Category Archives: Reading

What a star does

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This summer we drove to the Grand Canyon. We spent two days, our tent pitched among the rockiest soil I’d ever encountered while camping, exploring the trails around the South rim. We watched the sun rise and fall from the great hole in the earth and looked at the fossils of sea creatures trapped in the desert. As awe-struck as I was over the actual canyon itself, I was even more astounded by the night sky.

The night we arrived dozens of amateur astronomers  filled one of the park’s lots with telescopes and welcomed any park visitor to peer through their lenses and get a closer view of the stars and planets in the night sky. A handful of rangers took people on constellation walks and used green laser pointers to map out the constellations in the sky. They told us about not only the traditional stories for Cassiopeia, Orion, Ursa Major, and a dozen more constellations, but those stories that the Hopi tribe had about the stars.

I watched my children’s eyes widen as they finally began to connect the shapes of constellations to the stars in the sky. The longer we stayed looking at the sky, the more stars appeared. The rangers and volunteers were adamant that no one use any light source of any kind. They insisted that our our pupils would open wide enough to enable us to see by the light of the stars. There was also a lot of disparaging talk about light pollution and those dastardly city lights, which made my husband and I laugh because we are in the heart of hearts city people who love city lights.

When I was a child for one of our Christmases, we were given one of those machines that turns the ceiling into the night sky. Essentially you plug it in, slide in the correct piece of paper (Northern Hemisphere, Summer) and then turn off all the lights, and the bulb in the machine projects the image onto your ceiling. My brother and I spent hours looking at those projections and trying to trace with our own fingers the path that would give us Leo or Hydra. (I know the other siblings must also have done this, but I don’t have memories of arguing with them about where the tip of Orion’s bow started as I did with Nathan).

For a couple of years in high school, I worked at OMSI as an explorer. This basically meant that I walked around the exhibit areas and helped visitors interact with the displays. We technically weren’t allowed to go to the shows gratis, but sometimes depending on who was working, the other employees would let you slip into a laser light show or Omnimax film. As a teenager I had to pretend to LOVE the laser light shows, but I didn’t. What I slipped into most often were the planetarium shows.

Yesterday as part of my poem a day efforts, I came across “The great bear” by John Hollander. The premise of this poem is exactly how difficult it is to see constellations and to point them out to others. I read it and then I read it again. Each verse is wonderful, but my eyes kept catching the lines “What a star does/Is never to surprise us as it covers/The center of its patch of darkness, sparkling/Always, a point in one of many figures.” Beautiful isn’t it?

Which is to say that what I love most about stargazing is the ability stars have to anchor humans in a particular time and place and then be connected to another by pondering “a broken/And complicated line, webbing bright stars/And fainter ones together” as the Romans did, as the Hopi did. It is the same reason I love books.

spoiling Harry Potter

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I was a senior in college when Harry Potter came out. My younger brothers and sisters devoured the books and tried in vain to get me to read them. I resisted–at first because I was in completely the wrong sort of place in my life to enjoy young adult fiction–and later because I got it into my head that I wanted to read the books with my children.

When I decided this, I didn’t have any children, but I was always planning what my unnamed, unborn children would read. My childhood had been spent devouring Ramona, Trixie Belden, the Little House books, Louisa May Alcott’s books, and every word written by L.M. Montgomery and I wanted to share every book with them. Dragging my husband through Powell’s, I would see a forlorn copy of Where the Red Fern Grows and purchase it, insisting that someday I would read it to my children. I spent years looking for a copy of No Flying in the House, which had been my favorite of the thirty books my second-grade teacher read to us. (It has since been reissued and is easy to find). But I realized that reading a book for the very first time and re-reading a book are completely different experiences. The desperation of needing to know whether Anne and Gilbert end up together created a feeling I never experienced again. No matter how many times I read the books (9 times).

When the subject of Hogwarts came up, I excused myself–mentioning my lofty goal of remaining spoiler-free. I did not want to know one event that happened in Harry’s world before I read about it with my own children. I was pretty successful. One of my most joyous parenting days was when I looked up to find both of my children with their heads tucked down in the particualr tilt of a reader. I knew then it was time for Harry Potter.

This summer we read the first book and most of the second. It was glorious–exactly what I’d hope. My daughter was hooked–reading ahead of me. I kept up in my own copies. But then, she went back to school and the one detail I failed to account for in my quest to remain spoiler free is third-graders. It turns out third grade is when the know-it-all-itis hits. Some of the children had seen all of the movies. One or two of the children had already read all 7 of the books. And once Sofia started to talk about her love of Hermione and Harry to her classmates, spoilers started flowing fresh and fast.

Harry marries Ginny.

I knew that would surprise you. It did me. My daughter managed to sneak that one out on me in the car when I was only half-listening to her chatter.

Hermione marries Ron.

Now, I’m not sure I believe this one. I think sometimes eight-year olds might get their facts mixed up, but my daughter assures me that this is absolutely correct and that I must come to terms with it.  Following this revelation (which I still do not fully believe) I explained to my daughter the concept of spoilers and she has promised to keep any other enormous revelations (especially about Voldemort) to herself. I shall trust my lovely internet not to spoil any other events in the series as well, because each of you know the joy of being surprised by a book.

Poisonous Trees

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I used to be a journalist. I filled inches and inches of column space with information about cities, businesses, people and even a pot-bellied pig. Most of what I wrote was entirely forgettable. A handful of the stories have become entwined in my own memory and altered the way I look at the world. But mostly what I got out of those years was advice on writing. One of my editors told me the surest cure for writer’s block was research.

It is advice I continue to use.

The current book is in the capable hands of a copy editor and I’ve started on the next one. There is too little of it to give anyone much idea of what it is about, but one of the characters uses wood to make art and jewelry. This means I have on my desk no fewer than a dozen books about trees, wood carving, wood identification, etc. And among the gems I’ve found when I can’t seem to write is a most lovely chapter on poisonous trees.

Did you know one of the drawbacks to using planks from the Arcwood (a tropical tree with heavy wood and yellow flowers) is that the sawdust created when cutting Arcwood lands on human skin and turns it a muddish red? Also breathing the sawdust can cause major breathing problems. Or perhaps you are familiar with the Carolina Allspice, an ornamental with seeds that mimic the effects of strychnine. I think though my favorite poisonous tree is the Giant Nettle. Its leaves are covered in fine hairs that have poison sacs attached to the tips. It takes only the tiniest bump to break these hairs free and then once it touches an animal or human, it causes unbearable stabbing pain that can be followed by paralysis.

Before this, I think the only tree I’d ascribed danger to was the Poison Sumac–easy to know its is poisonous because, you know, it is right there in its name. The same goes for the Poison Wood  tree. But I think the most interesting fact is that there aren’t that many trees that are dangerous to humans and most of them that are, only affect some of us. Like the famous tree from a Tree Grows in Brooklyn. It was a Tree of Heaven, which is native to eastern asia and many people after touching it come away with symptoms similar to what happens when you touch poison ivy.

Which is to say all of this just reminds me how different we all are. What is poison to me, you may find beautiful.

Our world strives so hard to take away all the danger–the threats to mortality. We wear seatbelts, bike helmets, have created laws about drinking and driving, texting and driving, policies about the proper temperature to serve coffee. But what is life without a little risk? What is life without mortality? What happens to us when despite all our precautions we bump up against a poisonous tree?

These are the thoughts that come to me when I think about my children and how much I’m trying to protect them. I see your children nearly everyday in my classrooms–or rather they aren’t children anymore, they are trying to become adults and venture out without all the precautions their parents gave them. And I think they need to be prepared to bump into a poisonous tree every now and then. I hope it isn’t a Giant Nettle, but a maybe a Osage that will give some folks a nasty itch if they get any of the milky sap on their hands.

Because recovering is what makes us stronger.

The unbearable difficulty of poetry

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Poetry is like coconut to students. They firmly believe they don’t like it.

Richard Tillinghast says this attitude is our own fault. That we’ve made poetry out to be for the superliterate. We tell them it is more complex that it seems, that to quote Whitman it “contains multitudes.” To read poetry requires you to have read Dickens and Joyce. Or at least this is the culture we’ve created. During the interview he gave earlier this fall at the University of Memphis, he essentially told us to knock it off and encouraged us to read a poem everyday. Because what is more consumable in our fast-paced, multi-tasking world than a poem.

I took his advice to heart and have been starting most of my mornings with a poem. I do what I’ve not allowed myself to do since I was in high school–I jump around, skimming and looking for poems that catch me, catch my mood. Which means I’m mostly reading contemporary poets. I like poetry foundation–where I can type is a word like “rain” and get all their poems that contain that word. I like poems by women. I don’t like poems that set up an elaborate specific situation–either historical or imagined. I like poems that are full of marvelous turns of phrases or that redefine an abstract concept.

Sometimes I post parts of them as my status update and try not to worry that it makes me seem high-faluting or showy. I post them because they made me cry, or smile, or laugh, or inspired me to write a paragraph of my own. I am letting myself feel about poetry like I did when I was young enough to write an entire graduation speech about “The Road Not Taken” only to realize several years later that I’d never truly understood what Frost wanted me to about the two roads in a yellow wood. The woman who taught me that went on to win a Pulitzer for her own poetry, thus teaching me that first-year composition teachers are highly undervalued.

For a while, back in college, I fancied myself a poet. I became unholy fascinated by Sylvia Plath and started down my own path of intensely autobiographical poetry that was for all intents and purposes intensely bad. Not as bad as the bunkum I wrote in my high school diary, but of the same spirit. But it introduced me to a wonderful teacher, Heather Ross Miller, who is a tremendous writer with novels and poetry and stories. And deep down in my practical heart I decided it would be okay to pursue writing someday.

I hope you read poetry.

Summer Reading: Misogyny and Faith

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After Hemingway, I thought I’d give Philip Roth, another accused misogynist a spin. I’d read American Pastoral in college, but all I remembered of the book were the detailed passages on glove making. This time I chose The Ghostwriter mostly because Katie Roiphe, who I listen to religiously on Slate’s audio bookclub constantly brings the novel up in her discussions of other authors.

The book is small and a quick read. The writing is terrific, but what I was truly intrigued by is the questions the narrator, Nathan Zuckermann, poses about the obligations of Jewish writers. The novel includes a 10-point questionnaire Zuckermann receives in response to one of his short stories. In reading this passage, I couldn’t help but see similarities between those questions and ones I’ve heard posed to mormon authors. (This is in no way to make light such singularly Jewish issues as the holocaust and thousands of years of persecution.)

One of the main criticisms (besides the ending) I had after reading Brady Udall’s The Lonely Polygamist was that I felt he’d taken the sensational and cheap way road into literature by writing about polygamy. Roth’s book asks the same question about a Jewish writer producing a story that deals with a fight over money.

I’ve ready so many entries over at  AML, Sunstone, Segullah and Exponent about these issues and for the first time I began to realize that great Jewish writers like Roth and Catholic writers like Graham Greene have explored these issues of writing literature where faith plays a predominant role in the motivations of the characters. There is much to learn here.

Back to the misogyny …. I gotta say I didn’t feel it as deeply as I expected. Yes, the main characters in both novels are men and the women seem to be the antagonists, but for the most part, the women are well-rounded, fully realized characters. The flaw is that so much of their characterization comes from sex.

I’m on to Ann Patchett‘s State of Wonder next. She’s one of the authors I get the most enjoyment out of reading and I’ve devoured all of her other books. I’m looking forward to the new one because this is a woman who gets plot, but writes damn well. Although no one seemed to have liked her last one, Run, it was among my favorites.

I’ve also started reading Rebeca Makkai’s The Borrower, a novel by a debut writer who I went to college with. We had the same creative writing teacher and were both  published in our college’s literary magazine. The similarity ends there as she’s published her short stories to much acclaim in several well-respected journals and the Best of series four years in a row. Her novel is getting blurbs everywhere (Oprah, NYT) and I’m thrilled for her. I’m twenty pages in and so far it is an excellent, a grown up/twenty-first century version of Matilda.

 

 

 

 

Between the lines

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I’m giving Hemingway another chance. In the past, I’d dismissed him, like so many other male writers, for being too masculine to hold my interest. Also it seems like his female characters are mere caretakers, put on the page to serve the needs of the male protagonist.

However, I recently have become obsessed with Jennifer Eagen’s short story (also a chapter from Visit From the Goon Squad) Safari and decided to re-read Hemingway’s The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber because Eagen’s story is an atavism of sorts of Hemingway’s story. I’d also taught Hills For White Elephants recently and having enjoyed reading both short stories decided to go back to one of his novels.

I picked The Sun Also Rises and I”m about a third of the way through it. So far, I think I’d like to write a book of my own made up of all the exposition that Hemingway has excised.  I’m not sure if Hemingway originated the theory of the iceberg, but he exhausts the reader with his employ of it.

There are dozens of delicately written scenes in which characters talk around the fact that Jake Barnes in impotent, but there is no exposition that gives it that directly to the reader. I desperately wanted there to be a line in the first pages of the book that said something to the effect of Jake Barnes lost his penis fighting on the Italian front during the war.  But this book was not written in 2011 and there is little direct talk about the actual mechanics of Jake’s war wound.

The sparseness of the dialogue is good, although sometimes it can be clunky. I prefer the descriptions of fishing from A River Runs Through It, but despite my earlier assessment of Hemingway’s inability to write realistic female characters, I find Lady Brett Ashley to be quite interesting. I’m a little troubled by her motivations and wonder at the whole conceit that romantic love has to have a physical component.

I’m also learning new slang–evidently to be tight is to be drunk.