Three Hundred Paces: The Journal of Corporal Otis Truitt, CSA by William Cannon

 

Innocent by Scott Turow

 

Good, page turning, hard to put down, even though I haven't read PRESUMED INNOCENT, unlike everyone else in the world. The inner working of the judicial world - as a judge and a prosecutor who've worked together for 20 years face off in a murder trial that eerily echoes the same crime 20 years earlier.

Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life by Michael Nott

 

Deeply immersed. Very important poet to me, my first extended deep dive, met him at Northwestern, been reading him and thinking about his work ever since then.

The 1980s section devastating, where Gunn loses dozens of loved ones in the space of a year or so. Unimaginable until now when I read of how he took it full on, trying to survive it and gain some meaning from the carnage. 

And his "old age" as it were, is tragic as presented, although he is never really self-pitying. In his late 60s, he vigorously renewed his passion for drugs and picking up young men as sexual tricks, often homeless and troubled, although he cared for them as he could toward his purpose. He certainly died as he lived, with a fierceness and a care for the person he was with, and did not put on much of the dress of one ageing slowly and gracefully. He did not want that.

Yvor Winters definition of a poem: a statement in words about the human experience (p. 130)

The Sense of Movement was about a "specifically contemporary" kind of "malaise," the attempt "to understand one's deliberate aimlessness, having the courage of one's convictions, reaching a purpose only by making the right rejections." (147)

Gunn's love of Camus, particularly THE PLAGUE. (162)

Gunn on Lowell, and his aims for a personal autobiographical essay (209)

Gunn on Robert Creeley (218)

from TG piece about TOUCH: There remains open the possibility that one can deliberately and consciously attempt to create in oneself a field which will be spontaneously fertile for the tests of sympathy[.]... I do not mean that one can simply love everybody because one wants to, but that one can try to avoid all the situations in which love is impossible. (229)

Gertrude Stein: "She always says she dislikes the abnormal, it is so obvious. She says the normal is so much more simply complicated and interesting."

"Only Tony White, among my close friends, became an exception. He dropped out, coolly and deliberately, from the life of applause, having coming to see how the need for it complicates one's existence quite unnecessarily." 

... loss is loss, and time often only helps to show how deep and wide it is. (296)

Mike Kitay: "Tony Tanner was a good example of a smart friend Thom had, but he didn't like Tony's problems." (303)

"'The proverb is: A cat in gloves catches no mice. [...] I mentioned my proverb to a San Francisco poet, and he capped it with one of his own: And mice in high heels have a terrible time getting away from cats.'" (335)

TG on Duncan's definition of the Romantic movement: "the intellectual adventure of not knowing." (409)

"a poem is a record of activity" (422)

Thom saw these poems [in limited edition Unsought Intimacies] as "distinct from confessional poetry, which is a form of indirect boasting about pain, not so indirect maybe. When there is pain in these poems, it is a cause for deep regret." (431)

The Vet's Daughter by Barbara Comyns

 

Fascinating, dark, neglected novel from 1959. A violent, tormented English veterarian and his withdrawn, abused wife and their ignored, well-meaning 15 year old daughter. The daughter suffers through the death of her mother and her father's new rakish mistress, and beginnings experiencing acute psychological distress, including the (imagined?) ability to levitate. 

Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties by Ian MacDonald

 

Stunning, track-by-track dissection of the Beatles' recordings.

MacDonald's forewords to his several editions are piercing sociological essays on British (and American) culture.

He has strong negative opinions about many of the later Beatles' tracks, the ones where he feels (with good reasoning) that the drugs had taken over and the spontaneous and unplanned ideas almost completely took over the painstaking craftsmanship of the earlier songs.

The Hunter by Tana French

 

Liked this one, a "sequel" of sorts to her recent novel "The Hunter." 

But it's a slow burner, and her Irish idiomatic dialogue gets a little wearying. 

More secrets and betrays and bad parenting in a remote Irish town, centered on the transplanted American retired detective and the somewhat-abandoned, previously-feral 15 year old girl he cares for and attempts to instruct.

I do long for the earlier Dublin murder squad novels though.

Sheila arranges the shirt on a hanger and hooks it onto the back of a chair. She says, "I shoulda picked ye a better father."

"Then we wouldn't exist," Trey points out.

Sheila's mouth twists in amusement. "No woman believes that," she says. "No mother, anyhow. We don't say it to the men, so as not to hurt their feelings -- they're awful sensitive. But you'd be the same no matter who I got to sire you. Different hair, maybe, or different eyes, if I'd went with a dark fella. Wee little things like that. But you'd be the same same."