Thoughts on reading (87)

I have been feeling restless lately, unable to focus. Some of that is being played out in my reading (or my attempts at such). As the half dozen of you who actually follow this blog (thank you!) know, I keep track of what I read here with modest “book reports.” I also use GoodReads to keep track—no reports there, just star ratings with “date completed” noted. It gives me satisfaction to see titles rack up, and to remember the pleasure (usually) I got from certain books. This collage, courtesy of GoodReads, shows the books I read in 2022.

This year I have decided—because I enjoy constraints for the unexpected opportunities they create—to read in alphabetical order, by title. So far, All Systems Red (Martha Wells, sci-fi), The Book of My Lives (Aleksandar Hemon, memoir/essays), and Cloud Cuckoo Land (Anthony Doerr, fiction). For B, I picked up a few books, all fiction—Brooklyn (Colm Tóibín), Bone Fire (Mark Spragg), and The Blazing World (Siri Huvstedt)—but, for whatever reason—mood, that restlessness—I couldn't get into them. They are now on a stack that will be going to the library book store. It’s one way to start getting rid of books! 

For D, I had a similarly stuttering start, dismissing Defining the World, about the dictionary compiler Samuel Johnson, and Michael Crichton’s Disclosure, a dated (1993) thriller about the computer industry and sexual harassment. Although thrillers are often my default if I’m finding it hard to dive into a book—simple plot can suffice—by page 37 I wasn't feeling compelled to continue. 

And so I picked up Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process, by John McPhee. And was immediately drawn in. There is something so reassuring and calming about McPhee: his elegant yet approachable language, his themes and rhythms, his eclecticism, his attentiveness to detail, his patience. I have enjoyed some of his books in the past (and as you can see here, he has written a few!), and I am reexperiencing that feeling of trust. 

Also, the mere fact that it’s nonfiction, after the flights of Cuckoo Land fantasy: this tells me that, perhaps, what I crave when I pick up something new is that a different part of my brain is stimulated. I have a couple of friends who refuse to read fiction. Their loss. I love to get sucked into a good tale, maybe simply for the adventure, maybe for the morality or history that’s explored, maybe for the depth of feeling, or simply the characters and situations. But I also crave insight into what makes the real pieces of this world fall into place, and sometimes nonfiction is best for that. In any case, today that’s true. It’s settling and centering to have found my focus for the next week or so. Bring it on, Mr. McPhee.

Some words of wisdom (86)

I don't have energy for anything more than a couple of quotes today, both by Charles Bukowski:

“We're all going to die, all of us; what a circus! That alone should make us love each other, but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities. We are eaten up by nothing.”

and

 

Two poems about life and death (85)

I'm taking an on-line class with poet Pádraig Ó Tuama through the Rowe Center in western New York State, called "Practicing the Inner Life." Today was the first session, and he talked about "religionless spirituality," defining spirituality as something that is phenomenally physical, a practice that, in its essence, helps you to breathe.

The opposite of spirituality, he said, is suffocation.

As part of the discussion he spoke about death, and he read a few poems.  Here is one by Marie Howe. It is a poem that makes me stop in my tracks and, yes, take a deep breath, every time I read it. 

What the Living Do

Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won't work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up

waiting for the plumber I still haven't called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It's winter again: the sky's a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through

the open living-room windows because the heat's on too high in here and I can't turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,

I've been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,

I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.

What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss—we want more and more and then more of it.

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing so deep

for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I'm speechless:
I am living. I remember you.

And here is one by Michael Kleber-Diggs, whom I encountered this evening for the first time.

Gloria Mundi

Come to my funeral dressed as you
would for an autumn walk in the woods.

Arrive on your schedule; I give you permission
to be late, even without good cause.

If my day arrives when you had other plans, please
proceed with them instead. Celebrate me

there—keep dancing. Tend your gardens. Live
well. Don’t stop. Think of me forever assigned

to a period, a place, a people. Remember me
in stories—not the first time we met, not the last,

a time in between. Our moment here is small.
I am too—a worldly thing among worldly things—

one part per seven billion. Make me smaller still.
Repurpose my body. Mix me with soil and seed,

compost for a sapling. Make my remains useful,
wondrous. Let me bloom and recede, grow

and decay, let me be lovely yet
temporal, like memories, like mahogany.

 

(The painting I've featured above is Sense of Wonder II, by Jonny McEwen.)

 

Ellen Bass, poet (84)

The Thing Is

to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you’ve held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you down like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.

                                —Ellen Bass

Book Report: Cloud Cuckoo Land (83)

5. Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land (2021) (1/27/23)

Wow. I can't recall being so engrossed in a book in quite a while. Not just engrossed, but swept up, swept away—blown away. I closed the book just now feeling full—of emotion, of admiration, of wonder, of life, and of sadness too. Of appreciation for life, and for words and books and stories, and for the complexity and beauty (complex beauty, beautiful complexity) that this whole confounded world represents.

And this book, weighing in at 622 pages, is one of those monsters that I tend to avoid. Though admittedly, with its very short chapters and numerous part and section pages (the latter identifying simply a place and a time) surrounded by blank pages, it is probably closer to 522. But that's still more pages than I usually commit to without seriously considering how long it will tie me down.

Well, in this case, not long at all: a bare week. A good 400 pages in the last two days alone.

The book revolves around a fable, Cloud Cuckoo Land, written around the end of the first century CE by one Antonius Diogenes, telling the story of "Aethon: Lived 80 Years a Man, 1 Year a Donkey, 1 Year a Sea Bass, 1 Year a Crow." This fable figures into a trio of stories, set variously in 1450s Constantinople; early 21st-century Idaho; and a sometime-in-the-future spaceship 65 years out from Earth. We meet Anna and Omeir, she an energetic orphan who learns to read ancient Greek, he a boy with a hare lip and two strong oxen; Zeno, a Korean War vet and eventually translator, and Seymour, an autistic boy deeply dismayed by the damage being done to the planet; and 14-year-old Konstance, one of eighty-something prospective settlers hurtling toward a planet 4.24 light-years from Earth, a place they (or their progeny) won't reach for several hundred years.

It's not enough to summarize the book; it needs to be read. 

Here are a few passages I flagged. The first one takes place in Korea, where Zeno, not yet twenty, is a prisoner of war and has befriended another POW, a British classics teacher named Rex.

As soon as he can walk, Zeno is forced back into his duty as a fireman. Some days he is too weak to carry his meager bundle more than a few paces before setting it down again. Rex squats beside him and with a piece of charcoal writes Ἄλφάβητος on the trunk of a tree.
    Α is ἄλφα is alpha: the inverted head of an ox. Β is βῆτα is beta: based on the floor plan of a house. Ω is ὧ μέγα is omega, the mega O: a great whale's mouth opening to swallow all the letters before it.
     Zeno says, "Alphabet."
     "Good. How about this?"
     Rex writes, ὁ νόστος.
     Zeno rummages in the compartments of his mind.
     "Nostos."
     "Nostos, yes. The act of homecoming, a safe arrival. Of course, mapping a single English word onto a Greek one is almost always slippery. A nostos also means a song about a homecoming."
     Zeno rises, light-headed, and picks up his bundle.
     Rex buttons his piece of charcoal into his pocket. "In a time," he says, "when disease, war, and famine haunted practically every hour, when so many died before their time, their bodies swallowed by the sea or earth, or simply lost over the horizon, never to return, their fates unknown . . ." He gazes across the frozen fields to the low, dark buildings of Camp Five. "Imagine how it felt to hear the old songs about heroes returning home. To believe that it was possible."
     Out on the ice of the Yalu far below, the wind drives the snow in long, eddying swirls. Rex sinks deeper into his collar. "It's not so much the contents of the song. It's that the song was still being sung."

Here, on the spaceship Argos, a mysterious disease has just erupted. A boy, Zeke, and an older man, Dr. Pori, have died, and "twenty-one others—one quarter of the people on board—are experiencing symptoms." The ship has entered the second of four quarantine periods, this one lasting two months, as the central, all-knowing computer known as Sybil assesses the situation.

A week ago, it all seemed so secure. So settled. Everyone whispering down the corridors in their patched-up worksuits and socks. . . . Fresh lettuce on Tuesdays, Farm 3 beans on Wednesdays, haircuts on Fridays, dentist in Compartment 6, seamstress in Compartment 17, precalc with Dr. Pori three mornings a week, the warm eye of Sybil keeping watch over them all. Yet, even then, in the deepest vaults of her subconscious, didn't Konstance sense the terrible precariousness of it all? The frozen immensity tugging, tugging, tugging at the outer walls?
     She touches her Vizer [a means of entering a vast virtual library] and climbs the ladder to the second tier of the Library. Jessi Ko looks up from a book in which a thousand pale deer with oversized nostrils lie dead in the snow.
     "I'm reading about the saiga antelope. They had this bacteria in them that caused massive die-offs." . . .
     "Where's Ramón?" Konstance asks.
     Below them images from long-ago pandemics flicker above grown-ups at tables. Soldiers in beds, doctors in hazmat suits. Unbidden into her head comes an image of Zeke's body being sent out the airlock, then Dr. Pori's a few hundred thousand kilometers later: a trail of corpses left through the void like breadcrumbs from some ghastly fairy tale.
     "Says here that two hundred thousand of them died in twelve hours," Jessi says, "and no one ever figured out why." Far down the atrium, at the limit of her eyesight, Konstance sees her father at a table by himself, sheets of technical drawings sailing around him.
     "I heard," says Omicron, staring up through the barrel vault, "that Quarantine Three lasts a year."
     "I heard," whispers Jessi, "that Quarantine Four lasts forever."

And finally—because I only flagged three sections, and each one, in a way, encapsulates a bit of what this beautiful book is about—here is Seymour, the troubled boy who decides to wage war on the ruination of his home place. The following scene takes place in prison, several years after he has planted a bomb, which does go off, though not as he intended. Before that happens, he stumbles on a rehearsal that Zeno and five fifth-graders are undertaking of a Greek tale called "Cloud Cuckoo Land." He has recently requested the text of the play, and everything related to that performance has arrived, including the scripts the five children were using.

On one of the last pages of one copy are multiple edits, not in Zeno's hand, but in bright cursive.
     While he was downstairs with his bombs, the children upstairs were rewriting the ending.
     The underground tomb, the donkey, the sea bass, a crow flapping through the cosmos: it's a ridiculous tale. But in the version rendered by Zeno and the kids, it's beautiful too. Sometimes as he works, Greek words come flashing up from the depths of the facsimiles, ὄρνις, ornis, it means both bird and omen—and Seymour feels like he used to when he was caught in the gaze of Trustyfriend [an owl], as though he's being allowed to glimpse an older and undiluted world, when every barn swallow, every sunset, every storm, pulsed with meaning. By age seventeen he'd convinced himself that every human he saw was a parasite, captive to the dictates of consumption. But as he reconstructs Zeno's translation, he realizes that the truth is infinitely more complicated, that we are all beautiful even as we are all part of the problem, and that to be a part of the problem is to be human. . . .    
     In a child's cursive, beneath . . . crossed-out lines, Aethon's new line [at the end of the play] is handwritten in the margin, "The world as it is is enough."

It is, ultimately, a book of hope, though it doesn't flinch from the uncomfortable, the tragic. I loved Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See, which won the Pulitzer. I loved this book even more. Here is a brief profile of Doerr from the New York Times, where he describes some of what he was thinking as he wrote Cloud Cuckoo Land. I can't wait to see what he comes up with next.

Sweet Elena's (82)

I've got nothing today, so I'll just post three photos I took last Saturday when I met my friend Nina at one of our favorite coffeehouses, Sweet Elena's. I had a café au lait in a big bowl and a spinach-stuffed croissant, and I listened to Ellen Bass talk about epistolary poems. And I took these three photos:

Oh, and here's one of those epistolary poems, this one by Lucille Clifton:

note, passed to superman

sweet jesus, superman,
if i had seen you
dressed in your blue suit
i would have known you.
maybe that choirboy clark
can stand around
listening to stories
but not you, not with
metropolis to save
and every crook in town
filthy with kryptonite.
lord, man of steel
i understand the cape,
the leggings, the whole
ball of wax.
you can trust me,
there is no planet stranger
than the one i'm from.

Ralph Goings, artist (81)

A friend posted this on FB the other day:

Looks like a retro photograph, no? In fact, it's a painting (watercolor, I believe), by Californian artist Ralph Goings (1928–2016), who became identified with the photorealism school of the 1960s and 70s. He grew up in a working-class family in Corning, in the Central Valley, and his subject matter reflected that background, focusing early on on pickup trucks in rural areas, and later on diners: interiors and still lifes. He adopted the practice of taking photos, then projecting the resulting 35mm slides onto his canvases; he painted in both oils and watercolor. Here are a few of his works, which were often very large, as much as 4 feet by 6 feet:

Paul's Corner Cushion, 1970

Dick's Union General, 1970

Black Ford, 1975

Tom's Diner, 1997

Amsterdam Diner, 1980

Still Life with Peppers, 1981

Still Life with Straws, 1978

Ketchup, 1989 (lithograph)

Cream Pie, 1987 (lithograph)

Big Sur resources (80)

The other week a Big Sur resident and chronicler for the area, Kate Woods Novoa, aka bigsurkate, posted a set of three detailed maps of the Big Sur coast—specifically, of all the features and landmarks with their mile marker designations. I wanted to keep them handy, so I'm creating this post for those links. The three maps are for the northern section, from MM 43 to MM 72, and including the Big Sur Valley, El Sur Ranch, the Bixby and Garrapata coasts, and Carmel Highlands; the central section, from Lucia north to Pfeiffer–Big Sur State Park, MM 20–48, encompassing the Big Creek, Esalen, and Partington coasts; and the southern section, from Ragged Point (San Luis Obispo County MM 72) to Lucia, MoCo MM 23, and including the Lucia and Gorda coasts.

Another really useful set of maps can be found at BigSurTrailmap, a project of avid hiker Jack Glendening. These maps, some of which are downloadable to your phone, include the locations of camps and water sources as well as current trail conditions. Hike planning info specific to Big Sur and a wealth of other information are offered as well.

A final very useful site for the Big Sur backcountry is the Trail Reports forum of the Ventana Wilderness Alliance (VWA), which presents up-to-date information about individual trails in both the Ventana and the Silver Peak Wildernesses. Many years ago, I posted a report after hiking a trail (at night) on a Search & Rescue mission—and that report is essentially what ended me up as a VWA member and, ultimately, a Volunteer Wilderness Ranger.

Book Report: A Life Made by Hand (79)

4. Andrea D'Aquino, A Life Made by Hand: The Story of Ruth Asawa (2019) (1/23/23)

I bought a spate of picture books recently, including this one, which came highly recommended and is about an artist I admire. The story begins with the farm in California where Ruth Asawa grew up in the 1930s. "Working with her hands was an ordinary thing to do." However, she also noticed the world around her, inspecting the shapes of snails, the delicacy of dragonflies, the intricacies of spider webs. She'd draw patterns in the dirt with her bare feet, create tiny animals out of wire, fold origami shapes. Eventually she went to Black Mountain College, where she worked with dancer Merce Cunningham, futurist designer Buckminster Fuller, and color theorist Josef Albers. On a trip to Mexico she learned how to weave baskets with wire—a technique that she developed into the art form she became known for: "graceful sculptures that were light as air." She lived and worked in San Francisco until her death in 2013 at the age of 87.

It's a spare story, and leaves out—by request of Ruth's daughters—her internment during WWII, when she was 16. This part of the story is fully explained in the backmatter, as are many more details of her long life, but her family wished to emphasize her joy and her creative spirit in the book proper. And it does a lovely job of that.

The art is multimedia with collage:

And here are a few of Ruth Asawa's sculptures, some of which I've seen at San Francisco's De Young Museum. The way they interact with light to cast shadows is a beautiful part of their magic.

In 2020, she was honored on US postage stamps:

I think she would have liked both the stamps and this book.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A few days after posting this I happened upon (on FB, of course) a photograph by her Bay Area neighbor and friend Rondal Partridge of Ruth in her living room, and while searching for that I also found one of her in her studio, also by Partridge. So here's a P.S.:

 

Poetry and the surreal interior (78)

Illustration by Keith Negley, for an op-ed by
Roxane Gay, "Who Gets to Be Angry?"

This afternoon I attended a virtual workshop with the poet Jane Hirshfield. She started with a discussion of several directions she sees our social polity embracing just now, which she dubbed anger, allegiance, and affirmation. She dismissed the first two as being not especially useful for poetry because they are limited—they take you in a particular direction and then only so far. That said, she underscored that they are both necessary generally: to feel righteous outrage is important in life when we see wrongs being done, and allegiance—which she translated as having the "quality of the ampersand, the connecting 'and'"—means community, friendship, trust, loyalty, which we need in order to thrive. 

Numinous No. 33 by Yari Ostovany

The third element, however, affirmation (because she needed an a-word for her list), is useful for poetry. It is a way of saying YES—to both the easy and the difficult, to existence writ large. Shedding the need for an a-word, she suggested the numinous as something to think about: the embrace of the ineffable, always AND, always YES. (The word numinous comes from the Latin numen, 'divine will,' or properly: 'divine approval expressed by nodding the head," from nuere, 'to nod'.) She mentioned the related notion of amor fati, loving your fate—not in a passive way, but through active engagement. Waking up in a particular direction and seeing where it takes you while steering it.

Her first prompt for the generative part of the workshop was "surreal interior." Her instruction: select an object or an animal or what-have-you and inhabit it. Then write.

She read two poems to illustrate this, which I offer here:

Stone

Go inside a stone
That would be my way.
Let somebody else become a dove
Or gnash with a tiger's tooth.
I am happy to be a stone.

From the outside the stone is a riddle:
No one knows how to answer it.
Yet within, it must be cool and quiet
Even though a cow steps on it full weight,
Even though a child throws it in a river;
The stone sinks, slow, unperturbed
To the river bottom
Where the fishes come to knock on it
And listen.

I have seen sparks fly out
When two stones are rubbed,
So perhaps it is not dark inside after all;
Perhaps there is a moon shining
From somewhere, as though behind a hill—
Just enough light to make out
The strange writings, the star-charts
On the inner walls. 

                    — Charles Simic (1938–2023)

Inside

inside stone is stone and the memory of plate tectonics
inside brick is brick and the memory or forgetting of fire

flower the blooming flower has no inside just as in rain there is no inside
but inside seed are the four seasons, the desire for growth

inside the fly is flesh and blood I do not know
inside the chicken are organs blood vessels flesh and bones plus a dullness of the spirit

inside each human is either a mouse or a dragon
inside each human is either a village or else a pool of piss and a pile of shit

inside each human is darkness, obviously—there’s no starlight
everybody’s dreams gradually disappear inside them

inside a group of people there are people and inside a group of people are mountains and valleys
inside a group of people there didn’t used to be but now there is a bank

inside the bank is a branch president who sometimes ends up
a prisoner a teacher an actor a commander

but inside the cell is a universe that did not originate in an explosion
while inside the virus is a cackling demon

just as inside human disaster is scheming is misjudgment is foolishness
or inside breath is panic is sorrow is death

                    — Xi Chuan (b. 1963), trans. Lucas Klein

Chinese New Year (77)

Happy Chinese New Year! This coming year is the year of the rabbit, as we leave the roaring tiger behind. This (if we give astrology any credence, which we don't) means that we should see an abrupt change of pace as the next year unfolds. Though I have to say, it sure would be nice if that were true . . . Enough roaring already.

A FB friend posted an image of a Chinese postage stamp celebrating this new year:

As he said, it's a little disturbing! Nothing docile about that rabbit. Here's a more soothing depiction of the change from old year to new (including a gentler tiger: the description of this image mentions no roaring, only resilience):

Anyway, that blue rabbit got me searching out postage stamps depicting each of the 12 Chinese zodiac signs—from all over the world, as it turned out. Chinese New Year doesn't happen just in China.

Here is the rest of the zodiac, counting forward into the future—or, in reverse order, back into the past, as you wish:

And here are the US commemorative stamps for recent (pre-forever and forever) cycles of Chinese new years:

And this year's stamp:

In any case, Kung hei fat choy, Gong xi fa cai, 恭喜發財—or however you say it! If you'd like to watch a little video about this rabbit year, I offer you . . .