9 posts tagged “books”
For Mercy has a human heart,
Pity a human face;
And Love, the human form divine;
And Peace, the human dress.
Dorothea consoles Lydgate about his misfortunes:
"Tell me, pray," said Dorothea, with simple earnestness; "then we can consult together. It is wicked to let people think evil of anyone falsely, when it can be hindered."
Lydgate turned, remembering where he was, and saw Dorothea's face looking up at him with a sweet trustful gravity. The presence of a noble nature, generous in its wishes, ardent in its charity, changes the lights for us: we begin to see things again in their larger, quieter masses, and to believe that we too can be seen and judged in the wholeness of our character. That influence was beginning to act on Lydgate, who had for many days been seeing all life as one who is dragged and struggling amid the throng. He sat down again, and felt that he was recovering his old self in the consciousness that he was with one who believed in it.
***
Nobody in real life, I think, is an exact analogue of a Lydgate, or a Will "Plot Device" Ladislaw, or even poor old Casaubon -- it's fashionable to diagnose fictional characters with things, so let's go ahead and call Casaubon an Aspie struggling in a world of clueless neurotypicals.
I don't know if I've ever been a Dorothea. I've met a few Dorotheas, in several genders.
"A vividness and lushness of diction—that stubborn willingness to say whatever it takes to bring the poem alive for the reader—distinguishes Gwyn McVay’s poems from the vast majority of young poets publishing today. Combined with a serious and politically charged regard for our world, these poems are mature artistically as well as intellectually. When I came to the end, I wanted more." —Bruce Weigl
"Hi! Please read my book!" —Me
Book: Show us one of your favorite works of fiction.
Anyway, I was going to mention: A bearded, not unattractive young man named Kevin Powe is participating in The World's Greatest Shave -- a fundraiser for research to curbstomp leukemia. Because, as you may have noticed, cancer completely, absolutely, devastatingly sucks. And so, on March 16, Mr. Powe will be shaving his head at the Pig and Whistle in Brisbane to benefit the Leukemia Foundation. (The hair should fall right off, really, since -- as we all know -- Australia is upside-down.)
Now, here's the really great part. He's offering various levels of hair removal, based on how much money people donate. At AUS$500, he might end up keeping his goatee. But if he raises AUS$1750, he will end up shaving his beard and waxing his chest, shoulders, and legs! If your thing is smooth-bodied men, and you'd like to help turn a hirsute guy smooth for a good cause, I urge you, follow the first link and donate generously.
What books are on your nightstand?
Joseph Ceravolo is a poet whose works never fail to tickle my brain in all the right ways, like a cool ginger ale in a hot country store. He is sadly no longer an inhabitant of Earth; he has left the building -- but the poems he leaves behind are an incredible pleasure, and can always help get me writing again when I'm in a slump. I think I discovered him through the Electronic Poetry Center at SUNY-Buffalo, or the POETICS listserv based there.
I would be shocked out of my hiking boots if no birdwatcher was without a secret or blatant partiality to some subset of the bird kingdom. Some people are all about being able to identify different warblers. Some people have the money and leisure to travel the world extending their life lists by hundreds of species. You have your fans of particular biomes; you have your riparian birders (along rivers), your pelagic birders (along coasts), and then you just have people with admitted favorites. Peter Matthiessen likes cranes. I like them too, but as you may have figured out from the rest of this blog, I really, really like crows and their relatives -- ravens, magpies, jays, jackdaws, choughs, treepies, drongos.... I haven't got far into this book yet, which is really sad considering it was a birthday present (I'm a Pisces; you figure it out), but what I've read, I've liked.
Show us some rules.
What was (or is) your favorite subject in school?
This one is really difficult for me to answer. First, I have to make sure the English Department processed my book order for Toni Morrison's Sula and Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner (the latter will be gotten to if and only if we have time, so it's marked optional -- but how now do I build this syllabus around Sula? Does loving the book equate with being able to teach it?)... and of course I may be crazy for making a developmental English class read a novel as part of their study, but any number of them are really quite bright, and a significant number of them have already read and liked The Bluest Eye. Really, some of these students don't even need to be in developmental Eng....
OH SNAP. I think it might have been English. That would definitely explain why the hell I have this oh-so-useful Master of Fine Arts in Poetry on my curriculum vitae.
Seriously, looking at a number of posts that have answered this question, I think a lot of people have confused their favorite class with their favorite subject. I didn't particularly get on with my high-school English teachers, with the exception of those who also taught theater, and I had the eighth-grade English teacher from Hell. This woman not only insisted that we cover our textbooks, but that we cover them only with the school-logo book covers purchased from, not given out by, the school -- and fold them according to her method and nobody else's. She preferred that we write everything in blue ballpoint pen; black would do at a pinch, but any other color of pen ink (or the forbidden pencil) would receive an automatic zero. And she made us memorize the 48 prepositions of the English language in alphabetical order.
Nothing I have done since then -- as a proofreader, a copyeditor, a Publications Manager, a professor of English, or for that matter a poet -- has been helped in the slightest by my having memorized those 48 prepositions in that order. Nothing. That was pure sadism. Mrs. Avis Skinner, you suck.
Anyway, since the entry title is "Teacher's Pet" and I've already posted Fonzie, here is my other pet: Selina Kim, who occasionally posts reviews at IMDb.com. The magenta is up way too high on this, making her look more reddish than she actually is: she is the black cat who not only crosses my path dozens of times every day but faithfully sits on my head while I sleep, and then MEYOWWWWs me awake in the morning -- her mother was a Siamese, and she inherited the voice. Sometimes, no joke, she goes into the bathroom and just stands there practicing. She is 14 years old; besides reviewing movies, she likes to knock things over.
In the course of my travels I passed by an amusement park last week, but did not enter. I confess that I have never in my life been on a rollercoaster: I see little point in paying loads of money ($8 just to park at this particular attraction, never mind the actual tickets!) and waiting in line to endanger myself, when I once broke a toe merely thinking. (I got up to get some information that was in another room. Sadly, a very solid oak IKEA chair leg was in my way.) And really, I have enough extra adrenaline surges.
Yesterday and the day before, I signed two publishing contracts: one for my forthcoming book (I don't believe the words "my forthcoming book" even as I type them, yet, depending on the publisher's schedule and his already-accepted mss., it could happen as soon as this fall), and one for my contribution to a yet-untitled anthology of women poets that will be on Red Hen Press. I also got the news that my sister and her husband are beginning launch sequence to adopt an infant girl from Guatemala.
All of these things are made of awesome and win, yet they turn (what's left of) my spine to jelly. I really thought that once I learned my book had been accepted for publication, my sole, solitary, and only feeling about it from then on would be euphoria. It would be like having intravenous Ecstasy or something. Uh, no. Gentle reader, if you want to duplicate the sensation of staring at the words "my book" when they refer to your own very first book, drink five Mountain Dews and visualize being naked at the dentist. People will shortly be able to see everything. "Hmm, got a little plaque on that ass!"
If you've lost somebody (four grandparents; a whole pantheon of great-aunts; a mother who would have gone around mentioning her daughter's forthcoming book to every random person with whom she exchanged two words in the course of her day; friends), you've got that extra burden of knowing at every stage that the person would have been immensely happy at this moment, but isn't there to share it. My sister's future daughter will never have known her grandmother, so my auntiehood responsibilities are not merely doubled but squared: I need to carry for my sister's children -- suddenly the plural word applies, although her daughter-to-be may not have been born yet -- memories of their grandmother, and her ways of doing things.
So if you're having a book, as with antidepressants, it's not just like switching your internal mood indicator to Euphoric and leaving it there. You have mood swings, you have cravings. (No, I haven't thrown up so far. No weight gain either, no.)
Props time: Bruce Weigl, poet, memoirist, anthologist, translator, and literary scholar, was my first poetry professor in college. This is really all his fault. (My book, I mean. Not my sister's baby.) He doesn't keep one nice unified website, but you should totally go Google him or just head straight to Amazon and buy one of his books. (Interestingly, his memoir The Circle of Hanh is about international adoption.)
What magazines do you subscribe to, and why?
When I've got enough disposable income to keep up my Audubon Society membership, they send me Audubon, which is currently crowing (sorry, sorry) over the rediscovery of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, once thought extinct. In the North Museum on the campus of Franklin & Marshall University, they have a specimen of this bird in a glass case, with a button you can push to hear its call. There's a reason to learn this call, now -- a sort of cackle -- more than mere nostalgia. We like a conservation success story. They're so rare these days.
Occasionally, when he's renewing his own subscription to something, Dad will have a gift subscription, and will give me something like Verbatim, which I can't recommend highly enough for lovers of words, word use, word origins, word play... you get the point, I trust.
But the two magazines Doug and I absolutely cannot do without, the ones we remain subscribed to when there is no other reading material coming through the mail slot, are The New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books. Often, the articles about world affairs that end up in these two distinguished publications are more incisive, and written in greater depth and breadth, than anything you'd see in a standard "news" publication -- barring foreign ones like The Economist. Indeed, Doug and I, when these magazines come, are a great deal like Mr. and Mrs. Jack Sprat. It's not that I don't read the articles reviewing books about politics and world affairs, but he devours those and ignores almost entirely those to do with literature and the visual arts. (There are exceptions. If there's a book reviewed, or a poem in, by somebody he knows I like or is in my poetic lineage or so on -- example: Charles Simic just had a huge article in the NYRB about Dada -- Doug will notice this, and mention it to me. Or, because he knows I like to pick on Jorie Graham, he'll drop a satirical word to me about how my favorite poet is in there again. But he ignores fiction like a big ignorey thing.)
And so, conversely, I'll skim the articles about whatsit and whosie, and maybe mention to him if one of the articles vaguely concerns his work -- a book about the increased poppy-growing in Afghanistan, for example -- but I'll read the two magazines, and ponder their consensus that Philip Roth's new novel just isn't up to snuff, or notice that one reviewer quite likes a biography of Ted Hughes while another finds it sorely lacking. Reviews of books about science fascinate me, too. I wanted to be a doctor, or a vet, or at the very least a herpetologist and reptile wrangler as a kid, once I figured out I couldn't actually be a T. rex; after I saw a Disney sci-fi stinker called The Black Hole -- if a movie is so bad that it wastes the time of even Ernest Borgnine, it's pretty damn bad -- I became fascinated with physics as well. But my dyscalculia (think dyslexia, but with math or anything that involves internally counting; to this day, I can't jump rope) stymied all that, and today, if I had a career goal besides being reviewed in the LRB or the NYRB, I'd love to review for either august publication. Damn, imagine working with Elizabeth Hardwick! How cool would that be?
On LiveJournal, there's a community called, simply, "Buddhists." As such, from time to time we get a spate of new seekers asking very basic questions: What is the official Buddhist view on vegetarianism, homosexuality, nail polish? And somebody very patiently explains that there is no official Buddhist view on these things (except that the Vinaya, the monastic rules, could be interpreted to mean that monks should refrain from nail polish, but it's probably okay for laypeople), any more than you can obtain one unitary "Christian" view on anything.
Or I get questions. "Could you sort of explain the basics of what you believe?" says a well-meaning evangelical Christian on an email list. Egad. "Don't hurt people" again comes to mind, and I usually veer toward the precepts, because the Four Noble Truths are kind of abstract -- our "cause of suffering" isn't a red guy with horns, or other personification *cough* Xenu *cough*, so at times I start to feel like one of those silicon-based life forms from Star Trek attempting to communicate. (Not, never, dear reader, silicone-based. These are natural.)
If I had a nickel for every time I've recommended Damien Keown's A Very Short Introduction to Buddhism, I'd have... uh... I'd have at least enough to buy one more of his books! Even at the current bastardly exchange rate versus the pound! It's elegant and concise in a way that I can never think of being in discussion, and it avoids the dryness that makes some latter-day Buddhist scholarship such a reliable sleep-aid. Also, the publisher makes these books really teensy. They're even smaller than Dover Thrift Editions. You can hide it in the pocket of a hoodie, then whip it out and astonish people with your knowledge of doctrinal differences between Theravada and Mahayana. (Seriously, read through it once and then keep it on the shelf, and you'll be good -- it's clear enough not to need repeated pounding into your head.)
