LATE WINTER DOLDRUMS

In a bit of a bookish slump lately, sorry to say.  I see I haven't blogged here for almost a week.  The book I mentioned in the last entry, Mosaic, was a disappointment.  Yes, I read the whole thing (there's that difficulty with putting a book down unless it's truly entirely awful), but now I wonder why.  The story was gripping through part of the book, a woman's children taken by her husband back to his family in Jordan, his intent to raise them there by Muslim values, her attempts to get them back.  The writing was plebian, and in the end the whole story was facile.  Happy ending, nice and tidy.  Don't bother looking for it. 

Now I'm reading St. Dale, Sharyn McCrumb's latest, but in widely separated fits and starts.  I have been too busy to read it with any continuity.  I am therefore giving it the benefit of the doubt.  I will say that thus far I find it not up to her usual standards. 

Yesterday I ordered several things from the library, so perhaps the slump will end soon.

There is so much wonderful poetry in the world, don't you think?  I can't give up hope entirely while this is true.  Practically every day I discover a new writer, and a whole new vision opens up before me.  Today it's Timothy Walsh, thanks to Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac.  This poem is the perfect expression of the experience of going to PrimeHook on a late winter day, everything encapsulated in these few lines:

The Marsh in Winter

If you stand and listen,
you will hear the voice.
Reeds sharp as rapiers rasp the wind.
Frost creaks in the trees.
Sunlight, ice-bright, falls from the sky.
Scattered cedars and junipers loom like shadows.
Sheathed in ice, a willow droops heavily
Across the path.
Driven snow packs the creviced bark of cottonwoods.
Once-hidden bird nests now plainly marked
by a white cap of snow...

Out on the marsh, blue water shows through shifting ice.
Tall brown reeds, slim as dancers, bend in the breeze.
A hundred thousand cattails, each one lit
by the low-angled light of awestering sun,
each brown seed head blazing
like the head of a saint.

Timothy Walsh, from Wild Apples

My own photo, Terrapin Nature Preserve

Now I must find this volume of poetry, see if the rest is as good.  The title holds promise.  Nature poetry is what always grabs my heart.  My endlessly romantic (in the literary/art, not the Hearts & Flowers, sense) heart.

MANY BOOKS, LITTLE TIME

Finally finished The Briar King (Greg Keyes) several nights ago - what a relief.  The second volume is out, called The Charnal Prince, but I think I won't continue reading this series.  Far too much beheading, impaling, evisceration, etc. for my reading pleasure.  Alas, because the story is really quite good.  And I have to admit I'd like to know what happens to the few characters who remain standing at the end of this, the first, volume.  There's a lot that bewilders me about this story, mainly the fact that the royal family in this strange time and place traces its lineage back to someone named Virginia Dare.  Call me crazy, but I think that was the name of the baby born to the English colonists in what was called The Lost Colony, on Roanoke Island in Virginia.  The first English baby born in the New World.  Yes?  And in this book there is a place called Virgenia, and a language ditto.  So, when and where is the setting of this fantasy?  Okay, I may eventually have to pick it back up just to see if this question is ever answered.  Has anyone else ready any of this?  I wouldn't mind getting the answer to my bafflement the easy way. 

I went in to return Briar King, also pay my hefty late fees, and picked up two promising books.  Sharyn McCrumb is one of my favorite writers - her series of Appalachian mysteries based on folk ballads is outstanding for plot, characters, but most of all for place.  The Tennessee mountains are alive in these novels, written about with great personal affection.  One of my favorite contemporary characters comes from these books - Nora Bonesteel, an elderly woman with The Gift of seeing the past, sometimes also the future.  So, anyway, when I found a new Sharon McCrumb on the New Books shelves, I snagged it.  Even if it IS about NASCAR.  Yes, you heard me, NASCAR.  It's a novel, probably a mystery, and it shows you that I'm willing to read just about anything McCrumb puts her hand to.   It's called St. Dale, so there you go. 

Gail grabbed it first, however, so I'm reading the other one, Mosaic, by Soheir Khashoggi. I don't know this author, but it looked interesting, had a good cover (yes, I do, often), and is about a very contemporary problem - the clash of cultures and religions.  Here they clash in a microcosm of the larger world, a marriage.  I'll say more when I have read the book.                      

 

It occurs to me that during the snow days, the sick days, I read several books that I never mentioned here.  The one I remember most clearly is Anita Shreve's Light on Snow.  Though she's written a whole slew of novels, this is the first one I've read.  They have seemed to be too much in the Oprah Winfrey Mature Chick Lit vein previously.  I don't know if they are or not.  This one was an easy and pleasant read, especially for someone who had trouble keeping her eyes open with the flu.  Not great literature, but a good story with believable characters. She's not Neil Gaiman, but then - who is?  Except Neil Gaiman.  I don't pretend to be a reader of Great Literature, don't get me wrong.  I'll read more Anita Shreve, in all probability.

SPEAK OUT, RAVE ON

An interesting addition to the Ward Churchill thoughts in an earlier post, from John Nichols at The Nation.  Free speech remains alive and well at the Univ. of Wisconsin, even for Prof. Churchill.  The comments on my previous post are as interesting as this whole affair.

BETHANNE PATRICK, GIRL BOOK MAVEN

I just discovered something interesting on the AOL book page - we now have a "Book Maven" here at AOL.  Yes, our very own.  I'm trying not to hate her, because apparently this is a paid job. One where she gets to read books, comment on them, chat about them, and so on.  Okay, she's already a book reviewer and a journalist (she says), so sure, this makes sense.  Sort of.  They could have asked me, couldn't they?  Nah, I'm too leftwing for AOL.  Anyway, check out her journal, lots of book info there.  She apparently also gets to sell books for Barnes and Noble.  She has a book pile entry, and all the book covers will link to B & N.  Never thought of that myself.  Of course I would, if they were paying me.

WARD CHURCHILL

As I prowled the TV channels one night this weekend, I came across this guy giving an impassioned speech in front of a large college crowd on CSPAN.  The guy looked about my age, though retaining his hippie hair and mode of dress, flanked by what seemed to be Indians.  It looked pretty interesting.  Luckily I got in close to the beginning, so I managed to pick up the thread.  The guy is Ward Churchill, the school is the Univ. of Colorado in Boulder, the issue is, quite simply, free speech.  Or, perhaps, specifically, academic freedom. 

Churchill is a Cherokee Indian, has been the Chair of the Ethnic Studies Dept at the U. of CO. in Boulder, is an outspoken critic of, of...well, of just about everything that white corporate America stands for.  Starting way back, with Native genocide in this country.  I stuck with him for the whole thing, including the Q and A session at the end.  This is one controversial human being.  I wanted to find out more about him, so have been spending a little time researching him.  It all began with an article he wrote soon after the airplane attacks on the various sites on Sept. 11, 2001.  Nobody paid much attention to the article at the time, but it got dredged up recently when Churchill was scheduled to speak at Hamilton College in New York State.  The ruckus made it all the way to Faux News, and Bill O'Reilly took up the ball and ran with it.  What I was watching on CSPAN was Churchill defending himself and his position against the board of regents of the university and the governor of the state.  And, of course, Bill O'Reilly.

This is fascinating stuff, and shows what you get as divine retribution if you dare to be controversial and outspoken in today's America.  Or, as we would have spelled it in my younger days, Amerika.  This article from the Chronicle of Higher Education will introduce you a little more thoroughly to the whole story, and then you can go over here andread the piece itself.  Read the interview with Churchill on that same website, and note the news flash announcing that he has resigned his position as Chair of the department, although he will, as a tenured professor, continue to teach.  The guy was unwise to use some of the language he did during a time when emotions ran so high, but...where ARE we, people?  Am I the only one who remembers when academics and others were able to speak out on issues that might spark discussion, disagreement, even - dissension and controversy?  It really seems to me that much of what is going on now is a pogrom against things that began in the sixties, and have rankled in some people's souls ever since.  We thought we had achieved change -  but it seems to be moving backwards now.

 

FRIENDS AND READERS, A VALENTINE

The Sunflowers

Come with me
  into the field of sunflowers.
    Their faces are burnished disks,
       their dry spines

creak like ship masts, 
  their green leaves,
    so heavy and many,
      fill all day with the sticky

sugars of the sun.
  Come with me
     to visit the sunflowers,
       they are shy

but want to be friends;
   they have wonderful stories
     of when they were young -
        the important weather,

the wandering crows.
  Don't be afraid
    to ask them questions!
      Their bright faces,

which follow the sun,
   will listen, and all
      those rows of seeds -
         each one a new life!

hope for a deeper acquaintance;
  each of them, though it stands
     in a crowd of many,
       like a separate universe,

is lonely, the long work
   of turning their lives
     into a celebration
       is not easy. Come

and let us talk with those modest faces,
   the simple garments of leaves,
      the coarse roots in the earth
        so uprightlyburning.

                                             Mary Oliver

       If I were JudithHeartSong I would paint you a picture,
if I were Deabvt I would write you a poem (actually if I myself had a little more time I would write you a poem).

But sometimes I feel that because there is Mary Oliver, no one ever needs to write any more poems. She says everything, and always says it better than I could ever hope to.

This community of Journal Land is like this field of sunflowers to me: each one of you a new life with a wonderful story, people of whom I am not afraid to ask questions, say what I mean, each of you a separate universe, uprightly burning, with whom I hope for a deeper acquaintnance.

I love each and every one of you, I cherish your friendship, I am grateful to be in this field of bright, modest, upturned faces, telling our stories, listening to one another's, as we try, separately and together, to turn our lives into celebrations.

(Because there are some different readers in my two journals, I have posted the same valentine in both public blogs.  With apologies to those of you who read both.)

DAVID MAMET, ON ARTHUR MILLER

I said I might post more on Arthur Miller, but I am incapable of anything approaching this lovely piece by David Mamet.  He has said it all, perfectly. So, from today's NYT, here is Mamet in an article that brings tears to my eyes.

February 13, 2005

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

Attention Must Be Paid

By DAVID MAMET

os Angeles

DUSTIN HOFFMAN was playing Willy Loman in "Death of a Salesman." I met Arthur Miller backstage after a performance. "Arthur," I said, "it's the oddest thing, but in the scene between Biff and Willy, it was as if I was listening to a play about my own relationship with my father."

I went on a bit, and looked over to see a small, distracted smile on his face. Of course, I thought. He's not only heard this comment thousands of times, he has probably heard it from every man who ever saw the play.

It is the great American Domestic Tragedy.

And "The Crucible" is the American Political Tragedy.

He wrote it to protest the horror of the McCarthy era. The plays are tragedies as each reasoned step brings the protagonists closer to their inevitable doom. We pity them as they are powerless to escape their fate. We feel fear because we recognize, in them, our own dilemmas. This is the purpose of drama, and particularly of tragedy: to allow us to participate in the repressed.

We are freed, at the end of these two dramas, not because the playwright has arrived at a solution, but because he has reconciled us to the notion that there is no solution - that it is the human lot to try and fail, and that no one is immune from self-deception. We have, through following the course of the drama, laid aside, for two hours, the delusion that we are powerful and wise, and we leave the theater better for the rest.

Bad drama reinforces our prejudices. It informs us of what we knew when we came into the theater - the infirm have rights, homosexuals are people, too, it's difficult to die. It appeals to our sense of self-worth, and, as such, is but old-fashioned melodrama come again in modern clothes (the villain here not black-mustachioed, but opposed to women, gays, racial harmony, etc.).

The good drama survives because it appeals not to the fashion of the moment, but to the problems both universal and eternal, as they are insoluble.

To find beauty in the sad, hope in the midst of loss, and dignity in failure is great poetic art.

Arthur Miller's wonder at his country and his time will redound to America's credit when the supposed accomplishments of the enthusiastic are long forgotten. His work and the example of a life lived with quiet dignity are each an inspiration. I spoke at his 80th birthday celebration, my speech a prayer from Kipling that I will, again, offer here:

One service more we dare to ask -
Pray for us, heroes, pray,
That when Fate lays on us our task
We do not shame the day.

David Mamet, a playwright and screenwriter, is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play "Glengarry Glen Ross."

DEATH OF AN ICON

The playwright Arthur Miller has just died, at the age of 89.  He represents a large chunk of contemporary history and literature to me, in so many ways.  Here is a link to the article on his death, as well as his life, and here the NYT obituary link.  I may post more on this if I have time later.  In the meantime, go read The Crucible.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY DEAR ALICE

From Garrison Keillor's daily celebration of things literary, The Writer's Almanac, one of today's birthday pieces, about someone with a high place in my pantheon of inspiring people, beloved authors. With an interesting bit of trivia previously unknown to me, that Muriel Rukeyser was her poetry teacher at Sara Lawrence. 

"It's the birthday of the novelist Alice Walker, born in Eatonton, Georgia (1944). She grew up the youngest of eight children. She grew up listening to the women in her family telling stories about lynching and adultery and struggling to survive. Her parents were sharecroppers who made about $300 a year. Walker would have been spent most of her time helping out in the fields, but when she was four years old a school teacher noticed her and got her new clothes and made sure she went to school every day.

When she was eight years old, her brother shot her in the eye with a BB gun, and a scar covered that eye for six years. She felt like an outcast, and began spending most of her free time alone, hiding in the farm fields, and she began writing in a journal. She said, "I think I started writing just to keep from being so lonely."

She graduated first in her class from high school, but it was because of her partial blindness that she was given a college scholarship for disabled students. Her friends and family helped pay for the $75 dollar bus ticket to Atlanta.

She transferred to Sara Lawrence College, and then took a trip to Africa. When she got back to college she was pregnant and seriously considering suicide. She chose to get an abortion, and then began writing dozens of poems over the course of a week, barely eating or sleeping, and she shoved all the poems under the door of her poetry teacher Muriel Rukeyser. Rukeyser showed the poems to her agent, and they were eventually published as Alice Walker's first book Once (1968).

Walker went on to write several more books of poetry and fiction, none of which got much attention, and then she decided to try writing a novel in the voice of a woman like one of the women she grew up listening to as a child. She started writing letters in that voice, addressed to God, and those letters eventually grew into her novel The Color Purple (1982), which spent more than 25 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list and went on to win both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Walker was the first black woman ever to receive the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

The Color Purple begins, "Dear God, I am fourteen years old. I have always been a good girl. Maybe you can give me a sign letting me know what is happening to me."

Walker has gone on to write many other novels. Her next novel, Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart, will come out this spring."

And, a funky poem by Walker, in case you've only ever read The Color Purple.

I Said to Poetry

I said to Poetry:"I'm finished
with you."
Having to almost die
before some wierd light
comes creeping through
is no fun.
"No thank you, Creation,
no muse need apply.
Im out for good times--
at the very least,
some painless convention."

Poetry laid back
and played dead
until this morning.
I wasn't sad or anything,
only restless.

Poetry said: "You remember
the desert, and how glad you were
that you have an eye
to see it with? You remember
that, if ever so slightly?"
I said: "I didn't hear that.
Besides, it's five o'clock in the a.m.
I'm not getting up
in the dark
to talk to you."

Poetry said: "But think about the time
you saw the moon
over that small canyon
that you liked so much better
than the grand one--and how suprised you were
that the moonlight was green
and you still had
one good eye
to see it with

Think of that!"

"I'll join the church!" I said,
huffily, turning my face to the wall.
"I'll learn how to pray again!"

"Let me askyou," said Poetry.
"When you pray, what do you think
you'll see?"

Poetry had me.

"There's no paper
in this room," I said.
"And that new pen I bought
makes a funny noise."

"Bullshit," said Poetry.
"Bullshit," saidI.

BOOKS DU JOUR

On the weekend I finished Joan Silber's Ideas of Heaven, a Ring of Stories.  It was a beautiful and heart-breaking collection, with the title story as centerpiece.  In this story a young family leaves their Connecticut home to become Christian missionaries in China, shortly before the turn of the last century.  This puts them there just in time for The Boxer Rebellion.  I knew from the start there would be no Happy Ending to this story, and indeed there was not.  There was a time, when I was very much younger, when I thought being a missionary would be oh so romantic, and seriously thought about entering the Maryknoll order, whose whole purpose then was mission.  Now, I'm afraid I see it as the Boxers (the English name for them, they actually called themselves by the much grander name of The Righteous Fists of Harmony) did - just another form of Imperialism.  The characters in the story are so beautifully and gently portrayed, not seeming to be imperialists at all.  At the end of the story I could only sigh for the waste of lives, lives of good and decent people pursuing something totally unfathomable to me.

Most of the rest of the stories are about contemporary lives, with wonderful intertwinings (a "ring" of stories) of characters and themes.  Love, or perhaps more truly - sex, and religion are constant themes in all the stories, as a quote from the last story in the book makes clear:  "I could see that sex and religion were always fighting over the same ground - both with their sweeping claims, their promises of transport - and each ran into the breach left by the other, each tried to fill in for the other's failure.  Forms of devotion, forms of consolation."  There are worlds within worlds in this book, the stories roam from New York to France, to Italy and China, and further - into secret realms of heart and soul that we all can recognize.

Currently I'm reading The Briar King, by Greg Keyes, about which I've read many good things in the past year.  It is straight up epic fantasy fiction, and I'm not yet very far into what is quite a stout little paperback of a novel.  Having to admit to a lot of confusion, perhaps because I haven't much consecutive time to read - picking it up and putting it down much too often.  It's the first of a series entitled The Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone, so if my confusion doesn't lure me into giving up on it, I may have follow-up adventures ahead.  Those old fairy-tale words, eh?  Briar, thorn, bone, king - hard to deny them.  Anybody else read this, or know of it?

SATURDAY SIX

So, I've never done this particular little thing before, but I always read other people's answers to these Saturday questions.   Exhausted by my constant coughing, and without much inspiration for anything else to do - I'm giving it a try on this Saturday.

1. What is your favorite restaurant to visit for breakfast and what do you order?  

   My favorite restaurant to visit for breakfast is in Austin, TX, Las Manitas Avenue Café, with any one of the Kerby Lane Cafés as a close second choice.  Austin is an eating city, and these are two great places to get a Mexican breakfast or an American one, both fantastic.  In my current real life, however, I live in Delaware, so my favorite breakfast place is called White Caps Café, and is down the road a ways in Oak Orchard.  Great sticky buns, which they heat up on the griddle -oozing butter, covered with pecans. Needless to say, we don't do this very often.  Mostly in the summer with visiting family or friends.  Great crabbing pier there too.

2. Do you have any unique ability like those who appear on David Letterman's "Stupid Human Tricks?"  If so, how did you learn you had this talent?

None whatsoever, I can't even cross my eyes.  Like Cherie, I am able to pick stuff up with my toes, but this just comes from having long toes I think.  And I certainly wouldn't do it on David Letterman.
 
3. There are plenty of sites on the internet for pen pals; some of them are specifically designed for communicating with people in prison.  Have you ever or would you begin corresponding with a stranger who was in prison?

I have thought about this, and yes I would do it.  I have a friend who is a shrink at a women's prison, and I may some day see if she knows a woman or two there for a long time who might like a correspondence with the outside world.  Right now I don't really even correspond with my friends, so this would have to be in the retired future.
 
4. Name two questions you have always wanted to ask a pair of identical twins.

My question would be about a psychic or internal bond with each other - not sure how I would phrase it.  It would begin with asking if they spoke their own private language as small children, before they learned the language spoken by family members, or at the same time.
 
5. If you looked back at your high school yearbook photos, what is more embarrassing?  Your hair, your clothes, your glasses, or your complexion?

Actually, my high school yearbook pictures now look pretty damn good to me.  If I had left my glasses on when the pictures were taken it would definitely have been the glasses.  Big dark nerd frames, as I recall.  But I did take them off, and I really look just fine. 

6. If you had to change the color of one of the following, which would you change and why:  the walls in your living room, your car, or your eyes.

I'd love to have a bright yellow pickup truck.  Right now I have a beat-up old white Mazda pickup, incredibly dirty with birdshit and the recent nasty weather.  But I've got my eye on a little yellow Chevy truck in a used car place down the street.

WHAT'S IN YOUR PILE? VOL II

Around this time last year, I did an entry cataloguing the books I had in my bedside piles.  Just when I was thinking it was about time to do it again, Robin, in her very excellent journal Midlife Matters, did sort of a similar listing of reading matter lying about the first floor of her house.  I really couldn't make a thorough list, I'd scare myself to death. These are just items lying about in various states of disarray here and there in the house - I'm not going to talk about five shelves of gardening books, five shelves of cookbooks, or the bookcase in the little sitting room with nothing but philosophy and poetry.  No, stop.  We're planning a major move soon, and The Books are a major source of anxiety. 

So, bedside pile:  When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times, Pema Chodron;  Peace is Every Step,  Thich Nhat Hanh;  Brief Intervals of Horrible Sanity: One Season in a Progressive School, Elizabeth Gold;  Reading Lolita in Tehran, A Memoir in Books, Azar Nafisi;   The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life, Thomas Moore;   Gardener's Latin: A Lexicon;  Walking to Martha's Vineyard: Poems, Franz Wright;  Eats, Shoots and Leaves, The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation,  Lynne Truss; 

In computer room:  People's History of the United States, Howard Zinn;  Ruined by Reading, a Life in Books, Lynne Sharon Schwartz;  Killing the Buddha,  Manseau & Sharlet;  The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry.

By various reading chairs:  A Play of Isaac, Margaret Frazer;  The New American Spirituality:  A Seeker's Guide, Elizabeth Lesser;  The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy;  Fooling with Words, Bill Moyers;  A Place of My Own:  The Education of an Amateur Builder, Michael Pollan; Finding a Way, Essays on Spiritual Practice, Ed. by Lorette Zilker.

On kitchen table, dining room table, coffee table, etc:  piles of Orion Magazine,  Natural Home Magazine,  American Horticulture Magazine,  Native Plants Magazine,  Nature Conservancy Magazine, The Essential Teacher Magazine, various and sundry newsletters from EarthJustice, Oxfam,  RiverKeepers, Environmental Defense, ACLU, TESOL. 

Sunporch tables, floor:  The Red Tent, Anita Diamant;  The Sarasota, Sanibel Island & Naples Book:  A Complete Guide;  Emotional Alchemy, How the Mind can Heal the Heart, Tara Bennett-Goleman;  A Guide to Bird Behavior (Stokes Nature Guides);  Walks and Rambles on the Delmarva Peninsula, A Guide for Hikers and Naturalists, Jay Abercrombie;  Country Roads of Maryland and Delaware, W. Lynn Seldon;  Day Trips in Delmarva, Alan Fisher;  Music of the Birds, A Celebration of Bird Song, Lang Elliott (w/CD);  Terra Cotta, Pots with Style, Anthony Noel;  The Winter Garden, Planning and Planting for the Southeast, Loewer & Mellichamp;  Seashells, How to Identify and Collect Them.  Several copies of Perennials Magazine, more Native Plants Magazine, a Sauveur Mag, several Real Simple Mags. 

How's about you share your piles?  Leave a comment with your piles, or write an entry in your journal and leave a link here.  It's a lot of fun.  (And just in case Hocuscadabra happens upon this:  there are bibles in three different languages on various shelves in the house, pretty worn covers on 'em too.)