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While shelving books at work the other day, I felt an irrational surge of anger towards Charles Bukowski for coming between David Budbill and Hayden Carruth.

In honor of National Poetry Month, of which today is the final day, here is my favorite poem by David Budbill, favorite poet of so many people who "don't like poetry". From his collection Moment to Moment:

Bugs in a Bowl

Han Shan, that great and crazy, wonder-filled Chinese poet of a thousand years ago, said:

We're just like bugs in a bowl. All day going around never leaving their bowl.

I say, That's right! Every day climbing up
the steep sides, sliding back.

Over and over again. Around and around.
Up and back down.

Sit in the bottom of the bowl, head in your hands,
cry, moan, feel sorry for yourself.

Or. Look around. See your fellow bugs.
Walk around.

Say, Hey, how you doin'?
Say, Nice Bowl!

I was overambitious in my hopes of posting daily through March. Apparently, I would rather spend my time reading good writing than writing poorly about it. The main thing I've gained from this exercise is a feel for how challenging it is to compose and polish a coherent piece of writing, no matter how short, every day. So far as the books were concerned, some I remember better than others, which was as expected.

It quickly became evident that this project (conceived as it was in a fit of mild snarkiness) was not a great use of my time. My reason for trying to write this blog is to follow up with and respond to the literature that resonates with me. These were not, for the most part, the books that I want to be writing about -- the ones that I remember most vividly and still think about, and the ones I am currently seeking. Things that are engaging, engrossing, troubling. Stuff that confuses me and causes me to notice something new and want to learn more. I need to think up a project that will be a better vehicle for exploring and structuring those thoughts.

Author: Julia Alvarez
Date completed: March 31, 2010
What I remember:

This is one of those books that I felt I ought to read, since it is something of a contemporary American classic. It was the first work I read by Julia Alvarez, and I wasn't that into it. (As tends to be the case with books that I select from a vague sense of obligation rather than genuine curiosity...) I didn't find it personally compelling or otherwise engaging at the time, and so put it (and Alvarez) out of my mind for almost a year.

The following winter I was on an essay-reading kick, which led me to pick up her collection Something to Declare. These personal essays were, by contrast, so compelling that I immediately went on to read two of her other novels, which I appreciated much more, being better equipped with an understanding of the author's life and history and what it meant to be Dominican-American in the 1960s and 70s. The upshot is that, despite my initial, lukewarm reaction to How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, Alvarez is currently one of my favorite authors and I am quite eager to re-read it.

Author: Julie Wakefield
Date completed: March 28, 2011
What I remember:

Edmond Halley, he of the famous comet, had other scientific interests. Shifting his gaze away from the sky for a bit, he made significant contributions to the field of navigation through his work on magnetism. People were still scratching their heads over how to calculate longitude in the 18th century, and Halley's efforts were valuable in helping ocean-going sailors figure out where the heck they were. He did other stuff too. Highly readable and, as biographies go, comparatively short.

Book this post was intended to be about: A Car, Some Cash, and a Place to Crash
Author: Rebecca Knight
Date completed: March 21, 2009
What happened:

This morning I wrote the paragraph below, thinking it was about this title. Then I looked it up to find the author's first name and discovered that I was talking about a completely different book! A Car, Some Cash, and a Place to Crash is a guide to navigating post-college life, which does sound familiar now that I'm thinking about it. When I read it I was already several years out of college and past the point of finding it useful, so perhaps that is why it didn't stick. In any case, I don't recall it nearly as well as a book called World Stompers, which I actually read in June of 2008. I'm not sure how I managed to mix them up; you'd think the word "car" in the title would have tipped me off that it was not about backpacking...

Having adjusted the dates, this is what I had to say about World Stompers, by Brad Olsen:

I had travel on the brain in the spring of 2008. Ultimately I did not strike out with a backpack for another two years, but I read this offbeat travel guide while daydreaming about the possibilities. The author is a decidedly life-on-the-edge, spontaneous sort and offered advice accordingly. I prefer to do more planning myself, but it's fun to read about others' more adventurous adventures. Included are country overviews, a lot of useful information about finding work abroad to fund extended excursions, and a lot of less-useful-to-me information about partying opportunities. Fodor's this is not. Even Lonely Planet looks rather conservative by comparison. A particularly memorable tidbit was about sourcing weed in different countries -- and the consequences of being caught with it. I happen to think smoking is a waste of time, but does it merit life imprisonment or possible execution? Yikes.

Of course, I may not be remembering that correctly.

Author: Katherine Paterson
Date completed: March 20, 2010
What I remember:

This is another Vermont-affiliated novel. Katherine Paterson has written some of my all-time favorite children's and young adult books (Lyddie, Bridge to Terabithia...). The Day of the Pelican was being considered for a community-wide read at the college where I worked, so I made a point of reading it. It is a young adult novel about the experiences of an 11-year-old Muslim girl and her family, uprooted by ethnic conflict in Kosovo, who settle in Vermont as refugees. I thought it was a sensitive and age-appropriate treatment of the topic. I was not as taken with it as with some of Paterson's other works, but it may just be that it's difficult to compare anything to a book that one loved and was deeply affected by in childhood.

Regrettably, I can't recall anything about the pelican to which the title refers.

Author: Howard Frank Mosher
Dates completed: March 19 & 20, 2011
What I remember:

I read these back-to-back in two days and can't quite separate them. North Country is the product of Howard Frank Mosher's midlife crisis road trip along the US-Canadian border, describing the places, characters, and customs he encountered en route and connecting the pieces of his story-telling life in the process. To call it "midlife crisis" is maybe overly dramatic -- he may not have used the phrase himself -- but the journey did play a role in his coming to terms with middle age. I enjoyed everything about it: travelogue, narrative of a writer's life, mirrored inner and outer journeys, the tone and humor of the author, the landscape itself. I love the northern woods and the anarchic independence of people who are drawn to borderlands; I love liminal spaces of all kinds. It was the first thing I'd read by him, and as soon as it was finished I made a beeline for the nearest of his novels, The Fall of the Year.

It was ... okay. What was most interesting to me about it was knowing that it had been written shortly after North Country, and being able to see how some of his sources came from stories people had told him during the trip. The Fall of the Year, like several of his other novels, follows the townspeople of Kingdom Common, situated in a fictionalized version of the rugged and mountainous Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. I love the landscape, both the reality and as he imagines it. I was disappointed not to love the book, since he is a local author and this is my home territory, in a way. But his fiction style, as represented here and in another novel I've read since (On Kingdom Mountain), just isn't to my taste. It is straightforward but somehow less direct than his nonfiction voice, more "folksy" and almost jocular. It makes sense that the voice would be different, since The Fall of the Year is told from the main character's first-person perspective, but I felt the same way about On Kingdom Mountain, which is in third-person. The style of the language simply doesn't appeal to me. It is intriguing to think about a novelist as participant in his own story, stepping into the guise of a raconteur who, though he does not appear within the story proper, is nonetheless a person belonging to the fictional world in a way that the actual writer himself cannot.

Though I wasn't wild about the novels I have read so far, they haven't put me off trying more of his fiction. On the strength of North Country alone I expect to continue picking up more of his work as I keep reading.

Author: Ethan Hawke
Date completed: March 18, 2010
What I remember:

I sort of read this by accident. It came to my attention when I was shelving a cart of books in the library and noticed the author's name. Ethan Hawke -- the actor? A Hollywood pretty face writing something that wasn't an "autobiography" struck me as a relatively unusual occurrence, so I opened it to take a look and found myself unexpectedly engrossed. It's not one that springs to mind when people ask me for book recommendations, but it wasn't awful. The protagonist is a young actor (no big surprise) who has recently, rapidly attained some degree of fame and the pressures and ego issues that accompany that. There is a girlfriend, a reasonably three-dimensional figure. One can guess which elements were drawn from the author's life and which imagined, but though the story lacks oomph, it is clearly a serious effort from a not-untalented writer. He has also published another novel, Ash Wednesday, and written some stage plays, none of which would I be averse to reading/seeing should the opportunity arise.

Interrupting this month's foray into my mental archives is a book I read very recently: The Testament of Mary, by Colm Toibin. I read it earlier this week and found it extremely thought-provoking. It is a very short novella, and while reading I thought it felt like listening to a soliloquy; looking it up yesterday I discovered that it did in fact originate as a stage piece! As might be surmised from the title, it is narrated by Jesus's mother Mary, relating her memory of the events surrounding his crucifixion. Nearing the end of her life, she is cared for and questioned by her son's followers, who are writing the accounts of his life that will become the Gospels.

Toibin has an unconventional story-telling style; the plots of his novels are typically minimal, but the events are distinctly secondary to his exploration of the characters' psychological landscape. This is particularly apparent here in the voice of Mary, a woman who describes herself as being filled as much with memory as with blood and bone. He addresses the question of what Mary's thoughts and feelings might be -- she whose life is portrayed as one giant act of submission, all acquiescence to (another/greater/male) power. It doesn't often occur to people who tell or listen to this story that Mary might possibly be angry. She might have doubts. She might be resentful of the constraints placed upon her as a woman and as the mother of a man who claims to be the messiah. Toibin suggests all of these unsettling possibilities and more.

This version of Mary's story differs from the familiar gloss, but the explanation for this is embedded in the hints that her questioners are modifying what she tells them to suit their own purposes. The intricate irony of a male writer attempting to give voice to a woman who has historically been silenced and spoken for by men, in a story that depicts that very process, is headache-inducing to think about. Although I don't mean to downplay that essential issue, I think the most significant thing here is that a writer has imagined a different perspective on a person about whom much has been said but from whom very little has been heard.

Two books for today...

Book 1: Eats, Shoots & Leaves, by Lynne Truss
Date completed: March 7, 2011
What I remember:

A whole book about punctuation! Hilariously funny, short enough to read in one afternoon. This cleared up some distinctions between British and American comma usage, which previously I had thought was just people being confused. Which they often are anyway, probably because there are multiple standards.

Book 2: New York, by Edward Rutherfurd
Date completed: March 7, 2012
What I remember:

Quite a bit -- some of which I covered in a separate post a couple of weeks ago. I read this only a year ago, more recently than others I've covered for this project so far. Here I'll just add that I read it on a Kindle, which was both an advantage and disadvantage for a book of this size. It was nice not to lug around an 800-page tome, but frustrating when I wanted to revisit earlier passages; it is possible to search for a keyword or phrase if you know exactly what you're looking for, but I found this more laborious than flipping through pages by hand. (Unlike most of Rutherfurd's other books, New York did not have a family tree of characters listed at the beginning, so I was tracking it myself as I read.)

Author: D.H. Lawrence
Date completed: March 7, 2011
What I remember:

This is the sort of classic I read a lot of as a teenager. At that time there was nothing I loved better, but reading this made me realize how much my tastes have shifted. I have been reading much more contemporary fiction in recent years, and the pacing and use of language are jarringly different. It took some concentration to get through it and appreciate the nuances. It resides in my memory as a kind of verbal Impressionist painting; I have a sense of the whole without recalling many specifics of the plot. It was written during the first world war, but seems to take place in some unspecified time shortly before; the story is caught in a rift between the stasis of upper-class ennui and the uneasiness of a brewing storm that, in the novel, will never come. Overall it is an uncomfortable tale, and despite the passionate relationships of the four main characters, no one is having much fun. It does pop into my consciousness as musing-fodder more frequently than A Bend in the River, but for the most part both are instances where I read the book and then moved on.

Author: V.S. Naipaul
Date completed: March 5, 2011
What I remember:

I guess I read this because it is a generally well-regarded piece of literature. The story is blurred in my mind -- I have the impression that the narrator, an Indian man in a post-colonial African country, felt distanced from his surroundings, which may be why I can't recall them clearly myself. Neo-colonialism. Unhappy characters. A disappointment.

Editor: Amy Sonnie
Date completed: March 1, 2011
What I remember:

Another late winter read from a few years ago, this is an anthology of queer youth writing from the 1990s. These voices are a gathering of strength from young people, who are (queer or straight) so often overlooked, dismissed, patted on the head and told to wait their turn. So much passion is in these pages, and a reminder of how much has changed for LGBT people within the last decade, and of how much still needs to change. It made me feel old, but hopeful for the future. These writers are my contemporaries -- in a way, I am one of them. While reading it I thought: This is the kind of book that could have changed my life had I discovered it as a teenager. Today I'm thinking: why can't it change my life now?

Book 1: A Handwriting Manual, by Alfred Fairbank
Completed: March 1, 2009
What I remember about it:

At the time, I was planning to take a course in calligraphy and bookbinding that coming fall. I picked this up because I was curious about the history of handwriting and the characteristics of penmanship and different scripts. The book was dated (originally published in the 1930s?) but short. This interest has waned.

Book 2: Suddenly Jewish, by Barbara Kessel
Completed: March 1, 2010
What I remember about it:

This was a fascinating array of personal accounts from people who, not having been raised Jewish, learned only in adulthood that they had Jewish ancestry.* Many were surprised by this discovery, some discomfited, others delighted. In particular, some descendants of conversos (Sephardim who underwent forced conversions in Spain during the Inquisition) felt that it explained many peculiarities in their family traditions or in the habits of elderly relatives. I found especially humorous and poignant the story of one man, raised a devout Christian, who in an effort to show respect immediately bared his head upon entering a synagogue for the first time.

*I remember wondering whether all of these people were in fact halachically Jewish (direct descent through the maternal line) or whether some simply had Jewish ancestors somewhere in their background. I think this was not always made clear in their accounts. A few went through a formal conversion process after learning about their heritage, and one woman had actually converted to Judaism before learning that it was also part of her background.

Over the winter holidays, around the table with family, I was quizzed about my reading habits and the number of books that I read in a year. I offered an estimate of 50, and things got a little heated, with one person claiming that another relative might get through even more, and a third noting defensively that, though she read comparatively few, each was very carefully chosen and clearly remembered.

Caught up in my own tension between quality and quantity, I was at first annoyed by the (probably unintentional) implication that my own reading is not well-chosen, and then worried that it is all a waste of time if I can't recall in great detail the plots or arguments of everything I peruse. I aim for both depth and breadth in reading, but I do read an awful lot, and some of it does -- and rightly should -- fade quickly away. When not feeling on the spot, I'm fine with this.

However, my curiosity has been piqued: As a memory exercise, I have decided to try to write every weekday in March, posting something that I remember about books read in Marches of previous years.

Edward Rutherfurd specializes in multi-generational epics that trace the entwined lives of several fictional families in one location, from early settlement down to the present. The place is the main character, more than any of the people. Most of his novels are set in the UK and Ireland, but New York, obviously, is not. I read it about a year ago and made note of a few things:

It is not so epic as his other works -- but that is understandable, since he begins at the point of European arrival, which gives the story a span of only 400 years instead of the 2000+ of London, my favorite. Different scope.

He offers a well-nuanced rendering of political division within families during the American Revolution. Many Americans assume that they would have been patriots had they been alive at that time, but independence was not necessarily the obvious choice for a lot of Americans-to-be; the outcome of the war was not a foregone conclusion and loyalty was a murkier question than some modern patriots like to imagine. New York illustrates the complexities nicely.

The Native American family whose story is picked up with the others at the beginning of the book fades out of the picture rather quickly. An artifact passed on to a European family in the first chapter is traced instead. This is probably an accurate reflection of the city's demographics, and the symbolism may even have been intentional, but I wish this family's thread had been developed as much as the others, or that the author had taken the opportunity to begin the story with this group of people before the Dutch showed up. Can I praise the author for historical accuracy in some areas and condemn him for writing from the victor's perspective in others?

Looking forward to Paris in April.

In January I read Toni Morrison's Beloved for the first time. I am almost embarrassed that it took me so long to come to it. Thinking that it was "a book about a woman who killed her child" may have put me off, but that reductive summary could do no book justice. This is justly deserving of the label "masterpiece".

The plot itself is relatively straightforward, so one thing that particularly struck me was the way in which the story is told. The characters, former slaves and their children living in Ohio after the Civil War, have been subjected to a boatload of horrors, but when the story opens, much of the worst has already passed. Events of 18-25 years ago are visited as memories, and the protagonists, though still dealing with the aftermath, have themselves gained some perspective in the intervening years. It is more of a meditation on these experiences than a direct chronological relation of events, and that distance makes it possible to read the story without being utterly devastated by it; to read and actually understand something of it, which is much harder to do when one is caught up "watching" terrible things happen to characters one has come to care about. From the beginning we know, at least, who has made it to comparative safety, and that provides some security as we learn the details of what has transpired. I think it would almost be too heart-wrenching to read if events unfolded with greater immediacy.

At surface level, this is the tale of a particular family in particular circumstances, but it is also a profound exploration of the history of race in America and the catastrophic effects of race-based slavery on people of African and European descent alike. An intense and succinct summation of this theme, from the thoughts of a character called Stamp Paid:

Whitepeople believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle. Swift unnavigable waters, swinging screaming baboons, sleeping snakes, red gums ready for their sweet white blood. In a way, he thought, they were right. The more coloredpeople spent their strength trying to convince them how gentle they were, how clever and loving, how human, the more they used themselves up to persuade whites of something Negroes believed could not be questioned, the deeper and more tangled the jungle grew inside. But it wasn't the jungle blacks brought with them to this place from the other (livable) place. It was the jungle whitefolks planted in them. And it grew. It spread. In, through and after life, it spread, until it invaded the whites who had made it. Touched them every one. Changed and altered them. made them bloody, silly, worse even than they wanted to be, so scared were they of the jungle they had made. The screaming baboon lived under their own white skin; the red gums were their own.

Patience and Sarah surprised me. A story of lesbian lovers, set in 1816 and published in 1969 by Isabel Miller, it was delightful -- unexpectedly so. The title is often referenced in queer non-fiction (and in later fiction, for that matter) so for a long time I knew it was important, but I wasn't sure why.

I opened it anticipating depressed and angsty characters, oblique yearnings, and disappointments -- maybe even a tragic end to round things out. Instead, it turned out to be a bright, open, occasionally funny, and generally upbeat novel with engaging and forthright heroines. It's not a work of genius, but a solid and enjoyable piece of storytelling. Nice, I thought, but why all the fuss? It's not so extraordinary. No Well of Loneliness this, no Maurice...

The point hit me a day or two later: it is not like the early classics of queer fiction. It is significant because it represents a paradigm shift, both culturally (the Stonewall riots happened that same year) and in literature. Gay and gender non-conforming people finally had the hope of living freely and openly -- and of seeing their lives reflected positively in fiction.

During my first year of college I developed a significant interest in an older student who was writing his thesis on the works of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. I had not yet read anything by Woolf, but I had liked Dubliners and read, if not exactly enjoyed, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, so I figured we had some common ground. To catch his attention, I decided to read Ulysses. I planted myself at the opposite end of the library table where he spent each evening at work, and I read. Every evening, for days on end, I read. I made sure to angle the cover of the book so that the title was clearly visible. After more than a week, my diligence was finally rewarded. He looked up. His eyes widened and his eyebrows shot up.

"You're reading Ulysses," he said.

"Yeah, I'm really into Joyce," said I, all nonchalant.

"Which commentary are you reading it with?" he inquired with great interest.

"Oh, I'm... ah, I'm just reading it for fun," I offered, still hopeful.

There was a bemused quirking of the eyebrows.

"You're reading Ulysses without commentary? You can't possibly understand a word of it." He dove back into his books.

Momentarily crushed, I soon rallied and, determined to prove to someone (myself??) that I really was just reading the book for its own sake, I doggedly read on and on and on until finally I reached the end. I didn't understand a word of it. But, by golly, I had read them all!

I still like to imagine that someday I will re-read it -- with commentary -- but like relationships, proper appreciation of books has much to do with timing, and to date it has never been quite the right time for Ulysses and me.

This is probably cheating, because I am going to post a lengthy quotation without commentary, but it speaks so beautifully and perfectly for itself, I just can't add anything to it. A passage from Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, from part 4 of chapter 1, in which she illustrates exquisitely the simultaneous pain and numbness of realizing one has outgrown a relationship:

Looking at the far sandhills, William Bankes thought of Ramsay: thought of a road in Westmorland, thought of Ramsay striding along a road by himself hung round with that solitude which seemed to be his natural air. But this was suddenly interrupted, William Bankes remembered (and this must refer to some actual incident), by a hen, straddling her wings out in protection of a covey of little chicks, upon which Ramsay, stopping, pointed his stick and said 'Pretty -- pretty,' an odd illumination into his heart, Bankes had thought it, which showed his simplicity, his sympathy with humble things; but it seemed to him as if their friendship had ceased, there, on that stretch of road. After that, Ramsay had married. After that, what with one thing and another, the pulp had gone out of their friendship. Whose fault it was he could not say, only, after a time, repetition had taken the place of newness. It was to repeat that they met. But in this dumb colloquy with the sand dunes he maintained that his affection for Ramsay had in no way diminished; but there, like the body of a young man laid up in peat for a century, with the red fresh on his lips, was his friendship, in its acuteness and reality laid up across the bay among the sandhills.

He was anxious for the sake of this friendship and perhaps too in order to clear himself in his own mind from the imputation of having dried and shrunk -- for Ramsay lived in a welter of children, whereas Bankes was childless and a widower -- he was anxious that Lily Briscoe should not disparage Ramsay (a great man in his own way) yet should understand how things stood between them. Begun long years ago, their friendship had petered out on a Westmorland road, where the hen spread her wings before her chicks; after which Ramsay had married, and their paths lying different ways, there had been, certainly for no one's fault, some tendency, when they met, to repeat.

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sa leabharlann

in the library

Recent Entries

Bugs in a Bowl

Memory Project Summary

How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents

Halley's Quest

Oops

The Day of the Pelican

North Country ; The Fall of the Year

The Hottest State

The Testament of Mary

Eats, Shoots & Leaves ; New York (again)

Women in Love

A Bend in the River

Revolutionary Voices

A Handwriting Manual ; Suddenly Jewish

Reading as competitive sport

New York

Beloved

Patience and Sarah

How not to choose a book

To the Lighthouse