My Year in Lists: 2011

Reading

• Final count: 47 books, including fiction, nonfiction, and poetry!
• Most fun: The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, which I read twice! I also read the first five sequels in the Mary Russell series in a matter of months.
• Biggest surprise: Eat, Pray, Love. I can admit that I found it profoundly moving when I read it last spring. Sometimes books live up to their hype.
• Greatest accomplishment: Vanity Fair. It was looooooooong. Fortunately, its awesomeness was proportional to its length.
• Highest quality to quantity ratio: Winesburg, Ohio. Written about small town Ohio in the early 20^th century, Sherwood Anderson's tiny little collection of short stories was phenomenally beautiful, sad, and honest. I have no idea why I left it collecting dust on my To Read bookshelf for so long.
• Best poetry: Sleeping Preacher. 
• Fictional character I was most in love with: It’s a tie between Mary Russell’s Holmes or Mr. Thornton from North and South. (Feel free to draw your own conclusions from this!)

Television

I was all about period dramas this year. My favorites were

• The absolutely brilliant Downton Abbey from Masterpiece Theater.
• Granada’s beautiful 1980s interpretations of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. 
• The VampireDiaries. (Hey, there’s enough Civil War in there that I’m going to count it!) 

All three of these were superbly written and beautifully produced and addictive as all get out. Thank you, Netflix!

Music

What didn’t I listen to this year? Here’s a playlist of a few of my favorite songs from a few of my favorite artists this year. Most of these albums didn't come out in 2011, but they've all spent a lot of time on my iPod in 2011. 

Real Life

This year was tumultuous, at best, and while I was never bored, I was never quite at ease, either. 

The good:

• Three good friends got married and another got pregnant for the first time. 
• I got a new job that I love and am consistently challenged by.
• I traveled to Denver and Winfield and Manhattan, Kansas had a great time with friends at all three locations. 
• I did a lot of yoga and played a lot of softball and even did a bit of belly dancing. 
• I started a book club with my friends.
• I submitting my writing for publication again for the first time in years, and had a poem accepted for publication sometime in 2012!

The bad:

• I had an icky bout of bursitis that kept me on the couch for a good chunk of the fall. 
• My university went through a substantial restructuring process, and not everyone made it out unscathed. 
• My mom was in the hospital twice and recovering from surgery for a good part of the year.
• My grandma was in the hospital for a stroke and had to move to a nursing home with her husband in the fall.
• My grandpa was in the hospital twice, first for a hip injury and again for blood clots a few weeks ago.

The confusing: 

• Even awesome new jobs can be terribly stressful, baffling, brain-addling things.
• I set aside my first savings for retirement and taught myself about a bunch of grown-up stuff like building credit and buying cars and health insurance deductibles. Yay responsibility?
• I spent a lot of time thinking about Occupy Wall Street and the recession and global warming and the crimes at Penn State. The future seems more complicated and challenging than it ever has before.

When I look back on this year, I think that I’ll remember it as the first time that I realized that whenever life gets harder, sadder, or scarier, it also gets more interesting, gains a richer texture, becomes more precious and vital in its complexity. Life is a bit like beer: yes, Bud Lite (i.e. college life) is easy to drink, but it’s the bitter complexity of the hops that makes an IPA (being a 28-year-old) memorable. 

I’m glad I was here for 2011, whatever challenges it’s held, and I’m glad I got the chance to drink it to its dregs. So if you're lucky enough to live in the Midwest, go find yourself a Boulevard Single-Wide IPA and have a happy new year. See you again in 2012!

The Vampire Diaries: A Comparative Review

So for the past couple of months, I've spent a lot of time holed up in my apartment due to some epic hip pain. I have bursitis in my hips. That's right, bursitis. And, yes, this does mean that I'm an 80-year-old trapped in a 28-year-old's body: I also spend a lot of time cat cuddling and tea drinking and thrift shopping and grouching at the noisy youngsters who walk past my bedroom window and staying in to quietly listen to NPR. I'm cool with it.  ;)

Anyway, my bad flare up has had one good consequence: I've had the chance to spend a lot of time sitting on my couch,  icing my hips, and watching The Vampire Diaries. Created by The CW, The Vampire Diaries is one of those shows that shouldn't be good but is. It's a vampire show written for teenagers, but don't think Twilight--think True Blood with more high school and less nudity. 

The Vampire Diaries

The Vampire Diaries follows a 17-year-old girl named Elena who just happens to have two really fantastic looking vampire brothers fall in love with her. She spends a lot of time tenderly embracing one of them (Stefan) and kind of flirting with the other one (Damon) and fending off other mean old vampires who just happen to not be in love with her. And, of course, there are some witches and werewolves hanging about and a lot of relationship drama and witty repartee. Add in a whole lot of painfully good looking people and a dash of gratuitous violence and it makes for a heady, addictive mix. It's not quite as clever as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but The Vampire Diaries has more plot twists than a spy novel and surprisingly complex characters who actually manage to grow from episode to episode (which is more than a lot of TV series can claim). 

But after the first few episodes, I kept thinking, "Hmmmm, the names Damon and Stefan sure sound familiar." That's when I realized that the show was based on The Vampire Diaries novels written by L. J. Smith which I had owned and read when I was all of 13! I remembered not being a big fan of the series (I'm pretty sure that I sold them at a garage sale when I was in high school), but I adored (and--I will admit it--still own) her other four series: The Secret Circle, Dark Visions, The Forbidden Game, and Night World. I read and re-read those books, like, a lot. And I'm secure enough in my intellectual and literary tastes to admit it.  ;)

The Secret Circle and Dark Visions. (Oh, yes, I did find these on one of my bookshelves!)

All of these books involve witches, vampires, werewolves, psychics, or some combination of these supernatural types, and they're all very romantic and soul mate-y and "tragic" and probably horribly obnoxious, but I loved them all. I doubt that they would hold up to being reread by my adult brain, but I can't regret those hours I spent as a lonesome, awkward, angry, dreamy junior high student, laying in my bed re-reading those novels, wishing that something, anything, exciting would happen to me. (Heck, I wouldn't have minded a bite-y vampire boyfriend, so long as I had one!) Those books were just right for me when I read them, no matter how horrifying I would find them now, with their lovely, thoughtless heroines and their menacing, controlling supernatural boyfriends. 

The newest The Vampire Diaries edition.

But, of course, I had to at least try to reread The Vampire Diaries novels to see how closely they followed the show, and this proved to be one of those rare occasions where the screen version of something vastly improves upon the original text. 

The writers and producers at The CW have (thankfully) taken a lot of liberties with the novels. The books are abjectly awful; I made it through the first one only by reading every fourth word and flipping a few pages ahead whenever I was annoyed or horrified or confused by a character, a plot point, or an adjective (this happened a lot). The main character was awful, the writing was insipid (yes, tell me more about how Elena's furniture was Victorian cherry wood and she wore a peach colored silk ribbon in her hair, because that is both realistic and vitally important to my understanding of her character!), and the plot was mainly about how making out with vampires is not just fun--it's fulfilling! I mean, these books make Twilight read like Hemingway, all precision and restraint and deep, deep feeling. 

When will I ever learn not to read books whose cover blurbs start with "A DEADLY LOVE TRIANGLE"?!

But I would still highly recommend the show, no matter how sordid its origins. It does a great job of yanking out the best parts of the original novel's story-line and trashing the rest: Elena's personality is (thank goodness) drastically different, she's given a little brother and a slew of friends with compelling story-lines of their own, and the tumultuous relationship between the two vampire brothers is probably the most complicated and meaningful relationship in the show. Instead of being about vampires or (*shudder*) soul-mates, The Vampire Diaries manages to be about the strength of family bonds, self-transformation and redemption, and accepting one's past. 

And let's be honest: who would ever turn down two really pretty vampire boyfriends for the price of one? 

(Don't forget to wipe the drool off your keyboard before you go, ladies!)

Communication and Technology: A Smattering

1. At a work event last week, I added a short PowerPoint slide show to a presentation that I regularly deliver to students. There were like eight slides. The information I conveyed was exactly the same as my regular verbal presentation, but the students were way more impressed. They kept saying things like, "I don't have any questions! That was sooooo informative!" I don't know if it helped them to have the visual representation in front of them, or whether they were just impressed that I had my stuff together enough to have real life slides with the real live University logo on them. Either way, for 15 minutes of work, it was a pretty major WIN!

2. I've ordered myself the new iPhone 4S for my birthday. It's completely unnecessary and expensive and a little bit pretentious, but I'm soooooo excited for it to arrive! Siri looks downright amazing; I imagine that talking into my tiny handheld computer and having it talk back to me is going to be one of those things that makes me go, Holy crap, it's the future and we're living in it! It's funny to think that only 10 years ago I had just started using the Internet, I had just gotten my first (brick-like, green-screened, hideous, non-texting) cell phone along with my first car, and I didn't know how to search for things on Yahoo or AskJeeves or whatever was popular then. What a crazy and awesome time it is we live in.

3. I've been watching Occupy Wall Street in the news, and I'm absolutely fascinated by the protesters' use of hand gestures and "the human microphone" to communicate (you can read about the history of the method at New York Magazine). By using simple gestures and group repetition, the protesters can communicate a single speaker's information and respond to his/her ideas without relying on megaphones and amplifiers (which are often prohibited in the occupied spaces). The process is so simple and old fashioned, yet it's still marvelously effective. Not to mention the fact that it's pointedly democratic and, in my opinion, downright inspiring. You can watch a protester teaching the method to the Occupy Boston protesters here: 

The Bostonians by Henry James

After a long and happy lifetime of never reading any Henry James ever except for "Daisy Miller" in a sophomore year English class, I finally tackled The Bostonians. 

The Bostonians

In the past, James had always struck me as unbearably stuffy: his sentences had more clauses than a mall at Christmastime (ha!), and his paragraphs went on for pages and pages, and everyone was always making themselves so unbearably happy because of their tight, tight Victorian corsets. Basically, he seemed like a chore. But I had started The Bostonians in grad school, and I hate leaving a book half done, especially when I was enjoying it in the first place.


The Bostonians, despite being one of James's lesser-known novels, does not disappoint. I suspect that it's rarely read these days because it's so topical: it deals primarily with women's suffrage, or, as it was known in 1885, "The Woman Question." The novel centers around Verena Tarrant, a beautiful, red-headed young woman who just happens to be an electrifying public speaker interested in equal rights for women. Her family is poor, and her father is a disreputable mesmeric healer, which means that Verena is not only talented and on the rise in society, she is also dismally unprotected and without means of her own.

Woman with Red Hair, Albert Herter, 1894.

At her first speaking engagement in Boston, Verena meets Olive Chancellor and Basil Ransom (do I even need to mention those uber-obvious thematic names? oy!), two cousins who both begin, in their own ways, to woo Verena.

Olive wants Verena to stay unmarried, to live in Olive's home, and to travel the world, bringing a message of equality to the world. Basil Ransom, on the other hand, wants Verena to marry him and leave the public eye for good so she can spend the rest of her life entertaining and tending him (I'm not kidding--he actually says this). As the book builds toward its agonizing climax, Verena is forced to choose between a life on the world stage and a life that can be contained in a single sitting room.

What fascinated me about this book isn't its subject or even its plot, it's the fact that it's a novel without heroes. Verena is lovely and innocent and very sweet, but she also bends happily to the will of whomever's in the room at the time. She's a pushover by nature and by station. Olive Chancellor is zealous, brittle, tyrannical, and manipulative. Ironically, for all her passion for women's rights, she allows Verena no freedom of her own. Basil Ransom is handsome and charming but skin-crawlingly insidious: his love for Verena is a passion for possession and control. He wants to marry her, but primarily as a means of keeping her from "parroting" feminist beliefs that he doesn't believe she could possibly understand.

Verena is only given two extreme choices in the novel and no chance of winning, and that, I think, is the entire point. James refuses to espouse either ideology in this novel: he seems disgusted with the rhetoric of the women's rights movement (which he portrays as extremist and heartless), and yet he portrays their detractors (traditionalist Victorian males like Ransom) as pirates and captors.

Boston, 1880s.

Once she emerges into the upper classes of Victorian America, Verena cannot escape. In a world where she was truly free to build her own life, Verena Tarrant wouldn't have had to pledge herself to the rich yet spartan Olive Chancellor as her patron, ruler, and near lover, nor would she have to succumb to the seduction of the romantic but appallingly misogynistic Basil Ransom. If she were free, she wouldn't have to choose between being a feminist zealot or an obedient wife, a Northerner or a Southerner, a thinker or a feeler. She could be a little bit of all of these things and, most importantly, her own self.

But Verena is not free, which makes James's novel incredibly suspenseful and sad. If you're going to give James a try, I strongly recommend The Bostonians.

Albert Camus's The Plague (A Review)

My excessively ugly cover of The Plague.

Look at this cover. I mean, look at it: it's terrifying. A bleary, blackened eye set in a glaring blood-red cover doesn't really make one think of light-hearted, cheering, summer reading material, does it? Who could blame me for putting off Albert Camus's The Plague for several years after buying it at a used book shop in State College? And let's not even talk about Camus's reputation as a snooty, fancy-pants existential French (French!) philosopher. I expected this book to be dark, miserable, and brutal in the style of The Seventh Seal (which is an absolutely beautiful movie about the plague that makes me break out in hives of morbid claustrophobia).

So this is why I saved The Plague for the sunny, broiling days of August. As I rode my bus back and forth down sleepy, sunshiny highways, I was transported to a fictional 1940s Oran (located in northwestern Algeria, where Camus grew up) during a bubonic plague outbreak. The book follows Dr. Rieux, one of first physicians in Oran to diagnose and fight the plague, and a small group of his friends and acquaintances. Rieux first starts to suspect that something is seriously wrong when he walks out of his flat one morning to find a dead rat on his front porch with a spurt of blood trailing from its muzzle. Things only go downhill from there: thousands of rats die in the streets, the cats and dogs disappear from the city, people start to sicken die, and the government quarantines the whole town for nearly a year.

I expected Camus's novel to be about death, but it was, in fact, about the living. His descriptions of death by plague are haunting, to be sure, but he focuses far more on who's left: the lovers yearning for each other across city gates and stone walls, the doctors and sanitation crews working through exhaustion and unbelievable danger to care for others, the priests and atheists alike who come to understand the plague not through dogma or religion but through sympathy. Camus focuses continuously on how the townspeople deal with "exile," or separation from each other, from their deceased loved ones, and from their regular lives.

"Thus the first thing that plague brought to our town was exile."

In his portrayal, the narrator (unnamed until the book's last chapters) chooses not to catastrophize or sentimentalize the plague, but to portray it objectively, accurately, and, above all else, kindly: he chooses to focus on how people continue to live and love in the face of death, not the death itself.

"The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant [. . .] The soul of the murderer is blind; and there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clear-sightedness."

Albert Camus, damn fine writer and shockingly handsome devil.

As the novel nears its end, the narrator returns again and again to the idea that Oran's literal plague is just another extension of a larger plague that everyone suffers from, the plague that is inherent in life itself. I'm not sure that I ever quite followed what Camus meant, but I take it to mean that life is not just subject to trouble and illness, it is trouble and illness. It's a game that everyone always loses, no matter how hard or how skillfully you play. (As Mrs. E says over at Easy Street, "Never take life to seriously. Nobody gets out alive anyway!") But it's the fact that everyone keeps playing the game that Camus focuses on, that the people of Oran keep getting out of bed every day and going to the cafes or movies or church or work no matter who is disappearing around them, that Dr. Rieux and his sanitation crews keep giving serums and sanitizing houses, no matter how few people they are able to save.

For all its gore and darkness, The Plague is a beautiful book: generous and warm, thoughtful and leisurely, discomfiting and uplifting at the same time. It's a book that makes a reader think not of death, but of why it's worth it to keep on living.

Dear Winfield

Winfield, this year, on your 40th birthday, you left me exhausted, cranky, damp, bruised, and--let's be honest--slightly hungover. You confronted me with strangers who laughed and called me "a Winfield virgin" as they slapped parking stickers my windshield. You gave me a puddle to sleep in and a few hours at a laundromat manhandling wet sleeping bags. You gave me a tornado watch. You gave me a near death experience involving lighting, a nearby power plant, and a sky full of sparks. You gave me four pairs of wet socks in 36 hours. You gave me two sacks of damp, muddy, funky laundry. You covered my cowboy boots with a thick crust of mud.  You did the same to my Ford Escort, which after some pretty serious off-roading will be forever known as Mud Puppy. You gave me epically sore feet and a crick in my back and a sleep deficit reminiscent of my sophomore year of college.

The new tent, which my friend Ryan helped me stake up using his ninja knot tying skills.

But, Winfield, you also gave me and endless sea of bluegrass and old timey folk music as far as the ear could hear. You gave me Ashes to Immortality, Hot Club of Cowtown, Fast Food Junkies,  Eileen Ivers and Immigrant Soul, and Dumptruck Butterlips. You gave me strangers who shared directions and their campgrounds, strangers who offered me bags of wine and bowls of pasta salad and the use of their gas stoves. You gave me a new tent that has already proven itself both rainproof and seaworthy. You gave me lunches of cheese and bagels, pears, pumpkin bread, iced coffee, and brownies. You gave me gyros and kettle corn. You gave me two nights of listening to music and dancing with friends and happy strangers until 4:00 in the morning. You gave me music, adventure, camaraderie, and a really cool tee shirt.

Lunch, day 2.

Winfield, what I'm trying to say is I love you. See you again next year, same time, same place?

Yours oh so truly,
Lesley

Purposeful Sight

I've been reading a lot of fashion blogs recently. I love them: they're like subscribing to Vogue, but funkier, more egalitarian, more influenced by thrift store style, and much quicker (they change rapidly in response to street style). Even for someone who's never been known as a fashionista, they're strangely invigorating.

One of my favorite fashion bloggers Jessica Quirk. 

I wish I could say that this has substantially changed my wardrobe--in a small way, it probably has--but it has changed a good deal about the way I see the world. I notice aesthetic details more often now, most often in others' clothing but in design in general. When I see a woman who looks stylish, I don't just think, "She looks cute," I think, "Look at that interesting ribbing on her cardigan. And what makes those shoes a little different? The higher ankle? I like her choice of watch size, etc."

I've made an active study of these details in the hopes of improving my own work wardrobe. I've taught myself to see differently to the point where, believe it or not, it's almost second nature to me to notice the impact of individual accessories on an outfit. To say the least, this is not something I would have ever thought I'd be doing!

But I wonder if what we choose to see always comes at a cost to those details we choose to miss. The human eye--and mind--can only take in so much at a time. It's a survival tactic: if we pay attention to every blade of grass on the plains, the fluffy clouds in the blue sky, and the grasshoppers zinging around our feet, we might miss the irate buffalo barreling toward us. We tend to see the most important thing in any given setting by nature. Charging buffalo: important. That cloud that kind of looks a little like a buffalo: maybe we'll notice that when we're not running for our lives.

Watch out!

But in the absence of a buffalo, the first things we notice are what we've trained ourselves to see by inclination and mental habit. This is why one of my first creative writing teachers encouraged our class to eavesdrop on others. She told us to keep our ears open on buses, in hallways, in our dorm rooms, to listen shamelessly whenever someone talked loudly on a cell phone in public. She said it would give us an ear for natural dialog, a familiarity with spontaneous human language which would seep into our own writing. I've always been thankful for her advice--it makes public transportation far more interesting!--and because it actually works: along with my writing style, she has altered my vision in some small way forever.

If you subject me to your cell phone conversation on the bus, be assured that I will be listening to you.

People choose their own systems of vision every day, seeing things and events as proofs of whatever interests, theories, assumptions, and prejudices that they have adopted most fervently (or allowed to be ingrained in them). We see the world through a lens shaped by our past, by our culture's ideologies, and by ourselves, a  lens that actively reshapes the world whether we want it to or not. Without ever knowing why, a depressed person driving home from work will see gray clouds, all the lousy drivers cutting them off, and roadkill strewn along the median, while a relatively happy person might see the light shifting through the clouds, the green fields nearby, and that nice little Toyota that got back into the right lane right on time. The road may stay the same, but a person's state of mind changes everything.

Distorted vision.

My point is that it's important to be conscientious about the sight you choose to exercise in the world. Seeing is not passive but an active reshaping of our surroundings, our relationships, and, consequently, our lives. I may choose to be more cognizant of fashion, yes, but I don't want to forget how to see others' personal strengths and struggles and uniqueness. I want to remember how to look past nail polish and bias cuts to see people how their friends and mothers must see them, with kindness and understanding and completeness, as people whose lives stand for far more than what they wear, where they work, or who they text as they wait to get off at their bus stop and walk home.

Sleeping Preacher

Have you ever put off reading a book for one reason or another, only to finally read it and desperately regret your years of hesitation? That's what happened to me last week with Julia Kasdorf's Sleeping Preacher. Kasdorf was one of my instructors at Penn State. I've always loved her poems (I wrote about one here), but Sleeping Preacher was her first book, a book that I knew she had a love-hate relationship with. I just wasn't sure that it would be as moving as her later work, so I put it off.

But this book was far better than I ever expected. Kasdorf has described it as her "where I'm from" book, the collection that she wrote about her Mennonite family, growing up in small town Pennsylvania, and leaving that world for New York. It's a stunning collection: clear, purposeful, understated, and sparklingly lyrical. Kasdorf writes the type of poetry that gives you a sense of not just a time or place or experience, but of the woman behind the poems, the personality and passions that paint her experiences with meaning. It's no wonder that, out of 900 other first book manuscripts, Sleeping Preacher won the 1991 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize.

Kasdorf starts the collection out with a whammy of a poem "Green Market, New York", which places her in conversation with a Pennsylvanian farmers' market vendor in the heart of New York City. It's not just a good poem--it also serves as the book's thesis, flinging the whole text into tension and motion:

"'Do you live in the city?' she asks. 'Do you like it?'
I say no. And that was no lie, Emma Peachey.
I don't like New York, but sometimes these streets
hold me as hard as we're held by rich earth.
I have not forgotten that Bible verse:
Whoever puts his hand to the plow and looks back
is not fit for the kingdom of God."

From there, the procession of quiet, kind poems moves from Kasdorf's parents' childhood into her own childhood and adulthood. And while the book is known for its Mennonite subjects, some of my favorite poems were the later ones, the adult poems that are connected to other places and personalities far from Kasdorf's childhood. I loved "For Weatherly, Still in New York":

"This place could make you well.
Night, a black healer, comes so dark it kills
as it cures. Stars slice your fingers
if you try to catch them, falling.
This is no dinner invitation [. . .]
you can't stay on the Lower East Side,
or at least stay there and stay sane.
Come, lose your lease for this place."

"The View" was another favorite. The poem is dedicated to a friend who has moved to the shores of Lake Michigan. I especially love the subtle, lilting rhymes nestled within the lines of this poem. It's a technique that, I will admit, I plan to do my darnedest to steal from Kasdorf!

"[. . .] Last week, a wind charged
off the lake so cold pigeons froze to the walks,
four iridescent necks just on your block.
But all the cold carcasses in Chicago
mean nothing next to your view. Although
I never held still for your caresses,
I admit your talk makes me jealous:
the way you speak of the lake like a love
and refuse to hang drapes, the way you scrub
the panes until they seem to vanish into
the view. And lake and sky embrace you."

Julia has a new book of poems out called Poetry in America. Go get yourself some--I know I'm going to.

Strawberry Pie

I'm jumping the gun a little bit, but . . .

It's PIIIIEEEEE!

Tonight I made Shirley O. Corriher's fresh strawberry pie recipe from Bakewise. It's only the second pie I've ever made, and the first I've ever made unsupervised. It was pretty easy to make, though the upside-down crust baking method Corriher recommended made my pie look a little rough around the edges. The filling, though, was super easy: put fresh strawberries in the crust; cook up a thick, jellied syrup for the filling; and stick it in the fridge. There's no second baking required!

I made the pie for my dad's birthday tomorrow. I've never been a big fan of pie, so I've never learned to make them, and I think he's suffered from the loss there many years! There were always cakes and cookies in the house, but the poor man couldn't get a slice of apple pie to save his life. But this is his year.

Dad, I hope it's fantastic when you cut into it tomorrow--this pie's for you!

Summertime . . .

and the living is hot. Like really hot. Like "Oh, good Lord, where's the ice bath?!" hot.

The first 100 degree day of summer is upon us here in Kansas. Instead of getting cranky about it as I sweat to death on my couch, I want to write about my favorite summer things. The power of positive thinking and all that.  ;)

Here's what I love about summer:

1. Produce, produce, produce. There's so much delicious fruit in grocery stores and at the farmers' market that I actually have to work to eat it all. It's fantastic: first come the strawberries, then the nectarines and peaches, then the melons, and, of course, there are always the apples to look forward to in the fall. And don't even get me started on the cucumbers and salad greens! Ooooo, the salad greens! (Okay, so I like food--can you tell?)
2. The smell of barbecue. I like the taste, too, but barbecue is so heavy that I prefer salads and hummus and veggie-based dishes in the summer. Ugh, who can handle a belly full of greasy brats and burgers when it's this hot? But the smell permeates my neighborhood as the college kids crack open beers and grill on their decks. All of downtown is rich with charcoal smoke, Frisbee games, and lawn chairs.
3. How cold things taste extra amazing. Ice cream. Popsicles. Frosted and dripping bottles of beer straight from a cooler. Enough said.
4. The lake. I haven't gone swimming this year, but I'm desperate to! I miss wasting a whole afternoon splashing around in Clinton Lake between rounds of laying out under the blistering sun. (Well sun screened, of course!) And it's weird, I know, but I love the smell of the lake--it's so rich, so fishy and dirty and musty and gloppy somehow. It smells alive. I like it much, much better than chlorine.
5. Music. There are silly summer hits on the radio and fantastic concerts in Kansas City every night of the week. I've only gone to one show so far this year, but I've passed up about four great ones due to time conflicts. The music industry (and the whole world, it seems) is so gloriously busy in summer!
6. Nighttime. For me, my least favorite thing about summer is that the heat makes it hard to get a good night's sleep (at least in my apartment!). But the upside is that everyone seems to stay up a little bit later to take advantage of the cool night air. Summer nights are great for parties, for camping, for movie marathons, and for reading late into the night. There's something truly wonderful about being up at 3:00 a.m. on a summer night to hear the cicadas singing in the cool, damp air, and watching the moon high and bright overhead.
7. The haze. I love how everything and everyone slows down when it's really hot. We have no choice in the matter: the air feels like molasses. It's hard to move, to breath, to even think. The promise of heat stroke makes everyone pant, sweat, and sprawl their way slowly through the daylight hours. It's a sort of forced laziness. You have time to hear the crickets creaking, to watch the lightning bugs flicker, to smell the damp grass when twilight comes. Summer may be the loudest season--full of bugs and animals, fireworks, outdoor festivals, and wind--but  it always feels like the quietest season to me. It asks me to feel the sweat and salt on my skin, to stop moving so far and so fast, to hear my own thoughts moving through my own head. 

Opinionated

In the last year, I've found myself having more opinions, a lot more opinions: more opinions on music, on cultural figures, on literature, on fashion, on politics, and even on what I think are the best ways to live.


On the whole, I think this is great. I have more opinions not because I've started thinking more (trust me, I've always done far too much of that), but because I spent a large chunk of my growing up years thinking that the best way to get by in life was to not have any opinions. It seemed like a good way to get through the world without conflicts, without commitments, without ever making mistakes.

But now I know better: being afraid of having opinions doesn't lead to universal ease and understanding, it leads to being a damned milquetoast. Being opinionated obviously put a person at risk for experiencing disagreements and making mistakes, but not having an opinion means that a) you're not paying attention, b) you're not interested, or c) you don't have enough guts to try to be anyone at all, even yourself. To me, being opinionated means not that you're incapable of being wrong, but that you're confident and grown-up enough to handle being wrong every once in awhile.

But note the "on the whole" up above. What makes being opinionated less than perfect is that it's not all that useful for writing. There are some types of writing that are built on opinion and argument, of course--opinion columns, blogs, persuasive and academic writing of all kinds--but the types of writing I love aren't at their best when they're opinionated. Personal essays and poetry thrive on ambiguity, on challenging the pat answer, on withholding judgment for as long as possible for the sake of complexity, honesty, and surprise.

Keats's negative capability is probably the most famous statement of this--"when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason"--but I like Robert Frost's version, too: "No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader." I like my writing best when I've gotten from beginning to end and realized that I've turned around on my initial opinion--I don't necessarily make a 180, but at the very least I prefer to end up at an odd angle from where I started. It helps if I write about topics that I don't already have a firm opinion about; it's much better for me to start of feeling intrigued or confused instead of confident.

Writing like this helps me to remember to hold my opinions lightly. They're great, obviously, and probably 100% correct and as brilliant as I am (like, duh!), but writing helps me remember that the world is a fantastically big, complex, and surprising place; we're all muddling through as best we can, and all of our dearest beliefs and conceptions of the world may be proven absolutely false tomorrow. Writing helps me to remember that it doesn't matter whether I'm proven right or wrong in my views, only that I must remember to laugh when I'm proven wrong and to be gracious on those rare, glorious occasions when I can call myself something like "right."

My Big Fat Summer Reading: Vanity Fair

Last summer, it was Middlemarch. This year, I'm having a go at William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair. My annual way-too-long novel read has begun!

I was inspired to read Vanity Fair for two reasons: 1) Vanity Fair, the movie.

Actually, I've never seen it, even though it came out seven years ago. I make it a point to never watch a movie about a book that I might someday want to read. I get the actors' faces in my brain and I can never get them out again, which shapes the way I visualize the characters forever and ever and ever. I was afraid that I'd watch the film and never get Reese Witherspoon out of my version of Becky Sharp again. So, basically, I couldn't watch the movie (which looked really, really tempting) on Netflix until I committed to the novel.

And 2) I came across this awesome The Hairpin article about great classic novels with mean female main characters. It was funny and clever and totally convinced me that Thackeray was worth tackling. (Carrie Hill Wilner also wrote an article that convinced me to read Charlotte Bronte's Villette, which I totally enjoyed. So she's pretty much batting a thousand at this point!)

Anyway, a long jaunt through 19th-century England felt like exactly what I was looking for this June, and, so far, it has been! The novel is rife with earnest yearning and satire, innocence and deceit, creditors and debtors, outrageous wealth and the illusion of outrageous wealth. I sort of love Becky Sharp for all her shallow, back-stabbing, social-climbing ways--she's so good at what she does that it's difficult not to admire her. She's selfish and sometimes cruel, yes, but she's also doggedly clawing her way up in the world in the only way available to her, and her savvy and determination are remarkable.

But I also love her tender-hearted, naive, helpless best frienemy Amelia Sedley. In fact, I think that Thackeray is a great novelist precisely because he makes it possible for me to love both characters. Though the novel is known as a biting work of satire, I think that, at its heart, it's also a book written with a lot of empathy, understanding, and even gentleness.

I'm about 580 pages into its 800+ pages, and I'm on a pretty good tear (now that I'm past that really dull stretch about the battle of Waterloo--sheesh!).

 In fact, the only thing I don't like about Vanity Fair's length is that I have a huge stack of library books on my kitchen table that I desperately want to get to. There's Lord of the Flies and Howard's End and Wives and Daughters and Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad (which is my new book club's first read!). I'm definitely looking forward to the last forth of Vanity Fair, but I have so many treats in store--it's looking to be a great summer so far!

Leading Ladies in University Administration

There are plenty of things that I love about working at a university (good karma, student hijinks, excellent benefits, an abundance of general and free-floating intelligence, etc.), and a few things that I hate about it (bureaucracy, dowdy clothes, bureaucracy, student hijinks, bureaucracy, etc.).

But one of my favorite things about being a university employee is the number of brilliant women leaders hanging around. Of the two deans and three department heads I work with, four are women, so 80% of the leadership I'm exposed to is female. They're all brilliant in their own unique ways: this one's a great communicator and an excellent team manager, that one's efficiency and ability to think long-term is unrivaled, this lady bursts with a never-ending stream of fruitful ideas, and that one's kindness creates the type of team-oriented culture that makes working for her a pleasure. My last department at the university was also lead by a brilliant female director--one with a lot of invaluable stubbornness and savvy who was able to create and shape her program from the ground up. Trust me: I've worked with a lot of impressive ladies.

In institutions of higher learning, I love that there doesn't seem to be a glass ceiling in sight. Women can be leaders and managers here and still be genuinely respected and valued by their colleagues--and have I mentioned the fact that they're usually nationally respected, brilliant scholars leading research in their respected fields? Oh, yeah, that too.  ;)

All this is great news for me because I'm surrounded by strong, intelligent, successful women who I can readily adopt as role models. It's also great news for the flood of young women entering college campuses (57% of all students graduating from universities are women, according to USA Today): they're frequently exposed to intelligent female leaders in their classrooms, heading their departments, and piloting their universities (including the recently appointed chancellor at my university!).

I like to think that seeing women in leadership roles at the university-level will encourage young female graduates to go out and believe that they can do great things in the world, because they can. Maybe in 30 years, that 57% of college graduates will translate to 57% female leadership in corporations and government--here's to hoping.  :)

The Serious Wonder of Hayao Miyazaki

Last weekend, I finally got around to watching The Cat Returns, which is an animated movie from the now-famous Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli. It's the story of a teenage girl who rescues a cat from the road, only to realize that the cat is the royal prince of the Kingdom of Cats. As a reward, the King of Cats captures the girl and takes her to the Kingdom, where she must escape becoming the prince's bride. As far as animated movies go, it's a little weird, and very, very awesome.

"A little weird and very awesome" is applicable to pretty much all of Miyazaki's productions. His movies are whimsical, strange, and beautifully animated. They're also deadly serious. While most contemporary American animated movies (Pixar, Disney, Dreamworks, etc.) play tongue-in-cheek games with the conventions of fairy tales, creating films that they claim appeal to children and adults alike, Miyazaki takes fairy tales very seriously. His films are almost always about war and environmental destruction and the very real danger that comes from forgetting who you are. His movies inhabit worlds whose borders can blur at any second with eerie and dangerous magics. Aerial wars can break out between zeppelins and dragons. Birds can become staircases. Shadows can coalesce into henchmen. Even balls of dust and soot can come alive.

Dust sprites from Spirited Away.

I think that by taking fantasy seriously, by favoring whimsy and wild imagination over generic humor and contemporary references, Miyazaki is able to create movies that are truly fascinating to children and adults alike. My favorite is My Neighbor Totoro, which features a cat bus and trolls unlike anything you've ever seen.

OMG catbus!!

I'm also a big fan of Howl's Moving Castle (which is very unlike the original--and also excellent--children's fantasy novel by Diana Wynne Jones) and Ponyo, the Studio's most recent production.

 
Ponyo is, in theory, based on the fairy tale of the little mermaid, but Miyazaki's film is as different from Disney's The Little Mermaid as the Brothers Grimm stories are from Shrek. As a mermaid, little Ponyo is cute but creepy (she looks like a goldfish, occasionally sprouts bird-like feet, and really enjoys ham), and the film features massive flooding and prehistorical sea creatures.

Ponyo in her bucket.

I'm always surprised by the genuine delight that I still feel whenever I see a Miyazaki film. I'm fascinated with the little threads that flow through his movies--the stone ghosts, the dust sprites, the menacing shadow men, the omnipresent and insect-like war zeppelins--and how with every film he makes for children, he doesn't just play in the worlds of myth and fairy tales, he actively contributes to them. It's his startling originality--his ability to create creatures that are delightful and terrifying, beautiful and bizarre--that makes me rent his movies again and again.

The Art of the Nap

This morning, I woke up and promptly decided to do nothing with my day.

I had plans to go to the farmers' market downtown and errands aplenty to run, but after a cup of coffee and two toasted pitas with peanut butter, I hit the couch and haven't moved since--except, of course, to transition back to bed where I could better enjoy the warm breeze coming through my bedroom window, the buttery Saturday morning sunlight, and my comforter (which is just thin enough to be perfect for warm spring-time napping).

I've never been much of a napper (though I have recently developed a fondness for falling asleep on my couch for a half hour each night as an overture to my real bedtime). But I do love a good half-awake, hour-long loll in bed when just I'm conscious enough to hear cars driving by but asleep enough to lose track of which of my thoughts are real and which are the bizarre result of half-dreams ("Why shouldn't the ghosts ride motorcycles to make it to their graduation day history tests?").

Between this morning's naps, I've had the good fortune to spend my time with Joseph Epstein's Narcissus Leaves the Pool: Familiar Essays. I'd never heard of Epstein before, but I saw this book's title on another blogger's list of favorite essay collections, and I had to get it from the library.

Epstein's essays are emphatically "familiar." He writes in the spirit of Michel de Montaigne--his voice is indulgent, leisurely, charming, and desultory, and his topic of choice is always himself. Whereas "personal" essays are usually about some event in the author's life, their form still tends to be somewhat formal and narrative-based. Epstein's "familiar" essays, on the other hand, feel like letters Epstein has written to a dear friend. I imagine that Epstein worries far less about keeping his meanderings on topic than he does about maintaining a relationship with his reader that is warm, relaxed, and consistently engaging.

Joseph Epstein

One of my favorite essays so far has been "The Art of the Nap." In this piece, Epstein starts with his personal napping habits (a topic with an almost unimaginable potential for dullness) before waltzing playfully from the historical connections between writers and insomnia to sleep's purported similarity to death and back around to why it's important not to take Harvard too seriously. He manages, somehow, to transform the potentially banal into the delightful--a brilliant and surprisingly difficult trick.

Here's one of my favorite paragraphs from "The Art of the Nap":

I nap well on airplanes, trains, buses, and in cars and with a special proficiency at concerts and lectures. I am, when pressed, able to nap standing up. In certain select company, I wish I could nap while being spoken to. I have not yet learned to nap while I myself am speaking, though I have felt the urge to do so. I had a friend named Walter B. Scott who, in his late sixties, used to nap at parties of ten or twelve people that he and his wife gave. One would look over and there Walter would be, chin on his chest, lights out, nicely zonked; he might as well have hung a Gone Fishing sign on his chest. Then, half an hour or so later, without remarking upon his recent departure, he would smoothly pick up the current of the talk, not missing a stroke, and get finely back into the flow. I saw him do this perhaps four or five times, always with immense admiration.

Epstein possesses all my favorite traits in an essayist--he's light-hearted, well-read, subtle, intelligent, self-aware, and unfailingly kind--and he's made a lovely addition to my lazy Saturday morning.

Now the question becomes, where do I go from here? A trip to the gym is definitely in order, as well as a trip to Home Depot to look at paint swatches and perhaps a jog over to Old Navy to seek out sundresses. Maybe I'll make my way to the theater to see Bridesmaids tonight. Perhaps I'll find time to deal with the Jenga-like stack of dishes piled in my tiny apartment sink. It's possible that I'll even repair the complete lack of clean white socks in my uppermost sock drawer.

But, then again, there are essays waiting for me, not to mention more sunshine and that already well-rumpled comforter waiting on my bed . . .

Michael Chabon's Maps and Legends

I have a strange (though not necessarily bad) habit of finding wildly famous writers of fiction, ignoring their novels, and reading their essay collections instead. I did the same thing with Jonathan Franzen last fall, and I just did it again with Michael Chabon's collection of essays Maps and Legends. 

Maps and Legends with its gorgeous set of mythical layered dust jackets.

It's an absolutely stunning book to hold (way to go, McSweeney's!) and an engaging text to spend time with. For some reason, I kept comparing Chabon's book to Franzen's How to Be Alone--in part because they're both works by critically acclaimed and much lauded contemporary writers of fiction, and in part because they take on such similar topics (for example, The State of Modern Fiction and Reading) in such wildly different ways. Where Franzen is serious and brilliant and critical, Chabon is enthusiastic and blithe and mercurial. Franzen's writing is more precise and persuasive, but Chabon's is more engaging; I wish I could take a literature class with Franzen as my teacher, but I wish I could take Chabon out for a beer to talk about our promiscuous reading habits.

Chabon's collection contains essays on the state of the modern short story, the dangers of labeling novels by genre (he considers the library's system of categorization--science fiction, mystery, young adult, etc.--to be a sort of ghettoization), Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials Trilogy, the history of Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes, the myth of the golem, the importance of comics for children and adult readers, and his childhood love of Norse mythology. (If you know my reading habits at all, you can see why the table of contents practically forced me to get my hands on this collection!)

Chabon with superheroes.

While much of the essays are what could be called light or popular literary criticism (usually a serious, if accessible, genre), at its heart, the book is a gleeful celebration of reading for pleasure and entertainment. I think that the world of literature might be a better place if all authors--Pulitzer Prize winners or not--were able to occasionally admit to Chabon's thesis: "I read for entertainment, and I write to entertain. Period."

Chabon, Franzen, Tom Wolfe, and Gore Vidal as seen on The Simpsons.

Earth Day, Patagonia, and the World's Diverse Passions

Happy Earth Day, everyone! I completely forgot the holiday, but it's a happy coincidence that I bought a new Electra quick-release wire basket for my bike last weekend and a Patagonia messenger bag this week. Both I plan on using for environmentally friendly offices. I'm going to use the wire basket for conveying groceries from my local farmers' market and books from my library. It looks cute on my bike and is soooo fun to use!

The Patagonia bag is extra-special to me. I've wanted one since college. Patagonia makes high-quality camping, hiking, and bicycling products in an extremely earth-friendly way: they fund a lot of great causes, and pretty much everything they sell is either completely recycled or completely organic. They're a fantastic company, and I can't wait to tote my work computer around in their bag! I'm calling it a Happy New Job present to myself.  :) 

Finally getting a Patagonia bag is a big deal for me; their stuff is expensive (in part because it's meant to be used for decades without falling apart), so it's exciting to finally be able to afford one and to placate a consumerist fetish that I've been nursing for a long time!

Buying my bag got me thinking about people's unique proclivities and passions. Patagonia is an old one for me, and it's a passion that is unique to my geographic location, my class, my social situation, my values, and my temperament. It comes from being a former Enrivons member and a KU graduate and a Lawrence resident during the early 2000s. It's symptomatic of who I am and where I come from, just like my passion for bookstores and literature and education and vintage clothes and granola and pickles and who knows what else! Our loves and desires are created by more than just ourselves--they're organic outgrowths of our unique personal contexts, as well.

This has been on my mind as I learn about the students I'm involved with as an advisor. The personality types common to each of my academic programs are so distinctive from each other and often quite different from my own. Each day contrasts my values and understandings--those values and understandings unique to my background in the study of literature, writing, and the creative process--with those of my new co-workers and advisees.

I suspect that my job will be a great one for studying human nature and the variety of human passions. Whether it's service, professionalism, creativity, or knowledge that my students seek, I find it refreshing and fascinating to experience, at least for a few minutes at a time, how these lovely people perceive the world, themselves, and their career paths.

How Way Leads on to Way

I've been away. You may have noticed.  :P

My new job has taken a lot of adjusting to these past few weeks. I like the work, but traveling back and forth has eaten up much of my free time, and I'm still getting use to it. On top of that, my poor, lovely, stubborn mother has been in the hospital with an unusually nasty strain of pneumonia. She's back home and feeling better now, but I was worried for her. So, dear blog, I'm sorry, but you just haven't been a priority.

But since I've last visited, I've been reading a lot and enjoying my Netflix subscription and trying (trying!) my best to take it easy in my time off. I've been in a particularly fun sort of reading/television watching path--it's one of my favorite things about being out of school and being able to direct my own reading. I choose books with perfect freedom and whimsy, and I never run out of new strands of interest to follow. Each new book I read has the potential to sling me off into some new interest that I never expected to love. In reading as in life, as Frost puts it, "way leads on to way."

Most recently, I've been loving all things Sherlock Holmes, which I never in my life thought I would be interested in. I used to think that I didn't like mystery novels or crime stories, and police detectives in tweeds smoking pipes seemed like the dullest thing possible. But here's what happened:

• I watched that fantastically witty Doctor Who episode where Agatha Christie solves a real-life murder mystery involving a giant space wasp. (Yes, that episode is as awesome as it sounds.) -->
• Curious about Christie, I read The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Murder on the Orient Express, and Death Comes as the End. They were great--very clever and well written and British and astute. -->
• Thinking that I now liked old-fashioned British mysteries, I rented the new Sherlock Holmes action movie with Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law. I surprised myself by really, really enjoying it. -->
• Intrigued by the eccentricity of Holmes in the movie (drug use, bizarre fits of melancholia, a deep and curious jealousy of his friend Dr. Watson, etc.), I spent some time researching Holmes and Arthur Conan Doyle on Wikipedia.  -->
• Curious about Doyle's writing and the oddity of Holmes as a character, I read two of the Holmes novels (A Study in Scarlet and The Hound of the Baskervilles). They were fun, easy reading, as clear and fast-paced as if they'd been written in the late 20th century, not the late 19th. -->
• Because I enjoyed these novels, I decided to read Laurie R. King's The Beekeeper's Apprentice (which features Holmes in later life, living in semi-retirement in the 1920s and 1930s). -->
• King's version of Holmes was fantastically appealing, even better than the original! On top of the typical Holmes-style plot lines, there was a brilliant feminist female sleuth to keep Holmes in check (Mary Russell!) and a romantic sub-plot and really cool flapper clothing. So I read the next two novels in the series (The Monstrous Regiment of Women and A Letter of Mary) and loved them. -->
• Finally, I took Netflix's suggestion and started watching the Granada Sherlock Holmes series from the 1980s and 1990s with Jeremy Brett. I loved it and spent a good chunk of this weekend watching Holmes chase down Professor Moriarty and a dozen other amateur thieves and murderers. I never, ever thought I'd have an opinion about Dr. Watson as a narrator or the nattiness of Victorian-era men's clothing, but now I do. So yay!

So what's next? Inspired by King's Mary Russell novels, Downton Abbey's portrayal of pre-World War I Britain, and Ishiguro's conflicted post-World War II butler in  The Remains of the Day, I'll probably track down some more great modernist British literature. But who knows where I'll end up next?

Goodness, isn't reading fun?  :D

Terror and Pain and Other Awesome Things

So, BIG HUGE FANTASTIC NEWS: I started a new job this week. I'm still working at the University, but in a different department with far more responsibility and freedom. It's a distinctly grown-up feeling job, with nicer clothes and an incredibly hectic Outlook calendar and a steep learning curve and a lot more pressure.

Obviously, this is a huge step for me career-wise, but it's also frightening. Terrifying, in fact. But I keep reminding myself to breath deeply, to trust myself, and to trust the search committee that thought I was right for the job.

I also keep reminding myself that a yoga instructor once told my class that "Pain is good. Pain is just the feeling of your life force actualizing." Of course, she told us this as we were sweating and trembling at least three minutes into an arm-aching balance pose.

I keep telling myself the same thing this week: If pain is just my life force actualizing (!), then maybe terror is just my life changing, expanding, moving forward before my mind can wrap quite comfortably around all the changes.

So that's my philosophy and my hope for the next few weeks. I'll let you know how it all turns out.  :)

Howl, Howl, and Howl

What sound does a working woman in her mid-twenties make the morning after her first softball practice in two and a half years?

Why, how did you guess?

Softball practice was fantastically fun yesterday, but I'm paying for it today. I'm having trouble opening doors, people--I mean, lifting my arm, turning a knob, and stepping forward hurts. Who knew that throwing a ball and crouching for grounders and darting across a muddy field for an hour and forty-five minutes could do that to a body?

In less painful news, I finally saw Howl this weekend. Howl is a "biopic" about the obscenity trial that followed City Light's release of Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems  in 1956, but the movie was nothing like what I expected.

I thought the movie would be a typical biopic in the style of Walk the Line or Lean on Me or Braveheart: conventional and predictable and utterly sentimental. Instead, the obscenity trial that the film is supposedly about serves as little more than a backbone for the 84 minutes of poetic action, a mere cage of plot line over which the filmmakers draped the central components of the film: the interview scenes with Ginsberg (played by James Franco) and the poem itself (which is read by Franco and beautifully animated). Really, the poem is what gives the movie all its heart and soul and interest; I wouldn't have minded a 45-minute movie with nothing but black-and-white scenes of Franco reading Howl in a Village bar spliced with bits of that lovely, vivid, frightening animation.



I was especially fond of the animators' portrayal of Moloch, the poem's "villain" (see above).

Once I got past expecting an actual plot to appear, I really enjoyed the movie, and I loved it best for reminding me of how much I used to love Ginsberg. He's one of my favorite 20th-Century poets, and I've read a ton of his poems and interviews. (In fact, the first poem I ever published was very Ginsberg-inspired, with long lines and stacks of lists and happy over-the-top joyful cosmic hysteria). He was severely out of vogue at my grad school, so I hadn't read him in years, but in 2004, I pretty much wanted to be Allen Ginsberg.

"You were never no locomotive, Sunflower, you were a

sunflower!"

Watching Howl made me pull out my copy of Ginsberg's Selected Poems: 1947-1995, which (according the the receipt I found in the book) I bought from The Raven Bookstore in 2005. I reread my favorite sections of Howl (the "I am with you Rockland" section and "Footnote to Howl" with all its holy holy holy holys) and flipped through to see what poems I had marked back in 2005. It made for a lovely evening, actually.

I would definitely recommend Howl (the movie) to anyone who's read the poem and, while I'm at it, to anyone who hasn't read the poem. I believe that Franco reads the entirety of the poem over the course of the movie, and the filmmakers do an excellent job of getting to the heart of what Howl (the poem) is all about. They also did quite a good job of portraying Ginsberg as the complicated figure that I always imagine him to be: a poet, a revolutionary, an unloved lover, a square, a Beat, and an all-around brave and joyful human being.