On the Shelf 10.9.12

 
Reading
Watership Down, Richard Abrams
It is hard for me to express how much I love this book.  As a kid, I only knew it from glimpses of the movie version that I stole while playing at my friend Tony's house, the friend who had HBO.  I remember only something about a black rabbit at the end, but I don't want to know more. I'm reading it now, out loud, to my seven and nine year old kids, usually near the wood stove now that it's colder, and it's such a great final hour of the day that I'm usually ready to be tucked into bed myself after a chapter or two.

If you don't know it, it's about rabbits, and they talk, but it's not a kids book, really--it's written with enough sophistication and there is enough subtlety of character here that most of today's popular young adult fiction looks laughably simple in comparison.  And that's what's odd about it: I dare say it could be a difficult read for someone not used to challenging themselves much beyond Harry Potter or The Hunger Games, but, at the same time, my kids hang on every word, and it's not like they're especially special or anything. And I just spoke to another student last week who first heard the book read to her by her dad when she was seven, and it's her favorite book, too.  

But anyway, it's wonderful.  The brave young rabbit Hazel, leading his small band to friendlier land, the descriptions of the land itself, the violence and fear that makes up the life of these small animals--it's one of the most affecting novels I've picked up in a long time.

"Disunion," a series on the Civil War at The New York Times blog The Opinionator .

I used to have a teacher who used to brag to us students that his Civil War final exam was so difficult that . . something, I don't really remember, but I know it was bad.  We never found out because, luckily, he had some kind of health thing that made him retire before we got that far.  Ever since, the Civil War has always hung there for me, like a war all my buddies went off to without me.  There has been some guilt.  But Disunion, a series of blog entries that focus on big and little stories of the war, is helping me to face this dark period of my personal history.  It's full of details that feel quaint now: generals too timid to pursue an enemy to take a crucial railway station, the effect on mortality caused by a simple change in the shape of bullets.  I still don't have a clear overall picture of the war, and would fail that test for sure today if forced to, but this blog gives me enough of the tiny stories that I would be able to bluff my way through an essay or two.

Watching

The first six seconds of this video of Allen Ginsberg walking down the street.  The video lasts a little over five minutes, a silent clip of home-video showing Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac walking down a Manhattan street in 1959, but all I care about are those first six seconds.  There's something infinitely cool about the way he swings his arms, his lazy smile, his whole beat poet swagger.  I don't love it as much as I love hearing him read his poem "America," but there is a lot of that poem in those few slow-motion seconds of film.

Listening
My Last.fm scobbles might say differently, but it feels like the only song I've really heard for the past few weeks now is the mellow and naive R&B of Donnie & Joe Emerson's "Baby."  The story of how their one album was recorded, forgotten for decades, and then re-discovered in a second-hand shop and given new life is so sad and weird it's funny, but there is nothing funny about this song. 

On the Shelf 8.23.12

Reading
I just read Autoportrait by the late Edouard Leve. It reads something like a memoir, but really it's just a long, disconnected, unparagraphed string of assertions about himself.  The opening lines:

When I was young, I thought Life, A User's Manual would teach me how to live and Suicide a User's Manual would teach me how to die.  I have spent three years and three months abroad.  I prefer to look to my left.

 It continues in that broken style for another 100 pages or so, and before long I started writing my own version, adding a line or two every few days as they occurred to me.  Any book that gets you to pick up a pen has to have some merit, I think.

I also can't stop thinking about "Marathon Man," a New Yorker article about Kip Litton, a dentist from Detroit who has recorded impressive finishes in dozens of marathons all over the country--all without, apparently, actually running them.  Even with the entire online running world obsessed with catching him (see the 200+ page thread about him at Letsrun.com), no one has figured out how he cheats, although it appears that some of the races he has done well in did not actually exist.  Mark Singer interviews Litton himself, who denies it all, and it is all you can do not to try to reach through the pages of the magazine and try to shake some sense into the guy.

Listening

Now that school has started back up, the best time for me to listen to music is usually when I'm in the kitchen making a weeknight dinner.  And lately, apart from the new Frank Ocean,  I'm back listening to Air again.  No matter what time of day it is, the weather, my state of mind, it always feels like the right time to listen to their album Moon Safari, a record that can make an evening making quesadillas or curry, or a drive to Target to pick up paper towels feel like a scene from a movie worth watching.  


Following

A Restless Transplant.  Guy quits his job, buys a van and starts driving up and down the west coast, surfing skateboarding, losing himself on lost.  His blog documents his travels with lonely pictures of fog-shrouded coastal roads in northern California and Mexican beach communities, and they leave me wondering if maybe he has figured something out.   Most surfers make me wonder that, actually.  They seem to touch some kind of wisdom that eludes mere golfers and joggers. 

Eating

My friend Tracy Row told me about this recipe that is supposed to recreate Chipotle's barbacoa burritos, and finally, this weekend, it is going to happen.  It has to.  Or at least I will get myself to Chipotle.

On the Shelf

I finally got a copy of The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard and opening it to any page is like a happy machine for me.  He says everything that comes into his head, he says way too much, he makes drawings of his to-do lists and creepy versions of old Nancy cartoons.  It's naive and easy and makes you want to start copying excerpts from "I Remember":

I remember solid red when you close your eyes to the sun.

I remember the pale green tint of Coca-Cola bottles.

I remember French kissing and figuring out it must have something to do with the tongue since there isn't anything else in the mouth except teeth.

And now I remember how I miss teaching Composition because assigning students to write their own "I Remember" led to the creation a lot of my all-time favorite student work.

Will Oldham has always been one of my favorite enigmatic singer-songwriters even though I once convinced a bunch of friends to go see him with me in Bloomington and he put on one of the most awkward live shows I've ever seen.  Except for Cat Power, which was so much worse.  His new book is pretty much all I want to read right now.  I envy his gypsy lifestyle, friends in every city, no mailing address of his own.  I would have to get rid of a lot of stuff to do that, though, and I would miss my family, and the stuff, too, probably.

This simple article about writing has me making sentences in my head and then playing with them as a new pastime when I am driving around the city in silence or standing in the yard staring at my stacks of firewood.

Months later, I am still returning to this collection of Leanne Shapton's drizzly and intimate watercolors.

Pulphead, Essays by John Jeremiah Sullivan

For months, Amazon.com has not shut up to me about John Jeremiah Sullivan's book of essays, Pulphead. Every visit to that site has shoved it in my face: the casual Windows Paint-made script of its cover page, the washed-out, gritty sentimentality of the photograph. Somehow, Amazon’s algorithms, or whatever you call them, had determined that it was the perfect book for me, the one I was destined to meet and fall in love with, the book that would make me happy.

I don't even remember ordering the book itself, but yesterday, it came in the mail, and on the same day I got a notice from the library that it had come in for me after I’d placed a hold notice for it. True story. I don’t remember doing either, but here the book was, so I took a day off from reading George Eliot and started into the first essay, “Upon the Rock," a pretty hysterical account of driving a 29’ RV to a Christian-rock festival in remote Pennsylvania.

It’s a story full of characters—mainly a small, odd group of male concert-goers from West Virginia who spend their time going frog-gigging, antagonizing the festival security guards, and talking about their faith. Because of their gregarious West Virginia goofiness, they come across as easy people to make fun of, and Sullivan does, quoting them to let them make themselves look silly:

“I was born in Louisville,” I said

“Really?” said Jake. “Is that on the Ohio River? . . Well, I know a dude that died who was from Ohio . . .”

When he does this, gets to come across as though he’s not a mean guy, he’s just letting these people speak in their own voices. But he’s choosing which quotations to include, and his choices usually create humor at their expense.

Sullivan comes across as a person of complicated faith here. One interesting passage for me is his recollection of a time he calls “his Jesus phase” in high school, something he remembers when he sees that aging Christian rock band Petra has taken the stage. It’s an interesting story, and it feels more like he’s pondering a subject for a future essay rather than treating it fully here, which is either sloppy writing or an interesting glimpse inside the narrator’s relationship to his subject.

In the end, Sullivan comes away as more in awe than he does bemused. After describing a sense of “sneering machismo” that most American males saunter around with in public places, stadiums, males, etc., he observes the following:

“In the three days I spent at Creation, I saw not one fight, heard not one word spoken in anger, felt at no time even mildly harassed. Yes, they were all of the same race, all believed the same stuff, and weren’t drinking, but there were also one hundred thousand of them.”

I am feeling an urge now to get a Lilly grant so that I can rent an RV and hit festivals all summer and meet people. I should get started on that.

Eric Baus

"Here is how to hand a glass deer a beetle." from "Glass Deer."

Oh, this guy and his poems. The newly released Scared Text is Eric Baus's third book and maybe my favorite and I can't even begin to speak about it. It is full of lines like this, lines that seem to make such perfect sense to themselves. "Oh," I think, "so that's how you hand a glass deer a beetle. I need to remember this."

The poems themselves feel matter of fact, so poised in their delivery, even when they are depicting moments of miniature, impossible violence:

There are several kings in a single fox. They haunt one another's brows. They hunt their brains for a broken stinger. A crown of hornets fleeces their phlox.

from "Hornet Fleece." I like the way "hunt" echoes "haunt" here. It makes me think the voice is mis-hearing or mis-reporting something, but doing it with confidence. That confidence helps make the all the fantastic action here seem plausible and even likely, which is pretty magical.

Baus and I actually went to the same high school, not at the same time, but we had the same teachers, both experienced the passionate maelstrom of Mr. Rusk's English class. How nice to know that our town can give birth to such, I don't know, difference, maybe. It is more than a little inspiring to me.

Currently

Some recent purchases

". . . they rode out on the round dais of the earth which alone was dark and no light to it and which carried their figures and bore them up into the swarming stars so that they rode not under them but among them and they rode at once like something jaunty and circumspect, like thieves newly loosed in that dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely jacketed against the cold and ten thousand worlds for the choosing." All the Pretty Horses (30).

As much as I think about re-reading The Savage Detectives, it's All the Pretty Horses that I seem to open up and browse the most. I open it and pretty soon I am reading it out loud, usually some passage like this, with stars in it, glum cowboys nearby. Right now I wonder about the repetition of "thieves" here. Is it awkward? Could he have chosen a different word the second time? Sometimes I like to think that it's evidence that the narrator is trying again, trying to get it right, but that doesn't really fit with the tone of tragic omniscience the narrator usually carries in this book. It's not the voice of a consciousness that wouldn't get it right the first time. But anyway, I'm glad to be back in this book again.

Someday I want to outfit one of these with some shelves, make it an ice-reading shack. I'll drag it out on Burt Lake and start spending some nice alone time there. When sportsmen knock on the door and ask if I'm getting any bites, if that is indeed what they normally say in these situations, I will nod and tell them "you have no idea." If they ask why there isn't a hole in the floor of my shack, I don't know what I'll do. Maybe read them some Kenneth Koch. Or nod, give them an unnerving smile, and answer "exactly."

Currently

Edward Abbey

Desert Solitaire, Edward Abbey
Between Parentheses, Roberto Bolano
Any Human Heart, William Boyd
Beautiful & Pointless, A Guide to Modern Poetry, David Orr
The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Perilous Journey, Trenton Lee Stewart

This week: 388 pages
Last week: 446 pages

Sentences of the Week:

1. "I'm in the stifling head of the trailer opening a can of beer, barefooted, about to go outside and relax after a hard day watching cloud formations." Desert Solitaire

2. "When a nonspecialist audience is responding well to a poem, its reaction is a kind of tentative pleasure, a puzzled interest that resembles the affection a traveler bears for a destination that both welcomes and confounds him." Beautiful & Pointless

3. "Larrain photographs a parked car and it seems to be going more than sixty miles an hour." Roberto Bolano, Between Parentheses.

I read mostly from Any Human heart this week--up until I realized that finishing the book would kill him--and as much as I enjoy the book, there are not a lot of stand-out sentences to my ear. So William Boyd gets shut out again this week.

Edward Abbey is not as consistent a writer, and he seems self-conscious about it almost, but there is some fun variety here. In this week's winning sentence, he's referring to his job as a caretaker at Arches National Monument, where his main duty appears to be passing the time.

I'm not sure what you call this season we're in now is, but it's my favorite.It's not really summer anymore. The evening light has changed and there is a cooler air, like summer left a door open by mistake and let in a nice draft.

Telling June Apple that she's read enough Peanuts for one day.

Hammock reading makes this particular kids book somewhat more bearable.

Catherine continues to work wonders with the cutting garden.

Any Human Heart

This book still feels like something of a guilty read for me because I'm not used to reading things in which so much happens. I'm just ripping through it, though, sad that it's almost over but also sad, I'm realizing, that, because it is written in the first-person style of a journal, the end of the book means the end (death) of Logan Mountstuart.

He's a sad, pill-popping mystery to himself, Logan is, but I still care about the guy. Ominous how his new year's entries for the late 50's say "need to cut down on the booze," and his early 60's entries are starting to say "need to cut down on the booze and pills."

A peek inside June's new indoor reading yurt.

Flower Buddha happy in the Zinnias and Gomphrena.

new n+1.

Compared to The Believer, n+1, as I understand it, is supposed to be similarly omnivorous and, I don't know, "youthful" or something, but more willing to look critically at its own generation. I think some people believe The Believer and stuff coming out of the Dave Eggers empire in general can be too pleased with itself or too willing to sit back and just be a cheerleader for whatever cleverness their friends have submitted. n+1 is supposed to be more serious, and I do find myself laughing much less frequently than I do when I'm, say, browsing Timothy McSweeney's Internet Tendency.

Toward this goal of seriousness, the issue that came yesterday, no. 12, includes an attempted take-down of the taste-setting music site Pitchfork. Richard Beck, the cheeky so and so, gives P4k a "5.4," and tries to explain to us why we should not like it either. But it's an unconvincing piece, and I don't think it is at all honest with itself about its own ambivalence. Anyone who goes to that site is ambivalent about it. Much of the good new music we like we heard about there, but we worry, at the same time, that we are too dependent on it, that it is too popular, as if we can only maintain our indie cred if we know when to jump ship just before it loses its cool.

Beck seems to be arguing that this has already happened, but he can only throw a mish-mash of hand-wringing complaints at it. He accuses the writing of being too sloppily exuberant, but also concedes that that is the nature of the genre. He points out that no critical stars have arisen from the site, but also suggests that this anti-star feel is a conscious strategy on their part, and may be part of the reason for their success. He accuses them of being "king-makers" (as if Pitchfork were more responsible for the success of Arcade Fire than Arcade Fire themselves) and suggests that we are all missing out on more challenging and novel music as a result. Ultimately, he blames the music itself, arguing that we should "pursue a musical culture more worth our time." Go for it, Mr. Beck. But until that happens, you and I both know that we'll still be reading Pitchfork every day and agreeing with much of what they say.

In the end, he sounds just as conflicted and unresolved about this as we all are, but unaware of that ambivalence or even dishonest about it. He also could have acknowledged the Pitchfork spinoff, Altered States, which attempts to fill in some of those eclipsed musical corners he complains of, but maybe he didn't know about it.

Most importantly, though, Beck's single article had me thinking more than any five issues of The Believer put together, and that's why n+1 is worthwhile.

UPDATE: Reading this over, I really sound like a blowhard. "Go for it, Mr. Beck"? What was that about? I still think that this article doesn't quite explain to me my own ambivalence toward its subject like I wanted it to, but the author deserves more credit than I give him here. I guess the snark bug took over when I was writing.

Currently

Any Human Heart, William Boyd
Beautiful & Pointless, A Guide to Modern Poetry, David Orr
The Great Frustration, Seth Fried
The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Perilous Journey, Trenton Lee Stewart

This week: 446 pages

Sentences of the Week:

(1) "Our job was simple: get the monkey in the capsule."

--from "Those of Us in Plaid," in Seth Fried's The Great Frustration.

(2) "There are several things in this passage that seem interestingly right to me, but there are several things that are interestingly wrong as well."

--Beautiful & Pointless

(3) "Oh for a world that contains Cynthia Goldbergs!"

--Any Human Heart

A decent crop of sentences this week, but the winner by far is the hilarious Seth Fried, and if I wanted to be totally fair, he could probably have taken all three spots this week. I've even read these stories out loud to the kids and they get it; Birk keeps repeating this line about the monkey. It's the first line of the story, and maybe one of my favorite first lines to any story I can remember, though, honestly, I can't remember all that many.

Birk, Birds

Birk and June Apple at the A.C. extension garden a few nights ago. This looks like an album cover to me for some reason.
Decided these frames weren't quite right at our neighbor Barb's garage sale. She did have the exact kind of old popcorn popper I use to roast coffee beans, though, and gave it to me for free. I usually spend around $50 on ebay for them. Good old Barb. First time I ever met her.And for an anniversary present tonight, C gave me a t-shirt she made out of this drawing I did a few weeks ago. New favorite shirt!

I spend too much time looking at other peoples' houses on the internet, and sometimes I see one that is so beautiful it almost feels like a cruel hoax.

It's less about the house than it is the imagined life of solitude and no plastic toys on the floor and solitude.

In my own experiments this summer, I have figured out that solitude is found early, when the garden is still cool, not too late to water a corner or two. And not playing music or Radiolab podcasts around the house can extend this period of peace well into the late morning, when the pressure of errands starts to impede.

Our kitchen fox has gone all Anglophile on us lately. Stiff upper lip and that sort of thing, don't you know, what what. And the wolves keep dropping spoilers. I keep threatening the eraser, but isn't doing much good.

before.

after.

I love a nice walk up the street to Caliente. I get to pronounce the words papa relleno and ropa vieja and tostones, trying to communicate to the smiling owner that I, unlike most of her customers, know a thing or two about Spanish. But I know nothing, nothing, except that I like Cuban sandwiches and that I will read every last article the internet ever makes about drug violence in Mexico.

This issue of the Paris Review starts with a meandering and kind of self-indulgent piece by the late Edouard Leve, but I love it. It is so hard sometimes to know whether or not I should love something I read, and I found myself questioning myself as I read this one. "Should I really be liking this as much as I am," I will ask. And I never answer myself, but instead answer in the imagined voices of friends. I try to imagine whether Catherine would put the book down or read it in two days. If there is a part of me that suspects I'm being taken in, I imagine Joseph bestowing his inimitable "Ugh," Or if it is good in a way I can't describe, I imagine him giving it a gentle, thoughtful nod with his chin as if he's thinking about Pynchon. If I'm trying to decide what it is about the language that attracts me, I think "what would Dawn say"? It's amazing how little I participate in the formation of my own judgment.

quick update.

5 min. ago, the street outside my office during a sudden hard rain storm during the sunset.

During the day, about to turn the under-used herb garden into more of a cuttings garden.

And the dog, somehow, lives. And is pretty happy, actually.

And meanwhile I am in one of those phases where all I want to do is read a long John McPhee book about anything, just read him telling me about the regular Joes he meets in his travels around, this time, Alaska. It's so relaxing. I finished The Leopard recently, too, and I miss the prince a little bit and his untended gardens with their parallel lives. It's striking to me how much that novel reminds me of Faulkner's Hamlet/Town/Mansion trilogy, with the Snopes family standing in for the classless and conniving and ineluctably rising merchant class of Italy.

It's that nice part of the school year when all of your planning is pretty much done, the day-to-day obsession with the question that never leaves: "what else can I do to avoid boring these poor students to death?" There is a momentum to this part of the year, and we all feel it, students and teachers both. Or, I don't know, maybe I'm the only one who feels that way and everyone else thinks things are dragging on; I've never bothered to ask.

But for me, the summer has started in my head, it's true, because the worrying about planning is what invades the rest of my life the most. Now all I do is ration the grading that needs to be done each day, enjoy these last couple of weeks with students I will never know this way again, and then go home to think about my garden and read. And plan for our awesome trip to Spain that is going to be so awesome.

So that's where things stand.

From a fun tumblr called Outdoor Sanctuaries.

O, I haven't been here much lately. It happens in spring. One of the nice things about winter is the way it forces you to narrow your focus. Instead of inside and outside things, you can only do the inside, for the most part. The spring happens and, as I said to my friend Clare the other day, I see all these perennial weeds popping out early and I feel like my laundry has been scattered about the yard. All I want to do is be out there doing the yard laundry.

I need to start a demanding book of some kind is what I need to do. I'd been avoiding a novel because anything I started would have lain mute in the shadow of Adam Bede, so I went to anthologies like the new Pushcart, short and funny memoirs like Scott Carrier's odd ramble Running After Antelope and this other one I forget, plus some other stuff like Mark Doty's The Art of Description and Michael Schmidt's Lives of the Poets. And they are okay, but without some novel going at the same time I feel a little directionless.

So today was warmer than they said it would be, and I was able, after a hearty Easter brunch and a damp egg hunt, to do enough yard laundry to ease my conscience, take the whole family to the driving range, and then come home to start The Leopard. I can already tell it was the right thing to do. The prince has an overripe garden outside, and even the decorated walls of the palace itself are described like a something growing out of control. It feels a little familiar, that is. And now, to go read myself to bed.

O, elementary school. It does not change, cannot be changed. Our first family science fair. Second place for attempting to discover what will happen if you put sugar in different bottles of things and shake them. Based on the first place ribbons I saw, it is clear that the science fair judges of today have a distressing lack of experimental spirit, awarding only those projects that answer questions we all know the answers to: yes, potatoes and lemons still light bulbs, you can still make crystals with a crystal-making kit, heavy things still sink.

Second place is reserved, it must be, for the questions that grown ups can't answer and are afraid to find out. And this is why the ribbons are red. The judges are looking in the wrong places.

Next year I will bring my own special ribbons--I think they will be black, maybe with an unblinking eye in the center--to award those projects that leave me cold and trembling, the ones that I hurry by, with results that have been slowly sliding down their cardboard boundaries all night and pooling on the folding table below them or that explain their research in a 10 point font named "Scrawl." Until next year.

We learned a lot about the Civil War.

And the book is alive and well.