How Soon Is Now

I am listening to this song by The Smiths on repeat. It’s truly lovely.

Only five days until the start of the 2009-10 school year!

 

LA Times Interview

Interestingly, the LA Times’ Books Blog, Jacket Copy, did an interview with me this week about my Rock ‘n Roll Novel class…

Here a link:

Times story.

 

Previous Post

So: After a lapse of nearly two weeks, I’m back. You see how slow of a reader I am — and how small the chance is that I will get to all 15 or so of the books I wanted to talk about here, before the school year starts.

And — to make matters worse — I’ve decided I want to mention another book, one that I read a few months ago, at the height of the semester’s teaching and grading work.

That said, I’ll start with James Allen Hall’s Now You’re the Enemy. It was a joy to read this book of poems — despite the challenge of its (sometimes brutal) subject matter.

The collection’s first poem, “Family Portrait,” ends with the haunting last few lines: “… When I say I loved her, / I mean no story is true. / Not even tenderness lasts.”

But this is — in many ways — a very tender book, a book that is, as Mark Doty said: “Compassionate… and alive to the very core.”

But it’s also a sly, funny book at times. In poems such as “Portrait of My Mother as the Republic of Texas,” the verse has a mordant and self-critical sensibility. As a whole, the text was complicated and layered — and beautiful. A line from “Naming the End” has stayed with me for days:

“… When you leave, your skin repeats: I love you.”

The second book I wanted to mention was Laimonas Briedis’ book, “Vilnius: City of Strangers.” This is a book about — in a way — the skin of a city. In this case, the city is Vilnius, Lithuania.

This book was stunning in the manner it took the history of the city and made it into much more — a history of the arts, of modernity as a project, of the great sociopolitical forces that have swept through the Lithuanian capital.

It’s also a book about the religious history of this part of Central Europe. The scope and breadth of Briedis’ research is quite remarkable. He has also crafted a very readable narrative, and the book touches on some of the issues in Lithuania today — even as Vilnius is designated Europe’s Culture Capital of 2009.

That’s all for now. I’m working my way through two novels right now, and a collection of poems — so hopefully another post soon!

 

Skip Horack’s “The Southern Cross”

Just yesterday I returned from The Sewanee Writers’ Conference. It was an incredible 12 days, and I met an astonishing number of phenomenal writers. I am going to try to scroll through their books, one at a time, but it’s an awful lot of reading — even if I weren’t starting the semester in three weeks.

Skip Horack’s collection, Southern Cross, seemed like a good place to start. This is a beautiful — and sometimes disturbing — collection of stories. It has its own voice; it doesn’t conform to any kind of structural requirements you might imagine for the short-story-collection format.

A lot of these are sharp, fascinating vignettes. “Bluebonnet Swamp,” “The Rapture,” and “Chores” are all short (less than a few pages). In these tiny bursts of micro-fiction, Horack does some of his best work. He takes a character — or a moment — and expands it out until it has resonance, and beauty, and the ‘big’ feeling of great fiction. And they’re often funny; Horack has a good sense of humor; he entertains his readers — especially at the beginning of the collection.

As the book continues, the work often takes a grim turn. One piece opens with a particularly grisly murder. But the artistry and elegance of these stories shines thorugh, despite their willingness to go to dark places.

My favorite story, “Visual of a Sparrow,” turns on a tiny, subtle moment — one that is infused with a detailed are careful knowledge of the natural world. That world — the world of swamps and birds and creatures of all kinds — comes through vividly throughout this stunning first collection.

 

The Summer Through a Super Angulon Lens

Day

 

End of semester

Hello.

Semester 4 has ended. 2 years at Lewis and Clark. Amazing.

There’s a moment in my life that has stayed with me. It was in 1999, in August. I was living in Palo Alto with my friend Daniel. I had thought I would come down there and work for him at his web startup, but I arrived just as the bubble burst. The money dried up and so I just paid rent with cash I borrowed from my parents and worked on my second (failed) novel.

Anyhow. Sometimes I took BART into the city and hung out in downtown San Francisco. It was (and is) a pretty city — and so I’d write in some cafe or hotel on my laptop and then wander back out to the suburbs. On one such night, I walked all the way back to the house from the train station (rather than call and have Dan come pick me up).

It was a warm summer night, and just walking and being alone and unencumbered — it gave me a resolute sense of joy, a shiver, that I’ve felt rarely in my life.

In the geography of mental status, I’m certainly closer to the side where depression lies — those formidable dark lands that can be such a struggle for many. But I have had a few moments of happiness, of happiness so pure you can feel it in your body. That night, walking from the train, I experienced one. For no reason, other than I was walking. And I was young. And it was a pretty evening in the Bay Area.

Now, sitting in my classroom, my 94-seat auditorium where I held a lecture class on the Rock N’ Roll Novel this term, I experienced the same feeling. It was the end of classes. My last exam. And the seats were silent. Quiet. I was alone with the classroom, and my memories of the class, and the formidable performance that is teaching. And I was filled with that same happy visceral shiver.

 

From Emerson’s Self-Reliance

“I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching.”

-1841

 

Dickens Comic Books!

 

The work of students.

Sorry about the lapse in posting; although if you read the dates on the posts from the past two years, you’ll see that I am prone to these silences. I think it’s just part of not being entirely comfortable in the self-disclosure of the web. Anyhow.

But, I wanted to post a paragraph by one of my students, Adam Rager. This week he turned a 51-page story in to workshop. It was really wonderful in so many ways. This is the last paragraph of his story:

“…So this is the end.
Our dreams are paper cities. Our metaphors are paper cities. Our fictions are paper cities. Our truths are paper cities. God is a paper city. I am a paper city. Sadness, loss, and death are paper cities. Happiness, love, and life are paper cities. We are paper cities.”

 

Teaching

I think that teaching is very difficult. I enjoy it, but there are times when I wonder about the goals of reading literature in the classroom. I think that reading is a peaceful activity, and one that leads to understanding. So: These are two things that I love about teaching. It values two things — peace and understanding — that are integral to making the world a better place. I guess that these are the same two things that I value in writing. My books seemed — seemed — to care for me when I was a teenager. Books can care for you in a way that people can’t. They are reliable and, even when they challenge you, they do it to make you smarter and stronger. I think. So: That’s my rambling monologue about teaching for the day.