April Fool's Day Mystery

Day 51 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project.

Is this an April Fool's Day joke? Amazon has sent me an email asking if I am looking for mysteries and thrillers. That part I understand. A lot of you are reading mysteries and thrillers, so I search for them at Amazon to provide a handy link, and Amazon thinks I read them. (Huge issues of privacy, marketing, and cultural values shall be set aside for the moment.)

But why does Amazon classify The English Major by Jim Harrison as a mystery/thriller? Is it because it has a stalker in it? Or the word "stalker" in the plot summary? Anyhoo.... Dave, one of the SOBs who is reading The English Major for his book group (they call themselves the SOBs--I wouldn't ever call him one!) is also reading 2 other books by Jim Harrison, the ones we had handy at Babbitt's!

April is not necessarily the cruelest month. But it is supposed to be 80 degrees here today, and I do remember a blizzard on April 4 here in a past year. Anyhoo... April is also National Poetry Month, and there will be all sorts of poetry events going on, so 1) attend some and 2) read a book of poetry this month, even if you think you don't like it!

You can hear me read my very short poem "Coyote" on WGLT Poetry Radio today, if you want. You can stream it live today at 10 a.m. or 10 p.m., or hear it as a podcast at WGLT, iTunes, or various other websites that cull radio readings from other sites and gather them for general listeners and special populations.

Anyhoo...

A reading group down the road in Lincoln, Illinois is just starting up, using as its first selection Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe. I attempted a conversational mini-interview with the leader of this group, to find out why they were interested in reading this particular book at this particular time...but could not get a word in edgewise. The man preferred to have a long conversation with my boss, right in front of me as I worked, so I quietly typed away, listening for the answer, should it creep into the conversation, which was about business and power, not about books at all.

After Uncle Tom's Cabin, his book group will read Mansfield Park and Jane Eyre. Had I been able to engage the fellow in conversation, I might have asked why they were reading classics by women authors.

"Who's that by?" called the book group leader from the fiction aisle when he went to look for Uncle Tom's Cabin. I let the boss help him.

Do I sound bitter? Snarky? Neglected? Petty? Human? Foolish? Anyhoo...

Perhaps I will retitle this entry "Anyhoo."

And speaking of Jane Austen and Jane Eyre, a nice young woman came in the store last week confusing the two, as I did as a teenager, thinking one was the author of the other, etc. Well, it is hard to keep them straight. So I felt vaguely comforted for embarrassment in the past, and was happy to help her find some Austen and some Bronte! And, speaking of Bronte, there are more then one of them, those writing sisters, and a young woman was pleased to find a nice old hardback copy of Wuthering Heights on Tuesday.

And another young woman was delighted to find, in the window, where we had placed it as soon as it came in, Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, one of those wacky intertextual classics & monsters books, this one by Ben H. Winters (and Jane Austen), like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, by Seth Grahame-Smith (and Jane Austen), or Mansfield Park and Mummies by Vera Nazarian (and Jane Austen). Actually, I see there are two P&P and Zombies books--including Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls, by Steve Hockensmith--nay, a whole series of these "Quirk Classics."

And now Amazon will think I want to buy them.

Maybe, when he returns today to have lunch with the boss, I should recommend Mansfield Park and Mummies to the book group leader....

And that's enough human April folly for today.

Outcasts United Again

Day 50 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project.

First, a short knotted string of coincidences: Sarah Jane reports in a comment that she is reading a collection of essays, edited by Harold Bloom, on Jude the Obscure, the last novel by Thomas Hardy. After that, and the reception of scandalized critics, he wrote only poetry and drama, much of which I just riffled through when a Library of America edition of his works passed through my hands at Babbitt's Books.

Co-worker Jo, a Hardy scholar, and a reader of mysteries, just finished "a police procedural" (a term I wasn't aware of till she spoke it, apparently a kind of mystery focused on what the police do to solve it) by Peter Turnbull and is taking up The Man from Beijing, by Henning Mankell, a mystery set in Sweden and Beijing, among other places.

And Bill, poetry editor for The Hardy Review, and Jo's former professor, just emailed to have me update my bio to publish with 4 poems in the spring issue. The poems touch on Hardy themes of tragic accident, erotic love, intense weather, and biography.

Jude was a social outcast with thwarted dreams of being a scholar,working as a mason instead. (I am tempted to mention the tomes of "secret" Masonic literature we continue to receive at Babbitt's. Which reminds me, inevitably, of Peggy Sue Got Married, immediately lifting the mood to silliness.) And very soon, I will embark on another close reading of The Scarlet Letter, and spend some time Hester the seamstress, another social outcast.

But for now, I'll say that I have finished the "Tale for Two Cities" selection for my twin cities: Outcasts United: An American Town, a Refugee Team, and One Woman's Quest to Make a Difference, by Warren St. John, and look forward to hearing the author speak on April 12 at the fabulous new hotel and conference center in our little town. (This hotel will allow more academic conferences to take place here, where we have two universities.)

The young soccer players in this book are "social outcasts" in America only because they are outwardly different from their neighbors in small-town Georgia, having been cast out from various homelands for various reasons, often experiencing terrible trauma and violence. But soccer gives them a home and a team and a way to bond with others and, eventually, with the larger community.

This is more than a "feel good" story, even if the eventual movie might make it into that, and one certainly does not feel good reading about what has happened to these families before they got to Georgia, nor what they often encountered here. It is a fine and balanced account, resulting from "immersion" journalism (like the "participant observer" journalism of Truman Capote for In Cold Blood, but producing true non-fiction, not Capote's hybrid novel, which my husband is reading right now.)

Having mentioned Rick Bragg and his plagiarism woes earlier in this blog, I was struck by St. John's meticulous and abundant acknowledgements at the back of this paperback edition of the book, and this sentence in particular: "Times bylines usually carry only one or two names, a convention that hardly does justice to the true tally of people who contribute to each story." St. John's true tally is impressive, and he credits all those who helped with articles on The Fugees soccer team published in the New York Times as well as all those who helped with the book emerging from his immersion reporting.

"Reporters, it might be said, scour for facts in the hope of uncovering truths, and while the former may make the page, the latter take root in the mind and heart." St. John then deeply and sweetly thanks the players and families who have clearly taken root in his mind and heart. I was also thinking here of how his objective reporting of the facts allowed me uncover possible truths between the lines, and also to accept a number of complexities and ambiguities that simply can't be easily reported or resolved. They exist.

Projectile Synchronicity

Day 49 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project.

Paulette is reading Break of Day by Colette, and it is just now, as I compose, the break of day. There was a full moon last night, and life is beautiful.

A young man on spring break, soon to graduate with a wildlife biologist degree and a poetry habit, is now reading Charles Olson, who believed that poetry was a "high energy construct," poets taking energy from various sources and projecting it onto the page via thought, breath, heart, words...."projective verse."

(My hidden stand-up self cannot help but imagine projectile versifying.)

(That's why it's a hidden self.)

But now I must confess to some 1) impulse buying based on 2) synchronicity. Susan commented here earlier on synchronicity, cool coincidences, Carl Jung.

I was reading Midwest Eclogue by David Baker (see earlier entry), the poem "Melancholy Man," and the note on it at the back of the book referring to Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton. Having written recently on melancholy, I was struck by that coincidence and then further stricken by the desire to read the Burton book. Fortunately 1) I was home and thus nowhere near a bookstore and 2) when I accessed the Babbitt's search page, we didn't have it.

But I came into work yesterday, to do my lovely how-the-heck-am-I-going-to-make-a-living-as-a-poet job of typing books into the store database, and there it was, newly discarded by a library, The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton, in the All-English translation (no more Latin) edited by Floyd Dell and Paul Jordan-Smith. You know what happened next.

One of my jobs during how-the-heck-am-I-going-to-make-a-living-as-an-actress stage of my life was to work in Special Collections at the Newberry Library in Chicago. They have a fabulous Floyd Dell collection, so I learned a lot about him there. That's when I realized Edna St. Vincent Millay had also worked as an actress in Chicago, before heading off to Greenwich Village. And, yes, behind me on the bookshelf is the huge biography of Millay, Savage Beauty, by Nancy Milford, Christmas gift from my mom and dad back in 2001, deeply enjoyed. My mother introduced me to "Renascence," Millay's long passionate poem about coming back to life, as a verse reader on the high school speech team, and I've been in love with her ever since. Likewise, Emily Dickinson. Their fat biographies sit side by side, in fact, a fine coincidence in my random organizational system based on love.

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.

Tesla, Pigeons, Slice...of Houdini Pie

Day 47 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project.

Paul is reading The Invention of Everything Else, by Samantha Hunt, who talks about her book in an interview in Slice Magazine.

It's historical fiction about Nikola Tesla, an eccentric Serbian inventor famous for his work with electromagnetism and the alternating current. Even though some people consider Tesla to be a prime example of the "mad scientist," Wikipedia reminds us that Thomas Edison wished he himself had recognized the true value of the alternating current.

But wasn't there a film about what can go terribly wrong with the alternating current? Yes, the film is The Prestige. But, whoa, thank you again, Wikipedia! There is a whole article there, separate from the biographical and scientific info on Tesla, reminding us about his importance in popular culture, from Superman comics to Disney to video games.

Not to mention how the alternating current can be used, or imagined, as a death ray!

Tesla was celibate and loved pigeons. (I've linked you to the paperback at Amazon, but Slice shows pigeon cover.)

Paul Auster in Moon Palace and Thomas Pynchon in Against the Day also used Tesla as a character in novels. And Lynn Pattison has a book of poems called Tesla's Daughter. (Although--see celibacy above--this is an imagined, figurative daughter.)

(Just as I am Emily Dickinson's great-great-great-great-granddaughter.)

Paul Michel, the reader above, has his own novel coming out soon, mentioned here earlier but now available for pre-order at Amazon, ready to ship around April 10, and available at the AWP Conference, which Paul will be attending. It's Houdini Pie, and is about buried treasure, among other things!

And I just read Paul's sweet story "Not the King of Prussia" in the current issue of Glimmer Train.