The Books of August

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.

It’s Still a Big Damn Country

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

not restorable
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 “It’s Still a Big Damn Country”

The Books of July

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…

… 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

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.) *