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Old School

Old School

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Another morning walk, this time noticing who has those little plastic-wrapped packages at the end of their driveways every morning. Neighbors on either side and across the street. Not the quorum it used to be but a small and mighty band.

It’s our daily delivery of dead tree pulp, finely ground and rolled and imprinted with the latest follies of humankind.

Yes, we could scan the news on our iPads, iPhones or laptops. We could flip on the car radio and hear about the scandals and theories in the secure bubble of our automobiles. We could curl up in an easy chair with a cup of milky sweet Earl Gray and watch CNN. Or we could get the news (or what algorithms have deigned would delight us) from a Facebook feed.

On the other hand … we could unwrap the newspaper from its protective sheath, take it on the bus with us. We could dive into it as if into a cool, slow-moving stream. Could let the information and opinions it offers take us in directions we never could have imagined. Could wind up informed and inspired and enraged and smeared with ink.

But that’s only if we’re old school. Which so few of us are anymore. Hard copy? Dead trees? You betcha. I’m old school and proud. You’ll have to pry my print paper out of my cold, dead hands.

(Jon S. Creative Commons, from WNPR)

A Little Life

A Little Life

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It’s difficult to know just what to say about Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life. It’s not a little book, to be sure, and not easy to finish within the three weeks allotted by Fairfax County Library.

At times it was only the fact that I was 400 pages into it that made me keep reading. Not because it wasn’t beautifully written and a page turner in the character-reveal rather than plot-reveal sense of the word — but because the characters must endure the endurable. (And somehow, most of the time, they do.)

The book grapples with big questions, some of the biggest. Why are we here? How do we find meaning? What are the limits of love?

It doesn’t answer any of them, of course, but it makes us ponder them, and it makes us care about the characters who are pondering them. And that, as good fiction always reminds me, is what it’s all about.

A Slant of Light

A Slant of Light

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Lines from a book I just finished, A Slant of Light, by Jeffrey Lent. It was better than most at charting the ripples and eddies of a mind on a walk:

And he paused then and let his mind drift off a bit, as if overhead, riding the thermals of a hawk, or better, the air as a crow flies. And saw then his route, not along the road, but among the fields and farm lanes, the wooded ravines and gulleys that stitched together than land as a rumpled quilt, and continued walking until he came to the next to the last home on the rise of land.

 It was a book filled with long sentences that didn’t ramble but were well-tuned to the ramble, to the sight collage one experiences while moving through space and time.

It was a book that plumbed daily routines to tackle large topics. And one of the most elemental of these routines, of course, is walking — the thoughts and images to which it gives rise, the poetry it inspires.

One Sitting

One Sitting

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It’s been a while since I consumed a novel in one gulp — but that’s just what happened last night. The novel was On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan, a 200-page chronicle of Florence and Edward’s  honeymoon night.

The novel is set in 1962, a key fact, given the newlywed’s lack of sexual experience. The setting is an ironic frame handed to the reader, who knows of the sexual revolution to follow.

What amazed me about the book, though, was not the commentary on sexual mores but the nuance with which McEwan describes the nervous couple’s every word and touch. It was as if he was inside their skin — or, I should say, inside their separate skins.

In the final pages, McEwan pans out from this intense closeup. At first this seemed too neat — an easy way to end a book that could have gone on much longer (though it would have kept me up even later!). Upon reflection, though, the denouement is absolutely right. Sometimes our lives rise and fall on a single moment.

 

Reading the World

Reading the World

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For the last decade or so I’ve been writing down in the back pages of my journal the author and title of each book I read. This makes, if not for a perfect list (scattered as it is among a bunch of well-worn black books), at least a start at a disjointed one. A year or so ago I began to annotate the list, jot down a detail or two that would help me identify the book without googling the darn thing.

Which is all to say that reading is one of my pillars, one of the things I need to do in order to feel, well, right about the world. And the book I’m reading now offers an explanation for why reading is so important.

In The World Between Two Covers, author Ann Morgan writes of books’ “transformative” effect, in particular the chemistry between reader and writer, how the reader completes and embellishes the words on the page.

“As co-architects of a book’s imaginary universe,” she writes, “we do not merely register the events of a story: we create and feel them too. They are ours even as they are the author’s, and without us they would not exist exactly as they are.”

What else could explain the thoughts exploding in my head when I read Middlemarch or  The Great Gatsby or another favorite? What else could explain the wonder and the addiction?

The World Between Two Covers describes Morgan’s year of reading books from all 195 U.N. recognized countries. But the title also gets at the miracle of reading itself. From one minds, many; and from many minds, one.

Anne Frank Tree

Anne Frank Tree

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I usually walk right by it when I stroll around the Capitol, but for some reason yesterday I did not.

It seemed like nothing more than a fenced-in stick, so slender and insubstantial. But the fencing told me something important must be within — so I took a peek. I learned that the young tree is a sapling from the white chestnut that  grew outside the window of the Secret Annex of the Frank House in Amsterdam.

In May, 1944, less than a year before she would lose her life at the Bergen Belsen Concentration Camp, Anne Frank wrote, “Our chestnut tree is in full bloom. It’s covered with leaves and is even more beautiful than last year.”

The tree was brought down by a windstorm in 2010, but its chestnuts were gathered and germinated and the saplings donated. This little twig of a tree was one of its progeny. Here is what its parent meant to Anne:

Nearly every morning I go to the attic to blow the stuffy air out of my
lungs, from my favorite spot on the floor I look up at the blue sky and
the bare chestnut tree, on whose branches little raindrops shine,
appearing like silver, and at the seagulls and other birds as they glide on the wind. As long as this exists, I
thought, and I may live to see it, this sunshine, the cloudless skies,
while this lasts I cannot be unhappy.

(Photos: Wikipedia, Architect of the Capitol)

The Climate of Reading

The Climate of Reading

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The Wind is Not a River is not a book to read in the winter. When his plane is shot down, journalist John Easley bails out and lands on Attu, the westernmost of Alaska’s Aleutian Islands and the site of the only World War II battle fought on U.S. territory.

Easley has come to report on the war but instead finds himself in a damp, cold place known as “the birthplace of winds.” He survives by eating mussels and coaxing fire out of grass and driftwood. He wraps up in a parachute to sleep.  He is never really warm.

When I read this novel I find myself pulling up the covers or tightening my scarf. Such is the power of fiction to take us out of one place and plop us down in another.

But I must choose books more carefully. Read in the warm months, this book would be a cool breeze. Read in the winter, it’s yet another nail in the coffin of cold.

Bird Cloud

Bird Cloud

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It was not the best idea to pick up Annie Proulx’s Bird Cloud last night when I couldn’t sleep. I thought it would lull me back to dreams, much as it had the evening before.

But not this time. Last night I was farther along in Proulx’s Wyoming house-building saga. I wanted to know what would happen to the concrete floor that was poorly poured — and the color of liver. I wanted to understand how she could have spent most of her (considerable) income on a place that turned out to be uninhabitable from October till May due to wind and snow-packed roads.

I still haven’t gotten a satisfying answer to the last question (though it made me feel good that someone so accomplished could also be so gulled.) As to the first — well, I know she found a floor fixer who gave up his Thanksgiving (for a mere $40,000!) to sand, polish and stain her floor to a dull, serviceable brown.

Along the way, I read lines like this:  “Bird Cloud was to be a type of poem if a house can be that. After Bird Cloud was finished I knew it was a poem of landscape, architecture and fine craftsmanship…”

Why Memoir?

Why Memoir?

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Over the last week I’ve come face to face with my reading habits. I ripped right through In a Dark Wood: A Memoir of Grief by Joseph Luzzi. On its heels, Susan Cheever’s Note in a Bottle. I’m just starting Mary Karr’s Lit.

This is not a discussion of  individual books so much as what they have in common: the memoir form.

It could be that I read memoir because I write memoir — or at least memoirish. I’ve kept a journal since I was 16. I’ve written this blog for almost six years.

But I may also read memoir because we live in a confessional age, one in which the examined self is deemed more interesting than the fictional character. If that is true — and there’s much evidence that it is — then does it flow from a dearth of imagination, a surfeit of self-absorption or a quest for understanding?

This is not a new question and my thoughts here are amateurish ones, but it’s that last reason that resonates most. There are more and more of us sharing this planet, yet we know and understand each other less and less. Perhaps the humanity implicit in memoir promises relief.  If we can know and understand another, there is hope for us all.

The Archaeology of Grief

The Archaeology of Grief

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“The archaeology of grief is not ordered. It is more like earth under a spade, turning up things you had forgotten.”

I’m more than halfway through Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk and the dogeared pages are growing. More and more often I find myself holding her phrases in mind, turning them over, searching for the invisible strings that tether them to the page, so light are they, so deft at plumbing the dusky chambers of the human heart.

This one today came after a description of a dying rabbit and how adept Macdonald became at the coup de grace, at putting the bunnies her hawk, Mabel, killed out of their misery. “The serious, everything puzzle that was death and going away.”

Macdonald was grieving her father’s abrupt passing as she tamed her hawk; she was learning to be a participant in life rather than just an observer. That’s what gave her the “momentary shouldering of responsibility” that allowed her to kill the rabbit.

And she was ruminating, always ruminating. She didn’t feel regret for the killing but for the animal itself. “It wasn’t a promising sorrow,” she says. “It was the sorrow of all deaths.”

I bought this book because I thought it would be a companion in grief. It has become just that. It is  the spade, but it is also the salve.