A Dog Named Wolf

Day 293 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project, and my mom is a new subscriber to One Story, so she has been reading issues 141 and 142, and I got to borrow them from her, so I have also read these two fabulous short stories: "Nephilim," by L. Annette Binder, and "Housewifely Arts," by Megan Mayhew Bergman.

I love the idea of this tiny print journal--one story per issue, saddle stapled, chapbook style.  At the One Story website, you can discuss the stories, subscribe, get lots of additional information, and learn how to submit.  But it's a sweet little print magazine that comes in the mail, like Inch (for short poems and short short fiction) and blink, before it.

Marcus, a new Facebook friend and fellow writer, who lives in Germany, has an interesting stack of books on his desk right now:

The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, by Carson McCullers
Samuel Beckett, The Short Prose
Our Lady of the Flowers, by Jean Genet
Giraffes in Hiding, by Carol Novack
and three by John Hawkes: The Lime Twig, Second Skin, and Travesty

I would love to know from Marcus, why these particular books at this particular time?  Which will he read first? Will he read one straight through and then the next, or read around in several at a time?!

Looks like John Hawkes has great admirers and writes lyrically in mystery or thriller mode and also in complex prose resembling a European more than an American sensibility.  Is this correct, Hawkes readers?

Giraffes in Hiding looks like a wild ride!  And its subtitle is The Mythical Memoirs of Carol Novack, so she must be a goddess!  I love this bit of the author's bio at Amazon:  "Carol Novack is a writer of sociopolitical neuroerotic rants and raves, poems, prose poems, and image drenched, lyrical whatnots, and a play."  Ah, Genet and Beckett wrote plays, too.

Marcus, do you read a lot of plays?

I am progressing in Other Voices, Other Rooms, by Truman Capote, and found the phrase that is the title on page 100, in the indirect dialogue of the character Little Sunshine, who lives in an old hotel because if he ever "went away, as he had once upon a time, other voices, other rooms, voices lost and clouded, strummed his dreams."  And that is a taste of the lovely, lyrical, vaguely mysterious prose style of this particular novel.

I took up this novel to encounter the Idabel Thompkins, who is based on Harper Lee, as I learned in Mockingbird, by Charles J. Shields.  I mentioned this in an earlier blog entry, spelling it Tompkins, as I'd found it on page 59 of that book.  Imagine my surprise to find it spelled Thompkins in the actual novel.  This is one of those moments of mild woe for me, when I ponder the state of print publishing, proofreading, copy editing, entry level jobs, graduates with degrees in English or communications.  Sigh....

Fortunately, I write a BLOG, and can make all the errors I want.  Or, in most cases, don't want.

And, finally, I am dog-sitting a dog named Wolf.

More Pulitzer Coincidii

Day 285 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project, and today there will be more Pulitzer-Prize-linked coincidii, and Babbitt's Book encounter reportage.

The same day that the two young men doing the Pulitzer Prize project came in, Drew and Joshua, which was the same day an older man walked out the door with Eudora Welty, another older man walked out the door with Ivan Doig and Willa Cather.  I asked him about Doig, and he wanted this one because he had read three other Doig books and really liked them.  He happened to have a paperback of this one already, but we had a hardcover first edition, so he was happy to snap it up.

Willa Cather is another writer this older man likes, along with Wallace Stegner.  "Western writers," he said, appeal to him a lot.

So, in random coincidii mode, after speaking of these "older men," I refer you to Drew's blog entry, in which I appear as an "older woman" in his book search process, and to Joshua's blog entry on Willa Cather.

Meanwhile, I could not pass up Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee, by Charles J. Shields, which has come in and gone out of Babbitt's before, and she won the Pulitzer for To Kill a Mockingbird.  This book, with its careful introduction informing us that Shields wrote it without Harper Lee's cooperation, because, while she is a very community-minded person in her own community, she has been private about her writer life after a period of literary sociability, promises to tell me about her friendship with Truman Capote, the difficulties of that friendship (and I already know he lost a lot of friends), and why she never published a second novel.

And Kathryn Erskine just won a National Book Award for her children's novel Mockingbird, about a girl with Asperger's syndrome, which has To Kill a Mockingbird in the background.  Erskine was one of four women honored with this award, as reported in this short article in Her Circle Ezine!

Yesterday I was infected with Jon Stewart's anger, though everybody kept smiling, aroused by All the Devils are Here.  Today I am just glad to remember "it's a sin to kill a mockingbird."  Even if they are sometimes annoying, in real life and in The Bat-Poet, by Randall Jarrell!

Lucky Ducks

Day 279  of the "What are you reading, and why?" project, and my daughter is reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain, because it is assigned reading in her American Literature class and has not (thus far) been banned!!

It's one of the books, along with To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee,* and Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck, that routinely gets put on somebody's "banned" list because of what happens in it and because of the language of the times, which in these cases, involves racism. Alas! Since the message in all three of these books, if anyone bothered to read them, is against racism.  The trouble with literature is so often that nobody is really reading, nobody is paying attention, nobody is looking closely or past the surface.

Perhaps I overstate.  I respect the real issues here, but I think a good book stands as literature and a record of the social injustices of a given time.  I have had no trouble with troublesome language in my own classrooms.  I choose not to say the "n-word" aloud, given its negative historical charge during my own lifetime, but I leave it to my students to choose to say it aloud or not in our classroom, if we are reading aloud, and always feel they can read it silently and handle it and put it in its context, and they always can.  Quite maturely and responsibly.  Of course we discuss in advance what is appropriate classroom speech, when we are just talking, and we do not use language that would insult each other.  Again, students are quite respectful of one another when given the chance.

*Harper Lee was the name of one of my cats.

So far, no controversy has arisen in the local high schools this year, but even since my return to this area in 2000, there was a flurry of trouble about books assigned at the high school level, which led to my research paper assignment for my college students: find a book that has been banned, or put on somebody's "banned book" list at some time in some community, or caused a controversy, and say why.

I left it to them to argue whether a particular book should or shouldn't have been "banned" or put on some list, and they made all sorts of wonderful arguments. Mostly, they didn't want the book to have been banned, they saw its value, and they loved it when they had read it in school, but sometimes they agreed that the book might be too much for a certain age group, and ought to be taught, for example, not freshman year but maybe junior or senior year of high school.

I love my students!

Loved, as my college students are in the past..., but, of course, I still love them! I loved my high school students, too, whom I taught (as a replacement teacher when I first moved back to town) for three dreadful months, in which I went to work, came home, fed my family, and went to bed, pulling the blanket over my head in despair sometimes as early as 6:30 p.m.

We read To Kill a Mockingbird together. Some refused to read, but came alive when we acted out the trial scene in class. And then cried when they saw Boo Radley for the first time, watching the film.

And I love my current students, of all ages, in the rare book room at Babbitt's, including my mom! Yes, yes, I love and "teach" my mom!

Speaking of my mom, my daughter was also recently reading the 1988 NCHS Yearbook, the Reverie, in which my mom, her grandmother, appears as the Old Loon in a play called Lucky Ducks, written by a man who still currently teaches at my daughter's high school! Perhaps the playwright will stumble upon my blog, care to comment, and identify himself.

Perhaps the Old Loon will do likewise.

A Mockingbird Collage

Day 152 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project, and Ginny is re-reading To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee, because she just read a book of essays about it, how important it was in the lives of various readers, and it made her nostalgic for the classic she had long loved.

If you are a reader of this blog, you know I love coincidii (made up Latinesque plural of coincidence.) Here are some coincidii (and extrapolations) pertaining to To Kill a Mockingbird:

1) A young woman in Babbitt's recently fondled and bought the lavender paperback edition of it, as reported in Nostalgic Potpourri.

2) Kim recently pointed out the very same lavender edition in Border's, where we had gone for iced coffee.

3) Seana just wrote about To Kill a Mockingbird in her blog!

4) It is the 50th anniversary of To Kill a Mockingbird, with a new edition out echoing the cover of the first (pictured here).

5) Harper Lee has been almost as silent as J. D. Salinger....(also a topic in this blog and an author in the women's book group I'm in).

6) To Kill a Mockingbird was recently the book chosen by Chicago (and probably other cities) as the book for everyong to read that year.

7) Calpurnia, a crucial character in To Kill a Mockingbird, is also the name of Julius Caesar's wife, which I know from playing Portia, who is Brutus's wife, in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. Sigh... It's always all about me, isn't it?

Anyhoo, I notice that the brief Amazon review of the book of essays by Mary McDonough Murphy, called Scout, Atticus, & Boo: A Celebration of Fifty Years of To Kill a Mockingbird, advises people to go back to the book itself, which is exactly what Ginny did, but it was the book of essays that inspired her to re-read the original!

The essays are by Oprah Winfrey (who has done a heck of a lot for books with her book club), Alan Gurganus, Wally Lamb, Richard Russo, Tom Brokaw, and Roseanne Cash, among others.

Further coincidii:

8) Ginny was just in Babbitt's, making a fabulous literary collage from Things Found in Books,

9) and so was Kim,

which is how I got my information...

I have to say it was amazing to watch adults get wrapped up in (go into a trance involving glue sticks) making bookmarks. Ginny said she was just encouraging someone else to make one, and then she got hooked. Kim came with kids, one of whom made 4 bookmarks in 5 minutes and then went back outside in search of free frisbees (me following as temporary shepherd), one of whom ignored her, getting wrapped up in the sports books aisle, while Kim herself rummaged through the box of things found in books.

Ultimately, Kim and kids left...and Kim came back, alone, having safely deposited the children elsewhere, to work on her bookmark collage.

I love people! I love books! I love bookmarks! I love collage!

My mom made one, too. A poem collage. My mom rocks.

Nostalgic Potpourri

Day 149 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project and today, Garbage Day on my particular street and Hodgepodge Day in my meandering mind, I will report that several random strangers are reading wonderful books they remember from childhood or youth! (These are random strangers in a vintage bookshop, so not entirely random.)

A young woman caressed that pale lavender paperback copy of To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee, saying, "I used to read this over and over, and now I don't think I have it in my house," so she bought it, so she would. The fondness for the book was so sweet, and her nostalgia almost had the aroma of lavender. Plus, that background uncertainty--where is that book?--suggesting various leavetakings from various homes. Sigh....

A man returning to the area for the summer, on break from a professorship in the Middle East, visited the bookshop for old times' sake, bringing his wife and two young children, looking for books from his own childhood to give to his kids--particularly Dr. Seuss, and he found some. Meanwhile, his kids were vocal about their own non-Seuss finds, and he eventually gave in and got 3 books, one for each child, including his "inner child."

And a young man bought 100 Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a nostalgic favorite of mine, because people keep telling him to read it, so now he will. I love that book. I'm holding (well, now I'm typing, but I was holding) my mildly dampstained Avon Books paperback copy, 16th printing, in my cupped hands, as the lovers caress in their intense red and green jungle on the cover. Ah, 100 Years of Solitude. When I least expect it, the beautiful bald girl ascends to heaven in my mind.

And last night, I grew nostalgic for books I don't even have yet!--a paradoxical emotion. Just arrived from Amazon, where it waited on my wishlist till I had saved up, is What Feeds Us, by Diane Lockward, a poet I enjoy every time I find her work in the journals. Finally, I have this book. But her latest, Temptation by Water, is just out, and now I lust after that one. I say "lust" appropriately, I think, as this book seems to be about desire! And water, where I feel at home. And I still desire another Lockward book, Eve's Red Dress

Likewise, I yearn for The Alchemist's Kitchen, by Susan Rich, which sits in my cart till I save up again for poetry! But these two wonderful poets have given us all a treat. Diane interviewed Susan in her own blog, Blogalicious, which you can click on my bloglist, and you can read the interview, a poem, a meditation on the poem, and hear Susan read another poem via a link to youtube! (Or you can click Susan's blog, The Alchemist's Kitchen, on the bloglist, and find her link to the interview. Ah, the wonders of technology. Which reminds me, I signed up for Goodreads but haven't done anything there since. Sigh....)

Bloglists, aka blogrolls, are great. You see the latest entry, and they're so adorably clickable. Blogrolls sound edible.