On Writers and Their Readers:

Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours, addresses the complexities of translation and the relationship of writers with their readers in today's New York Times' Op-Ed page.

The Argument for Reading:

Recently techie folks have been arguing the relative merits of eBooks, focusing most especially on young readers and whether or not eBooks will increase the amount of time children spend reading. The evidence isn't in yet, but many observers not directly involved with the marketing of eBooks argue that kids will be no more interested in reading a book on a screen than they have been in reading words on paper. Ultimately, it is argued, content and not delivery is most important.

This debate is based on an interesting assumption, which is that reading as an activity is good in and of itself, which in turn is based on the assumption that the vicarious experience of reading allows for the acquisition of a greater amount of experience than one might otherwise have the opportunity for if one does not read.

But what happens if the reader can't remember what he or she has read?

James Collins addresses this question, one which every student has asked, in a New York Times' essay, published September 17 of this year. Central to the issue is "Am I somehow changed as a result of experience I have had in the past even if I cannot recall that experience?"

Legal and Deadly: The Water You Drink

In a lengthy article in today's New York Times, Charles Duhigg reports on the state of America's drinking water. The laws regulating our water have remained unchanged since 1974 and are far behind the development of deadly chemicals being dumped into reservoirs and waterways.

Complicating the matter, many citizens object to measures taken by officials to reduce the risk, claiming that if the water is "legal" nothing should be done. In other words, you should have the right to poison yourself—unwittingly—as long as 1) it keeps taxes down (especially for big business) and 2) it allows you to pretend that you are in control of your life.

Currently, we are in a battle to determine whether we trust big government or big and small business. (See the healthcare issue.)


What Should You Be Reading?

As the end of the year rolls around, we start to see reading lists pop up just in time for the holiday buying season. National Public Radio has provided their list, with more than one book that ought to keep you busy for a good portion of the winter, including The Paris Review Interviews, which is 1982 pages long. Who says they don't publish big books any more. And then there's American Fantastic Tales which is 1500 pages.

Don't worry, there are plenty of other books on the list in the 300-page range, including In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, which was reviewed here not long ago.


Other Worlds:

Today's New York Times reports on the discovery of a planet outside our solar system that appears to be composed entirely of water, with a surface temperature of 400 degrees Fahrenheit.

Don't get your fishing equipment out yet. It's 40 light-years away, and a year there lasts 38 hours.

December's National Geographic reported on the number of new planets found in the past few years, now that technology allows us to "see" beyond our own solar system with enough precision to discover them.

Book Review:

Raymond Carver's brand of story telling is alive and well in Wells Tower's book of stories, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned. Sure, you can quibble about minimalism and metaphor, but I was reminded of no one so much as Carver in reading Tower's stories.

The characters are everyday sorts of folks who find themselves in everyday sorts of problems, even when they run away from home and join the circus ("On the Show") or they join a band of marauding Vikings to sack a monastery ("Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned"). These are folks who are rundown and weary with their lot in life and desperately seeking answers in all the wrong places because these places are the only ones they know to seek answers in.

Maybe my favorite among the nine stories contained in the book is "Retreat," a story about two brothers, one of whom, Matthew, is doomed like Sisyphus to fail after every success. He is our story teller in this piece, and at the end, he manages to make a magnificent shot on a hunting trip with his brother of an moose. The animal will provide him with enough meat for a year. He and his brother and one other character work all afternoon to muscle the animal back to their hunting cabin, where they begin to butcher it, but while Matthew is cooking the three of them some steaks carved from the animal, the other two realize the meat has been spoiled, probably due to it being diseased.

All of that work for nothing, and how does Matthew respond to that. Like a good many other people I've known. But you'll have to read the story to find out.

This review focuses on plot and character, but the real magic in story telling comes from the voice of the narrator. The opening story, "The Brown Coast," beings with

Bob Munroe woke up on his face. His jaw hurt and morning birds were yelling and there was real discmfort in his underpants. He'd come in late, his spine throbbing from the bus ride down, and he had stretched out on the floor with a late dinner of two bricks of saltines. Now cracker bits were all over him—under his bare chest, stuck in the sweaty creases of his elbows and his neck, and the biggest and worst of them he could feel lodged deep into his buttock crack, like a flint arrowhead somebody had shot in there.

Now who wouldn't want to read on after that opening?

Book Review:

Placing a CD of a poet reading his work in the back of a book of poems isn't a brand new idea, but it's still one worth noting. Half of the World in Light: New and Selected Poems by Juan Felipe Herrera, from The University of Arizona Press (2008), contains such a CD, and it adds much to the pleasure of reading the book.

Let Me Tell You What a Poem Brings

Before you go further,
let me tell you what a poem brings,
first, you must know the secret, there is no poem
to speak of, it is a way to attain a life without bounderies

—Juan Felipe Herrera

One of the challenges to reading any book of poems is trying to determine how the poems should sound. Regardless of what any poet in the past might have said about poetry being the news of the day, poetry does not read like a newspaper column. Voice is paramount.

Of course, not all poets read their work well. Anyone who has heard the recordings of T. S. Eliot reading The Waste Land should recognize this. (I frankly prefer Garrison Keilor's reading myself.) But Herrera, while he may be no Eliot, knows how to read his own work and does a fine job of it. And after listening to the CD, I found the book even more accessible than it already was.

Herrera is the son of migrant workers and was born in California in 1948. He's been publish poetry for nearly forty years in both Spanish and English. As one reviewer notes, a remarkable and important voice in American poetry. (Google for other links to the man and his work.)

Special thanks to The University of Arizona Press for including the CD.

Book Review:

One of the things I enjoy most about reading fiction is the snap shots it can provide into other people's lives and cultures different from my own. I've recently finished reading Daniyal Mueenuddin's In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, a first collection of short stories all set in Pakistan. The opening story, "Nawabdin Electrician," was a selection for Best American Short Stories 2008, and the book itself was a finalist for the 2009 National Book Award. Little wonder, then, that I should both choose to read it and enjoy it.

As other reviewers have pointed out, the stories are connected through characters and specific settings, a sure positive for critics who nominate books for prizes, think Faulkner, Hemingway, Garcia-Marquez. But for me a serious part of the value of such a book is Mueenuddin's providing me with insightful snap shots into a culture and a place that I know little about.

The stories won't provide much background on current military action in Pakistan or the regions occupied by Al-Qaeda. Instead we are provided with a glimpse into the lives of the wealthy and those who wait on them, a sort of upstairs/downstairs vision of people in their daily lives, especially those of women. Domestic life and the struggle to survive and discover meaning to existence are central themes in the stories. Another is the constant state of negotiation. Note the following passage from the story, "About a Burning Girl":

When I returned punctually at five from the office, my wife called me into the living room, where she sat with an old lady, one of her projects, someone from whom she wanted something. Judging from the guest's enormous Land Cruiser parked in the veranda, she must be the wife of a big fish. This is the phrase; also a big gun. Imagine my wife as being the poor man's Lady Macbeth and you will have the entire picture.

Mueenuddin's characters are always making deals, and often the deals they make end up not serving them well. Readers will also note the fatalism throughout the strata of the culture he portrays. In all likelihood, it is this fatalism that most American readers will have the most difficulty with. Certainly it will not be the prose, which is as well crafted as that of anyone else writing in English today.

On Books:

One of the pleasures in reading the selected works of a poet who has lasted 50 years of publishing is watching the progression of his or her career. Last year, BOA Editions published W. D. Snodgrass's Not for Specialists, New and Selected Poems, which I've just finished reading.

The book opens with a poem from Snodgrass's first collection, Heart's Needle (1959):

These Trees Stand …

These trees stand very tall under the heavens.
While they stand, if I walk, all stars traverse
This steep celestial gulf their branches chart.
Though lovers stand at sixes and at sevens
While civilizations come down with the curse,
Snodgrass is walking through the universe.

I can't make any world go around your house.
But note this moon. Recall how the night nurse
Goes ward rounds by the mild, reflective art
Of focusing her flashlight on her blouse.
Your name's safe conduct into love or verse;
Snodgrass is walking through the universe.

Your name's absurd, miraculous as sperm
And as decisive. If you can't coerce
One thing outside yourself, why you're the poet!
What irrefrangible atoms whirl, affirm
Their destiny and form Lucinda's skirts!
She can't make up your mind. Soon as you know it,
Your firmament grows touchable and firm.
If all this world runs battlefield or worse,
Come, let us wipe our glasses on our shirts:
Snodgrass is walking through the universe.


And from this point on we inhabit Snodgrass's vision, which includes sections from his intriguing poetic take on the last days of World War II through the imagined and sometimes real words of Hitler and his compatriots from the bunker in The Fuehrer Bunker, the cycle of poems first published in 1977 and finished in 1995. These poems continue Snodgrass's playfulness in language brought to bear on serious topics, demonstrating the value that comes from a master investigating his topic, his characters through a series of works, not unlike Updike and Faulkner in their novels and short stories. There is a reason we celebrate those writers who approach a topic or characters at more than one front, although we might not be able to place our fingers precisely on why this is so appealing to us.

The book ends with

Invitation

Come live with me and be my last
Resource, location and resort,
My workday's focus and steadfast
Distraction to a weekend's sport.

Come end up with me, close my list;
Blank my black book, block every e-mail
From ex-loves whose mouths won't be missed;
Let nothing else alive look female.

Come couch with me mit Freud und Lust
As every evening's last connection.
Talk to me; prove the day like Proust;
Let what comes next rise to inspection.

Come, let old aftermaths get lost,
let failures and betrayals mend,
Cancel repayments; clear the cost;
Once more unto the breach, dear friend.

Come lay us down to sleep at least,
Sharing this pillow's picture show.
Who's been my braintrust and best beast?
Who else knows what I need to know?


Snodgrass may be one of our least appreciated truly important poets. Thanks to BOA Edtions, a non-profit publisher, his work continues to be available to us. Maybe not all is wrong in the publishing world after all.

How We Got That Way:

If you haven't yet, you might like to check out Salon.com's excerpt from Andrew Cockburn's Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy. Thanks to one of our reader's for passing this along. Here's a preview—the article's title is "When Rummy tried to nuke Russia." It would be funny if it weren't for all the dead and maimed this man has helped bring about while living out his fantacy.

No Librarian Left Embarrassed, or Silencing the Lambs:

Yup, this is about censorship. Today's New York Times reports on the state of the latest Newberry Award winner, The Higher Power of Lucky, by Susan Patron, a children's book that has terrified school librarians around the country. On its first page, the very beginning of the book, Ms Patron has dared to use the word scrotum!

Now here's the problem: schools around the country regularly order two or more copies of Newberry Award winning books every year. For some reason, foolish librarians have the notion that it is good for our children to read, as long as they don't read anything that might upset them. The them in this case is the school's librarians, teachers, principals, school board members, and two or three parents who are seeking an issue to draw attention to themselves, not the kids.

So what happens after copies of Newberry Award winning books are ordered for the school library? Why teachers, often the librarian, read the books to students. That's right, read them out loud to students. After all, everybody knows kids don't read books themselves. So here's the heart of the problem: No teacher or librarian wants to read that word (scrotum, in case you've forgotten) out loud to a bunch of ten-year-olds who will either giggle out loud or ask the teacher/librarian, "What's a 'scrotum,' Ms Smith, and do you have one?"

Not likely, neither biologically nor metaphorically. Long live the dark ages!

While we're on the topic of books:

Looking for a good read? Go to the library and check out Valerie Martin's The Unfinished Novel and Other Stories (Vintage 2006) and Mary Karr's volume of poetry, Sinners Welcome (HarperCollins 2006). The latter contains an essay well worth your time even if you don't particularly like poetry.

The essay in which Martin examines what led her to converting to Catholicism was originally commissioned for an issue of Poetry, where it appeared last year. But be prepared, the first paragraphs has the word dildo in it. Let us suggest you not read this aloud at the family gathering tonight.

Here's an example of her poetry:

Descending Theology: Christ Human


Such a short voyage for a god,
and you arrived in animal form so as not
to scorch us with your glory.
Your mask was an infant's head on a limp stalk,
sticky eyes smeared blind,
limbs rendered useless in swaddle.
You came among beasts
as one, came into our care of its lack, came crying
as we all do, because the human frame
is a crucifix, each skeletos borne a lifetime.
Any wanting soul lain
prostate on a floor to receive a pouring of sunlight
might—if still enough,
feel your cross buried in the flesh.
One has only to surrender,
you preached, open both arms to the inner,
the ever-present hold,
out-reaching every want. It's in the form
embedded, love adamant as bone.
In a breath, we can bloom and almost be you.


Valerie Martin's book of stories, her tenth book overall, presents the reader with episodes from the lives of six artists of moderate capabilities as they struggle to understand exactly what they've become in life, mid-listers, which may or may not be so bad. The stories, though longish by short story standards, are a quick read, bespeaking of Ms Martin's mastery of prose style rather than a judgement about content. Beware, however, they contain adult themes, and also moderately explicit sex. (If you're still reading books to satisfy your prurient interest in sex, then you're not reading this blog anyway.)