The Evolution of an Insatiable Bookslut: Laura’s Tale

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The earliest memory of reading I have isn’t technically about reading at all, but about writing.  When I was too young to read, but old enough to know that I loved it, I wanted to write a book.  That I had no idea how to finagle the squiggly nonsense on the pages was an obvious roadblock, but somehow I managed to stumble around it by writing music.  What I would do is listen to a song and write what I heard.  It meant that my earliest books looked like indecipherable loopy lines that at least read left to right.  I mean, if you could read it.  Which you couldn’t.

It probably looked exactly like this.

It probably looked exactly like this.

Throughout my childhood my mother fed me books.  As a working mom with a difficult marriage, my mama didn’t have tons of extra time to read books to us; I’m sure she did read to us, but the strongest memories I have are of her providing access to books.  That meant regular library trips in addition to the weekly ones my class took to our elementary school library.  I very vividly remember the first real chapter book I read because I had to get special permission to check it out; Jeanette Oakes’s A Woman Named Damaris is classified as Christian fiction, but it alludes to rape near the beginning. The librarian felt that I, as an eight-year-old, was probably getting in over my head.  I felt like A Total Grown-Up carting that book around school.

When I was a teenager, my mom would pass on all the grocery store fiction she read, books about medical examiners and serial killers, and I ate that shit UP!

Reading has just always been a part of what interests me and how I define myself; books are so intertwined with my life story that they can’t be separated.  When I think back on my school years, my mind is cluttered with so many memories that are tied to literature.  I was an Accelerated Reader badass with a million Pizza Hut coupons.  Teachers asked me to read aloud to the class.   After winning a contest by designing a book cover for The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, I got to take a picture with Barbara Robinson.  My high school English teacher let me read real books like They Cage the Animals at Night while my class was still thumbing through Flour Babies.  I was SO that student, the one that just annoys the shit out of everyone except teachers and other people’s parents.  I know.  I’m sorry.

Oh god I know. I KNOW.

Oh god I know. I KNOW.

I flitted around college majors before settling on English, though, weirdly enough.

By the time I started college I had decided to be a forensic or school psychologist.  Three classes in and I knew that wasn’t going to fly, so I fell to secondary education in English.  After my first middle school class visit, during which I said “fuck” to a student, I felt pretty sure being a high school teacher wasn’t going to be for me either, so I pared it down to English.  Things like salary concerns and job security had led me all over the place, but finally I was happy.  I would be lying to myself if I let this crap economy, the abysmal salary, and the sucky chances of landing a solid academic job get in the way of doing what I love.  (Current professors, please do not smash my graduate school idealistic imaginings, ok?)

Being a reader and a writer are part of my natural fabric, so it makes sense to make that as big a part of my life as I can.  Even though this comes with the pseudo-downside of having someone else choose what I read for the majority of the time, I’ll get to do that for my students one day, which is awesome (and possibly a forum for some nonsensical retribution).

Librarian Hanna is my spirit animal.

Librarian Hanna is my spirit animal.

And when you get down to it, I feel lucky. You’ll have to excuse my nerdy enthusiasm, but can you think of a better job than slaving away, writing short stories in some coffee shop, reading articles and books all night, every night, and teaching students who are math majors and will NEVER NEED TO WRITE DAMMIT? Because I sure can’t.

Authors, are you doing the wrong thing when it comes to Twitter sales?

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EDIT: As many people pointed out, this TOTALLY ALSO applies to Goodreads. See comments for details.

About a week ago, I was live-tweeting my new cable internet installation. I know, it doesn’t sound like much to live-tweet, but the dude installing my cable was unusually cool. I found out that he was super-afraid of spiders, but lest you think him unmanly, I would like to follow that with the fact that he’s a cage fighter. He reminded me of Andy Dwyer from Parks and Recreation, but smarter.

See? Super smart.

See? Super smart.

While I was live-tweeting about having cable internet installed, I had this conversation with DirecTV:

Here’s why this interaction ticked me off instead of enticing me toward buying their service:

  • Fake empathy. “Sounds frustrating, can I sell you something now plz?” Bzzzzzzt, wrong. It’s unfortunate, because the empathy play could have been very successful in a situation like this, but Lloyd, uh, pulled his trigger a little early, if you gets my meaning. By launching right into the pitch, he made himself seem vulture-like.
  • Lack of doing his homework. Any successful salesperson knows that people don’t give two shits about what you’re trying to sell them. They only care about things they want and things they need. Your job, then, as a salesperson, is to determine what they need and tell them why your product is the best thing to fulfill that need. Thirty seconds looking through my Twitter feed would have told Lloyd that I don’t actually need DirecTV because I was already having new service installed as we were tweeting. That’s like a car salesman trying to show you a car as you’re driving off in a car you just bought.
  • I didn’t even want TV, so even if I didn’t have another provider installing cable right then, I still don’t have any use for DirecTV.

What is it the kids say these days? SMH?

And here’s the kicker: should I ever be considering getting a service comparable to DirecTV, this little incident is going to ping in my brain. Even if it’s just a tiny negative, it’s still a negative; their competitors might not have any negatives, which would make this stand out stronger. This is the only interaction I’ve ever had with them, so most of what they are as a company to me is represented by an employee who takes the lazy route when doing online sales. Are their techs also lazy? Their customer service? This was not a good first impression.

There are probably blogs and magazines out there that suggest using a Twitter search to find potential customers so that you can solicit them. That’s what DirecTV seems to have done–set up a search for Time Warner Cable, look for complaints, and step in all smooth-like (snort): “Hey, girl. Heard you’re having a bad time with TWC. Come on over, I got what you need.” It’s actually quite a bit like a sleazy pick-up line, if you think about it. Knowing nothing about me, they tried to talk me into bed . . . figuratively speaking. I mean, I guess if sleazy PUA is the vibe you’re going for when you’re doing Twitter sales, this tactic would be the best thing for you–if not, then probably avoid it, and maybe avoid those blogs and sites if they’re not telling you how to use those searches effectively.

I get this from authors more frequently than I ought to, only far less targeted. (“She likes books and she has a few followers! Maybe she will read MY BOOK” seems to be about the extent of research done for Twitter pitches, as evidenced by the fact that I frequently receive pitches for erotica, romance, and bad urban fantasy.) Frankly, this is even worse; in the flirtation-as-sales-tactics analogy, at least DirecTV was going after a type. These authors, on the other hand, are hitting on anything with a pulse.

Don’t be that person. Don’t be a bad pick-up artist when you’re trying to sell your book.

DirecTV wasn’t getting a new customer that day no matter what sales tactic they tried; I wasn’t in the market for TV service, period. A little romance, though, might have opened the door to them at a later date. The conversation could have gone more like this:

DTV: “We’re sorry you had bad service from your cable provider. What happened?”

Me (eager to commiserate, as many jaded customers are): “They kept raising my rates! I’m paying almost $20 more per month than I was when I started! Ugh!”

DTV: “Oh no, that’s terrible. What kind of service did you have with them?”

Me: “Cable internet.”

DTV (being a television company and not an internet company, eep!): “I heard Internet Company X has outstanding service if you’re looking for a new provider. I hope you’d consider us if you ever need TV!”

Me: “Thanks for the helpful tip! If I ever need TV, I will look you guys up.”

If Lloyd had used this approach with me, it would have hit so many better notes. He would have seemed genuinely interested in discovering my needs as a customer, and he would have seemed helpful, despite the fact that he couldn’t directly sell me what I was in the market to buy. That shows real customer-needs focus, something I would remember if I did need TV.

For an author, this is a little trickier, I grant you. It’s far more difficult to work a pitch for your book into a conversation. However, there are some tips you can use here:

  • Be reader-oriented, not selling-your-book oriented. If someone puts out a call for book suggestions, for example, don’t recommend your book just because you want people to read it. (This happens SO OFTEN, I cannot even tell you. It’s always a womp-womp moment. Awkward.) You’re probably a reader, too, so talk to them as a reader, not as a salesperson.  If you can recommend a book they truly end up liking, you’ve just built up a nice little deposit of customer romance.
  • Do your homework on reading tastes if you’re going to tweet-solicit a blogger. Make sure you’re not trying to sell TV to a person shopping for internet.
  • Make genuine connections instead of using someone’s situation/complaint/request for books as an excuse to toss in a sales pitch. Not only does this de-smarm what might have been a bad pick-up-line situation, but it makes sure that you get valuable data that you can actually use to determine if the person will be a potential customer. Also, you might make a new friend! Friends are awesome!
If you don't totally have this song in your head now, we can't be friends.

If you don’t totally have this song in your head now, we can’t be friends. Okay, okay, we can be friends. I still love you.

Nothing but good things can come from this kind of sales approach. At worst, you haven’t pissed off any reasonable person. (If they’re unreasonable, just remember–we know who the unreasonable people are in our lives. We know who gets pissed when they haven’t even really been wronged. One of my family members used to do this in restaurants–go off on the servers for bullshit, non-issue “problems.” I always felt terrible for the servers and sometimes left them extra tips when the family member refused to do so.) At best, you get a new fan and maybe even a friend, a person who will talk you up, suggest you to friends, extol your best qualities and even defend you if some loony crank decides that you’ve done something to wrong them. Someone who will say, when your name comes up in conversation, “Oh, I know that person. She’s really cool, we talk on Twitter. I like her a lot.” I dunno about you, but that’s the kind of endorsement I’d want.

Have you had a bad tweet solicitation? Or a really good one? Share your Twitter sales stories in the comments below!

Review: Crapalachia by Scott McClanahan

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crapalachia

Book: Crapalachia

Author: Scott McClanahan

Published: March 2013 by Two Dollar Radio

First Lines: “There were 13 of them. The children had names that ended in Y sounds.”

Rating: 4.25/5 calls to 911 to get the ambulance to take you to the store to buy 7-Up for your son

HOLY BALLS YOU GUYS I AM WRITING A BOOK REVIEW. Yes, yes, I actually read my ass a book and now I’m reviewing the motherfucker*.

*Apologies to Scott McClanahan and Two Dollar Radio for referring to the book as “motherfucker.” I have no evidence at all that the book fucked any mothers.

I didn’t know anything about Crapalachia when it arrived in my mailbox. I didn’t read the blurb on the back of the book. I knew two things going into it: one, that Scott McClanahan had a somewhat cheeky way of referring to Appalachia, to which I can relate, having my own roots sprawling through the same area of the world; two, as a setting, it would (or should) feature highly in the book, since the cover had “A biography of a place” as the tagline.

I have no damn idea how to sum up how I feel about this book, and that’s the truth. So, I’m not going to try to sum it up. Here are some thoughts I had about this book:

  • I didn’t get any sense of place from the book, even though Appalachia seemed to be intended to be present enough to be an additional character. I grew up in Kentucky and my mom lived in West Virginia (where the book takes place), so I admit I had some expectations; I didn’t really feel Appalachia in this book. Other than some brief references to coal miners and coal mining, it could have been set in a bunch of different places.
  • After I readjusted my brain from expecting a story about Appalachia, I thought his stories about his family were just about perfect. So much so that I actually just deleted a bunch of stuff I wrote and bumped up the star rating a half-star. No, it wasn’t the book I expected to read. But it was a book I really enjoyed reading once my brain wrapped itself around the actuality of the book.
  • I found McClanahan’s style a little jarring at first, but it smoothed out quickly.
  • People who liked Running With Scissors and/or The Perks of Being a Wallflower will probably enjoy this book. Or people who generally like books featuring fucked-up families.
  • I’m half-saddened, half-happy that McClanahan felt the need to add an appendix to the book to talk about what was true and what he had taken liberties with. Saddened for the obvious reason–has it really become necessary to strip away the magic of a book because some people can’t friggin’ figure out that literature is not the same thing as journalism? (Thank you, James Frey, for putting one over so hard on Oprah that this is now a Big Fucking Deal.) McClanahan, however, handled the appendix so well that it was a great addition to the book. I’ve read other books where the “confession” retroactively diminished the power of the story I’d read, but this one didn’t, and I was glad.
  • Reading this book directly after reading a book by Barbara Kingsolver is probably not the best idea and might have been what flummoxed my brain.

Overall: yes, I think this is a book to read. Once I stopped looking for Appalachia, the magic of the stories got under my skin and wouldn’t let go. The characters rolled off the page and tapped me on the shoulder. I laughed and I grew somber. I felt. I related. Good job, Mr. McClanahan.

Do you ever not feel like reading?

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I told some friends recently that I hadn’t read anything for a month. Not a single book. Barely part of a book (light poetry for a post, but no heavy reading). These were friends I connect with digitally, but I could feel them giving me a blank look over the miles–something akin to the look I might get if I unzipped my face and revealed that I have been, this whole time, a lizard person.

And then we had a fight IN SLOW MOTION

And then we had a fight IN SLOW MOTION

“Wow,” they said. “I can’t even imagine not reading a book for a whole month.”

My friends weren’t being snotty about it–I’m not trying to imply that they kicked me out of the reading club because I hadn’t read anything lately. No, they were genuinely dumbfounded. It’s not that I just hadn’t read anything to review, or just hadn’t read anything pressing on my TBR, or just hadn’t read anything _______________ (fill in your own reading distractions here). I just hadn’t felt like reading anything. At all. Not a novella, not a short story, not a misleading back-of-book blurb.

Am I weird for going through phases like this?

This hasn’t been the first time I have completely stopped reading for a period of time. Actually, I’ve gone far, far longer than a month before–I’ve probably gone half a year without picking up something to read. Especially since I got the internet fifteen years ago . . . cough. It doesn’t really bother me when I’m not reading; I read when I get the urge, and when I don’t feel like reading, I find other things to do. I make jewelry or knit or watch 50 hours of Northern Exposure* in a row. I make ice cream or take up a new hobby that I will surely abandon at some point.

Oh, TV Guide from the 90's.

Oh, TV Guide from the 90′s.

*I don’t actually know if there were a full 50 episodes of Northern Exposure. But damn, that was a good show.

Then, out of nowhere, the urge to read comes upon me again and I devour a stack of books in a week. This time, I broke my hiatus with a re-read of Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver, followed closely by Crapalachia by Scott McClanahan. Which is apropos of nothing, really, except that sharing what we’re reading is kinda what happens at this ‘ere blog.

What I’m curious about is, does this happen to you, too? Or are you more like my friends, who would feel weird if they went for a long time without reading a book? If you take the occasional hiatus, what brings you back to reading? What are some good books you’ve read after a dry spell? Leave it all in the comments below!

 

Warren G shouldn’t have been allowed to regulate.

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So, I said I would be writing about more things than just books here. Mostly, I’ve still been writing about books; so, I thought, what better way to introduce general entertainment posts than with a post about mid-90′s rap? Super perfect. (fist pump)

Warren G’s “Regulate” came out when I was 11; the song, along with the upstairs neighbor who was allowed to watch as much MTV as she wanted, helped define my middle-school-era musical tastes. I would listen to it over and over again . . . which, I probably shouldn’t have been allowed to do, since it doesn’t exactly speak kindly of women. Recently, when I needed to put together a workout mix, I turned to the mid-90′s rap that I still pretty much love. Listening to “Regulate” again for the first time in quite awhile made me arch my brow  (especially after reading this hilarious post about it).

Warren G is a terrible regulator.

No, seriously.

I mean, at the very beginning of the song, he says you can’t be any “geek off the street” if you want to regulate. You’ve gotta like, you know, be good at it. In fact, he says that–”and we’re damn good, too.” So, let’s see how the night goes for Warren G:

  • Goes out looking for females.
  • Stops for a dice game and has guns pulled on him.
  • Proceeds to get robbed at gunpoint in his own town.
  • Starts wishing he was a bird so he could fly far, far far away.
  • Is saved by Nate Dogg.
  • Is led to a car full of stranded women, found by Nate Dogg.
  • Presumably scores with one or some of the women, but Nate Dogg got the one that he said was “sexy as hell.” Sexiness status of the other women is unknown.

Is it just me, or does Warren G kind of sound like a chump? Rolling up to a game of dice and getting robbed at gunpoint seems exactly like something that would happen to a geek off the street. And Warren G was definitely not handy with the steel (ie, his gun, which, let’s be real–they probably stole from him). Then, Warren G didn’t even help with finding the lay-deez for that evening’s romp. I bet Nate Dogg even had to pay for the hotel rooms, unless they recovered Warren’s stolen property before leaving the scene of their mass murder–or, I guess, mass-self-defense.

Also . . . in a dangerous situation, it doesn’t seem very tough to me to wish you had wings to fly away instead of doing something proactive, like reaching for your own gun or, y’know . . . fighting back somehow. I would fully expect a regulator to be able to take on a bunch of random thugs on the street. (Regulators are kind of like Batman, right? That’s what I’m getting from that song. A Batman who goes out trawling for “hoes”.)

At this point, I kind of feel like Warren G is Gilligan to Nate Dogg’s Skipper. Not very competent, but Nate Dogg keeps him around because he just loves his “little buddy.”

Gilligan-The-Skipper-gilligans-island-26546640-800-597

‘Man, I wanted to find the freaks this time.’ ‘Someday, little buddy, someday.’

Filed under: Yes, these are things I really think about. Welcome to the inner part of my brain.

The Evolution of an Insatiable Bookslut: Tony’s Tale

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Unlike many booksluts, I was not a natural born reader.  I have no stories about teaching myself to read or learning to read before I started school.  But I had a lot of people in my life who read to me at a young age.  My mom read Little Golden Books to me all the time, and so did my Aunt Jill and Aunt Stephanie.  I could recite my favorite books from memory, even if I couldn’t understand the letters and words.

The Saggy Baggy Elephant

One of my childhood favorites

Once I started school, it wasn’t until near the end of kindergarten that I learned to read very simple words, and throughout first and second grade, I struggled with reading and usually got placed in the slower reading groups.

But my love for information and a good story overcame my difficulties.  Despite my challenges with school-related readings, I started reading books on my own.  I always loved library day, and I would check out books from the A New True Book series to learn about different kinds of animals and dinosaurs and whatever else I was interested in at the moment.  They fed my information addiction like a 1980s children’s version of Wikipedia.   At night I read stories by my nightlight when my parents though thought I was asleep.  I had a variety of storybooks and an illustrated book of surprisingly graphic Bible stories that my dad used to read from.  This one quickly became my favorite, and when Dad’s job got too busy for him to keep up with family readings, I started reading it on my own.

Jehovah's Witness Book of Bible Stories

All I see now is a bunch of white people posing as Hebrews.

Before long, I was moving on to bigger and better books, and my school librarian guided me to the mythology section.  I read everything in it.  Then I spent a while devouring Choose Your Own Adventure books.

For summer vacations, I would ride my bike down to the park, and then to the pool, and then I’d go to the public library in damp swim trunks with the moisture soaking through the bottom of my T-shirt.  I checked out how-to books, and I read about all kinds of different crafts and artwork, drawing, origami, and making neat toys out of junk.  I also read even more about animals and some of my favorite books were the ones about where to catch critters and how to keep them alive in homemade habitats.

The Oubliette

I apologize to all the creatures who suffered this fate at my hands. Animals once considered me a super villain.

Those first years of reading were great, and I enjoyed them very much, but as I got older I moved on to different kinds of books.  At the age of twelve, I spent a day at my Aunt Tina’s house and I told her how I planned to read The Hobbit and then The Lord of the Rings because one of my friends had suggested it.  She put the conversation on hold as she ran into a different room to dig in her closet, and she came back with a bare green hardback copy of The Silmarillion.  I’ll never know what the dust jacket looked like.  “This is what came before The Hobbit,” she told me.  She let me borrow it, and I read the whole thing before I read any of the other books.  How, as a twelve-year-old, I had the patience for dry reading like The Silmarillion, I can only attribute to my previous readings of mythology and the Bible.  I quickly moved on to Tolkien’s other works, and finished off the entire Tolkien section of my middle school’s library, including Farmer Giles of Ham and his translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Following Tolkien, I made a deal with one of my friends that if he read The Hobbit, I would read Mossflower by Brian Jacques.  I loved it for the anthropomorphic rodent heroes, and I read every other book that was available from the Redwall series.  Even better was Watership Down.  After that, I became an indiscriminate sci-fi/fantasy junkie, which continued throughout my high school years.Redwall

Strangely enough, I very seldom enjoyed the “literature” I was assigned to read for school.  I won’t hate on A Separate Peace or The Great Gatsby too much, but I never got myself interested in them enough to match the enthusiasm that my English teachers had.  I was never assigned to read Hemingway, so naturally, he became my favorite literary author.  Of all the things I was assigned to read in high school, the only two I really appreciated were Grendel and To Kill a Mockingbird.  I obsessed over the dragon’s lecture to Grendel, trying to puzzle out all the big words and make sense of what my teacher had summed up as “a bunch of gobbledegook”.

Like Susie, I joined in academic competition and got to read and analyze a few literary works.  The one I remember best was Antigone.  I don’t know if it was the work itself or just that particular translation, but I found it moving.  Other than these few exceptions, though, I spent most of my time in high school reading pulp sci-fi and fantasy novels.  If I could have unread all the Terry Brooks books and been given the time back to socialize, perhaps the Virginity Fairy would have relieved me of my V-card much sooner.

Virginity Fairy

The Virginity Fairy visited me a little later than she did most people I know.

Near the end of my high school days, my friend Eric introduced me to Stephen King by getting me The Shining as a Christmas gift.  I got a few chapters into it before my dad confiscated it for religious reasons.  Undaunted, I read ‘Salem’s Lot, keeping it discreetly hidden.

Given my unwillingness to read most assigned books, I really wonder what possessed me to major in English when I started college.  Nevertheless, I did.  During my years at Indiana State, I hardly had time to read anything that wasn’t part of the curriculum.  It turned out that this was my time to finally gain an appreciation for some of the classics.  I tore up Things Fall Apart by recently departed Chinua Achebe.  I also loved me some Nathaniel Hawthorne, Bram Stoker, and Mark Twain.  Over the summer between my freshman and sophomore years, I decided to embrace my heritage and read the Bible from cover to cover.  I liked Ecclesiastes the most.  At that time in my life, it was comforting to know that everything is meaningless.

I kept reading and working my way toward a degree in English literature.  I was required to read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone for a pop culture class.  I followed the morbid misadventures of Bigger Thomas in Native Son, and I finally got a lesson in Chaucer where the professor assigned the Miller’s Tale.

Not all of my reading was in English.  For my classical studies courses, I translated Ovid, Vergil, and Catullus into English.  I especially liked Catullus.  His love affair with Lesbia mirrored my own heartbreaking college romance, so I really related to the euphoric poems at first, and the miserable ones later.

I graduated and took a break from reading literature for a while.  Instead I read self-help books about business as I tried to find my way in the world.  Thinking journalism to be a viable option for making a living, I started reading magazines and newspapers more than books.

In the decade since college, my appreciation for books has continued to develop.  For whatever reason, I did Cliff’s Notes on A Tale of Two Cities. (I had blown it off to read Fight Club and Choke.)  I remembered that the lecture made it sound interesting, so I went back and read it years after I graduated.  I read the remainder of the Harry Potter series after the last book finally came out.  I also discovered Gregory McGuire, Christopher Moore, and George R.R. Martin.  Finally, my best friend Eric–the same one who got me The Shining–talked me into reading The Gunslinger.  I shirked a lot of my personal responsibilities as I got sucked into that world.  Not long after, I began my love affair with audiobooks.  I usually listen to books I’ve already read, but occasionally I listen to something completely new, especially if it’s non-fiction.  I’ve done On Becoming a Leader, How to Win Friends and Influence People, and Pimsleur courses for Cantonese and Japanese.

My most recent discovery is Haruki Murakami.  I just finished Norwegian Wood, and I have The Wind-up Bird Chronicle in my to-read queue.

So there it is: Tony’s dirty, dirty past as a bookslut.  What about you, fellow booksluttians?  Did we read any of the same books?  How did you come to be a bookslut?

Meet Matilde, the love muse of Pablo Neruda.

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Serena asked me if I would participate in her National Poetry Month blog tour and I said yes, of course! Amy and I would both write posts! (Hers is here.) I initially intended to write a post about Jim Carroll, my favorite poet of all time–a poet that I’ve written poetry to. Then, this popped up on Facebook:

nerudalovepoetry

Sigh. Pablo.

When I think of (successful) love poetry, I think of Pablo Neruda. Love is one of the most moving, but one of the most difficult, subjects to tackle in verse; love poetry can go from sensual to porny, or from sweet to saccharine, or from devoted to obsessively-stalkery if the tone is just a hair off. As a subject, love is both inspiring and terrifically complicated to navigate.

The first Neruda love sonnet I came across was Sonnet XI. I was seventeen, and it gripped me from the first lines: “I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair. / Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets.” I connected to Neruda because I feel that we experience love the same way. In fact, we used lines from Neruda in our wedding ceremony; they seemed apt.

I don’t love Pablo himself, though. Not only because I adore my husband (shifty eyes), but because loving Pablo Neruda was the place of his wife and widow, Matilde Urrutia. His famous collection of love poetry, 100 Love Sonnets, was inspired by his love for her, which I think makes her one of the most well-loved women in all of poetic history. Neruda dedicated the book to her with a love letter, even: “I built up these lumber piles of love, and with fourteen boards each I built little houses, so that your eyes, which I adore and sing to, might live in them.” I decided that, for National Poetry Month, I wanted to get to know Matilde a little better. A woman who inspired the kind of poetry that Neruda wrote could be fascinating.

Neruda y Matilde.jpg

Matilde and Pablo

Sadly, I didn’t find a great deal about Matilde Urrutia, even though she was a singer before she took up with Neruda. The pair met in 1946. Neruda and his second wife, Delia, were attending a concert in Santiago; Matilde caught his eye immediately with her fiery red hair. We don’t generally think of someone who can love so deeply and write about it so beautifully as being a bit of a scoundrel, but Neruda was; he hired her in 1949 to be his nurse while they began their illicit affair under Delia’s nose. He and Matilde eventually had a home together and had been “symbolically” married while Delia was still . . . well, I was going to say “actually” married to Neruda, but from what I understand, their marriage wasn’t completely legally recognized because of Neruda’s first wife. This wasn’t the first time Neruda had taken a new lover while still married, it seems.

The Pablo Neruda Foundation’s website notes:

Matilde Urrutia arrived in Paris. Neruda was in the GDR, participating in the Third World Youth Festival, at which Matilda had also been invited to sing. They met in Berlin. In her memoirs, she wrote, “that taste of sin, to be lying, to hide, to conceal, was the biggest incentive for our love, those furtive glances… the complicity of every minute was something that grew the desire to be together, to touch, and this desire is devouring us, drags us to the conviction that we cannot live separately…”

Delia left Neruda permanently in 1955; Matilde transformed from a mistress living in the shadows to Neruda’s strong and loving wife. She left everything in her life to be with Neruda.

A painting of Matilde that hangs in their home, La Chascona, in Santiago. It portrays two faces–the public singer and the woman that Neruda privately loved. In her hair, Neruda’s profile is hidden to signify their secret relationship.

Matilde was Neruda’s last wife and fiercest protector. She forgave him his trespasses, and when she couldn’t, she sought only small revenges; instead of leaving him when he had an affair with her niece, she voted against his candidate in a major political election. (Granted, with Neruda’s political focus, voting against him wouldn’t have been “small.”) When he passed in 1973, she stayed with his body, weeping, unable to leave him. When she slept, she clung to him still.

After his death, Matilde took up the mantle of Neruda’s political causes. She suffered for this; the political climate in Chile at the time was stormy enough for many to believe that Neruda had been murdered by political enemies. In her will, she directed their estate to create the Pablo Neruda Foundation, primarily dedicated to maintaining his legacy.

I can’t say I approve of how Neruda and Matilde managed their affair, but it’s not my right to pass judgment. I feel for Delia (and his first wife, Marie, for that matter), but I can’t ignore that the love Pablo and Matilde shared was deep and significant. We should all be so lucky to have love like that.

I will leave you with a sonnet from Pablo to Matilde. Normally I would post a lovey sonnet (I kind of love love), but I saw this one and felt it really captured the turmoil of their lives outside of the love bubble.

Sonnet LXII (from “Evening” in 100 Love Sonnets)

Woe is me, woe is us, my dearest:
we wanted only love, to love one another,
but among so many griefs it was fated
that only we two would be so hurt.

We wanted the you and the me for ourselves,
the you of a kiss, the me of a secret bread:
and that’s how it was, infinitely simple,
till hatred came in through the window.

They hate, those who did not love
our love, nor any other love: those people,
wretched as chairs in an empty room–

till they were tangled in ashes,
till their ominous faces
faded in the fading twilight.

Sources: “Lover and guardian: Matilde Urrutia”

“Matilde Urrutia” from Universidad de Chile

The Pablo Neruda Foundation

Review: Double Feature by Owen King

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Book: Double Feature

Author: Owen King

Published: March 2013 by Scribner, 419 pages

Date Read: April 2013

First Line: ”The steel-on-steel whisk of the curtain rings scraping along the rod seemed to come from the sky, and for the last seven or eight seconds of his dream, Sam Dolan found himself turning in a circle, searching for the source of the sound, but there was no one else in the vast parking lot.”

Genre/Rating: Literary fiction; 5/5 well-known indie actors brandishing a replica of Bilbo’s sword Sting purchased from SkyMall with an (ZOMG!) actual, glow-in-the-dark blade!

Review: In 2006, I found a copy of Owen King’s We’re All in This Together on the library’s New Release shelf. It was excellent. So excellent, in fact, once I finished it, I turned right around and purchased myself a copy to own (which luckily I don’t do very often, as my bookshelves are overloaded to the breaking point and there is no room in here for even one more. Not even a TINY additional bookshelf. I’ve checked. I’ve measured. NO MORE ROOM.)

I waited patiently (fine, you guys know me, I wasn’t at all patient, I stalked his author page like a creeper) to see what King would produce next, and selfishly hoped it would be a longer work – if he’d won me over so completely with his short stories (and one haunting novella), I was eager to see what he’d do with a lengthier work.

I was completely in the right to be anticipatory.

Double Feature is one of those books where you not only fall in love with the characters, you get to know them. They’re very real. Flaws-and-all real. I love characters that are just like people I’d meet in my own life. People in books are all too often either ALL GOOD or ALL BAD or they’re VERY VERY GOOD with ONE FATAL FLAW or they’re just A METAPHOR FOR SOMETHING ELSE or what have you, and that gets tiresome, because real live people walking around on the earth, just trying their hardest to not screw it up too badly? We’re not all good, or all bad, or a metaphor for anything. We’re a gray area. We sometimes spectacularly mess things up, to the point of not being able to fix them. We sometimes are capable of great things. And we sometimes stagnate and just go about our day-to-day and go to work and live our lives and try really hard to keep our heads above water. That’s what real people do. And that’s what the people in this book do, and oh, did I love them for it.

Sam Dolan is a young, optimistic filmmaker when we first meet him, working on his very first production: an indie piece called Who We Are. His father is Booth Dolan, an over-the-top B-movie actor who Sam has never felt close to. His mother, Allie, has recently passed away and Sam hasn’t gotten over it yet. And then something happens with his movie, and I can’t tell you what it is, because the reveal of that was so brilliantly written that I actually half-covered my face and said, “Oh. Oh, no, oh, shit, no, really? SHIT.” And may have laughed a little, because that’s what you do when something is really, really uncomfortable. (Well, it’s what I do, anyway.)

The book moves between times; to Sam’s childhood, to years after the movie situation. We meet the players in Sam’s life: his roommate Wesley, who writes a review blog for things people send him and refuses to leave the house; his ex-girlfriend Polly who hasn’t quite settled into the ex role yet and her burly Germanic baseball-player husband Jo-Jo; Sam’s bitterly brilliant half-sister Mina; his godfather Tom, who can’t stop building rooms onto his sprawling house, even though he lives there alone; and Tess, the television producer who might just be a match for Sam’s tendency to run away from anything resembling a commitment.

These people are real, and flawed, and fantastic. You want to invite them over for dinner (and maybe hide the knives before they arrive.) You want to spend time with them, talking to them and getting to know them and laughing with them and being a part of their lives. There’s a feel of Irving to these people; that same lovable misfit quality, that same fierce love you feel for them when you get to know them. The book is also very intelligent, very witty, and very wise. And at one point there’s a little poetry, and you know how that wins me over, right? (Spoiler alert in case you don’t know: it does. It very much does.)

I sped through the book this week, because I wanted to know what happened. But that meant it was going to end. And I didn’t want it to end. So I was torn between wanting to finish and never, ever wanting to finish. I suppose there are worse things to happen in the world; I just know turning the last page made me very melancholy, because it was done.

I’m lucky enough to be going to see the author read from the book tomorrow night and will be getting my (sadly, water-damaged, as I was caught in a rainstorm last week with it, stupid rainstorm) copy of the book signed tomorrow night. The characters get to live on for one more day for me, in the author’s voice, no less. I have no complaints about that. I’ll be glad to meet up with them again.

Come with me, then, and we’ll leave it far and far away

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When Susie asked if I wanted to participate in Serena’s blog tour celebrating National Poetry Month at Savvy Verse and Wit, my response was:

  • Yes
  • When
  • Awesome
  • Oh, also hell yes

Most of you know I’m kind of a poetry nerd. There’s probably a name for that. Poetryphile? Poetryphiliac? Whatever, I dig poetry the most, daddy-o. I write it, I read it, it makes me all thrilly and sometimes there are tears. Sometimes I read it because I need beautiful words in my eyeholes and sometimes I read it because I want to revel in all those glorious words and sometimes I read it because I want to see what’s going on in the poetry world and sometimes I read it because I only have a brief period of time to read and poetry is a briefly compact magic.

So today, let’s talk about one of my most favorite poets. I have a lot of them, but today we’re talking about a major poetry badass: Mr. E. E. Cummings.

And also a fine, fine figure of a man.

And also a fine, fine figure of a man.

E. E. Cummings (real name: Edward Estlin Cummings, I like Estlin very much, it’s fancy, no?) was born in 1894. In his sixty-seven years, he wrote plays, poems, essays, and books, and oh, also was an artist, in case you thought he could only write. Why? Because he was a Renaissance man, I assume.

He also:

  • went to Harvard (FANCY!)
  • worked for a book dealer (HARDWORKING!)
  • enlisted and served in an ambulance corps in World War I (BRAVE!)
  • was a prisoner of war for 3.5 months in France and was released by President Wilson (WELL-CONNECTED!)
  • fell in love with France even though he was detained there (FORGIVING!)
  • traveled heavily throughout all of Europe (BON VIVANTY!)
  • was friends with Pablo Picasso (SUPPORTIVE!)
  • lost his father when he was only 32 (TRAGIC!)
  • guest-lectured at Harvard (SCHOLARLY!)
  • married two women, divorced each of them not long after, and lived in SIN with a third woman (SEXY!)
  • was randomly a Republican who approved of McCarthyism (PERPLEXING!)
  • was quite a writer of erotic poetry (HOT!)
  • played with style, form, and punctuation (CREATIVE!)
Also in his later years, he looked a lot like my grandfather, so how could I not love that?

Also in his later years, he looked a lot like my grandfather, so how could I not love that?

Also, I learned that even though I’ve called him “cummings” my whole life, he actually preferred the traditional capitalized spelling of his name, so “Cummings” it shall be from now on. I STAND CORRECTED!

Let’s look at some of his poems I love best and discuss, yeah? Yes, let’s!

(With the formatting, I have to paste in a photo or it’s all wonky. Click the photo for the original site – it’s Poets.org, and I highly recommend it.)

I love this one. SIDE NOTE! You’re aware of why the title’s “Buffalo Bill’s,” right? No? I WILL TELL YOU! When a poet doesn’t title a poem, the title becomes the first line. Cummings often didn’t title his work; therefore, a lot of his poems are titled with the first line.

I love “watersmooth-silver” and I love “onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat” and I love “blueeyed boy.” I love “defunct” as if Buffalo Bill just ran down like a wind-up toy. I love “Jesus/he was a handsome man” because I can hear the sorrow and regret in those lines. And I love “Jesus” just hanging out like that: it can either run into the next line, like a curse, or it can be addressing Jesus, like a proper name. And the last three lines: it’s railing against death, the waste of it, the abject unfairness of it all. This is an elegy for Buffalo Bill, but it’s also an elegy for anyone who’s died. I read this one aloud whenever I come across it; out loud if I’m alone, under my breath if I’m in company. It demands to be read aloud. Most of Cummings’ work does, I think.

I love this one. This one makes me weep. It is so intelligent on so many levels. First, you have to read this aloud. You’re missing out if you don’t. This is such a musical, lyrical poem. “Stars rain sun moon.” “With up so floating many bells down.” You have to say these things, because they ring in your mouth. They’re rich there. On the paper they’re lovely; in your voice, they sing.

On one level this is a love story; the participants are a man named Anyone and a woman named Noone. That’s the level I read it at in high school; the other kids around me were all, “THIS IS NONSENSE FOOLISHNESS” and I read “(and noone stooped to kiss his face)” and “noone loved him more and more” and fought back tears in my overly-bright English classroom.

But on another level, an adult level, this is about alienation, loneliness, dying alone. No one stooped to kiss anyone’s face. No one. No one and anyone were earth by April. Forgotten, but never even seen – no one saw anyone. No one did.

It’s a poem about how we’re never alone. It’s a poem about how we’re always alone. And therefore, it is a poem that is true.

No Cummings post would be complete without this, even though it’s become ubiquitous. It’s become ubiquitous because it’s (in my most humble opinion) just about the perfect love poem. You’ve probably heard this somewhere (In My Shoes, maybe? Cameron Diaz reading it tearfully at her sister’s wedding?) or seen it on a tattoo or in a Tumblr post or heard it quoted. That’s ok. I’m putting it here anyway. You can always see it again. It won’t hurt.

Here is the wonder that is keeping the stars apart. The wonder that is keeping the stars apart. Can you imagine a more perfect line of poetry? I get a thrill every time I read that. And I’ve read this poem, most assuredly, hundreds of times.

I have people whose hearts I carry in mine. I say this poem quietly for them, sometimes. This poem is theirs. It might belong to the whole world now, but it was mine before it was everyone else’s. I found it when I was only a wee one, and wept all over the anthology at the wonder that was keeping the stars apart.

My favorite Cummings poem, however, came to me late in life. I only found this one last year, and I think that was the way of the world; I wouldn’t have appreciated it if I’d found it when I was younger. It speaks to an adult me. It’s not a poem for the girl I was. It’s a poem for the woman I am.

I can’t find this on a pretty website. I don’t think it’s one of his more well-known works.

You are tired

You are tired,
(I think)
Of the always puzzle of living and doing;
And so am I.

Come with me, then,
And we’ll leave it far and far away—
(Only you and I, understand!)

You have played,
(I think)
And broke the toys you were fondest of,
And are a little tired now;
Tired of things that break, and—
Just tired.
So am I.

But I come with a dream in my eyes tonight,
And knock with a rose at the hopeless gate of your heart—
Open to me!
For I will show you the places Nobody knows,
And, if you like,
The perfect places of Sleep.

Ah, come with me!
I’ll blow you that wonderful bubble, the moon,
That floats forever and a day;
I’ll sing you the jacinth song
Of the probable stars;
I will attempt the unstartled steppes of dream,
Until I find the Only Flower,
Which shall keep (I think) your little heart
While the moon comes out of the sea.

This is a poem for adults, who have loved, who have lost, who are coming to each other with so much baggage that their arms are exhausted with the carrying of it. This is a poem for adults who have all but given up, but have the slightest fire of hope guttering barely pilot-light blue in the back of their eyes. This is a poem for adults who meet and see something in one another that they recognize, something that they are drawn to, something that they yearn toward like the pull of the tides, like magnets, like plants reaching toward the last ray of sunshine.

Tired of things that break, and-/Just tired./So am I.

Yes. Oh, my. Oh, my, yes. So, so tired. So many things have broken.

I read this one aloud, too. I cannot keep the tears out of my voice or my eyes.

But I’ll try for you. You need to hear this one. You need to hear it aloud.

Jacinth = pretty way to say hyacinth. Poetry most sincerely wins.

I’ll sing you the jacinth song/Of the probable stars.

 

Review: selected unpublished blog posts of a mexican panda express employee by Megan Boyle

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Book: selected unpublished blog posts of a mexican panda express employee 

Author: Megan Boyle

Published: November 2011 by Muumuu House, 96 pages

First Line: ”i could never be a sports writer, unless my assignment was to write ‘sports sports sports sports sports’ for three pages”

Genre/Rating: Poetry; 4/5 lists of your most embarrassing moments in life, dating back to age 5

Review: Confession: I don’t know how best to review this book.

For all of my love of poetry, I’m somewhat of a traditionalist. I like free verse (and it’s the form I use); I also can admire (and lust after, because I’m just not at all good at it) a well-rhymed poem with a more rigid structure.

I’m sure there’s a categorization for Boyle’s work. I’m sure someone’s come up with a name for it. I haven’t been able to find one online. Maybe this type of poetry is old hat, and therefore everyone assumes it doesn’t need to be categorized? Maybe they think there’s no need to categorize it? Maybe I’m just strange for my desire to put a name on it?

It’s part confessional blog post; it’s part prose poem; it’s part list poem; it’s part letter to a friend; it’s part text message; it’s part Tweet. I don’t know how else to describe it. She writes using all lower-case letters, very little punctuation, and very few of the poems have titles, other than a date. Is it experimental? I’d say yes, but only because I’ve personally never seen anything like it. Like I said, maybe this is happening all over and I just haven’t seen it before. I’ll be the first to admit that new volumes of poetry aren’t easy to find at my library.

It’s poetry for the digital age. It’s got the confessional feel of Sexton, but with a 21st century twist. It’s got a very off-the-cuff way about it; it’s a blog, broken into line breaks and stanzas. It’s equal parts funny, relatable, and heartbreaking. The narrator – whether it’s the author, or an unnamed narrator, it’s never specified – is very much a woman of our age: in her late twenties, dealing with technology, romance, food issues, media, family, friends, pets, work, school. It’s poetry for a generation that feels alienated from poetry. I love it for that; I love it for opening up poetry for an age that might consider poetry to not be “for” them – to hold no interest for them, to be something for an older age, maybe.

Personally, I find Boyle’s poems most successful, for me, with her list poems – her “unpublished tweets” (such as “seems…hard…to care about anything…lol…” – who on Twitter doesn’t at least have a mental list of these?); her “everyone i’ve had sex with,” detailing each and every person she’s been with since she started being sexually active; her “embarrassing moments,” listing her most embarrassing moments in life, from age 5 to now – my favorite line? the last: “email from my dad saying he’s read ‘everyone i’ve had sex with’ (age 23)” – and her “lies i have told,” both listing the lies she’s told and seeming to try, in a roundabout way, to analyze why she might have told them.

When Sexton and Plath and the like started writing their confessional poetry, the critics were horrified. Women shouldn’t be talking in such a frank way about their lives, sex, their failures, their (gasp!) emotions. This book is the child of the confessional poetry movement; confessional poetry for those with a short attention span, for those who get their literature in short bursts of light from a computer screen. “most of my time on the internet is spent refreshing the same pages repeatedly,” Boyle writes. “i wonder if they’re going to tell ghost stories about social networking sites someday”. They get graphic, sometimes, sexual, personal – but we’re the babies of the internet age, we’re used to that. Aren’t we?

The only criticism I have – and it’s minor, and it’s personal – is that the book begins to feel a bit repetitive, after a while. But that may be on purpose, and a conscious choice the author made. It’s a very stream-of-consciousness style of writing, and our minds can be a repetitive place, as anyone who’s been stuck in a rut can attest.

I don’t know if this is the future of poetry, or just the direction Boyle herself has taken, but either way, it was an interesting format, and I look forward to reading more by the author. Poetry’s constant ability to change with the times makes me happy. It’s how I know it’s going to survive long after I’m gone.