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The Books of August

September 6, 2016 / lara

August was mostly a craft book month. Poetry being the craft of the moment.

Books I read:

How to Read a Poem and Fall In Love with Poetry — Edward Hirsch (1999)

I’m not sure that this book will make anyone who isn’t already crushing on poetry fall in love. But if you are crushing on poetry but don’t quite understand what it’s going on about you might find some help here. One of the things that I like about poetry is once you’ve read a poem and been amused, affected, bemused, overwrought, bowled over, humbled, or puzzled by it you can go back and start to take it apart and glory in the small details of how it’s put together.
The book is 60% discussion of poetry as literature using specific poems and poets to show how poems work. There are a lot of familiar authors, both historic and modern and a handful of new (to me) ones. Hirsch knows a lot about poetry from Poland after the second world war; it’s fascinating stuff and I found a couple of new poets to enjoy.
The other 40% of the book is made up of a glossary and a long list of very diverse poets.
This book does a decent job of explaining some of that machinery — though that’s not the focus. You kind of learn it by accident. It is prone to falling down into the trap of MFA/EnglishLit Major gibberish. e.g. “Desnos’s verbal eroticism creates an aura of enchantment, a speech beyond speech, a prophetic language, and his strongly surrealist technique creates an access through the page to the back of the brain, to the unconscious mind.” (p104)
I wouldn’t usually buy something I feel ambivalent about in paper but the glossary is extensive enough that it might make it worthwhile.
* for those with a poetry crush *

Invisible Cities — Italo Calvino (1974)

Yes, again. I’m still taking this machine apart and being blown away by its intricacy and fineness every time I go back to it. It’s become a totem item to be read and reread.
* perfect little machines of meaning *

Dig and Fiesta Hotel — Lynn Emanuel (1994)

Poetry. There are a couple of things here that blow the top of my head off. (In that very Dickensonian way.) Frying trout while Drunk and The Dig in particular are finely crafted observations of a life made up of tangled relationships.
* poems about a life lived in the midst of subtle and not so subtle chaos *

My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry — Fredrik Backman (2013)

Another from the fellow who wrote A Man Called Ove. In much the same vein. Life changing events overtake the heroine — Elsa. Her grandmother is her only ally in a world that hasn’t much use for preternaturally mature nearly 8 year-old girls. In fact her grandmother is her super-hero. A flawed, cranky, anti-establishment super-hero but a super-hero by any measure. When her grandmother dies Elsa is left with the task of delivering a series of letters in which her grandmother begs the forgiveness of various people she believes that she wronged. Elsa discovers the unspoken connections between the people who populate her life and the house where she lives. I don’t usually like books with children as the protagonists but in this case Elsa is so appealingly misfit and her grandmother, who haunts the book long after her death, is exactly the sort of complicated character who I enjoy playing along with. Also, there is a monster. I love a good monster.
* charming in the very best sense *

Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry — Jane Hirshfield (1997)

A weirdly effective combination of literary criticism, maker’s handbook, and buddhist treatise.
There are nine “craft talks” here. Essays prepared for audiences of poets, students, and others concerned with the art of poetry. Many of the essays rely on her work as a co-translator of Japanese poetry to illustrate her insights into the role of the poet and of poetry in creating a shared world. It’s all a bit heavy on the mindfulness but she has useful things to say to the working poet. The essays on the dualities of Inward and Outward facing work and of Shadow and Light (roughly heaven and hell without the capital letters) and all of the poses in-between are especially effective. There is also an essay on the originality and the creative process that nicely sums up what I think is pretty common knowledge for those actually doing creative work but might help put some concepts into to words for those only beginning to explore that side of work.
* a balance of the scholarly and the practical *

Incarnadine: Poems — Mary Szybist (2013)

A National Book Award winner that Amazon has been trying to get me to buy for two years. I don’t take Amazon’s poetry suggestions seriously and didn’t buy this until it was recommended by a poet who taste I trust. Stupid me. Some of these are incandescent. Some are intriguing new forms (there’s a sunburst of rayed out lines and a diagrammed sentence) and few are pedestrian. Much of content is an examination of the question of faith and of the divine meeting the mortal/physical. In several poems the Virgin Mary is dragged into the twenty-first century and allowed to express both her faithfulness and her hesitations.
* how can I convince anyone to read poetry when I write such lousy reviews of it? *

The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Non-fiction — Neal Gaiman (2016)

A collection of speeches, book introductions, and brief essays on a variety of topics close to Gaiman’s heart. Makes good bedtime reading. Gaiman’s hobby horses reappear in several of these pieces. His love of comics and his contention that there are no bad books for children are on display in at least four speeches. His introductions to classic science fiction will prompt you to search out some of the writers that are unjustly forgotten. And a few that are imo justly forgotten — but there’s no accounting for taste. But introductions to books can make dry reading if you’re not in the market for the book. In addition to comics, prose books (science fiction and otherwise) he takes on film and music. His excellent reporting from the Syrian refugee camp is included.
* a little patience for repetitions will get you to the gems *

Listened to:

I listened to the beginning of Austin’s Sense and Sensibility but I wasn’t paying careful enough attention and will have to restart it. In August there were not many chances to sit and listen as I did very little sewing this month.

Upcoming:

I’m in the middle of a handful more books of poetry and poetry criticism. I’ve also started Diane Wynn Jones Dogsbody on the recommendation of Mr. Gaiman, even though I generally avoid books with dogs as protagonists.

P.S. The cover images link to Amazon. If you buy the book using the link I get a (tiny) pay back for writing these reviews.

are you going through? — A Bend in the Road - Hoosier National Forest Indiana.

It’s Still a Big Damn Country

August 18, 2016 / lara

Recently I was looking for this picture of an artfully rusted steam engine that I took during a cross-country trip in 2009.

Portion of the Engines for the Wake Robin.

Rather than dig through the many thousands of photographs on the back-up server, I searched through the series of blog entries titled It’s a Big Dam Country that I wrote while on that road trip. When I began that trip I was running very hard, and very fast, and very much away. I was running from myself and my itching demons. I was running on professional advice. I was making no progress while standing in the middle of the smoking crater that I had made of my life. My therapist — against all the rules of therapy — actually suggested that I go ahead and run for a while, to see what it felt like to move again. So I did. I packed up my little blue car with a handful of road snacks, my special pillow, and every scrap of camera gear that I owned, then set out on the finest fool’s errand I could conjure: To attend the graduation party of my oldest niece two weeks hence in the city of Pittsburgh and along the way to take as many pictures of as many dams as I could find. Continue reading

The Books of July

August 9, 2016 / lara

July was a thin month for books. I had a week in Port Townsend for the Centrum writer’s conference and some personal issues to attend to. But I did get through a few things.

Books I Read:

The Hatred of Poetry — Ben Lerner (2016)

The most often quoted bit in the reviews of this book begins: ‘Many more people agree they hate poetry’ Ben Lerner writes, ‘than can agree what poetry is.’
Lerner goes on to read the problem of poetry in neo-platonic terms. That poetry is always bound to fail because we are forever comparing a written piece of poetry to some Ideal that we hold. He goes on to partially dismantle this Ideal by considering the problems of how we have set up the Ideal in a world in which the Ideal is never has never existed.
It takes about 2 hours to read this — and at $8.50 its over-priced for something that runs less than a 100 pages. (List price is $12.) I’m not sorry that I bought it and certainly not sorry that I read it. But I’m also not sure that I got my money’s worth. Must be the philosophy degree that snuck up behind me and said “That’s just the Platonic Ideal and as an epistemology it’s pretty simplistic, surely poetry is more complex that that.”
* Surprising return to my original course of study *

Bukowski in a Sundress — Kim Addonizio (2016)

I was hoping to really like this book of essays. There are a couple — particularly those that involve the end of her mother’s life — that strike me as deeply felt and filled with the great ambivalence that so many of us feel toward our mothers as we close in on the age that they were when we first knew them adult-to-adult and they continue to advance into the future ahead of us. Many of the other essays are simply about behaving badly into your middle age and don’t speak to me. I gave up eating, drinking, and fucking like one of the boys a long time ago.
Anyway. It hasn’t changed may opinion of her poetry, which I’ve always liked. Go read that if you want to see how well Kim can write.
* Maybe not worth the price of admission for most of my readers. *

The Fran Leibowitz Reader — Fran Leibowitz (1994)

Fran holds up fairly well even though most of these pieces were written decades ago. Her curmudgeonly disregard for the niceties of society are universal and eternal. Children are still too often seen and heard in places that ought to be the province of adults. Smoking is still one of the joys of adulthood — though I gave it up 10 years ago. A few of these essays are hopelessly dated, but some stand up to the passage of time even when the topic under discussion is no longer in existence. For example: How to be a Directory Service. We may not have Directory Assistance any more but we have Customer Support call centers and the lessons for the truly gifted support staff are the same.
* classics of snark *

Nightmare Stacks — Charles Stross (2016)

Each story in the Laundry Files series has upped the ante and the level of horror and the level of threat. Until at this point it’s nearly impossible to top the previous act. Given Mr Stross’s penchant for burning down the building at the end of each book, just before the hero manages to save earth but barely, there are not a lot of buildings left. Alex (the genius mathematician/vampire) and Peter (the apocalyptically savvy vicar) are sent to Leeds. Because where else would the apocalypse happen? The story goes on to become mostly a satire with a twist of the goth girl/vampire urban romance. Except that there are, of course, ancient and vicious beings intent of destroying the earth and enslaving it’s population. I gave up — it’s just too much of muchness with the previous incarnations. Once upon a time… knowing that a book would delivery the same sort of story and the same sort of characters doing the same sorts of things with the same level of humor appealed to me. (Terry Pratchett, Piers Anthony, Spider Robinson, et al) but lately I’ve begun to find it less enchanting.
* still a good yarn, but the same color as the last one *

Books I Listened to:

Pride and Prejudice — Jane Austen (1813/2015)

When I read this in high school I just didn’t understand it. But now, oh my god, the caricatures are priceless pieces of work. This version is narrated by Rosamund Pike and her voices are deadpan and revealing, each one appropriate to the character. Even her Mr. Darcy is near to perfection; coming off as both proud and shy. The shy part being the one that most interpreters of the role don’t convey.
* Maybe I now get the appeal of Austen? *

I also continued to listen to Sherlock Holmes. It goes on forever…

Nuke and Pave…

August 8, 2016 / lara

… is an old computer term for removing all of the software from the hardware and starting over again. Back when we could rm ‑rf we would occasionally find that a system had got itself into a non-recoverable state and need to be rebuilt from the ground up in order to function again. Or on a happier note when a project finished we often wiped the software off of the hardware and repurposed it for the next project.
While systems have become much more resilient than they used to be, and rm ‑rf is rarely available to the average user, a compete wipe down of the buggy system using rm ‑rf’s newer relative, reset to factory settings, is still the only solution to certain problems. My iPhone got into one of those states recently. Slow to load apps and data for several weeks it finally reached the point of being unable to load the App Store for updates.
Google has as many solutions for these sorts of problems as there are ways of creating them. Everything from killing the running apps to fully erasing the phone’s memory and rebuilding it from “like new.” It’s a fraught process. There is a frisson of dread and hope. You will definitely start with the simplest least destructive options but there’s always the question: What if you have to go all the way?
I found and tried a number of folk remedies. Kill all the running apps and then restart the phone. Tap any button at the bottom of the App Store app 10 times to clear the cache — that worked for about 10 minutes. Remove all of your network settings and reboot your WAP — okay so the WAP was little wedged, etc. In the end none of these worked. The last non destructive option was a full backup and restore. And easy but lengthy process that could leave the phone in exactly the same barely functioning state that I had started in. An hour and half later that’s exactly what happened.
So there I was — faced with the option of last resort. The nuke and pave. Leaving me with a blank phone without a single bit of the personality that I’d given it over the last two years. That at once wonderful and frightening prospect of a new start. There is dread. It’s a colossal hassle. You lose everything. Every setting, every App, every bit of data. Your contacts, your text messages, your fitness band data, your photos of the dog acting idiotic. All of it. It’s like losing your phone only without the cost of new hardware. A total PITA.
And yet, and yet. It is also an exciting prospect. The new, virgin terrain. All of the miscellaneous cruft and crap and useless apps and passwords for wi-fi points in airports you’ll never visit again, and oopsie pictures of your feet are gone. You get to start again with a simpler, cleaner, less overwhelming device. You will also spend the next week adding back the apps, passwords, and data that it turns out you were using but had forgotten about. You will lose all of your deeply ingrained kinetic memory, the automatic finger presses and unthinking scrolling though the pages to reach the thing that you need.
Still.. new terrain. As an adult how often do you get enter new terrain for such a small price? Sure you can change jobs, change houses, change spouses, all of which take up a lot more than a lazy Sunday afternoon babysitting a hardware reset and a couple of hours of software updates and restoring data and passwords. And so I did it. Settings -> General -> Reset -> Reset All Settings and pressed the many pop-up buttons that confirmed that I did indeed intend to remake my phone into a pristine version of its now non-functioning self.
We all love the opportunity to reinvent ourselves. Even if it’s only in terms of little bit of pristine electronic wilderness that we can remake to suit our now two years older and wiser self. New phone wallpaper, a clean slate of wi-fi settings, and some nifty new apps. — Even if you end up reimporting all of the depressing fitness band data.

The Books of June

July 1, 2016 / lara

Books I read in June:

Cleaning Up New York — Bob Rosenthal (1976)

Referred to as a cult classic. I don’t get it. You expect a cleaning memoir to have good stories about clients and the occasional cleaning tip. This one has both but doesn’t manage to make either of them interesting.
* I just don’t see the charm. *

A Man Called Ove — Fredrik Backman (2014)

Ove is 59 years-old. He’s lost both his wife and his job. Without love or purpose left in his life, Ove is trying to commit suicide. Every day he plans a new way out of his now barren life and back to his beloved Sonja. Every day the people around him interrupt and interfere and generally get in his way. It begins with the arrival of a new neighbor, a man who can’t back up a trailer. A skill that Ove considers basic to adulthood. This Lanky Man and his very pregnant wife, and two noisy, nosy daughters complicate Ove’s life in ways that only well-meaning strangers can. His comfortable routines and grievances take a beating. Along the way he gains new friends, becomes an unlikely ally, and discovers that not disappointing Sonja isn’t the only reason for doing the right thing.
* Because no one with any sense would buy a Renault. *

Nobody’s Fool — Richard Russo (1994)

Sully is a 60ish odd-job man whose life is a bit of a shambles. He’s got no steady job, a bum knee, a crazy ex-wife with a grudge, a woman who isn’t actually his, and a son who’s suddenly back in his life carrying along a timid 10 year-old and troubles of his own.
The characters are likable — even the obnoxious ones, and the situations only just enough bigger than real life to make the humor stand out. Russo writes with humor and grace and a good deal of respect for the difficulties of being human.
* It must be my month for grumpy old men who find grace. *

Possession — A. S. Byatt (1990)

(I bother reviewing this only to remind myself not to try reading it again.) This is the second time I’ve started this book and the second time I’ve stopped at the introduction of James Blackadder as a narrator. I simply cannot abide him. Can not. I know he’s supposed to be funny and a sly poke in the eye with a sharp stick for superannuated academics. But it’s just too easy and not funny. The book is slow up to that point and the other characters are so generally flat and morose that I put it down one night and just never picked it up again.

* Leaving it on the night stand. *

Books I Listened to in June:

The Great Gatsby — F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)

You all know the story and probably read it in high school, but have you read it (listened to it) lately? Fitzgerald’s prose is sharp and on point, even if “old boy” sounds desperately mannered today. Prettily narrated by Jake Gyllenhaal — who makes a convincing Nick.
* Actually a story for grownups. *

The Complete Sherlock Holmes — Arthur Conan Doyle (1927)

There’s over 50 hours of this one. The shorter stories (often only 15 or 20 minutes) are an easy thing to sneak into a day of laundry and other house chores. And that’s about the right length for a clever Sherlock Holmes story. The novels are a little harder work to listen to.
* Good in small doses *

The Lives and Works of the English Romantic Poets — Willard Spiegelman (2013)

One of the Great Courses lecture series available from Audible. 24 half-hour lectures and accompanying readings. Spiegelman offers good overview of the six 18th/19th century poets that make up the English Romantic Movement: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Byron, Shelly, and Keats. It’s easy enough to knock the whole series off in a month. I listened mostly as a matter of curiosity. Wondering what I had missed by being a Philosophy major rather than an English major. I think it was worth my time, perhaps not so much because I like the poets being studied but because I learned a bit more about the systematic study of poetry.
* If you miss school (and I do.) *

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