experiencing the poem

I think I love school. Again. Which is a nice change from not loving school, and then hating school, and then panicking about school and running away, shrieking, from school and hiding in a dark corner rocking back and forth and whimpering in tongues. About school.

My first class was Wednesday, and despite a big unpleasantly pretentious weaselface (hello, weaselface!) it was a pleasure and a delight and I only looked at the clock five or eleven times. The rest of the class I "participated" and said "things that are smart" about "poetry." I was kind of sexy.

And now, I have a homework assignment, and I am excited. About homework! This is so much nicer than a dark corner. For my homework assignment, I have to choose a poem, and then, experience it. And then, write two pages about my experience of experiencing a poem. That rules. Mostly because my explicating skills are probably a bit rusty.

mary roach, i love you

I am reading Stiff, which is subtitled "The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers" and it is about, as you might imagine, dead people and the wacky things dead people do, like get blown up and rot and be harvested for bits.

It is, however, not morbid - it's smart, and it's cool, and it is really, really hilarious. And I found myself on the bus this morning thinking "Mary Roach, I wish you were my girfriend."

I also found myself closing the book and putting down my head and crying, out of nowhere, right in the middle of a description of organ retrieval. But not because Mary Roach is not my girlfriend. Because, you know, death. Oh, Death. Bodies! Bits! It's all so final and terrible and beautiful because one death helps save another's life and oh my god, angst, angst, terrible beauty. Woe and despair.

I could be a little crazy.

Call me, Mary!

I, the Divine: A Novel in First Chapters

Rabih Alameddine

This could have been gimmicky - it's a collection of the first chapters of a woman's repeatedly aborted attempts to write her life's story. She restarts and restarts, at first always in the first person, and then getting more literary, imaginative, fictionalizing, starting not at the beginning but in various places in her life's history, trying to figure out what her story is, and what she wants to talk about, what is important.

It's really fascinating to see something in one chapter that is glossed over in a linear narrative become the focus of the next restart, as if she was reminded of something she wants to talk about - the really amazing thing about this book is that this isn't just the story she's writing down, it's the framework of the story, it's watching the narrator make those decisions in fits and starts. It's also fascinating to see the bits and pieces of the story come together, each chapter enlarging another corner of the picture.

What was distracting, and sometimes irritating was how frequently the prose was just terrible - I'm assuming that's deliberate, a part of the conceit of the narrator's amateur attempts at writing the story. But it was still not always fun to slog through. And it was sometimes frustrating to find yourself in an angle that is fascinating - particularly one of the last first chapters in the book, where we learn more about the grandfather who opens the first first chapter - and realize that it's going to end soon, and wish that this could have been the whole of the book.

And yeah. I wish I had thought of this first. Because I have so many crappy half-finished starts of books, I could have had me a postmodern goddamn masterpiece, by god.

In conclusion: rock on. unfairly.

ha!

I've been reading I, The Divine for the past few days, and I'm still on the first chapter. Man!

(See, that's funny because the book is comprised entirely of first chapters because the narrator keeps trying to write her autobiography but keeps restarting and restarting and so it's just nothing but first chapters, so I'm still on the first chapter, no matter where I am in the book! Ha!)

Well, at least I make myself laugh.

The Book of Salt

Monique Truong

This was a complicated (plot-wise, with the time jumps and flashbacks) and really dense (very lyrical language-wise) book, so much so that I worried at the end I'd find myself looking at reading group Questions for Discussion! and I hate those goddamn things.

I think I liked this. On an emotional level, it was a strong story, and moving, fascinating frequently. It seemed, however, really backloaded as far as Amazing Surprises and Unexpected Twists, all in the final fourth of the book, you are suddenly blindsided - well, not blindsided, but presented with twists you had no idea were coming and which place the preceding pages in something of a new light, but in a lot of ways it seems oddly tacked on.

On a technical level, Truong was really amazing at handling all the time jumps and the subtle humor, but she was frequently "poetic" and by "poetic" I mean really weirdly obscure and unable to just say something already. Her subtlety was sometimes way too goddamn subtle, and I wanted to hit her. I don't enjoy having to reread something eight times to make sure I know what the hell she's trying to get at. Which makes me sound like an eighth grader reading Shakespeare for the first time, I know. But honestly, she was twisty for no good reason! Stop being twisty, Monique Truong. Thank you.

I am sorry I lost count of all the times she used the word "salt," though.

Why Did I Ever

Mary Robison

I picked this up sort of by accident -- when I thought I was taking a particular class this semester, I bounced through the library, gathering up the reading list and stacking all the books on my desk to check out, very efficiently. Then I realized that I wouldn't be taking that class, and wanted to toss all the books back on the reshelve cart in a piqued manner, and possibly do some huffing away.

But I poked through the stack first, and decided to read a couple of them on my own, and Why Did I Ever, as you may have guessed because you are very clever, was one of them. And I am so glad it turned up in that stack - this is one of the best books I've read in a long time.

It's a collection of fragments, over five hundred or so of them, that are prose poems in the best way - not the Jeanette Fucking Winterson dark soul of the night O Love! kind of fucking poetry, but the kind of poetry that is every word chosen carefully and every word incisive and perfect and sharp.

Robison is doing something really interesting, using form to indicate function - the narrator's fractured attention span because of ADD and because of the things going on in her life, but mostly I was arrested by the language and how much I loved the narrator who is horribly flawed but just a terrific character.

This is really, really funny, and really, really just sad and tragic. And really funny.

oncoming train

I am a bundle of yay yay yay wrapped around a tiny nugget of lord jesus, please do strike me dead.

School starts this Wednesday. How could I not have realized that? School starts Wednesday and I am ready, except that I'm kind of not. I am also a tiny bit disappointed, because I could not get the class I was interested in getting, which has to do with architecture and prose and the architecture of prose. Structure, bricks, that sort of thing. Maybe some plot and a little putty thrown in.

Unfortunately, that class is full. Building metaphors are big sellers, I guess.

So instead I am taking something that is about the blurring of boundaries between genres. Like poetry and interpretive dance, graffiti and tattooing. Or something. It looks like a class that is all wacky and "experimental" and the instructor is swell, but it somehow doesn't feel as hearty and, I don't know, sturdy, as the building books out of wood class. Maybe what I need is something fluffy my first semester back. Maybe I should take introduction to haikoo.

Written on the Body

Jeanette Winterson

The most interesting thing to me about this book was the ungendered narrator and how Winterson was focused exclusively on the physicality of love - it was overwhelmingly something bodily and corporeal and tangible, and yet the narrator had no body that the reader could pin down in any concrete way.

It was also incredibly off-putting, and it felt to me that though Winterson was making love, all through the novel, something all-consuming, powerful, something in which you drown, like it was also really giving a short shaft to the reality of love - which incorporates the physical, in ways that have been measured, even, which incorporates senses necessarily, but is not purely the body. This, coupled with the hyperbolic, over-poetic nuttiness of the writing, made this really frustrating to read. And the abrupt, ambiguous ending just pissed me the hell off.

I mean, it would have if I hadn't been so ultimately apathetic about the whole experience.

In conclusion: Jeanette Winterson, I admire your passion, but you are a little crazy. Thank you.

written on the booty

I am reading Written on the Body, which is often very pretty, but frequently kind of unbearably pretentious and overwrought. O, Love! O, Beauty! O Endless Beauty of Beautiful Love!

Oh, shut up.

I like it. But I would have liked it more when I was, maybe, 14. And I've been slogging through it because, you know, it's sometimes pretty but we've gotten to the Unbearably Tragic Twist portion of the book's proceedings and really don't think I can wade through much more of this crap.

Wow. My tolerance for Poetic Writing has really dwindled down to nothing.

Lying

Lauren Slater

This was loopy and odd and I rolled my eyes a lot at poor Lauren Slater and the way she may or may not be lying about things that may or may not be true or maybe possibly false and always metaphorical. She was too metaphorical for me. Too something. She was trying to do something interesting, tell an allegory, a fable, about her own life, but I ended up not caring at all - this felt dusty and strange and unpleasant.

And I am starting to think I am simply not a memoir-reader because they are much too self-indulgent in their grasping towards literariness and poetry and I don't know, postmodernism. Which is funny, you see, because I read online journals. But only the ones that don't suck.

back

You may consider this, she wrote, a formal notice from the Program allowing you to register again for classes. Welcome back, she wrote.

I'm back in grad school. There was the moment of elation, and now here comes the spiral of terror and despair, right on schedule, because I am nothing if not totally punctual in my neuroses.

Tempering that, however, is the excitement. I get to be in grad school again! I get to read things! Oh god, I have to write things. Hey, look how I'm right back where I started.

It's cool. It's cool. It's all, all, good. Oh god.

Middlemarch

George Eliot

I finished it, and oh, I'm glad I did. It was huge and complicated and beautiful and moving and incredibly wise - George Eliot is just astonishingly astute and observant and wise and compassionate, and Dorothea is one of the most vivid characters I've ever read - morally and emotionally and physically, particularly physically.

It was all interweaving storylines and funny and tragic and strong female characters and this amazing omniscient even-handedness and at one point I cried and I never do that. But don't tell anyone I did.

The ending kind of broke my heart but was happy and left me satisfied but - it is real, you know? Believable. Awesome. I forgive Eliot the weird gestures she gave Ladislaw, with all his head-tossing.

And man am I glad I finally finished.

finish line

Do you know how close I am to being done with Middlemarch? I am so close. I am thisclose. That’s really close. It’s thrillingly close.

Do you know how little I want this book to end? So very little. I am loving it. One of the most frustrating things about reading this book is how much I love it, but how easy it was to avoid going back to it. I would pick it up, and get immediately absorbed, have to put it away, and then it would take actual effort to force myself to pick it back up.

There is no explanation for this. I knew it was a great book, and I knew that I was enjoying it (it is hard to not be aware that you are enjoying something, I imagine, unless your lack of self-awareness borders on legal blindness) but there was something formidably off-putting about it when the cover was closed.

The first time I ever started reading it was for a class, and for that class – a graduate school course – I think I decided I wanted the important, hefty, weighty edition that would make me look very intellectual.

Fucker was the size of a brick. A really fat brick. An oversized brick with a weight issue. It was a big goddamn book, and man did I hate lugging that thing around.

In class, the instructor only had us read halfway. I’m still not sure why. But as soon as I got up to the halfway mark, the book went bam! on the floor, and even though I wanted very muchly to pick the thing back up, to finish the book that I had kind of been loving, I couldn’t do it. It was too big, I said.

Get a smaller copy! people said. And eventually, I did. And I had no excuse to not pick it up anymore, to not carry it with me and read it on the bus and finish the stupid thing and I still didn’t because I am weird and dumb.

However, despite my astonishing levels of weird dumbness, I am almost finished! I am going to get into the bathtub tonight, and I am going to add bubbles that smell like coriander and lemon, and I am going to stay in that tub while the water turns cold and terrible, terrible things happen to good people because that is the way life is and that is what George Eliot writes about.

Oh, I hope it has a happy ending.

irony and like, stuff

The director of my graduate program said We would like to have you return. But you have to make your appeal to the dean of graduate students.

The dean of graduate students said I have heard great things about you. But you are going to have to write a letter to the director of your graduate program to appeal for reentry. Oh, and CC me.

That’s real funny! Very funny, university people! Do you see the way that I am laughing and laughing and laughing? Tears of laughter, these are. Totally.

So I’ve been trying to write that letter for about an hour now. Here is what I have so far, after an hour of chewing my lip and jumping to my feet to stalk across the room and stare angrily at a corner before I stalk back across the room and glare at a pencil, and then reseat myself and snarl at the monitor. Are you ready? Here it is:

Dear [Director of the Graduate Program]:

Man.

It’s going to be all wacky and ironic when I talk all about how I’ve struggled and overcome the writer’s block that was instrumental in my decision to take a leave of absence from the program.

The Know-It-All

A.J. Jacobs

I do not so often read non-fiction. I am not a non-fiction kind of girl, I don’t think. I need a story and a plot and Fictional Devices and just – fiction. Fiction fills up my head and satisfies me in a way that non-fiction rarely ever does, even if it is a story that just happens to be all live nude truth. Don’t ask me why, because I’m not even entirely sure what it is.

It doesn’t stop me, whatever it is, from continuing to collect non fiction that sounds fascinating and interesting and must-read but that I often just somehow never manage finish. Which is another big difference between my fiction and non-fiction habits -- I will always, always finish a novel, no matter how much I hate it and it makes me clench my teeth and want everyone in the book to die (see: The Corrections). I might throw the book across the room with great and alarming force after I finish the final word, but I will get to that goddamn last word.

With non-fiction, the moment I start to wander is the moment the book gets set down, never to be picked up again. Anyone want a gently used copy of Darwin’s Ghost?

So it’s not entirely clear why I picked up The Know-It-All. Except that it sounded really fascinating, which is why I pick up all my doomed to be forgotten non-fiction.

It is entirely clear, however, that I loved it a lot. It was almost horribly sad, very frequently, and always very very funny, and it’s crammed with Interesting Facts and a whole lot of goofiness. A lot of its appeal was the narrator – the author – who decides that he’s going to read the Encyclopedia Britannica from A-Z which is nuts, and also kind of really sexy.

He is funny and a little crazy, self-deprecating and also really sincere about this quixotic quest of his and you’re doing that cheer the author along thing while you read the book, which is organized alphabetically, with his commentary on encyclopedia entries he’s reading, as well as his life – a thread runs through about his relationship to his wife, his family, trying to have a baby, and how he feels about his father, which is where a lot of the bittersweetness comes roaring through. He does a lot of thinking about why he’s doing this crazy thing, and what it means, and what all these facts can mean to his life or anyone’s life, and it’s fascinating. It might even be thought-provoking.

It feels, in the end, a little less complete and well fleshed out than it could be – as if the facts he’s relating become more important, way too frequently, than the story of his life he’s seeding in between entries, but I devoured this the way I would any novel, and I want to read his other books. Especially the one that compares jesus and elvis, because awesome.

all night long

Do you know how long it’s been where I’ve taken a night to just curl up in bed and read? It’s been too long. It’s been entirely and ridiculously too long. I have not had the attention span or the patience or the mental fortitude to do anything more than lie under my duvet and enjoy watching The O.C. more than anyone really should really be enjoying watching The O.C. The Iron Chef has also become my one true love, and Alton Brown my boyfriend on the side.

The point is, I’ve been watching way too much television. I never watch television. It is very irritating to realize that all I want to do is watch television like some kind of crazy television watching person who watches a lot of television.

I’ve also become some kind of crazy bus-riding person who stares into space rather than pulling the book I carry everywhere, to no avail (fucking Middlemarch, out of my bag. And at lunch, I’ve been going to the gym like a crazy gym-going person, rather than curling up on the couch in the break room and reading and eating cheese-whiz right out of the aerosol can like any normal person.

But Friday night, I cancelled all of my plans to go out into the fucking rain and be social, and I poured myself a glass of wine and I pulled the duvet up to my chin and read The Know-It-All until two in the morning and my eyes were rolling back in my head, and it was the best night I’ve had in a long goddamn time. I missed reading. I have to remember how I missed it, before I start missing it again like a big dope.

too long

It turns out you can't read when you're crocheting, or sewing, or embroidering, or crocheting something onto something that's embroidered, or sewing something that's crocheted or embroidering something you've sewn out of crochet.

I made most of my holiday presents this year, and so I have not been reading at all. At all! Because all my energy went towards keeping myself from breaking into full-body sobs and raking my all-too-tender flesh with my fingernails as I raced feverishly towards completion of a shitload of gifts my whole family hated.

Also, I'm still not done with the crocheting, the sewing, the embroidering, and the crocheting of the sewn embroidery and you know, etcetera. Don't you point at that calendar. Don't you dare.

So I've been reading Middlemarch since the middle of March. Ha! That was a pun. Or play on words! Paronomasia, if you will. And you should.

One of the things I'd like to do in ought five, besides finish all the holiday giving I have to do before ought six, is keep track of what I've been reading, and to be reading again - reading is what I do, and it is so very fucking weird to realize I haven't sat down for an extended reading in bed session in one million, billion years. That's a conservative estimate.

So the bookblog's back. And Middlemarch, you better watch your back. That might have been another play on words kind of thing. Or not. I'm a little rusty.