Stone Soup

Day 48 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project.

This will be another hodgepodge, random potluck of what people are reading. Michelle is reading John Grisham. Judy is reading Inklings by Jeffrey Koterba, a memoir by a cartoonist with Tourette's, about his challenges with that and with his father, compared (by Amazon) to The Tender Bar, by J. R. Moehringer, a memoir about a boy sort of raised by a "bar" of kind, drinking men. I would like my father, who had a similarly challenging father, to read that one.

Kevin said he was reading The Amazing Life of Oscar Wao, but I have a feeling is really reading The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, a novel about a scifi/fantasy nerd from the Dominican Republic. That boils it down rather too much, around a sinking stone, so to speak (of soup), as the novel sounds very funny, poignant, and probably oddly informative as well, spelling out the significance of the fuku curse on people who tangled with dictator Rafael Trujillo.

In fact, descriptions of the style of this book remind me of the mixed hilarity & poignancy of Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer, not to mention some other "dick lit" guys.

Which leads me to Zachary Mason and The Lost Books of the Odyssey, a novel that is "intertextual" with Homer's Odyssey, without requiring that you know the epic to appreciate the novel (just as you don't have to have read all the Gospels or the entire New Testament plus some Buddhism to appreciate Lamb by Christopher Moore). I'm not calling this dick lit; I'm just noting that some might, based on the incorporation of humor, a male main character, and one (female) reader's reference to Odysseus as a "real man" (in the way Jesus was in Moore's novel) with flaws. Another reader compares Diaz to both Neil Gaiman and Jorge Luis Borges, which prepares us for a real treat--good storytelling and metafictional labyrinthrian twists and turns.

Bob is reading The Lost Books (now or soon), so perhaps he will tell us more about it. He was, at last report, just finishing up The Diviners, by Rick Moody, which more than one reader compares to The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen as being a novel with edgy humor and the oomph of social criticism. In The Diviners, Hollywood takes the criticism.

Which makes one long for simpler pleasures, sweeter entertainments. Fortunately, Beth is reading Spread a Little Happiness: The First 100 Years of the British Musical, by Sheridan Morley, the son of comic actor Robert Morley.

And that's enough for this pot of stone soup.

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.