Do you ever not feel like reading?

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

The Evolution of an Insatiable Bookslut: sj

young_sj

I don’t remember learning how to read.  I know that I was reading before my fourth birthday – and have vague memories of being impatient with “age appropriate” books when I was in pre-school – but don’t remember if it was my dad who taught me how or if it was just something I was determined to pick up on my own.

It wasn’t just the books I was impatient with, but with pre-school in general.  I wanted more time to read, but was instead encouraged to (ugh) spend time OUTSIDE.  And INTERACTING.  I have never had the greatest social skills.  This was particularly evident the time I smacked a girl in the face because she’d stolen my jacket that had the book I was reading in the pocket…only to later find out that we just had the same jacket.

chocolate feverIn kindergarten, I was so proud when Mrs Heck (yes, really) asked me daily to read aloud to my class at naptime.  I later found out that when I was reading a chapter of Chocolate Fever to my classmates, Mrs Heck was outside having a smoke break.  I could be upset about this, but I can totally understand.

Heh, Chocolate Fever.  Did you all read that, too?

In the first grade I was tested for the GATE program, and was told that my reading and comprehension were already at a college level.  In addition to having to switch classrooms to go with the other GATE kids (it was 3 grades in one class because there weren’t enough smart kids in the school to have individual classes for each grade), I had to visit the 6th grade GATE class during Reading and Language classes every day.  Luckily, I was always tall for my age, so I wasn’t this tiny little kid being sent to hang out with the 11 year olds for half the morning, but when you’re six, even when you’re in a class with the other “smart kids” this can kind of do a number on you.

I had a difficult time making friends, and (again) had no interest in playing Thundercats during recess, so I spent most of my days hiding in the library, or just sitting next to my classroom door with whatever book I was reading at the time.

In early elementary school, I was in love with the work of Edward Eager and I tore through Nancy Drews like nobody’s business.  These were easy reads, and I had no problem burning through two or three in a day (especially during vacations when I could just READ AND READ FOREVER!).  In the 4th grade, my uncle gave me my first two Stephen King novels (I talked about that a little here), and for a while, I read as much of Unky Steve’s work as I could get my hands on.

I added Tolkien and Diane Duane to my list of favourites and discovered that fantasy was my first true love, as it provided me with the biggest escape.  I didn’t like reading about things that too closely resembled my own reality, so I stuck with things I knew weren’t really real.

red as bloodLate elementary school/junior high also rekindled my love for faerie tales.  By the time I was 13, I’d collected nearly all of Lang’s Colour Faerie books and was moving on to re-tellings/re-imaginings.  I found a copy of Tanith Lee’s Red as Blood, or Tales from the Sisters Grimmer at a yard sale, I read and re-read those stories (but when I tried to re-read it last year, I lost my patience with them and gave up after only reading two or three).

THEN! Towards the end of junior high, I was given the opportunity to volunteer at my teeny tiny two room local library in the summers.  I jumped at the chance because I got to spend 3 days a week sitting behind the actual desk and reading the whole day away.  The librarian (who was also a volunteer, tiny town, no money for a real library) would leave me there alone and go pick up the ILLs or…I don’t know, I’m pretty sure she frequently went to hang out at the General Store (go ahead and laugh) to have ice cream or whatever, since someone else was holding the fort.

I didn’t care what she was doing, it was just the best being able to be surrounded by books and pick whatever I wanted off the shelves to lose myself in.

What_mad_universeThat was when I discovered sf, and when I found a lot of the books and authors that are still my favourites today.  PKD, Fredric Brown, Douglas Adams (actually, I have a different story about my introduction to The Guide, which you can read here if you’re interested) – my science fiction roots may have been planted in Star Wars soil, but the pulpy greats of the 50s and 60s were (and still are) some of the best Imagination MiracleGro I’ve ever encountered.

I still primarily read fantasy and sf.  I occasionally branch out into other genres, but I’m not an adventurous sort at all when it comes to the books I choose.

I still read to escape, and because I slip into books to get away from the things that are making me mad/sad/angry/frustrated, I know I am not as well-read as many of my contemporaries.  Heh.  Yeah, I read a lot, but I’m not well-read.  That’s my new catch phrase.

 

Reading Rage: You can’t hide a self-published work under a vanity press name. Just don’t.

hiding

I will just say that my book was published by Fancy Unicorn Pants Press and people will never know I published it myself.

Our review policy has undergone (is that a word? did I conjugate that correctly?) some changes in the recent past. I decided to stop accepting pitches from self-published authors because it was eating up an enormous amount of my time for very little return on my time investment. I changed the policy at that time to say that we would only accept books published by small and/or independent presses, because that’s kind of our bag when it comes to reviewing books.

An interesting thing happened when I changed the policy, which led directly to our new new policy (we just don’t accept books anymore). We started getting a lot of books that were “published” by small presses that I’d never, ever heard of before. Not that I’ve heard of every small press, but I’ve gotten fairly well-versed in small presses; when I see one I haven’t heard of, I like to look them up. Just for my own education–and, okay yeah, because some of these “small presses” were a tad suspicious. When I followed the Google trail for these presses, I found some interesting things:

  • Many of the small presses were vanity presses, where the author paid to have their book published. This? is not the same as being published by a small press.
  • Other authors actually made up small presses, which had only published their book, or maybe two or three selections (probably from their friends). The pages for these presses are usually nothing more than a makeshift, generically-branded shop where you can purchase the author’s book. It’s pretty obvious that it’s a fake press.
  • Still other authors didn’t even bother making any kind of online presence for their fake press. They would slap an appropriate-sounding press name on their book, but when I searched for any inkling of the press existing, I found nothing.

headdesk

Look, authors who have tried or are considering trying this–it’s really obvious when a small press is not a real press. It’s really obvious when someone starts a press (even if they’re legitimately trying to start a real press, which is only true about half a percent of the time in these cases) just to self-publish without being “self-published.” I’ve never run across this situation where I have had to carefully ponder whether the press was real or not. The evidence is immediately damning. The only way to be slick enough to pull this off is actually to fully launch a legitimate small press where you have editors and designers and you publish books for real… and then you’re not being sneaky anyway, you’re being industrious.

Pretending to have been published by a small press when you haven’t been is really annoying. For one thing, it’s totally lying, which I hate on its own. Only smarmy people and grifters lie about things that they’re representing or selling. If you published your own book, you shouldn’t hide that behind a fake press name–in my eyes, that’s tantamount to fraud. The difference between being published and publishing one’s own book is quite significant in terms of process; to indicate that you were published when you did the process yourself is to misrepresent your book. If you want to put a vanity name on  your book, then you need to make it clear that it’s a self-published book under the name of your vanity press. I shouldn’t have to go hunt through Google to try to figure out whether you published your book yourself.

(And if you’re reading this thinking “What’s the big deal?”–if it weren’t a big deal, it wouldn’t be happening in the first place; nobody would be trying to bury the self-published stigma under a fake press name.)

It was also annoying because it was disrespectful to us. Our policy clearly stated no self-published books. Even if your book has a press name slapped on it, if you self-published it, you self-published it. The fake press names were included specifically to circumvent our policy, which had 0% to do with whether a book had a press name on it and 100% to do with the differences in process between small-press publishing and self-publishing. Those authors were attempting to cheat their way into getting a review, and apparently didn’t think I would be smart enough to figure out their tactics. Because, you know, that’s exactly the kind of person you want writing a review of your book. Derp.

Dear respectable self-published authors: all of these shady jerkwads are ruining it for the rest of you. I’m so sorry you have to deal with stigma because a bunch of people don’t know how to be courteous and professional.

Here’s the deal, shady authors: bloggers such as myself put a lot of work into our blogs. We will do our homework if we specify certain policies. And we talk to each other–try to put one over on one of us, and word is going to get around to many of the rest of us. Information travels at high speed these days, and we don’t like to be tricked or lied to, so that’s information we will definitely pass along whenever the opportunity arises. So, you need to stop trying to loophole yourself out of being self-published. If you did the work yourself, own it! Don’t bury it under a fake press name. It’s rude and perilously close to fraud.

Have you experienced this tactic as a blogger or a reader? Have you bought books thinking that they were traditionally-published, only to find out later that they were self-published? What’s your favorite TV show? Leave your comments below!

Review: A Hologram for the King by Dave Eggers

Book: A Hologram for the King

Author: Dave Eggers

Published: June 2012 by McSweeney’s, 328 pages

Date Read: March 2013

First Lines: ”Alan Clay woke up in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. It was May 30, 2010. He had spent two days on planes to get there.”

Genre/Rating: Literary fiction; 3.75/5 bottles of moonshine, drunk alone in furtive gulps long after midnight, that make you think performing surgery on yourself is a very good idea

Review: I met Dave Eggers once.

It is true! He gave a reading at one of our local colleges, and after the reading, he did a book signing. He was very polite and very kind, even though he was there forever signing books and the line was very long. He wrote something like “your beautiful smile lit up the room” in my friend’s book, and that made her so happy she beamed like the sun. I loved that about him.

I know a lot of people think Dave Eggers is a hipster god. I think he’s fine. I like him just fine, but I like a lot of authors. I think he does a lot of good work and I like McSweeney’s a great deal and know he founded it. He works a lot with disadvantaged youth. He seems like a good guy. I think I’ve only read one of his books – A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius – and have had The Wild Things on my to-read shelf for ages, but haven’t read it yet. I like him just fine.

Not surprisingly, I liked this book…just fine. A tiny little bit more than just fine, I guess. Just a bit under liked-it-a-lot.

Alan Clay is a consultant for an IT firm. He’s had a string of failures – his marriage, his various businesses, his relationship with his father. He thinks he’s dying of cancer. He can’t afford to pay his daughter’s tuition for her next year of college. He arrives in Saudi Arabia with his young, dynamic team of fellow consultants to present technology to the king. If this works, he will have enough money to do what he wants, send his daughter to college, take his house off the market. But in Saudi Arabia, things don’t run as Alan plans. The timeline seems to be much slower than he expects. There is no sense of urgency. Everyone is waiting for the king – but the king, much like Godot, never seems to arrive. And Alan seems to be looking at yet another failure in a long line of failures.

As a rule, I like books like this – a man pushed to the limit, at the end of his rope, a man who has to make a change or end up a casualty of life. I like them because I like to see what actions the character takes to get themselves out of the hole they’ve dug for themselves. I like to see the activity. What I didn’t like about this is there was very little activity. Which is, I suppose, more realistic – life, at times, seems to be all about inactivity – but I don’t know that I want to read about inactivity.

Alan didn’t do much. He was given opportunities to grab life by the balls and didn’t even make a snatch at it. He just let things pass him by. He seemed beaten, weary, depressed, down. And I know, this is realism. I know that. But I wanted him to fight. I wanted him to say, no, not today, I’m going to win this. And every time I thought he might – nope. Same old nothing.

That being said, the writing was beautiful. Eggers’ prose is haunting and spare and evocative. I love his words. I liked the characters, and I did appreciate the realism (even if I was wishing for a little more optimism in there.) I liked reading about Saudi Arabia – I don’t know that I’ve ever read anything about that area before.

Overall, not a book I’d unequivocably recommend, but not a book I’d steer people away from, either. It was good read, a solid one, and not a waste of time. And Dave Eggers, thank you for being so kind at the book signing. I will always remember that. We waited a very long time in line and you could have been an asshat, but you totally grinned like we were the only ones in the room.

Mine says "Do not turn away from the light!" This is a signed copy of Giraffes? Giraffes!" which he didn't write, but it's a McSweeney's book, so he signed it anyway. Also, read it, because it will make you laugh so hard you have a coughing fit.

Mine says “Do not turn away from the light!” This is a signed copy of “Giraffes? Giraffes!” which he didn’t write, but it’s a McSweeney’s book, so he signed it anyway. Also, read it, because it will make you laugh so hard you have a coughing fit.