Here are the books I've been reading recently. Oh, there are so many. And I have reviews for many of them. But I don't have time to post all of them just yet, so keep checking back! (Note: updated as of 5/24/05)
Poetry · Fiction · Nonfiction · Reading Lists
It is useful when reading translations of Sappho's poetry to realize just how much translators have "filled in the blanks" to create poems that are whole. Even more so than normal translations of complete texts, and even with lots of ingenious literary detective work on the part of the translators, with Sappho the likelihood of distortion is high.
Anne Carson has taken a different approach. In her translation, the blanks, gaps, and fragmentary nature of the original texts are at least alluded to, and often emphasized. Sometime the results are quite interesting... (read more)
She's an amazing poet. Go out right now and beg, borrow, or buy this book, or View with a Grain of Sand, or Poems New and Collected 1957-1997. The last two were translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh, and I have to admit that I like their translations just a little better than Joanna Trzeciak's translation of Miracle Fair. (read more)
The poems in Donkey Gospel are wise to the ways of humans, and articulate that thorny and tricky wisdom well. Hoagland's conversational style and strong narratives make the book inviting, and his understanding of humanity makes it rewarding to read.
Much of the wisdom found here has to do specifically with men—how they become men, how they feel more or less accepted into the "tribe" of men, what manhood entails. When Hoagland writes about men, however, it isn't drumming circles and mythopoetic mumbo-jumbo. It's lust, beer bottles, swearing, and lots of raw fear. Being a man is something based far more in sociology than in biology or essence for Hoagland; he writes about senators practicing saying the word homosexual, the use of the word dickhead to ease the transition to the world of adult masculinity, and the "cooking the male child undergoes" in order to become a man (30, 10, 41). Masculinity is a country, with a language that must be learned, and everyone there is an immigrant. Hoagland returns from that land as an ethnographer reporting his findings—and as a survivor reporting the shipwreck. (read more)
When reading Lunch Poems for the first time, you have the sensation of overhearing a telephone call or cocktail party conversation, full of references to people you don't know and places you have never been. The conversation is witty, lively, spontaneous, and ranges at times within the same poem—at times within the same line—from incredibly vulnerable and intimate to highly affected and playful. It transforms a mundane world of shoeshines and taxicabs and hangovers (and yes, lunch) into something shinier, brighter. (read more)
What can I say? It was fate. Actually, it was Ciaran Cooper, who gave a lecture on it this last residency that was so enthusiastic that when I saw it in the library on a re-shelving cart (fate?), I had to pick it up. I'm glad I did; it's a strange and wonderful book. It's part novel, part prose poetry, part allegory, part treatise on perception, imagination, and memory.
Here's the basic gist: it's a set of very short (usually one page or less) descriptions of fictitious cities, often given women's names (Chloe, etc.), described in an oblique (to say the least), almost mystical way, and interspersed with some commentary by the supposed author of the descriptions, Marco Polo, and some conversations between him and his patron, Kublai Khan, who is the supposed audience for these descriptions.
One of my favorites descriptions is of Maurilia (30-1), which seems also to be a treatise on nostalgia. On arrival the traveler is shown the city and postcards of the city as it used to be "with a hen in the place of the bus station, a bandstand in the place of the overpass, two young ladies with white parasols in the place of the munitions factory. If the traveler does not wish to disappoint the inhabitants, he must praise the postcard city and prefer it to the present one…." Marco Polo, however, concludes that "there is no connection between them, just as the old post cards do not depict Maurilia as it was, but a different city which, by chance, was called Maurilia, like this one."
The telling is not only oblique but anachronistic; when Polo describes Trude, for instance, he says if he had not seen the sign with the city's name, "I would have thought I was landing at the same airport from which I had taken off." The anachronism occurs late in the book, after the reader has accepted the fact that this is a deeply weird narrative, and after Kublai has posited the following:
Perhaps this dialogue of ours is taking place between two beggars nicknamed Kublai Khan and Marco Polo; as they sift through a rubbish heap, piling up rusted flotsam, scraps of cloth, wastepaper, while drunk on the few sips of bad wine, they see all the treasure of the East shine around them. (104)
So the cities are representative of other cities, but they are also one city, Venice, Marco Polo's home, and they also serve as stand-ins for human relationships and the human mind itself. In many Calvino is exploring memory and imagination (is in Maurilia); elsewhere he is playing with notions of form vs. reality and order vs. disorder, as he does with Eudoxia, a tangled city that contains a carpet "in which you can observe the city's true form"-orderly and comprehensible. A consulted oracle said of the two that one "has the form the gods gave the starry sky and the orbits in which the worlds revolve; the other is an approximate reflection, like every human creation" (97). Polo observes wryly that, although at first it was the carpet that was taken to be of divine origin,
you could, similarly, come to the opposite conclusion: that the true map of the universe is the city of Eudoxia, just as it is, a stain that spreads out shapelessly, with crooked streets, houses that crumble one upon the other amid clouds of dust, fires, screams in the darkness. (97)
Invisible Cities is like that, trying to undercut or simply upend assumptions the reader may make (which at times were created by the narrative itself at an earlier point).
The intricate structure of this book interests me quite a bit, too. The book is arranged in nine sections; the first and last contain descriptions of ten cities, and are framed at beginning and end by short bits of dialogue between Khan and Polo. The other sections each contain five cities, similarly framed. Each city is given a label which somewhat describes its theme, like "Cities and memory," "Cities and the sky," "Continuous cities," and so on, and a number (one through five; they appear in order, but are not continuous, if that makes sense). There are five of each type, interspersed throughout the book.
Interestingly, the sense that I get from this tightly ordered scheme is one of freedom within a form and structure; Calvino's playfulness (which incarnates as Polo's sleight-of-tongue in his descriptions of cities and his interchanges with the moody Khan) suffuses the book, and make it a castle in the air, rather than a geography lecture.
This is a great book to get your book group to read, if you want to stir up trouble. This book of essays is based on several academic pieces by Steven Levitt, whose basic M.O. is to apply analytical tools from the economics to answer questions that haven't undergone that type of analysis before. Some samples:
The book is highly readable, perhaps the most interesting book on economic analysis around today.
One of my rituals on plane rides is to read Awakening Loving-Kindness, a little pocket-sized book by Pema Chödrön. So I read that once every six months. It's an interesting exercise, because one of her big messages is that you are all you've got to work with—all your neuroses, all your anger and everything else you see as negative, it's all inextricably mixed together with the parts that might seem more positive—and she cautions against the idea of self-improvement as a subtle act of aggression against oneself.
Reading this every six months has been a good thing, because the first time I read it, I thought, "I agree totally." The next time I read it, I thought, "I know it's true, but it's making me feel a little unsettled." The third time I read it, I thought, "This could have implications for my own life." The fourth time I read it: "This is about me, now, and about my writing, and letting everything into my writing, being willing to be real and true and not limit myself to those voices I think are the best or most likable or impressive or poet-like." Luckily, she also has the story in there about the worst horse, which is the horse that has to feel pain right down to the marrow of her bones before she's willing to move, so I don't have to feel so bad about taking awhile to get it.
So I'm working toward allowing my voice to be whatever it is—possibly dry and even pedantic in places, or small-minded, or what have you. Just stating this as a goal has given me a great feeling of widened scope, broadened possibilities, freedom. (That feeling comes and goes of its own whim, though!)
Fall 2002 Reading List for Bennington
Spring 2003 Reading List for Bennington
Tentative Fall 2003 Reading List for Bennington
Spring 2004 Reading List for Bennington