No Frigate Like a Book

Day 310 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project, and I return today to The Death of Adam, by Marilynne Robinson, because I finally finished this amazing book of essays by a wonderful historian and novelist, and because of the marvelous mention of Emily Dickinson on page 211. This comes in the essay titled "Marguerite of Navarre, Part II, " which is really mostly about Marguerite, while the essay "Marguerite of Navarre" (understood to be part I) was mostly about Jean Cauvin, whom she sheltered and nurtured.

In addition to revealing Robinson as an excellent historian and compassionate moralist, this book reveals her as a feminist and environmentalist. I remember that when I started this book, I kept wondering why The Barbaric Heart, by Curtis White, wasn't full of references and citations to Marilynne Robinson. Her book was first published in 1998, and his in 2009, a full decade later. I still don't know why!

Her last essay "Wilderness" heralds a book like his: "I think we are desperately in need of a new, chastened, self-distrusting* vision of the world, an austere vision that can postpone the outdoor pleasures of cherishing exotica, and the first-world pleasures of assuming we exist to teach reasonableness to the less fortunate, and the debilitating pleasures of imagining that our own impulses are reliably good." She points out that our own impulses quite often foist nuclear waste onto the wildernesses of Utah, Idaho, and the Lake District in England, so beloved of the Romantic poets. In fact, she has a whole book, Mother Country, about environmental pollution in Britain, evidently so ignored or so unpopular as to be out of print....

People want pictures of koalas. They want to "Save the Whales" on bumper stickers. They don't want the cold hard truth.

"I am bold enough to suggest [that], to this point, environmental successes quite exactly resemble failure. What have we done for the whale, if we lose the sea?  If we lose the sea, how do we mend the atmosphere?" And so on.

*And Curtis White, in The Barbaric Heart, criticizes the environmental movement itself for falling short of the real change, which must come in the heart.

"Every environmental problem is a human problem," says Robinson. "Civilization is the ecology being lost. We can do nothing that matters if we cannot encourage its rehabilitation." She wants us to civilize ourselves enough not to keep up with the current money-based industrial and military practices that require the relentless dumping of dangerous garbage into our seas and wildernesses, even to "surrender the idea of wilderness," especially of wilderness "as an escape from civilization," and instead become civilized enough not to destroy it and each other.

But what about Marguerite and Emily?! Marguerite gathered scholars and writers together and promoted French as a literary language and advanced civilization in the time she lived, and herself wrote poems and stories that today read as modern but were neglected in her own time and "read as lady's poetry and therefore as all she asked of herself, or the best she could do. Emily Dickinson comes to mind." And the dismissing of her innovations in language and punctuation.

"There is no frigate like a book," wrote Emily Dickinson. When I first heard that phrase, I did not know a frigate was a sailing vessel, often light and swift, that could carry me away to far-off places, like a book, and sometimes a war vessel, that could "arm" me with knowledge. But I had heard the phrase "frig it," one "f" word substituting for another in a frustrated curse, so I thought I was hearing something I shouldn't have heard when someone, my dad, I think, first quoted that line in my hearing.

But I have sailed backward into history, and forward into the inevitable deterioration of the environment if we do not veer off our present course, via The Death of Adam, by Marilynne Robinson. And still I look around at our present world, as she does, with childlike wonder and hope and ripples and waves of compassion.

Cyborgs & Cannibals

Day 40 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project.

Susan is reading Real World by Natsuo Kirino (fiction) and Oneiromance by Kathleen Rooney (poetry), and she will tell you more about that at her own blog! This entry mentions cyborgs & cannibals, about which I know nothing! I think she also said she was reading Orange Crush (also poetry) by Simone Muench, and if it wasn't Susan, then somebody is reading Orange Crush and thinks it is "a beautiful, beautiful book." And we will watch for Susan's own book about Cyborgs (poetry!) to come out this summer from Mayapple Press.

And this brings me to Mike's nice comment about liking the blog because people who say anything about the books here have actually read them! This was in response to the previous entry about book clubs (Great Conversations), where sometimes people haven't actually read the book they have gathered to discuss! I want to make sure Mike and any of you know that often I am simply reporting what other people say about the books they are reading! I could not possibly read this many books in a week or a day!!

But I do read a lot, and read books simultaneously, as many of you do, an interesting thing to learn. I connect the simultaneous reading to our generally fragmented and interrupted lifestyles these days, and to the deep cyberspace click and go somewhere knowledge cloud of the Internet and how it is changing the ways we read, think, and gather information. I am alternately worried about what is happening to our thinking (sustained, contemplative thought and the making of certain kinds of logical connections perhaps going by the wayside) and very excited about us using more of our brain folds! We can think in different ways and make new kinds of connections! Maybe we can even recover some intuitive ways of thinking that we've lost!

I carry books around with me so I always have something to read, and this is part of my fragmented, simultaneous reading. Between volleyball matches at a tournment, I might be reading a poetry chapbook! Odd place to read poetry, but, on the other hand, the loud music, buzzers, and yelling of warmups makes me focus, and the poems also grab my intense focus. Reading in a peaceful place, like my own back yard, might encourage me to look around at the birds, clover, etc., remember an old boyfriend, and the next thing I know, I am writing my own poem!

I finished the book of Letters to a Young Fiction Writer, which had a wonderful thread at the end: a letter from Caroline Gordon to Flannery O'Connor about Wiseblood, a letter from O'Connor to another writer, and so on. I continue to read essay after essay in The Death of Adam by Marilynne Robinson with utter amazement. Now she has a deeply contemplative thought process and style, and I am learning so much from her. One of her complaints--uttered with both patience and subtle peeve--is that historians and literary critics will repeat blanket statements and dismissive cliches about books they have not even read--examples: The New England Primer and The McGuffey Readers--which ties right back in to Mike's comment and concern. Those who dismiss the books without reading them reveal their ignorance...but only to those who actually know something!

What the Dickens are you reading?

So today I am starting my "What are you reading?" project in earnest. Two people are reading Charles Dickens: Sarah is reading Oliver Twist and Ron is reading Pickwick Papers. I am hoping they will come here eventually and comment on why they are reading these particular books at this particular time, but for now I will just riff a little on all this.

First off, I will probably do informal research on the authors and books in that wonderful place we tell students not to use in their research papers: Wikipedia. I love Wikipedia as a first place to look for info, because it gathers it all up in a lively way. For real research, Iwould follow it all up in other sources, but for this blog...well, we'll see. I'd like to think of the book itself and the people who are reading it as my main sources. I want to know what you are reading, and why.

Secondly, I want to write about what people are reading as hard copy, in print sources, to track how that's going. I love all the info available on the Internet and I read both print and online literary journals, newspapers, magazine articles, etc., and links people send me. But I work in a bookstore, and I like to see what people want to hold in their hands to read! What they want to keep forever, or bring back and trade in, etc. I am interested in the state of reading, in a general way, to better understand those scary statistics about the decline of reading, and in the specific way of who is still reading hard copy/print media, and why. And, more specifically, books, hardcover or softcover.

Thirdly, I work in a used bookstore. I love books, and I buy some new, at the big bookstores, and at Amazon.com when I have a coupon and/or a desperate need. Otherwise, I buy my books cheap, used, where I work, with my employee discount of 20%. (Yesterday I bought Unless by Carol Shields, paperback, and Letters to a Fiction Writer, edited by Frederick Busch, hardcover, first edition, first printing. I am a book addict.) (I have read Busch's introduction so far, about a crappy rejection letter he got, and about more generous letters since, and the first letter, by Lee K. Abbott to his son, who also wants to be a writer. The thrilling thing there is that Abbott tells his son what I have heard from other writers, too: you have to go deep, and tell them everything you think, feel, and know about life. Permission to tell!)

On the one hand, I am troubled by this (buying used, not the book addict thing; I accept my book addiction): the author is not getting a royalty. On the other hand, I know authors want to be read. Many authors are generous and want their books to be passed from hand to hand, resold so the less affluent can afford to read/keep a book, donated to the library book sale, so both the reader and the library benefit, etc. A used bookstore is also a form of recycling. (And, literally, a too-damaged book is one we do recycle locally; for hardcovers, we remove the cover and recycle the textblock. And then I look for an artistic use of the hardcover, as well.) So there are my confessions, disclosures, hopes.

Pickwick Papers was, according to Wikipedia, Dickens's first complete novel. I don't think I've read it. Dickens is the guy who often composed/published his work serially, with readers waiting eagerly for the next installment. I miss that! But Harper's Magazine serialized Happyland by J. Robert Lennon a short while back. (He has a website, a literary blog, etc. You can start here to learn more about him: http://www.jrobertlennon.com/) (Oops, straying wildly from the hard copy/print media focus already, but, hey Harper's a a print magazine, and that's where I read Happyland.) I have read other Dickens novels, and recently watched Little Dorrit on PBS, online. (Ditto. Sigh.) Anyway, my life has been entwined with Dickens. I have fond memories of sitting in the theatre for the marathon performance of Nicholas Nickleby in Chicago and having muffins thrown at me! I read David Copperfield in my teens, and likewise Oliver Twist.

My first experience of Oliver Twist, however, was Oliver, the musical. The film. I was young enough to have been shocked by the darkness in it, that a character we come to know and love actually dies. Even though it was a musical, not everything worked out. And Fagin in the book is much darker than he is in the musical, or than he is, of course, in the Disney adaption, Oliver and Company, which I viewed with my children. The character Fagin was based on a real man named Fagin. It's no surprise that Dickens based many characters on people he'd seen, known, worked with, or was related to in life.

Dickens is one of those writers who delves deep into family--exploring good relationships, troubled ones, various kinds of love and loyalty. By coincidence--or is it synchronicity?--I am reading the essay "Family" in The Death of Adam right now. And here's something I want to mention about my little "What are you reading?" project. I have noticed that I read just the right thing at just the right time, which is coincidental, not supernatural, but everything else I read/notice at the time connects. I think this is because I am attentive and see the connections, and because they are there. We read and write our shared human experience.

Sometimes I put a book down. Usually this is not the writer's fault. If I take up a book that someone has recommended to me, and I can't get into, it may be a matter of taste and preference, yes, and I may not take up that book again, but mostly likely, in my case, it is simply not the right time for me to be attentive to that particular book. Two close reader friends, with whom I am in a book group, have recommended to me A Prayer for Owen Meany, by John Irving, as one of their favorite books of all time. Three times I tried to read it. My husband, not as avid a reader as I am, read it before I did. But I did complete it last year, and, indeed, it is a wonderful book, a book that lives in me now, that taught me about the Vietnam War, and that spead my compassion wide and deepened my awe at the mystery of life.

So tell me what you are reading, and why. And let me know if you, too, experience that right-book-at-the-right-time phenomenon.