New Century Reading

It's Tuesday, where are you?

Hosted by Raidergirl

I'm in a barn in an unnamed community, trying to deliver an overdue introduction to an anthology of rhyming poems while sorting through my messy personal life (girlfriend left me, deep in debt). No matter what, though, I'm very passionate about poetry, and sometimes I'm even funny. (Yes, I'm enjoying this book!)

Teaser Tuesdays is hosted by Miz B. The rules:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!   

I'm going to give more than two sentences, but no spoilers:

"What did she really mean by 'It doesn't have to rhyme?' Did she mean it could rhyme but it didn't have to? No. She meant Don't rhyme. She meant: I am going to manacle your poor pliable brains with freedom. I'm going to insist that you must be free. She wrote 'FREE VERSE' on the board."

The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker. A great, fun read so far (not quite done). It's also on the shortlist for the 2010 Tournament of Books.

5th Annual Cyberspace Poetry Slam

This is such a fun annual event.

This year's entry is from Minnesota poet and writer Patricial Hampl. 

Direction

Being alone, write postcards
saying I love being alone.
Call it solitude,
mention the pleasure
of wasted time, the jolt
of red when you saw
the forked amaryllis
in the store window yesterday.
And your thought: if
I were happy
I would not notice this.

Dare things to change.
Well, they do, things do.
A flower pressed thin
as grit in the family Bible
becomes the color of ink
on an old agreement, broken,
no flower at all. There's too
much symbol in saved things.

The mail arrives, word
of a friend's death.
Pile your hair in a chignon,
sear your face with make-up,
for hours stare at the mirror
as if this were grief (this is).
You'll become beautiful
(the eyes get sad first)
and nobody will notice how
your hand rubs your temple.

Some ragged gesture,
the wound of too much explaining.
What you need is to stand still,
no mirror, no flower, no future.

To the Lighthouse

This installment of Woolf in Winter is hosted by Emily.

I think there is a danger in reading too much Virginia Woolf, too close together. For the past week, I've been living in a bit of a fog, or time warp. I see a Rice Krispie bar for sale at a coffee shop, and first it makes me smile as I remember my oldest son at age 2, trying to ask for one, and completely befuddling me by stating he needed a "tippie car." But then I remember a neighbor we had that was my friend at the time, and how later that friendship turned toxic, and we don't live there anymore, and I wouldn't want to be her friend, but maybe I understand now a little more about her and the way she behaved, and and and...

Never mind the train of thought that went off when I thought about making spaghetti for dinner tonight. God help us all if I ever decide to tackle Proust.

But of course, what I don't do well is what Woolf did so brilliantly. The lives of these people, of Mr. Tansley and Mr. Ramsey and Lily Briscoe and Minta and Paul, and James, sweet James (musical pun intended), all encompassed by Mrs. Ramsay, are so intricately wound together and beautifully portrayed. The little bits and pieces of thoughts that people have, how opinions are often so tenuous and can be swayed, sometimes by so very little, and sometimes can never be swayed at all (did Mr. Carmichael really not ever like Mrs. Ramsay?).

There's so much that's just beautiful about this book. At first, I felt like it was suffering from comparison to Mrs. Dalloway, but the more I read, the deeper I went into it (this is a second read for me on this one). I could quote endlessly some of the passages I found thought-provoking and lovely; I think this pretty much sums up the nature of the book for me: "She felt, too,...how life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach."

Or Mrs. Ramsay's sad but true thought about her children: "They were happier now than they would ever be again."

Did anyone else find their heart stopping just a little bit when Woolf tells us Mrs. Ramsay has died, rather suddenly? Yet we don't see that, and in the end it's a bit of a mystery how she died--did make me wonder about that temper of Mr. Ramsay's.

In the book Beowulf on the Beach by Jack Murnighan, the author suggests skipping the middle section, Time Passes. I'd argue against that. I think it's critical to bridging the other two sections. You could simply go from The Window to The Lighthouse and pick up the story, but the hallucinatory tale of the decline of the house over the years after Mrs. Ramsay's death is a heartbreaking metaphor for the decline of the family without its grounding member: "So loveliness reigned and stillness, and together made the shape of loveliness itself, a form from which life had parted."

Given the tension between Mr. Ramsay and James in the early pages over James' dream of going to the lighthouse, the middle section tells us without being overt that things have not gone well, and in such a beautiful, sad way, that the ending of the book is even more heartbreaking, knowing that James and Mr. Ramsay have made one small step towards each other, and it may not be enough. Their relationship may be permanently damaged by the loss of Mrs. Ramsay, and yet there's still a glimmer of hope.

So, this is all very gushy of me, but I do love this novel. However, I have to confess in full geekitude that reading it helped me make some other connections. I'm a bit of a fanatic about the work of Sylvia Plath, and having read her journals and letters, I know she in turn was a fanatic about Woolf, reading and re-reading her novels compulsively and wanting to be like her. So I offer up a few comparisons:

Mrs. Ramsay thinks about her children: "The door sprang open and in they came, fresh as roses."

Plath, from her poem Kindness: "You hand me two children, two roses."

Mr. Tansley noting that "he was coming to see himself, and everything he had ever known gone crooked a little."

Plath in her journals (and possibly in The Bell Jar), noting that "the world had gone crooked and sour as a lemon overnight."

From the middle section: "Toads had nosed their way in. Idly, aimlessly, the swaying shawl swung to and fro. A thistle thrust itself between the tiles in the larder. The swallows nested in the drawing room...Poppies sowed themselves among the dahlias."

From Plath's poem Mushrooms:

Overnight, very
Whitely, discreetly,
Very quietly

Our toes, our noses
Take hold on the loam,
Acquire the air

Nobosy sees us,
Stops us, betrays us;
The small grains make room

...

We shall by morning
Inherit the earth.
Our foot's in the door.

My interpretation, of course. :-) But I'm finding this close reading of Woolf to be beneficial in other ways too.

Now, if it just doesn't cause me to become too absorbed in my past, present and future...Well, in any event, I am now off to see what everyone else has to say about this book, as I've been holding off reading the blogs until I finished.

It's Tuesday, where are you?

I'm revisiting a beloved place--a worn, well-loved family beach house in Scotland, where a protective, loving mother watches over her family with keen, insightful perspective, while entertaining various houseguests.

I've decided that as long as I'm doing the "It's Tuesday, Where Are You?" piece, I might as well do the other Tuesday component, hosted by Miz. B. 

 

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

"To pursue truth with such astonishing lack of consideration for other people's feelings, to rend the thin veils of civilisation [sic] so wantonly, so brutally, was to her so horrible an outrage that, without replying, dazed and blinded, she bent her head as if to let the pelt of jagged hail, the drench of dirty water, bespatter her unrebuked. There was nothing to be said."

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, for this week's Woolf in Winter read-along, hosted this week starting Jan. 29 by Emily. The Mrs. Dalloway conversation was wonderful--if you've read or are reading To the Lighthouse, be sure to check in with Emily on Friday for more insights!

Boy howdy.

It's Tuesday, where are you?

I'm in 18th-century Jamaica, following the story of a young woman born to a teenage slave, who died and left the baby with the unmotherly Circe...

The Book of Night Women by Marlon James (on the shortlist for the 2010 Tournament of Books)

Clover, Bee, and Reverie

Ah--at last. A poetry challenge. I'm especially looking forward to this one--I do read poetry, just about every day, but not in a particularly organized manner. Mostly it's a case of "oh look I got my daily poem from Writer's Almanac or in the New Yorker". I own poetry books, but have left them languishing for far too long. So! I'm in, in, in for the Clover, Bee, and Reverie challenge.

There are four levels of participation:

Couplet: Read 2 books of poetry
Limerick: Read 5 books of poetry, and finish at least one badge
Octave: Read 8 books of poetry, and finish at least two badges
Sonnet: Read 14 books of poetry, and finish two badges, and one expert badge

What is a badge? A badge just means you need to read two books of poetry that are connected in some way: same time period, some subject matter, same form, same author, etc. An expert badge means four books, same constraints.

Finally - the Free Verse Option. We know that some people want to read lots of poems from lots of different authors. Because of this, we've set up an equivalency: 20 individual poems = one book of poetry. So, if you WANTED to, for instance, for the couplet level, you could just read 40 individual poems, instead of two books of poems.

I am going to go all wild and crazy and sign up for the Octave level. The badges will be challenging, and I'll have to put some thought into that. But in the meantime, I have books by Jude Nutter, Heyden Carruth, and Jeannine Hall Gailey all waiting for attention. I want to read some older poets too--maybe revisit Dickinson? Or the Bronte sisters, since I'm a Bronte fan. And of course, my closet fascination with Sylvia Plath will probably have to be revisited.

Won't you join me?

Mrs. Dalloway

So, Virginia Woolf. She kind of intimidates me. OK--she totally intimidates me. I think of myself as reasonably intelligent, not as smart as some, not as dumb as others, but I have a terrible fear of reading Woolf and, you know, not getting it. This in spite of the fact that I have read some Woolf, and while I found it difficult, I also found it enormously rewarding.

I want to say that I love Mrs. Dalloway, and I do, but then I feel compelled to spout forth some highly erudite thoughts as to why I love it. Once compelled, I'm struck with images of Mrs. Woolf roaring in vexation from the great beyond at my insolence and lack of capability. Sort of how I imagine Kurt Cobain to react when I listen to his music. Or how they'd both react to being put in one paragraph together, which one probably shouldn't do, but there you go--that's how I roll.

"Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely; all this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely? but that somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she survived, Peter survived, lived in each other, she being part, she was positive, of the trees at home; of the house there, ugly, rambling all to bits and pieces as it was; part of people she had never met; being laid out like a mist between the people she knew best, who lifted her on their branches as she had seen the trees lift the mist, but it spread ever so far, her life, herself."

This is heady stuff, and it's beautiful, and not in an empty way devoid of meaning. Although not much happens (with one notable exception), this novel contains an entire world full of flawed, yet sympathetic people, people who have views and opinions on those around them which are so often wrong, and yet so often well-intentioned and based on years of contact. Some of them are unbearably sad--Septimus, obviously, and the rigid Miss Kilman (seriously? I wish Woolf had written a book just about her). But they all have their reasons for sadness, private or not, and they all have a certain amount of self-awareness and self-deception operating at the same time.

One thing I noticed was the frequent use of "thread" or "string", which made perfect sense, given how these people are all connected, some very tenuously, and yet their lives touch and affect each other, sometimes to an extent they don't realize or understand.

The edition I chose to read was in The Mrs. Dalloway Reader, edited by Francine Prose. Now having read the novel, I can go back and read the essays about the novel included in the reader--and I so look forward to doing just that.

It's Tuesday, where are you?

Hosted by Raidergirl

Currently, I'm in Indiana, following a headstrong young man as he has a falling-out with his father that will last a lifetime.

Abraham Lincoln by James McPherson. Sort of the Cliff Notes of Lincoln bios, clocking in at a mere 70 pages. All in preparation to read this.

Little Bee

Well, this certainly got 2010 off to a ripping start for me. I saw this on lots of "best of" lists late last year, and when it showed up on the long list for the 2010 Tournament of Books, it seemed more than logical to add it to the library queue. It conveniently showed up just in time for New Year's weekend, and has become my first completed book for the National Just Read More Novels Month challenge.

But how to describe it? Clearly, given that I'm not the speediest reader, finishing the book in four days shows that I was pretty deeply engaged (a long holiday weekend also helped). But the plot itself is so spoiler-ific that I hardly know what to say. The back of the book says this:

"We don't want to tell you too much about this book. It is a truly special story, and we don't want to spoil it. Nevertheless, you need to know something, so we will just say this: It is extremely funny, but the African beach scene is horrific. The story starts there, but the book doesn't. And it's what happens afterward that is most important. Once you have read it, you will want to tell everyone about it. Please don't tell them what happens. The magic is in how it unfolds."

Although that summary reeks of hyperbole, it is, for the most part, right. About all I can say without a spoiler is that it's about an orphaned illegal refugee in England, trying to find her way after escaping terror in Nigeria. The beach scene is rough indeed--although I've since read some reviews that have understandable criticism of that part of the book--but there are many other scenes which, while not as graphic, are equally painful.

And yet, there's also humor. Some readers apparently don't like the British people who become involuntarily entwined in Little Bee's life, but I thought they were sympathetically drawn. Let's face it--most of us have no clue what Little Bee's life would be like, and we wouldn't necessarily respond any better.

It's a little frustrating, not being able to tell more. But it's a good book. Go read it, quick, before the Tournament of Books announces its short list.