews with global economists.
• A triumvirate of big dailies: The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal. These guys rock. I particularly like The New York Times series The Reckoning, and I particularly recommend their story on ostensible wise man Alan Greenspan.
• Slate Magazine's The Big Money. I'm particularly fond of a Depression-era diary they're running, written by a lawyer who lived through it in Youngstown, Ohio. Check it out here and here.
  

When I get scare of what's going to happen in the coming months, I comfort myself with this thought: the life of the mind is pretty cheap. Instead of spending money, I'll stay home and read The Brothers Karamazov.

Baseball and Man's Hubris

The baseball season ended this week, and no, my beloved Rays did not win, but they gave it a great try and I'm very proud of them. Way to go, guys! 

They had the worst record in baseball last year, so this year's efforts are quite an accomplishment. Also, the paper's book section interviewed Rays outfielder Fernando Perez about what he was reading, and he mentioned two poets that I will check out -- Robert Creeley and John Ashbery. 

But I'm very bothered about one aspect of this year's World Series. The weather was awful in Philadelphia, and it delayed one game to a 10 p.m. start, and suspended another game so that part of the game had to be played two days later.

This is an outrageous turn of events, due mostly to an extended schedule that now has the World Series played in Northern climes at the end of October. Baseball is  supposed to end in crisp autumnal air, not in the onset of winter, as is what happened in Philly last week -- rain and cold temps. 

It used to be, the World Series was played at the beginning of October (in the afternoon, no less) and that's really the way it should be. There are lots of reasons the season has been extended, which I won't go into here. But baseball management needs to find some way to shorten the season up. And they also need to start the games earlier in the evening; these 8:37 p.m. ET times are too late. It's not fun to have to stay up until 1 a.m. on a work night. 

But really, I'm most bothered by the idea that human beings can or should be playing the championship game of what is essentially a summer sport at the tail end of October. It's fine in Florida, but in the more established baseball cities with their outdoor stadiums-- New York, Boston, Pittsburgh, St. Louis -- it's insane. It's man foolishly saying he can overcome the turn of the seasons. It's just wrong and it makes me worry.

PS The spouse says he agrees but basically says, get in line. It's an old complaint and nothing seems to come of it.

DFW Memorial, Part IV

I've been reading the many tributes, memorials and critiques of David Foster Wallace since his death, and one of my favorite things so far is a map created by the Boston Globe that shows the city of Boston as portrayed in the novel Infinite Jest. It's just cool. It also would be a great starting point for someone coming to the novel for the first time ... Infinte Jest is like Joyces' Ulysses, in that it has a very interesting plot, but said plot is not easily apprehended at first look. So reading guides and tipsheets help immensely, if you like that sort of thing. (Which I do.)
Anyway, check out the Boston Globe's map. It really made me want to pick up IJ and read it again. Such a wonderful, mapcap, harrowing trip to an alternate universe where we begin our study of depression, loneliness, addiction and humor.

My intellectual Rays

I love baseball, which is very odd to my old high school friends who remember me as being very anti-sports. "I see you as the cool goth girl under the bleachers, smoking cloves, and making fun of the cheerleaders," my friend RF recently messaged me.
Well, yes. But I would submit that that image and being a baseball fan are not as incompatible as it might seem. There's a lot of diversity in baseball among its fans and its players. Which brings us to today's New York Times story on Fernando Perez, who plays in the outfield for my most beloved team the Tampa Bay Rays. (For you non-baseball fans, the Rays have made it to the play-offs this year for the first time after ten straight losing seasons.)

While classmates at his New Jersey prep school back in 2000 listened to the Dandy Warhols and watched “Survivor,” Fernando Perez had his own idols.

“I was big into Hermann Hesse,” he remembered proudly.

This would be less remarkable if Perez, who went on to major in American Studies with an emphasis on creative writing at Columbia University, had followed his dream to write short narrative prose for a living. But that plan has been shelved while he helps craft a fairy tale otherwise known as the Tampa Bay Rays.

Perez, a switch-hitting outfielder with wit as quick as his lightning legs, has emerged as a surprising contributor to the no-longer-surprising Rays. ...

Then it goes into his development through the Rays minor league system before coming back around to his writing.

He is committed to pursuing this career [baseball], but just in case, he keeps his writing skills sharp by working on short prose and some personal essays on his laptop. He does not care about being published, and if he ever is he will do so under a pseudonym.

“So that it’s taken on its own merits, not because I’m a baseball player,” Perez said. Meanwhile, he will gladly collaborate with 24 other Rays on baseball’s story of the year.

DFW Memorial, Part III

Salon has a story about David Foster Wallace's final days, with comments from his father, mother and sister. It confirms with more detail the return of Wallace's debilitating depression. It's sad reading, but it's also comforting to know that he had the support of his family and loved ones at the end. It helps explain.
I prefer this kind of straight-up reporting to some of the other things I've read about Wallace during the past days. Wallace's work over the years has consistently addressed issues like depression and suicide, and some critics now are looking back at his work for themes that might shed light on his death.
I think we have to be very cautious about this kind of reading for biography. We do authors and literature a disservice when we get carried away looking at the work this way. It trivializes the writing, which should be able to stand on its own. Yes, it is helpful to understand an author's historical and cultural milieu. And the author can and will use details of his or her everyday life, which biographers can document. But the author's artistry should transcend those details in ways that make the biographical details much, much less important to the active reader. At least that is what happens if the author is good, and Wallace was beyond good. He was great.

Adventures in second-hand book-buying, Part I (Peter Pauper Press)

My household is in austerity mode thanks to the recent economic downturn. So I've curtailed my book-buying. A few weeks ago, though, I was visiting a friend in Sarasota and we stopped by the very lovely Selby Library, which has a Friends of the Library used book store.
For 50 cents each, I picked up one reference book published in 1969 on modern world history (in retrospect, a dubious selection) and one very interesting copy of the Psalms.
I have several Bibles already, so I didn't need a copy. But what caught my eye was its charming design. Titled "The Psalms of David" and published by Peter Pauper Press, the small hardcover came in its own cardboard slipcase. The slipcase was frayed, but but it did its job of protecting -- the book inside is in excellent condition. (Book on left; slipcase on right.)




It has charming woodcut art by Valenti Angelo, and the paper is rich and textured. There's no information to identify the year of publication, but I poked around on WorldCat and figured out it could be 1936 or 1943.



I'm also fascinated by the fact that the Psalms are laid out in paragraph form, i.e. big blocks of text.



In the Bibles I have, the Psalms are laid out with many breaks between sentences, so that it resembles poetry. This mimics the traditional thought on the origins of the Psalms, which are said to be music lyrics authored by King David (of David and Goliath fame). David would sing the Psalms while accompanying himself on his lyre, which is a harp-like musical instrument. I love the image of the handsome young warrior king, moodily strumming his lyre under a shade tree, but taking a break every now and then to open up a can of whup-ass on someone.

I also looked up the Peter Pauper Press, and as I expected it was a budget imprint of yesteryear, specializing in inexpensive editions of the classics. I almost fell off my chair, though, to read that its first edition was ... Petrarch sonnets translated by J.M. Synge. Synge is a major, major figure in Irish literature, the author of the once scandalous play "The Playboy of the Western World." Why do so many things come back to Ireland? More evidence of Ireland's important place in my own narrative history.
I'll have even more thoughts on this copy of the Psalms in my next post.

DFW Memorial, Part II

The act of reading is so intimate and dear to me, that I have a constant fantasy that certain authors are my friends. Good friends, too. Intellectually, I know this is a fantasy, but on an emotional level, there is a certain kind of reality there. I think anyone who loves reading knows what I'm talking about.
I was so sad this week thinking about the death of David Foster Wallace. He was my favorite living author.
But he was not the kind of author I would whole-heartedly recommend to friends, because he was just so darn difficult. He wrote about off-putting, pathetic characters in his short stories. His two novels, by any standards, are long and verbose. His nonfiction essays appeared in popular magazines, though, and the collections A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again and Consider the Lobster are brainy and accessible.
To talk about his fiction: it has to be Infinite Jest. That was his masterwork. It's on the same scale as Ulysses -- huge and complicated and daunting. But on another level, if you were willing to surrender to it and just go with it, it was remarkably funny and freewheeling, but serious and sad and touching, too. It was an inside look at the following: addicts who go to AA meetings, tennis-prodigy teens at a sports boarding school, what it's like to be a punter in the NFL, and wheel-chair bound assassins plotting next moves.
I can still remember vividly where I was when I was reading certain parts of it -- the New Mexico State Fair on a perfectly crisp and sunny late afternoon.
Wallace is often referred to as postmodernist, and I can see because Infinite Jest doesn't really wrap up its plot in any discernible way -- it just kind of stops -- and it has tons of creepy pop culture references. Also, Wallace would make these funny discursive asides about what he was trying to do as an author and whether or not he was succeeding or failing.
But he was also terribly traditional, and obsessed with moral behavior. Not ina binary good vs. evil kind of way, but a How-should-we-treat-each-other-in-the-world kind of way. His Kenyon College speech is a classic here. (If you haven't read it and have a few minutes, please do so.)
Many, many tributes this week. Here are my favorites:

• McSweeney's
  The literary Web site run by author Dave Eggers has posted a number of lovely, heartfelt reminiscences of people who met Dave Wallace, as he liked to be called. It really hit home with me what a good man this was -- a kind, caring person.
• A.O. Scott
  I liked this remembrance by A.O. Scott, especially its title: "The Best Mind of His Generation." How I agree with that compliment. Scott compares Wallace to Ezra Pound (my friend Ezra) but I think there are many more parallels between Wallace and James Joyce. Not just that they wrote big, doorstop novels with anti-plots, but also that they were concerned with the theme of exile of the mind, and fashioning your own belief system in a society in which the belief systems has become dessicated and hollow (Catholic Ireland under English rule and the corporate, consumerist United States, respectively).
  That latter point is really brought to the fore by ...
• Steve Almond in the Boston Globe
  Headline is "A Moralist of Hope." This gets at what a moral writer Wallace was, something I never felt like he got his just due for. Almond writes
  

  This is the crucial question of our historical moment: whether our citizens can
  rise above their doubts and anxieties and express a genuine idealism. And it's
  the very reason we should mourn Wallace's death. He was one of the few popular
  writers who threw himself into the maw of American life and challenged the
  reflexive cynicism he found there. He was a moralist of astonishing clarity and
  hope.

  
  Then he writes about Wallace's appreciation of Dostoevsky. I really need to read Dostoevksy soon. Too many signs and portents are telling me to read him.

David Foster Wallace archive at Harper's

Harper's magazine has posted all the stories David Foster Wallace wrote for them. Go there now and read one of my favorite stories of his, "Everything is Green." It's short, not even a whole page.
It begins:

She says I do not care if you believe me or not, it is the truth, go on and believe what you want to. So it is for sure that she is lying, when it is the truth she will go crazy trying to make you believe her. So I feel like I know.

Read the whole thing here.

NYT Obituary on David Foster Wallace

The New York Times has published a moving obituary:

A versatile writer of seemingly bottomless energy, Mr. Wallace was a maximalist, exhibiting in his work a huge, even manic curiosity — about the physical world, about the much larger universe of human feelings and about the complexity of living in America at the end of the 20th century. He wrote long books, complete with reflective and often hilariously self-conscious footnotes, and he wrote long sentences, with the playfulness of a master punctuater and the inventiveness of a genius grammarian. Critics often noted that he was not only an experimenter and a showoff, but also a God-fearing moralist with a fierce honesty in confronting the existence of contradiction.

Well worth reading here.
His parents confirmed that he was suffering from terrible depression, that he had been hospitalized over the summer and had tried numerous therapies, to no avail.

I hope and pray he's gone to a better place.

DFW Memorial, Part I

One of my favorite bits from David Foster Wallace was this little joke, which is featured prominently in his novel "Infinite Jest":

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?"

Wallace used this joke to begin a commencement speech he delivered at Kenyon College in 2005. He further explained:

The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.

This really very quickly gets at what I love about Wallace.
And a bit later:

As I'm sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.

This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth.

Read the whole speech here.

David Foster Wallace, RIP

I learned today that David Foster Wallace has died.

This is sad, shocking news. 

Regular readers will recall he is a particular favorite of mine. His novel Infinite Jest affected me deeply, and I would venture to say even changed my life in the way that only great works of literature can.

The news reports are frustratingly brief -- that he committed suicide by hanging at his home, that his wife found him, that he was 46. There is no mention of depression or illness or other explanation. I doubt we'll learn more -- the human response from his readers is a mournful, incredulous Why? -- but Wallace was an extremely private person.

I'll be gathering my thoughts on his passing and posting more soon. 

This is a very sad day for American fiction, and my sincere condolences to his family and friends. 

Biblical epigraphs

Epigraphs -- the short quotations that begin a longer work of fiction or nonfiction -- are rare in newspaper reporting. But this week's column by Floyd Norris in The New York Times about the takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac uses one perfectly.

No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other.

— Matthew 6:24

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were intended to serve at least two masters — the investors who put up capital and a government that wanted to help the housing industry and extend home ownership. In the end, they failed to serve either one very well.

Read the rest of the column here. 
It got me to thinking about epigraphs -- those short sentences that begin a novel. Usually they get their own page, setting the tone for the 200+ pages yet to come.

Now doesn't that seem like a great Jeopardy! category?

"I'll take Biblical epigraphs for $200, Alex."

Answer: " ... The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to the place where he arose ... "

Question: "What is The Sun Also Rises"

Alex: "That's correct, the novel by Ernest Hemingway."

"Biblical epigraphs for $400."

Answer: "For we are strangers before them, and sojournors, as were all our fathers."
Question: "What is Dreams from my Father."

Alex: "Yes, the memoir by Barack Obama."

But then I ran out of ideas for my Jeopardy! category ... . 

Begin tangeant: In the interests of nonpartisanship, I will note that John McCain begins his memoir "Faith of My Fathers" with a moving quote from the eponymous hymn by Frederick William Faber:

Faith of our fathers, living still,

In spite of dungeon, fire and sword;

O how our hearts beat high with joy

Whenever we hear that glorious word!

Faith of our fathers, holy faith!

We will be true to thee til death.

It's works well as an epigraph, but it is not strictly Biblical. I will soon do a separate post on hymns, because I have a lot more to say on that subject. End tangeant.

But then I couldn't think of any more answers for my Jeopardy! category ... 

But I was thinking maybe some of the more knowledgeable Spoonreader readers -- Mmm, I'm glancing your way, Drs. K and L -- might be able to help me come up with four more appropriate Biblical epigraphs! Hope so, anyway.

I have two more pieces of advice for authors about epigraphs.

1. Pick one epigraph, not two. One epigraph has punch and power. Two epigraphs make you look indecisive.
2. I would advise against using an epigraph in a foreign language. Most Americans only know one language. And if you use an epigraph in Latin or French, you'll seem pretentious and no one will no what you're talking about -- I'm sorry to say it, but that's just the way it is.

Confederacy of Dunces and my juvenile sense of humor

Walt Disney World, which is not far from where I live, puts on an annual Christian rock festival it calls Night of Joy.
In the great New Orleans novel Confederacy of Dunces, the Night of Joy is a French Quarter strip club where dim-witted Darlene works on her "exotic" dance routine involving a cockatoo; a tipsy Irene Reilly sells her hat to vintage clothing dealer Dorian Greene; Lana Lee masterminds her illegal porno ring; and janitor Burma Jones plots the sabotage that will bring this wacky house of cards tumbling down.
(Snicker snicker snicker.)

Gustav has passed; thoughts on Kate Chopin and The Storm

Hurricane Gustav has passed, and my friends and family in Louisiana are doing well. I breathe a sigh of relief and gratitude.
Hurricanes remind me of a short story by Louisiana author Kate Chopin, who wrote the 1899 novel The Awakening. "The Awakening," like a number of 19th century novels, has the general plot of "married woman wakes from her stuporous life, finds herself, has an affair, meets tragic end." (The great novels Anna Karenina by Tolstoy and Madame Bovary by Flaubert come to mind easily. House of Mirth by Edith Wharton is a variation on the theme.)
Anyway, the Chopin short story is called "The Storm." (Read the story online. It's fairly short.) In "The Storm," Calixta is waiting at home alone for a hurricane to pass; her husband and son have gone to town. An old flame of hers -- the wonderfully named Alcee Laballiere -- is passing by and stops by her house to wait out the storm. One thing leads to another. We come to lines like ... "when he possessed her, they seemed to swoon together at the very borderland of life's mystery." (I think that's a well-written line and take it seriously, but it makes me smile, too.)
The storm ends, Alcee goes on his way, Calixta's husband and son return. Amazingly, tragedy does NOT ensue. Instead, Calixta is very sweet to her husband and makes him a nice dinner. Alcee writes his wife a thoughtful letter and tells her to extend her vacation in Biloxi; the wife is relieved and glad to get more time away to relax.
Chopin concludes, "So the storm passed, and every one was happy."
Definitely a different take on the usual "tragic end" plotline! My book tells me this story was written in 1898 but not published until 1969. Not hard to see why.

New template and thoughts on my mission

I got bored, so I changed the template for the blog. That's why the colors and layout look different.
I've also been thinking about who are the core audiences for this blog and how I can better serve them.
Here's my list:

1. Me. Yup, it's true. I am the most dedicated reader of this blog. The number one reason I keep blogging is because it's fun. It helps me organize my thoughts about books I'm reading or themes I'm pondering. I don't post as much as I would like -- there are many things I' obsessed with that never make it to this space. But I do well enough to please myself and keep this thing going. It's hard to believe this blog is going on almost four years now.
2. My friends from high school. Yes, Louisiana School for Math, Science and the Arts Class of 1990 and friends, I believe you are the next most dedicated readers of this blog. I try to read all of your blogs too, and one day I may do a blog roll. It's fun that we get to share our thoughts with each other. It's like a lovely echo of that intense intellectual community we shared back in the day. Priceless. You mean the world to me.
   
3. Various and sundry Web surfers. I get a little report on how people get to this blog, and a lot of it is random Googling. If you Google "Bill Wilson LSD", my blog post on the topic is the sixth hit. That one is probably among the most popular posts on this blog. I also get a good number of hits from students who want to write papers on Spoon River Anthology. I think my post on why this blog has its name is my most-commented post.
4. Work colleagues. Every now and then, someone I work with will say something like, "Hey, I saw your blog post about blah-dee-blah." That's nice.

So I'm thinking about these audiences as I contemplate a new project for this blog, kinda like my friend Doug's ABCs of Music. More to come on that.

I'm nonplussed, too!

Meghan Daum has a wonderful column in the Los Angeles Times, headlined "I'm nonplussed, maybe":

I need to say something. And even though I'm going to refrain from typing in all caps, I urge you to pretend I did.

The word "nonplussed" does not mean unfazed, unperturbed or unconcerned. I know just about everyone uses it that way, but I really wish they'd stop.

"Nonplussed" comes from the Latin non plus, meaning "no more," which landed almost intact in English as "nonplus," meaning "a state in which no more can be said or done."

The standard definition of "nonplussed" is "bewildered, confused or perplexed." Got that?

Read the complete column here.
I couldn't agree more, and -- I will use all caps here -- I see "nonplussed" misused ALL THE TIME. I've almost (almost) given up on being upset about it. Daum interviews a linguist about how words change meaning sometimes -- they seem to "evolve" in some cases -- which is very interesting.
Daum also wrote a brainy chick-lit novel called The Quality of Life Report, about a Manhattanite who relocates to Nebraska looking for greater meaning in life and cheap rents. She also wrote a memorable essay for The New Yorker about going broke in New York (abstract here), hence her real-life move to Nebraska.)And finally here's an interesting article about how she got from Nebraska to Los Angeles.

Swimming shows of yesteryear

And now for a rare break from the world of reading. My spouse and I were watching the Olympics and marveling over half-man half-fish Michael Phelps. It got us to thinking about extraordinary swimming abilities, and, strangely, the TV shows of our youth.
I was reminded of the great and all-too-brief '70s show, "The Man from Atlantis," starring Patrick Duffy.
To wit:

My spouse, though, is a bit older than me, a gap that looms large in matters of pop culture. His childhood memories are engraved by "Sea Hunt," starring Lloyd Bridges.


Enjoy!

Even more on books and the presidential race

Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin wrote this month about whether it's possible for a presidential candidate to bring a "Team of Rivals" into the White House. (I'm sporadically reading her book of the same name right now. It's long.). She says what Abraham Lincoln did -- making his political opponents part of his presidential cabinet -- would be much more difficult today in the era of professional, partisan campaigns and the 24-hour news cycle.
But lest you think days gone by were more civil, check this out from Goodwin's essay:

In selecting (Edwin) Stanton as his secretary of war, Lincoln revealed a critical ability to put aside past grudges. He and Stanton had first met when they worked together on a trial in Cincinnati in the 1850s. At first sight of the ungainly Lincoln, with his disheveled hair and ill-fitting clothes, Stanton dubbed him a "long-armed ape" and remarked that "he does not know anything and can do you no good." For the rest of the trial, Stanton ignored Lincoln and refused even to open the brief his colleague Lincoln had painstakingly prepared. Lincoln was humiliated.

Read her essay here.

As a side note, Barack Obama said "Team of Rivals" is the one book aside from the Bible that he would bring to the White House with him. Not that I want to give that too much importance. Katie Couric asked all the presidential candidates that question back during the primaries, and the candidates were pretty clearly making fast responses to an unexpected question, not really mulling over an answer for all time. John McCain, for instance, said he'd bring Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations." But the Washington Post recently revealed that John McCain's favorite book is For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway. (Go papa!)

In the novel, (Robert) Jordan, an American volunteer on the anti-fascist side of the Spanish Civil War, finds love, then chooses death in service to a hopeless cause he believes in. In last week's interview, conducted in the leather-covered first-class seats of his campaign plane, McCain was asked if he, like Jordan, is a "romantic fatalist." McCain answered quickly and forcefully: "Yes, yes." (McCain aide Mark ) Salter described his boss's fatalistic philosophy: "Life sucks, but it's worth doing something about anyway."

Read the WaPost profile of McCain here.

The Weeding Process Update

So I totally geeked out this weekend, pulled all the books off the shelves, weeded them and re-ordered them.
All the fiction is now arranged alphabetically by author.
The nonfiction is categorized by subject. The largest subjects, in no particular order are: Ireland, Journalism, Religion/Spirituality, Self-Help, Ecology/Coastal Issues, Baseball, General Nonfiction. I also created sections for Children's Books and Graphic Novels.
By grouping them into subjects, I was able to make substantial process on weeding. For instance, in the category of Ireland, my spouse and I had about a dozen books on the history of Ireland, and another dozen books on general Irish topics (roughly 24 books). By looking at the group as a whole, we were able to determine easily which books were really useful and substantial, and which books were of lesser importance or outdated. So we probably weeded about half a dozen books to bring us to a svelte and efficient 18 books. And we felt no remorse about the discards. What a relief!
I also created a section of Books I Haven't Read Yet. This way, when I'm looking for something to read, I can easily browse for a new title. I think of it as Spoonreader's Free Bookstore Inside My Home. Sweet.

De-cluttering books

I loved this series from the Washington Post about how this poor woman set about de-cluttering her attic, which from the photos looks like it was a complete wreck. So over the course of 11 weeks, I got to read a different aspect of how to de-clutter.
Week 4 was -- you guessed it -- de-cluttering books. I eagerly read the installment, because my shelves are overstuffed and unsightly. Alas, the author wrote:

On the issue of books I got surprisingly little help from Caitlin Shear, the professional organizer who has signed on to be my coach and hand holder during this process. Each week she has led me through the sorting, scrapping and separation anxiety of dealing with clutter. But when it comes to books, fiction and nonfiction, she is unabashedly a keeper.

"I am a big books person," she admits. "I tend to get rid of everything else before I will let go of a book." She has even allowed her husband, Mike, to keep his collection of science-fiction paperbacks from the early 1980s. "I am," she says, "a total bibliophile."

So this was not very helpful.

I will soon be turning to lessons learned from my recent library science class on Collection Development, on what librarians call "weeding." Weeding is when a librarian from time to time discards books that have been little used or are worn out. Yes, they discard them, and that means they throw them away, though sometimes the books go to reading programs etc. This is done because no one library can hold every book, and shelf space is at a premium.
I'm going to try really hard this weekend to weed my books and maybe even sort them.
What are the criteria for weeding, you ask? Well, poor physical condition is probably the number one reason, followed by outdated information and/or lack of patron interest. Wish me luck because I weed my books regularly and it is very difficult to find things to discard.

Yeats exhibit in Dublin

I was reading an excellent article today about a major exhibit about the Irish poet William Butler Yeats going on in Dublin. It sounds fascinating, with lots of multimedia components of interest to aspiring high-tech librarians like me. To quote a bit from the story, which talks about a letter to Yeats from his passionate friend Maud Gonne:

Yeats taped the letter into the notebook. Now, a century later, that book is on display at the National Library of Ireland, opened to a page that is just barely visible under the indirect lighting prescribed for aged ink treasures. Yet every syllable — every comma-deprived sentence, every curve in her script, every ampersand — is legible. Next to the display case the entire notebook has been digitally reincarnated. With the stroke of a finger on a touch screen, a visitor can flip through pages written 100 years ago and summon an image of this letter, or any other entry. If needed, Gonne’s handwriting can be deciphered on a pop-up screen that types out her fevered scrawl.

Read the whole story here. This is very exciting stuff to me.
The heartbreak is that I could have seen the exhibit when I was in Dublin last year, but didn't. It's one of several things that we just didn't jam into our few days in the city. Knowing what I know now, I would have made room for it by bumping something else. On the other hand, the visit to Dublin was a sumptious feast, especially from a literary point of view. So it's like enjoying a fabulous full-course meal and then complaining afterwards because you didn't get a cheese plate too. (And boy do I like cheese plates.) Instead I'll just be thankful for the feast!

Flannery O'Connor, Parker's Back and Comforts of Home

A few weeks ago I was feeling like I had been reading "junk food" lately and wanted to engage with something more substantial. So I read for the first time Flannery O'Connor's short story, "Parker's Back."
How great this story is! It's funny and real and transcendent, all at the same time. What I like about O'Connor is the way her stories are very much in the school of realism, while also being highly symbolic.
It's about a man named Parker who is married, not so happily, to Sarah Ruth. He's also addicted to getting tattoos, which she doesn't like. Rather than divulge anymore, I will instead urge you to run, don't walk, to your nearest library and get a copy of "Parker's Back." You'll find it in the short story collection "Everything that Rises Must Converge" or "The Complete Short Stories." I also want to point you to a wonderful web site I discovered while googling "Parker's Back."
The site is Comforts of Home: The Flannery O'Connor Repository -- created by a librarian, naturally! It is a collection of information and links to authorative information about Flannery O'Connor. I particularly like that it includes a bibliography, aka "Offline resources," for those critical essays that you can't get on the Web. (Shocking but true -- not everything is on the Web.) This site really is a superb model for Web sites that celebrate great literature.

Lincoln and Spoon River Anthology

I picked up Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln to read during a short vacation. I did not finish it yet, but it's an excellent book; I'm quite engaged with it.
I was excited to see that it quotes an Spoon River Anthology poem early on. (The index tells me this is the only SRA poem quoted.) It quotes arguably the most famous of the SRA poems:

Anne Rutledge

OUT of me unworthy and unknown
The vibrations of deathless music;
“With malice toward none, with charity for all.”
Out of me the forgiveness of millions toward millions,
And the beneficent face of a nation
Shining with justice and truth.
I am Anne Rutledge who sleep beneath these weeds,
Beloved in life of Abraham Lincoln,
Wedded to him, not through union,
But through separation.
Bloom forever, O Republic,
From the dust of my bosom!

Anne Rutledge was the young love of Abraham Lincoln. She died early, and he never got over it, or so the story goes. There's not a whole lot of evidence to support this, but it's certainly part of the Lincoln legend that she died young, and that the loss affected Lincoln forever.
Abraham Lincoln haunts Spoon River. The poems in Spoon River are set roughly during the turn of the century, so the Civil War would have been in the living memory of some of the older people of Spoon River. I think a good idea for a student paper would be to trace the influence of Lincoln and the Civil War in Spoon River Anthology.
My favorite Lincoln poem from SRA, though, is this one:

Hannah Armstrong

I WROTE him a letter asking him for old times’ sake
To discharge my sick boy from the army;
But maybe he couldn’t read it.
Then I went to town and had James Garber,
Who wrote beautifully, write him a letter;
But maybe that was lost in the mails.
So I traveled all the way to Washington.
I was more than an hour finding the White House.
And when I found it they turned me away,
Hiding their smiles. Then I thought:
“Oh, well, he ain’t the same as when I boarded him
And he and my husband worked together
And all of us called him Abe, there in Menard.”
As a last attempt I turned to a guard and said:
“Please say it’s old Aunt Hannah Armstrong
From Illinois, come to see him about her sick boy
In the army.”
Well, just in a moment they let me in!
And when he saw me he broke in a laugh,
And dropped his business as president,
And wrote in his own hand Doug’s discharge,
Talking the while of the early days,
And telling stories.

You have to be cautious about examing war in Spoon River Anthology, though, because some of the poems refer to the Spanish-American War, not the Civil War. One of the most moving poems, "Harry Wilmans," refers to the Spanish-American War, which Masters very much opposed.

Harry Wilmans

I WAS just turned twenty-one,
And Henry Phipps, the Sunday-school superintendent,
Made a speech in Bindle’s Opera House.
“The honor of the flag must be upheld,” he said,
“Whether it be assailed by a barbarous tribe of Tagalogs
Or the greatest power in Europe.”
And we cheered and cheered the speech and the flag he waved
As he spoke.
And I went to the war in spite of my father,
And followed the flag till I saw it raised
By our camp in a rice field near Manila,
And all of us cheered and cheered it.
But there were flies and poisonous things;
And there was the deadly water,
And the cruel heat,
And the sickening, putrid food;
And the smell of the trench just back of the tents
Where the soldiers went to empty themselves;
And there were the whores who followed us, full of syphilis;
And beastly acts between ourselves or alone,
With bullying, hatred, degradation among us,
And days of loathing and nights of fear
To the hour of the charge through the steaming swamp,
Following the flag,
Till I fell with a scream, shot through the guts.
Now there’s a flag over me in Spoon River!
A flag! A flag!

Favicon

Literary Comfort Food

Last weekend I wasn't feeling so great -- a summer cold was coming on -- so I curled up with some ice cream and its literary equivalent. "Mr. Darcy's Diary" by Amanda Grange. This is what I would call fan-fiction related to Jane Austen. In this case, Grange imagines the male side of the great novel Pride and Prejudice and writes from the hero's perspective, as opposed to the heroine's.
There's a lot of this kind of Jane-related fiction if you care to read it: sequels and prequels and alternate takes, all generally summed up under the category of "para-literature." I generally steer clear of this stuff because reading these impersonations of Jane Austen's inimitable style can be quite painful.
On the other hand, I really liked "Mr. Darcy's Diary." It's title explains it; the jottings of Mr. Darcy as he meets and courts P&P's Elizabeth Bennet. This was a very smart approach on the part of Ms. Grange because there's no need for her to imitate Austen's style -- Mr. Darcy's musings are appropriately masculine, plain-spoken and to the point.
Did I learn anything new from hearing Darcy's side of the story? Not really. But oh how I enjoyed it. And I soon got to feeling better.

Read an excerpt from Grange's Web site. In this scene, we find out what happens after Elizabeth's sister Lydia runs off with the scoundrel George Wickham. In P&P, Darcy sets it aright, but we never really learn details of what happens. Here's Grange's take on the meeting between Darcy and Wickham:

I met Wickham at my club and the negotiations began.
'You must marry her,' I said to him shortly.
'If I do that, I give up forever the chance of making my fortune through marriage.'
'You have ruined her,' I said. 'Does that mean nothing to you?'

Continue reading ...

1001 Books

I love lists, and really, who doesn't? So first thing, I went through the new list of "1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die," and checked off all the ones I've read. My haul was pretty pitiful. I've read 80 of the books on the list. William Grimes of The New York Times has read 300! Don't I feel inadequate.

I was also startled because if I were to divide the books I've read into categories, the number one category would probably be books I read in high school, followed by books I read with my book group. It really depresses me that I didn't read more in college. Sure, I read some, but not nearly as much as I could have. I wasted so much time in college hanging out, partying, etc. Very dumb on my part. I also read -- by my own choice -- a lot of literary theory in college that has not held up well over the years. That's a whole other post, but I think theory was useful as an analytical tool in some contexts. Now, though, I would prefer that I had had a broader exposure to the history of literature.

I hope to create a new master list of books I would like to read, and then methodically read them, to make up for lost time. But is this realistic? I work a 40-hour job and have friends and family members to attend to. I also have library school and my beloved violin lessons.

College-goers, may this sad tale be a warning to you!

Here are the 10 favorite books of the most recently published 80 books I have read:

• Kafka on the Shore – Haruki Murakami
• Life of Pi – Yann Martel
• Infinite Jest – David Foster Wallace
• Written on the Body – Jeanette Winterson
• The Temple of My Familiar – Alice Walker
• Watchmen – Alan Moore & David Gibbons
• The Color Purple – Alice Walker
• Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
• Interview With the Vampire – Anne Rice
• In Cold Blood – Truman Capote

The New Yorker on Ezra Pound

The New Yorker has a fascinating review of a new book about Ezra Pound. Ezra Pound! Has anyone touched more great literature? Friend and adviser of Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats, and James Joyce. Also the lesser lights: William Carlos Williams, H.D., Robert Lowell.
The New Yorker essay really captures the weird dynamic about Pound: While he redefined literature with his slogan "Make it new," he was also, quite literally, a treasonous, Fascist anti-Semite. What a juxtaposition. In Pound's defense, there is some evidence that he was mentally ill.
For a humorous take on Pound's political leanings, read McSweeney's The Ten Worst Films of 1942; As reviewed by Ezra Pound over Italian radio. "CAT PEOPLE: A race may civilize itself BY LANGUAGE, not film. Cat People is filth."
I'm told that Pound was the one who came up with the title of Eliot's "The Waste Land." Eliot himself wanted to call it ... (oh dear) ... "He Do the Police in Different Voices." Good lord, what a dreadful title. If that's all Pound did, he did literature a favor.
And then there's Ernest Hemingway's memoir of his Paris years, "A Moveable Feast." A really marvelous book. Hemingway writes:

Ezra was the most generous writer I have ever known and the most disinterested. He helped poets, painters, sculptors and prose writers that he believed in and he would help anyone whether he believed in them or not if they were in trouble. He worried about everyone and in the time when I first knew him he was most worried about T.S. Eliot who, Ezra told me, had to work in a bank in London and so had insufficient time and bad hours to function as a poet.

Love Papa Hemingway! That writing just jumps off the page for me with it's elegance. I especially love "insufficient time and bad hours."
If only Edgar Lee Masters had had a Pound to help him with Spoon River Anthology. He would have trimmed off the ponderous pseudo-epic-poem finale "The Spooniad." (Not kidding! That's how SRA ends.)

If I seem tense ...

An article in American Journalism Review gets at some of the difficulties facing my beloved newspaper industry right now. It discusses projections made by consultant Mark Potts that show online advertising is not increasing fast enough -- not nearly fast enough -- to make up for the declines in print advertising.

(T)he scariest problem — which Potts himself points out — is that many papers won't share in the online growth. There will be winners and losers. And even as the industry as a whole survives, we may begin seeing, pretty soon, big American
cities with no daily newspaper.
"It's going to be really bloody, incredibly devastating," Potts predicts. "And I think there are going to be a lot of major metros that don't make it."

Books and the presidential candidates

Jeffrey Goldberg interviewed John McCain about the Middle East, and one of his questions was about favorite Jewish writers. (Goldberg interviewed Obama previously, who mentioned how much he liked Philip Roth.)

JG: A final question: Senator Obama talked about how his life was influenced by Jewish writers, Philip Roth, Leon Uris. How about you?

JM: There’s Elie Wiesel, and Victor Frankl. I think about Frankl all the time. “Man’s Search for Meaning” is one of the most profound things I’ve ever read in my life. And maybe on a little lighter note, “War and Remembrance” and “Winds of War” are my two absolute favorite books. I can tell you that one of my life’s ambitions is to meet Herman Wouk. “War and Remembrance” for me, it’s the whole thing. ...

JG: Not a big Philip Roth fan?

JM: No, I’m not. Leon Uris I enjoyed. Victor Frankl, that’s important. I read it before my captivity. It made me feel a lot less sorry for myself, my friend. A fundamental difference between my experience and the Holocaust was that the Vietnamese didn’t want us to die. They viewed us as a very valuable asset at the bargaining table. It was the opposite in the Holocaust, because they wanted to exterminate you. Sometimes when I felt sorry for myself, which was very frequently, I thought, “This is nothing compared to what Victor Frankl experienced.”

The mention of Victor Frankl brought back a ton of memories for me, and McCain is absolutely right that it's an incredibly moving and thought-provoking book. Frankl was a psychiatrist who was imprisoned in Auschwitz, and Man's Search for Meaning was the book he wrote afterward based on his observations there. I still remember his articulation of "the last of the human freedoms - to choose one's own attitude in any given set of cirumstances, to choose one's own way."
I also vividly remember where and when I read this book -- when I was 13 years old and a Catholic school girl. Certainly this is a testament to Frankl's skills as a communicator (and definitely NOT to any extraordinary perception on my part) that his book resonates with people of different ages, social standings and circumstances.
Here's the summary of "Man's Search for Meaning" from Google Books:

Man's Search for Meaning tells the chilling and inspirational story of eminent psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, who was imprisoned at Auschwitz and other concentration camps for three years during the Second World War. Immersed in great suffering and loss, Frankl began to wonder why some of his fellow prisoners were able not only to survive the horrifying conditions, but to grow in the process. Frankl's conclusion - that the most basic human motivation is the will to meaning - became the basis of his groundbreaking psychological theory, logotherapy. As Nietzsche put it, "He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how". In Man's Search for Meaning, Frankl outlines the principles of logotherapy, and offers ways to help each one of us focus on finding the purpose in our lives.

Spoon River Anthology and spoonriveranthology.net

The most commented post on this blog is "Why Spoonreader?", one of my first posts that I wrote way back on Sept. 14, 2004 when I was just getting started. Recently, a student posted a question there about marriage and Spoon River Anthology. Here's our exchange:

Anonymous said...
I have to write a paper for my english class including 15 epitaphs and 20 outside sources on a spoon river theme. some possible themes are corruption, death as the great equalizer and so on. I had thought about doing something with fakenesss of marriage or along those lines, any thoughts or help?
May 13, 2008 10:40 AM

Angie said...
20 outside sources?! That sounds like a lot. I hope this is a college class.
I think marriage would be a great topic. Though I would call my paper something like "Master's Kaleidoscope of Marriage," that way you can talk about some of the poems that say good things about marriage, too. Here are some of the poems you should look at: Amanda Barker, Mrs. Pantier, Benjamin Pantier, Julia Miller, Mrs. Williams, Margaret Fuller Slack, Willard Fluke, Amos Sibley, Mrs. Sibley, Tom Merritt, Mrs. Merritt, Roscoe Purkapile, Mrs. Purkapile, Elsa Wertman. For a more positive outlook on marriage, try Lois Spears, Lucinda Matlock and William & Emily. That's just off the top of my head, there are other poems, too, I'm sure.
As for your critical sources, I can really only recommend one: the introduction to Spoon River Anthology: Annotated Edition, edited by John E. Hallwas. Please email me a copy of your paper when your done, I'd love to read it.
May 13, 2008 11:00 AM

Anonymous said...
haha yes it is a college class, the paper will surely be huge. And thats good that you cited John Hallwas because I did add him in my list of sources. I think im going to relate the theme to corruption of marriage and human nature as a sort of subtopic, thanks for the epitaph listing! It helps a lot.
May 14, 2008 2:16 PM

To dig up all those names, I used a very cool web site, www.spoonriveranthology.net The poems here are hyperlinked so you can easily see which poems talk about each other. There's also some neat analysis of words used in the different poems. You can also comment on the poems, and the comments include the gamut of responses you would expect. Because "Spoon River Anthology" is a town of people talking about each other, it's similar to a network, and the hyperlinks really draw out that aspect of it. I like the site a lot.

Poems I love, Part 2

Lately I've found it hard to concentrate on any one book. There are a bunch of half-started books littering my home, almost all of them nonfiction. Certainly this is a byproduct of stress. The newspaper industry in which my spouse and I make our livings is in severe recession and transformation. The future is unpredictable. Also I find aspects of this modern life worrisome, everyone so busy and filled with the need to acquire.
When I feel anxious about what's happening, this Wordsworth poem comes to mind:

THE WORLD IS TOO MUCH WITH US

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

I love everything about this sonnet, except perhaps the last two lines. I don't think neo-paganism will solve my problems, or Wordsworth's. And old Triton blowing his wreathed horn is a hokey image. If I were a wealthy philanthropist, I would sponsor a contest to re-write the last two lines.

Poems I love, Part 1

One of my favorite poems is "Anecdote of the Jar," by Wallace Stevens. This came up lately because my mother got two cats, and she was trying to decide what to name them. Now of course I set about trying to think of literary names. (I once knew a cat named Percy, named after Louisiana author Walker Percy, and I thought that was so cool.) These cats are Siberian cats, so I thought, why not name them after the greats of Russian literature? So I suggested Fyodor (Dostoevsky) and Leopold (Tolstoy). Well, this suggestion did not go very far for a variety of reasons, including that one of the cats is female.
Another pertinent fact about the cats is that the breeder lives in Tennessee. So I suggested Wallace and Anna. Wallace after Wallace Stevens and Anna after Tolstoy's famous heroine Anna Karenina.
Why Wallace?, mother asked. Because of "Anecdote of the Jar," I replied.

Anecdote of the Jar

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion every where.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

What does that poem mean?, mother asked. Well, it's hard to say what a poem really means, but I think it's about architecture, roughly speaking. We build things, and those things change the way we see the natural world. And the natural world changes the way we see the built environment. In other words, the natural world and the built world influence and change each other, so we should take care of what we build.
On another level, I just love the delicious language of this poem: "Like nothing else in Tennnessee". "The jar was round upon the ground". "It took dominion everywhere".
Well, mother didn't like that suggestion either. In retrospect, I should have made one last Tennessee-related suggestion: She really should have named them Stanley and Stella, from "A Streetcar Named Desire," the play by Tennessee Williams.
But she ended up naming them Angel and Mimi, after her two children. Yep, so now I have my very own familiar ("a spirit often embodied in an animal and held to attend and serve or guard a person").
The photo above is me with Mimi.

Crunch Time!

Sorry for the light blogging, I'm in the final week of my most recent library science class, Digital Libraries, and I have a paper to finish by Thursday. (Yikes!)
For those of you keeping track at home, this is the seventh class I've finished. I have six more classes to finish the degree, so I'll be getting my MLS around 2010.
Getting the degree at this slow pace -- once class per semester --has been mostly about the satisfaction of learning for me. (I had written " for the sheer joy of learning," but that's a little too exuberant for my exhausted outlook at the moment.) Nevertheless, I look forward to each class being done in anticipation of graduation.
As for what I'm reading right now: I'm re-reading the last Harry Potter book. Our book group pick is "Mudbound," which won a big prize for literature in support of social change. I'll start that this weekend. And I'm still addicted to the RealClearPolitics site for election coverage.

Writing and Grief

I'm mostly posting this here for Howellsreader, I thought she would like it. It ran in on the front page of our paper today, and it's about a father who writes science fiction and who lost his son in the Virginia Tech shooting. It was written by my colleague Michael Kruse. It begins:

LAGRANGE, Ga. — Michael Bishop, whose son was a German instructor at Virginia Tech, sat one morning last month in a classroom at LaGrange College, ready to read one of his stories to his students in Creative Writing 3308.

"This was Jamie's idea," he told them.

Jamie Bishop left behind on his computer 10 notes. Michael Bishop, an award-winning science fiction writer, saw them and saw stories. At first he wanted to honor his son by finishing what the son could not. It was a way to keep a connection, and to cope. Keep reading here ...

What your lover reads

Some women break up with their boyfriends because said boyfriends have crappy taste in books. Thus reported the NYT Book Review recently in an essay with the snarky title, "It's Not You, It's Your Books":

Some years ago, I was awakened early one morning by a phone call from a friend. She had just broken up with a boyfriend she still loved and was desperate to justify her decision. “Can you believe it!” she shouted into the phone. “He hadn’t even heard of Pushkin!”
We’ve all been there. Or some of us have. Anyone who cares about books has at some point confronted the Pushkin problem: when a missed — or misguided — literary reference makes it chillingly clear that a romance is going nowhere fast.

It goes on to explore more salient points: Literary taste can point to important differences in education or class; and the dumpers tend to be brainy women.
I myself side with Marco Roth, an editor who's quoted in the story:

"I think sometimes it’s better if books are just books. It’s part of the romantic tragedy of our age that our partners must be seen as compatible on every level."

Who wants a romantic partner who agrees with you on everything? How boring is that? Though I must confess, my own spouse impressed me early on in our relationship when he told me his favorite book was Cannery Row.
"Cool, Steinbeck," I thought. Then I read it and thought it was just OK. It's nice, but it's not much compared with "East of Eden" or the luminous "Grapes of Wrath." And it's kind of a "guy" book.
Years later, it's pretty obvious we have very different tastes in books. He not much for fiction, but reads quirky histories about things like the Dust Bowl or the evolution of the public swimming pool.
We do bond over other reading material, though: We're total news junkies, and we're often turning each other on to different news stories or Web sites. It's been six years, and we're still reading the news together.

C'mon, America! Let's meditate!

Oprah's latest book pick is A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle. I haven't got a copy yet, but I expect I will: It's on sale at Amazon for the insanely low price of $7.70. That is so cheap it's sure to sell a bazillion copies, as if Oprah's picks don't sell a bazillion copies anyway.
The books is not fiction; it's more like self-help. (And loyal spoonreader afficionados will remember by dark secret love of self-help.) "A New Earth" sounds like handbook on mediation and its corrollary, "mindfulness." Picking this book seems to be Oprah's way of saying, "C'mon, America! Let's meditate!" Tolle himself is something of a mysterious figure; read a New York Times profile of him here.
My favorite author on meditation, though, is Pema Chodron, who has also been interviewed by Her Royal Oprah-ness. (Chodron is Buddhist and I'm not, but she writes in a way that's inclusive of a multiplicity of beliefs.) The book of hers that I'm reading now has the most marvelous title: The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times. Love that title! It begins with the Tibetan epigraph:

Confess your hidden faults.
Approach what you find repulsive.
Help those you think you cannot help.
Anything you are attached to, let it go.
Go to places that scare you.

Poetry.

Politics, Literature, and Romantic Poetry

I spent part of today selectively reading parts of The Survivor: Bill Clinton in the White House by John F. Harris. This is kind of background reading for work, but I liked it very much. Harris is a reporter, formerly of The Washington Post and now of the always-interesting politics web site Politico.
I think journalism is the ideal genre for writing about politics. Fiction, on the other hand, is best for writing about love and religion. Fiction and journalism are both good for writing about social issues, for example The Grapes of Wrath, which started as journalism and then became a novel. There are probably lots of exceptions to these overly broad generalizations, but what the heck.
Another political/literary connection that's been on my mind: Last week I read a column by Peggy Noonan in The Wall Street Journal. She's consistently interesting, too. She was reacting to Obama's speech on race, and here's just a snippet of what she said:

Near the end of the speech, Mr. Obama painted an America that didn’t summon thoughts of Faulkner but of William Blake. The bankruptcies, the dark satanic mills, the job loss and corporate corruptions.

Maybe I'm being too literal, but I really don't think William Blake is the right author to make that point. The better reference, I think, would be Charles Dickens. But maybe "Dickensian" has become an overused perjorative. I don't think Blake was concerned with corporations, but possibly I'm wrong. I'd like to hear from the Pisan Circle (former Romantic Era Poetry classmates) on this one.
Of course all this gives me an excuse to copy one of my favorite poems from Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience. This is from Songs of Innocence:

THE CHIMNEY-SWEEPER
When my mother died I was very young,
And my father sold me while yet my tongue
Could scarcely cry ‘Weep! weep! weep! weep!’
So your chimneys I sweep, and in soot I sleep.

There’s little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head,
That curled like a lamb’s back, was shaved; so I said,
‘Hush, Tom! never mind it, for, when your head’s bare,
You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair.’

And so he was quiet, and that very night,
As Tom was a-sleeping, he had such a sight!—
That thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned, and Jack,
Were all of them locked up in coffins of black.

And by came an angel, who had a bright key,
And he opened the coffins, and set them all free;
Then down a green plain, leaping, laughing, they run
And wash in a river, and shine in the sun.

Then naked and white, all their bags left behind,
They rise upon clouds, and sport in the wind:
And the angel told Tom, if he’d be a good boy,
He’d have God for his father, and never want joy.

And so Tom awoke, and we rose in the dark,
And got with our bags and our brushes to work.
Though the morning was cold, Tom was happy and warm:
So, if all do their duty, they need not fear harm.

Book group on The Ha-Ha

My book group met last night and we had a good discussion on The Ha-Ha. This novel begins when we meet Howard, a Vietnam vet who hasn't been able to speak since the war due to a brain injury. His addict ex-girlfriend Sylvia is being forced into rehab, and she asks him to take care of her nine-year-old son Ryan.
Lots of different reactions to Howard. When we meet him in the novel, he's basically given up on communicating with other people. Some of our group sympathized with this reaction while others felt he should have tried harder. We compared Howard's reaction to his injury to the guy who wrote The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Howard just gives up on communication, while the paralyzed author of DB&B writes a memoir by blinking out letters. So there's a tremendous range there, to say the least.
We all agreed that we hated Sylvia, though I thought she was a well-rendered, realistic portrayal of a selfish, whiny addict. J opined that Sylvia might be the biggest bitch in all of literature, but then I reminded her of Cathy from East of Eden, and she conceded the point.
The main topic of discussion was how believable were the character motivations. The novel is told from Howard's point of view, so it's interesting to try to fill in the blanks on the other characters, especially Howard's friend Laurel.
One thing I really loved about this novel was how beautiful some of the scenes between Howard and Ryan are. They are really just everyday father-and-son type interactions, but author Dave King imbues them with this really lovely tenderness. You couldn't write a whole novel just about a father who loves spending time with his son, so the plot for "The Ha-Ha" works well to reveal these same types of interactions.
This concludes my report on our book group and The Ha-Ha. Our next book is Mudbound by Hillary Jordan. More on that later.