Beloved by Toni Morrison

Another powerhouse book.  Morrison's razor-sharp prose, drawing poetic strength from pitch-perfect dialogue, is a moral density the likes of which I've never witnessed before.  Truly a giant of American literature in the past fifty years -- possibly THE giant. Giantess, even.

Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison

There is no bottom to this book, which I first read as a junior in high school and just re-read to mark Toni Morrison's passing. What the reader suspects (as a high school junior) to be the symbols and archetypes of the novel stay firmly grounded as people, places, things happening in a world where the miraculous and the fantastic breed with the real flesh and agony.

He became a plain on which, like the other cowboys and Indians in the movies, she and her husband fought. Each one befuddled by the values of the other. Each one convinced of his own purity and outraged by the idiocy he saw in the other.She was the Indian, of course, and lost her land, her customs, her integrity to the cowboy and became a spread-eagled footstool resigned to her fate and holding fast to tiny irrelevant defiances.

Guitar on FDR and white people: "What I’m saying is, under certain conditions they would all do it. And under the same circumstances we would not. So it doesn’t matter that some of them haven’t done it. I listen. I read. And now I know that they know it too. They know they are unnatural. Their writers and artists have been saying it for years. Telling them they are unnatural, telling them they are depraved. They call it tragedy. In the movies they call it adventure. It’s just depravity that they try to make glorious, natural. But it ain’t. The disease they have is in their blood, in the structure of their chromosomes."

People behaved much better, were more polite, more understanding when Milkman was drunk. The alcohol didn’t change him at all, but it had a tremendous impact on whomever he saw while he was under its influence. They looked better, never spoke above a whisper, and when they touched him, even to throw him out of the house party because he had peed in the kitchen sink, or when they picked his pockets as he dozed on a bench at the bus station, they were gentle, loving.

Apparently he thought he deserved only to be loved--from a distance, though--and given what he wanted. And in return he would be . . . what? Pleasant? Generous? Maybe all he was really saying was: I am not responsible for your pain; share your happiness with me but not your unhappiness.

Boyhood by J.M. Coetzee

vivid and psychologically compelling.  but bone-dry and humorless.

Up Against It: A Screenplay for the Beatles by Joe Orton

Just saw A HARD DAY'S NIGHT again so was thinking of this fateful final creation of Joe Orton's. Sort of silly really, but I still like it, as I do all things Orton.

"Do Nothing Marvell Would Not Do": Remembering Professor Mary Kinzie

[In May of 2019, I was thrilled when my friend and Northwestern University Department of English Senior Lecturer Brian Bouldrey contacted me to ask if I would write a short memoir about studying poetry with Professor Mary Kinzie, who would retire that month.]

In 1980, almost 40 years ago, I studied with Mary Kinzie for two short years. But her effect on my life and my writing has been astounding, though: she asked the right questions of me, and challenged me, and pointed me toward many poems and poets who have been right here with me almost every day since then.

When we read Elizabeth Bishop, I transcribed inside the cover of my The Complete Poems Mary’s suggestions for what to keep in mind: Note her use of the conjunction “and”;  how she immediately establishes a visible landscape and is extremely descriptive, but how her outrageous images are meant to help readers, not to show off; how she absolutely finishes a thought; her “refusal of the literary”; how she uses repetition to glue herself to an idea; her childishness, her self-correcting style, her good manners.

The seeds she planted in me grew up – she might be appalled at how the plant has tilted, and some of the colors and shapes it has taken on – but I consider her the monumental mover of my mind during my undergraduate years.

I was attracted to form but at 19 years old was a firm communicant in the Church of the Romantic Ejaculate – my writing was holy, and the poem as first-struck was a sacred relic and to be preserved as such. Mary taught me how form flexed but must be cared for; to revise with intent; to change what the draft poem was not, in most cases, in my eager and largely dreadful work; to finish a thought or moment or abandon it; to be deadly efficient and finely honest.

She was stern and brilliant and methodical, but also had a pungent, memorable wit, particularly in her written comments: I remember from her daily poems assignment list for three Marvellian-tetrameter stanzas: “Formally, do nothing Marvell would not do.” “The danger of alliteration, according to Gross, is ‘consonantal clang.’” Her note on my Auden imitation was, “You’ll have to have a clearer plot (i.e., mythology) and an array of details more telling (and more easy to stick into an iambic pentameter line) than a DISHWASHER.”

But she taught me to expect more of myself, as she always did: she noted on my journal entry on a Yeats poem, “You should be cross with yourself over this irrelevant entry.” 

I determined to do everything she said to do, even if I couldn’t understand very much of it. It was like learning a tricky piano piece: you just kept going through it again and again, and note by chord by bar, it improved, and your hands warmed to the pleasure of your ears hearing the code in front of you begin approach the sound you wanted.

After I left Northwestern, I continued to pay attention to Mary: via her volumes of poetry, her reviews in APR, and eventually in her collected criticism and essays, her epic A Poet’s Guide to Poetry. In the back of Summers of Vietnam I scrawled the words I had never heard before: tarn, fardels, chitin, faience, morrices, tmesis, clerestory, colfox, cok brake, calor, ghostwheat. She refused to stop teaching me, from a distance.

I watched her own formalism retreat over time, but the poems expand and astonish me with their emotional and narrative effect. “Reading an Old Poem of Mine” and “Lunar Eclipse”– I almost memorized them. Again, it was mostly beyond me, but I kept writing, thinking, reading:

I tear back all I know till I don't know it,

and I can see the jagged

flicker at the core

prior to understanding,

tearing thought down into pieces

that sit about oddly under a different light,

strange, hard, anonymous.

(from “Lunar Frost” by Mary Kinzie)

At the same time, I partly blame Mary’s rigor for driving me away from anything to do with academic study. My lazy soul took ten years to go back and get my MFA. During that time, something loosened in me, in reaction to Mary’s exercises: my mind was suddenly brimming with unassigned poems. But even as I started drifting from formal verse, something had also tightened: there was always a formidable ghost of form.

And my very first published poem in 1988 was a revision of a daily poem syllabics assignment– in 1981 Mary had noted, “This is close to being a perfectly realized poem.” She wanted more in the middle of the poem and a new title – it took me eight years to add two lines and change the title. True to me, it’s about a lazy soul, but true to Mary, it’s well-wrought.

Progressions

Outside the window it is evening.

Since morning I’ve watched the shadows change

From pointing this way to pointing that,

Combing the tall lime grass of the lawn.

It now glows dark olive, still uncut.

I’ve planned all day long what I would do

All day long, so haven’t done a thing.

The temptation to move slides further

Away even as I reach for it.

Perhaps today was not meant for acts

But for the gradual notation

Of shadows that will never return—

Not exactly, at least, as before.

New Age Magazine was pleased to have it, and I hoped they moved plenty o’ vitamins and healing stones as a result. They’d never know how hard it was to write – and how much of what Mary Kinzie taught me in class still clanged clear across the years since I’d seen her. And continues to. Thank you, Mary! And enjoy your redeployment.

The Man with the Golden Arm by Nelson Algren

WOW.  It's something of the dialect vernacular of Eugene O'Neill's sea plays, crossed with a muderously serious Damian Runyon, crossed again with the effortless depth of character in Bellow's Adventures of Augie March.

He looked like a man who had never seen a cloud. (72)

Sophie: If I get any luckier I'll be the luckiest woman in the cemetery. (73)

He was too dear to her: into everything he did she must read some secret hatred of herself. (82)

Violet: Lies are just a poor man's pennies. (84)

Violet: So it was up to me to show him he was somebody all by hisself-- that's the first thing a woman got to do for a man. 'N of course there's no sense tryin' to prove somethin' like that standin' up. The least a girl owes herself is to be compfortable about it. (85)

Orange World by Karen Russell

Country Girl by Edna O'Briend

She knew everybody, she did everything, she wrote about most of it.

Feminist, risk-taker, rule-breaker.  Barhopping with Brando and Mailer, dropping acid with Laing.

Conviction by Denise Mina

Burned through this in 24 hours.  While not her best book, it's beyond readable and should have been called CONFECTION.

Never a Lovely So Real: The Life and Work of Nelson Algren by Colin Asher

Terrific book on Nelson Algren, his childhood, his meteroric rise in prominence as a novelist, his puzzling retreat as a journalist.

On bullfighting: “It’s always a shutout for the bull.”

We are all members of one another. Algren, The Man With The Golden Gun

From his 1957 essay “Ain’t Nobody on My Side?”:

Surely never before has any people lived so tidily in the midst of such psychological disorder. Never has any people deodorized, sanitized, germproofed, cellophaned and hygienized itself so thoroughly, and still remained stuck with the sense of something dead under the house. Never have so many two-baths-a-day people gone to so many analysts to find out how to quit washing their hands. Never have so many analysts made appointments with other analysts. How can we be so satisfied that God is on our side, and at the same time be so apprehensive lest he be not?

No other people, I suspect, has set itself a moral code so rigid, while applying it so flexibly. Surely nowhere before has any people possessed such a superfluity of physical luxuries companioned by such a dearth of emotional necessities. Never has any people been so completely at the mercy of its own appliances.

Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe

Big Bang by David Bowman

Sort of amazing monumental book.  What he's done is take a cast of historical characters from 1950 to 1963 (but with generous casts in time before and after, to establish some history and to layer more irony by reporting on the future), all of which characterizing is eventually pointing at November 22, 1963, when John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas.

These charcters include JFK and Jackie Kennedy, Aristole Onasis and Jackie's sister, Richard Nixon, the Vietnamese political and military leadership, Howard Hunt, the erstwhile CIA misadventur who eventually bumbled into Watergate, authors like William Burroughs, Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg, Arthur Miller and his wife Marilyn Monroe, noted baby doctor and author Benjamin Spock and his wife, TV personality Ed Sullivan.  And literally dozens more.

He builds richly detailed personal lives for all these historical characters.  Some of it sounds like it's actually historically true, but this seems to become less and less important the more richly detailed the interior lives become.

The Altruists by Andrew Ridker

Exhalation, and Stories of Your Life, by Ted Chiang

Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips

Intriguing true-crime ish novel, abounding with details about the Kamatchka peninsula in the Russian Far East.

two girls go missing in the first chapter, and we don't see or hear from them until the final chapter.  in between, over the course of the year, we do submerge deeply into lives of a dozen or so residents whose lives have been touched by the girls' disappearance in small and larger ways. the isolation, the hopelessness, the hope, the national and ethnic frustrations of these people are bracingly delivered by Julia Phillips piercing, empathetic prose.

Recommended.

Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan

another good one. it's not enough for the novel to cover a menage a trois between two humans and a robot, a buried crime involving rape, murder and a non-rape.  It also contains an intellectual and ethical history of the development of robotics and computers, an alternate history of the 20th century that includes the survival of Alan Turing, JFK and the defeat of Reagan in 1980, as well as an alternate conclusion to Britain's Falkland Islands gambit.

hard to put down. some of the plot machinations seems a bit facile and quickly-established, and I could do without McEwan's constant interlude marker ("and then we made love") but hard to argue with a novel that does so much in so little space.

The New Me by Halle Butler

Bowlaway by Elizabeth McCracken

I liked it but found it a bit slow going.  In a world where everything seems eccentric -- in a novel were everything seems eccentric -- the eccentric begins to become a bit... normal.

A woman found sleeping in a Massachusetts graveyard establishes a candlestick bowling alley that is later determined to be inhabited by ghosts, both real and literary.

Proof of God? Proof was in the world, and the way you visited the world was on foot... Your walking was a devotion. (44)

LuEtta had recently decided she would be a wonder instead of a beauty.  She had seen beauties go mad in middle age, as their beauty turned less live and more monumental, beauty still but mostly to mark the space where greater beauty once had been. But wondrous was wondrous, even when you outgrew it.

Summerlong by Dean Bakopoulos

Fear by Bob Woodward