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 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!)

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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).

Lonesome Literature

When the title of a book has the word "lonely" in it, remind me to pay attention in the future.

I finished Carson McCuller's The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter a few weeks ago. I bought it at The Dusty Bookshelf because I liked the cover and because I was in the mood to read a serious novel and because I wanted to read something set in the South. It's winter, goshdarnit, and I want to dream of hazy humidity and mossy trees and thick brambles of green.

I don't regret reading the book--in fact, I thought it was one of the best novels I've ever read--but this really wasn't the best time of year to read it. It's a book whose topic is loneliness. The novel follows John Singer, a deaf mute living in a small Southern town in the late 1930s. His best friend, another deaf mute, has been sent to a mental institution many miles away and, for the first time in his ten years of adulthood, no one can "hear" him speak.

As he copes with this loss, Singer moves into a new boarding house and begins to be visited by strangers who feel compelled to talk to him: Dr. Copeland, a black doctor who reads Marx and Spinoza and is desperately, painfully committed to helping his people escape oppression; Jake Blount, a half-mad alcoholic anarchist and labor activist; Biff Brannon, a cafe owner and recent widower who wants to understand Singer and the people who follow him; and Mick Kelly, the 14-year-old girl who dreams of moving to the snowy north and becoming a musician and who has Mozart's symphonies playing constantly in her head.

All of these characters, particularly Dr. Copeland, Jake, and Mick, and burning with a passion that no one else in the town is able to access or understand. And all of them, the quiet Biff and Singer included, are hounded by loneliness, the desire to be heard and to be understood. Singer follows his mad friend, aching to use his hands to speak directly to someone who understands him. Dr. Copeland and Jake and Mick chase Singer, feeling paradoxically that the lip reader is the only man on earth who understands them. Biff watches them all out of the new emptiness his wife's death has created, wondering what all this loneliness means in the world.

Despite the characters' passions and yearnings and hungers, it's a novel where very little happens. Usually, I dislike plotless novels, but McCuller's characters are so brilliantly drawn, so lifelike and complex and beautiful and sad, that I was rapidly pulled through the 300+ pages of the novel by pure curiosity. I desperately wanted to see these characters' lives become better because I understood their motives in the same way that I understand my own. McCuller's creates true empathy in this novel, and she does so brilliantly.

Mick Kelly especially comes to life. She made me remember being 14, feeling constantly confused and over-excited and angry and hungry and passionate for art--books in my case, music in Mick's. I get the impression that McCullers (who was only 23 when she wrote the novel) modeled the character after her own childhood and, I presume, her own desire to be a writer.

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is a novel I would recommend to anyone, but not in November or December. It's the kind of heavy reading that's best reserved for the summer months, when there's sunshine and plenty to do and the world feels all fat and lazy and happy and slow. One needs the summer to counteract messages like "deep and soul-wrenching loneliness is intrinsic to human life and is its greatest and most painful motivator." Ack! The winter is just too cold for novels like this.

I thought I learned that lesson a few years ago when I read Ethan Frome and Jude the Obscure, two of the saddest novels ever written in America, in the same week in December. No, thank you! This time, the lesson's going to stick! It's only The Golden Compass and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Tamora Pierce from here until March, people! Loneliness is an excellent topic for excellent novels, but a terrible topic for mid-winter ruminations.

Food, Inc.

On Wednesday night, I finally got the chance to watch Food, Inc. on PBS. It's a documentary about the American food industry, more specifically the meat, corn, and soybean industries.

Now I've seen the PETA video about the horrors of slaughterhouses, chicken houses, and feedlots (Warning: Do NOT click on the previous link unless you have a strong stomach!), and I was expecting more of the same: excruciating scenes of sick and dying animals, fetid killing floors, and desolate swaths of polluted ponds and fields.

Instead, I was surprised to find that the documentary focused on the human costs of industrialized farming and food processing. The film covered a wide range of abuses, many of which I had never heard of before, including

• food corporations' gross exploitation of immigrant worker communities,
• the coercion of American farmers by giant seed and meat corporations,
• the rising diabetes epidemic as an unintended consequence of government subsidized corn products,
• and the prevalence of e. coli and salmonella contaminations in slaughterhouses across the country (which the USDA is largely unable to regulate).

I know that these bullet points seem unbelievable--you may be thinking, what a bunch of hippie, anti-capitalist babble!--but the documentary does an excellent job of talking directly to the persons involved and explaining these issues clearly. So I highly recommend that you check it out for yourselves and form your own opinions.

One of my favorite things about the documentary was its concluding message: each of us has the power to change our food by "voting" with our money. By buying conscientiously, with an eye toward human costs as well as the more obvious monetary costs, we can change the way food in America is grown and raised. So buy locally, choose sustainably raised and organic foods when possible, and go to your local farmers' market this weekend!

Twilight: New Moon--A Review

Last night, I rented Twilight: New Moon and watched it with my mom. It was . . . long. And pretty boring. But it did give us plenty of opportunities to make cracks whenever a character took off his shirt. We could have made it a drinking game: take a shot every time you spy a bare pectoral!

The Twilight: New Moon poster.

I've mentioned before that I've read all of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight books, and that I enjoyed them a little too much. Her writing is terrible, her characters are shallow, and her plots are predictable at best and downright silly at worst. But they're also fun: Meyer can entertain an audience nearly indefinitely, dragging out her frivolous storylines and serious sexual tension for thousands of pages. I wouldn't read the books a second time, but they made for one great weekend's worth of reading!

What the Twilight movies miss is just that: fun. They're long (both films run a little over two hours) and exhaustive (they include every minor detail from the novels, necessary or not) and relentlessly serious. Their color palette is muted--all blacks, browns, and silvers, with occasional dashes of red and yellow--and their soundtracks are painfully emo. (I'm not saying that the music is bad, mind you, just very angsty teenager.) The movies show no sense of humor at all. Instead of a gentle awareness of Twilight's innate camp, we get a lot of awkward, twitchy teenage conversations; yearning half-kisses; and lovelorn staring.

 Teenage Bella being moody, missing Edward, and thinking about how all grownups are phony.

While watching New Moon, I couldn't help but wonder where Stephanie Meyer's deliciously silly, hyper-romantic, super-dramatic cheese-fest sensibility has disappeared to? Why is New Moon a meditation on teenage depression instead of a thrill ride of yearning and vampire make-out sessions and unnecessarily frequent werewolf fights?

The only thing that the movies get right is that everyone is incredibly good looking. In the books, the main characters are blatantly shallow, and that blandness if effective if not entirely purposeful: their vapidness allows a reader to imagine herself in Bella's generic little sneakers and imagine her own tasty versions of Edward (the vampire boyfriend) and Jacob (the werewolf boyfriend) to vicariously lust after.

The casting directors have done a great job of choosing attractive young actors who are capable but not too interesting: Bella (Kristen Stewart) is dull, likable, and very pretty; Edward (Robert Pattinson) is dreamy and has the deliciously tortured air of a pouty consumptive;  and Jacob (Taylor Lautner) combines a cute, boy-next-door sort of appeal with a whole heap of well-tanned muscles.

Battle of the beefcakes.

I think that the producers of the Twilight movies know that as long as they produce a set of four decently made movies full of pretty faces and meticulously accurate plotlines, teenage girls (and their mothers) (and 26-year-old bloggers) will show up for the spectacle. But I would have loved to see the filmmakers make Twilight their own, to make a movie with a little lightness, charm, and romance, maybe something with some rock music or characters with actual personalities. Then maybe their films would stand a chance of being watched twenty years down the road.

Instead, these filmmakers are happily raking in the cash by creating a suite of films whose expiration date seems to already have passed. Or will have passed just as soon as Robert Pattinson gets his first wrinkle or Taylor Lautner goes squishy around the waist.

Avatar: A Review

So here's the thing: earlier this week, I wrote a really long review of Avatar that had links and references and smart words in it and everything. Unfortunately, the more I wrote, the more I hated it.

This has happened to me before: I've written a few long posts that, once I stop typing, strike me as just awful--long-winded, pretentious, and dull. I never post them, and I won't subject you to this one, either.

Instead, here's my review of Avatar in brief Q&A form:

Was Avatar . . .

• Long? Yeeeessssssssss.
• Preachy? Uh huh.
  
• Racist? For sure.
• Moving? Yes.
• Beautiful? Definitely.
• Exciting? Sometimes.
  
• Good? Ummmmm, well, sorta . . .
• Bitchin'? Yes! (Fight scenes + dragons + helicopters = automatic bitchin' rating.)
  
• Worth your $10: Yes. Seeing the world that James Cameron creates is worth the price of admission. Go for the pretty blue people communing with trees in a gorgeous CGI forest, just don't expect too much from the script.

I've Been Doing It Again: Rereading Pride and Prejudice

I have a problem: Ever since high school, I've been compelled to reread Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice every three or four years. And that doesn't count how many times I've seen the A&E miniseries version of Pride and Prejudice, which is six hours long and takes most of its dialog directly from the original novel.

I've even seen that silly Keira Knightley version where Darcy and Elizabeth make-out like a couple of randy teenagers at the end.

The number of hours I've dedicated to this book is a little silly, but I know that I'd do it again in a heartbeat. It's a book that keeps on giving, no matter how many times I've read it. I'm always surprised by what I've forgotten, and I'm captured completely anew.

The Mr. Darcy-Elizabeth love story is always titillating, of course, in its restrained 19th-century sort of way, and the main characters' struggles, triumphs, and transformations are enthralling every time.

But the most impressive thing about Pride and Prejudice  is that there's not a single character in the book that goes to waste. No one in Austen's novel is ever flat or one-dimensional. From Mr. Collins to Lydia Bennet to Lady de Bourgh, no one is spared their displays of silliness and buffoonery, yet all of these characters seem familiar, too, and a little bit vulnerable, and incredibly lifelike. They're ridiculous, but they're intensely lovable, as well. It's kind of like finding an old friend's flaws endearing instead of off-putting, and loving them a little more for having them.

I think that, like Dostoevsky and Dickens, Austen's brilliance comes from the world she creates. Sure, the novel's plot is good, and the ideas behind the characters are certainly there, but it's the rich array of side characters that makes Pride and Prejudice such an enduring pleasure to read.

This time, I read Austen's novel aloud to Charlie. This was both a challenge and a pleasure. When reading Austen's sentences, which are quite long and well-packed with meandering asides, commas, and stray phrases, I had to start each sentence with a deep breath and blind faith that it would go somewhere grammatically correct, even if, in her typically circumspect manner, Austen had buried the object of her verb half a paragraph away!


[ GASP! ]

But, around Chapter Fifteen, I got so used to Austen's voice that I couldn't stop talking like her. I kept pestering poor Charlie about "the renewal of that gentleman's addresses" and being "quite set on" reading another chapter and wondering if Lucky Charms for breakfast was considered "keeping a good table." Eventually, I had to ask Charlie why on earth he was "regarding me with a look of such vexation!"

Anyway, classic literature like Pride and Prejudice often gets a bad rap for being old and having funny words in it and being pushed upon you by high school librarians who wear those long, beaded eyeglass dangles. But Pride and Prejudice is one of those books that justifies all librarians and English teachers alike: it has the potential to show students that classics are classics for a reason.


Visit Project Gutenberg and Librivox for free online versions of Pride and Prejudice.

"We Have Entered Eternity": Louise Gluck'sThe Wild Iris, Part Two

I finally finished Louise Gluck's The Wild Iris, and I'm completely in love with it. I've already written a bit about it here, but after finishing the volume, I'm even more astonished by Gluck's skill. This is a book that could stand up to Keats or Dickinson or Frost, the kind of book that I think will be read and loved for a very long time.

Here are my reasons for being a total fangirl about it:

1. As a book, it's masterfully conceived. Gluck obviously planned it out very carefully and thought a great deal about her premise and how the poems would speak to each other. The book begins with the first flowers of early spring and ends with the death of the last of summer's blossoms. Each poem is told from the point of view of either a human speaker, God, or a flower. The human speaker calls out to God to be reassured of His existence, God chastises the human about her deafness, and the plants speak to the human to complain about her foolishness.  The book is tight and precise, and I wonder at Gluck's ability to get a whole collection out of such a limited space (a summer garden) and such a limited subject matter.
2. Speaking through flowers? Is she kidding? The book's premise sounds implausible and frivolous and silly, but Gluck makes it feel totally natural. I took the flowers perfectly seriously and found the poems to be surprising, moving, and profound.
   
3. Gluck makes death new again. The fear of death is an ancient theme, and the inability to connect with God is just as old. But by speaking through one garden, a few clumps of flowers, and certain slants of light, Gluck makes the human speaker's angst entirely new again. Her ability to reinvigorate this fear is astonishing.
   
4. The poems are wonderfully simple. Each poem is brief, perfectly executed, and centered around one concept, one nugget of truth. The rest of the poem simply sets up the speaker's voice and prepares us for the poem's real crux. Gluck gives her poems space to breathe, space to luxuriate in their own meaning. I think it takes a lot of skill, self-restraint, and confidence to write this way.
5. This book makes me want to write. Not all poetry does this to me: some poems cow me with their brilliance, some poems bore me with their dullness, but it's a rare and wonderful poem that inspires me to pick up my own pen and write. Gluck is the kind of poet that other poets love to read, and I'm no longer surprised that this book has been recommended to me by so many writers.
   

I could go on and on. I liked the book so much that as soon as I finished it, I turned right back to the first page and started reading it again! But I'll stop with the praising and share a few of Gluck's poems here.

These two poems are the last in the book. After all of the human speaker's yearnings for God, after all of His failed attempts to be heard, after all of the fear of death lurking at the edges of these poems, everything comes to a head here: the flowers die, and it seems that God cannot, or chooses not to, hear them.

These poems are beautiful in themselves, but the impact they have at the end of the volume is astonishing: the phrases "your child's terror" and "we have entered eternity" leap from the final pages, chilling the reader with the harsh reality of mortal life and death.


---------------

The Gold Lily

By Louise Gluck

From The Wild Iris

Taken from Plagiarist.com

As I perceive
I am dying now and know
I will not speak again, will not
survive the earth, be summoned
out of it again, not
a flower yet, a spine only, raw dirt
catching my ribs, I call you,
father and master: all around,
my companions are failing, thinking
you do not see. How
can they know you see
unless you save us?
In the summer twilight, are you
close enough to hear
your child's terror? Or
are you not my father,
you who raised me?

---------------

The White Lilies

By Louise Gluck

From The Wild Iris

Taken from Plagiarist.com

As a man and woman make
a garden between them like
a bed of stars, here
they linger in the summer evening
and the evening turns
cold with their terror: it
could all end, it is capable
of devastation. All, all
can be lost, through scented air
the narrow columns
uselessly rising, and beyond,
a churning sea of poppies--

Hush, beloved.  It doesn't matter to me
how many summers I live to return:
this one summer we have entered eternity.
I felt your two hands
bury me to release its splendor. 

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!"

What I'm Reading: McCarthy, Snyder

Charlie recommended Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian to me months and months ago. He's read it three or four times, and I can see why. It's an amazing book.

It's taken me quite awhile to get through it, though. The language is a little difficult (McCarthy is famous for avoiding punctuation), but the book's most challenging aspect is its violence. Set in 1849, the novel is dark and troubling and casually gory; scalps and blood fly constantly as a troupe of hired killers hunt Indians tribes along the Mexican-American border. McCarthy is preoccupied with war not as an incident but as a natural state of man. His characters roam deserts and scrub lands killing and being killed, caring little for why they do so.

But beyond the gore, McCarthy's imagery is startlingly beautiful, and his characters grow increasingly symbolic as the book progresses. In its final pages, the book transforms from murderous picaresque into something more allegorical, more profound. Even though I cringed my way through all 300 pages of its relentlessly senseless violence, McCarthy's novel provides more than enough intellectual heft to make me love it, in spite of its dark view of human nature.

I've also been reading Gary Snyder's Axe Handles. I've never read Snyder before, and, to be honest, I'm not sure that I will again. The book as a whole was disappointing. There were too many flat spots throughout, and too many poems that felt lazy or sentimental. I don't know if this is just one of Snyder's weaker collections, or whether it is characteristic of his usual work.

But there were a few moments in the book that I loved. Snyder is at his best when describing nature's fine, peculiar details. In his nature poems, the writing is precise, moving, and surprising, and without the sentimentality of his poems about family or the painful baldness of his political poems. I was especially fond of Snyder's long, sectional poem "Little Songs for Gaia" and the charming "A Maul for Bill and Cindy's Wedding."

I also loved "Old Rotting Tree Trunk Down," which I've posted below. It seems to have something in common with Blood Meridian: both works confront death and death's purposes, and revel in the chaos of decay.

---------------

Old Rotting Tree Trunk Down

By Gary Snyder

From Axe Handles

Winding grain

Of twisting outer spiral shell

Stubby broken limbs at angles

Peeled off outer layers askew;

A big rock

Locked in taproot clasp

Now lifted to the air;

Amber beads of ancient sap

In powdery cracks of red dry-rot

               fallen away

From the pitchy heartwood core.

Beautiful body we walk on:

Up and across to miss

               the wiry manzanita mat.

On a slope of rock and air,

Of breeze without cease--

     If "meditation on decay and rot cures lust"

     I'm hopeless:

     I delight in thought of fungus,

     beetle larvae, stains

               that suck the life still

               from your old insides,

Under crystal sky.

And the woodpecker flash

     from tree to tree

     in a grove of your heirs

On the green-watered bench right there!

     Looking out at blue lakes,

     dropping snowpatch

               soaking glacial rubble,

     crumbling rocky cliffs and scree,

Corruption, decay, the sticky turnover--

Death into more of the

Life-death same,

     A quick life:

     and the long slow

     feeding that follows--

     the woodpecker's cry.

                                    VII, '78, English Mountain