The Beforelife, Poems by Franz Wright

 

Exceptional, dark, depressing, funny poems. 

How does one go

about dying?

Who on earth

is going to teach me—

The world is filled with people

who have never died

Deceptively easy to read, they are bruising when you slow down and read them aloud, and allow some breathing room to the spaces between lines and stanzas.

Alcohol

You do look a little ill.

But we can do something about that, now.   

Can’t we.

The fact is you’re a shocking wreck.   

Do you hear me.

You aren’t all alone.

And you could use some help today, packing in the   

dark, boarding buses north, putting the seat back and   

grinning with terror flowing over your legs through   

your fingers and hair . . .

I was always waiting, always here.   

Know anyone else who can say that.

My advice to you is think of her for what she is:   

one more name cut in the scar of your tongue.

What was it you said, “To rather be harmed than   

harm, is not abject.”

Please.

Can we be leaving now.

We like bus trips, remember. Together

we could watch these winter fields slip past, and   

never care again,

think of it.

I don’t have to be anywhere.

Memoir

Just hope he forgot the address

and don’t answer the phone

for a week:

put out all the lights

in the house—

behave like you aren’t there

if some night when

it’s blizzarding, you see

Franz Wright arrive

on your street with his suitcase

of codeine pills,

lugging that heavy

black manuscript

of blank texts.

—from The Poem Said

The poem said never love anything

Not even you?

I asked

and it answered

especially me

Based On a Prayer of Rabi'a Al-Adawiyya

God, if I speak my love to you in fear of hell, incinerate me in it;

if I speak my love to you in hope of heaven, close it in my face.

But if I speak to you simply because you exist, cease

withholding from me your

neverending beauty.

Description of Her Eyes

Two teaspoonfuls,

and my mind goes

everyone can kiss my ass now --

then it's changed,

I change my mind.

Eyes so sad, and infinitely kind.

Ongoingness: The End of a Diary by Sarah Manguso

 

Cool Machine by Colson Whitehead

 

Another (third and final?) volume in Whitehead's Harlem Trilogy.

All Change by Elizabeth Jane Howard (vol. 5 of the Cazalet Chronicles)

 

I'm pre-depressed it's almost over. Jumping ahead to 1956 (from 1946), there are new children's names to learn, and the Duchy dies! 

Sob.

Kill Your Friends by John Niven

 

Niven's 2007 (?) debut novel. Okay as far as it goes, but definite AMERICAN PSYCHO vibe - over-the-top sexual, emotional, and linguistic violence. A Martin Amis-lite experience.

All about a music scene (UK 1990s) that I couldn't know (or care) less about. Reading it on iPad ("reading" it) but it's not the amazing experience listening to OH BROTHER has been.

O Brother, a memoir by John Niven (audiobook)

 

Listening to Niven read this hilarious, heartbreaking, stubborn memoir of growing up with and mourning his troubled younger brother.

Casting Off by Elizabeth Jane Howard (Vol. 4 of Cazalet Chronicles)

 

Beginning Volume 5 today with great trepidation about it being over. I don't think I've ever read another novel (for I consider it one novel] as long as THE CAZALET CHRONICLES that maintained such steady, intense, interesting focus and detail on such a number of characters for so long a period (ten years, 1937-1947 so far).

p. 95 -  [Stella about her Uncle Louis after Auschwitz] "The point is that when... anyone becomes more than a certain amount unhappy they get cut off. They don't feel any comfort or concern or affection that comes from other people - all of that simply disappears inside some bottomless pit and when people realize that, they stop trying to be affectionate of comforting."

p. 343 - ... how the Duchy had once said to him that part of bearing the responsibility for one's actions entailed not unburdening them to other people and making them unhappy also. 

p. 369 - ... about whether anything they ever did would in the least change the worl and its dreary, warlike, power-mongering ways, about whether the arts were a politically civilizing influence, about whether people had always been the same and the only changes were technological.

p. 503 - "Stop being so sorry for yourself, making everyone else pay for your mistakes, expecting everyone to make allowances for you without even doing them the honour of telling them why. You've got to stop wallowing."

p. 591 - [what Father Lancing had said that a monk had told him] "You can put yourself in the centre of the universe, or you can put God. You cannot put another person there."

Summer of '42 by Herman Raucher

 

Tore through this via Kindle at the beach, a hit novelization of a hit movie, the novel of which my father had on his shelves and I read several times during my teen years. A coming-of-age, sentimental, quasi-sexual summer spent chasing an older woman. Still enjoyable after all these years.

Vagabond, a memoir by Tim Curry

 

Confusion by Elizabeth Jane Howard (Vol 3 of the Cazalet Chronicles)

 

Vol. III of the series. Love loved, couldn't put it down at the beach. The war continues, the girls (in particular) get older and wiser and hurt. 

p. 23 - "Isn't it funny how men have large ones and they hardly ever cry, and ours are only good for one dainty nose blow, and we cry far more often than they do?"

p. 81 - I don't think people every get over something as terrible as that [mother's death]; it just slowly stops being the only or main thing in their mind, but when they remember it, they feel the same.

p. 82 - [St. Nazaire destroyer incident - Brits rammed destroyer against lock gates, then mined the ship, then invited many German officers on board for drink when they were to be taken prisoner, and then they blew up their own ship.]

Erasure by Percival Everett

 

Another striking novel b Percival Everett, published in 2001, the earliest of his that I've read. Semi-autobiographical, emotive, meta (it contains another satirical novel and a short story). They made a move of it, American Fiction, 20 years after it was published, which I'm looking forward to watching.

Marking Time by Elizabeth Jane Howard (Vol 2 of the Cazalet Chronicles)

 

Volume II of the series. Great great great I'm hooked. The war starts and the kids get older. Rupert is lost in France. Zoe loses one baby and has another.

p. 13 - It's as though our feelings were simply the size of our bodies - smaller.

112-113 - She had decided that although she did now believe in God, she certainly didn't love him, she didn't even like him very much.

147 - Tragedy is never just bad luck. Tragedy is not taking everything into account, usually one own's nature. I'm not going in for tragedy - not me.

161 - but then Zoe had childish views = she was rather like an old sort of worn out child, Clary realized, and quickly put that down.

 

I don't often mention or think about theatre or TV or movies here - I watch too much of them to mention! and half at least are unspeakable - but finally caught up with the TRANSPARENT series this past month. It bedeviled and fascinated and puzzled me and energized me enough that I'm going to write a little about it.

Ostensibly about gender identity (the main protagonist, a father of three who decides in his late 60s to embrace his lifetime-closed identity as a woman), it morphs early and often - and ends - much an essay about indentity at large - particularly religious identity, and here mostly Judaism. 

The stunning (to me, at least - controversially received) Musicale Finale, a 90 minute one-off after four complete seasons, was almost all about Judaism, I think. I found the music to be delightful (if totally pop), the lyrics thoughtful and funny, and the production great. (The whole series was amazing to view, beautiful and colorful and deep). The series had to end abruptly, and without Jeffrey Tambor in the Finale, as he was fired from the production after the fourth season, following  accusations of sexual misconduct (harassment charges from trans members of the cast and production staff, ironically - he denied charges but admitted being difficult to work with).

The characters were what drove me crazy - each one completely self-centered, most very selfish (if comic). No one did a thing but worry about themselves really, throughout. But in the Musicale, the three kids don't do much - a host of non-central characters lead the parade. This was part of Slate's well-put review:

The Pfefferman children—Sarah (Amy Landecker), Josh (Jay Duplass), and Ally (Gaby Hoffmann), now nonbinary and going by the name Ari—have always been phenomenal talkers. Volatile need monsters who can only be safely interacted with through a protective screen, they unload their unruly feelings and abundant sexual energy on basically everyone with feverish, realistic linguistic verve. Highly emotional and narcissistic, with the same relationship to boundaries that kids learning to play soccer have to orange pylons—knock ’em over!—their verbal too-muchness, the never-any-small-talk mania with which they carry out their existence is so much of their charm. But the musical reduces them to non-native speakers.

The Light Years by Elizabeth Jane Howard (Vol 1 of the Cazalet Chronicles)

First volume of five, the Cazalet Chronicles. Enjoying it very much so far. Excellent control of shifiting points of view of all members of the Cazalet clan - and the hired help. Little daunted by the fact that there are four more, but only halfway through.

Finished this, 8/4/2026 - really like it, looking forward to the second volume. WWII appeasement has just been sought by Chamberlain at end of volume 1, Cazalet family mostly relieved. Vol 2 starts with appeasement not working. Howard's touch is really very deft - no character left behind.

pp.26-27: ... and at weekends she [Miss Millicent, 73-year old governess] looked at pictures. Looked! She stared, stayed, revisited a picture until it was absorbed into those secret parts of her bulky being that made memory, which digested into spiritual nourishment. Truth - the beauty of it, the way that it could sometimes transcend the ordinary appearance of things - moved and excited her; inside, she was a paradise of appreciation.

p. 42 - He [Edward] didn't read at all, as a matter of fact, but luckily she didn't ask him, and so it became one more little grain in the molehill of her ignorance about him. The longer they knew each, the more things there were like that.

p. 156 - He thought, but did not say these things; his deepest adoration of her could not be shared; somewhere he knew that her image and herself were not the same, and he could only cling to the image through secrecy.

p. 258-9 - As he put his arms around her and drew her into bed, he discovered, with a sad but grateful amazement, that loving her did not depend - as he had been afraid it did - upon his admiration. Later, lying awake while she slept, I married her, he thought, and she has always given me all of herself. It was I who invented some other part of her that she would not give. But I was wrong: there was nothing to withhold. The discovery was painful and astonishing: then it occurred to him that if he loved her enough, she might change. He was not yet able or willing to accept that this was unlikely, or even impossible; he clung to the more welcome idea that though a person might be transformed by love they could not be transformed without it.

p. 311 -  All I want is for him to love me, she thought. I don't care about anything else. She was not aware that the secret lies are the ones that endure.

p.323 - She [Evie] was perfectly determined in this, as in her emotional life, never to learn from experience. She is a monster, thought Sid, but she thought it protectively. Since Evie's birth, when Sid was four, she had been conditioned to feeling that Evie was up against circumstances rather than her own nature - she had always been subject to ailments, and an early and bad attack of measles, acute appendicitis and peritonitis had enfeebled her frame and strengthened her powers of manipulation to the point where she could be certain of special consideration for whatever she did or didn't do and resulting circumstances kept her steadfast in her discontent.

The Rolling Stones: The Biography by Bob Spitz

 

Loving this, finding it deliciousness, even if the prose is consistently wooden - the facts as such of the Stones' existence and triumph are overwhelmingly enough.

The Mouse That Roared by Leonard Wibberley

 

Having suffered through the lousy Peter Sellers movie treatment, I bought the book, which I remember reading in grade school with delight. Three chapters in, it's already much better than the film.

PostScript: the novel is charming and a real achievement. 

Let's go (so we can get back) : a memoir of recording and discording with Wilco, etc. by Jeff Tweedy

 

Okay for awhile, but didn't finish it. He's a fluent, conversational writer, but no really piercing insights.

The Keeper by Tana French

 

How to Write One Song by Jeff Tweedy

 

good but slight book - reads like a series of creative writing exercises, ballasted with philosophical rejoinders on the importance of creativity to the soul. Liked, didn't love.

The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller

 

Another slow-building marvel from Andrew Miller. Two couple live across a field from each other in an English village - one man is a doctor, one man is new farmer, both of their wives are pregnant and become friends, and the relationships intermesh and are poisoned as slowly as snow falls and as viciously as snow keeps falling.