Enjoy this excellent rendition of Maurice Sendak’s classic Where the Wild Things Are, read (and editorialized on a bit) by Christopher Walken.
To live in this world
To live in this world, you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.
Mary Oliver
Past Lives by Irene McKinney
Sad news. West Virginia poet laureate Irene McKinney has passed away. Here’s a lovely poem of hers from the Blackbird archives. (Apologies, the formatting doesn’t keep.)
Past Lives
Go ahead. There’s only the one life,
really, even if there are more.
Whoever takes us by the hand
and sets us on the path to the temple
must be trusted. A prince,
a weaver, a carpenter.
This is the way the living instruct us.
Not with money or power. To that
I become deliberately blind.
Everything happens at least
twice anyway, once in the body
and once in the soul.
I stare at the green bills without seeing,
a self-chosen idiot savant.
In every cell some
happiness lurks, you can feel
it when somebody
hugs you. Go ahead,
you are already everything that’s happened.
You are seven years of the moon’s sucking
and pulling back. What happens now
happens then. Go, and hang out in the bardo,
move along. There are 54 wrathful deities
and 48 peaceful deities
you will have to meet. Try to
feel the channel-wheel
at the heart. And if
you really must, try to take a birth
where you can get some work done.
Go on. There’s only this one.
Dare mighty things
This is the year of daring mighty things.
I’ve just decided.
I don’t make New Year’s resolutions, but I resolved myself several months ago, after Segundo was born, that I am going to lose 50 pounds and drop the weight of two babies and too much laziness that I’ve accumulated over the past three or so years. So I’ve been getting my money’s worth at the YMCA for about five or six weeks now; Zumba, Turbokick, Pilates, MusclePump–if they offer the class, I’m taking it, in addition to the ridiculous circuit workouts that C. designed for me. We go to the gym together every Saturday, where he kicks my butt. I literally feel ill after working out with that machine I’m married to.
I’m not anywhere near my goal yet. In fact, I don’t think I’ve dropped any weight at all yet because I’ve been gaining stupid heavy muscle. But I feel good. I am getting faster and stronger. And I can dance better (or at least I like to tell myself that).
As the good Theodore Roosevelt said:
In the battle of life, it is not the critic who counts; nor the one who points out how the strong person stumbled, or where the doer of a deed could have done better.
The credit belongs to the person who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; who does actually strive to do deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotion, spends oneself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement; and who at worst, if he or she fails, at least fails while daring greatly.
Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those timid spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.
So what about you? What mighty things will you dare this year?
More to love
Have I told you how much I love Mumford & Sons? SO much. For one thing, their music makes me want to write something beautiful, which I haven’t had the time or energy to do much lately. For another, it somehow and for some reason makes me want to be a better person. Really, if I tried to quote their lyrics to demonstrate what I mean, I’d end up posting all the songs on Sigh No More. Just go to YouTube and watch some videos. Trust me.
They quote Shakespeare quite a bit, did you know? And make references to things like The Odyssey and Plato’s allegory of the cave. So it’s icing on the cake to happen upon a book club on their blog! And Mr. Mumford himself cites Steinbeck as his favorite writer! I think I’m in love.
Babies and books things
Baby got borned, two weeks ago today. I call him Segundo, not just because he’s my second son, although he is, but also because I have been listening almost exclusively to Compay Segundo and his buddies in the Buena Vista Social Club (well, that and The Format). I don’t ever get tired of that CD.
So with baby boys on my mind, it’s fitting to write a word or two about Emma Donoghue’s novel Room. It’s written entirely from the perspective of Jack, a five-year-old boy who has been trapped in an 11-by-11-foot room since he was born, along with his mother who was kidnapped and raped by a man he calls Old Nick. Sounds pretty rough, but the whimsy and innocence of Jack’s narration makes it bearable and somehow like a great big adventure. And the tenderness between him and his mother is almost painfully beautiful at times. As Janet Maslin says in her New York Times review, “One of his favorite books is ‘The Runaway Bunny,’ a tale that raises the thought that a mother and child could be separated. That’s still scarier than anything else he can imagine.”
I don’t know if any novel could (or should) be contained entirely within an 11-by-11 room, so I’ll go ahead and spoil it for you: they escape, and the second half of the book is about the equally terrifying adventure of adapting to the outside world. The two halves of the novel read almost like different books, the energy is so disparate. I think I preferred the first half, maybe just because it was so unusual and so finely written. I agree with some reviews I’ve read that Jack’s voice can get a bit tiring or too “cutesy,” but I really didn’t mind it all that much, and I found that when all the tightly wound tension of the first half rushed out in a frenzy, the end lost some of its resonance for me.
It’s quite an engaging read — I think I tore through it in about a day — and chilling because it’s similar to a few recent real-life horror stories. Room won or was short-listed for a number of awards, and it’s certainly worth a looksee.
An intermezzo
Before I jump into the novels I mentioned in my last post, I have two things to mention. Firstly, I have a short nonfiction piece up at Liturgial Credo, where I also contribute my talents, such as they are, as fiction editor. Check it out.
Secondly, I just finished Nabokov’s Pnin, and I don’t get it! Can somebody help me out here? It seems to relate a string of events that happen to dear Professor Pnin, and then he drives off into the sunset. But I’m left wondering where the story was. David Lodge writes in The Guardian that “the stories describe a continuous narrative arc, poignantly tracing Pnin’s quest, which is ultimately frustrated, to find a home, or to make himself ‘at home’ in alien Waindell,” but I didn’t get a very strong sense of quest. (Although now, the word quest draws a strong association in my mind between Pnin and Don Quixote.) Everyone seems to agree that it’s a comedy, but I found it only very mildly so. I’m sure I just didn’t get the jokes.
Lodge continues: “Novel of character, roman à clef, campus novel, epiphanic short story, postmodernist metafiction – Pnin contains elements of all these fictional subgenres, but ultimately it is sui generis, uniquely and quintessentially Nabokovian, having a family resemblance to his other works without being exactly like any of them.” Perhaps this is the cause of my consternation: I can’t quite pin down what this book is supposed to be because it’s so many things at once.
Teenagers are dumb
And I mean that. I was a teenager once, less than a decade ago, and I thought I was awesome. I was bright, witty, well-liked, and I finished as salutatorian of my graduating class.
I was still dumb.
I thought Romeo and Juliet was drivel, for one thing. And I thought the universe was Jessocentric, for another. (As DFW said in his Kenyon College commencement speech: “Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. … Think about it: There is no experience you’ve had that you were not at the absolute center of.”)
But today I was reminded that teenagers are dumb when I read this article in The Rumpus. It’s not a unique phenomenon, teens complaining about the books they have to read for English class, and I’ll concede that most teenagers are not intellectually or emotionally mature enough to appreciate Shakespeare (but God, how passionate I was about my college Shakespeare class; it changed my life). But let’s consider the quote from darling little Olivia Reed: “Current required readings often make students skip the book and go straight to the movie or use Spark Notes to pass the test.” Yes, Olivia, when things in life are too difficult for you, make sure you always take the lazy way out and cheat on the test. That’ll get you far and give you a deep sense of satisfaction.
The article solicits suggestions for modern-day equivalents of current high school reading requirements, contemporary books that would be more engaging and accessible to teens. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all about branching out of the canon and exposing kids to great literature that will make lifelong readers of them; one of the article’s commenters is a teacher whose kids are reading Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and I think that’s amazing. But The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn isn’t accessible? What do they want? Would See Spot Run satisfy them, or would Spark Notes find a new market in children’s literature?
Young Jacob Stroud tries to sound intellectual when he says, “The veil of time often blinds young readers to a book’s meaning.” No, Jacob, being a teenager tends to blind you to what’s actually important in life. Here’s a tip: it may not be you.
The serialized novel is back
And better than ever?
As of Monday, the University of Michigan Press has begun serializing two novels on its facebook page, Marjorie Kowalski Cole’s A Spell On the Water and Becky Thacker’s Faithful Unto Death. The online serializations are free and will likely be available until Labor Day, but you can still buy a print or electronic version.
I think the concept is interesting, and I love to see facebook being used in such a creative fashion, but I certainly don’t want to sit at my computer to read a whole novel.
Onward and upward, though, I suppose. We’ll see how it goes.
