Sucked into the Vortex

Day 55 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project.

Several of us were traveling over the weekend, and Bob reports that he was sucked into the vortex of a used bookstore:

"The weather in Washington was beautiful on Thursday, so I went for a walk at lunchtime--and was sucked into the vortex of a used book store. My eye was caught by a two-volume biography of Lytton Strachey by Michael Holroyd. Having always been interested in Strachey as a critical writer, and having been intrigued by Emma Thompson's portrayal of Dora Carrington, I picked it up. And, when I saw Gielgud: A Theatrical Life right next to it, I couldn't resist that either. Then, I saw Jack Germond's and Jules Witcover's Blue Smoke & Mirrors--their account of the 1980 presidential campaign, and had to pick it up. (I've long been a fan of both of them, since Jules Witcover's 85 Days: The Last Campaign of Robert Kennedy, and since the first column I read by Jack Germond back in the Washington Star), Seymour Hersch's Dark Side of Camelot and lastly Don DeLillo's Falling Man. I only stopped at six volumes because of how far I had to walk back to the office."

Because I work in one, I am very familiar with the hazards of being sucked into the vortex of used books, and I wish Bob well with his heavy lifting as well as his heavy reading. I am hoping he reports here again when he has time, as his comments are always enlightening. Anna was reading Falling Man earlier in this blog, and I think my dad would like the Gielgud book, as he was reading one Alec Guinness's memoirs, Blessings in Disguise, this summer, so I borrowed and read it, too. Ah, in fact we traded memoirs, as I recall, so, as I had wished recently, he has already read The Tender Bar! And, yes, my mother had found the Guinness book in the vortex of Babbitt's Books.

I will rummage in the vortex to see if we have My Name Escapes Me, another Guinness memoir, built from diary entries, just because I love the title! This seems like one I could dip into on breaks and leave in the store for someone else, which I should, of course, do more often!

Ah! And all this reminds me that I will indeed get to pack books for a week-long vacation in Michigan in July. There is no Internet access in the house but there is in a little cafe down the street, so if my son allows it, I will borrow his laptop to keep up with this blog. If not, I will again hand write the entries and post them later, as I did with this little Easter weekend trip.

And I loved Susan's comment about asking perfect strangers what they are reading, which I do regularly in the vortex of the bookstore, or sometimes when I follow people outside and talk to them on the sidewalk. (Julie, I am not a stalker.) I promise I will ask perfect strangers on the beach this summer what they are reading, especially if they have actual sandy books visible on the towel or sticking up out of the swim bag. And in the Internet cafe. If I am not too shy.

And it's possible that we will get to Virginia sometime this summer, too, Bob! I have an aunt there fixing up a house in Charlottesville, and a handyman artist husband with a volleyball pal in Northern Virginia (a separate country, as I now understand it, the rest of Virginia being a part of The South, which was brought home to me when I handled a Richmond, VA newspaper from the Civil War period listing Jefferson Davis as The President of the United States), and another aunt in Alexandria. If events collide, we might wander the vortex together!

Dark Towers

Day 41 of the "What are you reading, and why?" series.

Today I put together two completely different kinds of writers, as one aspect of American literature these days is to have battered on any barrier between "high" and "low" culture. I know people still do categorize and label--there is "serious fiction" or "literary fiction," and there is "genre fiction," and these things are still organized in bookstores in various ways that keep them apart from each other. But college classrooms put things together, study everything, and have "elevated" certain kinds of writing that were dismissed before. The "comic book" is now the "graphic novel"--or "Graphic Illustration" in Babbitt's--and people are respecting each other's art in new ways that are less hierarchical than when I was growing up.

So I'll tell you that Kim has been reading The Gunslinger, the first in the Dark Tower series by Stephen King, and that Charlie is embarking on Point Omega, the new novel just out in hardcover from Don DeLillo. (Earlier in this blog we heard a bit about Falling Man, a DeLillo novel about the man falling from the dark towers of 9/11..., and the cover pictured here is from Libra, different towers altogether in DeLillo's book about the Kennedy assassination.)

A guy who runs a business down the street came in for another stack of the books he likes to read and was saying the last book in the Dark Tower series was a huge disappointment, and made him feel he had wasted his time reading everything building up to it. But the series was recommended to Kim by Bob, who said the last book made the whole reading adventure worth it, and to definitely start at the beginning! The link above is to a revised edition of The Gunslinger, as King was writing other works simultaneously (the way we read books simultaneously, or the way painters works on numerous paintings simultaneously, etc.) and realized by the end that the beginning needed some adjustment. So Kim might want to figure out which edition she has, and perhaps that's why the guy from down the street was so disappointed. He read the original work, and things didn't add up?!

I'm pretty sure the only thing I've read by Stephen King is On Writing, and, to my mind, he was right on about writing.

Don DeLillo is a writer I've not yet read. I have read excerpts and essays by him, but not a whole novel. I almost took home White Noise the other day, but instead got The Wishbones by Tom Perotta. I'm pretty sure this is "dick lit."

Killer Bees

Day 24 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project.

Jo is reading Murder on the Eiffel Tower by Claude Izner, the first in a series of Victor Legris mysteries. It’s a historical mystery, taking place in Paris in 1889, during the World Exposition.

Reminds me of Devil in the White City, by Erik Larson, taking place in 1893 at the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago. This one is not a novel but speculative non-fiction based on historical facts, looking closely at the architecture.

Bees play a key part in Murder on the Eiffel Tower as the victims appear to die from bee stings.

I loved the book Bee Season by Myla Goldberg! It is not about actual bees. Instead, spelling bees. Since I love words and word origins, this was a great book for me, as letters and roots and languages and meanings whirl around in the main character’s head…

Which reminds me of Woman in Mind (December Bee), a play by Alan Ayckbourn. I just told you I can’t read plays, but I am reading this one because Julie wants me to. (Perhaps she wants me to be in it, as she is on the play reading committee for a local theatre.) Which reminds me of Trouble in Mind, a movie, and a Johnny Cash song. It’s used a lot as a title, in fact, for music, books, even a book of poems by Lucie Brock-Boido, whose name sort of bounces off the walls like words and letters in Bee Season.

Which was also made into a movie, not to be confused with Spellbound, a documentary about spelling bees, which I watched at the home of Lizabeth, from whom I have borrowed many excellent books! And isn't there also a play, maybe even a musical comedy, about spelling bees?

Of course, Spellbound is also a Hitchcock movie with Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck (my heart throb, Atticus Finch), a psychological thriller murder mystery. I don’t think there are bees in it. But there are bees in The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd, and of course there is also a movie of that. I am not even going to attempt free association with killer bee movies and Attack of the Killer Tomatoes.

But I will say that Secret Life of Bees and Bee Season are books that came out close enough together that people got confused…as I am now…and that I sometimes find them near each other on the floor at Babbitt’s, waiting to be shelved, or to be picked up by people browsing. I don’t dare walk down the fiction aisle at Babbitt’s, or I will, as I did Tuesday, pick something up and put a yellow post-it on it, “Hold for Kathleen,” and then buy it, when I can rummage up the $6-8. Post-it-ed at the moment: The Wishbones by Tom Perotta and White Noise by Don DeLillo. These, though by men, and contemporary, and no doubt containing some humor and/or irony, are probably not “dick lit,” as defined earlier (via Internet searches), just as the bee books by women are not “chick lit.”

And now I should reveal that Victor Legris of the historical mystery series is a bookseller. So far people have told me they like mysteries for the suspense, the puzzle, the psychological insights, the great research into place and time period, the escapes into a world evil confronted by justice, etc., but if anything would draw me in to a mystery series, it would be this! The bookstore connection!

Keep those comments and book insights & recommendations coming!

Falling Man

Day 20 of the “What are you reading, and why?” project. March 1. I am hoping March will come in and go out like a lamb.

Anna is reading Falling Man by Don DeLillo because she recently watched 10 straight hours of video on the 9/11 event. She was doing this in part because she was ready to learn about it, after being overwhelmed when it first happened, and in part because she was writing poems with political/historical themes. She will read her own poem about a falling man at the McLean County Museum of History tomorrow, Tuesday, March 2, at 7:30 p.m. Because the whole thing chokes her up, she will take a short break from Falling Man until the poetry reading is over, so she is not overcome by emotion during the event.

In the last two blog entries, I got a little worried about Jonathan Safran Foer, but he can probably take care of himself. He has also written about the 9/11 event, in Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. I don’t know whether to recommend it to Anna, so I will read it myself first, but I have some trepidation about reading it and/or the DeLillo book...

When I worked as a poetry editor, we got a slew of poems, almost immediately, about 9/11, and there was a lot of stuff zinging across the Internet, too. W.H. Auden’s poem "September 1, 1939," from a different era, went around, but also plenty of raw stuff, email exchanges, collage poetry. I had the icky feeling a lot of it was exploitation poetry, not really that person’s story to tell, a roiling of rage and grief, mixed with self-importance about what, now, was the only thing worth writing about, or worth reading, and which would, incidentally, get that poet her/his brief fiery 15 minutes of fame.

So I am hoping the DeLillo and Foer books are not exploiting that terrible event, but exploring it. Telling the truth about it in ways that don’t…what?—do further damage.

Bruce Weigl, a poet who managed the impossible in a poem called "The Impossible" (which I leave you to seek out on your own, as it is too shocking for many readers--it is in his book What Saves Us)--that is, to tenderly transform something horrific into something...impossibly beautiful, closes the poem with his ars poetica: “Say it clearly and you make it beautiful, no matter what.” Some critic told Weigl he ought to have said it the other way around: "Say it beautifully and you make it clear...," but it was not beautiful, what had happened to him, then, and what he witnessed, later, during the Vietnam War, which ruined him and made him a writer. “When one is traumatized,” says Weigl, “the world recedes, and when the trauma stops, the world gradually returns, only things are different.”

Things are different. It would be awful to pretend they are not.

I hope Foer and DeLillo are saying it clearly. Without pretense, without exploitation. Revealing the beautiful, horrific, deep, ugly, tender truths.