Poet's Corner

-Image courtesy of Fashion Abuse

Whereabouts

by Marcus Jackson, from Neighborhood Register. © Caravan Kerry Press, 2011.

—to Nicole

Finished early at the library,
          I strolled Canal Street to fill
          empty hours
before we'd meet home for dinner.

          Late-winter light sneered,
          reluctant to leave
the streets, bargain tables
          with t-shirts or imposter purses,
          jewelry coves
where gold necklaces refracted
          from squares of scarlet felt.

          All down Mulberry, arched
garlands of festival bulbs
          shined champagne.

          From Italian restaurant stoops,
waiters with handsome accents
          lured tourists by describing
          entrées like landscapes.

At Ferrara's dessert café,
          the wait bent
          halfway up the clogged block.
I whittled inside, browsed
          glass cabinets of cookies,
          yellow-shelled cannolis,
cakes displayed
on paper placemats
          that looked like lace.

I arrived 40 minutes late.
          You balanced, hand
          against bedroom door-jamb,
pulling off your office heels.

          Once you noticed the bakery box
          under my arm, your face calmed—
my earlier whereabouts
          evidenced in sweetness
          we would fork from the same plate.

This is a great little poem. I love how the first four stanzas start out slowly, just snapshots and observations from a lengthy stroll, and then in the final three stanzas we get a series of images that hone in on something very personal. Still, until those final few lines, you get the sense that the whole thing is centered on the narrator.

But the last stanza turns the aimless loafer into a romantic hero. It suddenly becomes a statement about a couple’s intimacy. And those last three lines are worth the price of admission alone:

“my earlier whereabouts

          evidenced in sweetness

          we would fork from the same plate”

Very good, no? Have you had your socks knocked off by a good poem lately? Share them in the comments.

The Lending Library at the End of the Earth

I’ve talked about my interactions with lending libraries here. But in today’s post, I thought we’d strike out a little farther afield. I’m talking about the lending library at the Amundsen-Scott Research Station at the South Pole.

As background, let me just say that I’m an unabashed blog voyeur (there’s probably a post of its own in that statement, but I’ll save that for another day.) I rarely, if ever, reach out to these internet authors on whom I drop in unannounced (the same way the vast majority of you will never leave a comment here), but every once in a while you come upon a question that tickles your curiosity- one that you’ll likely never get answered if you don’t just go ahead and ask it. So that’s what I did.

I wanted to learn something about the reading life for Winter-overs at the South Pole. How much people read, what kinds of things they read, whether any book-clubs or literary discussions pop up during those long, dark days at the station, etc. So I emailed the author of this blog to find out. Here's her very interesting reply:

"The winter-over reading life tends to be a personal one. We have a "library" with books filed by category and author, books are free to take or add at will. There's also an unorganized huge bookshelf in one of the lounges. That one tends to be paperbacks in the sci-fi/mystery dept, or bestsellers like Grisham and Dan Browns.

 "But in my two winters no organized reading groups. Largely I found that it was hard to maintain enough mental wherewithal to read books during the deep darkness of winter. There are rarely multiple copies of books and if we had to wait for all the interested winter-overs to finish a book before discussing it...well...it'd never happen. And it never does. Occasionally you run into someone who has read the same book as you and you talk about it. Or you pass on a good book to someone then talk about it, but rarely if never anything organized.

 "The collection of books is pretty much whatever has been donated, or brought down and then left behind over the years. There's a good collection of Antarctic history books, including a fair number of rare books, locked away. But the key is easy to get. You get the DaVinci Codes, the Oprah book clubs, and then some real oddities that show up. But usually a fair number of good ones. 

"I found reading to be really challenging in my winters. Maintaining the focus was hard. I reached a point where I couldn't even finish a movie on my laptop, and a 30 min TV show on DVD was often too much too. Just lost focus. If there had been The New Yorker magazine I think I could've finished articles about that long, but then again, maybe not. 

"A lot of people are starting to read on e-readers, which makes the lending and leaving behind of good books less likely. I wonder how that'll have an impact on books available in the library. 

"We also tend to stay away from challenging topics in the effort to make the winter easier to survive. And books, even fiction, can be controversial. You have to believe everyone is after your best interests and will work towards the station's survival if the shit hits the fan during the winter, and book discussions can make it pretty clear just how opposite people you have to live with are. Small community, best to just pretend sometimes."

Fascinating stuff, is it not? Here's an inside shot of the station, courtesy of the information superhighway:

A Big Fish, Wrapped in a Small Book, Inside a Short Video

We made a suggestion the other day that Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea  was a nice, short introduction to the world of classic literature. Below, you’ll find a nice, short introduction to that nice, short introduction. Enjoy.

.

Pick a haiku- any haiku

First Line Friday

"As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic vermin."

-Franz Kafka (Metamorphosis)

Casting Call: Round 2

After making you wade through ten paragraphs of personal history yesterday, it feels like a good time for another author look-alike post. Our first attempt can be found here and, as always, we’ll post these side-by-sides in the forum, where you’re free to add some of your own.

First up, we have a short-haired Nathan Englander and Robert Downey Jr.:

Not to be outdone, long-haired Nathan Englander teams up with saxophonist Kenny G:

Then there’s Franz Kafka and that kid from “Hook” (Charlie Korsmo):

And by my reckoning, the only thing separating Steven Millhauser from Larry David, is about 8 weeks of mustache:

Philip Roth strikes a “Kramer-esque” pose that might as well be Michael Richards:

And finally, it would be easy to double-down on the "8 weeks of mustache" joke here, but because she's still living I'll forego it. I give you the late Kurt Vonnegut and nonagenarian Phyllis Diller:

Got any more? Thrown them in the forum thread, here.

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Birth of a Careful Reader: the Sequel

In yesterday’s post, Tucker pinpointed the exact instant he became a serious reader. Others may have had similar epiphanies or “a-ha” moments, but my journey was a little more drawn out. For me, there was no single spark. But looking back, there are a few obvious flashpoints that set me on my way. If you want the one paragraph version, I’ll refer you to our ‘About Us’ page. But if you have time for the full monty, read on.

One of my earliest milestones was reading A Taste of Blackberries by Doris Buchanan Smith. I still remember being struck by the death of the narrator’s best friend. I even remember where I was when I read it. That a book could do more than entertain, that it could really work through some serious stuff, (and that a person could die of something as innocent as a bee sting) was all a revelation to me. It hadn’t really been done in a kids book before. I mean, sure, Charlotte’s Web had done it. But Charlotte was a spider. What kid hadn’t seen a dead spider before? Who gets all broken up about losing a spider? But this was different. This was a book that made me think.

I continued to read for pleasure, The Bobbsey Twins, the Boxcar Children, some Roald Dahl and Beverly Cleary, and a lot of biographies in monochrome canvas library bindings. Nothing yet that could be called great literature. But my first big setback was about to rear its head. I still wonder what genius decided to greet the newly-arrived 7^th graders of Clayton Jr. High with Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, but that’s precisely what they did. Some of my classmates may have benefitted from that first assigned reading, but I  certainly wasn’t ready for it. It would become the first in a long line of assigned texts I would avoid like the plague.

A broken leg in my freshman year would put me back on track, removing the possibility of any regular, afterschool high-jinks and paving the way for me to actually tackle Great Expectations in my new-found free time. The mystery of Pip’s unknown benefactor pulled me through what would become my first novel-length reading assignment actually fulfilled. It was a proud moment. Still, when my afternoons were once again filled with sports and aimless wandering, good books fell by the way-side.

A series of painful reading experiences followed. The Scarlet Letter, Beowulf, The Sound and the Fury, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man… There are too many to name. All of them unread to this day. In that period though, I remember one experience that was similar to the one Tucker described. I sauntered into class one-day, and the kid next to me was reading For Whom the Bell Tolls while he waited for the bell to ring. Who did he have for English, I asked. He answered. I hadn’t seen anybody else reading that book- were they reading it in class? No, he answered. You mean, you’re just reading it for fun- by choice? Mmm-hmm. Is it any good? Mmm-hmm.

He was probably either annoyed or embarrassed under my questioning, but I was trying to make sense of the following:

a) why someone my age would fill their free time, by choice, with a literary classic, b) what kind of book was so interesting that one would read it even during the 10 minute intervals between classes, and
c) what great secrets were being kept from me by my insistence that these books were outside my reach?

I didn’t immediately find the answers to those questions, but they did come eventually. So Nathaniel Schaeffer, wherever you are, I owe you one.

AP English awaited me in my senior year, and for the first time we were expected to read a book over the summer and turn in a paper before  slackers like me could leach onto any sort of in-class discussion to pick-up the salient points. I would actually have to read the book. As it turned out, Song of Solomon  by Toni Morrison was the highlight of my high-school English career. I loved that book. It was interesting, it was about  something, and it even carried off the kind of heart-pounding ending I had only read in thrillers.

Still, I wasn’t fully converted. One thing held me back. I always was, and am today, an atrociously slow reader. A life filled with great and important books would surely be a painful one. I needed one final catalyst to make me a serious reader, and that would come in college.

I lived on campus, but got a job at the airport. My wife was commuting to another school, 45 miles away, which left me without a car for most of the week. This meant a  train ride downtown, a bus ride to the airport, and a shuttle to my actual work location. Now, some people can study while commuting like this. But trying to juggle gigantic O-Chem textbooks, a notepad, a calculator, a sandwich, and pens and highlighters, I could not. What could  I do on this daily odyssey? I could read. And read I did.

I soon found that it wasn’t literature itself that had aggravated me for years, but the deadlines, quizzes, papers and essay answers that my K-12 education had married to it. Freed from the constraints of all that garbage, I found that even the “great” books were, well… pretty darn great. They’ve been my first literary love ever since.

How about the rest of you? Was there one moment for you? Or was becoming “a discerning reader” a process?

The Moment In Which One Becomes A Reader

Is it possible that there is one singular moment when an individual ceases to be merely literate, and commences a sojourn much deeper than simple literacy? A moment in time when that person actually becomes a thoughtful, analytical, and persistent reader?

I would assume for many of us that the answer is “No, I became a reader over time.”

For me, the answer is different. Perhaps I am unique, but I can specifically pinpoint the exact moment in time when I consciously made the decision to forego mere literacy in favor of being a well-informed, enlightened, careful, thorough reader of great literature.

In 1998, I was living in the Gracia neighborhood of Barcelona (another story for another day).  I was twenty years old. One particular autumn evening, I specifically remember sitting on the subway as it rumbled below La Rambla de Catalunya. I don’t remember where I was going. It was a beautiful evening, to be sure, but I felt bland and uninspired. Across from me on the metro was a girl, probably about my age, and most likely a university student. She probably wore a scarf and a long jacket with a shoulder bag (like most Catalan university girls), although I can’t remember.


What I do remember is sitting there just looking at her as the subway bumped along underground. She was reading.

I remember thinking to myself, “Hmmm, I wonder what she's getting out of that book?”

The book appeared to be a collection of Federico Garcia Lorca poetry. I remember that it had a classic black-and-white photo of the Spanish poet on the cover, and he seemed to be staring at me, and I stared back.

And then I remember thinking, “She’s surely getting more out of that book than I am getting out of my current state of doing nothing.”

And then, “Come to think of it, I see all of these Barcelona university students reading all of the time!”

And then, “Wait a minute! The fact that all of these Barcelona residents enlighten their minds by reading constantly, whereas I do not, seems unjust.”

And then, as I stared at the girl across from me, “But, I too could be reading that book of Lorca poetry in order to similarly enlighten my experience and my mind.”

And at that very moment, I became a well-informed, enlightened, careful, thorough reader of literature. I remember it well, as if some forgotten component of my mind just took over from that point. Not long thereafter, I started with Don Quixote de la Mancha (and found that it did enlighten my experience and my mind), and then Dandelion Wine, The Sun Also Rises, A Room With a View, On The Road, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Human Stain, East of Eden, Angle of Repose, The Good Earth, House of Spirits, The Monkey Wrench Gang, Crime And Punishment, One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Chosen, Stones for Ibarra, The Great Gatsby, The Stranger, Herzog, and on and on and on and on and on.

With each novel that I read, I felt a sense of empowerment. I felt that I had been given inside information about the social intricacies of human nature. I felt my mind growing in intelligence. So I kept reading through my college years, and then through law school, and marriage, and young children, and home ownership, and right through an otherwise normal trajectory for a young American male.

Now I read because it’s who I am. And as Ralph Waldo Emerson so aptly stated: “A Man is known by the books he reads.”

But for me, it all began on that autumn evening as I pondered the value that a young Barcelona university student derived from reading poetry on the subway.

Of Hunger Games and Literary Acclaim

Youmight have seen this provocative piece by Joel Stein entitled “Adults Should Read Adult Books.” If you haven’t, go ahead and click through- it’s all of five short paragraphs.

Predictably, in the wake of massive success for recent Young Adult series like Harry Potter, Twilight and the Hunger Games, people are eating him alive in the comments. Now, we’re not flocking to Stein’s banner by any means, but if you’ve hung around here long enough, you know we sympathize somewhat with the sentiment he’s trying to convey (though he might have tried honey instead of vinegar to get his point across).

‘Improve your self, Improve your shelf’ is the admonition featured in our header above. And the Henry David Thoreau quote on the right sidebar carries a similar message to readers. But who decides what the best books are, or which are worth your time?

I hate to disappoint you, but I’m not going to get into that today. People are gonna read what they’re gonna read. And while I’d love it if they mixed a little Scout Finch in with their Katniss Everdeen, I won‘t begrudge anyone their choice of reading material. It’s not like I don’t enjoy a good beach read now and again. What I’d like to know is this (regardless of what you read, and regardless of whether you have aspirations as a writer):

If you could choose between writing books that became celebrated literary works, taught in schools and revered for generations, -or- writing gripping YA novels that yielded you bucketloads of cash and worldwide fame- which would you choose?

Answer the poll question below, and feel free to elaborate in the comments. No wrong answers here, I’m just curious.

The Kerouac-Seuss Connection, Part II

Sometimes, when you try to be funny, you stumble onto a shred of truth. Yesterday’s post led me to Google, which led me to the Google Books preview for Kerouac: The Definitive Biography, by Paul Maher. Take a look at the following paragraph, which discusses some of Kerouac’s early literary influences:

“Most of Kerouac’s friends sensed only marginally the full depths of his aspirations to write, but one among them perceived more. Sebastian Sampas had grown into a tall, lanky young man with dark, curly hair. He had developed an intellect seasoned by Greek literature, William Saroyan, Thomas Wolfe, and Oswald Spengler. (He introduced Kerouac to all of these, equipping him with his first major writing influences.) Kerouac shared with Sebastian his love of Thomas Hardy, Emily Dickinson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. Sebastian and Jack also read PM, a New York daily newspaper (founded on June 18, 1940) that Charles subscribed to. PM accepted no advertising and relied solely upon income derived from its subscribers. It vowed to tell the “truth,” was partial to no political party, remained uncensored, and was fundamentally antiestablishment. It attracted some of the best photojournalists, writers, and artists, including Ernest Hemingway, Erskine Caldwell, and cartoonist Dr. Seuss (Dun, dun, dun!!!) . PM’s principles cannot be ignored. Kerouac’s sentiments for freedom of expression and his antiestablishment stance directly paralleled PM’s.”

There’s a doctoral thesis in there somewhere, if anyone wants to take a crack at it.

Oh, and here’s this again, ‘cause it’s awesome:

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