"Enlightenment is a Bitch"

Day 22 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project.

Kim is reading The Sun, issue 411, March 2010, as am I, because it arrived in the mail this past week.

The Sun is a wonderful print magazine published by Sy Safransky in Chapel Hill, NC, that has no advertisements* and relies entirely on your subscriptions for its survival, so please consider reading and subscribing! I got hooked on The Sun when Kim sent me a gift subscription one year for Christmas. (Plus, I should say I am also now hooked on Kim's blog, Hummus Anonymous!)

She drew my attention to the first poem in this month's issue, "Enlightenment is a Bitch," by Dane Cervine, a writer, guitar player, and Tarot reader in Santa Cruz County, CA, by saying she wished she had written it!! It is indeed a delightful, wise, and funny poem. It resonates for me alongside Molly Peacock's poem, "Why I Am Not a Buddhist," and a moment in Clay's Quilt by Silas House, when the drunken Anneth insists that everybody wake up and look at the moon!

I know Kim was just reading Clay's Quilt because we are in the same book group, and because she just turned it back in at the library on Saturday (via the Jewel book drop-off), and I was able to check it out on Monday, thanks to the nice woman at the circulation desk who went down to the carts in the basement to retrieve it for me. I love living in a small town! So now, finally, I am reading Clay's Quilt, a week before we discuss it. (Note to self: remember the hush puppies!)

Rumi had his friend Shams. I have my friend Kim, having parallel reading experiences with me and enlightening me to the joys of hummus! Ah, life is good.

I should pause to say that Kim and I don't have exactly the same kind of relationship as Rumi and Shams may have had, and that I will be back soon with a blog entry on gay lit, about which I know next to nothing, but, fortunately, I have the comments of a friend to share with you.

In the same issue of The Sun is the poem "Turning Fifty," by Paul Hostovsky, one of my favorite poets from my days as a poetry editor! This poem, too, is wise and delightful. Seek it out. How can you resist a man whose contributor bio reads, "On his daily commute he reads Braille with his right hand while steering with his left." Although I am a little scared about this...preferring hands-free devices, no texting or cell phones while driving, etc. Plus, is the right hand supposed to know what the left hand is doing? At any rate, I love the poems of Paul Hostovsky.

And while we are at this enlightenment business, Douglas is reading Be Here Now by Ram Dass.

The Ram Dass book no doubt connects to some aspects of the interview with Tim Farrington in this same issue of The Sun. D. Patrick Miller has conducted the interview in the article "Till Morning Comes: Tim Farrington on Creativity, Depression, and The Dark Night of the Soul," and, if you are a regular follower of my blog since its inception--that is, if you are Kim--you may recall my recent mention of The Dark Night of the Soul, by St. John of the Cross, who wrote it in prison. It is a poem, and a love poem at that, followed by the saint's own explication, pertinent to nuns, monks, and all spiritual seekers. I read it in the excellent translation by Mirabai Starr. (Amazon calls her Mirabel, but she's Mirabai.)

St. John of the Cross, Tim Farrington, and Dane Cervine all seem to agree that "enlightenment is a bitch" in its "dark night" or depression stage, which is, as Farrington says, a sort of fever that heats the body to heal it. Farrington also notes, as might Ram Dass, that the "stages" are not really progressive or linear but simultaneous.

Have I mentioned that I don't really believe in linear time? If you are Kim, you know I have!

*But The Sun is advertising a Job Opening for a digital-media director on p. 3 and at their website! So if you are digital and in need of a job, hey, go there!

So, what print magazines do you read regularly? News magazines, literary magazines, general interest magazines, special interest magazines...and why?!

Circus, Circus

Day 10 of the “What are you reading, and why?” project, and last night I had plenty of Internet, so I came down to my home office this morning full of energy at 5:45 a.m., still had it, and then, during the major-yet-routine virus scan of my machine, Internet went out. So, it’s something, and it’s something to do with stress and strain, and I am typing onto a regular document page to copy & paste into this blog later, and try to edit/adjust to avoid wacky spacing and add links.

Have I sighed lately? Sigh….

Anyhoo, back when I first asked my little question on Facebook, 10 days ago, “What are you reading?” Richard answered that he was reading Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen. I knew the answer to the “Why?” question this time was “for book group” because somebody else from his book group had come in looking for it. (I must pause to praise this particular book group, a courageous men’s book group that, back in December, read my little poetry chapbook Broken Sonnets, and discussed it. I was not there but heard, in summary, that they found all sorts of things I didn’t even know were in there, etc. I am honored. They also brought in their own favorite poems to share. And I think they did some drinking of beer.)

So, book group. I told Richard, 10 days ago, that we have an actual circus elephant guy in our town, which, coincidentally used to be a big circus town, a “winter home” though one wonders why winter here if you could winter in Sarasota, Florida? But the answer is: big barns. The big barns were practice spaces for the fliers, the trapeze artists. Or maybe I misheard, and it was the "summer home."

Our local circus elephant guy started out with horses, tending to them in all kinds of ways but specifically their hooves, and the elephant care grew out of that. Just as in the novel, he saw some poor care of elephants by the circus, but he insisted on tending them properly, making sure they got enough food, water, rest. He had some run-ins with bosses, but he took care of his animals in the circus on Navy Pier, in Chicago.

I used to meet him at the train station, this elephant man, as the ticket agent, now retired, was a circus buff. He writes about the circus and curates the circus collection at our university. Once at a fundraiser I bid on and won a painting of an Australian circus and donated that to the university circus collection. I’ve attended local art exhibits of paintings of the circus and its clowns. And recently, last May, I learned that my good friend Gary, who went to graduate school in theatre in this town, had done a thesis project on the circus and its local connections, gathering a group of…old….clowns together, putting a tape recorder in the middle of the table, and letting them talk over old times. So, if you visit Milner Library at Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois, and want to listen to clowns talk about the circus, listen to that!

And my friend Susan used to teach voice and movement to clowns, yes, at Clown College in Sarasota, before it closed. What is the world coming to, that it has to close down its Clown College?

Ah, but we still have the Actors Gymnasium!--which is receiving an award this month from the mayor of Evanston.

By coincidence, when I first started at Babbitt’s, we got in a big bunch of circus books and ephemera. There were little circuses all over the country, and I have catalogued books and souvenir programs and documents from some of the places cited in Gruen’s acknowledgements on the copyright page of Water for Elephants: the collection of the Ringling Circus Museum, Sarasota, Florida; the Pfening Archives, Columbus, Ohio (I did not know of this when I lived for a year in Columbus, writing for an encyclopedia!); Tegge Circus Archives, Baraboo, Wisconsin. We have several circus books by a guy with an ax to grind, and several nostalgic reminiscences.

And I think there is an actual literary magazine and press dedicated to circus writings, particularly the fliers, and/or to that particular kind of risk and thrill: Hanging Loose. (Is that right? Hanging Loose Press? Yes, this is a famous press, but it has nothing to do with the circus. It has to do with "hanging loose" pages, the poetry of the now. However, I think there is a press dedicated to circus-like risks and books, and that I have seen one of these.... Help?)

But, book group. Are you in a book group? And, if so, what are you reading for it? And how do those discussions go? I am reading, soon, as soon as I purchase it, Clay’s Quilt, by Silas House. Last year, or the year before, as time sort of gets away from me and is circular, spiraling, or emanating from one moment, as in ripple on a pond, for me (have I mentioned that I can’t quite any more believe in linear time?) I read his book The Coal Tattoo because he was coming to town to speak about in our Tale for Two Cities thing (twin cities here, and Bloomington was actually the big circus town, I gather), our version of The Big Read before it was called The Big Read…I think, but arising from the same impulse to get people reading again, and talking to each about what they read. Anyway, Silas House is one charming, sweet, funny guy. And I am eager to read Clay’s Quilt and discuss it with my book group. The Coal Tattoo follows two sisters and a whole community through the ravages of coal mining, and it and Clay's Quilt are part of a trilogy. Silas House has a website/blog. (It is in fact here at blogspot!)

What are you reading, or your own, or for a book group, and why?

(And P.S., here's a link to an article from the Vidette at ISU about the circus collection in Milner Library and a book event there.)