NEXT BLOG

Have you ever noticed the little NEXT BLOG link at the top of Blogspot's pages? Each time a blog page is loaded, Blogspot connects the NEXT BLOG link to a random site from their network, and it links to a different page for every new page load.

I'm a big fan of the NEXT BLOG link. Clicking my way through strangers' posts is surprisingly fun. I can't understand at least a third of them--it seems that Blogspot has quite a user base in South America--and I rarely read any of the posts closely. But it's interesting to see what other people blog about.

So far, I've seen three main types of posters on Blogspot:

1. Families: Many young couples are using Blogspot to record their children's early years. These blogs always involve lots of pictures and cute stories. Maybe these couples live far away from their extended families, or maybe the mother or father just feels the need to write and focuses on their family for content. Either way, it's a great way to record the kind of events and images that are so often lost to children because they're stored only in memory. These kids will be able to go back and look at their parents' posts for the rest of their lives (or at least as long as Google stays in business), and that's pretty amazing.
   
2. Crafters: I've seen everything out there, from hand-made cards to belly dancing costumes to crocheted doilies. Sometimes the bloggers are selling their wares, and sometimes they just like to write about what they've made, often in excruciating detail. But I sort of love these sites. They're usually maintained by quietly passionate women trying to share something they love. A blog gives them the chance to communicate their passion to the blogosphere, even if no one ever buys their hand-painted porcelain kittens figurines.
3. Travelers: Blogging must be an inexpensive, convenient way to let others know you're alive and having fun traveling through exotic lands (assuming, of course, that those exotic lands have the Internet). These sites always have lots of pictures, usually of wild looking foliage, towering buildings, and blurry-faced people in fleeces and sunglasses. Though these blogs are the most exotic, they're also the dullest: the scenery is always beautiful in the same flat way, and the experiences of travel (wonder, delight, fatigue, and alienation) aren't terribly interesting unless you're the one feeling them (which is why everyone loathes looking at everyone else's photo albums). But I know that these sites must be fascinating to their owners and to their friends and family, and they show how blogs can used to communicate directly with loved ones.
   

What I like best about the NEXT BLOG button is that it reminds me how many passions are out there. No matter how much I love poetry or advertising or baking, there are a million other bloggers who would pass my site by just because we're not passionate about the same thing. It's humbling. Whenever I see someone else's 2,000-word post about their new hand-knitted baby booties, I'm reminded not to be such an old snarkster about everything. I'm sure that the bootie-knitter feels just as flummoxed by my love of poetry as I am about her fascination with tiny feet.

Blog browsing reminds me that everyone loves something, from the smallest thing to the biggest, and that exploring that love through writing is what really matters.

Art & Copy

I managed to see Art & Copy this weekend at Tivoli Cinemas in Westport. It was absolutely fascinating and, for a documentary about advertising, it was surprisingly moving. I decided to write a review about it because a) I figured it would help me sort out my thoughts about the movie, and b) it would give me another journalistic writing sample. I managed to trim this piece down to 415 words without sacrificing any major facts, ideas, or opinions, so I was very pleased.

Anyway, I hope that my review persuades you to go out and see Art & Copy for yourself. If you're at all interested in advertising, art, writing, or the creative process, I think you'll enjoy it.

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The Faces of Advertising

Don't let the trailer fool you: Art & Copy isn't a documentary about creativity or the American advertising industry. It's an astute examination of psychology: the psychology of the American consumer and of advertising's greatest creative executives.

In Art & Copy, director Doug Pray interviews a handful of creative giants to find out what makes them tick. We meet Jeff Goodby and Rich Silverstein (“Got milk?”), George Lois (“I want my MTV!”), David Kennedy and Dan Wieden (“Just do it.”), Mary Wells (“I love New York”), and even Hal Riney (the mind and voice behind Ronald Reagan's “Morning in America” reelection campaign).

Pray presents a wide array of campaigns in the film, taking us from Volkswagen's revolutionary “Think small” 1959 Beetle campaign to iPod's 2001 iconic dancing silhouettes. Each campaign is introduced and explained by its creators.

While this formula sounds dull (talking head-style interviews, office tours, and a slew of commercials), the results are electric. The creative directors are fascinating characters: George Lois is outspoken and crass, Mary Wells crackles with drama, Lee Clow (of iPod fame) looks like a beach bum but talks like a revolutionary, and Hal Riney simultaneously soothes and charms from his unassuming cream-colored couch.

As we learn more about the artists and writers behind each campaign, the commercials take on a whole new life. We forget to suspect them as calculated sales tools and begin to see them as their creators do: as works of art, as haiku, as tools for social change, as legitimate cultural artifacts, even as expressions of human truths.

Pray is enchanted by the creatives he interviews, and his take on advertising is overwhelmingly positive. But he does gesture briefly to advertising's tremendous size and influence: he tells us that the average city dweller sees 5,000 ads a day, that 65% of us feel bombarded by too many ads, and that more than $500 billion is spent per year on advertising. But these stats don't stick. The creatives are too compelling, too charismatic to ignore.

In a way, Art & Copy is the best advertisement you'll ever find for the advertising industry. It shows us the faces behind the images and catchphrases that have become as quotable to us as Shakespeare (“Where's the beef?”).

Pray does for his subjects what they do for the huge, anonymous corporations they work for: he gives the advertising industry a face, a personality, a heart.

"What Elements You Blend"

Last night, standing in a long, tortuous line at the Wal-Mart pharmacy, I thought to myself, "Maybe I should become a pharmacist! Clearly, there are not enough of them in the workforce. Why else would this line be so infernally slow?"

This idea isn't as crazy as you might think. I've always been good at chemistry. I usually had the top grade in my high school AP chemistry class, and I continued to do well in chemistry, biology, and genetics courses at KU. For a few years, I even wanted to be a chemistry major. I was fascinated by how many billions of chemicals and compounds existed in the world, and how they always reacted together in the same ways. Combine three white powders, add heat, and boom! You get a blue-black chunk of soot. Each reaction is reassuringly reliable and completely mysterious at the same time: there is no chance that the three powders will make something other than the blue chunk, but, looking at the powders separately, it seems impossible that they could conceal such a surprising product. So, to me, chemistry seemed both magical and mechanical, awe-inspiring and comfortingly sane.

This mysterious reliability is the same reason I love to bake. Baking is essentially chemistry: if you mix ten ingredients together in the correct proportions and add heat, the results will yield a delicious dessert that looks like none of its component parts. In the absence of human error, baking is as regular as the seasons, as breath, as hunger.

While my first poetry workshop at KU didn't erase my love of chemistry, it certainly overwhelmed it. Where chemistry was intriguing but tamable, writing felt alchemical and downright wild. Writing a successful poem was a rush because it was so much more difficult than following a set of instructions to reach a certain chemical product. Language is just so wily, so slippery and difficult that a good poet can be unsuccessful for 29 days out of a month only to succeed outrageously on the 30th day.

Besides the artistic thrill of it, I liked how immediate literature felt, how it could change a reader's life almost instantly. I know that chemistry makes lives better (I've seen your commercials, Du Pont!), and that there is meaning to be found in understanding the minute workings of the natural world. But reading a poem makes you feel something right away, though even the fastest pills take a half hour to enter the bloodstream. Besides, without pleasure and understanding, how fulfilling is a healthy but unexamined life? And so I set myself to the task of gathering words and images, mashing them together in a few hundred syllables, and hoping for an explosion.

Among all these thoughts of chemistry and poetry, of transformation and reliability, I thought of Robert Frost's "Choose Something Like a Star." It's always been one of my favorite poems. I love the speaker's tonal modulations, how his voice shifts smoothly to match the popular mob and the distant star. But I also love Frost's underlying message that, no matter how much we uncover about the mysteries of the natural world, nature's ancient archetypal meanings still loom large in our minds. What we know about stars changes every day, but starlight's essential human importance--its offerings of perspective and patience--cannot be changed by any fact.

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Choose Something Like a Star

by Robert Frost

O Star (the fairest one in sight),
We grant your loftiness the right
To some obscurity of cloud --
It will not do to say of night,
Since dark is what brings out your light.
Some mystery becomes the proud.
But to be wholly taciturn
In your reserve is not allowed.

Say something to us we can learn
By heart and when alone repeat.
Say something! And it says "I burn."
But say with what degree of heat.
Talk Fahrenheit, talk Centigrade.
Use language we can comprehend.
Tell us what elements you blend.

It gives us strangely little aid,
But does tell something in the end.
And steadfast as Keats' Eremite,
Not even stooping from its sphere,
It asks a little of us here.
It asks of us a certain height,
So when at times the mob is swayed
To carry praise or blame too far,
We may choose something like a star
To stay our minds on and be staid.

" . . . because, without beer . . .

things don't seem to go as well . . ."

The above quote is attributed to Brother Epp, a beer-brewing monk who lived in Kansas in the early 1900s. Once national prohibition hit, his monastery was forced to quit brewing their beloved ale, and Brother Epp famously wondered how they would keep toiling through the sweltering Kansas summers without beer to help them along.

Brother Epp's words are especially appropriate when it comes to Dave Lieberman's Chocolate Stout Cupcakes. I made these last night to disperse some pre-interview nervous energy (I think it went great, btw!).

Technically, things didn't go that great: my butter solidified upon being doused with some slightly-cooler-than-room-temperature stout, then I splattered the watery batter everywhere, then there was the wonky cup incident. Oy, what messes I made!

But these things happen. The most important thing is that I had bought an extra bottle of Boulevard Dry Stout to drink during the baking process, so then it felt like things were going better than they really were.

But at the end of the day, the cupcakes turned out good. They were, of course, chocolaty (they took 3/4 cup cocoa powder, for goodness sake!), but the stout gave the cakes a slight beery bitterness, making them taste like they were made with dark chocolate instead of cocoa powder. And the frosting--oh, goodness, the frosting!--turned out to be so, so good. It combines the mild tanginess of cream cheese with the puffy mildness of fresh whipped cream.

Even without all the deliciousness, aren't these a great idea? They're like delectable little Irish car bombs, only without the alcoholic bomb part: the cake is the Guiness and the frosting stands in for the Bailey's and the whiskey. And while the frosting may be (slightly) less hazardous to your health than hard liquor, I'm pretty sure that it's just as addicting.

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Chocolate Stout Cupcakes

Recipe by Dave Lieberman

Originally posted on FoodNetwork.com

Cake Ingredients

3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa, plus more for dusting finished cupcakes
2 cups sugar
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
Pinch fine salt
1 bottle stout beer*
1 stick butter, melted
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
3 large eggs
3/4 cup sour cream

Icing Ingredients
1 (8-ounce) package cream cheese, softened at room temperature
3/4 to 1 cup heavy cream**
1 (1-pound) box confectioners' sugar

Directions for Cake
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.

In a large mixing bowl, whisk together the cocoa, sugar, flour, baking soda, and salt.

In another medium mixing bowl, combine the stout, melted butter, and vanilla.*** Beat in eggs, one at time. Mix in sour cream until thoroughly combined and smooth. Gradually mix the dry ingredients into the wet mixture.

Lightly grease 24 muffin tins. Divide the batter equally between muffin tins, filling each 3/4 full. Bake for about 12 minutes and then rotate the pans.**** Bake another 12 to 13 minutes until risen, nicely domed, and set in the middle but still soft and tender. Cool before turning out.

Directions for Icing
In a medium bowl with a hand mixer, beat the cream cheese on medium speed until light and fluffy. Gradually beat in the heavy cream.***** On low speed, slowly mix in the confectioners' sugar until incorporated and smooth. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate until ready to use. Icing can be made several hours ahead and kept covered and chilled.

Top each cupcake with a heap of frosting and dust with cocoa.******

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*Be sure the beer is room temperature!

**Go light on the heavy cream. The recipe makes a ton of frosting, so you can skimp a little on the cream, leaving less liquid for the powdered sugar to soak up.

***Since my butter solidified (which is not uncommon, based on the FoodNetwork.com comments), it might be best to gently beat the butter, vanilla, and eggs together first before adding the stout.

****Mine only took about 15 minutes per pan, and rotating the pan did nothing for my cupcakes. Unless your oven is prone to creating lumpy, misshapen cakes, you can skip the rotating step. 

*****Be sure to beat the cream cheese for awhile to get it fluffy, and then to beat the heavy cream for awhile more after it's been added. You want this mix to be as fluffy as possible, since the powdered sugar actually makes the mixture more drizzly as you add it.

******I apologize for my excessive use of asterisks. They were uncalled for.

My Contemporary Literature Reading List

!!!!!

That's the only way I can type how I feel right now. I just got off the phone with a dean from a local university. I had applied for a teaching position there about a month ago. Since the school is a self-described "career-minded" college, I had assumed that they'd want me to teach composition or business writing or something similarly work-intensive and tedious. But the dean said that they would want me to teach a 400-level Humanities course in Contemporary Literature.

Again, !!!!!

The reason this is so exciting is that most adjunct lecturers (meaning lecturers who teach part-time and who aren't in tenure-track professorships) with English degrees are usually forced to teach a very limited array of composition courses semester after semester. At Penn State, full-time lecturers could teach intro to composition, business writing, technical writing, and writing in the humanities. If the lecturer worked really hard and hung around long enough and earned high enough student evaluations, he or she would be given a single coveted section of creative writing or literature appreciation. And that's a big "if."

So I'm absolutely thrilled at the opportunity to teach literature for this school. Of course, there's still the interview to get through, and maybe I will decide that this particular university is not for me. But I'm excited enough that I've already compiled a tentative reading list for a Contemporary Lit. course.

This particular university runs on 8-week sessions, meaning that I'd only have class time for 8 books at most. And really, if you take into account time for papers and tests, 6 books/reading units would be best. On a 6-week schedule, I'd allocate 3 weeks for novels, 1 week for short fiction, 1 week for drama, and 1 week for poetry.

Here's the reading list for my dream Contemporary Literature course, off the top of my head. Please feel free to suggest additions in the comments section!

Novels:
1) Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping (or maybe Gilead, since it won the Pulitzer)
2) Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian (or The Road to exploit the movie tie-in)
3) Junot Diaz's The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao

Short Stories:
1) Alice Munro (I don't know what I'd pick, but she'd definitely be in there)
2) Joyce Carol Oates's "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?"
3) Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried"
4) Selections from some contemporary short story anthology

Drama:
1) Tom Stoppard's Arcadia

Poetry:
1) Selections from The Best American Poetry 2009
2) Selections from Mary Oliver's American Primitive (Oliver's great for people who are new to poetry)
3) Selections from Billy Collins's Picnic, Lightening (also good for beginners, and funny, too)
4) Selections from Lynne Emanuel's Then, Suddenly--
5) Selections from Harryette Mullen's Sleeping with the Dictionary

So, my dear reader, would you take my class?

Suburban Riding

Cycling in Olathe has its challenges. I'm constantly stuck at lights and stopsigns, swerving to avoid overcautious drivers, jostling over bumpy sidewalks, and searching for those ever elusive bike lanes (you know, the ones that go for a half-mile and then mysteriously disappear).

 

But, then again, Olathe is wonderfully flat, so it's easy to conquer miles and miles of road here with minimum pain. And I have to admit that some parts of Olathe are beautiful. Take the shady, verdant streets near my house or the hidden trails and parks tucked away alongside Olathe's busy intersections and strip malls. 

My favorite trail is the loop around Frisco Lake. The trail is smooth and well-tended, the lake is shimmering and clear, and you can see from horizon to horizon over the water's expanse. Usually, the surrounding park is teeming with Canadian geese, men fishing, gaggles of small children chasing ducks, and mothers visiting on park benches. But yesterday afternoon, the park was wonderfully empty and still. The cooler weather had cleared away everyone but the ducks that snoozed on the bank, and this:

  

I don't know if she was a heron or something else, but she had a beautifully spotted neck. She waded through the water delicately, snatching up and gobbling fish that looked at least seven inches long.

It's not often that I catch sight of such natural beauty in the suburbs, but I am grateful for it, and grateful for whatever moved me to haul my bike out yesterday, strap on a helmet, and take on the streets of Olathe on a Tuesday afternoon.

Contemporary Book Club classics

By Lesley Owens

As the weather cools and the kids head back to school, you may be looking for a palate cleanser after all that pulpy summer reading. So re-shelve your copies of Twilight and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and make a plan to catch up with these three classics of contemporary literature.


The Center of Everything

At the beginning of Laura Moriarty's The Center of Everything (2004), Ronald Reagan is president and Evelyn Bucknow of Kerrville, Kansas is nine, old enough to notice when her mother's life becomes a series of misfortunes: the car breaks down, she loses her job, and she gets pregnant by a married man. But as things go downhill fast for the Bucknow family, Evelyn finds herself increasingly singled out as a gifted student “special” enough to distance herself from her mother's mistakes.

As Evelyn tries to escape her unwanted poverty and her mother Tina struggles to find happiness, Moriarty creates something very special: two characters who are flawed yet likable, and tragic without being gratuitously gritty. As you read, you're sure to recognize high school classmates, your grocery store check-out clerk, and your best friends in the novel's startlingly realistic characters.

There are many flaws in this novel, Moriarty's first, but she ably tackles complex relationships, welfare, and small town life, producing a page-turning coming-of-age novel that avoids melodrama and political warfare.


Hateship, Friendship, Loveship, Courtship, Marriage

Alice Munro is known as a master of the short story form, and Hateship, Friendship, Loveship, Courtship, Marriage (2001) solidifies her reputation for writing quietly beautiful short fiction. The stories in this collection are set in Ontario, Canada and take on the difficulties of real life relationships. Unwanted and strained connections abound, mostly between wives, husbands, and desperate female relatives.
 
Munro's characters come from a variety of milieus and eras, but they are always short on happiness and long on repressed urges, unreachable temptations, illness, and death. But these stories feel flat, not sad. Munro's characters could explode into action and drama at any second—in fact, as readers, we often expect them to—but they simply don't.

And that's the whole 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.


Housekeeping

Reading Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping (1980) is a lot like reading Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway: it's fascinating, somewhat baffling, and immensely compelling. As you turn the last page, you'll find yourself wanting to start page one all over again.
 
Housekeeping is set during the Depression in Fingerbone, Idaho. After a series of family deaths, Ruthie, the narrator, is adopted by her aunt Sylvie. Sylvie is a former transient and an unconventional parental figure: she takes catnaps on park benches and fills her family home with tin cans and stacks of magazines. As Ruthie's sister Lucille increasingly rejects Sylvie's ways, Ruthie willingly dissolves herself into the rhythms of Sylvie's bizarre lifestyle.

Robinson's prose is supple and rich with sensuous imagery, and each page of the novel is lush with contemplative eddies as Ruthie considers memory, death, and time's liquidity. Robinson's skillful writing ruthlessly mirrors Ruthie's increasing difference from the outside world, and despite the novel's leisurely pace, you'll find yourself content to slow down, to wander within the watery flow of Ruthie's mind.

The Round-Up

Despite the utter lack of job postings in the KC area, I've been busy lately. I've been conducting informational interviews (Callahan Creek must have the kindest copywriters in the world), reading up on marketing, working on my portfolio, and generally trying to let the world know that I'm looking for a job.

My brain's been fragmented, so this post is going to be, too. Just go with the flow, people. Dig the melange.

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1. I finally chose a poem for my friend's wedding, and she loved it. I'm so thrilled! It's by Paul Laurence Dunbar, one of the first major black American poets. I've never really cared for his poetry (I always thought it was too sing-songy and cliched), but this poem is killer precisely because it so gentle, soft-spoken, and unexpected. I especially love the refrain of "And you are welcome, welcome."

Invitation to Love

By Paul Laurence Dunbar

Come when the nights are bright with stars

Or come when the moon is mellow;

Come when the sun his golden bars

Drops on the hay-field yellow.

Come in the twilight soft and gray,

Come in the night or come in the day,

Come, O love, whene’er you may,

And you are welcome, welcome.

You are sweet, O Love, dear Love,

You are soft as the nesting dove.

Come to my heart and bring it to rest

As the bird flies home to its welcome nest.

Come when my heart is full of grief

Or when my heart is merry;

Come with the falling of the leaf

Or with the redd’ning cherry.

Come when the year’s first blossom blows,

Come when the summer gleams and glows,

Come with the winter’s drifting snows,

And you are welcome, welcome. 

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2. There's a fantastic article about swine flu in this month's Vogue. It's called "The Year of the Pig," and even if you're not a Vogue subscriber, I'd strongly recommend that you park yourself by a Border's magazine section and give it a read. In the piece, Robert Sullivan takes a look at how the government has been planning for the swine flu pandemic and why experts are so worried about it. He explains that H1N1 is behaving very much like the Spanish Flu of 1918: so far, it hasn't proven very dangerous (except to children), but experts suspect that the strain may mutate by next year and cause rocketing number of cases in the fall and winter of 2010. They don't believe that the virus will grow much more fatal, but it will severely strain the American health care system. Scientists are raising alarms about the flu now in order to prepare for next year. So, in conclusion, ack!

Reading this reminded me of Ellen Bryant Voigt's Kyrie, which is one of the saddest and most beautiful books of poetry I've ever read. It's a series of sonnets about the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic. Voigt writes mostly in the voices of the flu's survivors, and her use of the sonnet form is clever, appropriate, and moving. Go out and read it, like, now.

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3. Speaking of horribly sad poetry, I finally managed to read Donald Hall's Without. Hall's collection follows the illness and death of his wife, poet Jane Kenyon. Surprisingly, the volume was a page-turner; I read the whole thing in about an hour, and, naturally, waterworks ensued. Why am I so attracted to poetry that ruins my make-up?

To be honest, I wasn't in love with the poetry in this collection. The poems were just so raw, so straight-forward, so narrative that I couldn't call it very good or interesting poetry (thought, in general, I think Donald Hall is quite brilliant). But it did depict a beautiful love affair and the sort of raw emotion usually reserved for romance novels and chick flicks. I'd recommend this book if only for the catharsis.

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4. I've also been reading The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing. It's a fascinating exploration of how to successfully position a product within a unique market. Jack Trout and Al Ries use a ton of real-world examples to prove their points, including the never-ending marketing battle between Coca-Cola and Pepsi and lots of little tidbits from the emerging PC market (well, emerging in 1993, when the book was first published).

But despite the myriad references to Atari, Commodore, and a hundred other computer and software companies I've never heard of, the book feels relevant and useful to a business newbie like me. In fact, these guys are kind of blowing my mind: they make me realize how complex marketing strategies can be, but they're also reinforcing how much I have to learn if I want to be a part of the marketing industry. It's wonderfully exciting to read about something as familiar as Coke and Pepsi, but to find myself seeing it in an entirely new way.

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. 

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

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.

"The More Loving One"

Happy Labor Day, everyone! I've been lounging around the house all weekend, reading and going on bike rides and visiting or being visited by friends who are in town for a few days. My only "labor" has been gutting my graduate thesis to make two chapbooks (something I've wanted to do ever since I compiled the original book-length manuscript).

I've also been reading An Invitation to Poetry: A New Favorite Poem Project Anthology. The anthology was one of Robert Pinsky's projects when he was Poet Laureate. It's a collection of Americans' favorite poems. Each poem is prefaced with a brief explanation of what the poem means to the person who nominated it.

I think it's a great collection because of its lack of thematic or academic premises; these poems aren't supposed to illustrate or teach us anything except why someone loves them. The anthology treats poems the way they should be treated: not as instruments of academic edification, but as works of art that can inspire passion and understanding in an individual reader.

Here's one of my favorites from Pinsky's collection. I've always liked Auden because he's such a thoughtful poet; he reminds me of Frost in that there's always an argument lurking behind the beauty of his images. This particular poem didn't really strike me when I first read it (I wasn't in love with the rhyme scheme), but it's been bouncing around in my head ever since. It's teasing me into thought, which makes me suspect that it's a better poem than I first took it for.

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The More Loving One

W.H. Auden

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.

Poems of Love, and Coffins?

A friend of mine is getting married in October, and she asked me to read a poem at her wedding. Since she first brought this up a month ago, I've been flipping my way through anthologies trying to find something just right.

I spent this afternoon at Borders skimming the pages of every love-themed anthology I could find (and there are a lot of them). I kept thinking I was hitting gold: I'd start reading, and the poem would be aurally enchanting yet plainspoken, passionate yet safe for church, modern yet without ennui, and romantic without being too flowery. I'd be ecstatic, and a lump of triumph and wedding-time goodwill would start to balloon in my throat--

And then I'd hit the last stanza. Gah! Each poet had to slip something unpleasant in there at the end. Sometimes he left me with a surprise ending that savaged my belief in happy marriages, or she would mournfully reveal that her lover was long gone and that nothing, especially love, could ever last.

The most common trick, however, was to end with death. Not the death of one of the lovers, per se, just the mention of death. Even a hint was enough to kill (har!) my interest. Poets are always going on about how love can stand up to age, decay, and mortality, but that means that they end up writing an awful lot about death when they claim to be writing about love. For example, take Shakespeare's oft-quoted Sonnet 116:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments; love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no, it is an ever-fixèd mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his heighth be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved. 

The opening is gorgeous, iconic: "love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds." Beautiful! It's about the steadiness of love, how it never wavers--fantastic marriage material! But Shakespeare just has to stick in those unsettling images of the "bending sickle" and "the edge of doom." These images don't really embody the joyful mindset I'm going for; I don't want anyone watching that wedding to see sickles looming over the flower arch.

Or how about Kenneth Rexroth's Songs of Love, Moon, & Wind? It's a gorgeous little book of translations of Japanese lyrics, each of which is brief, imagistic, romantic, and as refreshing as running your hand through a cool creek. After skimming the table of contents, I naturally flipped to the following poem:

Married Love
By Kenneth Rexroth
 

You and I
Have so much love,
That it
Burns like a fire,
In which we bake a lump of clay
Molded into a figure of you
And a figure of me.
Then we take both of them,
And break them into pieces,
And mix the pieces with water,
And mold again a figure of you,
And a figure of me.
I am in your clay.
You are in my clay.
In life we share a single quilt.
In death we will share one coffin.

Perfect title, terrible poem for my occasion! I was willing to give the unexpected metaphor a try, to let the clay have its chance--and then he drops the "one coffin" on us in the last line. Kenneth, just like Shakespeare, you are not helping!

This happened so frequently that I started to look for the catch in each poem. This, in turn, got me thinking of how rare it is to find a poem that is a perfectly sincere expression of love or joy or praise. I think this is because poets don't really write out of pure emotion like Wordsworth argues. We write out of complication, which means that if we write about our emotions, we pick ones that have been somehow perverted, thwarted, or made to fail (which is why so many of the love anthologies included special sections on loss and lovers' quarrels).

To me, conceiving of a poem isn't like sitting down to express myself, it's more like scratching a mental itch. I sense something strange or paradoxical or just plain tangled up in my head, and I have to figure it out on paper. I don't know if that's how other poets do it, but I do know that finding a wedding poem for my friend that is beautiful, meaningful, and positive will be a challenge.

But at least I get to read a lot of great poems about death in the process.

A Chocolate Cake You Can Be Proud Of

Usually, I don't use the word "diet," and I most definitely don't use it in the same sentence with the word "dessert" or, even worse, "cake." I love cake, and I don't believe in mutilating a perfectly delicious food by making it low-cal or low-fat; it always turns out dry or gummy or plastic-y or flavorless or tasting vaguely like cardboard dust. I'd rather eat small amounts of indulgent recipes or to cut them out altogether in favor of fruit or yogurt, or whatever it is dieters eat.

But last week, a friend of mine who happens to be dieting for a special event was also having a birthday. I wanted to make her something that would be festive without being too over-the-top bad-for-you (which is usually my forte). So, of course, I hit Google, and after a short search, I discovered a low-fat cake recipe on EatingWell.com called the "Died-and-Went-to-Heaven Chocolate Cake."

I felt comfortable trying this recipe because it doesn't include anything too bizarre (no apple sauce or Diet Coke or prune juice, thank goodness!) and it's very similar to one of my favorite recipes ever: Nigella Lawson's Dense Chocolate Loaf Cake (I make it for Charlie's birthday every year). Just like the DCLC, EatingWell's cake is dark, chocolaty, moist, and (to use one of Nigella's favorite words) squidgy.

I also knew that this cake wouldn't be too dry (which is my number one complaint against most good-for-you recipes). Unlike most cakes, this one doesn't depend on vegetable oil for its moisture; instead, it stays succulent because of hearty doses of low-fat buttermilk and strong black coffee. As you can see, it makes a very runny, slightly frothy batter.


I doubled the recipe so I could have a couple of smaller cakes for my family to snack on. I made my friend's big cake in the bundt pan as the recipe suggests, but I used a couple of 9-inch round pans for the smaller cakes. I ended up liking the plain little round cakes better; they looked chic and demure, somehow, and it was very easy to tell when they were done baking. The bundt, however, was a little more challenging to judge because of its size; I could never get my toothpicks to come out completely clean, even after the cake shrunk away from the inside of the pan.


Besides the pan size, there's nothing I wanted to change about this recipe (which, by the way, was terrifically easy). I used vegetable oil instead of canola oil because it's what I had on hand, but I don't think it made a difference in the flavor. Be sure that the coffee you use is very strong; I couldn't taste the coffee flavor at all in my cake, but a stronger brew gives the chocolate a little more darkness and bite. Admittedly, the frosting is just a plain old sugar and milk recipe like the one I use to frost sugar cookies (only a little runnier), but its sweetness makes a wonderful contrast to the cake's mellow chocolate flavor.

I would highly recommend this recipe to someone who's watching his or her weight (it's only 220 calories per serving!), and it's great if you just want something chocolaty around the house that you can eat with a little less guilt. Also, this is a good dessert to trick an unwilling dieter with: if I hadn't told my friend and my family this was health food, I don't think they would have been able to tell!

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EatingWell.com's Died-and-Went-to-Heaven Chocolate Cake

Ingredients

Cake

• 1 3/4 cups all-purpose white flour
• 1 cup white sugar
• 3/4 cup unsweetened Dutch-process cocoa powder
• 1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
• 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 1/4 cups buttermilk
• 1 cup packed light brown sugar
• 2 large eggs, lightly beaten
• 1/4 cup canola oil
• 2 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
• 1 cup hot strong black coffee

Icing:

• 1 cup confectioners' sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
• 1-2 tablespoons buttermilk, or low-fat milk

1. Preheat oven to 350°F. Lightly oil a 12-cup Bundt pan or coat it with nonstick cooking spray. Dust the pan with flour, invert and shake out the excess.
2. In a large mixing bowl, whisk together flour, white sugar, cocoa powder, baking soda, baking powder and salt. Add buttermilk, brown sugar, eggs, oil and vanilla; beat with an electric mixer on medium speed for 2 minutes. Whisk in hot coffee until completely incorporated. (The batter will be quite thin.)
3. Pour the batter into the prepared pan. Bake for 45 to 55 minutes, or until a cake tester inserted in the center comes out clean. Cool the cake in the pan on a rack for 10 minutes; remove from the pan and let cool completely.
4. To make icing: In a small bowl, whisk together confectioners' sugar, vanilla and enough of the buttermilk or milk to make a thick but pourable icing. Set the cake on a serving plate and drizzle the icing over the top.