Melancholy Baby

Day 43 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project.

Today, and since last night, I am feeling a little melancholy. The spring itself is joyous--the sunshine, temps in the 60s, birds and animals out, dogs barking at the new smells, etc.--but perhaps the shift to the new season, or the energy it takes to shift, creates this other, poignant mood.

So I'll tell you that Beth is reading "Ode on Melancholy" by John Keats, and two other poems with a strain of melancholy in them, for a poetry discussion tonight. Her discussion group is also reading T. S. Eliot's "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," and that's melancholy with its yellow fog and whispering women, doubts and regrets, mermaids singing. So is Walt Whitman's "Facing West from California's Shores," even with its "very pleased and joyous moment," as it's about traveling the world and not finding, or quite remembering, what one set out to discover.

And melancholy is one of those mixed emotions, isn't it? The sadness is dominant, but the sweetness is underlying. I think of Abraham Lincoln's melancholy. 2009 was a big Lincoln year, especially here in Illinois, and I am still halfway through Team of Rivals, which I want to finish 1) before the movie comes out and 2) before I start The Lincolns: Portrait of a Marriage, by the poet Daniel Mark Epstein, whose book Lincoln and Whitman: Parallel Lives in Civil War Washington I very much enjoyed. I'm also a loyal reader of Epstein's poetry because he's a Kenyon College alum, like me!

Some years ago, I had my Lincoln College students read an excerpt from Lincoln's Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled his Greatness by Joshua Wolf Shenk. I heard Doris Kearns Goodwin speak, and she does like that more open term, melancholy, to describe Lincoln's famous sadness. She prefers it to the clinical-sounding "depression." The discussion of the medications of the time in the Shenk book and Atlantic excerpt fascinated my college students, as several of them were also medicated on our more modern drugs; in Lincoln's day getting treated for ailments might add lead poisoning to the list of troubles!

Biographies and memoirs are particularly good at exploring strains of sadness in our lives. Paulette is now reading Hermione Lee's thick biography of Edith Wharton. I have been reading it, too, slowly, and my bookmark in it is in roughly the same spot as my bookmark in A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates, by Blake Bailey--that is, about a quarter of the way through each. I can report that one summer, reading a number of things at the same time, I made it all the way through Cynthia Griffin Wolff's thick biography of Emily Dickinson. I think what happens is that I encounter a rough spot in someone else's life...and just can't get past it...but I must, as I am reading to learn how to be human.

And Michael and Kay, who sometimes read the same book at the same time, took up Half Broke Horses, a "true-life novel," by Jeanette Walls, after reading her memoir The Glass Castle.

Tonight I'll be attending a poetry reading by David Baker, who is poetry editor of The Kenyon Review. It's poetry, so I imagine I'll encounter a bit of melancholy there...but perhaps in the way that blues music relieves by giving voice to the blues...

Glimmer Train

Day 7 of the "What are you reading?" project. (And still being kicked off the Internet at home...)

Suzie is reading What the World will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, a collection of short stories by Laura van den Berg. That is one scary title! But it sounds like the stories mix big trouble with gentle insight in magical ways each time.

I am also reading some short stories, interspersed with my other reading, which works because I am still reading a book of essays and a book of letters. I paused to read two stories by Paul Michel in back issues of Glimmer Train, a wonderful literary magazine edited by two sisters and published in Portland, Oregon. I was an early subscriber to this magazine, delighted by the policy of publishing pictures of the authors as children and having them comment on their work in "The Last Pages." My mom also liked it from the start and has been a faithful subscriber ever after, so now I borrow her copies!

So I read Michel's stories "Say to the Waves" in the Summer 2004 issue and "Green" in the Spring 2006 issue, and he will also have a story in the forthcoming Spring 2010 issue. Paul and I were at Kenyon College at the same time, and we recently reconnected at Facebook, which is why I love Facebook. Loved these short stories. "Green" gets the tornado sky of the Midwest, and the icky fear of it, just right, and then there is all this subtle family stuff going on, too. "Say to the Waves" is a story that grabs me and makes me care about these people I am just now meeting, and puts me right there on a bench with them.

Paul has a new book coming out in April, Houdini Pie, and will be at the AWP conference in Denver this year to help promote it.

What I always love about short stories is you can sit down and eat them. What I mean by this is what Richard Bausch says in his essay/letter "Dear Writer," collected in the Letters to a Fiction Writer book edited by Frederick Busch. Bausch is first reissuing Fitzgerald's advice to his daughter Scottie that "you must try to absorb...six good authors a year" and goes on to say that "you swallow them. You ingest them, and move on."

I do look at reading this way. It sustains me. It keeps me alive, it helps me write. It is nutritious, good reading!