Tag Archives: books

Into her drawers and shadows (Joan Didion’s Blue Nights)

Posted on January 13, 2012 | 2 Comments

Haunted Didion

As I read Blue Nights, Joan Didion’s repetition of images and phrases hypnotized me, as did her peeled and still-peeling layers of story. As with The Year of Magical Thinking, here I felt Didion recounting memories in the way we actually experience them. As if she set out to articulate against the linear necessity of language: one letter, one word, one thought at a time, arranged tidy in a row, which is one way we make sense. The intentional fragmentation of narrative was accessible and didn’t fall off the page (or render me lost in the land of “what the fuck?”) because of Didion’s clarity. Because of her sentences. And perhaps because of the fact of what she was doing: the narrative act of slowing down, examining, opening drawers and closets brimming with iconic possessions. As Didion names these ghosts on p. 45: “The objects for which there is no satisfactory resolution.” The detritus of the lives of the people she loves best, and lost. As she opens each drawer and tells the stories of what she finds, she assumes the role of docent in the Joan Didion Museum of Loss.

(In the essay “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” Didion writes: “Someone works out the numerology of my name and the name of the photographer I’m with. The photographer’s is all white and the sea (‘If I were to make you some beads, see, I’d do it mainly in white,’ he is told), but mine has a double death symbol.” I read that passage again after I’d read The Year of Magical Thinking, and could not avoid thinking of her life story’s foreshadowing in that moment, the double death that awaited her.)

In addition to the quandary about what to do with all that stuff (and my own eventual stuff, should I live long enough, outlive someone I love) I felt the writer’s grief and discomfort at the ache of questions she turns over and over, things upon which she shines a light, unable to avoid the vast shadows of murk.

Shadows which, despite the fact that some people, including me, happen to believe Didion walks on water, do not flatter her.

There’s something about that peeling, that sad onion, those haunts, her willingness to shine light despite what might crawl out, which makes me feel more human.

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Tagged being a mother, Blue Nights, books, Interdisciplinary Aesthetics, Joan Didion, reading, sentences, truth in nonfiction, words, writing

Eating potatoes, greedily

Posted on January 3, 2012 | 4 Comments

Flann O'Brien, of whose prose I could not get enough last month

Like tucking into a vat of potatoes after long without food, during winter break, I read in rapid (rabid?) succession Flann O’Brien’s The Poor Mouth and The Hard Life. Truly when I finished reading The Poor Mouth, I was still hungry and needed more. Good thing I stocked up on both books!

Anything I say about Flann O’Brien will clunk like a can down malnourished and decrepit steps into the void of my own unworthiness, but my evangelical urge I can no longer ignore. So.

If you’re into the show “Lost” perhaps you’ve heard of or even read O’Brien’s The Third Policeman. I didn’t watch many episodes of that show, so I’m blind to the connection, but I’m glad more people heard about (and possibly read) O’Brien’s novel. (The which I need to re-read, and soon. I first read it as part of a seminar in grad school with Rod Val Moore. The book was suggested in preparation for a field trip to the Museum of Jurassic Technology.)

Reading The Poor Mouth (published in 1941) is like diving into a pool of hilarity and squalor (yes) and eating it all with a spoon. Yum, hyperbole! My favorite! Among other things I hope to grasp as soon as I re-read The Poor Mouth, O’Brien becomes a sort of cantor, invoking lyrical phrases of misery, a tapestry of moments in which, for instance, we hear, “…generally no sound except the roar of the water falling outside from gloomy skies, just as if those on high were emptying buckets of that vile wetness on the world.” A tattered weariness in which scenes begin with openings like: “One afternoon I was reclining on the rushes in the end of the house considering the ill-luck and evil that had befallen the Gaels (and would always abide with them) when…” Reveling in this luxurious squalor and over-the-topness, I laughed loud and often as I read along, even more than while reading Wodehouse. To rip a phrase from O’Brien and twist it terribly, each chapter is like a thesis, proving without doubt that the plight of O’Brien’s Gaels is a bad life “whose like will ever be there again.” (Just read the book. It’s short. If you hate it, I’ll give your money back.) I also need to read it again to see how it lines up with another hyperbolic novel on the topic of poverty, though not nearly as hilarious, George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London.

Literary belly still grumbling, I took up The Hard Life. Published in 1962, the story was more shaped and plotty than The Poor Mouth. At intervals, two characters tussle in flappy rants about the shadowy political power of Jesuits within the Catholic church. Their dialogue was so well written that I didn’t struggle, despite my lack of knowledge about the issues they debated. To press these two characters into a modern context, their arguments could have been mouth-offs between two old school rappers, one-upping each other (mostly) good-naturedly, but with no self-censor. They were funny. And the mountingly bizarre plot twists were delectable. (See, I’m still on this stuff as if it’s food! And really, it is.) The end was unexpected and brilliant. I’ll say no more, so as not to spoil a good meal.

Bon appetit!

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Tagged books, fiction, Flann O'Brien, Interdisciplinary Aesthetics, P.G. Wodehouse, The Hard Life, The Poor Mouth, The Third Policeman, writing

Joan Didion and her bits

Posted on January 1, 2012 | 2 Comments

Joan Didion and Quintana Roo

“Only the very young and the very old may recount their dreams at breakfast, dwell upon self, interrupt with memories of beach picnics and favorite Liberty lawn dresses and the rainbow trout in a creek near Colorado Springs. The rest of us are expected, rightly, to affect absorption in other people’s favorite dresses, other people’s trout. And so we do. But our notebooks give us away, for however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable ‘I.’ We are not talking here about the kind of notebook that is patently for public consumption, a structural conceit for binding together a series of graceful pensees; we are talking about something private, about bits of the mind’s string too short to use, an indiscriminate and erratic assemblage with meaning only for its maker.”

–Joan Didion, “On Keeping a Notebook,” Slouching Towards Bethlehem, p. 136.

I just began reading Blue Nights. The passage above from Didion’s much older essay has been with me as I approach a still-too-tender writing project. It’s stuff I will write about some day, though more time must first elapse. I need perspective, and this is too messy and raw. Meanwhile I put bits into a jar (or notebook) to save, to turn over, to approach for the quilt when it’s time.

Meanwhile, merely typing Didion’s words (and reading her new memoir) is a comfort and a privilege.

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Tagged being a mother, Blue Nights, books, Interdisciplinary Aesthetics, Joan Didion, On Keeping A Notebook, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, truth in nonfiction, words, writing

The kid-think of Room (novel by Emma Donaghue)

Posted on December 19, 2011 | 8 Comments

Many Moons Passed with the Wolf at My Door, by Angela Treat Lyon

The first book I read after fall quarter had dusted down was Emma Donaghue’s novel, Room. I can’t avoid “reading as a writer,” and thinking about how the writer does and makes her thing, but wanted to immerse myself, so I refused the urge to take notes.

The narrative procedures used in this book are inseparable from the sensational story, which is, to quote the Wikipedia entry, “told from the perspective of a five-year-boy, Jack, who is being held captive in a small room along with his mother.” The book is a page-turner, sure, but what kept me riveted was the grace with which Donaghue sustained the narrative told, first-person, in a young child’s words. It’s of particular interest to me because I know it’s so damn hard to do. (My novel, The Watery Girl, is told from the point of view of a seven-year-old, but I didn’t want to limit myself to her language. So I used a close third person, still intimate, often imbued with thoughts and words directly mined from the protagonist Claire, but third person allows space to wiggle language. First person really locks you in. All writing is artifice, but if you want to convince a reader like this one, you better stick close to what a child would actually say. And more than that, Donaghue’s Jack breathes the breath of childhood, lives out its logic. I’m convinced her sentences are true kid-think.)

As I read Room, I kept holding my breath (not only because of the story) to see if Donaghue could sustain that thing with the kid. She did. There was not one moment when I disbelieved I was reading Jack’s true five-year-old thoughts. Yes, Jack is precocious and smart, but the writer explained his particular intelligence so effortlessly when needed, and made clear that Jack’s mother worked hard to engage her son in his (albeit tiny) world. Reading about their life in Room, I was enrapt and also exhausted, imagining how hard it would be to live in a single room with a child, non-stop, for five years. (Putting aside the whole ordeal–the sheer exertion of the character’s work as a parent was amazing. And yet believable. I bought, without question, that Jack was her redemption.)

When I opened the book, I didn’t know the plot, just the premise. As I read, I wondered how Donaghue would sustain the claustrophobia of one room for an entire novel. When I realized their situation was about to change, the novel became “about” something very different from what I expected. I was glad. Thinking, as I have been this year, about brain plasticity and pinning many hopes to that idea, it fascinated me to read and consider about how Jack might (or might not) adapt to life outside Room. And like many who have read the book probably have done, I wondered whether we each have a Room of some sort of other that’s shaped what we expect and want from the world.

I want to read more of Donaghue’s writing, soon, because anyone who can do what she did in Room is worth the time.

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Tagged being a mother, books, child protagonist, child's point of view, fiction, Interdisciplinary Aesthetics, kid-think, reading, reading as a writer

Where do hummingbirds go in a hurricane?

Posted on October 23, 2011 | 8 Comments

"...making a promise..."

Robert McCloskey’s Make Way for Ducklings was one of my daughter’s early favorite books. Soon, my friend Maryellen recommended some of McCloskey’s other books, Blueberries for Sal and One Morning in Maine. The Sal stories are fun, jaunty, and touching. Sal loses a wobbly tooth while grubbing for clams with her father on the beach, feeling for it with her muddy finger, the mud bitter in her mouth. The stories ebb and flow with the tide as they follow Sal and her family on their bucolic adventures on the Maine coast. (And I love how these stories depict strong, outgoing, capable girls, unafraid to roll up their pants and get dirty, carry heavy stuff, play with discarded spark plugs, and generally frolic freely through childhood.)

Then I found Time of Wonder which continues the saga of Sal and Jane, but this time in a very different type of narrative. My daughter just rediscovered the book, and so reading at “bed night” thrills me more than it usually does.

The book reads like a poem in places, and interestingly, rather than continuing to name Sal and Jane as the protagonists, Time of Wonder is written in second person, so it’s directed at “you.” With beautiful illustrations of the seasons of coastal life, spring ferns uncurl and fade to make room for summer boats. As the summer folks leave the island, there follows the uncertain skies, the time for being watchful. The climax of the book is the hurricane, and the hypnotic rhythm of preparation builds with the repetition of characters’ lines:

“We’re going to have some weather./It’s a-coming!/She’s gonna blow./With the next shift of the tide.”

After the storm slows, the picture shows Sal and Jane creeping upstairs to bed. The text on that page reads:

“The moon comes out,

making a rainbow in the salt spray,

a promise

that the storm will soon be over.

Now the wind is lessening,

singing loud chords in the treetops.

Lessening,

it hums as you go up to bed.”

The whole book is a joy to read. McCloskey’s other books are, too, except I stumble with One Morning In Maine because it could use some editing, and has clunky dialogue tags, which cause me to cringe a little when I read it with my writer’s ear. (And reading that book aloud is a reminder that reading aloud is crucial in catching clunkiness.) But I love reading Time of Wonder. Maybe because of the catharsis of Storm (which is part of the natural rhythm of life there; even children know the rituals of preparation, one last trip to the island for groceries and gasoline). Or maybe it’s simply the poetry.

Even if you’re not reading it to a child, read it. You might like it.

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Tagged books, Interdisciplinary Aesthetics, reading to children, Robert McCloskey, Time of Wonder

The exquisite seasons of Kazuo Iwamura

Posted on July 2, 2011 | 1 Comment

A lovely book from a series by Kazuo Iwamura.

A librarian friend sent my daughter a bunch of discarded library books last year. (I often find the best children’s books are discarded by libraries.) Among that batch was the The 14 Forest Mice and The Summer Laundry Day, by Kazuo Iwamura. It’s a story of a family of mice who pack up and take their laundry to the river to wash. The mama mouse knows why her children are rushing–they’re excited for the accompanying swim. Along the way, gorgeous illustrations walk the reader past delicately-rendered dragonflies and foliage. Reading it feels like a hike in the woods.

My daughter loved this book almost as much as I did. Quickly I looked for the other books in this series: there’s one for each season. Finding affordable copies of the 1991 English translations by MaryLee Knowlton was a slight challenge. I eventually found all three of the others, on eBay and abebooks.com. Today, the winter book came, completing our collection.

I love how this series shows the mice making sleds and indoor games to pass the time during a blizzard, or forging a platform to watch the harvest moon in autumn, or rice dumplings for a spring picnic. The illustrations make me feel like I’ve been out in nature: colors rich and vibrant, drawings not just of “flowers” but true species. The wood violets look like wood violets. I also love how the series can give a child a sense of the year’s cycles, and a focus on the natural world. The mice create things by using curiosity and invention, and the materials around them.

The stories are elegant and simple, and illustrate how to live in harmony with nature. The large family (grandmother and grandfather on down to a toddler) works together to do the stuff of life, the maintaining of home. Though somewhat hard to find, if you are seeking books that show kids something other than our consumer-based culture, it’s worth the search. Let me know what you think of them.

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Vigor takes work

Posted on April 9, 2011 | 4 Comments

E.B. White, writing in Maine

I just reread Elements of Style, and several bits of wisdom have taken residence in my mind. This was the first time I’ve read the fourth edition. I found the updates to this edition helpful, in particular, some of the tidbits in the final section on style. If you haven’t read it, do.

I’ve been working through a novel, editing, pruning, and rearranging. Strunk and White remind me of point 22, on p. 32 of this edition: “Place the emphatic words of a sentence at the end.” This can apply to sentences, paragraphs, lines of poetry, and even words: the beginning and end of these units carry the most power, the most weight. The middle can be incidental, or worse, ignored. Here’s a clever example (possibly urban legend, but interesting anyway) of how words can work with mixed up middles becoming invisible, and yet the content is still clear. (Thanks to my friend Lara for digging this up when my human memory failed.):

“Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.”

Beginnings and ends of these words are stable, are what we expect, and therefore they guide in reading through the garble.

Another thing that Elements of Style illustrates is more visual than literal. Writers have to learn the twin arts of making a mess (making a creation, a draft) and then cleaning it up (editing, revising). If you look at the layout of the examples in Strunk and White, you could consider the left column (before the makeover) as the making of the mess, and the right column (after the makeover) as cleaning it up. I’m going to use this idea when I talk to students. I think it helps to put the implicit and explicit judgment of Strunk and White into a context: all writing is a process, a walking through and then away from the muddy, toward the clear. Start somewhere. Edit as needed, strive to improve the mess, to communicate better.

Maybe the most important advice is point 17, on p. 23, “Omit needless words.” An anthem for some people who write, an ideal to strive toward. I’ve been polishing, weeding the needless, plucking extraneous words from overburdened sentences. Sometimes it takes years to realize a word is needless. Omit needless words is a noble mantra and practice. With time, I could whittle this paragraph down even more than I have, but in the battle between how the blogosphere measures time and my tendency toward perfectionism, I go for speed and risk flaws. This time, for the first time, I found (or noticed) the sub-mantra of Omit needless words on p. 19, under point 14. “Note, in the examples above, that when a sentence if made stronger, it usually becomes shorter. Thus, brevity is a by-product of vigor.”

It’s worth repeating: “…brevity is a by-product of vigor.”

That is such a beautiful fact, and beautifully put. No wonder I am tired, this revision has been vigorous. The novel is shorter. And, I hope, stronger.

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Tagged academic writing, books, de-junking, fiction, Interdisciplinary Aesthetics, making a mess, sentences, words, writing

Writing in books

Posted on February 21, 2011 | 2 Comments

I just read an interesting article in the NY Times about marginalia. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about “reading as a writer” and what that means, how interactive and not passive it can/should be… yet I have trouble writing in books, myself. So I take a lot of notes, recopy passages, and do my work that way. Maybe I need to rethink this, and break the water of the pristine book.

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Tagged books, reading, reading like a writer, writing

Read any good girls lately?

Posted on January 16, 2011 | 6 Comments

My daughter is three years old, and has gotten to the point of focusing on who is a “she” and who is a “he.” This includes people she knows, toys, and musicians playing on CDs. It also includes characters in books.

Without being obsessive, I’ve tried to ensure a balance of genders in her literary protagonists. Fairly early, many of her favorite characters were male, among them: Else Homelund Minnarik’s Little Bear, and Peter of the Ezra Jack Keats books. But giving her plenty of shes to think about was more challenging than it seemed. To minimize gender stereotypes, and give her plenty of female heroes. Her latest hero is Katy, from Virginia Lee Burton‘s book Katy and the Big Snow. Following is from the Amazon.com review:

Katy, a red crawler tractor, “could do a lot of things,” Burton explains early on. In the summer she is a bulldozer, helping to build and repair roads in the city of Geoppolis. In the winter, she turns into a snowplow, waiting and waiting for her chance to be useful. Most of the winters, though, the snowfalls are mild and the town doesn’t need Katy. But when the big one finally hits, the town is buried in page after page of powder. The power lines are down. The doctor can’t get his patient to the hospital. The fire department can’t reach a burning house! “Everyone and everything was stopped but… KATY!” Suddenly, the entire community is dependent on one little snowplow.

I found the book in a jumbled shelf at Dark Star Books last week. My daughter now fully identifies with Katy. This is a snowy winter, and her Grandpa Mark drives a snow plow, so the story of Katy is not only relevant but personal. At one point in the book, the highway department says of Katy, “Nothing can stop her.” A couple days ago, my daughter repeated it, about herself.

I want to capitalize on this moment, so I’m looking for recommendations. I like best the books where it feels incidental that the characters are female–not necessarily overtly political or socially aware (or please, not simply politically correct!) and I want books that have good stories, well written, and with lovely art. I love old books that have held up over a long time. And with strong females or girls. Female animals are okay, but I want to make sure we have some good shes around.

Read any good girls lately?

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Tagged books, fiction, Interdisciplinary Aesthetics, reading to children