“A creature designed for reading”

Did you see Caitlin Flanagan’s article about Twilight in this month’s Atlantic?

I’ve been reading The Atlantic for several years now, but I didn’t know I had much in common with Flanagan until she confessed that she hates YA novels because they “bore” her. Well, me too. Ok, yes, there are a few that I’ve been reading and rereading since childhood. But in terms of picking up new ones, now, as an adult, that I didn’t first read as a kid… nope. Can’t do it. Am hard pressed to think of any kids’ books I’ve enjoyed as an adult. Oh, The Lightning Thief! I did like that one. And the first Children of the Lamp book wasn’t bad either. But I couldn’t finish Inkheart even when my own son gave it to me as a gift. Harry Potter? No thanks. And in fact (here’s where Caitlin and I disagree) I didn’t even particularly like Twilight. Oh, it held my interest enough that I did manage to finish it, but… meh.

Oh hell, I sound like such a curmudgeon. Could be I’m reading the wrong kind of books. Lena subsists on a steady diet of fantasy, especially all those animal fantasies like that series about cats and that other series about owls. If there is a genre that I categorically can’t stand it’s Books With Talking Animals As Protagonists. Also, I know I’m not being very careful about distinguishing between children’s books and YA, if that distinction even matters. Anyway, maybe I’m reading the wrong kind of books… or maybe it’s just that I’m a grownup.

Remember the conversation here and here about The Thirteenth Tale and how our experience of reading has changed since adolescence? Flanagan talks about the same thing:

The salient fact of an adolescent girl’s existence is her need for a secret emotional life — one that she slips into during her sulks and silences, during her endless hours alone in her room, or even just when she’s gazing out the classroom window while all of Modern European History, or the niceties of the passé composé, sluice past her. This means that she is a creature designed for reading in a way no boy or man, or even grown woman, could ever be so exactly designed, because she is a creature whose most elemental psychological needs — to be undisturbed while she works out the big questions of her life, to be hidden from view while still in plain sight, to enter profoundly into the emotional lives of others — are met precisely by the act of reading.

Yup.

Posted on December 23, 2008, 9:08 am by Julie | Filed in Reading | Comments (8)

In which Bookworm attempts to interpret a poem

Y’all seemed to enjoy my “liveblogging” of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, so here’s something similar. Follow along, if you can, as I reveal the labyrinthine thought processes of a totally clueless poetry reader (i.e., me).

The background here is that my daughter’s new violin teacher asked her to memorize a poem and recite it “with feeling.” (Can you beat that? He is so awesome!) Lena picked “Bear Song” by Kay Ryan, because she thought it would be easy to memorize. Here it is:

If I were a bear
with a bear sort of belly

that made it hard
to get up after sitting

and if I had paws
with pads on the ends

and a kind of a tab
where a tail might begin

and a button eye
on each side of my nose

I’d button the flap
of the forest closed.

And when you came
with your wolf and your stick

to the place that once was
the place to get in

you’d simply be
at the edge of the town

and your wolf wouldn’t know
a bear was around.

Eh? The flap of the forest? Your wolf and your stick? Your wolf? It’s a strange little poem, ain’t it? The belly, paw pads, and button eyes suggest maybe a teddy bear, but the second half of the poem, with the wolf and the stick and the YOU feels almost menacing. Naw, couldn’t be.

Lena found “Bear Song” in an anthology called Poetry Speaks to Children. It has a wide variety of poems, many of which are obviously written for children (R.L. Stevenson, A.A. Milne, Roald Dahl, Margaret Wise Brown, etc.). Others are by “grownup” authors (Shakespeare, Poe, Sylvia Plath, Blake, Rilke, etc.). Still others (like Kay Ryan) I’d never heard of. However, the fact that the poem is in a children’s anthology makes me want to give it a gentle interpretation. Yeah, must be a teddy bear. Maybe even a puppet — a wolf on a stick? And the flap of the forest could be, I dunno, the scenery of the puppet show. Still makes no sense, but the illustration kind of bears out (ha ha) that reading. You can click on the image to see a full-size version.

But wait! This book comes with a CD! Duh, we could actually listen to the author read the poem! Wonder if that would make a difference to my understanding (or lack thereof). So we popped the CD into the player, hit track 9, and… whoa! I’ve uploaded it here. Listen if you can (I’ve never uploaded an audio file before), and then come back.

It has a whole different meaning now, doesn’t it. It’s a real bear, and you’d best not disturb it. “You” are a hunter, and your wolf and stick are your hunting dog and rifle. Or, since this is a children’s anthology, maybe it’s a grumpy kid, feeling bearish, who wants to be left alone, and you and your wolf and stick are the grownups who keep bothering you. Either way, this poem definitely has a dark side. And the illustration, I now realize, is crap.

So, next question: who the heck is Kay Ryan? Well… it turns out she is the current Poet Laureate of the United States. Her profile at poets.org describes her poems as “compact, exhilarating, strange affairs, like Erik Satie miniatures or Joseph Cornell boxes” and the New York Times says she is “known for her sly, compact poems that revel in wordplay and internal rhymes.” Yes, I think both quotes could apply to “Bear Song,” don’t you? Even better, though, is this hilarious article that she wrote about the one and only time she attended a writers’ conference:

It turns out I have an aversion to cooperative endeavors of all sorts. I couldn’t imagine making a play or movie, for instance; so many people involved. I don’t like orchestral music. I don’t like team sports. I love the solitary, the hermetic, the cranky self-taught. Make mine the desert saints, the pole-sitters, the endurance cyclists, the artist who paints rocks cast from bronze so that they look exactly like the rocks they were cast from; you can’t tell the difference when they’re side by side.

Ha ha, I love this woman! What a kindred spirit! Except for the bit about orchestral music, I agree with everything she said. Especially *ahem* the “cranky self-taught.” Knowing this about her, the meaning of “Bear Song” becomes even clearer, doesn’t it. Yes indeed, she’s a grumpy old bear lady who just wants to be left alone. No doubt about it.

I wish I didn’t need all this extra information in order to be able to understand a poem, though.

Posted on December 4, 2008, 8:40 am by Julie | Filed in Children's Books, Poetry | Comments (7)

Liveblogging CCM

I think it was for a Weekly Geeks thing, way back, that someone said about me “she only writes when she has something to say.” At the time I took it as an enormous compliment. I mean, really! But now I’m wondering if the blogger was simply trying to say nicely that I’m one of those erratic people who won’t stick to a schedule and is sometimes absent from the blogosphere for months at a time with no explanation.

But the fact is, I really haven’t had anything to say. The election was one major distraction; there have also been some distractions on the home front — good distractions, but still distractions — and the upshot is, I just haven’t been feeling very bookish lately.

Until yesterday afternoon, that is, when I read the first four pages of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. And I was so amazed at — well, not at the first four pages in and of themselves, but at the way they unfolded for me as I read them, that I was filled with an overwhelming desire to tell someone about it. Particularly I wanted to tell my friend Les, who dammit is out of town again.  Then I thought… hey! I’ll liveblog it. Oh, don’t worry. I’m not going to liveblog the whole entire book (I don’t think). But the first four pages, I can’t resist.

Choosing the book

So first of all, I’m trying to decide what to read next. I just finished Prep, which was good but hard to read. It’s a painfully intimate portrait of a young girl at boarding school. Imagine a female Holden Caulfield who, rather than dismissing the “phonies,” buys into their crap and tries unsuccessfully to be like them and be liked by them. Prep is well done, but God, it makes your toes curl. Sooooo… I was looking for something that would take away the prep school taste from my mouth. I wanted something grand in scope, and with humor of the Robertson Davies “God is a rum old joker” variety. Thanks to BookMooch I have some interesting things on my TBR shelf right now (in fact, it’s thanks to BM that I have an actual TBR shelf at all, instead of just a mental list). I considered something by Robert Graves, oh and I’ve got a Christopher Morley which I’m really excited about too, but in the end the one I pulled off the shelf was Captain Corelli’s Mandolin.

I’ve read one other book by the same author, Birds Without Wings, which I wrote about here. The gist of it is: BWW is a book with a split personality. One personality is charming, hilarious, Dickensian. The other personality is a truly gruesome war story, so gruesome I almost couldn’t finish it. I don’t know anything about CCM; haven’t seen the movie, have no idea what it’s about. All I know is 1) I was in the mood for something with the first, but not the second, personality of BWW, and 2) we own a mandolin and I sort of know how to play it. So the big question is: how similar to BWW is CCM? Would it be the perfect remedy for what ailed me? Or would it be too tragic to read?

It occurs to me now that I should have read page 69, but at the time (i.e. yesterday) I simply opened up the book and read the first paragraph.

The first paragraph

Well, I think I’ll let you read it for yourself rather than try to describe it. Here ’tis:

Dr. Iannis had enjoyed a satisfactory day in which none of his patients had died or got any worse. He had attended a surprisingly easy calving, lanced one abscess, extracted a molar, dosed one lady of easy virtue with Salvarsan, performed an unpleasant but spectacularly fruitful enema, and had produced a miracle by a feat of medical prestidigitation.

Oh ha ha ha! I. Love. It. This is exactly what I was hoping for! Actually, I wanted to call Les right then and there. She is in nursing school and this week she had her first clinical experience. She had to catheterize an old woman who moaned “Oh God, take me now” the entire time, and I just knew this paragraph would totally cheer her up.

So, I am thrilled. We’ve got the charm! And the humor! And it’s about a doctor! And a calving! And medical procedures! Oh I am so in heaven already. Sure, it’s gross, but it’s not gruesome — not in a serious, tragic, war-story way. Gross is actually good. Rubbing my hands gleefully, I continue reading.

The next four pages

Um. Did I just say I was excited about reading about gross medical procedures? *swallowing nausea*

The next four pages go on to describe, in horrific detail, the aforementioned “feat of medical prestidigitation.” Dr. Iannis… well… again, I don’t think my description would do it justice. Read on if you dare:

He had gone to old man Stamatis’ house, having been summoned to deal with an earache, and had found himself gazing down into an aural orifice more dank, be-lichened, and stalagmitic even than the Drogarati cave.

Ewwwwwww!

He had set about cleaning the lichen away with the aid of a little cotton, soaked in alcohol, and wrapped about the end of a long matchstick.

Ewwwwwww! I should probably mention here that I am absolutely obsessive about ear hygiene. I feel about earwax the way some people feel about zits and scabs (fascinated and repulsed and can’t keep their hands off *cough* like my sister *cough*). I go through Q-tips like there’s no tomorrow. To continue…

He was aware that old man Stamatis had been deaf in that ear since childhood, and that it had been a constant source of pain, but was nonetheless surprised when, deep in that hairy recess, the tip of his matchstick seemed to encounter something hard and unyielding; something, that is to say, which had no physiological or anatomical excuse for its presence.

Oh. My. God. It turns out that the something unyielding is a pea which old man Stamatis presumably had stuck in there himself, as a toddler. A pea, tightly packed in there, with a “hard brown cankerous coating of wax.” He ponders how to remove it, and now we have a bit of comic relief:

“You have an exorbitant auditory impediment,” replied the doctor, conscious of the necessity for maintaining a certain iatric mystique, and fully aware that “a pea in the ear” was unlikely to earn him any kudos. “I can remove it with a fishhook and a small hammer; it’s the ideal way of overcoming un embarras de petit pois.” He spoke the French words in a mincingly Parisian accent, even though his irony was apparent only to himself.

Ok, now they go get the fishhook and hammer. Can you believe this? And here comes the part that I most wanted to share with Les:

The doctor carefully inserted the straightened hook into the hirsute orifice and raised the hammer, only to be deflected from his course by a hoarse shriek very reminiscent of that of a raven. Perplexed and horrified, the old wife was wringing her hands and keening, “O, o, o, you are going to drive a fishhook into his brain. Christ have mercy, all the saints and Mary protect us.”

Now I’m laughing hard. At this point the doctor has second thoughts about attempting to remove the pea this way, and instead instructs them to “fill his ear up with water and mollify the supererogatory occlusion.” So old man Stamatis spends the day lying on his side, with an earful of warm water. You know, just like you would soak your peas before you cook them. Softened, the pea comes out easily…

Encrusted with thick dark wax, rank and malodorous, it was recognisable to neither of them as anything leguminous. “It’s very papilionaceous, is it not?” enquired the doctor.

The old woman nodded with every semblance of having understood, which she had not, but with an expression of wonder alight in her eyes. Stamatis clapped his hand to the side of his head and exclaimed, “It’s cold in there. My God, it’s loud. I mean everything is loud. My own voice is loud.”

“Your deafness is cured,” announced Dr Iannis. “A very satisfactory operation, I think.”

And oh what a very satisfactory reading experience!

Posted on November 23, 2008, 9:51 am by Julie | Filed in Blogging, Reading | Comments (15)

Jump at the Sun, by Kim McLarin

You know those books where the character you’re rooting for makes a bad decision and you just want to jump into the book and shake them by the shoulders and point out their folly? This book was kind of like that, except I wanted to jump into the book and hug the main character and tell her: it’s okay, you’re not the only person who feels that way and it will get better, I promise.

The protagonist is the SAHM of two young children and she is struggling with the tedium and inexorability of motherhood. McLarin describes it with painful accuracy; anyone who has ever been driven batty by the daily demands of a three-year-old will surely recognize themselves in this book. Of course she fantasizes about running off and abandoning them. What SAHM hasn’t?

Fortunately Jump at the Sun isn’t just about the daily demands, etc. It also has history, flashbacks, sociology & race relations, life, death, marriage, and lots of other good stuff. But it is mainly about parenting, and if you’re a bookish introvert who has ever chafed at the bonds of motherhood you will definitely appreciate this novel. You might not love it. The plot twists were a little too convenient, and the language at times was a little unbelievable (okay she’s an academic, but does that really give her the right to use the word enchiridion to describe a parenting book?). But you will definitely appreciate it.

Posted on November 7, 2008, 10:54 am by Julie | Filed in Parenting, Reviews | Comments (1)

Whew!

At last, the election is over and I can get back to normal life again. Honestly, those last few weeks reminded me of late-stage pregnancy: thinking of nothing but that slowly approaching date, the mixture of dread and excitement, the utter inability to focus on anything else… Yes, I am thrilled with the results (except Prop 8 in California) but even if it had god forbid gone the other way I would still, at least, be glad that the damn thing was finally OVER.

It is good to be back here at Bookworm! During my unplanned hiatus I read a grand total of ONE books. Yes, that’s right. I have read ONE book since August 30, the date of my last real post. And I have let all your posts pile up in Google Reader. Instead, I read about fifty million diaries on dailykos, and about a hundred thousand articles apiece on huffpo and fivethirtyeight.com and mudflats and various other assorted lefty liberal blogs. “Pundit” is now right up there with “maverick” on my list of Words I Never Want To Hear Again.

So… I have lots to do now that we have a president-elect. I have blog posts to read, client work to catch up on, a book review to write, and shit, my house and yard are positively sordid.

Posted on November 7, 2008, 8:24 am by Julie | Filed in Blogging, Political | Comments (7)

Heads up, everyone: next week is Banned Books Week!

Just a quick post to remind you all that the big event is coming up, September 27–October 4, 2008. Head on over to the American Library Association’s website for more information and lists of frequently-challenged books. Needless to say, those who would ban books make me want to puke. I hope you’ll join me in reading some banned books, not just next week but year round, and encouraging your kids to read them too.

I created this little graphic myself because I couldn’t find anything “official” at ALA. Feel free to download it (control- or right-click) if you like. And Tango Makes Three tops the list of challenged books this year.

While we’re on the topic of banned books, I came across a cute article titled “Why We Shouldn’t Still Be Learning Catcher in the Rye.” Don’t worry, the author isn’t actually suggesting the book be banned — just replaced on the sophomore English syllabus with something more shocking.

Posted on September 23, 2008, 6:57 pm by Julie | Filed in Children's Books, Political | Comments (15)

Two short reviews

Only Human: A Divine Comedy, by Jenny Diski

I mooched this book from April Boland after reading about it on her Sunday Salon post. It’s a retelling of the story of Abraham and Sarah, with a twist: the story is narrated alternately in the third person from Sarah’s point of view, and in the (omniscient?) first person, by God.

God is by far the most interesting character in the book. God is “only human” in a lot of ways; he (she?) experiences confusion, jealousy, loneliness, love, desire, dismay. And what I liked most is that the author has come up with a completely coherent explanation for God’s actions, all the way up to the sacrifice of Isaac. Whatever your religious beliefs, there is lots of food for thought here.

Where this book falls short? Alas, in the storytelling department. I found myself wishing for more detail, more color, more description, more dialogue, more showing and less telling. A lot of the time I felt like I was reading an essay rather than a novel.

Garden Spells, by Sarah Addison Allen

I read two reviews of this book, one glowing and the other vitriolic. Of course, I failed to bookmark either one, and now I can’t find them. Needless to say, I was sufficiently intrigued by the two extremes that I felt like I really should read it myself.

This was quite a contrast with Only Human. No problems in the storytelling department here! It’s a light romance, with a bit of magic. Lots of color, detail, dialogue, action. Totally predictable plot, but don’t all light romances have totally predicable plots? The fun is in the charming characters, the “garden spells,” the humor, the quirkiness. This book certainly won’t change your worldview, but it’s a nice way to spend a rainy afternoon. Two thumbs up. :-)

Posted on August 30, 2008, 8:07 am by Julie | Filed in Reviews | Comments (6)