If Zadie Smith and Douglas Adams Had a Baby . . .

it would be precocious and aggressively clever and named January 2012.

Work has been so hectic this month that once January 23rd rolled around, I realized that I had only read one book since the new year: Zadie Smith's Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays. "Only one?!" I thought. "I'm shooting for 52 total this year! I can do better."

Besides the busyness, I can also blame my lack of book-reading on my scattered forays into essays and poetry and stories that were way too heavy for winter months, like Kafka's "Metamorphosis" and a few choice back issues of The New Yorker and bits of The Best American Poetry of 2011 and Great English Essays: From Bacon to Chesterton. It was all very intellectually stimulating and vocabulary expanding and also sludgy and dreary, and it contributed nothing to my Goodreads list.

Smith's essays went along this same erudite vein, and they were painful in the same way that stretching a muscle you don't use very much is painful: it's difficult, and it burns, and your butt may feel like it's all the way across the room, but it's also invigorating and relaxing and almost certainly (you tell yourself) "for your own good."


Changing My Mind collects Smith's previously published essays on a mixed bag of topics, from reading her favorite authors (Zora Neale Hurston, George Eliot, Nabokov, and David Foster Wallace) to touring through impoverished Liberia and fancy dress parties in LA, to reviews of bad movies and British humor, to her father's death.

Smith opens her collection with an essay about her love for Their Eyes Were Watching God. She describes her relationship with this novel as "extraliterary": she appreciates Hurston's style and skill as an author, but she truly loves the novel because she feels like she shares Hurston's values, her story, her struggles and loves. I felt the same way about much of Smith's writing: I thought she was at her most brilliant when writing about authors I already loved (Hurston and George Eliot, specifically), but she lost me where our opinions differed; I very dutifully read her essay on Barthes and Nabokov and her (very, very) long paean to David Foster Wallace, but those bits of writing didn't sing for me.

Still, I was happy to have found something from Smith that I enjoyed; I read the first 200 pages of White Teeth, her wildly popular debut novel from 2000, and loathed it, so I was happily surprised to enjoy so many of her essays so much. I've gained respect for her obvious intelligence; her muscular, efficient, nuanced prose; and her ability to make me look up words on my Merriam-Webster dictionary app ("patois," "lacunae," "apogee"--never stop, Zadie! you're making me a smarter person!).

But after Smith's weight, I had to cleanse my reading palate. I turned right to Douglas Adams's  The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy at the recommendation of a friend, and I wished instantly that I had read it when I was 12: it's manic, sugar-coated, and wildly imaginative. It's also more over-stuffed with jokes than (as my father would say) 10 pounds of potatoes in a 5-pound sack. And while part of me thought, "Douglas Adams, this much funny is like serving me a bowl of gravy at Thanksgiving dinner. Yes, gravy is delicious, but where's the meat, buddy?" it was also quick and silly and just what I needed on January 26th, 2011.

What's next on my winter reading list? Definitely another tawdry faerie novel from Laurell K. Hamilton (after tackling Kafka for the first time, I've earned it!), as well as the steampunk YA novel Leviathan and maybe Game of Thrones or Ready Player One. Let my sci-fi/fantasy winter begin!

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.

Eat, Pray, Love

Honestly, I was hesitant to read Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love. It was just so damn popular--so popular that it spawned a Julia Roberts movie (an outcome that, I think, many a writer would dread). C'mon, I thought, how could Eat, Pray, Love turn out to be anything other than cheap tourism and stories about tiramisu and hunky Italians and faux-spiritual enlightenment and steamy tropical romances?

 Fortunately, I was wrong. My mom convinced me to give Gilbert a chance, and I'm so pleased that I pulled one of my local library's fifteen copies of this memoir off the bookshelves. It's a lovely piece of writing and self-exploration, a breathtakingly honest and cleverly written chronicle of Gilbert's sojourns in Italy, India, and Indonesia.

Gilbert's memoir is not literary-ly ambitious but personally so: She's writing the type of confessional non-fiction that holds very little back, and so a reader's enjoyment of the book hinges not on whether or not you like the story, but whether or not you like Liz Gilbert, Narrator. And though I did occasionally find her neuroses irritating, I really, really liked Liz Gilbert: I admired her emotional and spiritual bravery (both as a traveler and as a writer), even when I didn't necessarily "get" her.

Of course, this is how most personal essays and memoirs are meant to be. For example, E.B. White's One Man's Meat isn't brilliant because of its stories (in fact, I don't remember any sort of "plot" anywhere in the entire book) but because of the richness of White himself. It's the same with Gilbert's book: despite the way the memoir was marketed (as a sort of chick lit/humor/travel memoir hybrid), Gilbert's writing is so rife with personality and literary references and carefully crafted scenes that she places herself squarely within the tradition of classic personal essayists. Even when there wasn't much action going on (especially in the Italian chapters), Gilbert's voice, her obvious intelligence, and her wide-ranging literary and spiritual references make this book rich and worthwhile.

I ended up reading this very quickly and with great pleasure and found myself marking favorite quotes again and again. Here are a few that stuck with me, even after I was done:

"But I felt a glimmer of happiness when I started studying Italian, and when you sense a faint potentiality for happiness after such dark times you must grab onto the ankles of that happiness and not let go until it drags you face-first out of the dirt--this is not selfishness, but obligation. You were given life; it is your duty (and also your entitlement as a human being) to find something beautiful within life, no matter how slight."

"Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it, you must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it. If you don't you will leak away your innate contentment."

 "But what I have come to realize is that, when the patriarchic system was (rightfully) dismantled, it was not necessarily replaced by another form of protection. What I mean is--I never thought to ask a suitor the same challenging questions my father might have asked him, in a different age. I have given myself away in love many times, merely for the sake of love. And I've given away the farm sometimes in that process. If I am to truly become an autonomous woman, then I must take over that role of being my own guardian."

"My thoughts turn to something I read once, something the Zen Buddhists believe. They say that an oak tree is brought into creation by two forces at the same time. Obviously, there is the acorn from which it all begins, the seed which holds all the promise and potential, which grows into the tree. Everybody can see that. But only a few can recognize that there is another force operating here as well--the future tree itself, which wants so badly to exist that it pulls the acorn into being, drawing the seedling forth with longing out of the void, guiding the evolution from nothingness to maturity. In this respect, say the Zens, it is the oak tree that creates the very acorn from which it was born."

 And, finally, one very, very lovely bit of language:

"I walked home that night feeling like the air could move through me, like I was clean linen fluttering on a clothesline, like New York itself had become a city made of rice paper--and I was light enough to run across every rooftop."

All quotes taken from Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love (Viking 2006).

Dear Blog,

I miss you. I really do. I want to write posts for you about snow days and this really good new sugar cookie recipe I found and Eat, Pray, Love and walking in the cold and writing essays and . . .


*sigh*

You get the idea.

But things have been busy here in Lesley Land. I took on an editing job last week that had a very tight deadline. It was a fun project, but it kept me busy all last week. Regular work has been unbelievably busy because of the snow days, and I've been furiously playing catch up for a solid week now. And then last week my writing group members decided that it was time for me to wrap up the essay I've been working on and submit it, so I've been furiously churning out 1,500 words per night all week long--and I'm still not done! Now I'm hoping to whittle it down and send it off early Saturday afternoon.

So, blog, know that I miss you. Know that I keep having ideas for you and writing them down, right before I go off and edit and/or write and/or work really hard and/or go to the gym to stay sane.

Anyway, I'll visit again soon.

Much love,
Lesley

Happy December

Happy first of December, everybody!

I'm always a little bit excited about December. It's not the holidays I love--I'm not a huge Christmas person--and it's not exactly the weather; I don't usually like the cold, and I hate having to wear gloves to drive my car or type at the office. But I've always liked winter. At the beginning of the season, the cold feels crisp and new and intoxicating. The first snow flakes look cleansing and bright, and roads and cars aren't yet covered in that awful salty, sandy, dirty sludge that seems to epitomize the February doldrums to me. It feels like a new world is beginning each December, and I like that.

Besides, I've been ready for November to be done for awhile now. It was not my best month ever.  :P

In other news, last night, I walked out in the cold and the dark to see a reading downtown. The two authors were local-ish (native Kansans from a town an hour away). One wrote essays and the other poetry, and they were both underwhelming. They did not write excellent or surprising or even terribly engaging literature, but I tried to listen to it with a better attitude than I used to. In the past, I've been a terrible literary hater; I've gotten angry over the success of poems and essays and even people that I don't like or respect. But that's a cheap and miserly way to live, and it certainly wasn't making me any more successful when I ripped on others' work.

These days, I'm trying to remember that all literature, even literature that I *ahem* disagree with, was written by someone who was doing his/her best to write, to survive, and to be happy. All literature is written by someone who is trying to learn his/her own song and sing it, and their bravery, persistence, and stubborn individuality is something to respect, even if the writing itself irks me.

Random Five for Friday

1. Dead Tired. I've been planning to write a blog post all this week, but I didn't expect for my travel hangover to last quite so long. I have been beat. My trip to State College was fantastic, as was my family reunion in Marion, but they made for a whole lot of traveling and not a whole lot of sleeping. So my post in praise of Susan Orlean will just have to wait until next week!
2. Spicy Food. This week, I attempted vegetarian chili, which is basically a bunch of beans with some spices and tomatoes thrown in. The problem with vegetarian chili is that meat adds a good deal of fat and flavor that is indispensable to the whole chili experience. I was forced to turn to lots and lots of red chili flakes to make my chili appetizing. My taste buds have been feverishly thrilled all week, but every day my stomach growls at me and says, WTF, Lesley! Are you kidding me? MORE of this stuff? Ahhh! Stop it!!! Where's the Tums?!
3. Good Reads. I finished two really excellent books this week: The Art of Losing (a collection of poems on mourning that I wrote about here), and Jonathan Franzen's How to Be Alone. I picked up Franzen's essay collection because I was curious about his writing, but I didn't want to commit to taking part in the Freedom "best novel of the century" hoopla.Though many of the book's essays are about reading and the state of the novel, How to Be Alone consists largely of an old-fashioned curmudgeon's complaints about modern society (its disinterest in serious fiction, its mindless passion for new technologies, its meaningless passion for privacy, etc.). It can easily be read as a work of late adopter naysayer-ism that frequently contradicts itself, but Franzen is so brilliant in his thinking and so adept in his prose styling that you're willing to growl and harrumph along with him, just for the pleasure of spending time with his voice. The collection made for surprisingly good airport reading material, and it's convinced me to put The Corrections on my to-read list.
4. Writing & Wranglin'. The last week's busyness has put a serious crunch on my writing time, so the writing has been going slowly. I'm in the process of radically revising my chapbook, and I'm trying to work my way through a new process of drafting and revising. In grad school, I had to write fast to keep up with the pace of workshop (I wrote one poem a week for years!). Now, I'm trying to write more slowly and to think more deeply. Instead of playing with images and making up the substance as I go along, I'm trying to clarify the ideas and feelings I want to express before I start worrying about image and diction and line length. I think that this will be an excellent method in the long run, but it's trying right now. Writing more truthful, more emotional, more intellectually interesting poetry is hard. I'm trying for a sort of clarity that is extremely difficult to achieve. So, like one of my Penn State MFA Reading Series t-shirts says, I "Just Keep Pounding Those Keys!"
5. Wedding Weekend. Last night, one of my third cousins got married. She's having her wedding reception in Abilene this weekend, and I'm going with my mom. Though I'm not thrilled to be traveling for the second weekend in a row, I'm really looking forward to it. Charlie's stepfather once told me that the quality of a wedding always depends on the feeling between the couple. If the couple is joyful and deeply in love, the wedding celebration will feel joyful and easy and sincere. Consequently, I expect this weekend's celebration to be an excellent one. :)

Guess What I'm Doing Tomorrow

Oh, nothing much, just flying to State College, Pennsylvania to see Susan Orlean read as Penn State's 2010 Steven Fisher Writer in Residence. Which Susan Orlean? Oh, yeah, that Susan Orlean who just happens to be my favorite living writer of non-fiction. I'm going to drink Yuenglings with her and stuff. At least I will be when I'm not stuffing my face with Waffle Shop and carousing with my friends from grad school who I haven't seen in a year and a half.

So, you know, no big weekend.


*pause*

AHHHHHOMIGOODNESSSOEXCITEDIT'SGOINGTOBEWAYAWESOMEYAY!!!

*ahem*

You get the idea.  ;)

I'll see you next week, blog friends!

Phillip Lopate on Michel de Montaigne

I've started reading Phillip Lopate's Against Joie de Vivre: Personal Essays. I've been enjoying some of the essays, but others have left an unguent, unpleasant taste in my mouth. (Lopate is a bit of a confessionalist, which is a tricky mode to write in.)

However, I'm loving "What Happened to the Personal Essay?", especially the parts about Michel de Montaigne:

"It was Montaigne's peculiar project, which he claimed rightly or wrongly was original, to write about the one subject he knew best: himself. As with all succeeding literary self-portraits--or all succeeding stream-of-consciousness, for that matter--success depended on having an interesting consciousness, and Montaigne was blessed with an undulatingly supple, learned, skeptical, deep, sane, and candid one. In point of fact, he frequently strayed to worldly subjects, giving his opinion on everything from cannibals to coaches, but we do learn a large number of intimate and odd details about the man, down to his bowels and kidney stones. 'Sometimes there comes to me a feeling that I should not betray the story of my life,' he writes. On the other hand: 'No pleasure has any meaning for me without communication.'"

Ah, Montaigne, I want to be just like you when I grow up!  :)

One Man's Meat

I finally finished E.B. White's One Man's Meat, and now I don't know what to do with myself. I was really sad to leave it. I dreaded the last page and made a little "Awww . . ." sound as I turned to it. I wanted more!

I've been reading it at lunch time over my sack lunches and cafeteria salads. White's essays on country life are so calming, so rejuvenating, and he somehow made subjects like patriotism and World War Two and freedom feel immediate and fresh and important. His essays created a truly quiet space in the middle of my work days; they seemed to clean out my brain for a little bit, sort of smoothing down its rough edges before I took out my notebook for my mid-day writing session.

Finishing a beloved book is a sad event, and also an exciting one. I get to choose a new book now, with a great deal of apprehension (will it live up to White's essays?) and a little bit of hope (could it possibly be even better than White's essays?!).

I think that I'll stick with essays at lunch time. They seem suited to the noon-hour. Poems, which are all impression, emotion, and instinct, seem right for foggy-headed mornings, and novels are purely evening fare, with their human camaraderie and thrilling imaginative leaps. But the honesty of non-fiction, the way that essays inch their way from fact toward wisdom, is steadying and filling, sort of like a turkey sandwich on whole grain bread.

So what's next? Hmmm . . . here are the possibilities:

1. Walter Benjamin's Illuminations
2. Joan Didion's Slouching Toward Bethlehem
3. Annie Dillard's Teaching a Stone to Talk
4. Ralph Waldo Emerson's Self-Reliance and Other Essays
5. Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle
6. Marilynn Robinson's Absence of Mind 

Any suggestions?

"Gaity, or Truth in Sheep's Clothing"

I got home from a reading a few hours ago. There were five readers: three fiction writers, one non-fiction writer, and one poet turned non-fiction-ist. The reading was fine--it was a little long, a little dry, and in a restaurant filled with smoke from an over-heated pizza oven--and only one writer really stuck out to me. She was one of the non-fiction writers, and she was writing about growing up as an evangelical Christian in a public high school.

In most ways, her writing was no different from her peers': her language flowed smoothly, her scenes were rife with clear imagery and distinct characters, and her prose felt polished and lively. But she differed from everyone else because she made the audience laugh, and not in a cruel way. Even though she was writing about the misadventures of an overeager young girl fumbling her way toward an identity outside of her religion, she was tender about her past self and her former friends. She acknowledged that her audience might not identify with her upbringing or her past beliefs, but she never sacrificed her past self cruelly, selling herself out for cheap satire. Her essay worked because she was unashamed of her past and because she treated her past self gently, with great kindness and great levity.

Her writing made me think of Dostoevsky, a little bit, and of Michel de Montaigne and Jane Austen in that she was capable of telling her story with both levity and compassion, something which is exceedingly rare. The other readers read very nicely crafted pieces, but they took themselves awful seriously. There was a lot of imagery and profound symbolism in their pieces, but not a lot of joy.

I've been thinking about the importance of gentle humor because of E.B. White's excellent One Man's Meat. Early in the book, White describes "a certain writer, appalled by the cruel events of the world" who has "pledged himself never to write anything that wasn't constructive and significant and liberty-loving."

"I have an idea that this, in its own way, is bad news. [. . .] Even in evil times, a writer should cultivate only what naturally absorbs his fancy, whether it be freedom or chinch bugs, and should write in the way that comes easy. [. . .] In a free country it is the duty of writers to pay no attention to duty. Only under a dictatorship is literature expected to exhibit an harmonious design or an inspirational tone. A despot doesn't fear eloquent writers preaching freedom--he fears a drunken poet who may crack a joke that will take hold. His gravest concern is lest gaiety, or truth in sheep's clothing, somewhere gain a foothold, lest joy in some unguarded moment be unconfined. I honestly don't believe that a humorist should take the veil today; he should wear his bells night and day, and squeeze the uttermost jape, even though he may feel that he should be writing a strong letter to the Herald Times."

 After a long stint in graduate school, where satire and self-deprecation often took the place of true gaiety and good-humoredness, I'm a little more appreciative of writers who, like E. B. White and tonight's reader, can combine humor and kindness to get to the heart of whatever they're after.

Sunday Randos: A List!

1. I've finished my first week at the new job! Each day, my thoughts swung from "I can totally do this! Yay me!" to "Oh, God, I'm lost and confused and destined to be a failure at life. I'm going back to the cafe!" So far, it seems like the biggest part of my job is learning the ropes. I'm going to have to learn how to navigate KU's staggeringly complicated bureaucracy, learn all the quirky little software programs I'm working with, and learn the myriad tasks and procedures associated with running an academic department at KU. It's intimidating, but I know that (I hope that?) I'll eventually figure everything out!
2. I finally finished Middlemarch. The end was a little disappointing--the happy ending felt out of sync with Eliot's world--but I'm glad I stuck with it. The plot really picked up around page 500 so that the last 300 pages went quickly. For all the time Eliot spent on small-town dynamics and politics, the novel was ultimately about marriage and the way people perceive themselves and people's expectations about their lives. It wasn't the best novel I've ever read, but it was definitely thought-provoking, and I think it will stay with me a long time. Here's Virginia Woolf's brilliant quote from the back cover of my edition: George Eliot "was one of the first English novelists to discover that men and women think as well as feel, and the discovery was of great artistic moment. Briefly, it meant that the novel ceased to be solely a love story, an autobiography, or a story of adventure. It became, as it had already become with the Russians, of much wider scope."
3. I haven't done a thing about the fact that I'm moving to an apartment in Lawrence in a couple of weeks. I should start packing, but it doesn't seem real yet! I walk past my apartment building every day on my walk to work, and I gaze at it longingly. I can't wait to move in and decorate it and start living my life there. But it won't seem real until I'm holding the keys and my cat's litter box is moved in!
4. Speaking of kitties, I've been cat-sitting this weekend. The parents are in Virginia for my cousin's graduation, so I'm feeding the cats, picking up the newspapers, and taking out the garbage. It's strange to be in Olathe, but it's made for some good shopping. I love New York & Co. way more than I should!
5. I've been writing over my lunch hour at work. I like it a lot: it's nice to be creative for a half hour every day, especially in the midst of all my phone calling and spreadsheet wrangling. But it's also making me want to buy a netbook, so I could type on a tiny little laptop instead of scribbling in a notebook!
6. One of my inspirations these days in One Man's Meat, a memoir-y essay collection by E.B. White. Each brief chapter covers a month in his life and contains a handful of tiny essays about anything and everything, from chickens that lay too many eggs to the approach of World War II. There's a sense of happiness and relaxation to White's writing that's very appealing. The book is not entirely memoir, and it's nothing like the research-based nonfiction so common today. It's full of good-natured, free-form ramblings in the style of Michel de Montaigne. Reading White's book feels like chatting with an old friend who is candid and funny and smart and true, and it's a wonderful thing to read at lunch before I start my own writing: it makes me feel as if writing naturally is the best and easiest path to writing well.

 E. B. White with his evil and affectionate dachshund Fred.

Ten Tumbled Tidbits

I don't feel like writing anything sensible today, so here's a list of what's on my mind:

1. Spring begins in less than two weeks. I love that the color of sunlight is changing and that I can smell the earth again. Yes, PLEASE.
2. Easter is one of my favorite holidays. Everyone's joyful, the weather's usually beautiful, and, let's face it, Easter candy is the best holiday candy ever. What can possibly compete with jelly beans, Sweet Tarts shaped like bunnies, malt balls, and Cadbury cream eggs? (Yes, Halloween, I am calling you out, chump!)
3. (Nerd Alert!) I've been thinking about the benefits of AP Style lately. It's unflinchingly in favor of brevity, simplicity and clarity. I think it might be a good thing.
4. I've been in an essaying sort of mood. Writing poetry every day has made me grumpy: I've grown sick of forcing line breaks and of hearing that irritatingly "poet-y" voice I sometimes fall in to. So I've given in and started writing brief lyric essays everyday instead. I like how this is going.
5. Someone recently told me that I have terrible taste in music because I like Lil' Wayne. Are you kidding me?! You can disagree with his persona, his hairdo, his violation of gun laws, and his misogyny, but, good grief, you cannot deny that the man is a brilliant poet/rapper/lyricist. And his music is funny, which I think is a rare and wonderful thing.
6. Project Runway should never have a break between seasons. Ever.
7. I'm finally reading George Eliot's Middlemarch. I love Eliot's insights into human nature, but goodness, it's wearying to read such dry, relentless, scathing satire. Just like someone already, George!
8. I'm a redhead again thanks to the efforts of my cousin Sarah, who is an amazing hairdresser! It's been a few years since I've dyed my hair, and I'm enjoying the change.
9. OmigoodnesssoexcitedwhenwillithappenahhhhIlovebasketball! (Translation: I am suitably enthused for the NCAA men's basketball tournament.)
10. I'm reading a collection of Gerard Manley Hopkins's poems very, very slowly. His work is beautiful; each line is stuffed with the complex music of sprung rhythm and constant alliteration. But his syntax is downright tortured by his sound schemes, and it's hard to pick out the meaning of some of his lines. I have to read each poem through a couple of times before my initial response ("Ooooo, pretty!") matches up with my desired response ("Aha! I see what old Manley is getting at!"). Anyway, he's good, so here's one of my favorites. Enjoy!

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The Windhover

By Gerard Manley Hopkins 

From PoetryFoundation.org

To Christ our LordTo Christ our Lord This epigraph dedicated the poem to Jesus while echoing the Latin phrase, Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam, the Jesuit motto meaning “To the Greater Glory of God.”

I caught this morning morning's minionminion favorite, darling; also, an underling or servant, king-

    dom of daylight's dauphindauphin prince; a French historical term, along with “chevalier”, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding

    Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding

High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimplingwimpling rippling wing

In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,

    As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding

    Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding

Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here

    Buckle!Buckle! to bend, attach; prepare for flight or battle. The verb could be descriptive of the bird’s action, or it could be the speaker’s imperative. AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion

Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!chevalier French word for “knight” or “champion”; pronounced Chev-ah-leer, to rhyme with “here” and “dear”

     

   No wonder of it: shéer plódshéer plód slowly, laboriously, and without break; these accent marks, inserted by Hopkins, tell the reader to place more accent or emphasis on those syllables when reading aloud makes plough down sillionsillion Fresh soil upturned by a plow (“plough”)

Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dearah my dear Compare with the same phrase in the poem “Love (III)” by George Herbert, a poet Hopkins admired.,

    Fall, gallgall to become sore, crack, or chafe themselves, and gash gold-vermilionvermilion a vibrant scarlet color.

Between the Folds

I woke up chilly this morning, and thankful for my flannels sheets and the warm kitty nestled at the foot of my bed. There's a fine layer of snow outside. It's no more than an inch thick, but it's very pretty and white and clean on such a frigid day.

Since it's nearly the holidays and I have two part-time teaching gigs lined up for January, I'm taking some time off from my job search. Instead of spending another day slogging away at resumes and cover letters, I've spent my afternoon in a very warm kitchen. There's a loaf of white bread rising in the bread machine for dinner, a pan of gingerbread cooling by the stove (expect pictures soon!), and a package of spicy Italian sausage waiting to be cut up and simmered in marinara sauce for dinner.

I've been thinking a lot about how people discover what they really love in life and how they reshape their lives to fulfill their passions. I started thinking about this because of Between the Folds, a documentary that premiered last night on PBS. Part of the Independent Lens series, this hour-long documentary tells the stories of scientists, mathematicians, and artists who have dedicated their lives to origami. Each origami artist tells how he got interested in paper folding, and a few of them describe the fear they felt about abandoning successful careers as engineers and sculptors to pursue origami full-time.

Their work is beautiful, complex, and astonishing: life-like men and gnomes molded from thick, woolly paper; flat flowers that pop up into three-dimensional towers; dragons with a thousand scales made from a single uncut square of paper; flimsy white sheets folded once and twisted deftly to resemble birds and angels; and even simple pleated contraptions that twist naturally into flexible, springy parabolas.

I loved origami as a child and spent hours folding paper, but these men have transformed this seemingly simple craft. Their work is truly art, and, sometimes, it's even a mathematical playground that allows them to study geometry and theoretical algebra.

But what struck me the most about these men is how dedicated they are. Their eyes flash with excitement as their thick fingers crease and crumple sheets of paper. Their pieces show hours and hours of work: each piece requires hundreds of tiny and seemingly irrelevant manipulations that add up to something fantastical, and fantastically delicate--if a single step were missed, the construction would fail.

Yet no matter how complex and beautiful the final objects appear, each piece is still just a sheet paper, hollow and light enough to be picked up by the wind, delicate enough to be mashed by one misplaced elbow.

To live one's life for folding paper requires a passion and engagement that few of us will ever know. Last night, as I watched the documentary, I wanted to be like those men. I didn't want to be a paper folder, exactly, but I did want to be someone who loves what they do, whose eyes shine as they perform the same complex task again and again, endlessly inching closer and closer to mastery in their pursuit of beauty.

(For more on origami, read Susan Orlean's fantastic profile of Robert J. Lang "The Origami Lab."

Book Abandonment: White Teeth and Out of Africa

Have you ever stopped reading a book in the middle?

I've always prided myself on finishing all the books that I begin. I don't like the idea of characters floating around in my memory, half-formed and, to my knowledge, fate-less. Did Dave die? Did Joanie ever find love? Did Xangar III ever return to his home planet? I hate the idea of not knowing, of leaving books and characters incomplete.

But I've been cleaning out my bookshelves and lugging unwanted books to the local Friends of the Library Book Sale bin. I've rediscovered two books that I abandoned over the summer: White Teeth by Zadie Smith and Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen.

These are two very different books. According to the official Amazon.com review, White Teeth is about "race, sex, class, history, and the minefield of gender politics." This seems accurate; after reading nearly 100 pages of the novel, I think that Smith writes more about ideas like "race" and "history" than about characters with real emotions and real lives. The novel follows an interracial (and inter-generational) London couple and their Indian neighbors over several generations. This premise sounds like it should make for great fiction (clashing cultures, faltering marriages, alienated children, the ebb and flow of history, etc.), but instead the novel is vapid and slow moving. The characters seem flat as they move through the pages, spurred by unfathomable motives and faulty relationships.

Out of Africa is Dinesen's autobiographical account of her time running a coffee plantation near Nairobi. Dinesen writes beautifully of the Ngong Hills, East Africa's seasons, and the animals that roam her land. But the book never takes off, and it never developed enough substance to sustain me beyond the first 130 pages. Dinesen offers no storyline and no vibrant characters to grab onto, just a stream of vaguely racist observations about her African servants and how deeply different they are from her Danish self. She seems to keep her African "friends" at arm's length, and therefore is incapable of telling us anything about the Africans she meets except that they seem to be stubborn and fatalistic people.

Both of these books have undeniable merits (Dinesen's eye for detail is enthralling, and Smith has a vibrant imagination for characters with colorful backgrounds), but neither book delivers the kind of soul that, to me, makes a book worth reading. Dinesen can't depict anything beyond landscapes and caricatures, and Smith's characters present fantastically interesting surfaces that cannot disguise the fact that they, ultimately, are bores.

Out of Africa is considered a classic, and White Teeth won a slew of awards when it was released in 2000, so I felt obliged to give both of these books a fighting chance. But, for me, they were both unfinishable.

So what is my punishment for abandoning these books? I'm sure to be haunted by them every time I wander into a Barnes & Noble. They'll leer at me from the shelves, taunting, "Now you'll never know what happened in the end! You'll never know what happened to meeeeeee!"

"The Great Plains" and "The Good Earth"

Ian Frazier's The Great Plains is one of those wonderful books that surprised me at every turn. As I read, I never knew quite where we were heading, never expected that I would encounter Crazy Horse and hardy Russian wheat varieties and America's underground nuclear arsenal. I was also surprised at how much the book managed to teach me without feeling like a history text. Frazier really likes archival research and long lists of details and relating his encyclopedic knowledge of, say, Sitting Bull, to an extent that should be boring, but somehow Frazier manages to whip each grain of data into an emotional dust storm by the end of the book, linking ideas and characters and themes so that they all become unified and meaningful, the whole of the Midwest suddenly tied together and transformed within the dark and moving cloud of Frazier's words.

Not only did I love The Great Plains, but it also inspired me to read more Midwestern poets, something I've wanted to do since I began writing my thesis (a book-length manuscript of poetry about growing up in Kansas) at Penn State. Though being a Midwestern writer is nearly trendy these days (we had four panels of our very own at AWP's 2009 conference in Chicago!), there are very few terribly famous Midwestern poets, and those who are terribly famous (like Robert Bly and Albert Goldbarth) don't really like to talk too much about it. After all, real literature in America is about the mad and dirty streets of New York, the umbral woods of New England, the moss and humid corruption of the Deep South, and the zen mountains and forests of the West Coast, not about corn fields and highways. As if seeing horizon to horizon inhibits the writing of good poetry.

To get started, I checked out The Good Earth: Three Poets of the Prairie (2002). Ice Cube Press put out the slim volume as part of the Harvest Lecture Series, which is dedicated to the connections between "the natural environment and the spiritual realm" (according to the purpose statement at the beginning of the book). The eponymous three poets are Paul Engle, William Stafford, and James Hearst, none of whom I had read before this book.

I had heard of Paul Engle, however, as the influential director of the Iowa Writer's Workshop and the teacher of Flannery O'Connor and Robert Lowell (I'd recommend Mark McGurl's The Program Era for a detailed look at Engle's influence on Iowa's prestigious program). I had never heard of James Hearst at all, and I think, unfortunately, that my ignorance of both Hearst's and Engle's work is largely deserved, at least based on the selection found here. Engle's poems in this collection are sing-songy (and not in a fun T.S. Eliot sort of way). They present pretty images that do nothing more than sit on the page and stare back at you. Hearst, on the other hand, comes right out and says what he means but skips that whole showing business (as in "Birthplace" when he tells us there's a decrepit barn before him that makes him "tremble to think how things / Outlive the hands that used them").

Stafford, on the other hand, I mostly liked, and not just because he was born in Hutchinson, Kansas and went to KU. Another Kansas poet, Denise Low, introduces his section, calling his poems "Likeable, yes, but [. . .] not naive, primitive paintings. The poems are subtle, dark, Godly and paradoxical at once. [. . . But] they are not stereotyped rural landscapes of barns and windvanes." Low later describes how Stafford wrote to recapture a "dream vision" he experienced while camping near the Cimarron River, a vision that impressed upon him "the size and serenity of the earth and its neighbors in the sky."

Though only eight of Stafford's poems appear in The Good Earth, I liked them enough to check out The Way It Is, a selection of his work published in 1998. I'll surely say more about it once I'm deeper in, but in the meantime, I'll leave you with my current favorite William Stafford poem. It's a poem about choice and compassion and, I think, human convenience and cruelty. I can never help blaming the speaker, even though I don't know what else he could have done.

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Travelling Through the Dark
By William Stafford

Traveling through the dark I found a deer
dead on the edge of the Wilson River road.
It is usually best to roll them into the canyon:
that road is narrow; to swerve might make more dead.

By glow of the tail-light I stumbled back of the car
and stood by the heap, a doe, a recent killing;
she had stiffened already, almost cold.
I dragged her off; she was large in the belly.

My fingers touching her side brought me the reason--
her side was warm; her fawn lay there waiting,
alive, still, never to be born.
Beside that mountain road I hesitated.

The car aimed ahead its lowered parking lights;
under the hood purred the steady engine.
I stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red;
around our group I could hear the wilderness listen.

I thought hard for us all--my only swerving--,
then pushed her over the edge into the river.