spoonreader

spoonreader evolves ...

2010-05-27T22:08:00.003-04:00

It's been a great run here at spoonreader, but all good things must come to an end. Or at any rate, what with graduating from library school and all, I'm feeling like it's time to close down spoonreader and start a fresh blogging endeavor.

After today, you'll find me on my new blog. Here is the address:

http://angieholan.tumblr.com

Thank you for all the reads, comments, etc.! Please join me at the new space ...

A long overdue update

2010-05-11T21:58:00.000-04:00

I have finally graduated from library school! Yes, the long hiatus from this blog was as I finally finished my program.
I have some plans for a new blog experience, stay tuned!

Olive Kitteridge and The Housekeeper and the Professor

2009-12-04T21:55:00.004-05:00

I read two excellent books recently, a collection of short stories and a novel.
Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout. This is very close to being a novel, it's related short stories about life in small-town Maine, most in the present day, and all connected by the irascible old woman Olive Kitteridge. The writing is wonderful, and Olive is a fascinating character: a school teacher and a mother, not quite likable, but admirable in her own way. Aspects of this book reminded me of my beloved Spoon River Anthology, because I couldn't help but start looking for all the little clues of connections between characters and stories. This book won the Pulitzer Prize earlier this year.
The Housekeeper and the Professor, by Yoko Ogawa. In this novel, translated from the Japanese, a young housekeeper goes to work for a retired math professor with a strange brain injury. Due to a car accident, his memory stopped and now he only retains memories for 80 minutes. So every 80 minutes, he meets the housekeeper for the first time. In spite of this limitation, the e housekeeper comes to understand the professor's deep love of math.

There was something profound in his love for math. And it helped that he forgot what he’d taught me before, so I was free to repeat the same question until I understood. Things that most people would get the first time around might take me five, or even ten times, but I could go on asking the Professor to explain until I finally got it.

When the professor learns that the housekeeper has a young son, he insists that she bring him with her to work -- he writes a note to himself so he won't forget. The relationship between the three is charming and touching, developing slowly through small outings and events. It's a sweet novel, and I'm going to check out Ogawa's other translated work, a collection of short stories called The Diving Pool.

A poem for the changes of history

2009-11-05T07:53:00.001-05:00

The spouse and I talk a lot about newspapers, the economy, old and new business models, and the tide of history. In that vein, he recently sent me this poem, by Carl Sandburg.

HALSTED STREET CAR

COME you, cartoonists,
Hang on a strap with me here
At seven o'clock in the morning
On a Halsted street car.

Take your pencils
And draw these faces.

Try with your pencils for these crooked faces,
That pig-sticker in one corner--his mouth--
That overall factory girl--her loose cheeks.

Find for your pencils
A way to mark your memory
Of tired empty faces.

After their night's sleep,
In the moist dawn
And cool daybreak,
Faces
Tired of wishes,
Empty of dreams.

1916

American death rituals

2009-11-02T21:19:00.004-05:00

My story of the week is about American death rituals, or lack thereof. Thomas G. Long, a professor at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University, writing an op-ed in The New York Times, begins with the latest fads in mortuary services,

"new baubles and gewgaws of the funeral business — coffins emblazoned with sports logos; cremation urns in the shape of bowling pins, golf bags and motorcycle gas tanks; 'virtual cemeteries' with video clips and eerie recorded messages from the dead; pendants, bracelets, lamps and table sculptures into which ashes of the deceased can be swirled and molded."

Yikes!

Long suggests that our phobia of dead bodies and our love of consumer culture have robbed our death rituals of their meaning:

"At upbeat, open-mike 'celebrations of life,' former coaches, neighbors and relatives amuse us with stories and naïvely declare that the dead, who are usually nowhere to be seen and have nowhere to go, will nevertheless live always in our memories. Funerals, which once made confident public pilgrimage through town to the graveyard, now tread lightly across the tiny tableau of our psyches."

After reading this story in full -- which I encourage you to do -- I turned to the spouse and said "Promise me that you will never, ever turn my cremated remains into a key chain or any other tacky knickknack." He promised me he wouldn't, and I promised the same.
One thing that bothered me: The story appeared on All Saints' Day, sometimes known as Dia de los Muertos ("day of the dead") in Hispanic cultures. There was no explicit mention of that in the paper, that I could see. I wonder how many people got that connection.

In honor of Halloween, a Yeats poem

2009-10-31T18:18:00.002-04:00

In honor of Halloween, here is a poem from William Butler Yeats, my favorite poet:

The Cat and the Moon

THE CAT went here and there
And the moon spun round like a top,
And the nearest kin of the moon
The creeping cat looked up.
Black Minnaloushe stared at the moon,
For wander and wail as he would
The pure cold light in the sky
Troubled his animal blood.
Minnaloushe runs in the grass,
Lifting his delicate feet.
Do you dance, Minnaloushe, do you dance?
When two close kindred meet
What better than call a dance?
Maybe the moon may learn,
Tired of that courtly fashion,
A new dance turn.
Minnaloushe creeps through the grass
From moonlit place to place,
The sacred moon overhead
Has taken a new phase.
Does Minnaloushe know that his pupils
Will pass from change to change,
And that from round to crescent,
From crescent to round they range?
Minnaloushe creeps through the grass
Alone, important and wise,
And lifts to the changing moon
His changing eyes.

Toni Morrison's A Mercy and T.R. Reid's Healing of America

2009-10-31T10:06:00.001-04:00

I read two really good books lately that have nothing in common.

First, Toni Morrison's A Mercy. She's Toni Morrison, Nobel Prize winner, author of the harrowing and well-respected Beloved. She's also very intimidating, because her recent novels have struck me as long, difficult and dense. So I found her recent novel, A Mercy, tempting, because it was fairly short -- 176 pages -- and the first few pages were intriguing. Read the excerpt; it begins:

Don't be afraid. My telling can't hurt you in spite of what I have done and I promise to lie quietly in the dark--weeping perhaps or occasionally seeing the blood once more--but I will never again unfold my limbs to rise up and bare teeth. I explain. You can think what I tell you a confession, if you like, but one full of curiosities familiar only in dreams and during those moments when a dog's profile plays in the steam of a kettle.

The setting is 1682, and the narrator above is Florens, a young enslaved woman, who tells her own story, interweaved with stories of others who live on a Maryland homestead. There are two other enslaved woman, a Dutch trader, his "mail order" wife (probably they didn't call it that back then), two indentured servants, and a free African blacksmith. I don't want to tell too much here, but I'll just emphasize I thought this was a fascinating, poignant gem of a novel, very thought-provoking and beautifully written. And it inspires me to go back and and read Beloved.

The other book I liked was The Healing of America, by T.R. Reid. This is nonfiction, a look at health care systems in other countries and what lessons they might hold for the U.S. Reid was in the unique position of working abroad for many years, and having a stiff, sore shoulder. So he took his shoulder to all the doctors and health systems of the world and wrote about it. (OK, maybe not all the health systems of the world, but the United States, France, England, Germany, Japan and India.) What he finds is pretty interesting. According to Reid's telling, the French seem to have the most hassle-free system for records and billing. In Japan, you don't really need an appointment, you just walk in and get seen. In England, you don't get whatever treatment you want, but whatever you do get is free. India's traditional medicine yielded surprisingly good results. And the United States loves its high-tech surgeries.
Another interesting point Reid makes is that in other countries, doctors get their med school tuition paid for by the state, and then they make more middle-class salaries. This is different from the States. Little insights like these made for a fascinating book, very thought-provoking.
One thing that made me chuckle mordantly is that Reid felt the need to put a brief justification in the book about why he was writing about the medical systems of other countries. Some Americans may feel that we shouldn't consider any information from other countries, because ... why? Because we're better than them? Because they couldn't possibly have anything to teach us? He rejects those ideas, and so do I. I just don't get not being curious about new ideas and ways of doing things. It's kind of an anti-learning mentality, and I can't stand that, as you well know.

Reader Advisory: New Jersey Politics

2009-10-27T06:55:00.002-04:00

I'm instituting a new feature here at spoonreader: Reader advisory for news stories and features. I hope to highlight something interesting I read every week, with an emphasis on the periodical literature (librarian-speak for newspapers and magazines). My goal will be to post something on a Monday or Tuesday, or possibly as late as Wednesday.
This week's story is one I found very, very funny; it's about New Jersey politics; it's from the New York Times Magazine; and it's by Matt Bai.
It's told from the point of view of Jon Corzine, the incumbent Democratic governor of N.J., and it's about, well, why the state is so screwed up and Corzine's political fortunes are so troubled.. I'm picking this one because I love the writing, and because I think it has important insights into local government and why it can seem so dysfunctional.
Sample lines:

"Even in the best of times, New Jersey’s highly taxed voters are a chronically cantankerous lot, and no one’s likely to confuse these with the best of times."
"If California collapsed of its own weight and drifted off into the Pacific, New Jersey would instantly become the most dysfunctional state in the country."
"New Jersey could raise up its own army and invade Pennsylvania, and all the state’s voters would want to talk about, still, would be their property taxes."
"The question of why property taxes keep rising could keep a symposium of budget experts arguing for a week, but at its core, the property-tax problem hints at a deeper, structural flaw in the state, a defect that’s more cultural than it is fiscal. Basically, New Jersey is sliced into so many local fiefs — 21 counties, 566 municipalities, more than 600 school districts — that it’s just about falling apart."

I should say I don't know much about New Jersey. I don't have a reason to be interested in New Jersey. But I read this article from start to finish and was fascinated. That's a mark of a well-told story. So please do enjoy this little gem of political reporting and read the whole thing for yourself.

Books about the '08 campaign

2009-10-03T08:27:00.000-04:00

I consider the 2008 election something of a subject specialty, so I've been trying to be strategic about reading new books about the election. I just read The Battle for America 2008 by Dan Balz and Haynes Johnson. Balz is with The Washington Post, so this is a fairly straightforward political account of the election, with a few minor new revelations. Interesting things that jumped out at me: They report that Democrat Ted Kennedy made a condition of his early endorsement that Obama address health care reform in his first year. And, they go into brutal and hilarious detail about Republican candidate Fred Thompson's reluctance to actually campaign for the presidency.
The other book I'm reading now is Renegade: The Making of a President, by Richard Wolfe, who covered the election for Newsweek. I'm just starting this one, but the book's selling point is that Wolfe got the most inside access to the Obama campaign.
Other campaign books I'd like to read:

How Barack Obama won : a state-by-state guide to the historic 2008 presidential election, by Chuck Todd and Sheldon Gawiser: I expect this to be a very geeky (in a good way!) analysis of voting patterns in the 50 states.
The audacity to win : the inside story and lessons of Barack Obama's historic victory, by David Plouffe. Written by Obama's campaign manager. Again, this one will probably be pretty much in the weeds for true politics junkies. I'm hoping to gain insight on Obama's caucus strategies from this one.
An unnamed book (or at least I don't know the name) from Ryan Lizza, who covered the election for The New Yorker magazine. I really liked Lizza's reporting during the campaign; his article "Making It" was one of the best things I've read on Obama's years in the Illinois state senate.
And no list would be complete without Going Rogue: An American Life, by Sarah Palin. I can't wait to see what she has to say about the campaign. I hope it's well-written and interesting. Sometimes books by elected officials can be really boring, but we'll see.

Eliot's Little Gidding

2009-09-27T20:20:00.000-04:00

Yesterday was J. Alfred Prufrock Day, which is the way I think of the birthday of T.S. Eliot. I love that poem so much. Whenever I feel creaky, I say, "I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear my trousers rolled ..." And whenever I buy a peach, I say, "Do I dare to eat a peach?" and then, "In a minute there is time, for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse."

The spouse just heard me saying, "Do I dare to eat a peach?" He says from the other room: "Go ahead, J. Prufrock."

But lately, I have been much more enamored of Little Gidding. The passage below seems incredibly important and touching.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Reading skills and the 24-hour Day Theory

2009-09-26T21:44:00.000-04:00

My friend K., a teacher, posted a note about her students and their difficulties reading Jane Austen. She quipped that Austen appears to be the new Shakespeare, and Shakespeare is the new Chaucer. This really tickled me, because I'm always a sucker for "X is the new Y" formulations. (Brown is the new black. 50 is the new 40. Salsa is the new ketchup. Etc, etc.) Such a succinct way of conveying change in tastes!
It also encapsulates the perceived decline in reading among young people. A book I loved called Reading Matters had a very sophisticated analysis: The idea is that standards for literacy have dramatically increased over the last 100 years or so, so perceived declines are not always actual declines. In other words, our expectations for student reading are high, and remain so.
I have a theory though. I think literacy skills may be in actual decline because of the proliferation of electronic media, especially gaming. There are more different types of media to fill up a day. Yet the 24-hour duration of a day remains stubbornly static. So the time spent on sustained reading declines. That's my theory, anyway.

A good primer on international issues

2009-09-13T21:53:00.003-04:00

I recently finished The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power, by David E. Sanger. It was an excellent introduction to today's pressing foreign policy challenges: Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, North Korea and China. I feel much more comfortable reading daily news stories about these countries now that I've read a good overview of their historical situations and contexts.
In fact, I'm a bit amused by the fact that the book has "Obama," in the title, because the book's content is mostly about how the Bush administration (and to a lesser extent, other previous administrations) handled these areas for the past eight years. There's not much about Obama at all. But it is a clever way to spin older material forward.
In fact, the next time the Visa bill comes due, I'm going to tell the spouse, "That is not a bill for shoes. That is an investment in future opportunities for the display of fashionable feet."

Another crazy dispatch from the school reading front

2009-09-07T09:34:00.002-04:00

In fairness, I wouldn't call letting kids pick their own books "crazy." Debatable, but not crazy. But this essay I ran across does seem to deserve the word. This system, called "Accelerated Reader," assigns point values to certain books. Kids rack up enough points, and they get a treat or a prize or whatever.
But look at the howling-sick points assignments, according to the New York Times story:

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, by J.K. Rowling: 44 points
Harry Pointer and the Deathly Hallows: 34 points
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire: 32 points
My Antonia, by Willa Cather: 14 points
Go Tell it on the Mountain, by James Baldwin: 13 points
Hamlet, by Shakespeare: 7 points

I like Harry Potter, but I have a big problem with this points system. The latter three works are much more sophisticated and thematically challenging. That they would be worth fewer points strikes me as bad and wrong, ESPECIALLY when school kids are motivated to read the Potter books anyway. What is the world coming to? The essay author, thankfully, is appalled as well.

For school kids: Pick your own books?

2009-08-30T16:10:00.004-04:00

English teachers are starting to let their students pick their own books, according to a Sunday front page story in The New York Times. The story profiles a teacher who is using that method with her seventh and eighth graders. It's a fascinating piece of reporting, you should read it.
I have mixed feelings about it, though. I think the research pretty clearly suggests that readers get better by spending a lot more time reading (duh), and that struggling readers who pick their own materials are significantly more motivated. Still, I think there's so much to be gained from students sharing a common literary experience. (Right, my Romantic Poetry classmates?)
The story did note that some teachers mix methods, allowing students to pick their own books at times while also assigning everyone the same book at least once during the year. I like that.

Michael Chabon, David Foster Wallace and suicide

2009-08-16T08:25:00.005-04:00

John Wilson reflects on author Michael Chabon's recent essay about suicide and the death of David Foster Wallace. I can't find Chabon's original piece, but Wilson writes that it's part of a new nonfiction book by Chabon to be released in October, titled Manhood for Amateurs.

Interesting point:

Mr. Chabon quotes Mr. Wallace himself saying that fiction gives the reader, who is "marooned in her own skull, . . . imaginative access to other selves." But there's a problem: "that gift of access, for all its marvelous power to console the lonely . . . , is a kind of trick, an act of Houdiniesque illusion."

Put another way, the desire for connection, for imaginative access to other selves, Mr. Chabon believes, is fundamentally a desire for escape. It drives writers and readers alike, he says, "to seek the high, small window leading out, to lower the makeshift ropes of knotted bedsheet that stories and literature afford, and make a break for it." And when "that window can't be found, or will no longer serve" -- here he returns to the question of suicide -- "small wonder if the longing seeks another, surer means of egress."

Read the whole thing via The Wall Street Journal, it's fascinating. Wilson is editor of Books & Culture: A Christian Review.

The Song is You

2009-08-16T07:52:00.002-04:00

I'm always on the look-out for high-quality fiction written about the way we live now. Writing about right now, I imagine, is pretty tough: How can you know what will be tomorrow's important event versus a short-lived trend? A lot of successful fiction is set in the recent past, probably because it's easier for authors to get critical distance.
So I had high hopes for the recent novel The Song is You by Arthur Phillips. Julian, a music-loving an advertising photographer in New York City, is bereft after the collapse of his marriage and the loss of his family life. He's aimless until one night he wanders into a Brooklyn bar and hears a new band with an entrancing lead singer/songwriter. He writes her a series of notes on the back of bar coasters, and she finds his advice penetrating and perceptive for her climb up the rungs to pop-rock stardom. Other communications ensue, and so begins a funny, distant relationship between a fan and his muse.
I liked this novel a good bit, especially the parts where Julian remembers his father's love for the jazz singer Billie Holiday. (A charming setpiece on Billie Holiday opens the novel.) But I wanted to read a lot more about Julian and his relationship with his ex-wife, while the novel was pretty focused on his relationship with the singer. (Is this a guy thing?) Still, The Song is You is an interesting, readable novel of our current moment.
From a librarian perspective, I'd recommend The Song is You as a read-alike for Nick Hornby's High Fidelity, which I think is still the definitive contemporary novel on pop music. (Read-alike is librarian jargon for, "If you liked X, you might also like Y.")

Ways of organizing books

2009-08-09T10:03:00.004-04:00

I realized recently that I haven't been very good about writing in a tiny brown leather notebook where I keep a list of all the books I've read. In fact, my last entry in the little notebook appears to be September 2007. Gulp! I've read lots of books since then. Now I'm going back and reconstructing my reading history so I can make accurate entries in the little notebook.
Thankfully, I have several other ways of organizing my reading habits to which I can refer.
There's this blog, for one! I don't notate everything I read here, but I do quite a bit, and certainly the high points and most of the fiction. One of the things I enjoy about this blog, after keeping in touch with my old friends, is perusing the books I've read over the years through the archived entries.
Next is my catalog on LibraryThing. I started with LibraryThing back in 2005, and though other online reading sites have entered the fray since then, I still like LibraryThing the best, mostly because of its robust cataloging function. GoodReads is more oriented toward sharing books, but I found its interface a little too cumbersome to be worth switching. This is the benefit to LibraryThing's first entry: For me to switch from LibraryThing, a new service would have to offer a substantially better service. A merely somewhat better service would not be able to overcome my inertia toward changing services.
I also have kind of mixed feelings about these online services for sharing books and thoughts on books. I don't really need new ideas for books to read. I have long, long, long lists of books I want to read but probably won't ever get to, so I don't need to actively search for new ones. And I go back and forth on making my LibraryThing catalog public. Right now, it's private. I can never decide on whether I want the outside world to view my library or not. Sometimes I think it's harmless. Other times I feel like a personal library is a highly, well, personal thing, and I'm not so anxious to share. This is one area where LibraryThing could improve: Making a catalog visible to friends but not the general public. Maybe you can even do that already, but I have not yet discovered how.
Finally, I keep a spreadsheet of every book I've read with my book group. It includes the book title, author, and which member of our group picked it. Yes, I am this organized! (Read: Obsessive-compulsive)
So with these tools I am now updating the little notebook, aka the analog database.

The new Dave Eggers book

2009-06-30T21:39:00.004-04:00

I got a new book in the mail today. It's "Zeitoun," by Dave Eggers, and it's about a Syrian-American family that survived Katrina. I'm very excited to read it because I so loved his last book, What is the What. I'm also excited because I ordered it directly from McSweeney's, Mr. Eggers' book company. It will probably be published jointly with a major publishing house, but the editions from McSweeney's are always a little unique or special with their binding or their art work. I still love those kinds of details.

I feel like a bit of a slacker on blog posts recently. I'm still slowly reading Brothers Karamazov. I'm also trying to not spend so much time mindlessly clicking around the computer, surfing the Internet, so that leads to fewer blog posts. It's not a snooty intellectual thing; it's just a time management issue. I've been trying to go to bed early, slow down and de-stress, etc etc etc.
Still, I don't want to stop this blog for the (mainly) friends and family who read it. One day in the golden future I will post more regularly, with perfectly search-engine-optimized headlines, and make a name for spoonreader throughout the land. But not today.

Summer reading round-up

2009-06-14T21:40:00.003-04:00

I've been trying to slow down and not get over-busy, so that slows my reading down a little. Mainly, right now I'm reading The Brothers Karamazov. I've always wanted to read it because so many writers I love -- Dorothy Day, David Foster Wallace -- love it. I'm about a third of the way through.
It's fascinating reading, for sure, especially Dostoyevsky's outlook on religion, which he clearly takes very seriously. Also I like his characterization the dissolute father, Fyodor Pavlovich, who reminds me of a few people I know. These are all superficial impressions, I should do some more rigorous thinking on the novel, but right now I'm just enjoying all the great characters and dialogue and not thinking too terribly deeply.
I think I've also found the perfect use for SparkNotes (online Cliff's Notes for you oldsters like me). I read the plot summaries on SparkNotes to help me remember which character is which, and keep track of all the nicknames, some of which are not obvious at all, e.g. Mitya=Dmitri. So you see, there is a use for SparkNotes besides shirking your college reading!
As a lark, I finished the Michael Lewis memoir on fatherhood, Home Game. I still like him a lot but this book was too light and flip for my taste. In the last section, he gets a vasectomy, which he plays for laughs, and which I really did not need to know about. Hey, but that's OK, nobody's perfect. He's still one of my favorite authors. I think this is definitely a book for guys and only certain guys.
While I'm being kind of trivial here, guess what I found! Another volume of Jane Austen paraliterature, this time yet another book masquerading as Mr. Darcy's diary. But the new twist here is that Mr. Darcy was friends with LORD BYRON. For those of you who don't know, I was obsessed with Lord Byron is high school. I checked the dates, it's not totally implausible, though I think Darcy would have been a little bit older than Byron, but it depends on when you date the events of Pride and Prejudice. After I finish Karamazov, I will get my own copy of this book and read it and give you a detailed critique. I read the first chapter at the book store: Mr. Darcy is not so upstanding as P&P would have you think, but he's also not fully embracing of all of Lord Byron's mad, bad and dangerous-to-know ways. This is really hilarious to me -- Mr. Darcy and Lord Byron!

Books I bought at Faulkner House in New Orleans

2009-05-16T21:53:00.003-04:00

I was in New Orleans last weekend for a wedding and went to the wonderful book store Faulkner House. K. and J. introduced me to this place a long time ago, but I hadn't been back in years. I was delighted to find it still stuffed with new fiction and old classics -- most in lovely hardcover editions -- and of course an extensive selection on books about New Orleans and Louisiana.
I selected two books. The first was the new Michael Lewis book, Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood. Lewis is best known for writing about business and baseball, but he's also a native New Orleanian. (He attended the prep school Isidore Newman.) His new book is about navigating the rocky shoals of contemporary fatherhood. This normally would not be my cup of tea, but Lewis is one of the few living writers who makes me laugh out loud, so I picked it up. Gen Xers will appreciate that his wife is Tabitha Soren, formerly of MTV News. So far, it's a funny, light, sweet book. We'll see if it gets deeper as I approach the finish.
The other book was a bit more meaty: A lovely, small hardcover of Walt Whitman poetry from Everyman's Library. I picked it because it included the poem "I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing." Here is the full text for your reading enjoyment. I think he really captures the majestic beauty of the trees, which have a meditative effect on me as well:

I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing,
All alone stood it and the moss hung down from the branches,
Without any companion it grew there uttering joyous of dark green,
And its look, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of myself,
But I wonder'd how it could utter joyous leaves standing alone there
without its friend near, for I knew I could not,
And I broke off a twig with a certain number of leaves upon it and
twined around it a little moss,
And brought it away, and I have placed it in sight in my room,
It is not needed to remind me as of my own dear friends,
(For I believe lately I think of little else than of them,)
Yet it remains to me a curious token, it makes me think of manly love;
For all that, and though the live-oak glistens there in Louisiana
solitary in a wide in a wide flat space,
Uttering joyous leaves all its life without a friend a lover near,
I know very well I could not.

Three excellent books about reading

2009-05-12T07:45:00.001-04:00

The most excellent class of Adult Services, a.k.a. Reader Advisory, has come to an end. I loved everything about this class, which taught the art and craft of librarians recommending leisure reading to adults. Besides reading some great books for my book talks -- see my book talks on Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and The Book of Chameleons -- I also read some great books about reading. Here's a recap of three of my favorites.

Reading Matters: What the Research Reveals about Reading Libraries and Community, by Catherine Sheldrick Ross, Lynne (E.F.) McKechnie, and Paulette M. Rothbauer. I love the old saying, "In God we trust. All others must bring data." This book brings the data on reading research, providing empirical evidence gleaned from recent studies on why people read, how they become proficient readers, and how they select books. The key point for me is that people who are skilled readers "speed through stretches of text with apparent effortlessness." For children, "well-designed phonics instruction" is best, and being read to aloud is crucial. Adults should be encouraged to engage in sustained long-form reading in whatever genre or style they prefer, because reading begets more reading.

The Reader, the Text and the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work, by Louise Rosenblatt. If only I had heard of Louise Rosenblatt when I was in college, back in the early 1990s during the heyday of literary theory. Back then, you could read any old book you wanted and then say it was either reifying cultural hegemony or subversively troubling societal norms. In retrospect, these were interesting intellectual exercises, but it also seemed silly to argue that a reader could find any meaning she wanted in a given text. Rosenblatt, on the other hand, acknowledges that readers bring their own assumptions and beliefs to a text that they read, but she also says that the author has a particular meaning she or he is trying to convey. Two human beings are involved in the transaction between author and reader, and you can't theorize away the intentions and motivations of either party. This reminds me of author Zadie Smith's metaphor, that the relationship between author and reader is akin to the relationship between a composer of music and the musician who sits down to play the work.

Great Books for High School Students: A Teacher's Guide to Books that can Change Teen's Lives, edited by Rick Ayers and Amy Crawford. These are seven essays written by teachers who describe the particular experiences they've had teaching novels to high school students. The essays are personal and subjective, and fascinating reading. I thought the essay about The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain, was particularly good, showing why it's such a challenging book. The teacher wrote about how her students had strong but very different reactions to the book's depictions of slavery and race. Then there were the efforts of other adults to stop her from teaching the book. I also thought the teacher revealed that she wasn't quite as emotionally prepared as she thought she was to teach a book that raises all the sensitive issues that Huckleberry raises. It was a good essay, very personal and honest and grounded in real-world circumstances. The other books teachers wrote about include Bastard Out of Carolina, by Dorothy Allison; Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison; Oresteia, by Aeschylus; Bless Me, Ultima, by Rudolfo Anaya; Reservation Blues, by Sherman Alexie; and The Things They Carried, by Tim O'Brien.

Reading vs. doing

2009-05-11T07:22:00.000-04:00

One of my favorite blogs is Zen Habits. It's about living a simple life, being organized, and getting things done. So it's right up my alley.
The blog's author, Leo (hey, that's my dad's name!), has a great post last week on reading vs. doing. He says reading is great and can teach you things, but you actually have to put whatever it is you're reading about into practice.

So reading countless self-help articles and books are great — I’ve written a few myself — but remember that it’s only the first step.
You have to put the personal development posts away, get away from the computer or book, and start doing it. Today.
Only in doing it will you actually learn.

Read the whole post for yourself.
I think he's onto something really important. Reading is wonderful, but it's not the same as direct experience. Leo is talking about self-help and organizational books here, but I think it applies other emotional contexts as well. Good food for thought.

Dreams of DFW (DFW Memorial Part VI)

2009-04-30T21:14:00.000-04:00

I dreamed of David Foster Wallace a few nights ago. He looked just like his photos, the ones where he has long hair and no bandana. He was smiling, and I was standing next to my spouse, and David was asking me how I was doing, and what was going on in my life. I started to cry. I was trying to tell him that I knew he had been sad and that I hoped he was OK now. In my dream, he had tried to kill himself but failed ...
He smiled and said, "I'm doing fine. I'm not sad anymore. But tell me about you. ..."
And that was it.
I know why I dreamed the dream. That day, I had finally got a look at the new, posthumous book of his.
It's a copy of a commencement speech he gave at Kenyon College, an essay I dearly love. It didn't have a title when he gave it. Now it's called, "This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life." Of course, the speech wasn't really long enough for a proper book. So the publisher decided to print one sentence per page, creating a book that comes in at 144 pages.
In theory, this could be a good idea, forcing the reader to slow down and savor the language.
But I thought it made the speech seem disjointed. Kind of like someone reading aloud at too slow a pace.
On a more positive note, I love the cover. It's white with a little tiny goldfish at the bottom.

The goldfish is part of the opening anecdote:

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?"
... If you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don't be. I am not the wise old fish. 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.

The parable of the fish also figured prominently into his novel Infinite Jest, which is a personally totemic novel for me.
I will end up buying the book, even though you can read the essay for yourself on the Internet here. Some people might say it's dumb to buy a book of an essay that you can read on the Internet, but this doesn't account for the phenomenon of text-as-beloved-object. I love the permanence and tangibility and symbolism of words written on bound paper. Not the same as the computer, not to me.

Reader, I married him

2009-04-13T22:04:00.000-04:00

Here's a selection from the conclusion of the 1847 novel Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte:

I have now been married ten years. I know what it is to live entirely for and with what I love best on earth. I hold myself supremely blest--blest beyond what language can express; because I am my husband's life as fully as he is mine. No woman was ever nearer to her mate than I am: ever more absolutely bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. I know no weariness of my Edward's society: he knows none of mine, any more than we each do of the pulsation of the heart that beats in our separate bosoms; consequently, we are ever together. To be together is for us to be at once as free as in solitude, as gay as in company. We talk, I believe, all day long: to talk to each other is but a more animated and an audible thinking. All my confidence is bestowed on him, all his confidence is devoted to me; we are precisely suited in character--perfect concord is the result.

Read the novel Jane Eyre via Project Gutenberg.
I identify a lot with bookish Jane, but I can also be the madwoman in the attic. Thanks to the spouse for putting up with both. Happy anniversary.

What I'm reading now

2009-04-05T12:27:00.005-04:00

My library school class is coming to a fast close. I'm a little sad, because this has been one my favorite classes of library school. It's called "Adult Services," and it focused on what's known as "Reader Advisory," or recommending voluntary reading material to adults. This could be anything a person wants to read: literary fiction, romance novels, science fiction, whatever. I'm working on my final project now, which is an annotated bibliography on the topic of "great books discussion groups." I'm taking a broad view of "great books": My reading tells me a librarian should ask, "Great for who? Great in what way?" And I definitely don't mean that in a relativistic, throw-away-the-standards, "what anybody wants is fine" sort of way. I mean it in a rigorous, standards-based, "you're not going to stick my patrons with a boring book" sort of way. So I'm reading articles on how to select the best sorts of books for discussion groups, with nods toward the Western canon, multiculturalism and diversity, bestsellers vs. award winners, readability, and how books lend themselves (or don't) toward group discussion. Lots of interesting intersections here.
On another front, my book group just finished a very long selection (A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz, 500 plus pages), and now we're going to read two much shorter young adult novels (Stuck in Neutral and Cruise Control by Terry Trueman). So this means I have extra time to read my own choices. Nice. Here's what I'm reading right now:

Nothing Right, by Antonya Nelson. This is literary fiction, short stories about upper-middle-class Americans and their nefarious ways. Affairs, deceptions, break-ups, stabs in the back, etc. I'm not sure why it's so interesting to read about the twisted characters in Nelson's stories, but it sure is. Nelson has this fascination-with-the-grotesque thing going, much like Flannery O'Connor. Except Flannery wrote about people living in the (mostly) rural South of the 1950s; Nelson writes about people who listen to NPR.
Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the GOP, by Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam. The conservative authors argue that the Republican Party needs to develop and promote policies that provide economic stability for the working class. Douthat was recently named a columnist to the New York Times, which will certainly amplify his voice on the national stage. I read Douthat's blog occasionally; I like that he puts his intellectual integrity ahead of his loyalty to party. (Actually, I love writers who put intellectual integrity ahead of loyalty to party -- any party. This is a nonpartisan blog.)
Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, by Clay Shirky. This book looks at the implications of the Internet for group dynamics and organization. Shirky recently wrote a blog post, "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable," on the decline of newspapers that was pretty brilliant. He concluded we're in the grips of systemic, historical change similar to the advent of the printing press. So I'm just starting on his book and interested to see what the implications are for the future of journalism.

And after all this, I really, really want to read and stop putting off reading The Brothers Karamazov. It's time!

W. B. Yeats: The Poems

2009-03-15T21:35:00.002-04:00

The spouse went to Ireland, and because I had to stay home, he brought me back a truly splendid gift: W. B. Yeats: The Poems, a hardcover collection from the British version of Everyman's Library. I really love Everyman's Library; it's an imprint of Random House that publishes the classics in these relatively compact but kinda sumptuous hardcover editions. (Interestingly, W. B. Yeats: The Poems is not part of the American version of Everyman's. Which seems a terrible oversight, but I guess Yeats still does not have the stature in the U.S. that he does in Europe. That's a shame.)
So the book includes most but not all of Yeats' poetry. Yeats was very prolific, so even this abridged version is 395 pages of poetry. His major works are represented in full, so it appears to have the complete content of books such as The Wind Among the Reeds, Responsibilities, The Wild Swans at Coole, Michael Robartes and the Dancer, The Tower, and Last Poems, just to name a few. Then it has extensive notes. Also, a chronology of Yeats' life and a critical introduction. AND an index of titles and an index of first lines. Awesome, awesome, awesome!
I am very pleased with this book. It's my new favorite book.

New translation of Divine Milieu by Sion Cowell

2009-03-07T08:00:00.010-05:00

I love books as objects -- I do, I do, I do! And I much prefer hardcovers to paperbacks. I'm in my 30s, and I've seen beloved paperbacks lose their structural integrity over the years and literally fall apart before my eyes. Not so with hardbacks. They are sturdy things, built to last.
So I've been looking for a hardcover copy of The Divine Milieu by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. This book is hard to explain; it's very different from most other books. It was written by a paleontologist Jesuit priest in the 1920s as a way of reconciling Christianity and evolution, but it's also something of a spiritual self-help book, too, if I can say that without diminishing its theological complexity.
The latest copy of the book describes itself this way:

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's spiritual masterpiece, The Divine Milieu, in a newly revised translation by Sion Cowell, is addressed to those who have lost faith in conventional religion but who still have a sense of the divine at the heart of the cosmos. "The heavens declare the glory of God," sings the Psalmist. Teilhard would agree. "We are surrounded," he says, "by a certain sort of pessimist who tells us continually that our world is foundering in atheism. But should we not say rather that what it is suffering from is unsatisfied theism?" He sees a universe in movement where progress is the spiritualisation of matter and its opposite is the materialisation of spirit. Teilhard opts for progress. The Divine Milieu is the divine centre and the divine circle, the divine heart and the divine sphere. The Divine Milieu is written for those who listen primarily to the voices of the Earth: its purpose is to provide a link to traditional Christianity (as expressed in Baptism, Cross and Eucharist) in order to demonstrate that the fears prevalent in contemporary world society as it abuses its very foundation - Mother Earth - may be better understood by the Gospel path. Teilhard's primary purpose is to show a way forward, which he sees as the "Christian religious ideal".

Clearly, this is not a book for everyone, but it really rings bells for me as I have long seen science and religion as mutually reinforcing, not opposites. This is what happens to a person when her early education is overseen by the sisters of the Sacred Heart.
So my wonderful new translation in HARDCOVER arrived yesterday. I had to pay $36 (!) for it in these difficult economic times, but I did anyway, and that was Amazon's deep discount from the $50 list price. It is a lovely slim volume with a groovy cover design that implies cutting-edge sophistication. Interestingly, the cover resonates with some recent popular science writing.
Compare the cover of the new Divine Milieu ... :

... with the cover of a recent(ish) book, completely scientific on string theory by scientist Brian Greene called The Fabric of the Cosmos:

Kinda looks the same, doesn't it? Speaking of Greene, wouldn't that would be a dream dinner party: Teilhard de Chardin and Brian Greene. Throw in Pema Chodron and Jonathan Safran Foer for an ecumenical foursome. I'd cook a delicious feast and we'd talk late into the night ...

Book talk on The Book of Chameleons by Jose Eduardo Agualusa

2009-03-01T20:10:00.004-05:00

Here is my book talk on The Book of Chameleons for my library science class after finding it on the Three Percent blog, an excellent source for news and reviews of translated literature. As I've noted before, the assignment requires that our book talks have to be very positive. But I honestly liked this book just as much as my book talks says! (Librarians, feel free to use this book talk as you like.)

Lovers of dreamy, experimental fiction, The Book of Chameleons is for you! Set in modern-day Angola, our narrator is a self-reflective gecko -- that's right, a lizard -- who lives on the ceiling in the home of Felix Ventura. Felix Ventura is an albino antique books dealer and seller of memories, and there's no shortage of customers. "They were businessmen, ministers, landowners, diamond smugglers, generals -- people, in other words, whose futures are secure. But what these peoople lack is a good past, a distinguished ancestry, diplomas. In sum, a name that resonates with nobility and culture. He sells them a brand new past. He draws up their family tree. He provides them with photographs of their grandparents and great-grandparents, gentlemen of elegant bearing and old-fashioned ladies. The businessmen, the ministers, would like to have women like that as their aunts ... old ladies swathed in fabrics, authentic bourgeois bessanganas -- they'd like to have a grandfather with the distinguished bearing of a Machado de Assis, of a Cruz e Souza, of an Alexandre Dumas. And he sells them this simple dream."

This fantastic premise actually works well with its real-world history of contemporary Angola, a former Portuguese colony on the southwest coast of Africa. In 1975, factions began fighting in a civil war there that was to last 27 years, dominated by Cold War politics. In 2002, the civil war ended. Angola has since been rebuilding its economy, primarily through oil exports. The cross-section of people who come to buy memories in 2004 from Felix Ventura represent the cross-section of people trying to reinvent themselves in post-civil war society.

In The Book of Chameleons, a retired photojournalist and war photographer comes to Felix Ventura and buys the identity of Jose Buchman, a persona that Ventura has invented based on his history books and antiquities. Buchman returns not long after, telling Felix he has been to the village where his "father" lived and photographed his father's grave. Buchman travels to New York City to find his American "mother," then follows her to South Africa. How can this be, Felix wonders? Meanwhile, the gecko meets Buchman in a series of dreams. The neighborhood hobo -- formerly, one of Angola's once-powerful Marxists -- is staking out Felix's house, while Felix's new lady love Angela Lucia visits regularly. The characters all take their parts in a murder mystery that comes together only at the book's conclusion.

The book's author, Jose Eduardo Agualusa, was born to Portuguese parents in Huambo, Angola, in 1960. The Book of the Chameleons won the 2007 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, a prize for fiction in translation published in the United Kingdom, and it was the first book written by an African author to win the book. Agualusa, a fiction writer and a journalist, has written seven novels, including Creole which was awarded the Portuguese Grand Prize for Literature. Both The Book of the Chameleons and Creole were translated by Daniel Hahn, who also translated the autobiography of Brazilian footballer, Pelé, which was shortlisted for the Best Sports Book of 2006 at the British Book Awards. The 2008 American edition of The Book of the Chameleons includes a question and answer with the author and a book group reading guide.

With its emphasis on magical realism and post-colonial politics, this book is particularly recommended for fans of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Colombian author of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera. Fans of the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges will enjoy the sly joke that the gecko narrator is Borges reincarnated.

This is literary fiction at its most dreamy and interesting, but it's also accessible to more casual readers, thanks to our approachable lizard narrator. The book is also short in length, so if you are looking for something to expand your horizons that's not too much of a time commitment, this book be for you: The Book of the Chameleons, by Jose Eduardo Agualusa.

D.T. Max on David Wallace (DFW Memorial Part V)

2009-03-01T19:48:00.003-05:00

D.T. Max of The New Yorker has a heart-breaking story about David Foster Wallace -- his career as an author and his last days. Wallace was working on a novel called The Pale King before he died. His publishers expect to issue the incomplete manuscript next year.
Max writes:

The novel continues Wallace’s preoccupation with mindfulness. It is about being in the moment and paying attention to the things that matter, and centers on a group of several dozen I.R.S. agents working in the Midwest. Their job is tedious, but dullness, “The Pale King” suggests, ultimately sets them free. A typed note that Wallace left in his papers laid out the novel’s idea: “Bliss—a-second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious—lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (Tax Returns, Televised Golf) and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom.” On another draft sheet, Wallace typed a possible epigraph for the book from “Borges and I,” a prose poem by Frank Bidart: “We fill pre-existing forms and when we fill them we change them and are changed.”

First, I find this description so poignant, and it vibrates on the same frequency as the Alcoholic Anonymous credo that Wallace depicted in Infinite Jest: One day at a time. Second, his passing yet again stikes me as so utterly sad -- an artist unable to complete his work, dead by his own hand from depression. Finally, I find it personally endearing that Wallace had become obsessed with taxes. I have my own obsession with taxes that developed relatively recently. It is its own arcane language, like a priestly code. Perhaps aliens will one day assume the IRS tax code was our holy book.
Read the entire article. Max wrote a previous article on the awe-inspiring literary archive at the University of Texas at Austin, so he has a great deal of sensitivity for Wallace's place in American letters.

Obama as Emma Woodhouse

2009-02-16T21:01:00.003-05:00

I can't resist logging this amusing Jane Austen comparison from Sunday's Maureen Dowd column in The New York Times. The heart of the column is her fussing at Pres. Obama for his subtle jibes at Veep Joe Biden. Obama should show more respect, Dowd says.

Then the kicker: She compares Obama to Emma Woodhouse. Joe Biden is Miss Bates. Mr. Knightly is Dowd herself, I guess.

I'm not much of a fan of Emma -- Pride and Prejudice is infinitely superior, in my view. But the moment Dowd's referring to in Emma is my favorite of the book, and worth quoting here. It's Austen's fine-tuned psychological rendering at its best. The set-up is that Emma has made snide remark about how boring Miss Bates is. Then she tries to use the old excuse, "It was just a joke!" But Emma's suitor Mr. Knightly isn't having any of that, and calls her on it:

"Emma, I must once more speak to you as I have been used to do: a privilege rather endured than allowed, perhaps, but I must still use it. I cannot see you acting wrong, without a remonstrance. How could you be so unfeeling to Miss Bates? How could you be so insolent in your wit to a woman of her character, age, and situation?— Emma, I had not thought it possible."

Emma recollected, blushed, was sorry, but tried to laugh it off.

"Nay, how could I help saying what I did?—Nobody could have helped it. It was not so very bad. I dare say she did not understand me."

"I assure you she did. She felt your full meaning. She has talked of it since. I wish you could have heard how she talked of it—with what candour and generosity. I wish you could have heard her honouring your forbearance, in being able to pay her such attentions, as she was for ever receiving from yourself and your father, when her society must be so irksome."

"Oh!" cried Emma, "I know there is not a better creature in the world: but you must allow, that what is good and what is ridiculous are most unfortunately blended in her."

"They are blended," said he, "I acknowledge; and, were she prosperous, I could allow much for the occasional prevalence of the ridiculous over the good. Were she a woman of fortune, I would leave every harmless absurdity to take its chance, I would not quarrel with you for any liberties of manner. Were she your equal in situation—but, Emma, consider how far this is from being the case. She is poor; she has sunk from the comforts she was born to; and, if she live to old age, must probably sink more. Her situation should secure your compassion. It was badly done, indeed! You, whom she had known from an infant, whom she had seen grow up from a period when her notice was an honour, to have you now, in thoughtless spirits, and the pride of the moment, laugh at her, humble her—and before her niece, too—and before others, many of whom (certainly some,) would be entirely guided by your treatment of her.—This is not pleasant to you, Emma—and it is very far from pleasant to me; but I must, I will,—I will tell you truths while I can; satisfied with proving myself your friend by very faithful counsel, and trusting that you will some time or other do me greater justice than you can do now."

While they talked, they were advancing towards the carriage; it was ready; and, before she could speak again, he had handed her in. He had misinterpreted the feelings which had kept her face averted, and her tongue motionless. They were combined only of anger against herself, mortification, and deep concern. She had not been able to speak; and, on entering the carriage, sunk back for a moment overcome—then reproaching herself for having taken no leave, making no acknowledgment, parting in apparent sullenness, she looked out with voice and hand eager to shew a difference; but it was just too late. He had turned away, and the horses were in motion. She continued to look back, but in vain; and soon, with what appeared unusual speed, they were half way down the hill, and every thing left far behind. She was vexed beyond what could have been expressed—almost beyond what she could conceal. Never had she felt so agitated, mortified, grieved, at any circumstance in her life. She was most forcibly struck. The truth of this representation there was no denying. She felt it at her heart. How could she have been so brutal, so cruel to Miss Bates! How could she have exposed herself to such ill opinion in any one she valued! And how suffer him to leave her without saying one word of gratitude, of concurrence, of common kindness!

Time did not compose her. As she reflected more, she seemed but to feel it more. She never had been so depressed. Happily it was not necessary to speak. There was only Harriet, who seemed not in spirits herself, fagged, and very willing to be silent; and Emma felt the tears running down her cheeks almost all the way home, without being at any trouble to check them, extraordinary as they were.

On my bedside table

2009-02-14T14:13:00.004-05:00

I was talking with a friend lately outlining my reading list for the next few months. Anyway, here's what I have read in what order.

The Book of Chameleons, by José Eduardo Agualusa: This is for my reader's advisory class. The assignment was to pick a contemporary work of fiction in translation, in this case, from the Portuguese. This is an avant-garde murder mystery set in Africa and narrated by a lizard! I started reading it this morning, and it's beautifully written and already haunting me. In tone and mood, it reminds me just a bit of The Sea by John Banville. (Are you reading this, JJ?)
A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Tolz: Speaking of JJ, this is her book pick for our next book group meeting. It's a zany literary-adventure novel from Australia; The Wall Street Journal compared it to my much beloved A Confederacy of Dunces. Because I'm a hard-working blogger, I dug up the exact quote from the WSJ: "Mr. Toltz's merry chaos -- a mix of metaphysical inquiry, ribald jokes, freakish occurrences and verbal dynamite booming across the page -- deserves a place next to 'A Confederacy of Dunces' in a category that might be called the undergraduate ecstatic." The reviewer then calls it "Voltaire meets Vonnegut." OK, so you get the idea. It is, so far, snicker-out-loud funny. And it's loooooooooong ... some reviewers say too long.
I have two books that I may review. I won't name them here but one is about post-Katrina New Orleans and the other is a first novel.
Finally, I made a deal with my mom. Either I read The Brothers Karamazov by her birthday or I give her my spanking new, hardcover, fabulous new translation copy of the book. I don't want to do that! Her birthday is May 4. Can I make it? Only time will tell!

The Inaugural Poem

2009-01-24T12:49:00.002-05:00

You've heard of never speaking ill of the dead? Well, I choose never to speak ill of poets. I love poetry, and it's in too much trouble these days to crack on anyone trying keep it alive.

So with that preface, I'll say that I really liked the poem Elizabeth Alexander read for the recent inauguration. I advocate for plainer meaning in poetry, and this poem works nicely. Don't get me wrong, I love modernist poetry, which tends to be obscure -- think T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens. But the historical moment for modernism has passed. I think what we need now is a plainer poetry that is easier for people to "get." Less obscurity and randomness. Isn't there enough of that in the broader culture these days? Whereas Eliot and Stevens to me seem like artistic responses to a culture of conformity.

So I really liked Alexander's poem. Read the whole thing here. I liked the lines:

A woman and her son wait for the bus.
A farmer considers the changing sky.
A teacher says, Take out your pencils. Begin.

I really liked, "Take out your pencils. Begin." Doesn't that sum up all the potential and excitement of learning? To me it does.

And I also really liked:

Praise song for struggle, praise song for the day.
Praise song for every hand-lettered sign,
the figuring-it-out at kitchen tables.

Now just so you know I haven't gone completely Pollyanna, I also liked this critical examination of the poem from the UK's The Guardian, which accuses the poem of being too prosy. ("Prosy"?) It is critical, but it's also serious textual analysis. It's serious criticism worthy of a serious poem, so to speak. And if you go over to Ta-Nehisi Coates' blog, you'll find a wonderful font of comments, both pro and con, about the poem. Ta-Nehisi's blog is mostly politics and culture, but he posts a poem every Friday morning and then opens the comments in the afternoon. It's a lot of fun.

Book talk on "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close"

2009-01-23T05:35:00.003-05:00

Some of you have already seen this, but for everyone else, this is my book talk on "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close." Keep in mind that a book talk is different from a review in that a book talk is not overtly critical. It's a talk from a librarian meant to get patrons interested in reading a particular book.

Librarians, feel free to use this book talk yourself if you feel so moved.

Audience: Book talk at main library for "Book Group Night," for book groups looking for new ideas about novels to read.

Nine-year-old Oskar Schell lives in New York City. In his spare time, he likes to write letters to famous people, play the tambourine, and think up new ideas for inventions to save people's lives. But Oskar also had days when he's very sad, or as he puts it, he has "heavy boots." His father died in the World Trade Towers on 9/11, and Oskar is keeping a secret from his mother and grandmother about one of his memories of that day. Months after the tragedy, Oskar finds a key among his father's things in an envelope marked "Black." He's instantly convinced that if he can find whatever the key opens, he will find something wonderful. He decides its his mission to visit every person in New York City with the last name of Black to see if they know what the key opens.

So begins "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close," by Jonathan Safran Foer. This is a novel for people who don't mind serious topics, but also enjoy a sense of the fantastic. Foer likes to throw in things that make a reader think, "That couldn't really happen, could it?" Perspectives shift -- sometimes Oskars' grandparents tell the story. The author also experiments with typography. One character literally circles words in the book in red, for example, and we see the red circles on the page.

Foer's first novel was the critically acclaimed "Everything is Illuminated," a novel about an author named Jonathan Safran Foer who travels to the Ukraine to find the village where his Jewish relatives lived before they died in the Holocaust. ("Everything is Illuminated" became a film you may remember starring Elijah Wood.)

Foer's work tends to get strong reactions from readers. Some people think of him as a "love him or hate him" kind of writer. About his work, Foer himself says, "Books make people less alone. That, before and after everything else, is what books do. They show us that conversations are possible across distances.''

If you like adventurous fiction about important world events, you will like "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close," by Jonathan Safran Foer.

Michelle Obama biography

2009-01-23T05:28:00.003-05:00

Just to note it, here's a link to a review I wrote about a biography of Michelle Obama. Bottom line:

For researchers and investigators, (the book) is mostly a compendium of the known record, although Mundy gets bonus points for her easy-to-read prose style and for documenting her sources well in above-average end notes. For confirmed Michelle Obama fans or for those who are simply intrigued by a new first lady and would like to know more, Michelle is great night-table reading.

It was interesting writing this because I wanted to make sure I was just talking about the book and not veering off into extraneous commentary on Michelle Obama herself. My other goal was to summarize the book for the people who read reviews so they don't have to read the whole book.

Readers Advisory Class

2009-01-14T22:16:00.004-05:00

I've finished all the core courses for library science school and now I'm into eclectic electives. The one I'm in now is awesome: The course title is Adult Services in Libraries, but it might be more accurately described as Reader Advisory. Whatever you call it, it teaches all the ins and outs of recommending books for adult leisure reading. One of the primary assignments is book talks, where the librarian gives a 10-minute talk recommending a particular title. We have to give four book talks in four different categories this semester. We get to pick the books.

Here's are the categories and the books I've selected:

Notable fiction, i.e. a recent work of fiction that has won a major award. I selected "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close," by Jonathan Safran Foer.
Notable nonfiction, same deal but for nonfiction. I chose "The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals," by Jane Mayer.
A work of genre fiction from a genre with which we are personally not familiar. I chose "The Tin Roof Blowdown," a Dave Robichaux detective novel, by James Lee Burke.
A work of notable fiction in translation. I chose "The Book of Chameleons," translated from the Portuguese, by José Eduardo Agualusa.

So far the class is excellent, excellent, excellent. Really interesting. In fact, I should be blogging more stuff from it like theories of reading and my new favorite reading theorist, Louise Rosenblatt. As usual, apologies for my very sporadic posting and I will try to do better soon. Sometimes life feels just too busy.

James Joyce reference

2008-12-16T22:41:00.003-05:00

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

2008-12-16T21:18:00.002-05:00

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

2008-12-16T20:35:00.004-05:00

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

2008-12-13T09:31:00.001-05:00

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

2008-11-29T16:29:00.003-05:00

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

2008-11-26T07:42:00.004-05:00

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

2008-11-22T08:40:00.007-05:00

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.

2008-11-19T08:02:00.003-05:00

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

2008-11-13T20:18:00.001-05:00

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.

2008-11-10T21:26:00.000-05:00

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 ...

2008-11-08T09:34:00.003-05:00

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

2008-11-02T16:04:00.002-05:00

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

2008-11-01T09:37:00.002-04:00

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

2008-10-26T16:04:00.006-04:00

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

2008-10-05T20:12:00.004-04:00

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

2008-09-26T08:45:00.003-04:00

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)

2008-09-23T21:34:00.003-04:00

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

2008-09-21T17:58:00.004-04:00

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

2008-09-16T00:37:00.003-04:00

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

2008-09-15T08:30:00.002-04:00

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

2008-09-14T16:47:00.004-04:00

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

2008-09-14T09:08:00.006-04:00

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

2008-09-12T22:26:00.001-04:00

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.

Pick one epigraph, not two. One epigraph has punch and power. Two epigraphs make you look indecisive.
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

2008-09-04T09:33:00.004-04:00

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

2008-09-03T09:06:00.001-04:00

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

2008-09-01T22:23:00.005-04:00

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:

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.
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.
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.
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!

2008-08-21T08:35:00.003-04:00

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

2008-08-14T07:20:00.004-04:00

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

2008-08-12T08:08:00.000-04:00

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

2008-08-03T17:44:00.002-04:00

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

2008-07-31T21:21:00.002-04:00

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

2008-07-20T20:44:00.004-04:00

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

2008-07-10T21:56:00.002-04:00

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

2008-07-06T22:50:00.005-04:00

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

2008-06-30T21:24:00.002-04:00

Literary Comfort Food

2008-06-21T08:52:00.004-04:00

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

2008-06-07T09:38:00.001-04:00

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

2008-06-04T07:11:00.000-04:00

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 ...

2008-06-02T22:07:00.002-04:00

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

2008-05-30T21:05:00.004-04:00

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

2008-05-25T13:54:00.001-04:00

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

2008-05-17T10:05:00.007-04:00

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

2008-05-12T21:44:00.008-04:00

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!

2008-04-20T21:39:00.003-04:00

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

2008-04-12T08:29:00.002-04:00

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

2008-04-12T08:11:00.000-04:00

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!

2008-04-06T15:31:00.000-04:00

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

2008-04-01T21:21:00.001-04:00

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

2008-03-28T22:00:00.003-04:00

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.

What I read during our recent trip

2008-03-27T08:15:00.004-04:00

A certain someone (Ryan F.) has compared me unfavorably with my pal over at Sunny Southwest, saying that I don't post as often as she does. Sad but true. In that spirit, I'm going to concentrate in April on posting and not worrying so much about links or multimedia.

We got back from a trip to Pittsburgh this week. The spouse raised his eyebrows because I brought four books on a five-day trip, but I'm glad I did.

I finished Searching for Bobby Fischer by Fred Waitzkin on the plane. This is the memoir (it became a movie) of a chess dad and how his little son became national champion. Lots of interesting stuff on where a parent's ambition ends and a child's begins. The father and son also go to Russia for an exhibition -- this is the 1980s, the Soviet era -- and there are fascinating examinations of how the Russian government viewed chess players as important symbols for the promotion of communism and thereby corrupted the game.

I finished The Web Library for my library science class "Digital Libraries." It's a guide to free, high-quality information sources on the Web. My biggest gripe about this book is that it was published in 2002 and some of it is out of date. But it had interviews with information professionals that I found useful and have blogged about previously.

I also finished The Ha-Ha on this trip, which I will blog about later as our book group is meeting tonight to discuss it. (It was very good.)

I did not get to read my fourth book, Glut: Mastering Information through the Ages, by Alex Wright. It's good and I'm about halfway through it. It starts at the beginning of human history, and I'm in the Dark Ages right about now.

So reading three out of four books is not a bad record for this trip.

More on keeping books

2008-03-16T13:38:00.003-04:00

I'm still thinking about hoarding books versus letting them go. I ran across this interview with Michael S. Hart, founder of the very cool Project Gutenberg, where you can find many, many free e-books. If it's no longer under copyright and a volunteer entered the text, it's on Project Gutenberg.
Here's what Hart said in an interview with Nick Tomaiuolo in the book The Web Library:

Under "ye olde" system, versus under the new system, if you've got a library of 1,000 books, you're pretty cool. A personal library of 1,000 books in a room is impressive. Now you can fit 10,000 books on a DVD, and nobody knows how cool you are because the collection looks small. ... Under the "olde" system you can look cool just by displaying the books. Under the new system you actually have to read them to look cool. It's a big difference. In "ye olde" system you are defining yourself by what you own as property; in the new way you are investing in yourself by reading, not simply in possessing the physical books.

I really liked this sentiment. It's both democratic and meritocratic. It also made me feel better about purging some of the physical copies of books I've already read.
Though I do have to mention that last week author Samantha Power came up in the news, for calling Hillary Clinton a "monster." (Power is an Obama supporter; she apologized for the comment and left the campaign.) It was pretty nice to be able to stroll over to my book shelf and pull down her book A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. The book is still under copyright and not available as an e-book in the resources to which I have access.

Free Lunch by David Cay Johnston

2008-03-12T21:23:00.000-04:00

Here's a recent book review I wrote.

It begins:

Corporations and the rich are taking this country for a ride, sucking tax breaks and subsidies from the public trough in subtle and not-so-subtle ways to avoid public outcry. That's what New York Times reporter David Cay Johnston argues in his new book, Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You With the Bill).

Whether it's jobs moved overseas, the health care system, utility deregulation or taxpayer-subsidized sports stadiums, Johnston's book documents the many ways that the middle and lower classes are supporting big business and the wealthy.

Johnston, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter, uses real-life examples and everyday people to make his case. He addresses familiar topics and obscure ones, and he presents sophisticated economic transactions in layman's terms.

Life of Pi, again

2008-02-23T08:55:00.001-05:00

The spouse was asking me why I didn't recommend one of my favorite novels, Life of Pi, to the presidential candidates. Well, I said, "Life of Pi" is more about personal belief -- the decisions every human being has to make about what they will believe about things they can't see or prove. That includes religious belief, but it's also about what kinds of things are possible in the world, kind of metaphysical questions. I don't think a president in particular needs to consider those questions any more than anyone else. They're important questions for everyone.
Not that the question of faith can't be a political question. It clearly is, and lately you can see it in a round of quasi-political books advocating atheism: Christopher Hitchens' God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything or Sam Harris' Letter to a Christian Nation. Those books (which, to be clear, I have read only reviews of) remind me of what "Life of Pi" says about atheists. Our hero young Pi -- who is so religious he embraces Hinduism, Christianity and Islam equally -- encounters his science teacher, Mr. Kumar, at the zoo. Admiring the animals, Mr. Kumar tells Pi he is an atheist:

"When I was your age, I lived in bed, racked with polio. I asked myself every day, 'Where is God? Where is God? Where is God?' God never came. It wasn't God who saved me -- it was medicine. Reason is my prophet and it tells me that as a watch stops, so we die. It's the end. If the watch doesn't work properly, it must be fixed here and now by us. One day we will take hold of the means of production and there will be justice on earth."
This was all a bit much for me. The tone was right -- loving and brave -- but the details seemed bleak. I said nothing.

A bit later, Pi reflects:

It was my first clue that atheists are my brothers and sisters of a different faith, and every word they speak speaks of faith. Like me, they go as far as the legs of reason will carry them -- and then they leap.

Gnash, gnash

2008-02-23T08:50:00.000-05:00

Oh the vexatious cull!
I got rid of my John McCain memoir. Gave it away or something.
What was I thinking?
I was thinking, "He's running for president, every library in the country will keep this book forever. I don't need to keep it."
Now I'm thinking, "I want to look at that book and I don't feel like dragging down to the library to get it."
Grrrr ... .

Sherman Alexie and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

2008-02-03T23:48:00.000-05:00

I've read several reviews and news stories about the author Sherman Alexie. I first heard of him in the '90s when he was an up-and-coming young Native American writer who had published a book of stories with the truly fabulous title of "The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven." He later wrote the screenplay to the film "Smoke Signals," a novel, and another collection of well-reviewed short stories. But Alexie was sadly on my list of Writers I Just Haven't Gotten Around to Reading Yet, Even Though I Would Like To. (I should formalize this list and post it.)
He has a young adult novel out now that is getting stellar reviews, and this week when I was at the university library, a copy was sitting on the new books table, so I snagged it.
What a great book! Hearkening back to my MLK post from last week, it's a living blend of sharply marked opposites. Funny and uplifting, sad and bleak and depressing. It's about Arnold Spirit, Jr., a teenager who decides to leave the reservation to attend the all-white high school, in hopes of improving his education and his fortunes. He also draws cartoons: "Who My Parents Would Have Been if Somebody Had Paid Attention to Their Dreams," for example, and "How to Pretend You're Not Poor."
Like many good YA (Young Adult) novels, "The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian" dwells a lot on budding sexuality and the body. In the above video clip, you'll hear how Arnold and his new friend Gordy talk about boners, in the context of getting excited about books. (It's worth listening to Alexie's reading.)
But Alexie's above reading ends before my favorite part. The scene goes on:

"I don't think you should run through life with a real erect penis. But you should approach each book -- you should approach life -- with the real possibility that you might get a metaphorical boner at any point."
"A metaphorical boner!" I shouted. "What the heck is a metaphorical boner?"
Gordy laughed.
"When I say boner, I really mean joy," he said.
"Then why didn't you say joy? You didn't have to say boner. Whenever I think about boners, I get confused."
"Boner is funnier. And more joyful."
Gordy and I laughed.
He was an extremely weird dude. But he was the smartest person I'd ever known. He would always be the smartest person I'd ever known.

Happy Birthday James Joyce

2008-02-02T14:31:00.001-05:00

Bust of James Joyce
Originally uploaded by spoonreader

Today is the 126th anniversary of James Joyce. Happy Birthday to the master! Yes, I say yes!

Mark and Angie at Sandycove
Originally uploaded by spoonreader

And here is a photo of me and my love at the James Joyce Museum and Tower at Sandycove, near Dublin. This is from back in August.

Books and the Presidential Campaign

2008-02-02T12:38:00.001-05:00

Katie Couric asked the presidential candiates which single book they would take with them to the White House, aside from the Bible. Read about it here.
Barack Obama and Mitt Romney cited recent history books. Obama picked Team of Rivals, a biography of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin. Mitt Romney picked John Adams by David McCullough. I was pleased by their picks, because I suspect they chose books they actually had read and enjoyed.
I was less impressed by the old safetys. John McCain named Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith. Rudy Giuliani and Hillary Clinton both wanted The Federalist Papers.
Mike Huckabee, on the other hand, picked a book I'd never heard of, called Whatever Happened to the Human Race. A little research on my part reveals that this is a serious philosophical book with a Christian orientation on life issues. Barnes and Noble says:

In this moving book, the renowned pediatric surgeon and Surgeon General of the United States, C. Everett Koop, M.D., joins with one of the leading Christian thinkers of our day, Francis A. Schaeffer, to analyze the widespread implications and frightening loss of human rights brought on by today's practices of abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia. They see the present as a crucial turning point. Choices are being made that undermine human rights at their most basic level. Practices once labeled "unthinkable" are now considered acceptable. The destruction of human life, young and old, is being sanctioned on an ever-increasing scale by the medical profession, by the courts, by parents, and by silent citizens.

Meanwhile, Bill Moyers asked his viewers which book they would recommend for the president to read. A lot of people submitted answers here. I don't see too many interesting suggestions though, and some of the answers are just silly.
What would I suggest? The first book that popped into my head was Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, which isn't about politics or history or anything like that. It's a short, lyrical novel about a country minister who is dying and writing a letter to leave to his young son. To me, the novel is about humility and the limits of knowledge, and how good-hearted people can disagree vehemently on the best way to solve problems. This was more of an intuitive choice; it's just the first thing I thought of. If I think of something more apropos, I'll post again.

When Teen Lit Geeks Grow Up

2008-01-23T19:52:00.000-05:00

I had a wonderful couple of days visiting a dear old friend with whom I share a special love of reading. We go way back, back 20 years ago to the high school where we met. We were what I would now call Lit Geeks, using Geek in the tech sense of an astute, obsessive expert. There was nothing nerdish about us. We were COOL. Really. Our school was just that kind of place.
Anyway, she blogged so well about our old exploits that I'm going to let her post speak for itself, at least for the time being.
So if you want to read about the crashing of the faculty Christmas party, or guess which Romantic poet served as my alter ego, or even see a photo of one of our special T-shirts, check out her post here.

Martin Luther King Jr. and "Strength to Love"

2008-01-20T14:08:00.000-05:00

Martin Luther King Jr. Day is tomorrow. I truly love a book of his sermons called "Strength to Love."

My favorite is the first one, "A Tough Mind and a Tender Heart." King talks about the need for us to combine disparate qualities, in this case using the Bible verse from Matthew where Jesus sends the Apostles out to preach, telling them, "Be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves." Whenever I turn back to this essay, I find it very difficult to put it down because the words flow along so well, building up to King's advocacy of nonviolence.

In this this passage, though, King talks about science and religion, a theme I've been thinking about this weekend. He says there may be conflicts between "softminded religionists and toughminded scientists, but not between science and religion." He goes on:

"Science investigates; religion interprets. Science gives man knowledge which is power; religion gives man wisdom which is control. Science deals mainly with facts; religion deals mainly with values. The two are not rivals. They are complementary. Science keeps religion from sinking into the valley of crippling irrationalism and paralyzing obscurantism. Religion prevents science from falling into the marsh of obsolete materialism and moral nihilism."

You can read the whole essay online here.

Bobby Fischer, R.I.P

2008-01-18T12:45:00.000-05:00

Bobby Fischer died today (read the obit here), and it brought back a lot of memories about how much I love the game of chess. Not that I'm very good at it, but I used to spend a lot of time playing chess and particularly reading about the lives of the grandmasters. They were always these strange characters with interesting backgrounds, and I found something heroic about chess players who used their wits to triumph over those who would destroy them.

My favorite was Paul Morphy (1837-1884), the champion from my home state of Louisiana. Chess was his hobby; he was a lawyer by profession. He was supposed to have a formidable intellect; I read once that he could recite significant portions of the Louisiana civil code from memory. Apparently he became very eccentric toward the end, not unlike Bobby Fischer and Fischer's lamentable anti-Semitism.

Two books I want to read about chess:

Searching for Bobby Fischer: The contemporary memoir of a father who discovers his son is a chess prodigy. Contains funny bits about parents who seem to take the competition more seriously than the kids do. The movie was good, too.
The Kings of New York, subtitled A Year Among the Geeks, Oddballs, and Genuises Who Make Up America's Top High School Chess Team: Sports reporter Michael Weinreb looks at the world of competitive scholastic chess. Apparently it's about to be released in paperback under the new title "Game of Kings."

My Best Books of 2007

2008-01-09T21:27:00.000-05:00

I've been sitting on this post for over a week now because I wanted to craft the most perfect words of praise for my favorite books of 2007. Well, it's Jan. 9, so it is what it is.

In previous years, I've done "Best Of" lists for the year. This year, there's only three books that reached the level of excellence to my way of thinking.

The Best Fiction of 2007 goes to ...Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris. A comedic but serious novel of life-at-work: what happens when layoffs come to a Chicago advertising agency. The title is too hard to remember, but it's great. This book deserves a wider audience; I'm quite fond of it.
Best Nonfiction of 2007 goes to ... The Braindead Megaphone by George Saunders. Essays on life, politics, and the media, all keenly observed with a sharp sense of humor and an abiding spirit of compassion. Saunders is known for his off-beat short stories; this was his first work of nonfiction, published at a nice price in paperback.
Special Commendation for a book I read in 2007 that published previously ...The Road by Cormac McCarthy. OK, nothing funny about this one. I was an emotionally spent wreck after reading it. One of the rare books that changed the way I see the world. It's about a father and son trying to survive a post-Apocolyptic dystopian landscape; they have to head south before winter hits. Many of us look at the world and wonder why evil exists; I suspect McCarthy looks at the world and wonders just as seriously why there's good. His book shows a world of evil with a tiny speck of luminescent good that somehow, miraculously endures.

Book Buying and the Budget

2008-01-05T14:44:00.000-05:00

For a New Year's Resolution, the spouse and I have decided that we are going to strictly budget in 2008 -- that is, keep an record by month of what we plan to spend, and then record what we actually do spend. I'm interested to how this affects my book buying. I do buy a lot of books, but in all honesty, a significant percentage of them are impulse buys -- not really considered and planned choices. I was thinking of instituting a personal rule that I have to check books out of the library or at least see if the library has them before I buy them.
I buy most of my books at my local bookstore. They're not as cheap as Amazon, but I think it's valuable to support a local business, and I value the staff's recommendations and expertise.
Now -- oh joy, oh happy day -- it's my turn to pick the book for my book group this month. We rotate pics. There are two conditions: First, you can't get input from other people in the group. This is so we get a good variety of books without any picks "by committee." Second, no one can have read the book. We all come to the book fresh as new readers.
So with the budget in mind, I'm going to pick a book that I own but that I haven't read. Here are some of the possible contenders.:

The Tin Roof Blowdown by James Lee Burke: Burke writes mystery novels set in Louisiana. This is his latest, set in post-Katrina New Orleans. It is supposed to be excellent with a literary bent, and I've never read him before.
Mothers and Sons by Colm Toibin. Short stories set in contemporary Ireland; Toibin has superb reputation as a serious fiction writer. He recently wrote a fictional life of Henry James ("The Master") that got great reviews. The only thing holding me back from picking this one is that my last pick was a contemporary Irish novel -- The Sea by John Banville. I may pick Toibin anyway.
The Ha Ha by Dave King. This is American fiction from 2005, about a brain-damaged Vietnam vet who befriends a little boy. The man doesn't speak, yet he narrates the novel. It's supposed to be a really good and has gotten great word of mouth.

I also have the following unread titles to consider:

Generation X by Douglas Coupland: I've never read this novel released in 1991 that gave the name to my age cohort;
Bayou Farewell by Mike Tidwell: Pre-Katrina nonfiction about Louisiana's vanishing coast line;
A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia by Victor Pelevin: Short stories from one of Russia's best contemporary writers;
New Stories from the South 2007 edited by Edward P. Jones: an anthology of last year's writing from Southerners.

So you can see I have quite a few choices. Feel free to comment and let me know what you think, excluding current book group members. I think I'm going to narrow it down to three books, then read the first chapters of all three, then pick one.
Update: This post has been amended. It originally said "The Ha Ha" was "about an autistic man who befriends a little boy." See comments for details.

John B. Kean and the spirit of Christmas

2007-12-22T16:39:00.002-05:00

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

2007-12-19T22:35:00.000-05:00

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

2007-12-19T22:18:00.000-05:00

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?