Tag: Culture

FROM ONCE UPON A TIME TO HAPPILY EVER AFTER

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Continuing this month’s survey of Books Read, here are a few more entries:

  • Maria Tatar, ed.: The Annotated Brothers Grimm. As one who’s come to treasure the grittier sides of both Native American mythology and Biblical texts, I’ve long wondered about the earlier versions of the stories collected by the Grimm brothers and, as the notes to this volume also discuss, their French parallel Charles Perrault, especially with his Mother Goose. At last we’re getting glimpses into those unsanitized roots, in large part thanks to the work of Tatar and others. The introductory pages by her and A.S. Byatt make the volume worthwhile on their own, as they examine the fine line between folktales and mythology and recognize that these are really wonder tales, full of magic and harsh reality, a kaleidoscope of rapid presentation where fairies rarely have a role. The mentions of versions having Gretel as a trickster, Rampunzel as not realizing her weight gain is pregnancy, Little Red Riding Hood performing a seductive striptease, Snow White’s pricked finger blood as her menstruating or deflowering all add powerfully, as does the sense of polyphony in the overlapping voices. Although reading all of these close together can be a bit much, it does allow the patterns to emerge: sibling rivalries where the youngest and seemingly dumbest child is in reality blessed, and so on. As for the surrounding forest, where is it in the urban reality? The ghetto? The cellar under the apartment house? The subway?  Another volume I’ll be returning to frequently.
  • Philip Pullman: Fairy Tales From the Brothers Grimm. Reading Pullman second gives the astute reader a sense of what a translator can add or omit. As a famed writer himself, he admits to taking liberties at times, drawing on similar tales and the like. You can see the differences from the very outset, with “The Frog King, or Iron Heinrich,” which Tatar begins, “Once upon a time, when wishes still came true,” versus Pullman’s “In olden times, when wishing still worked …” His translation is often more direct and less tradition-bound, and often has a deft detail or insight that is simply brilliant.
  • Nicholson Baker: The Size of Thoughts, U and I, and A Box of Matches. Back in high school, hearing a teacher proclaim that all fiction is based on conflict, set a challenge for me: can a novel work without any essential conflict? Baker comes close here with his Box of Matches, set as daily reflections before sunrise one January, as he lights a fire in his fireplace (hence the matches) and drinks coffee — the closest he comes to conflict, in fact, may be the struggle of making coffee in the dark, a consequence of his decision to keep the lights off. Lovely meanderings through the minutia of daily living. U and I is his notorious paean to John Updike, full of deliberate misquotes that reflect the ways of time on the memory and wonderful confessions on the joys of reading and the trials of writing. (I’m happy to see I’m not the only writer who has a lifelong admiration for a great model, or at least an adult lifelong admiration.) The Size of Thoughts, meanwhile, is the perfect volume to end this month’s collection of readings. Each of its quite varied essays follows a topic through a wandering net based on thinking itself. Of special importance are his pieces on the loss of learning that occurred when university libraries junked their card catalogs and his 148-page investigation of the other meanings of “lumber” as they evolved in the antiquity of English poetry. As the second essay begins, “Each thought has a size, and most are about three feet tall, with the level of complexity of a lawnmower engine, or a cigarette lighter, or those tubes of toothpaste that, by mingling several hidden pastes and gels, create a pleasantly striped product.” If you’ve sensed something similar emerging through this month’s discussion, just remember, The Size of Thoughts mentions many, many fine books in passing. Just in case you’re ready to read more.

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FROM A WEED LECTURE AND WINE TO SOME WILD COOKING

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Continuing this month’s survey of Books Read, here are a few more entries:

  • Martha Paxson Grundy: Quaker Treasure. Having known Martha since we were both active in Ohio Yearly Meeting (Conservative), and watched her subsequent service in the broader Quaker organizations, I find my admiration upheld in this 2002 Weed Lecture given at Beacon Hill Friends House in Boston. As she observes, unlike evangelical Protestantism, where the emphasis is on personal salvation, the Quaker treasure is its emphasis on the shared experience of the Prophetic Presence. In that, we nurture and guide one another in a living faith.
  • Jancis Robinson: How to Taste: A Guide to Enjoying Wine. Designed as alternating pages of Theory and Practice, this volume was a 2000 update of a 1983 book by a British wine authority. She does a clear job of introducing the differences in the ways we taste, and of linking that to the language of wine, complete with a decent glossary. Also helpful is her survey of grape varieties and the wines they produce, both in France (where they assume geographic names) and around the world. As she speaks of international wines, however, the book dates quickly – Washington State and Argentina, especially, have come a long way since. Even so, an excellent reference book.
  • Kim Stafford, ed: William Stafford on Peace and War. A profound and moving selection of poems, journal entries, interviews, and published excerpts focusing on Stafford’s pacifist faith and witness. Well worth returning to repeatedly.
  • Sheldon Morgenstern: No Vivaldi in the Garage: A Requiem for Classical Music in North America. In this rather strange memoir by an orchestral conductor best known for his role in establishing the Eastern Music Festival on the campus of Guilford College in Greensboro, North Carolina, some of the best pages examine the strengths and weaknesses of boards of trustees in the non-profit world and, at times, the ill-informed consultants they sometimes hire. Yet he doesn’t shy away from gossip, skewering some of the big names and their inflated fees while lavishing praise on his buddies and students. While he repeatedly dismisses his teacher, Thor Johnson, I suspect he overlooks positive aspects; in contrast, one friend of mine, who had been a regular substitute in a major symphony orchestra, said Johnson was the best prepared conductor he had played under. And while Morgenstern has little fondness for contemporary music, which is the core of American classical composition, he appears ignorant of our rich Romantic-era legacy, which I think is essential for American repertoire in the future. I’m left wondering just how much of this is sour grapes from an almost-ran.
  • Tamar Adler: An Everlasting Meal: Cooking With Economy and Grace. After living more than a decade with a wife who’s a cooking genius and two daughters who follow in their mother’s wisdom there, my own kitchen skills had largely atrophied. To be honest, I’ve never had her knowledge and seemingly intuitive sense of using herbs and spices, and preparing anything I think they’ll be eating becomes inhibiting. Still, now that I’m freed from the office and commuting routine, the time has come for me to pick up some of the meals preparation each week. Nevertheless, it feels like learning from scratch, especially after the Pellegrini readings. So when Adler begins with a chapter “How to Boil Water,” I thought I’d be on the right track – like Yehudi Menuhin learning to play violin all over again as a young adult. Wrong! She quickly veers off into a much different realm of cooking, one loaded with onions, anchovies, and beets (three of my least favorite ingredients ever), and soon seemingly slapdash in all directions. This, from a woman who admits ineptitude when it comes to making bread. In the end, though, this will likely be the volume I keep returning to as we make the best of our garden produce through the season. She has me largely rethinking meals and routines – this, coming from a Midwestern kid whose idea of dinner revolves around a slab of meat, or some substitute in the vegetarian variations. Rice, anyone?

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FROM QUAKER CULTURE TO JANE’S CLAY PUPPETS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Continuing this month’s survey of Books Read, here are a few more entries:

  • James Walvin, The Quakers: Money & Morals; Jean R. Sunderlund, Quakers & Slavery; Barry Levy: Quakers and the American Family. These three volumes, tackled together while purging my spirituality shelves in my lair, present a fascinating examination of Quaker economic systems in history. Walvin approaches the rise of Quaker wealth and capitalism in Britain, especially through the networks of traveling ministers, apprenticeships, extended families, and so on. Of course, within three or four generations we had the phenomenon of much of those families leaving the Society of Friends and, later, the companies themselves being acquired by larger corporations. Sunderlund examines the resistance in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting to the abolition of slavery, finding it more intense in some quarters than in others – but most intensely entrenched in the yearly meeting’s hierarchy itself. While he ponders the events that allowed the yearly meeting to turn in the 1750s, he does not calculate what I sense might be the most obvious: the wealthiest families, which were most likely to own slaves, were drifting away from Friends. Combine that with the deaths of the previous generation of wealthy leaders who remained Quaker, and you have the possibility that persuasion had less to do with the transformation than we might hope. Levy, meanwhile, raises the model of Quaker farming as an underpinning of the success of Friends as an institution across multiple generations. He suggests that the families that were least able to set their children up on their own farms or businesses were also the least likely to see their children find mates within the Society of Friends, and thus marry out. He also observes that in Quaker marriages, the husband was not the authoritative head of the household, not in the model Calvinists followed. Rather, a marriage was subject to the women’s meeting, shifting the authority to the women elders. This is a powerful aspect of the women’s meeting I’ve not previously seen articulated, and one that could be greatly advanced.
  • Christian Pessey & Remy Samson: Bonsai Basics: A Step-by-Step Guide to Growing, Training & General Care. A lovely little book (yard sale find) that may very well convince me not to undertake what would obviously become another compulsive activity.
  • Andrei Codrescu: Whatever Gets You Through the Night: A Story of Sheherezade and the Arabian Entertainments. More about the royal brothers and their problems, ultimately, than the ostensible subject. Gets lost in scholarly insider jokes and footnotes and socio-economic/political sidebars. Quite disappointing.
  • Jane Kaufmann: Unframed. A marvelous coffee-table art book autobiography of a popular New Hampshire ceramic artist and her life’s work. Great for endless inspiration, especially in keeping a light yet acerbic touch.

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FROM THE CROSS TO CHINESE CHARACTERS, WITH LADY CHATTERLY ALONG THE WAY

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

Continuing this month’s survey of Books Read, here are a few more entries:

  • Richard John Neuhus: Death on a Friday Afternoon: Meditations on the Last Words of Jesus From the Cross. A beautifully designed volume laced with some tender pastoral memories, the line of argument ultimately collapses for me under the weight of the Augustinian tradition and its emphasis on Paul (or more likely pseudo-Paul) rather than Jesus himself. Despite all of the subtle contortions, I don’t see God getting off the hook here.
  • D.H. (David Herbert) Lawrence: Lady Chatterley’s Lover: What a marvelous bit of storytelling! I love the way he’s free to tell, with just enough show to make it compelling. Some marvelous dialect here, too. As for the scandal, he was pushing the envelope of conventionality. All of the anti-social diatribe, however, reminds me too much of Micki. How curious!
  • D.H. Lawrence: Women in Love, Sons and Lovers, Short Stories. A tedium sets in quickly with these, especially as one sees them as studies for the later Chatterley. So much of the dialogue awaits action, which proves tepid when it arrives.
  • Friends General Conference, Religious Education Committee: Opening Doors to Quaker Worship. Some interesting exercises for deepening an understanding of Friends Meeting, some for adults. One to pass along.
  • Walden Bello: Visions of a Warless World. A survey of world religions regarding war, including the dual strands in the Judeo-Christian stream in which God originates as a war deity and is transformed along the way. But I find the broader vision missing – just how, for instance, do we channel the innate aggression in human nature?
  • Ernest Fenolosa, edited by Ezra Pound: The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry. What fun to revisit this piece from much earlier in my career!

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FROM GOD TO CINCINNATI

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Continuing this month’s survey of Books Read, here are a few more entries:

  • Karen Armstrong: A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. A stunning a provocative overview. One I will be returning to repeatedly. Its examination of early Islam, especially, opens entirely unexpected perspectives to my awareness. The distinction between the Trinity of Western Christianity and of Orthodoxy is quite helpful in my emerging argument of Logos/Light.
  • G.I. Gurdjieff: Meetings With Remarkable Men; P.D. Ouspensky: The Fourth Way: A Lucid Explanation of the Practical Side of G.I. Gurdjieff’s Teachings. Two that will be leaving my collection. The meetings aren’t all that remarkable – for the most part, mostly travel journeys, actually, or an autobiography – in quite meandering, wordy prose. I could easily come up with nine more remarkable individuals from my own sojourns – and not exclusively male, like his. The Ouspensky turns out to be equally convoluted Q&A accounts of speculation. The wordiness (and vast ego) leave me unmoved.
  • David Meltzer: Hero/Lil and Six. After Armstrong’s explanation of Kabbalah and its growth, I returned to these two poetry collections and find them quite rich and energizing. Hero, however, comes across as more of a villain (and a deadly trickster, at his best) than does Lilith. Some great leaping within the individual works, including (to my surprise) the prose-poems in Six that actually work for me.
  • Robert Lawrence Smith: A Quaker Book of Wisdom: Life Lessons in Simplicity, Service, and Common Sense. A former headmaster of Sidwell Friends School reflects on the lessons he learned growing up in Philadelphia Quaker culture and the ways it played out over the ensuing years.
  • Stephen Mitchell: Parables and Portraits. An enjoyable read of original poems and prose poems based in large part on Biblical figures and their stories as well as others ranging from Manjushri and Huang-po to Vermeer and Freud.
  • Three poetry chapbook competition winners – Carolyn Page, Barn Flight; Linda Lee Harper, Buckeye; and Gary Myers, Lifetime Possessions. Page, a native of Rochester, presents some disturbingly violent insights into Swamp Yankee and then redneck (in North Carolina) life; the poems are essentially flat, prosaic, a single read tells you everything. Harper, with her stories of a childhood in Cincinnati, has a little more edge; still, I’m left wondering how rare my upbringing was, since I’ve found no hints of childhood sexual abuse. The last four poems in Myers’ volume break free from the pack and enter into a dreamlike state – the first pieces, in fact, that have stirred my admiration (how I wish he’d been able to sustain this for the entire book!).

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FROM SYMBOLS TO MAKING A DIFFERENCE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

Continuing this month’s survey of Books Read, here are a few more entries:

  • Mary Douglas: Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology. This is one volume that has perplexed and confounded me ever since I picked it up in 1983 in Dupont Circle. Part of my difficulty is in her compression of symbol and ritual, and another part in her use of African tribal anthropology to illustrate some theory. What I take away from this is that there are conventions in any society that enhance or facilitate actions that benefit both the individuals and the collectivity. When the experiences of individuals are paramount, there is little way of expressing them across the collectivity; when the collectivity is paramount, the individual may be crushed. Divide this individual/collectivity plane by another she calls grid/group and you get what I see in the collectivity as the faith community (group) or the totalitarian/bureaucratic regime (grid). Here, in the grid, the empowered individual may be the elite leader who moves people as pawns, while in the group, the individual may be … the mystic? If I interpret her right, groups may form at the fringe of society, while grids instead become the majority or norm. Whew!
  • David Burnie: Light. An Eyewitness Science illustrated book, this one gives me a clearer concept of scientific thought on light itself. Apart from a timeline of discoveries from the time the Quaker movement emerged up to the present, the bits leave me wondering just what I might incorporate into the idea of metaphor … and how.
  • A. Monroe Aurand Jr.: Early Life of the Pennsylvania Germans. Pamphlet.
  • Plain magazine. Nine issues Rachel received on Cushing Street. Lovely periodical that would likely have been better as a blog, if only they weren’t so neo-Luddite! Yes, I remain fond of hot type and all. The Barnesville connection made the issues especially pertinent to me as I reflect on the moves that landed me here.
  • Charles E. Fager: A Man Who Made a Difference: The Life of David H. Scull. This biography of a 20th century Friend made an interesting counterpoint to the Plain strand, although perhaps just as economically distant from the modern mainstream. Scull was able to do much of his far-reaching work within socially conscious organizations because of the freedom his small company gave him, thanks in part to his equally committed business partner. But that road, demonstrated by the cusp of the computer revolution in printing, Scull’s business, has changed everything. What are the alternatives for young Friends today?
  • E.F. Schumacher: Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. Like Muddling Toward Frugality (above), this classic is both dated and visionary. The devastation of globalization – on American wages, for starters – and the emergence of the Internet throw many of his strategies into disarray, yet the underpinning arguments of wrong focus and limited resources remain intriguing and relevant.

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OF SPRAWLING SYMPHONIES AND MUDDLING

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Continuing this month’s survey of Books Read, here are a few more entries. OK, the first one’s not a book, apart from the liner notes. But it’s still a major undertaking:

  • Gunter Wand conducts Bruckner, the nine symphonies: Listening to these in sequence close together discloses how little the composer grew from the first to last work. They become bombastic fanfares over wavering strings, and heavy footed. Only in No. 8 does he use harps, and then three of them. Despite all of the religious impulse others find in these works, I find them postured, with a vengeful, magisterial deity rather than the blissful radiance I feel in worship. While I have 3, 7, and 9 on vinyl, I am surprised how much of the others I recognize, at least in certain passages. So this has been an instructive exercise, especially in its unintended conjunction with Augustine.
  • Warren Johnson: Meddling Toward Frugality. An interesting 1978 volume from Sierra Club Books that is in many ways dated, especially in its expectations of decentralization and increasing local control, much of his overall thesis remains intriguing. His failure to anticipate the impact of globalization, computerization, and the wealth shift to the wealthiest Americans skewers his predictions, yet his expectations of lower worker income is bearing out (despite higher productivity!). His interpretation of muddling as positive, and demonstrated in both corporate and political decision-making, is illuminating. On a more personal note, I appreciate his interpretation of the Eden story as yet one more layer of wisdom: “The Biblical legend of the expulsion from the Garden of Eden seems clearly to describe the invention of agriculture. The tree of knowledge was the knowledge of agriculture: ‘The tree was good for food,’ and the woman took the first step – ‘She took the fruit thereof and did eat’ (Genesis 3:60). The penalty was the expulsion from the Garden [of the hunter-gatherer society] and ‘In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread’ (Genesis 3:19). Most important, it was irreducible. Once the knowledge had been gained and populations had risen above the carrying capacity of the hunter and gatherer, there was no turning back. The expulsion from the Garden was final. … Mankind would henceforth live in an intimate relationship with the soil.”

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FROM THICH NHAT HANH TO AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 6 Comments

Continuing this month’s survey of Books Read, here are a few more entries:

  • Thich Nhat Hanh: Buddha Mind, Buddha Body and Call Me by My True Name. The first, subtitled “Walking Toward Enlightenment,” lays out classic Buddhist teaching regarding human thought processes – something with interesting parallels to what I’m considering in the Quaker experience – as well as some good passages on seeds that may be applicable to my examination of the metaphor of The Seed. The collected poems, however, strike me as amateurish – first drafts, apparently all from single-day attempts – rather than deeply profound. Both volumes, all the same, treasured gifts.
  • Russell Banks: The Darling. A tale of a Weatherman member who goes underground and then flees to Africa, where she becomes the wife of a Liberian civil minister before getting caught up in the civil wars that bring the tyrant Charles Taylor to power. Masterful plotting, moving across past and present, and a range of meticulous reporting that includes not just politics and history but also ethnology and, especially, chimpanzee survival issues. Having read two Banks’ novels, now, I now move him to my list of favorites. But how many of his 22 or more volumes do I tackle?
  • Augustine of Hippo: City of God. Revisiting this political science course assignment, I am surprised how little I remember of his argument but am also impressed by my previous underlining and comments. Even so, a few of his points remained in my mind, especially the part about faith standing apart from rewards (even though Augustine eventually presses the heavenly rewards argument). His criticism of the pagans is solid and his argument that a society and government failing to uphold justice are no commonwealth at all – that is, are invalid. But he falls into the trap of predestination and despite his claims to the contrary, cannot support his claims we are free to do good. This time around, I see his extensive framing of a theology based on Original Sin of Eve as a faulty, and see no need for so many pages examining faithful and fallen angels, at least in terms of a polity. His statements about serving victorious forces, seeing their victory as God’s providence, and about just war are quite troublesome, while his descriptions of the City of God are logically thin – unsupported claims, essentially. Crucially for me is his error is linking the Word to Jesus alone: “the only begotten Word of God” – this, despite his close examination earlier of the schools of philosophy following from Pythagoras and Plato. I see this, ultimately, as a formulation of Catholic Orthodoxy far more than as any political blueprint.

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DISCOVERING JONATHAN LETHEM AND NICHOLSON BAKER

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

Looking back, I was surprised to find that somewhere along the line, I’d stopped making entries in my Books Read list. Curiously, this was a period in which I discovered two writers who leaped to the top of my favorite living novelists esteem, Jonathan Lethem and Nicholson Baker, two incredibly versatile writers who (fortunately) cannot be pigeonholed. Since this span of reading includes about a dozen of their volumes (half of them from the public library), I won’t try to summarize the works – they deserve long entries on their own – but I will note that The Everlasting Story of Nory opens with something I’d long argued for fiction: for the first 50 pages, there is seemingly no conflict at play, which somehow heightens the tension all the more. And I love the way Baker can handle a sentence of 250 to 300 words, a rarity in our era. Lethem, meanwhile, can construct a fat novel – and how – with insight, imagination, and flair.

These encounters – joined with Andre Dubus and Russell Banks – came as a relief after a stretch in which I wasn’t finding anybody in the current scene who was moving me the way, say, Kerouac, Kesey, or Vonnegut had back when I was in college. (Or even Brautigan, right after.) What a relief! And maybe, as I would hope, my standards have risen.

This period also includes discovering my most detested contemporary novelist, who will go unnamed. Tossing a string of senselessly murdered bodies in our direction does nothing to raise my sense of humanity. Quite the opposite. And with his professions of religious faith, I find no excuse for such nihilism. Nory, by contrast, delivers on all counts.

I also read Ernest Hebert’s Live Free or Die and Spoonwood, with their requisite New Hampshire perspectives. (His work is anchored in the distinctive Monadnock region of the Granite State.)

Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son, with its portrayals of the Plymouth Brethren in England, also led to the father’s marvelous illustrations of tide pool life, something I’m now pursuing every summer.

Kay Davis Coltrane’s Centre Friends: The Legacy of the Meeting on the Hill is a fat, thoroughly illustrated history of the Quaker congregation my Hodgson ancestors helped settle in North Carolina in the 1750s. Wonderful work.

Also, I reread Julian Barnes’ Proust’s Parrot and Proust’s Madame Bovary, and Tuesday’s With Morey.

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FROM MOTHERS IN FLIGHT TO THE GREAT HEREAFTER

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 7 Comments

Continuing this month’s survey of Books Read, here are a few more entries:

  • Rosie Jackson: Mothers Who Leave. Published in 1994, this consideration of British and American mothers attempts to balance the predominant view that mothers who leave their children in a divorce are somehow abnormal, morally deficient, irresponsible, or self-centered. Drawn more from literature and pop culture (especially Hollywood) than from social science research.
  • Dawn Powell: The Wicked Pavilion. World War II-era novel set on a star-crossed romance that keeps returning to a “musty” French restaurant in Manhattan. New Yorker-flavored style, with a good dose of dry humor. Also, her novel, The Golden Spur, set in and around a Greenwich Village tavern.
  • Thomas P. Slaughter: The Beautiful Soul of John Woolman, Apostle of Abolition. Not read closely, but rather as a quick overview. Am not impressed with the author’s interpretation of Quaker faith as such, especially in its origins, but his focus, understanding, and specialty are naturally on Woolman per se.
  • Sarah Dunant:  The Birth of Venus, A historical novel set in Florence at the end of the Medici reign and during the time of the fundamentalist monk Savonarola, at the end of the 1400s. An interesting counterpoint of papal opposition within the Catholic church in Italy a few years before Luther and Calvin to the north. Told from the point of view of a woman who is married off to a homosexual. Wikipedia confirms the prevalence of homosexuality in Florence and the destructiveness of the Bonfire of the Vanities, and explains that the widespread outbreak of pox, otherwise known as the French Pox, was syphilis.
  • Charles Olson: Selected Writings. A revisit to essays and poems, especially those related to Gloucester. Olson’s debt to Pound is quite obvious, though I find little memorable here. Still, a palate-cleanser. Curiously, his MAXIMUS poems are a blend of prose poems and lyrical.
  • The Diary of Anais Nin, Vol. 2 (1934-1939 (unfinished on my return to the office). Apparently, I read part of this long ago, though I remember nothing. This time, I’m fascinated by her working with Otto Rank and her descriptions of his personality. Of course, much of the masculine/feminine debate is very dated. I would very much like to hear from the other sides of her subjects, since she is so confident in her opinions.
  • Quaker Life, March/April 2009. Wonderful issue focusing on Friends and Their Pastors, including a piece by me.
  • F. Scott Fitzgerald:  The Great Gatsby. An enjoyable read, obvious if one considers the longevity of the work. But also quite flawed, first in overall structure, and second in some erratic shift in point of view: some scenes are elaborately described even though there was no way for the first-person narrator to have knowledge of them, much less detailed dialogue. In the end, I have little interior sense of any of the characters, apart from their gyrations in regard to wealth – including the narrator, and am left with little sympathy for them or their condition. I can understand the initial attraction of the big lavish parties, but that quickly becomes a screen for the underlying vacuity.
  • Henry Miller: Nexus (The Rosy Crucifixion). Not really a novel, this work is more a series of confessions and speculations. The subjects and style are something I once would have perceived as profound and worthy of pursuit, though they now strike me more as pretentious, confused babbling. The Christmas section, however, starting on page 72 is a refreshing alternative to the usual happy-happy sort of holiday memories one is usually served. This, like the Nin, is another example of writers and other artists living in the poverty of a self-proclaimed higher existence of Their Art; in this case, aspiring to The Novel.
  • Vanity Fair, April 2009. Issue devoted to the Vanishing American Dream, hedge fund collapses, Bernie Madoff’s victims, and so on. Not one of the most compelling collections, despite its timeliness.
  • Stack of Columbia Journalism Review issues, 2007-2008. Sherry’s gift to my reading pile … but all the pieces on the changing field and the desperation afloat left no encouragement. In addition, so much simply felt dated, even at a year’s remove.
  • Henry Miller: Tropic of Cancer. Along with Joyce, puts Kerouac in perspective. Alas.
  • Andre Dubus, Finding a Girl in America and Selected Stories. A master.
  • Russell Banks, The Sweet Hereafter. Yes, another master.

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