The Red House by Mark Haddon

Nearly True by Sean Enright

http://www.amazon.com/Nearly-True-Sean-Enright/dp/0615671128/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1350263224&sr=1-2

It's 1938, post-Depression, pre-WWII Catholic Queens, NY. Ten year old Kenneth Cadogan leads silent film star Clara Bow, a deranged WWI veteran who’s obsessed with the actress, and his gang of friends who pretend to be cowboy heroes, in a search for missing television stock certificates. Kenneth also tries to solve the mystery of his father's disappearance after swimming in plain view of his son and his wife. Poking around in his father’s haunts in their neighborhood, Kenneth uncovers mysteries about his father’s life and marriage and demons. The search spreads to lower Manhattan and the Hoovervilles of Hoboken and Jersey City, culminating in the 1939 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadow, a monumental technology showcase when television was first displayed to the mass public, and where surprises and missed chances compound the mystery.

"What do Clara Bow, the World’s Fair, a shell-shocked WW1 veteran, and a father who walks into the ocean at Astoria Point one hot summer night in 1938 have to do with each other? Maybe nothing. Unless of course, you’ve entered the mordant whimsy of a Sean Enright novel. Nearly True tells the story of one boy’s passage from the make-believe of childhood, to the half-glimpsed, half-understood mysteries of adulthood as he comes to terms with his father’s disappearance. Enright is a master at capturing the tipping point of innocence, when the particular, heartbreaking way a child sees and then, refashions his world shows us more about what we have lost than we could imagine." Sarah Blake, New York Times best-selling author of The Postmistress.

"In the summer of 1938, a man goes for a swim in Turtle Bay in Queens and vanishes. This is the riveting mystery that propels Nearly True, an expansive, compassionate novel that is also the portrait of a boy and a country on the cusp of transformation. In search of his missing father, Kenneth Cadogan eavesdrops on the adult world and encounters an historical moment rife with venom, celebrity, shattering loss, and miraculous invention, including Radio Priest Father Coughlin, Clara Bow, the Hoovervilles, and the 1939 World’s Fair where television was born. In Kenneth, Sean Enright has given us a character as poignant and yearning as the era he describes." Maud Casey, author of Genealogy, a New York Times Editor's Choice Book

"You won’t soon forget Kenneth Cadogan, the character at the center of Sean Enright’s terrific new novel Nearly True. Set against the backdrop of the 1939 World’s Fair, Enright’s tale is a rollicking, riveting drama of an Irish family’s struggles in late Depression-era Queens and one boy’s heart-breaking quest to solve the puzzle of his father’s disappearance. Reminiscent of the works of Alice McDermott and E.L. Doctorow, Nearly True limns the joys and sorrows of the American immigrant experience with exuberant irreverence and wit. The result is a masterly portrait of familial love and sacrifice." Kate Walbert, author of A Short History of Women and the National Book Award nominee Our Kind

True North by Jim Harrison

In many ways it lived up to my brother's description: "Frederick Exley in northern Michigan. Plus, lots of hot-sounding ladies." I really liked the way he wove together philosophical discursion and mundane life observations, the sense of humor the narrator had about his own serious, obsessive side, and the irony and humor with which he was treated by his closest friends and family.  

The landscape of the U.P. and northern Midwest forests were great, the fishing stuff too.

The flaw is that it meanders so much that I got lost often, as to where we were, and where he was on his campaign to expose the family's crimes and more particularly to punish his father.

Capital by John Lanchester

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

Ulysses by James Joyce

Where to begin?  I allegedly read this book around 1982.  There are some marks on the pages (p. 190: "Bosh! Stephen said rudely.  A man of genius makes no mistakes.  His errors are volitional and are the portals of discover.")

This time, though, I spent some real time on it, having also read Dubliners and Portrait and Ellmann's magnificent biography.

Findings:

Stephen Daedalus is much less annoying and pious here than in Portrait.  Of course, he's drunk a great deal of the time here, too.

Found "The Oxen of the Sun" section deeply annoying.

Found the "Circle" playlet to be magnificent.

Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter

Stay Awake by Dan Chaon

How It All Began by Penelope Lively

Author's reputation: 10 (Booker Prize Winner)
Character depth: 9.
Plot anxiety-level: 3.
Believability of plot: 5.
Description of characters' financial situations:  Meh.
Cover title font: 1. (looks sloppy)
Sentence quality: 5.
Deployment of immigrant man's pidgin dialect: 2.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

Field of Blood by Denise Mina

The Uninvited Guests by Sadie Jones

An Edwardian birthday party overrun by ghosts.

Dubliners by James Joyce

This is a nearly perfect book of short stories.  From "The Sisters," about the wake for a newly-dead priest who went mad and was found laughing quietly by himself in confessional, to "The Dead," an epic story about a New Year's musical recital and the memory of a dead first love, Joyce writes minutely about ordinary Irish lives and summons a monumental tone of liveliness and regret.

Prized Possessions by L.R. Wright

Over Tumbled Graves by Jess Walter

James Joyce by Richard Ellmann

This is a tremendous literary biography.  It has compelled me to go back and read James Joyce again, and as I progress through Ellmann's book, it has become impossible for me to not to try to write about Joyce, as I'm thinking about him so much.

Three things stand out in my mind as I come to a new, larger understanding of the man and the author.

First, from age six to age twenty, he was almost without interruption educated by Jesuits and boarded at Jesuit educational institutions.  This led Joyce himself to say that though it wouldn't be accurate to describe himself as a Catholic, describing himself as a Jesuit did seem appropriate.

Second, and via the first fact, Joyce's most extraodinary mental ability seemed to be his tremendous Jesuit-led instruction in rhetoric, the ordering and advancement of argument in language.  Even his most brutish physical descriptions, piled on as they are, always appear to be grasped within a ligament of argument.

Finally, As J. M. Cohen suggests, Joyce seems to come to things through words, instead of to words through things.  This has more than a little to do with his vision problems:  born with weak eyes, he developed severe ocular disorders that progressed throughout his life.  So seeing things physically, while certainly important, was not his finally wrestling ground for language.  He put things in words before they made sense to him.

His sins became serious, and his sense of sin, 'that sense of separation and loss,' brought him to consciousness, from which vantage point he sloughed off all but the vestiges of Christian guilt.

On top of that Howth train alone crying to the rain:  naked women! What about that, eh? (Ulysses)

To become greater than our sins is worth more than all the purity you preach. (Sudermann's Magda)

Silent Years by John Francis Byrne, coded memoir, largerly about Joyce. "One of the most crotchety and interesting of the many books of Joyce's friends."

Women: "soft-skinned animals."

Shakespeare= "Literature in dialogue."

Lermontov's "Hero of Our Days."

Schnitz:  "The writer must write every evening the history of his day."

GB Shaw had a very complex reaction to ULYSSES, who had once been a young man in Dublin himself.
 “I was attracted to [Ulysses] by the fact that I was once a young man in Dublin, and also by Joyce’s literary power, which is of classic quality. I do not see why there should be any limit to frankness in sex revelation; but Joyce does not raise that question. The question he does raise is whether there should be any limit to the use in literature of blackguardly language. It depends on what people will stand. If Dickens or Thackeray had been told that a respectable author like myself would use the expletive “bloody” in a play, and that an exceptionally fastidious actress of the first rank, associated exclusively with fine parts, would utter it on the stage without turning a hair, he could not have believed it. Yet I am so old-fashioned and squeamish that I was horrified when I first heard a lady describe a man as a rotter. I could not write the words Mr Joyce uses: my prudish hand would refuse to form the letters; and I can find no interest in his infantile clinical incontinences, or in the flatulations which he thinks worth mentioning…

    Ulysses is a document, the outcome of a passion for documentation that is as fundamental as the artistic passion — more so, in fact; for the document is the root and stem of which the artistic fancy works are the flowers. Joyce is driven by his documentary demon to place on record the working of a young man’s imagination for a single day in the environment of Dublin. The question is, is the document authentic. I, having read some scraps of it, reply that I am afraid it is, then you may rise up and demand that Dublin be razed to the ground, and its foundations sown with salt. And I may say do so, by all means. But that does not invalidate the document.”

Shaw famously concludes:  “If a man holds up a mirror to your nature and shows you that it needs washing — not whitewashing — it is no use breaking the mirror. Go for soap and water.”

Joyce thought very highly of Yeats, that he was a true imaginative talent.  Later he (Joyce) said to Jacques Mercanton, “Why regret my talent?  I haven’t any.  I write so painfully, so slowly.  Chance furnishes me with what I need.  I’m like a man who stumbles: my foot strikes something, I look down, and there is exactly what I’m in need of.’  On the other hand, he often agreed with Vico that ‘Imagination is nothing but the working over of what is remembered,’ and said to Frank Budger, ‘Imagination is memory.’”

Joyce's favorite song:  "The Brown and Yellow Ale."

His daughter Lucia struggled her entire life with mental illness, and was finally confined for schizophrenia.  Joyce took his daughter's illness extremely personally, and Ellmann notes that several scholars find the father and daughter very similar creatively.  One notes, though, that though they both spent their lives as if they were jumping out of a boat into the ocean, but that James Joyce was "diving" while his daughter was "jumping."

"I ask myself what then will happen when and if she [Lucia] withdraws her regard from the lightning-lit revery of her clairvoyance and turns it upon that battered cabman's face, the world."

Joyce's beautiful later poem, "Epilogue to Ibsen's Ghost," which begins:

Dear quick, whose conscience buried deep
The grim old grouser has been salving,
Permit one spectre more to peep.
I am the ghost of Captain Alving.

Silenced and smothered by my past
Like the lewd knight in dirty linen
I struggle forth to swell the cast
And air a long-suppressed opinion.

King Suckerman by George Pelecanos

Bicentennial week in Washington DC, 1976. Get some body bags!

A Chill Rain in January by L. R. Right

LR Wright is a delicious small pleasure, like a sip of something strong that's over before you know it, and then it gives you a kick.

The canvas is small: a tiny town in Vancouver.  There's a clearly psychotic character, but the secret of her active madness is kept close until the very end, all we see are symptoms and leakages.

The End of the Wasp Season by Denise Mina

Dark Places by Gillian Flynn

Gillian Flynn executes some gorgeous prose, but she takes her time, and it ends up being too slow a place for me.  Setup and premise is dynamite (PopCultureNerd sums it up well here) but it just seemed to take forever. Still want to read Flynn's first novel Sharp Objects though.

Who gives a shit about this crap?  Do I sound passionately aggrieved?

NAKED EXCEPT FOR THE JEWELRY

"And," she said, "you must talk no more
about ecstasy.  It is a loneliness."
The woman wandered about picking up
her shoes and silks.  "You said you loved me,"
the man said.  "We tell lies," she said,
brushing her wonderful hair, naked except
for the jewelry.  "We try to believe."
"You were helpless with joy," he said,
"moaning and weeping.  "In the dream," she said,
"we pretend to ourselves that we are touching.
The heart lies to itself because it must."

It's not worth parodying, although I considered doing just that.  But how could I surpass the original, both as an original and as a parody?

Still Midnight by Denise Mina

Great detective novel. British female detective struggles with failing marriage, recent loss of child and competition on the beat. Crime is a puzzling kidnapping.

The Iliad by Homer trans. by Stephen Mitchell

A Firing Offse by George Pelecanos

Another great one, the eighties bands that Pelecanos' name-checks for me were worth the price of admission alone. Scathing level of knowledge and detail on electronics retail sales industry. Loved it.

On Green Dolphin Street by Sebastian Faulks

Friday Night Lights

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

A sneaky book.  A group of British schoolboys grows up and falls out of touch.  One of the schoolboys, Tony, the narrator, shares a girlfriend, with one of the group, the brilliant, philosophically-advanced Adrian.  Time, memory, callousness, narrative undependability, all conspire, not exactly against the narrator or the other characters, but against the reader.  For 164 pages, this novel whallops one.

"Can I ask you something?"
"You always do," she replied.
"Did you leave me because of me?"
"No," she said.  "I left you because of us."

Remorse, eytmologically, is the act of biting again: that's what the feeling does to you.

1Q84 by Haruki Murakami

The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman

Engleby by Sebastian Faulks

A Week in December by Sebastian Faulks

Mad talented writer, Faulks.  Tore through this novel of contemporary London -- the interlinked lives of a financial derivatives trader, a poor barrister, a working class young women who drives a subway train, a disgruntled youth flirting with Muslim extremism, an ignored teen from incredible wealth experimenting with drugs.  Not at all like Birdsong, Faulks' incredible WWI novel.  Not at all, but still wonderful, vivid, complete writing.  Each life he touches is more interesting that the last.  I'm so thankful for such wonderful, beautiful, talented writers -- and so annoyed, at the end of the day.  Highly recommended.

Birdsong: A Novel of Love and War by Sebastian Faulks

Don't know quite where to begin with this novel. Powerful, sweeping, moving World War I narrative, that begins with an ordinary provincial love affair in France in 1910, then jumps to the outbreak of the war, then jumps to 1978-1979, then jumps back again. Faulks prose is effortlessly detailed. Each character is fully believable. Heroism is undercut by cowardism and selfishness, which is further cut again with heroism and love.

The futility, horror and grand scale of trench warfare is rendered in an utterly personal manner: each soldier thinks he is doing something important and worthwhile, and each soldier knows with almost complete certainty that he will soon be dead.

Stephen Wraysford is a young Englishman who joins the army in 1914 and commands of a miner brigade. They tunnel beneath the German lines and set explosions under them. The underground combat scenes are incredibly brutal and disturbing. Stephen, rootless and exiled from home after a love affair in France before the war, becomes almost addicted to the danger and impossibility of surviving combat.

It felt as though she were being penetrated by a knitting needle with large walnuts midway up its shaft.

The supressed frustrations and unexpressed violence of his life were turned into hatred of the Germans.

"He's shouting for his mother," said the orderly as they brought him into the tent.
"They always do," said the medical officer, peeling back the field dressing Byrne had applied almost thirty hours before.

Then, as the fever in his abandoned body reached its height and he moved toward the welcome of oblivion, he heard a voice, not human, but clear and urgent. It was the sound of his life leaving him. Its tone was mocking. It offered him, instead of the peace he longed for, the possibility of return. At this late stage he could go back to his body and to the brutal perversion of life that was lived in the turned soil and torn flesh of the war; he could, if he made the effort of courage and will, come back to the awkward, compromised, and unconquerable existence that made up human life on earth. The voice was calling him; it appealed to his sense of shame and of curiosity unfulfilled: but if he did not heed it he would surely die.

Within minutes the hillside was seething with movement of the wounded as they attempted to get themselves back to their line.
"Christ," said Weir. "I had no idea there were so many men out there."
It was like a resurrection in a cemetery twelve miles long.

He heard nothing at first. Then, as the last pieces of displaced earth settled in the tunnel, he heard a long thick sigh; it was a sound he had never heard before, but he knew that it was the noise of several men expiring simultaneously.

The hedgerows were deep and ragged where he walked, covered with the lace of cow parsley. The air had a feeling of purity as though it had never been breathed; it was just starting to be cool with the first breeze of the evening. From the tall elms he could see at the end of the field there was the sound of rooks, and a gentler calling of wood pigeons close at hand. He stopped, and leaned against a gate. The quietness of the world about him seemed to stand outside of time; there was no human voice to place it.

Above him he saw the white moon, early and low above the elms. Over and behind it were long jagged wisps of cloud that ran in ribbed lies back into the pale blue of the sky, then trailed away in gestures of vapourous white.

Stephen felt himself overtaken by a climactic surge of feeling. It frightened him because he thought it would have some physical issue in spasm or bleeding or death. Then he saw that what he felt was not an assault but a passionate affinity. It was for the rough field running down to the trees and for the pathgoing back into the village where he could see the tower of the church: these and the forgiving distance of the sky were not separate, but part of of creation, and he too, still by any sane judgement a young man, by the repeated tiny pulsing of his blood, was one with them. He looked up and saw the sky as it would be trailed with stars under darkness, the crawling nebulae and smudged lights of infinite distance; these were not different worlds it now seemed clear to him, but bound through the mind of creation to the shredded white clouds, the unbreathed air of May, to the soil that lay beneath the damp grass at his feet. He held tightly on to the gate and laid his head on his arms, in some residual fear that the force of binding love he felt would sweep him from the earth. He wanted to stretch out his arms and enfold in them the fields, the sky, the elms with their sounding birds; he wanted to hold them with the unending forgiveness of a father to his prodigal errant but beloved son . . . nothing was immoral or beyond redemption, all could be brought together, understood in the long perspective of forgiveness. As he clung to the wood, he wanted also to be forgiven for all that he had done; he longed for the unity of the world’s creation to melt his sin and anger, because his soul was joined to it.

The Stranger's Child by Alan Holinghurst

The Conservationist by Nadine Gordimer

The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt

A tale of two gunmen in the old American West told in a narrative voice that more resembles that of a Protestant religious reformer than your typical shoot-em-up cowboy. Odd, unusual transitions, and an undramatic style: started out reading it very coldly, ready to bail, but have grown to like it for its oddness.

Video: SeanEnright.com

Video: SeanEnright.com

Pascali's Island by Barry Unsworth

Corruption, paranoia in a crumbling corner of the Ottoman Empire.

My room, scene of my labors over the years, scene of triumphs of a higher order than that of mere physical superbia, yet seemed cramped and mean to me, the hold at the end of my burrowing life. I looked at my miserable paraphernalia of pleasure, books, hookah, coffee cup and bowl; at my shabby clothes and unkempt person, still sour from sleep. A kind of rebellious misery rose in me. Why should I sit here, hatching other people's motives and purposes?

"How Annandale Went Out " by E. A. Robinson

"They called it Annandale--and I was there
To flourish, to find words, and to attend:
Liar, physician, hypocrite, and friend,
I watched him; and the sight was not so fair
As one or two that I have seen elsewhere:
An apparatus not for me to mend--
A wreck, with hell between him and the end,
Remained of Annandale; and I was there.

"I knew the ruin as I knew the man;
So put the two together, if you can,
Remembering the worst you know of me.
Now view yourself as I was, on the spot--
With a slight kind of engine. Do you see?
Like this. . . You wouldn't hang me? I thought not."

The Cut by George Pelecanos

Home-town hero George Pelecanos adds another impeccable crime novel to his collection. More DC than just about anybody, Pelecanos writes about DC neighborhodd with granular, unmistakable precision, particularly N.E. and the Petworth/Georgia Avenue corridor. By rendering such a relatively limited scope to his novel's setting, he works a handful of well-drawn characters deeply into the landscape: they have always been there, and they always will remain, they were almost all born there, and die there (we see more than a couple do so in front of our eyes).

His hero, Lucas Spero, the adopted son of a Greek-American couple, has returned from active duty in Iraq and now works as a "finder" for a local attorney: he finds people, he finds money, he finds stuff. He also finds "the right way": guided by his beloved, deceased father's ghost, Spero struggles to keep promises, punish bad guys, and assist the less fortunate. Pelecanos' sense of moral ourage is a wonder to examine.

Maybe Speros goes down a little too easy with the ladies, maybe the lady characters exist to be attracted to him and flirt with him. But that's a small bother.

(His musical references are also stellar: Drive By Truckers, Black Uhuru, The Hold Steady, just to name a few.)

The Parking Lot Movie

Great movie. A bunch of disgruntled grad students, skate-boarders and malcontents administ The Corner Lot in Charlottesville, Virginia. A marxist critique of the American service economy, as well as a juvenile attack on the fraternity system. Essential.

February 22 2012

A Sketch of the Great Dejection
by Thom Gunn

Having read the promise of the hedgerow
the body set out anew on its adventures.
At length it came to a place of poverty,
of inner and outer famine,
where all movement had stopped
except for that of the wind, which was continual
and came from elsewhere, from the sea,
moving across unplanted fields and between headstones
in the little churchyard dogged with nettles
where no one came between Sundays, and few then.
The wind was like a punishment to the face and hands.
These were marshes of privation:
the mud of the ditches oozed scummy water,
the grey reeds were arrested in growth,
the sun did not show, even as a blur,
and the uneven lands were without definition
as I was without potent words,
inert.
I sat upon a disintegrating gravestone.
How can I continue, I asked?
I longed to whet my senses, but upon what?
On mud? It was a desert of raw mud.
I was tempted by fantasies of the past,
but my body rejected them, for only in the present
could it pursue the promise,
keeping open to its fulfilment.
I would not, either, sink into the mud,
warming it with the warmth I brought to it,
as in a sty of sloth.
My body insisted on restlessness
having been promised love,
as my mind insisted on words
having been promised the imagination.
So I remained alert, confused and uncomforted.
I fared on and, though the landscape did not change,
it came to seem after a while like a place of recuperation.

Life Times by Nadine Gordimer

Again and again she seems to effortlessly cross the imaginative line between a patronizing liberal sympathy and a truly creative and understanding empathy with the victims of apartheid in South Africa.
"The Soft Voice of the Serpent," the only non-racially-centered story so far, a gentle, tragic portrayal of a young man in a wheelchair feeling his limits.
"The Amateurs," about a white theatre troupe going into the camps to perform Oscar Wilde, not realizing until too late just how vast the imaginative distance is between themselves and their audience.
"Six Feet of the Country" about the struggle of a black family to get back the dead body of their child, an illegal immigrant, in order that they can bury him appropriately.
"Face from Atlantis"
"Which New Era Would That Be?" about a
"The Smell of Death and Flowers." That was one of the things she held against the missionaries: how they stressed Christ's submission to humiliation by the white man.
"Not for Publication"
"Through time and Distance"
"A Chip of Glass Ruby," about a widowed Hindu mother of five and adoptive mother of four more, who has married a Hindu widower, and she gets arrested for her work organizing and participating in anti-apartheid activies for the black population.
"Some Monday For Sure." It reads like a Frank O'Connor story about the IRA. A young man becomes involved with the anti-apartheid forces through his sister's husband, who drives a "dynamite truck" for a construction. He participates in an armed robbery of the truck, and escapes with his sister and brother in law to Rhodesia, where they are forced to live for years. Odd long second half, after the robbery, where the husband has returned to South Africa, and the sister and her younger brother remain in exile, the boy hopeful and optimistic that he will return to freedom-fighting, but his sister despondent about the loss of her previous life.

The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown

The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown

To End all Wars by Adam Hochschild

Incredible documentation of the intersection of the war industry and peace forces mostly in Great Britain during the run up to World War I and throughout that horrendously destructive conflict.

The execution of several members of the Bantam Battalions, composed of men who were above 5 feet tall but less than 5 foot three inches tall, and so had missed the height minimum for the first round of conscription.

The proximity of the German and Allied lines during the first 18 months of the war, and how the opposing forces would declare impromptu cease-fires and socialize.

The Color of Night by Madison Smartt Bell

Bell's Haitian novels are tremendous documents, exciting and soulful and desperate and dark. This slight novel, though, was disappointing to me. It seems to want to be his Don Delillo move, or even TC Boyle, but it had no power. The deranged former hippy chick obsessed with the twin towers falling, journeying back to her abusive childhood where she was raped by her brother from when she was 11 to 14, to her years as a drifter in the 1960s in Airzona and points west, and the Haight and LA, a sometimes hooker and then member of cult not unlike Charles Manson's storied Family: it sound melodramatic and pitch-friendly, like Bell thought it would be a movie on a page. But it's not. It stays on the page.

King of the Badgers by Philip Hensher

A novel about privacy, society, obsession and civility. A young girl in a small town in western England is abducted. First everyone is suspected, and then, as the media horde loses interest, Hensher's lens moves in on the private lives of the town's citizen. Aint nobody squeaky clean

I enjoyed Hensher's The Northern Clemency but that did not prepare me for this. The swerve from a creepy-Church-of-Dead-Girls-suspense novel to full boxer-bunching gay orgies was unnerving. But I stuck with it!

A Village Life by Louise Gluck and Chronic by D.A. Powell

First Snow
by Louise Gluck

Like a child, the earth's going to sleep,
or so the story goes.

But I'm not tired, it says.
And the mother says, You may not be tired but I'm tired-

You can see it in her face, everyone can.
So the snow has to fall, sleep has to come.
Because the mother's sick to death of her life
and needs silence.

This poem (for Gluck's very quiet, extraordinarily graceful volume of poems) had resonance for me. I've been struggling for some time over a poem for my very sick mother:

The Subjunctive Blues

by Sean Enright

If should could be finale of would…

We hiked on that sudden warming February day:
girls shrieking in the woods suddenly full of people,
dog splashdowns into the icy low creek,
plastic trash caught in fallen branches,
golden pools of thick scum-bubbles,
everything still dead, still completely gone, dull brown.

Ame spotted the severed foreleg of a deer
draped across a low branch,
we all circled back to look,
the white bone at the haunch showing,
the hoof and lower leg still covered with fur,
and I kept looking for other remnants as we walked back;

winter day that was the last moment of that death
before life was to begin again,
and I thought of the opposite,
the last moment of life, and you were in my mind
as you always have been this past year
who would never walk these woods again,
will essentially never walk anywhere again,

except little steps you watch from above
without any connection to your feet
this is ridiculous 1 2 3 4
and we put it to music take a little one step
two step three step come a little closer please
learning forward until something primitive in your mind
catches and your hips startle, knees quiver

and feet inch forward
always with your forehead down, searching for those steps
that got away, giving you an attitude of shame,
so cowed by your ordeal, don’t want to be seen,
and still it has not broken you; little pitfalls

of snowdrops seen here and there
through the transparent woods,
their faint sick antiseptic smell, but still,
born again, never again to die, until the next time,
free to live late winter long
like a crown on a corpse.

My poem first came after the hike with my family, and recalling this poem by Wordsworth:

To A Snowdrop
by William Wordsworth

LONE Flower, hemmed in with snows and white as they
But hardier far, once more I see thee bend
Thy forehead, as if fearful to offend,
Like an unbidden guest. Though day by day,
Storms, sallying from the mountain-tops, waylay
The rising sun, and on the plains descend;
Yet art thou welcome, welcome as a friend
Whose zeal outruns his promise! Blue-eyed May
Shall soon behold this border thickly set
With bright jonquils, their odours lavishing
On the soft west-wind and his frolic peers;
Nor will I then thy modest grace forget,
Chaste Snowdrop, venturous harbinger of Spring,
And pensive monitor of fleeting years!

Chronic, poems by D. A. Powell, is more inscrutable to me, but I'm drawn to the poems, and titles, particularly the title "meditating upon the meaning of the line 'clams on the halfshell and rollerskates' in the song good times by chic."

A Kind of Loving by Stan Barstow

Beautiful 1960 British novel, about a working class young man who falls in love and suffers the usual dire consequences. There is a truthfulness and a familiarity about Barstow's narrator voice (the young man's voice) that is refreshing and seems unusual for that particular moment in pre-sexual-revolution Britain.

Astounding use of northern England slang, too, dozens of words and phrases I'd never seen before, like "take a butcher's" (to look at).

The Family Fang by Kevin Wilson

Another Bullshit Night in Suck City

A great title, but the book itself never really moved me.

This is Not Your City: Stories by Caitlin Horrocks

Very beautiful stories. The first one a strange, second-person singular narration. The second about a rural girl caring for her 40ish mother crippled by rheumatoid arthritis, and the lonely girl befriends a philosophical Amish young woman: story is in the form of a make-up term paper to earn her high school equivalency.

Orientation and Other Stories by Daniel Orozco