Summertime . . .

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

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

Here's what I love about summer:

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

Random Reads

I always keep a list of books somewhere that I mean to read. In high school, I kept the list tacked to my wall. In college, I kept it in my journal. Now, I keep it on Goodreads.

But no matter where I store it, the list doesn't ever seem to grow any shorter. In fact, it only gets longer and longer and longer, and it develops a desultory stink about it. No matter how excited I am when I first type a new book into my list, the excitement never lasts. The longer the book sits on my list, the less I want to read it and the more it feels like a chore or an obligation. Right now, the most tenured book on my list is One Hundred Years of Solitude. At this point, I'm pretty sure I'd rather sift through my old trig textbook than crack the spine of Solitude.

However, there's something truly invigorating about choosing to read a book that I've never heard of before, a book that I know absolutely nothing about. I decided to snatch Barbara Vine's The Minotaur off the shelf at the KU library purely because it was a stranger to me.

Before I started The Minotaur, I'd never heard of Vine and I didn't realize that the book was a mystery. All I knew was that I loved the first sentence of the jacket blurb: "As soon as Kerstin Kvist arrives at remote, ivy-covered Lydstep Old Hall in Essex, she feels like a character in a gothic novel." Awesome.

So far, I like it. I want to know what's wrong with John Cosway, and I want to know where Kerstin will find the labyrinth, and I want to know what's locked inside the library. Right now, that's good enough for me.

In the meantime, I'm doing a lot of walking, sweating, swimming, and editing, with a little baking thrown in (pictures are coming, I promise!). Mostly I'm just sweating, but that's July for you. More specifically, that's July in an apartment with a single window unit, weak fans, and a dryer constantly running outside the front door!  :P

Summer Favorites of 2009: Three Reviews

Surprisingly, being an English major is hard on a reader. When I first signed my major declaration slip at KU, I thrilled at the thought of all the wonderful books I would be exposed to. And when I sent out my first applications for graduate school, I grew giddy fantasizing about the hours and years I would spend with my nose stuck in a book.

But what I didn't expect was that reading would become harder the longer I stayed in school. Instead of finding myself more absorbed in literature, I became worn out with it. Being forced to read for days on end turned my reading time into work, especially since so many of my required texts were dull or esoteric or just plain useless. I constantly missed my teenage years when I read voraciously and carelessly, free to pursue any book cover or review or recommendation that caught my attention.

So, for me, this summer has been about finding a way to read with pleasure again. I whipped through the Twilight series and ravaged Charlaine Harris's Sookie Stackhouse books (all nine of them!) with fiendish joy. I read hundreds of pages a week, and it wasn't edifying in the slightest—how wonderful! My choices were whimsical, frequently pulpy, and always completely personal: I picked books based on what plot lines I wanted to experience, not based on whether or not the book would make me a better writer.

However, as the summer wore on, I found myself reading books that were both personally pleasing and brilliantly written. These books all came to me through personal connections. I tracked down Laura Moriarty's The Center of Everything after attending one of her readings in Lawrence; at the reading, I realized that she wasn't just writing about places I knew well, but also about the kind of personalities and life stories I had grown up with in eastern Kansas. I took a chance on Alice Munro's Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage because Charlie's mom recommended it. And I took on Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping not because its reputation was almost biblical in my MFA program (it was), but because my wonderful thesis adviser Julia Kasdorf had spoken so highly of it. 
 

This summer has made me fall back in love with books and has made me newly grateful for the reading recommendations of friends. So I thought I'd pass the reading joy along: here are three brief reviews of some of my favorite books this summer.

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The Center of Everything

The Center of Everything follows Evelyn, a girl growing up in Kerrville, Kansas with a mother on welfare, a developmentally disabled younger brother, and three kittens rescued from their apartment complex parking lot. When the novel begins, Ronald Reagan is president and Evelyn is nine, just old enough to notice when her mother's life transforms into a series of misfortunes: the car breaks down, then she loses her job, then she becomes entangled with a married man, etc. Things go downhill fast for the Bucknow family, but meanwhile, Evelyn finds herself increasingly singled out as a gifted student, as someone “special” enough to distance herself from her mother's bad choices. 
 

The novel is about how Evelyn deals with her unwanted poverty and the social stigma that comes with it. As Evelyn progresses through her various rebellions and her mother struggles to find happiness, Moriarty creates something very special: she writes a pair of characters who are flawed yet likable and believably tragic without being gratuitously gritty. As I read, I recognized my high school classmates, my grocery store check-out clerk, even my best friends in the novel's movingly realistic characters.

There are many flaws in this novel, Moriarty's first—the book starts pages before the plot does, Evelyn's voice doesn't always suit her age, etc.—but Moriarty manages to write about Reagan, welfare, and small town life with such panache that she easily avoids melodrama, cheap feel-goodery, or political warfare.

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Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

I almost didn't read Alice Munro's Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage because I don't like short stories. I've always thought that short stories suffer from action-less mooning or strained and overwrought plotlines, and I hated that a reader could never get really involved with the protagonist of a story the way one can become absorbed in a character from a novel. 

But Munro is the first to convince me that there's more to short stories than foreshortened relationships and one-night-stand plots. The individual stories in her collection combine to comment on the difficulties of real life relationships. Unwanted and strained connections abound in these pages, mostly between wives and husbands (though relationships between female relatives frequently appear and falter, too).
 

In Munro's world, there is little loving but plenty of repressed urges, unreachable temptations, and death to go around. Yet the stories do not feel sad, just flat. Munro shows us characters who could explode into action and drama at any second—in fact, as readers, we often expect them to—but in Munro's stories, they simply don't. 

And that, I think, is the point. The stories in Hateship, Friendship are not “slice of life” pieces, but they are very much like life: no matter how rich and riotous our inner lives feel to us, our outside lives often remain as plain and practical and faded as old linoleum. 

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Housekeeping

My response to Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping was very similar to my response to Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway: I tentatively loved it, I was never sure I completely understood it, and as soon as I turned the last page, I immediately wanted to start reading all over again. 
 

Housekeeping is narrated by Ruthie, a teenage girl who, after a series of unfortunate family deaths, is raised by her aunt Sylvie. Sylvie, a former transient, is an unconventional parental figure: she takes catnaps on the town park benches, fills her family home with tin cans and stacks of magazines, and serves dinner every night with the lights out. As Ruthie's sister Lucille increasingly rejects Sylvie's ways, Ruthie finds herself willingly dissolving into the rhythms of Sylvie's strange, unfettered lifestyle.

Housekeeping is a novel that asks its readers to slow down. After a summer of Charlaine Harris, I had to focus on reading Housekeeping patiently, on respecting the ebb and flow of Robinson's style. But this brief novel amply rewards a reader who is willing to be still: Robinson's prose is supple and winding and rich with sensuous imagery, and each page is lush with contemplative eddies as Ruthie mulls over memory, death, and the liquidity of time. 
 

While Munro and Moriarty are compelling because of their realism, Robinson's writing entrances with its literary unreality: her novel is very much a reflection of Ruthie's perceptions and interior thoughts. Robinson's writing ruthlessly mirrors Ruthie's loneliness and increasing difference from the outside world, but Robinson writes so beautifully, so sadly, and so sensually that I was content to wander within the watery tide of Ruthie's thoughts.

"A Small Breath": Of Ripeness and Rot

I've been busy applying for jobs this week, so I haven't been posting as much here as I would like. I did, however, spend last night making salsa with my mom. The recipe she uses involves cutting up lots and lots and lots of tomatoes, peppers, onions, and garlic; dumping in vinegar and a few spices; boiling for about an hour; and pouring the delicious mess into sterilized jars (note the empty jars heating at the back of the stove and the boiled rings and flats in the front).Because you don't boil the filled and lidded jars like you do in conventional canning, the salsa is only shelf-stable for three to six months.However, last month I made some sweet pickles with my grandmother the conventional way, and they'll stay fresh for at least a year, if not longer.The salsa turned out really well, and it's nice to have a healthy snack hanging around the house since it deters me from more baking!

I've been enjoying the local August produce here, the farmers' markets and contributions from friends' gardens, and I've been reading James Peterson's Vegetables, which covers the basics of how to cook different types of fresh veggies. Having grown up on canned and frozen vegetables, I've never cooked many types of fresh produce. I haven't tried any of Peterson's recipes yet, but his how-to section has given me the courage to take on the plastic sack of summer squash sitting on my parents' counter (delicious creamy gratin, here I come!).

The only problem with all this produce is how quickly it spoils, how willingly the peppers shrivel, the peaches wrinkle and sag, the cucumbers embitter and turn translucent, and the corn husks blight over with moldy blotches. My parents and I eat so much (nectarines for breakfast, tomatoes and cucumbers for lunch, peppers and corn and and zucchini for dinner, watermelon for dessert), and we still throw so much away. And outside, the weather mimics the produce, so that each day the air belches and smothers with its cloying heat, soggy humidity, and myriad stinks that rise from the over-heated earth and sagging, flaccid foliage. The sky is too ripe, too full, it seems, flushing with heat as the hemisphere teeters unwillingly on the edge of fall.

All this puts me in mind of Theodore Roethke's brilliant second collection The Lost Son and Other Poems (1948). It's a book full of vegetable life that is, for Roethke, rife with meaning and terror, the violence of life and the sensuous rot of death. He seems galled by the processes of the earth, and the poems that result are descriptively rich and emotional.

Here are two of my favorite poems from The Lost Son. Naturally, they appear one right after the other in the text.

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Root Cellar

Nothing would sleep in that cellar, dank as a ditch,

Bulbs broke out of boxes hunting for chinks in the dark,

Shoots dangled and drooped,

Lolling obscenely from mildewed crates,

Hung down long yellow evil necks, like tropical snakes.

And what a congress of stinks!--

Roots ripe as old bait,

Pulpy stems, rank, silo-rich,

Leaf-mould, manure, lime, piled against slippery planks.

Nothing would give up life:

Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath.

Forcing House

Vines tougher than wrists

And rubbery shoots,

Scums, mildews, smuts along stems,

Great cannas or delicate cyclamen tips,--

All pulse with the knocking pipes

That drip and sweat,

Sweat and drip,

Swelling the roots with steam and stench,

Shooting up lime and dung and ground bones,--

Fifty summers in motions at once,

As the live heat billows from pipes and pots.