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Leif Enger, who maddeningly does not have a website, made an appearance at The King’s English in Salt Lake City last night. Before we proceed, I must disclose that I LOVE Peace Like a River. It’s due for a rereading (right after I finish So Brave, Young, and Handsome), so I’ll likely post a review of it then.
As you might have guessed, Leif Enger’s new book is So Brave, Young, and Handsome. I haven’t finished it yet, but the fifty or so pages I have read were quite delightful. Quite.
Anyway, we (me with my husband and brother, neither of whom had heard of Leif Enger prior to being dragged to the signing) appeared at The King’s English and were ushered by Betsy into a small alcove of books with about twenty chairs. While we were waiting for Leif (which, by the by, I have always pronounced, incorrectly, as “Leaf”), the husband and the brother skimmed through books by Mary Roach, whose titles include Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, and Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife.
Leif arrived and after a somewhat awkward summary of the new book (which included at least five uses
of the word “implacable“) and introduction by Betsy, the reading began. We were a little disappointed once he started talking that, as a Minnesotan, his accent did not in the least resemble that of the cast of Fargo. However, Leif was very amicable and invited audience participation in a way that reminded me of my favorite college professor. He read aloud to us in an engaging manner, almost but not quite as if he were reading to children.
Then Leif invited us to engage in a discussion (an interesting and more inviting way of saying “let us now commence with the obligatory Q&A”). The crowd consisted of mainly fifty-somethings, most of them obviously associated with the English Department at the University of Utah. Trust me, they were. The Q&A proceeded with the audience members making obvious and uncomfortable references to their books, writing groups, and writing students. The most exciting moment came when, asked who his favorite author was, Leif responded that it was currently Tobias Wolff (who also lacks a website) and his book Old School. (Old School, along with Peace Like a River, currently has a place in my current top five favorite books of all time.) Leif took it all in stride and politely answered the interminable round of insipid questions. Afterward, we were all offered coffee and wine while we waited in line to have our books signed.
Having attended two other book signings in the last week, I am a seasoned signing linestander. First, I prepped the books for signing by marking the pages to be signed, and then I made the hard decision to ask Leif to just sign the books without inscribing them to me (increasing their sale value one hundred years from now). Unfortunately, Leif just asked me my name and proceeded to both inscribe and sign my books while we made uncomfortable small talk about the rankness of the Great Salt Lake. I also turned into gushing reader and mentioned that Peace Like a River is one of my top five favorite books of all time. Blah.
The reading was great fun, and, as I’ve mentioned before, I like supporting my favorite contemporary, and therefore living, writers. Here here.
I’m not a big nonfiction reader. I generally prefer my books to be fictive. Sometimes, though, a nonfiction title will catch my eye, as did Maps and Legends, recently released by Michael Chabon. Maps and Legends is a collection of Chabon’s essays. The essays and their arrangement were infinitely readable. I scarfed down essay after essay about maps and comic books and Sherlock Holmes and Israel. My favorite essays, though, were those that comprised the last half of the book—the essays about Michael Chabon’s own writing adventures. I love writing about writing, which is the main reason I checked out this book.
Michael Chabon has a nice writing style that is difficult to describe. It’s affable and talkative and at the same time, erudite and literary. I’m now working on The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. I’m sure I’ll be as pleased with it as I was with Maps and Legends.
Maps and Legends, by Michael Chabon: (55) * * *
As part of the novella challenge, I read Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote this weekend. The novella is quite short, only 85 pages in the version I read. Still, unraveling the intricacies of Holly Golightly would take up many more pages. For a critical analysis go here.
Holly is twenty years old. She has a somewhat questionable past in that, at fourteen, she married a much older Texan with a slew of children. She had a brief stint in Hollywood, and we find her living in New York, living off of tips she gets from men in bars. She makes a weekly pilgrimage to Sing Sing to deliver a “weather report” to a mafia boss named Sally Tomato. In the brief glimpse that we get of Holly Golightly’s life via the narrator, Holly has a cat. The cat, though, has no name.
“We just sort of took up by the river one day, we don’t belong to each other: he’s an independent, and so am I. I don’t want to own anything until I know I’ve found the place where me and things belong together. I’m not quite sure where that is just yet. But I know what it’s like.”
At the end of the story, Holly dumps the cat in a rainy alley and tells the driver to drive away. Before they get to the end of the block, she jumps out of the car and goes in search of the cat, to no avail.
“I’m very scared, Buster. Yes, at last. Because it could go on
forever. Not knowing what’s yours until you’ve thrown it away. The
mean reds, they’re nothing. The fat woman, she nothing. This,
though: my mouth’s so dry, if my life depended on it I couldn’t spit.”
The narrator promises to go in search of the cat, and Holly continues on her way to the airport, out of the story. The narrator spends days looking for the cat and when he does, the cat has found a home. Perhaps Holly did too.
I loved this story. I love Holly Golightly. I love the way she describes her particular form of depression as the “mean reds.” I love that the only cure for a particularly bad case of the mean reds is a trip to Tiffany’s. I love how all of the characters in the book fall in love with Holly for different reasons and in different ways. (I also love the movie.) Mostly, I love the themes of the futility of taming a wild animal and of our life’s search for home.
Breakfast at Tiffany’s, by Truman Capote: (55) * * * *
The Whaleboat House, by Mark Mills, is a murder mystery. It takes a meandering approach to the genre. Character development relatively irrelevant to the plot takes up much of the almost 400-page novel. As far as the murder mystery part of the plot, I thought it was thin, at best. Though much time is spent on character development, it is mostly the “good guys” who are being developed. The lack of development of the “bad guys” made it difficult to believe the motivations behind the killing. Also, the clues were revealed in a disconcerting jumble. In fact, the killer is revealed in a sort of off hand manner—very anti-climatic.
Two minor complaints:
Fishing jargon. I know Mills was trying to give life to the setting, but I felt that the fishing jargon was not explained well enough for a layperson to understand. For example, there is a scene where the characters are harpooning swordfish and something important happens with the keg. Now, to me, keg means a barrel with alcohol in it. The importance of the scene, though rested on the reader’s understanding of just what a keg is in this context.
Sex. I’m not really a book prude. I can handle a sex scene or two, but these sex scenes were not only totally irrelevant to the plot but cheesy and explicit in a manner reminiscent of Danielle Steel.
Overall, I thought this was a fairly mediocre, meandering read.
The Whaleboat House, by Mark Mills: (75) * *
Today’s prompt:
Do your reading habits change in the Spring? Do you read gardening books? Even if you don’t have a garden? More light fiction than during the Winter? Less? Travel books? Light paperbacks you can stick in a knapsack?
Or do you pretty much read the same kinds of things in the Spring as you do the rest of the year?
I haven’t yet determined exactly the cause of my reading habits. For the most part, I think, I generally read the same kinds of things in the spring as I do in the rest of the year. I’m not a gardener (blackest thumb, though I try occasionally), so no new spring reading there. (Also, I’ve noticed that my gardening acquaintances tend to read about gardening in the winter. They pick seeds out of catalog’s and whatnot.) Anyhow, as a fiction aficionado, I have noticed more of a willingness to try out the nonfiction in the winter. Also, I probably give in to some more “beach reads” in the spring/summer—probably more as a result of the excellent marketing on the part of my local bookstores than my shifting moods.
I’ve lately been reading Emma, by Jane Austen. (Though I was temporarily derailed when I found Love Walked In by Marisa de los Santos in the bargain bin at Borders.) Anyway, I started reading Emma in earnest because of the PBS Masterpiece Classic series “The Complete Jane Austen.” I have now viewed at least one movie version of all six of Jane Austen’s principal novels, though I’d only previously read Pride & Prejudice. And, I must admit, viewing the movie version of Emma before reading the book has helped immensely. Actually, I’m not sure if it is the movie itself that is helpful or just knowing the progression of the plot. In any case, I find myself reading more closely, picking up more textual clues about people’s true characters and Emma’s subtle, but important, misperceptions.
This experience with Emma made me reevaluate my reading skills and methods. I’m a compulsive, rapid reader. I tend to read and dump. (Likely a product of college English classes where professors would schedule a mere week for the reading of Anna Karenina or Dante’s Inferno.) I generally don’t read closely. Having just completed a book, I probably couldn’t tell you what color hair the heroine has. I jump over “unimportant” details like that, partly because I like to imagine the characters myself and partly because I’m in a hurry. I think miss a great deal in my hurry.
All of this reflection made me recall a chapter in Francine Prose’s book Reading Like a Writer on close reading. In the very first chapter, Ms. Prose advocates getting back to reading basics and focusing on close reading, paying attention to the words and sentences and paragraphs.
Several websites supply variations on the theme of “how to conduct a close reading.” See websites here and here and here and here. Though lists and suggestions are a good place to start, the lists, I think, are a little too narrow. Most of them anticipate close reading conducted on short works of fiction like poetry or excerpts of longer works. It seems to me that close reading should be applied to all kinds of reading: literature, poetry, newspapers, technical manuals. Rather than a technique used in English papers, close reading should be a method, a form inseparable from our reading.
This definition of close reading sums it up for me: a method in which you pay close attention to a text, either in order to observe striking features generally or in order to answer specific questions concerning that text.
In light of the above, I hereby resolve to amend my reading habits by:
- Slowing down and enjoying the experience, the moments, of reading
- Reading with a pencil in hand
- Looking up words I don’t know
- Pausing occasionally to contemplate what I’ve just read
Here is the meme:
I’ve always wondered what other people do when they come across a word/phrase that they’ve never heard before. I mean, do they jot it down on paper so they can look it up later, or do they stop reading to look it up on the dictionary/google it or do they just continue reading and forget about the word?
My response is that it depends. I keep a dictionary in my husband’s nightstand (no room in mine), so if I’m reading in bed and come across a word I don’t know, I’ll usually look it up. If no dictionary is available but I have my BlackBerry, I’ll head to dictionary.com. If there is no dictionary, paper or digital, around, I’ll try and remember the word for later. And, many times, I’ve just used to context to get sometime of meaning and kept plowing on through the book. I hereby resolve to do better.
One of my favorite poets is William Butler Yeats. I’m a sucker for Modern British writers.
Here are two of my favorite Yeats poems with some commentary:
The Lake Isle of Innisfree (1890)
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the mourning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet‘s wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
_______
I love the way this poem sounds. Each word was carefully placed in its line. “Bee-loud glade” and its accompanying line is my favorite-sounding part of the poem.
The first stanza of the poem contains a flurry of daytime activity – “nine bean rows,” “hive for the honey-bee,” and “bee-loud glade.” The second stanza slows down a little to a pace more akin to night – “peace comes dropping slow,” “dropping from the veils of the morning,” “midnight’s all a glimmer,” and “evening full of the linnet’s wings.” The third stanza is about action “night and day.” Innisfree is always calling.
The whole poem has a solitary, self-reflection vibe. According to my Norton Anthology, Yeats wrote this poem after his father read him some passages from Walden. Each of the elements of the poem play into the aloneness – especially the title (Innisfree = “in is free”) and the nature references (“water lapping” “evening full of linnet’s wings”). I can escape into the language of this poem.
A Coat (1912)
I made my song a coat
Covered with embroideries
Out of old mythologies
From heel to throat;
But he fools caught it,
Wore it in the world’s eyes
As though they’d wrought it.
Song, let them take it,
For there’s more enterprise
In walking naked.
_______
This poem contains a rather obvious self-rejection of Yeats’s earlier style. I like the simple language and compact message.
I particularly like the imagery of a writer’s works being made into a coat, a covering. But Yeats’s covering was to be viewed only by those who had earned it. It makes sense it me – parading literature or art in front of those not able or willing to appreciate it cheapens the art. Also under fire in the poem are other “artists” who just imitated Yeats’s style. In fact, Yeats would rather be naked (i.e. not write at all) than write for simpletons or the imitators. I think this poem expresses a yearning to be understood on a higher level and an aspiration to achieve more as a poet.
Here are a few poems on spring in an effort to hurry it here.
The Enkindled Spring
This spring as it comes bursts up in bonfires green,
Wild puffing of emerald trees, and flame-filled bushes,
Thorn-blossom lifting in wreaths of smoke between
Where the wood fumes up, and the flickering, watery rushes.
I am amazed at this spring, this conflagration
Of green fires lit on the soil of the earth, this blaze
Of growing, these sparks that puff in wild gyration,
Faces of people streaming across my gaze.
And I, what fountain of fire am I among
This leaping combustion of spring? My spirit is tossed
About like a shadow buffeted in the throng
Of flames, a shadow that’s gone astray, and is lost.
The Green Linnet
Beneath these fruit-tree boughs that shed
Their snow-white blossoms on my head,
With brightest sunshine round me spread
Of spring’s unclouded weather,
In this sequestered nook how sweet
To sit upon my orchard-seat!
And birds and flowers once more to greet,
My last year’s friends together.
One have I marked, the happiest guest
In all this covert of the blest:
Hail to Thee, far above the rest
In joy of voice and pinion!
Thou, Linnet! in thy green array,
Presiding Spirit here to-day,
Dost lead the revels of the May;
And this is thy dominion.
While birds, and butterflies, and flowers,
Make all one band of paramours,
Thou, ranging up and down the bowers,
Art sole in thy employment:
A Life, a Presence like the Air,
Scattering thy gladness without care,
Too blest with any one to pair;
Thyself thy own enjoyment.
Amid yon tuft of hazel trees,
That twinkle to the gusty breeze,
Behold him perched in ecstasies,
Yet seeming still to hover;
There! where the flutter of his wings
Upon his back and body flings
Shadows and sunny glimmerings,
That cover him all over.
My dazzled sight he oft deceives,
A brother of the dancing leaves;
Then flits, and from the cottage-eaves
Pours forth his song in gushes;
As if by that exulting strain
He mocked and treated with disdain
The voiceless Form he chose to feign,
While fluttering in the bushes.
Late February
The first warm day,
and by mid-afternoon
the snow is no more
than a washing
strewn over the yards,
the bedding rolled in knots
and leaking water,
the white shirts lying
under the evergreens.
Through the heaviest drifts
rise autumn’s fallen
bicycles, small carnivals
of paint and chrome,
the Octopus
and Tilt-A-Whirl
beginning to turn
in the sun. Now children,
stiffened by winter
and dressed, somehow,
like old men, mutter
and bend to the work
of building dams.
But such a spring is brief;
by five o’clock
the chill of sundown,
darkness, the blue TVs
flashing like storms
in the picture windows,
the yards gone gray,
the wet dogs barking
at nothing. Far off
across the cornfields
staked for streets and sewers,
the body of a farmer
missing since fall
will show up
in his garden tomorrow,
as unexpected
as a tulip.
in Just-
in Just-
spring when the world is mud-
luscious the little
lame baloonman
whistles far and wee
and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it’s
spring
when the world is puddle-wonderful
the queer
old baloonman whistles
far and wee
and bettyandisbel come dancing
from hop-scotch and jump-rope and
it’s
spring
and
the
goat-footed
baloonMan whistles
far
and
wee
______________
______________
HAPPY SPRING!
I think every Tuesday is in need of a bit of poetry.
On this, the inaugural Poetry Tuesday, I want to share two of my current favorite poems. Both of them come from a project called Poetry 180. Poetry 180 is a project started by Billy Collins, former poet laureate, in an effort to bring poetry into the lives of high school students. Despite the purpose of the project, these poems aren’t just for high schoolers. There is a Poetry 180 book, but the website has all of the poems on it.
Anyway, here are my two favorites:
#23
Tour
Carol Snow
Near a shrine in Japan he’d swept the path
and then placed camellia blossoms there.
Or — we had no way of knowing — he’d swept the path
between fallen camellias.
#53
Selecting a Reader
Ted Kooser
First, I would have her be beautiful,
and walking carefully up on my poetry
at the loneliest moment of an afternoon,
her hair still damp at the neck
from washing it. She should be wearing
a raincoat, an old one, dirty
from not having money enough for the cleaners.
She will take out her glasses, and there
in the bookstore, she will thumb
over my poems, then put the book back
up on its shelf. She will say to herself,
“For that kind of money, I can get
my raincoat cleaned.” And she will.
Poetry makes me happy.
