Tag: Quaker

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 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 POETRY WINNERS TO MIRACLES

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 4 Comments

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

  • Poetry book competition winners, mostly. Mary Biddinger, Prairie Fever (Steel Toe); Chuck Carlisle, A Broken Escalator Still Isn’t the Stairs (Concrete Wolf); Mark Conway, Any Holy City (Silverfish); Becky Gould Gibson, Need-Fire (Bright Hill); Michelle Gillett, The Green Cottage (Ledge); Noah Eli Gordon, Acoustic Experience (Pavement Saw); Jason Irwin, Watering the Dead (Pavement Saw); Joshua Kryah, Glean (Nightboat); Rachael Lyon, The Normal Heart and How It Works (White Eagle Coffee Store); Dawn Lundy Martin, Discipline (Nightboat); Rusty Morrison, The True Keeps Calm Biding Its Story (Ahsanta); Heather Aimee O’Neill, Memory Future (Gold Line); Simon Ortiz, From Sand Creek (Arizona); Pitt Poetry Series, New and Selected 2012; Liz Robbins, Play Button (Cider Press Review); Jonathan Thirkield, The Waker’s Corridor (Louisiana State); Cider Press Review, Vol. 12; Slipstream, No. 31.  By and large, how dreadful – even meaningless or worse, false – I find these hermetic works of creative writing MFAs, often incestuously selected by associate professors of creative writing or literature. Far from finding anything I might wish I had written, I’m instead left grasping at straws for anything I might even admire – even a single line or stanza seems elusive. On top of it, the pervasive anti-Christian invective in many seems to amplify the shallowness of much of any thought running through these – often, there’s only a vague link to the title. And all of these similes!  Admittedly, many of these are gorgeously produced – their covers, especially. So what I’m keeping, this round: Need-Fire, with its impeccable scholarship of early Christianity in England and its lovely reconstruction of early English verse; Glean, with its lacy evocations. Ortiz remains in a class by himself.
  • Albert Goldbarth: Heaven and Earth. Wonderful collection (poems).
  • Poetry, December 2011-April 2012. Catching up! Some good work by Dan Beachy-Quick, Dick Allen, and Linda Kunhardt (December), varied responses to prayer and faith (“One Whole Voice,” February), Marina Tsvetaeva plus Kabbalah-influenced work (March).
  • American Poetry Review, March-April 2012. No keepers, apart from an essay on metaphor.
  • George Fox: Book of Miracles. A reconstruction of pastoral work by Fox, with extensive introduction looking at the expectation of miracles and providences at the time.
  • Evelyn Underhill: Abba. A close gloss on the Lord’s Prayer and its radical implications.

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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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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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FROM A PAPER DOLL TO BALLS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

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

  • Robert B. Parker: Paper Doll. By quoting Emerson and placing the scene of the crime “right in Louisburg Square” in Boston’s Beacon Hill, both on Page 2, Parker had my full attention. A delightful read, and fast – despite my usual distaste for genre writing of any kind. A fine tonic after Moore’s laborious scaffolding, especially.
  • James P. Carse: The Religious Case Against Belief. A perplexing argument that belief relates to belief systems that actually inhibit the sense of wonder that is at the heart of religion. He sees religion more as long-term culture, each one filled with varied and evolving responses. In addition, open-ended poetry is at the heart of religion, unlike belief, which has answers even before any question is raised. His discussion on Page 65 leads me to the Forbidden Fruit as the first law. The freedom to violate it leads us to trial-and-error knowledge. Without that opening, we would have a static – rather than dynamic – state of existence. The New Adam, in effect, would be returned to a state of wonder and awe, rather than a confining “belief system.” The full freedom of relationship, in other words, rather than subservience.
  • Michael Ray Taylor: Cave Passages: Roaming the Underground Wilderness. An obvious companion to The Mole People and my Southern Indiana experiences. Makes me realize that no matter how fascinated I am by karst formations perceived from above ground, I have no desire for the cold, clammy, and downright wet – and often claustrophobic, jagged, and muddy – conditions underground.
  • Wilmer A. Cooper: Growing Up Plain: The Journey of a Public Friend. Rooted in places and people I’ve known, this account provides a candid dimension of the difficulties placed upon children growing up in Ohio Wilburite families in the years when the one-room schoolhouses were being closed down. A good counterpoint to the rosier versions told by William Taber. One bonus is in the appendices, which include John Brady’s history and two OYM Disciplines.
  • Stephen D. Edington: The Beat Face of God: The Beat Generation Writers as Spirit Guides. Here a Unitarian minister in Nashua really stretches to make his all-too-shallow case. Not only does he repeat himself, but he seems to be ignorant of many key incidents in the lives of these players. Apart from Snyder and Whalen, and perhaps activists like Ferlinghetti, hedonism could be seen to be the operating principle, rather than religious quest.
  • Lester C. Thurow: The Zero Sum Society. Another critique of conventional economics, this one was first published in 1980, which leaves it in a curious situation. Since it is addressed to a series of political stalemates preventing long-term economic reform, much of his analysis feels dated, especially the concerns about inflation or income security. (These days, we’re looking at the possibility of real deflation and negotiated pay cuts.) On the other hand, the failure to solve these problems back then have led us, in part, into the disastrous situation the Obama Administration is now facing. He sees energy reform as the central problem. Thurow’s argument, of course, is the question of which segment of society will most bear the brunt (and the economic costs) of any change.
  • Richard Adams: Watership Down. The British rabbit novel I was supposed to read my senior year of college. So rabbits talk? And one of their favorite sayings is that a cloud doesn’t like to be alone? Disturbing.
  • Patricia Foster, ed.:  Minding the Body: Women Writers on Body and Soul. In contrast to Minding the Light, this collection puts the focus on the corporeal – perhaps quite fitting for someone recovering from surgery! Actually, a remarkable collection. I can’t imagine men writing about our bodies and our varied struggles with them – including issues of being overweight or skinny, illness (especially cancer), or aging.
  • Nanci Kincaid: Balls. A fast-moving 396-page novel from the viewpoint of the women in the shadows of football, especially Dixie, who becomes the wife of Mac, the central coach in the story. Humorous and quite disturbing as it looks at the disintegration of marriage and the male obsession with success.

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FROM RELIGIOUS COACHING AND ANTS AS SOCIETY TO DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Continuing this month’s survey of Books Read, here are a few more entries. But first I should note that this section was compiled during recovery from major surgery, when I’d been warned I could read like crazy but just wouldn’t remember much, thanks to the morphine. Thus, this was an exercise to help me recall what I’d completed – 43 volumes in all.

  • Rick Warren: The Purpose Driven Life. This is really set up as a sports COACH set of game plan instructions. Sports jargon is full of motivating, directing maxims, focusing concepts, directions. It’s also legalistic: these are the rules, this is what you do: behavior-oriented.
  • Paul Ormerod: Butterfuly Economics. A  challenge to orthodox economics. Curiously, ants, not butterflies, are the basis of the reconsideration of public policy options.
  • J. Brent Bill: Mind the Light. Pleasurable approach to faith by a Friends pastor, with good exercises for experiencing the Light.
  • Vanity Fair, February 2009. (I’ve subscribed to this magazine for years, so I could have included every issue.) On fundamentalism, Christopher Hitchens, “Assassins of the Mind”:  “For our time and generation, the great conflict between the ironic mind and the literal mind, the experimental and the dogmatic, the tolerant and the fanatical, is the argument that was kindled by The Satanic Verses.” Also,  a great, lengthy oral history of the George W. Bush presidency and a piece on how his administration killed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
  • Indiana Alumni Magazine, January/February 2009. Includes a touching piece on a Vietnam veteran who had been one of the top newspaper editors but died in isolation in Florida.
  • Pennsylvania Mennonite Heritage, January 2009. (Another magazine, quarterly, where I could have noted every edition.) Includes an excellent overview of early Anabaptist history, resulting in four branches: the Mennonites, Amish, Hutterites, and Munster uprising.
  • Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America. Volume 1: I had expected more description of his travels and insights in America. Instead, his focus in on how to avoid the tyranny of the majority as a consequence of democracy. An aristocrat himself, his interest is as much on ways democracy might be better constrained in its applications in France as it is on the American experience. His look at local and state politics is unduly weighted on the New England model, ignoring, for instance, the mid-Atlantic states in his contradistinction with the Southern states. His understanding of religion, especially his apologetics for Roman Catholic faith fitting well into democratic systems, fails to appreciate the Puritan connection of personal salvation and covenant or the Quaker sense of walking in the Light as foundations of democratic decision-making. On the other hand, he also perceives the states at this time as essentially sovereign, the resulting weakness of the national government (including a prediction of weak executives, which was in fact the case up to Lincoln), and foresees the possibility of the slave issue leading to the dissolution of the Union.
  • Volume 2: Here, the discussion turns to more of general findings from his travels in America and abroad. Still, his findings are vague impressions than specifics. Many of his conclusions must be seen in the time-frame of 1830, before American arts and letters really began to take shape. He does have an interesting theory about the tensions between an army in a democratic society and a democratic people itself.

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OF THE GRAVE AND BEES TO PERFUME AND HOLLYWOOD

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

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

  • Graham Montague: The Stillness of the Grave and the Quickening of the Spirit. Pamphlet by a contemporary British Friend, suggested by Patrick Burns. I love the use of Walt Whitman’s description of attending his first Quaker meeting and sensing the worshipers were as still as the grave — followed by insights of dying to the world around us momentarily and resurrection.
  • Matthue Roth: Never Mind the Goldbergs. Flippant fiction as late-night fun for this reader. One of my favorite teen-angst novels, it has some marvelous insights into religious identity as well as some scathing portraits of Hollywood values and practice.
  • Holley Bishop: Robbing the Bees: A Biography of Honey, the Sweet Liquid Gold That Seduced the World. Although the author spends much of her time following a commercial beekeeper in Florida, she does present a range of fascinating detail on the care of honeybees through history, the evolution of commercial hives, and the place of honey and beeswax over the centuries. A book to stand alongside, Cod, Salt, Cotton, and other basic commodities. Includes recipes.
  • Mandy Aftel: Essence and Alchemy: A Book of Perfume. A beautifully designed and produced book (North Point Press) exploring the history, artistry, psychology, and ingredients of perfume. But do I want all of those recipes?

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FROM BIRDING BY EAR TO GROWING OLDER, WITH OR WITHOUT CHOPSTICKS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

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

  • Peterson Field Guides: Birding by Ear (booklet and audio tapes). Tweet! (OK, I still can’t identify most birds by their singing. Maybe I just don’t know the words?)
  • Stephan Yafa: Big Cotton. Exploration of the impact of another major commodity on world economies and politics. In line with Salt, Cod, Honey, even the fur and tusks that Farley Mowett has pursued.
  • E. Digby Baltzell: Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia. A disturbing comparison of the legacy of two Colonial cities founded on faith. Baltzell’s reliance on High Society and family dynasties gives the work its own twist, so that families that moved away from either city vanish from sight, no matter their continuing contributions to society. Still, many of his conclusions are also disturbing, especially from a Friends’ perspective.
  • Henry David Thoreau: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. A surprising amount of bad poetry here, as well as very little observation of what’s right before him. I find myself dismissing Thoreau as a suburban naturalist, more an antecedent to Kerouac than, say, Snyder.
  • Tom Montag: Kissing Poetry’s Sister. Includes looks at creative nonfiction as a genre. He’s another middle-aged poet who has continued to write in relative obscurity while being employed in non-teaching positions.
  • Elizabeth Lyon: The Sell Your Novel Toolkit. Had this one sitting on my shelf all along, thinking it was another self-marketing guide for once the work was published. Instead, it turns out to have in-depth sections on query letters, synopsis/outline presentations, landing an agent, and the like. As a result, I have reworked all of my materials for the three novels I’m pitching – even renaming two of them. Now, let’s see if it does the trick.
  • Victoria Abbott Riccard: Untangling Chopsticks. A young woman from New England moves to Kyoto to master the cooking and presentation of food that accompanies tea-ceremony. Along the way, she becomes adept in a culture where she would always be an outsider, even after a lifetime. Includes recipes.
  • Tom Plummer: Second Wind, Variations on a Theme of Growing Older. Pleasant essays more appropriate to newspaper or magazine columns, by an understated Mormon.

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