Friday, December 31, 2010
Year's End Book Round-Up 2010
Following are some of the books I enjoyed this year, listed in no particular order, but I'll try to group them according to genre. Some are recent releases, some are old, one is quite old, none ancient. I think I'll make it a standing New Year's resolution to read at least one classic a year. I haven't read any Hawthorne yet, so I hereby commit to The Scarlet Letter. I've been meaning to read it since I saw Melville's dedication in Moby Dick. Last year's resolution was to read more women writers, and it was an inspired decision. I discovered Vivian Gornick, Lorna Sage, and Deborah Eisenberg, and dipped into (or immersed myself completely in) Sharon Olds, Kim Addonizio, Sharon Doubiago, Pat Barker, Hilary Mantel, Mary Gaitskill, Eleanor Wilner, Mary Karr, Patricia Hampl, and Fanny Howe. Right now I'm reading the diaries of Katharine Mansfield, the John Middleton Murry version, despite accusations that he edited all the darkness out of her. The alternative was the complete journals and notes, but it was too big and too expensive, and it includes shopping lists and 'to do' notes - no kidding. There's only so much reading time in life. One of my biggest complaints. I'm also closing out the year with Frank Bidart's Stardust and a wonderful and strange book about non-linear thinking by Stephen Harrod Buhner called The Secret Teachings of Plants: The Intelligence of the Heart in the Direct Perception of Nature. Its one of those books that confirm what poets know only in a different register.
First prize goes to Cormac McCarthy for Blood Meridian. I think it might be the best novel I have ever read. It might not even be a novel, though of course it resembles one. It reads like something else entirely, some sort of extended invocation to the gods of the underworld that rule our lives and have delivered us smoking from the mouth of the pit ...
POEMS AND PROSE POEMS
El Nino by Sharon Doubiago (1989)
It's my favorite Sharon Doubiago book, and a bit different from her poetry collections in that each fragment or 'story' is a simple retelling of some episode in her life. The pieces are fresh, unworked-up, direct. And in many cases, as magical and strange as anything she has written elsewhere. Some stories are just 5 or 6 lines long. My favorites are transcribed conversations or snippets of monologues overheard in bars up and down the Mendocino coast. They manage to situate some extreme sense of delicacy and wonder right square in the middle of our lived lives. The lived lives, that is, of poets, drinkers, bartenders, fishermen, drifters, hitch-hikers, fiddle-players, Vietnam vets, and the boys and men this poet has loved along the way. It's a beautiful, surprising, completely original book, romantic and gritty at the same time, and, for Northern Californians, delightfully recognizable as well.
The Caged Owl by Gregory Orr (2002)
A fantastic 227-page collection of the beautiful, incomparable Gregory Orr, whose tragic sense of loss and wild, almost hieratic ability to transfigure death and find meaning in beauty is a constant source of wonder for me. Lyric, mythic, stripped to essences, his words have an absolute quality, like things religious, or alive. 53 pages of new work plus selections from all his other books since 1973. Here's one. I can't start quoting people all over the place or I'll never get this finished before midnight, but for Gregory Orr I will make an exception. I love this poet.
Singing the Pain Back into the Wound
I crouch naked at the wound's edge
and call its name softly,
until it hovers over me and I am clothed
in its shadow. Then I throw ropes
over it, pulling it down into the wound
that its body fits perfectly
like a fish-shaped cork.
Its wings beat frantically. I lash them together,
fold them carefully into a black
bundle on its back.
Lucifer at the Starlite by Kim Addonizio (2009)
I tried to hold out until this came into paperback, but in the end I had to have it ASAP, because Kim Addonizio is that good. I love her defiant, clever, disillusioned voice, her ordinary, contemporary, sometimes tawdry subjects and the elegant aesthetic she brings to them. Her closings are small masterpieces of concision and inclusion, making each poem a perfectly finished object, a microcosm of some understated universe we might otherwise have overlooked. She is the most accessible poet I know, but there is some indefinable quality at the center of almost every poem that speaks precisely to things mysterious and profound. Another local - I think she lives in Oakland and does workshops there.
In the Western Night: Collected Poems 1965-90 by Frank Bidart (1990)
I was oblivious to this incredible poet's existence until November, but now he is at the center of my universe. This collection covers a lot of territory and so is an excellent introduction to his oeuvre. There is nothing else out there like this. His voice is utterly unique. Long poems, discursive, philosophic, crammed with italics and upper case letters and other signs of admonition and emphasis, freely ranging across ages and continents, with scholarly musings and newspaper headlines elbowing each other across the pages in long, impassioned arguments for or against various positions, they dissect human motivation with the precision of a surgeon while remaining completely subjective. Loathing, desire, madness, denial, its all there, in poems that work out intimate problems in Bidart's own life as well as extended meditations from the perspectives of others. The 28-page War of Vaslav Nijinsky is an event in its own right, as is the indescribably brilliant First Hour of the Night, clocking in at 36 pages, but his poems about his mother and father and his struggle to separate from them are just as startling in their originality.
The Light the Dead See by Frank Stanford (1991)
Local poet and independent publisher Brooks Roddan introduced me to Frank Stanford this year, and within minutes I was blown away by his stunning, inimitable voice. I say this about all my favorite poets, and it is always true, that their work is utterly unique. Frank Stanford's poems are small legends cast in the soft yellow light of his native Mississippi and Arkansas, peopled with snake doctors and knife throwers, bootleggers, fishermen, midgets, drunks, children and animals and enormous hogs with names like Holy Ghost. Dreamlike and weird, they have the qualities of parables set in some sort of mythic, uber-American space and time. The poem 'Hidden Water' might be perfect, if there is such a thing.
The Monster Loves his Labyrinth by Charles Simic (2008)
I have only a passing acquaintance with Simic's poetry, but I love this little book of poetic vignettes. The first section in particular is crammed with tiny, luminous moments of irony as they occur naturally in people's lives, and each fragment is complete as both a narrative, with a small twist, and as a poetic statement. The best of them point to an almost impossibly paradoxical quality that adheres to the details in life, and it is something we recognize and determine to notice more pointedly from now on. Some of the more aphoristic lines fall a bit flat - at worst, they are inflated and dull, like ideas that have come to the great man as he tied his shoes or ate his cereal, lines which impress him enough to transcribe whole when they should have been woven obliquely into something more crafted. Some, like The child-beaters took their little son to church on Sundays are wry and successful; others, like A broken refrigerator in the yard next to the plaster statues of the Virgin read like enigmatic poetic seeds, and there are some real gems, humorous and odd, like this one, In a zoo I noticed many animals who had a fleeting resemblance to me, but I think we can do without lines like Birds sing to remind us that we have a soul altogether - and there are a few of them. It's a mixed bag, but fascinating anyway.
Strike Sparks by Sharon Olds (2004)
Sharon Olds rules. You can't read a poem like 'Why My Mother Made Me' or 'I Go Back to May 1937' without knowing you are in the presence of a master. People who complain that she is too confessional or too hung up about this incident or that in her childhood need help. Strike Sparks pulls poems from all 7 of her collections and shows the remarkable integrity of her vision, unwavering in its intensity over a period of 22 years. Here is real human life, physical, painful, joyous, sexual, and above all, imaginative, as if the imagination of a person is a physical organ which pulses, flinches, bleeds, breathes, and emits electromagnetic waves in the form of words and ideas. She is the only poet I have written to in an ecstasy of gratitude and awe. I didn't send the letter, but you get the idea. If you only read one poet next year, read Sharon Olds, the poet who prayed to Satan for her voice, and got it.
OK that's it for poets.
MEMOIRS AND ESSAYS
Bad Blood by Lorna Sage
Hands down the best memoir I have read this year, maybe because Lorna Sage is English, like me? Probably because she's just brilliant. She died right after it came out in 2001, a terrible loss for readers everywhere. All her other stuff is academic. See the review listed under Lorna Sage to your right.
The End of the Novel of Love, Fierce Attachments, The Men in My Life, and Approaching Eye Level, by Vivian Gornick
I inhaled all four of these books during one sunny week-and-a-half in late October. The pleasure was so intense I just couldn't get enough. Fierce Attachments, the memoir about her difficult relationship with her mother, past and present, and the childhood she spent in the Bronx as well as her pivotal relationships with 3 men over the course of her life, is the book for which she is rightly famous. It is dazzling. Jonathon Lethem is not exaggerating when he says, in the introduction, that it has that mad, brilliant, absolute quality of all timeless classics. But her critical essays are even better, if you like that sort of thing, especially those collected in The End of the Novel of Love. She analyzes several different writers, most of them women and some of them lesser known novelists like Clover Adams, developing in beautiful, lapidary sentences her contention that romantic love has steadily been written out of the modern novel as a metaphor for success as female writers have tackled the issue of their own independence. Succinct and insightful, every essay is a jewel in its own right, but together they make up a book of considerable theoretic heft. And yet she is light, radiant in fact, readable, never ponderous or academic. Her treatment of issues of desire, suffering and disappointment is the most sensitive imaginable. The Men in My Life is a similar venture, except it explores male writers as diverse as Loren Eiseley, HG Wells, Randall Jarrell, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Allen Ginsberg, Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, James Baldwin and VS Naipaul. Finally, her collection of essays about contemporary life and culture Approaching Eye Level contains probably the most searing portrayal of loneliness and disillusion I have ever read, though it is absolutely unsentimental and even quite funny in parts. Chapter 5: 'At the University: Little Murders of the Soul'. Read it, and know.
A Fan's Notes by Frederick Exley
Finally I get to use the words flawed masterpiece in a review! This book is it. Flawed, because its unexamined misogyny splattered all over the place makes it hard to read in places. But a masterpiece nevertheless, one long, sustained, glorious, irreverent, hilarious, and sublimely written rant about failure, drunkenness, and alienation in fifties and sixties' America. I rarely read a book twice, in fact I've only reread 2, not counting stuff I used to study in school. This is one. The other was The Passion of Michel Foucault by James Miller. Go figure. Actually, I reread that this year too, so I'll stick it in this list somewhere. Anyway, Fred Exley is forgiven, since he has suffered so much for his own sins, and because he's such a great, great writer, at least, in this work. One of these days I'm going to write a post about writers, artists, and their sins. If they kill their wives (Carl Andre, William Burroughs), have sex with their kids (Woody Allen), have sex with other people's kids (Roman Polanski), exploit lost souls (Andy Warhol), or rape women (Arthur Koestler), should we enjoy them anyway?
All the Strange Hours by Loren Eiseley
This is a strange little book, something I would never have ventured upon without the prodding of Vivian Gornick (see above). It was some quality of compassion in her review, and curiosity on my part, made me want to see for myself what ailed this famous anthropologist. It is a very unusual read, something like a confession of secret heretical religious conviction delivered at the eleventh hour (Eiseley died shortly after publication) which can be read as a psychological document not entirely unlike those famously popularized by Freud, though without the analysis. As Gornick points out, Eiseley is largely or wholly unconscious of his own message, which is one of crippling, agonizing disappointment. It is also a beautifully crafted work, not in its organization, which is haphazard and eccentric, but in its sometimes achingly lovely prose.
The Adderall Diaries by Stephen Elliot
If you don't already receive the daily emails of this local writer, you might like to check them out - go to http://www.therumpus.net/ and sign up for the Daily Rumpus in the top right corner. They are sloppy and personal, a writer's public private life. The Adderall Diaries is a book about compulsion, creativity, violence, and not-belonging, and it skilfully weaves together two interlocking narratives in its accounts of a Bay Area murder trial and of the author's own childhood and personal life, growing up in group homes in Chicago, moving to SF, kinky sex; the issues that pertain to both accounts combine to tell the story of this man's life. Not, as Vanity Fair would have it, the work of a genius, but brilliantly organized, compulsively readable, and sort of edgy. Lots of SF references too. Local writers get extra points in my world. It's inevitable, we love to see ourselves reflected.
The Liar's Club by Mary Karr.
The classic of the genre, really, this is the most popular memoir out there. Not surprisingly. Karr's voice is arch, witty, and tough, inflected with plenty of Texas drawl and influenced by the storytelling prowess of her father, whose 'Liar's Club' of beer guzzling men met in a neighbor's garage. It is a riot. Brilliantly written, canny, hilarious, and profound, it is both wild and masterfully controlled at the same time. This woman's childhood would have felled a lesser soul, but as a writer Karr is its fabulous incarnation.
My Father's Love by Sharon Doubiago
I posted a review of this book on its Amazon page, because I loved it, and it struck me as important in a social-political sense, being an unflinching account of child sexual abuse and the confusing, sometimes devastating reality of living with, and loving, an abusive parent. There are parts which could only have been written by the poet this writer is, beautiful, magical passages in which she fully inhabits the perspective of her child self and tells the story from there. Meticulously documented and full of photographs, it is more than one woman's story - it is a rich account of its time and place as well. Second installment forthcoming from Wild Ocean Press.
The Love of my Life by Cheryl Strayed
I came across this essay in a book about grieving called In Passing which I found in the free box outside Phoenix Books, and while most of the collection was pretty blah, this one essay stood out like a jewel. It can be found in the much more exciting Best American Essays 2003. This is hardcore grief writing - the woman practically lost her mind, did, in fact, lose her marriage, as she went on a sexual bender that lasted for years - and she writes about it all with the clarity of an angel, or a person transfigured. It is a wonderful read.
Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin
Having never read any James Baldwin before this year I was unprepared for the intellectual detonation that a first encounter with this brilliant thinker can bring on. Everybody else seemed flabby and soft in comparison. How to describe his particular brand of genius? Polemical doesn't even come close. His mind is so razor-sharp, his technique so diamond-cut, and his argument so terrifyingly passionate and true. The relevance of his insights to today's social problems is astonishing as well. Astonishing, and terrible. Contemplating his sophisticated hyper-articulate argument was one of the high points of my year.
Blue Arabesque: A Search for the Sublime by Patricia Hampl.
I'm not sure I can give a faithful account of this writer since this short book is all I've read of her fairly prolific output. I've read an excerpt of her memoir A Romantic Education and it was lovely, elegant and wise, but Blue Arabesque was slightly disappointing. Perhaps because the subject, an aesthetic awakening, is so close to my heart (Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is an all-time favorite) and not written of enough. It starts out well; I especially liked her assessment of modern fractured consciousness and the loss of what was our birthright, the uninterrupted gaze ... the world ordered inwardly by seeing, the act of unbroken private attention that was an expression of integrity clasping imagination, making sense, making "vision". Though I disagree that our modernity is necessarily the villain, it is refreshing to stumble upon so sensitive an account of what seeing can actually mean, seeing in the sense of the uninterrupted gaze, that is, seeing as a way of being ...
Anyway, I wanted more of this, and less of the padding (as I saw it) that was her attempt to render episodes in the lives of Matisse and Delacroix. There were many beautifully written passages, some overwritten passages, and some rather amateurish lumps that went on too long and lost my attention. But I love what she said in an interview about nuns and the contemplative life, and I loved the excerpt of her memoir in the collection Writing Women's Lives, so I'm not giving up on this writer.
Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature by Kathleen Dean Moore
I picked this up at Point Reyes Books, the best spot to find writing about nature and ecology, the imagination as a natural phenomenon, sensory intelligence, craftsmanship, etc. - ie. the dream bookshop for a certain sort of mood. The book is a series of essays about the author's immersion in the natural world, in country living, wild country, deserts and snow-packed ridges, rivers and forests ... her minute observational skills and poetic gifts are everywhere in evidence, and she develops a parallel theory about human nature and the 'solace' people can experience when they are tuned to the rhythms of their environment. Some absolutely beautiful passages and images, fine textures, details.
THEORETICAL STUFF
Gathering the Winds: Visionary Imagination and Radical Transformation of Self and Society by Eleanor Wilner (1975)
This is a knockout book, completely unique, brilliantly imagined and researched. I love it when poets go all theoretical on you and this book is one of the best - she doesn't just consider the role of imagination in human consciousness, but develops an entire ingenious argument to the effect that imaginative patterning and mythic or visionary thinking correlates directly to the state of emergency and disorder an individual or a society might suffer, acting upon events in a way that changes the course of history and human development. Three elegantly presented chapters consider the agency of vision in preliterate societies, the mythic imaginations of Blake, Beddoes, and Yeats, and finally, the most astounding chapter of all, a consideration of Marx's thought as the ecstatic 'materialization of the ideal' that promised redemption to an alienated, divided world. Wilner brings her own version of synthesis (scholarly and poetic thought) to the project, so that the book is, like its subject, a sort of vision in itself.
Re-Visioning Psychology by James Hillman (1976)
Either you love Hillman or you think he's a Jungian nut, but if you love him there is no end to the pleasures of reading and rereading him, and, fortunately, a long list of publications to work through as well. Re-Visioning Psychology is one of his first, and it lays out the essence of the argument he is to develop in various ways later on. Come to think of it, he might be a Jungian nut, but perhaps this is what I love about him. He is a fearless advocate of the soul, of the multitude of voices and visions, which he plainly calls gods and demons, active in our psyche, of relativity in the inner world (departing from the Jungian project of individuation) and of inspired commands to 'stay with the image', which is music to artists' ears. But none of this goes anywhere near to explaining how radical, how utterly paradigm-shattering his thinking really is. At bottom, he is arguing not just for the 'polyvalence of the psyche' but for its non-human essence, which hauls him into the category of a visionary, in my eyes anyway. See chapter 4 on 'Dehumanizing'. Our souls are not ours.
The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James (1902)
This is one of those books I have always meant to read in the interests of research, since it is mentioned by other writers about as often as, say, The Golden Bough is mentioned, as an influence and even a source of inspiration. James is a Victorian writer, so there is a lot of unnecessary connective tissue everywhere, but his insights are clean and clear. There is no Freud in it at all, nothing weird or occult, nothing theoretical really, just observation and reflection and a lot of first-person accounts, which are the life of the book. The testimonies of people converted after long struggles with their souls are riveting; they have a curiously Buddhist flavor as well, something to do with abandoning the self, the ego, etc.
NOVELS AND STORIES
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
John Banville said Blood Meridian "reads like a conflation of the Inferno, the Iliad, and Moby Dick", and he wasn't exaggerating. It blew my mind. I had to take it in in short, ten or twenty page intervals and then put it down, in case ... I wasn't sure exactly ... in case perhaps I'd suffer some sort of adrenal shock if I kept on ... Mephistophelian ... utterly bewitching ... the beauty of its prose unearthly. And because that prose (it's really poetry) is in service of such relentless brutality the experience of reading it becomes almost a moral affair, religious, in the same way the Inquisition was religious. It's a kind of inverted oracle, an apocalyptic vision with its head on backwards, staring at our bloody roots. It's not a 'book'.
Twilight of the Superheroes by Deborah Eisenberg
Thank God for Deborah Eisenberg, whose stories I read between bursts of Blood Meridian in order to refresh my palette. She is the perfect antidote to McCarthy's unremitting darkness - wry, witty, sophisticated, elegant, urban, contemporary - Twilight of the Superheroes is her latest collection and it's brilliant. Her stories are miracles of condensation, precise yet enigmatic - she's our Chekhov.
Herman Melville's ; or The Whale , ed. Damion Searls
My version of this is actually an issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction from summer 2009, and I haven't read it, but I had to own it as a sort of art object in its own right. It consists of all the bits left out of Orion Books' Moby Dick in Half the Time, published in 2007 as part of its Compact Books series. Some chapters are almost intact (ie. completely cut), some riddled with omissions, one consists of the single word - Hark! I feel delighted just contemplating it. It's fun, eccentric, conceptual, and it can carry just about any meaning you want to bring to it, depending on your feeling for the original, or for literature in general.
more later ...
First prize goes to Cormac McCarthy for Blood Meridian. I think it might be the best novel I have ever read. It might not even be a novel, though of course it resembles one. It reads like something else entirely, some sort of extended invocation to the gods of the underworld that rule our lives and have delivered us smoking from the mouth of the pit ...
POEMS AND PROSE POEMS
El Nino by Sharon Doubiago (1989)
It's my favorite Sharon Doubiago book, and a bit different from her poetry collections in that each fragment or 'story' is a simple retelling of some episode in her life. The pieces are fresh, unworked-up, direct. And in many cases, as magical and strange as anything she has written elsewhere. Some stories are just 5 or 6 lines long. My favorites are transcribed conversations or snippets of monologues overheard in bars up and down the Mendocino coast. They manage to situate some extreme sense of delicacy and wonder right square in the middle of our lived lives. The lived lives, that is, of poets, drinkers, bartenders, fishermen, drifters, hitch-hikers, fiddle-players, Vietnam vets, and the boys and men this poet has loved along the way. It's a beautiful, surprising, completely original book, romantic and gritty at the same time, and, for Northern Californians, delightfully recognizable as well.
The Caged Owl by Gregory Orr (2002)
A fantastic 227-page collection of the beautiful, incomparable Gregory Orr, whose tragic sense of loss and wild, almost hieratic ability to transfigure death and find meaning in beauty is a constant source of wonder for me. Lyric, mythic, stripped to essences, his words have an absolute quality, like things religious, or alive. 53 pages of new work plus selections from all his other books since 1973. Here's one. I can't start quoting people all over the place or I'll never get this finished before midnight, but for Gregory Orr I will make an exception. I love this poet.
Singing the Pain Back into the Wound
I crouch naked at the wound's edge
and call its name softly,
until it hovers over me and I am clothed
in its shadow. Then I throw ropes
over it, pulling it down into the wound
that its body fits perfectly
like a fish-shaped cork.
Its wings beat frantically. I lash them together,
fold them carefully into a black
bundle on its back.
Lucifer at the Starlite by Kim Addonizio (2009)
I tried to hold out until this came into paperback, but in the end I had to have it ASAP, because Kim Addonizio is that good. I love her defiant, clever, disillusioned voice, her ordinary, contemporary, sometimes tawdry subjects and the elegant aesthetic she brings to them. Her closings are small masterpieces of concision and inclusion, making each poem a perfectly finished object, a microcosm of some understated universe we might otherwise have overlooked. She is the most accessible poet I know, but there is some indefinable quality at the center of almost every poem that speaks precisely to things mysterious and profound. Another local - I think she lives in Oakland and does workshops there.
In the Western Night: Collected Poems 1965-90 by Frank Bidart (1990)
I was oblivious to this incredible poet's existence until November, but now he is at the center of my universe. This collection covers a lot of territory and so is an excellent introduction to his oeuvre. There is nothing else out there like this. His voice is utterly unique. Long poems, discursive, philosophic, crammed with italics and upper case letters and other signs of admonition and emphasis, freely ranging across ages and continents, with scholarly musings and newspaper headlines elbowing each other across the pages in long, impassioned arguments for or against various positions, they dissect human motivation with the precision of a surgeon while remaining completely subjective. Loathing, desire, madness, denial, its all there, in poems that work out intimate problems in Bidart's own life as well as extended meditations from the perspectives of others. The 28-page War of Vaslav Nijinsky is an event in its own right, as is the indescribably brilliant First Hour of the Night, clocking in at 36 pages, but his poems about his mother and father and his struggle to separate from them are just as startling in their originality.
The Light the Dead See by Frank Stanford (1991)
Local poet and independent publisher Brooks Roddan introduced me to Frank Stanford this year, and within minutes I was blown away by his stunning, inimitable voice. I say this about all my favorite poets, and it is always true, that their work is utterly unique. Frank Stanford's poems are small legends cast in the soft yellow light of his native Mississippi and Arkansas, peopled with snake doctors and knife throwers, bootleggers, fishermen, midgets, drunks, children and animals and enormous hogs with names like Holy Ghost. Dreamlike and weird, they have the qualities of parables set in some sort of mythic, uber-American space and time. The poem 'Hidden Water' might be perfect, if there is such a thing.
The Monster Loves his Labyrinth by Charles Simic (2008)
I have only a passing acquaintance with Simic's poetry, but I love this little book of poetic vignettes. The first section in particular is crammed with tiny, luminous moments of irony as they occur naturally in people's lives, and each fragment is complete as both a narrative, with a small twist, and as a poetic statement. The best of them point to an almost impossibly paradoxical quality that adheres to the details in life, and it is something we recognize and determine to notice more pointedly from now on. Some of the more aphoristic lines fall a bit flat - at worst, they are inflated and dull, like ideas that have come to the great man as he tied his shoes or ate his cereal, lines which impress him enough to transcribe whole when they should have been woven obliquely into something more crafted. Some, like The child-beaters took their little son to church on Sundays are wry and successful; others, like A broken refrigerator in the yard next to the plaster statues of the Virgin read like enigmatic poetic seeds, and there are some real gems, humorous and odd, like this one, In a zoo I noticed many animals who had a fleeting resemblance to me, but I think we can do without lines like Birds sing to remind us that we have a soul altogether - and there are a few of them. It's a mixed bag, but fascinating anyway.
Strike Sparks by Sharon Olds (2004)
Sharon Olds rules. You can't read a poem like 'Why My Mother Made Me' or 'I Go Back to May 1937' without knowing you are in the presence of a master. People who complain that she is too confessional or too hung up about this incident or that in her childhood need help. Strike Sparks pulls poems from all 7 of her collections and shows the remarkable integrity of her vision, unwavering in its intensity over a period of 22 years. Here is real human life, physical, painful, joyous, sexual, and above all, imaginative, as if the imagination of a person is a physical organ which pulses, flinches, bleeds, breathes, and emits electromagnetic waves in the form of words and ideas. She is the only poet I have written to in an ecstasy of gratitude and awe. I didn't send the letter, but you get the idea. If you only read one poet next year, read Sharon Olds, the poet who prayed to Satan for her voice, and got it.
OK that's it for poets.
MEMOIRS AND ESSAYS
Bad Blood by Lorna Sage
Hands down the best memoir I have read this year, maybe because Lorna Sage is English, like me? Probably because she's just brilliant. She died right after it came out in 2001, a terrible loss for readers everywhere. All her other stuff is academic. See the review listed under Lorna Sage to your right.
The End of the Novel of Love, Fierce Attachments, The Men in My Life, and Approaching Eye Level, by Vivian Gornick
I inhaled all four of these books during one sunny week-and-a-half in late October. The pleasure was so intense I just couldn't get enough. Fierce Attachments, the memoir about her difficult relationship with her mother, past and present, and the childhood she spent in the Bronx as well as her pivotal relationships with 3 men over the course of her life, is the book for which she is rightly famous. It is dazzling. Jonathon Lethem is not exaggerating when he says, in the introduction, that it has that mad, brilliant, absolute quality of all timeless classics. But her critical essays are even better, if you like that sort of thing, especially those collected in The End of the Novel of Love. She analyzes several different writers, most of them women and some of them lesser known novelists like Clover Adams, developing in beautiful, lapidary sentences her contention that romantic love has steadily been written out of the modern novel as a metaphor for success as female writers have tackled the issue of their own independence. Succinct and insightful, every essay is a jewel in its own right, but together they make up a book of considerable theoretic heft. And yet she is light, radiant in fact, readable, never ponderous or academic. Her treatment of issues of desire, suffering and disappointment is the most sensitive imaginable. The Men in My Life is a similar venture, except it explores male writers as diverse as Loren Eiseley, HG Wells, Randall Jarrell, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Allen Ginsberg, Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, James Baldwin and VS Naipaul. Finally, her collection of essays about contemporary life and culture Approaching Eye Level contains probably the most searing portrayal of loneliness and disillusion I have ever read, though it is absolutely unsentimental and even quite funny in parts. Chapter 5: 'At the University: Little Murders of the Soul'. Read it, and know.
A Fan's Notes by Frederick Exley
Finally I get to use the words flawed masterpiece in a review! This book is it. Flawed, because its unexamined misogyny splattered all over the place makes it hard to read in places. But a masterpiece nevertheless, one long, sustained, glorious, irreverent, hilarious, and sublimely written rant about failure, drunkenness, and alienation in fifties and sixties' America. I rarely read a book twice, in fact I've only reread 2, not counting stuff I used to study in school. This is one. The other was The Passion of Michel Foucault by James Miller. Go figure. Actually, I reread that this year too, so I'll stick it in this list somewhere. Anyway, Fred Exley is forgiven, since he has suffered so much for his own sins, and because he's such a great, great writer, at least, in this work. One of these days I'm going to write a post about writers, artists, and their sins. If they kill their wives (Carl Andre, William Burroughs), have sex with their kids (Woody Allen), have sex with other people's kids (Roman Polanski), exploit lost souls (Andy Warhol), or rape women (Arthur Koestler), should we enjoy them anyway?
All the Strange Hours by Loren Eiseley
This is a strange little book, something I would never have ventured upon without the prodding of Vivian Gornick (see above). It was some quality of compassion in her review, and curiosity on my part, made me want to see for myself what ailed this famous anthropologist. It is a very unusual read, something like a confession of secret heretical religious conviction delivered at the eleventh hour (Eiseley died shortly after publication) which can be read as a psychological document not entirely unlike those famously popularized by Freud, though without the analysis. As Gornick points out, Eiseley is largely or wholly unconscious of his own message, which is one of crippling, agonizing disappointment. It is also a beautifully crafted work, not in its organization, which is haphazard and eccentric, but in its sometimes achingly lovely prose.
The Adderall Diaries by Stephen Elliot
If you don't already receive the daily emails of this local writer, you might like to check them out - go to http://www.therumpus.net/ and sign up for the Daily Rumpus in the top right corner. They are sloppy and personal, a writer's public private life. The Adderall Diaries is a book about compulsion, creativity, violence, and not-belonging, and it skilfully weaves together two interlocking narratives in its accounts of a Bay Area murder trial and of the author's own childhood and personal life, growing up in group homes in Chicago, moving to SF, kinky sex; the issues that pertain to both accounts combine to tell the story of this man's life. Not, as Vanity Fair would have it, the work of a genius, but brilliantly organized, compulsively readable, and sort of edgy. Lots of SF references too. Local writers get extra points in my world. It's inevitable, we love to see ourselves reflected.
The Liar's Club by Mary Karr.
The classic of the genre, really, this is the most popular memoir out there. Not surprisingly. Karr's voice is arch, witty, and tough, inflected with plenty of Texas drawl and influenced by the storytelling prowess of her father, whose 'Liar's Club' of beer guzzling men met in a neighbor's garage. It is a riot. Brilliantly written, canny, hilarious, and profound, it is both wild and masterfully controlled at the same time. This woman's childhood would have felled a lesser soul, but as a writer Karr is its fabulous incarnation.
My Father's Love by Sharon Doubiago
I posted a review of this book on its Amazon page, because I loved it, and it struck me as important in a social-political sense, being an unflinching account of child sexual abuse and the confusing, sometimes devastating reality of living with, and loving, an abusive parent. There are parts which could only have been written by the poet this writer is, beautiful, magical passages in which she fully inhabits the perspective of her child self and tells the story from there. Meticulously documented and full of photographs, it is more than one woman's story - it is a rich account of its time and place as well. Second installment forthcoming from Wild Ocean Press.
The Love of my Life by Cheryl Strayed
I came across this essay in a book about grieving called In Passing which I found in the free box outside Phoenix Books, and while most of the collection was pretty blah, this one essay stood out like a jewel. It can be found in the much more exciting Best American Essays 2003. This is hardcore grief writing - the woman practically lost her mind, did, in fact, lose her marriage, as she went on a sexual bender that lasted for years - and she writes about it all with the clarity of an angel, or a person transfigured. It is a wonderful read.
Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin
Having never read any James Baldwin before this year I was unprepared for the intellectual detonation that a first encounter with this brilliant thinker can bring on. Everybody else seemed flabby and soft in comparison. How to describe his particular brand of genius? Polemical doesn't even come close. His mind is so razor-sharp, his technique so diamond-cut, and his argument so terrifyingly passionate and true. The relevance of his insights to today's social problems is astonishing as well. Astonishing, and terrible. Contemplating his sophisticated hyper-articulate argument was one of the high points of my year.
Blue Arabesque: A Search for the Sublime by Patricia Hampl.
I'm not sure I can give a faithful account of this writer since this short book is all I've read of her fairly prolific output. I've read an excerpt of her memoir A Romantic Education and it was lovely, elegant and wise, but Blue Arabesque was slightly disappointing. Perhaps because the subject, an aesthetic awakening, is so close to my heart (Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is an all-time favorite) and not written of enough. It starts out well; I especially liked her assessment of modern fractured consciousness and the loss of what was our birthright, the uninterrupted gaze ... the world ordered inwardly by seeing, the act of unbroken private attention that was an expression of integrity clasping imagination, making sense, making "vision". Though I disagree that our modernity is necessarily the villain, it is refreshing to stumble upon so sensitive an account of what seeing can actually mean, seeing in the sense of the uninterrupted gaze, that is, seeing as a way of being ...
Anyway, I wanted more of this, and less of the padding (as I saw it) that was her attempt to render episodes in the lives of Matisse and Delacroix. There were many beautifully written passages, some overwritten passages, and some rather amateurish lumps that went on too long and lost my attention. But I love what she said in an interview about nuns and the contemplative life, and I loved the excerpt of her memoir in the collection Writing Women's Lives, so I'm not giving up on this writer.
Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature by Kathleen Dean Moore
I picked this up at Point Reyes Books, the best spot to find writing about nature and ecology, the imagination as a natural phenomenon, sensory intelligence, craftsmanship, etc. - ie. the dream bookshop for a certain sort of mood. The book is a series of essays about the author's immersion in the natural world, in country living, wild country, deserts and snow-packed ridges, rivers and forests ... her minute observational skills and poetic gifts are everywhere in evidence, and she develops a parallel theory about human nature and the 'solace' people can experience when they are tuned to the rhythms of their environment. Some absolutely beautiful passages and images, fine textures, details.
THEORETICAL STUFF
Gathering the Winds: Visionary Imagination and Radical Transformation of Self and Society by Eleanor Wilner (1975)
This is a knockout book, completely unique, brilliantly imagined and researched. I love it when poets go all theoretical on you and this book is one of the best - she doesn't just consider the role of imagination in human consciousness, but develops an entire ingenious argument to the effect that imaginative patterning and mythic or visionary thinking correlates directly to the state of emergency and disorder an individual or a society might suffer, acting upon events in a way that changes the course of history and human development. Three elegantly presented chapters consider the agency of vision in preliterate societies, the mythic imaginations of Blake, Beddoes, and Yeats, and finally, the most astounding chapter of all, a consideration of Marx's thought as the ecstatic 'materialization of the ideal' that promised redemption to an alienated, divided world. Wilner brings her own version of synthesis (scholarly and poetic thought) to the project, so that the book is, like its subject, a sort of vision in itself.
Re-Visioning Psychology by James Hillman (1976)
Either you love Hillman or you think he's a Jungian nut, but if you love him there is no end to the pleasures of reading and rereading him, and, fortunately, a long list of publications to work through as well. Re-Visioning Psychology is one of his first, and it lays out the essence of the argument he is to develop in various ways later on. Come to think of it, he might be a Jungian nut, but perhaps this is what I love about him. He is a fearless advocate of the soul, of the multitude of voices and visions, which he plainly calls gods and demons, active in our psyche, of relativity in the inner world (departing from the Jungian project of individuation) and of inspired commands to 'stay with the image', which is music to artists' ears. But none of this goes anywhere near to explaining how radical, how utterly paradigm-shattering his thinking really is. At bottom, he is arguing not just for the 'polyvalence of the psyche' but for its non-human essence, which hauls him into the category of a visionary, in my eyes anyway. See chapter 4 on 'Dehumanizing'. Our souls are not ours.
The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James (1902)
This is one of those books I have always meant to read in the interests of research, since it is mentioned by other writers about as often as, say, The Golden Bough is mentioned, as an influence and even a source of inspiration. James is a Victorian writer, so there is a lot of unnecessary connective tissue everywhere, but his insights are clean and clear. There is no Freud in it at all, nothing weird or occult, nothing theoretical really, just observation and reflection and a lot of first-person accounts, which are the life of the book. The testimonies of people converted after long struggles with their souls are riveting; they have a curiously Buddhist flavor as well, something to do with abandoning the self, the ego, etc.
NOVELS AND STORIES
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
John Banville said Blood Meridian "reads like a conflation of the Inferno, the Iliad, and Moby Dick", and he wasn't exaggerating. It blew my mind. I had to take it in in short, ten or twenty page intervals and then put it down, in case ... I wasn't sure exactly ... in case perhaps I'd suffer some sort of adrenal shock if I kept on ... Mephistophelian ... utterly bewitching ... the beauty of its prose unearthly. And because that prose (it's really poetry) is in service of such relentless brutality the experience of reading it becomes almost a moral affair, religious, in the same way the Inquisition was religious. It's a kind of inverted oracle, an apocalyptic vision with its head on backwards, staring at our bloody roots. It's not a 'book'.
Twilight of the Superheroes by Deborah Eisenberg
Thank God for Deborah Eisenberg, whose stories I read between bursts of Blood Meridian in order to refresh my palette. She is the perfect antidote to McCarthy's unremitting darkness - wry, witty, sophisticated, elegant, urban, contemporary - Twilight of the Superheroes is her latest collection and it's brilliant. Her stories are miracles of condensation, precise yet enigmatic - she's our Chekhov.
Herman Melville's ; or The Whale , ed. Damion Searls
My version of this is actually an issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction from summer 2009, and I haven't read it, but I had to own it as a sort of art object in its own right. It consists of all the bits left out of Orion Books' Moby Dick in Half the Time, published in 2007 as part of its Compact Books series. Some chapters are almost intact (ie. completely cut), some riddled with omissions, one consists of the single word - Hark! I feel delighted just contemplating it. It's fun, eccentric, conceptual, and it can carry just about any meaning you want to bring to it, depending on your feeling for the original, or for literature in general.
more later ...
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Sunday, December 12, 2010
Monday, December 6, 2010
Quote: Karel Capek
There is "another type of wisdom that doesn't judge but looks ... seeing is great wisdom"
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
