All Books Day

Day 266 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project, and, with Halloween just over, and in anticipation of tomorrow, All Souls' Day, a day in celebration of the "dearly departed" (as Wikipedia puts it), and because at work today some people could not find the books they wanted, I celebrate some books that are not there.

Not there today: Women Who Run with the Wolves, by Claudia Pinkola Estes.  A young woman who used to live in town and is back visiting, who has multiple copies of this book in her house, was looking for one to give to a local friend.  No go.

Also not there today, nor on Thursday, when I found it online for her with another used bookseller: the 1958 Illinois State University yearbook, called The Index, edited by a woman who was also one of my junior high school teachers.  I looked online again, and it was already gone, though there were other years, just not one she'd edited.  Somebody bought up all the local copies recently, probably to sell on eBay.  Sigh....

There, but not in the house of the author, who might buy an ex-library copy from us at Babbitt's because she loaned her own to someone who never returned it: The History of Street Railways in Bloomington-Normal, Illinois, by Red and Mary Rozum.  It's always a little odd when an author calls or emails to order his or her (hir) own book!  I told her I hoped the boss would give her a discount!

And not there yet in my yearning little hands, but heard of by my yearning little ears on NPR, are these two books:

Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives, by Annie Murphy Paul.  Here's a great brief essay by her at NPR that you can read or listen to, and below that an excerpt from the book itself.

This made me recall a book that is not there on my shelf, because I gave it to a midwife friend:  Having Faith: An Ecologist's Journey to Motherhood, by Sandra Steingraber.

And, lest you think I am math-challenged, which I am, here is the second NPR book, one I want to read with my book group, because I loved Bee Season:

The False Friend, by Myla Goldberg.  I did not happen to hear this NPR story back on Wednesday, but I read the excerpt today.  A women remembers a childhood friend and some bad behavior that evidently led to the death of the friend.  Ouch.  Talk about atonement....

Nor have I read Atonement, by Ian McEwan, but I have seen the movie, which does make me want to read the book, even though I will already know what happens.  But that's the way Flannery O'Connor likes it.  Skip the suspense and focus on what the people do, and why, and ponder what they (or you) should be doing instead.

Flannery would know that today is All Saints Day, and what that's about.  I don't, really.  Except that it's connected to All Souls' Day, and the Day of the Dead, which reminds me of little sugar skulls and skeletons.

And the dearly departed.

Speaking of Compassion....

...and soulful coincidii, you might want to watch this wonderful 10-minute animation, which you will also be reading!  (You'll see.)  It's by Jeremy Rifkin, author of The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis.

I recommend also cell biologist Lynn Margulis, who says we are like this down at the cell level--and she's the co-author of Mystery Dance, with her son Dorion Sagan, mentioned earlier in this blog.

And to Richard Rorty (R.I.P.), a wonderful philosopher sociologist.

And, of course, back to Living Downstream, by Sandra Steingraber, and the new documentary film based on the book.

You can find all these things on your own, and this is a much shorter entry, eh?!  Many thanks to Bill Harrison, who posted the youtube link at Facebook!

Today's the Day!

Day 251 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project, and today's the day!  The day of the screening of Living Downstream, a documentary based on the book by Sandra Steingraber, which many people are now reading in its second edition, or will be soon, as Babbitt's is selling copies of the book at the screening!

Here is a link to my earlier blog entry on this, with some details.

So far I am reading the foreword to the second edition and then the source notes and end matter (like Bob, the great reader, who sometimes reads endnotes first) as I read the first edition a few years back, and then I will revisit the  whole book in light of the documentary, hoping all the ways of seeing and receiving the information help make it indelible.  I remember how Steingraber's excellent writing made all the complex science so clear!

I have my Great Books Foundation blue and yellow cloth book bag to carry the book with me to today's events.  It is big enough to hold the other books I am carrying, too: 11 little Beatrix Potter books for Phyllis's grandbaby and Favorite Poems, Old and New, selected by Helen Ferris and illustrated by Leonard Weisgard, for that same grandbaby!  I will deliver these at church and then head over to the....

....fabulous local food brunch at Medici, as a sweet and generous woman who cannot attend has given me her ticket.  I will get to eat fresh, healthy, and, one dearly hopes, not-polluted food grown on local farms, and perhaps brush elbows with the author and filmmaker.

My tote bag will be lighter on the walk home, with just Living Downstream in it, by then signed!

And perhaps I will stop by Babbitt's on my way, to visit the new tiny kitty!  Yes, Brian was out in the country, I think in the book van on a book buy, when he saw a teeny tiny kitty walking down the center line of the road.  He picked her up, she has her shots, and she will be living at the bookstore for 6 weeks.  In our laps by day and in a crate by night.  And we have two large sunny picture windows, so we will set up various soft places for her there, too, for when she decides she is safe enough to venture out of a lap.  I see major dusting and cleaning in our future, so she will be absolutely certain what is a litter box and what isn't.  And, by the way, what is a scratching post and what is a stack of books on the floor.  I see major shelving in our future.

Because she is a stranger, some of us want to name her Camus....but the boss is not convinced.  So her name is TBA.  For now.  (I'm calling her a she, but I don't know what she is.  Maybe she's a he.  Our little stranger has arrived to help us celebrate LGBT History Month, too!)

And, for those of you who read "An Empty Nest" yesterday, daughter had fun at homecoming dance and is home and still asleep.  And we had Skype time with son!

Living Downstream

Day 226 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project, and people have been reading Living Downstream, by Sandra Steingraber, the second edition, since it came out in April, but now even more local people will read it, as she's on a book-and-film tour for the documentary film based on the book, so she's coming to our town.

We'll be selling the books at Babbitt's, and I'll be taking my poetry workshop to the showing of the film on Sunday afternoon, October 17.  She is a poet, and I've read her book of poems, Post-Diagnosis, as well as Having Faith, her book on pollutants in breast milk.  (Gave the latter to a midwife.)  Steingraber spent time at both universities here.

I'm linking you to her books here, and the blue image is the movie poster, and it's on the little brochure I'm carrying around to remind me to get my ticket ($8) in advance at The Garlic Press.

I read the edition published in 1997 a few years later when my brother sent me his copy, and will get the new one when it gets here.  In the wonderful-but-dangerously-polluted land of coincidii, she'll go from here to other places I've lived and also to San Francisco, near my brother.

Here is the Illinois Screening Tour, which shows that she'll also play in Peoria, not far from Pekin (where she grew up and got bladder cancer at 22), Springfield, Champaign, and Chicago (where you can get your tickets at the fabulous Women and Children First bookstore).

Here at her website, you can watch the trailer (as you can on the film page), listen to an interview, and see that she's also headed to Kansas, Maine, New York, and my alma mater, Kenyon College, in Gambier, Ohio.

And yet another coincidence.  Years ago I wrote an essay on reading Steingraber for a lovely magazine called Seeding the Snow.  Here is their website, and, in case you are a woman poet, artist, or writer interested in ecology and prairie restoration, their submissions page.

***

Update:  I just got my movie ticket, $8 in advance, at the Garlic Press.  Earlier, my blog said $12, and I don't know where I got that figure...but it's always good to get tix in advance!  To go to the brunch before the movie, you add $50, so I will stick with popcorn.

Education Sunday

Day 117 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project, and today is Education Sunday at my church. My mom and the other Sunday school teachers will speak, and whatever kids are there will be included. Several are on vacation. School's out!!

The mom-in-church thing is one of the reasons I did not make it to Ohio this weekend to visit my alma mater, pun intended, on a reunion weekend. Sigh... I am so not hip in my humor. (I make myself laugh, though. Sometimes through my nose. Anyhoo....! Gesundheit.)

Also, my mom is my real alma mater. She's why I'm a poet. (For college buds, she told me to do The Belle of Amherst as my senior thesis project, so I did, and I have been in love with Emily Dickinson ever since. So that's why I'm weird! And spend a lot of time in my own back yard. Looking at flowers. Again, anyhoo...!)

What was I saying? Oh! Marty is reading The Death and Life of the Great American School System; How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education by Diane Ravitch. Marty teaches theatre at the local community college, and says this is a very good book, based on Ravitch's 40 years of experience observing education, sometimes as historian, sometimes as Assistant Secretary of Education. Ravitch has changed her mind on education issues, seeing both sides politically and all sides realistically, and now understands that standardized testing, as the foundation for learning and funding, does more harm than good. Marty says it took Ravitch this long to figure out because she didn't have kids in the schools, herself, going through it.

Ravitch has written lots of books. Here's her website.

Richard is reading Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, by Jane Bennett and his written about it in his own blog, where he mentions a "blog-chain reading group." Wow, what a great idea! The Bennett book looks really important, presenting a philosophy of "vital materialism." (I don't want to apply my weird punnish humor, but I do want to say "vital.") Looks like Bennett, like Sandra Steingraber, handles all the complexities in environmental issues, their science, their politics. But I'm not sure. If you are reading Jane Bennett, and/or Sandra Steingraber, you tell me!

It's Education Sunday. Go read something.

Scarlet Letters

Days 53 & 54 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project. While I was in Ohio this weekend, I did discover what 4 people are reading, some of them family members, one my actual daughter, who has inherited my ability to read in a moving car.

Jeff*, who came on a plane from California to the Midwest for perfect 80 degree spring weather (leaving 40 degrees and a cold rain behind him), was reading The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell and in fact finished it on this trip. He reads widely, likes to read used or borrowed books, and a tiny yellow post-it on the front cover tells him to return these Wordy Shipmates to "BAD," someone's initials, not someone's nickname. So I hope he will! Sarah Vowell mixes humor and historical anecdote on public radio as a contributor to "This American Life" and in books like this one, where the topic is the fine distinctions and conflicts between feisty Massachusetts Puritans, as well as other conflicts in the world at large.

By coincidence, my niece Maggie has just been reading The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, also about the Puritans, or at least using them in emblematic, fantastic, and romantic ways to tell the story of Hester Prynne and the courage of someone valuing the inner life against the conventions of the community...and eventually revealing her value to the community and to so many readers ever since.

(Also by coincidence, I am just now starting a re-reading of The Scarlet Letter--one of the readings for Great Books Chicago in early May--and still reading the essays, one by one, in The Death of Adam, by Marilynne Robinson, an expert on those same Puritans.)

Alas, for Maggie's Honors English class, forced to read some truncated version of the American classic! Maggie read the original, purchased on her own, and her class read the "dumbed down" version as she referred to it, "with different words." Why is an Honors English class reading a "dumbed down" version, I have to ask. It seems an irony, no doubt related to the teaching-to-the-standardized-test conventions of education in our times.

Family had gathered in Ohio to see a dance concert, with commissioned new music, choreographed by my brother-in-law, based on a series of my husband's paintings of hands. By continuing coincidence, the theme of the dance was that marvelous tension between individual and community, Hester's lifelong dance. (Though none of the dance creators had been reading The Scarlet Letter!)

In the lobby on opening night, I found Mary, mentioned here earlier in a simultaneous reading context, who, like Toni in an earlier blog entry, was reading The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker, in which the main character, unable to write the introduction to a contemporary anthology, rails a bit against the popular poet Billy Collins, whom, again, it seems important to defend, not that he needs me to defend him! His poems certainly speak for themselves and are heard by many.

I confess that I don't really understand how the same people who celebrate the breaking of any barriers between "high culture" and "low culture" are also sometimes the ones who can't abide a poet of the people, a popular and successful poet like Billy Collins or Garrison Keillor. All I can think is they want to be able to use popular culture in their own poems without having to connect to people as Collins, Keillor, or, for that matter, Walt Whitman can. But that might be 1) cynical or 2) not it at all. There is a lot I don't get, and I have never been hip or cool.

It's not that every single poem by Billy Collins is a "great" one. Not every single poem by Emily Dickinson is a great one, either. Some are surely clunkers. Why wouldn't they be? She wrote a jillion poems, most often without benefit of helpful feedback from readers/poets who could match her in innovation and intelligence. Billy Collins could have helped her! And did, in his poem "Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes," which takes my breath away, and hers. Seek it out in his book Picnic, Lightning, or reprinted in Sailing Alone Around the Room.

Come to think of it, my poem "Making Love to General Robert E. Lee," published last year in Poems & Plays, is similar to the Collins poem in bringing people together despite the barrier of history (but I have already mentioned here my nonbelief in linear time!). Because of its unusual subject matter, this is one of those poems I have published but not shared with my daughter, who is reading Honey, Baby, Sweetheart by Deb Caletti, checked out from her school library.

While the title is disconcerting, I gather from the flaps that it will have an ultimately wholesome message of female empowerment, independence, and self-realization...and that the heroine will have learned from her experience of her irresponsible father not to get too wrapped up in the "bad boy" boyfriend, but we'll see. I think this because the librarian mom drags her daughter to a senior citizen book group, so I think there will be some learning from the wise and some learning to be compassionate mixed in here!

The heroine's name is Ruby McQueen, which the flap tells me she thinks of as her "rodeo cowgirl porn star" name, also a bit disconcerting, as it means my daughter might be learning (or asking me) what a porn star is, and also a bit comforting, as it might mean I can show her my poem coming out soon in the new issue of Poems & Plays...called "My Porn Name." (Don't ask. But the answer is: one of those quizzes on Facebook.)

Happy Egg Hunt, if that's something you do. (If you are Kim, Happy Hummus.)

*Jeff, my brother, is the one who first introduced me to Living Downstream by Sandra Steingraber, about toxins in the area in which we grew up, and, before he flew back to California early this morning, and before we drove back beside the possibly toxic cornfields, I was able to alert him to a second edition, with updated science, recently out in paperback and Kindle.