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.

I don’t know why you say goodbye. I say hello.

Oh dear, I’m quite certain you’ve all given me up for dead, but I’m very much alive. It’s just that I’ve been terribly busy gestating and entertaining a two-year-old. You know how it goes.

I’ve not stopped reading, at least. Let me tell you a little of what I’ve been up to during my long radio silence.

• Room by Emma Donoghue
• Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
• The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon
• Stories from the Blue Moon Cafe edited by Sonny Brewer
• Dear American Airlines by Jonathan Miles
• Moving to Higher Ground: How Jazz Can Change Your Life by Wynton Marsalis

Some of these books I enjoyed quite a lot and one or two not so much. I’ll fill you in on the pertinent details in upcoming posts.

And so, since I’ve missed it all, I hope you had a lovely Columbus Day, Halloween, Reformation Day, and All Saints Day. Holla.

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.

Need me some books and Requited Journal

Perhaps it’s the oppressive daily double-digit heat that’s kept me so quiet lately. Or that I just can’t seem to get into anything that I’m reading. I ended up returning Bellow’s Herzog unfinished, and I picked up Hilary Thayer Hamann’s Anthropology of an American Girl and Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke. The former I heartily disrecommend that anyone ever read (it’s boring, for one thing, and too long, for another, and the female protag is flat, self-absorbed, and prefers foisting blame onto her every boyfriend instead of taking responsibility for her own damn life), and the latter, while it started out wonderful enough, started to drag about halfway through. It was sort of The Things They Carried meets Catch-22, but not as poignant or as funny as either one.  I was a little heartbroken because I love Johnson so much, but when I checked out Umberto Eco’s The Island of the Day Before and found myself slogging through yet again (is this a philosophical treatise or a novel?!), I realized it has nothing to do with the books and everything to do with me. It’s 105 degrees. I’m pregnant. Feel free to disregard most everything I say for the next few months.

That said, check out my new tiny piece of fiction over at the always fantastic Requited Journal!

Now I’m headed over to Powell’s Books to spend some gift cards I received for my birthday. There’s a book just waiting for me to fall in love, and I’m going to find it or die trying (it’s that important).

Extreme Couponing

Can we take a break from books and just talk about this disgusting show on TLC called Extreme Couponing? Have we seen this show? I saw an episode for the first time last night, and it made me sick.

Lots of people on the Interwebs seem to have a problem with the obsessive portrayal of couponers (which I didn’t even know was a thing) and others see early signs of hoarding. They do all seem to have a touch of the OCD, what with their insistence on stacking everything neatly in their carts and then their immaculately organized stockpiles (they all seem to be preparing for some apocalypse). Then they all freak out at the register, afraid their hundreds of coupons will overload the computer, as though the items cannot simply be put back on the shelves. Sure, it would be a stockboy’s nightmare, but these people don’t seem to have any regard for other people’s time (spending an hour and a half at the register, then going back for more stuff when their coupons leave them with an overage) or for other people at all, really, since they love to clear the shelves of an entire item, leaving none for anyone else.

But what really bothers me about these extreme couponers is their attitude toward food. Food should not be an issue of the bottom line. Food is not just fuel. Food is not just about money (I say just because due to the upside-down nature of the machine known as US agribusiness, food that’s bad for us is often cheap, while food that’s good for us is pricey). Food should be about nutrition (extreme couponers fill up their baskets with snack-sized bags of Cheetos and packets of Kool-Aid) and identity and pleasure and relationships, even. To quote Michael Pollan, these couponers don’t seem to spend much time “think[ing] very hard about where their food comes from, or what it is doing to the planet, their bodies, and their society.” In an article in The New York Review of Books, he says, “The modern marketplace would have us decide what to buy strictly on the basis of price and self-interest; the food movement implicitly proposes that we enlarge our understanding of both those terms, suggesting that not just ‘good value’ but ethical and political values should inform our buying decisions, and that we’ll get more satisfaction from our eating when they do.”

After watching the show, C., worried about money, suggested we do something similar. I flew off the handle. It’s not that I’m opposed to using coupons (I do use them when I have them, but I don’t get the newspaper or have a printer right now, so my coupon access is limited), and Lord knows I love a good deal. But I didn’t see any produce in the couponers’ carts. I didn’t see anything fresh at all, really. I don’t know when they buy fruits and vegetables and dairy products, but I don’t envision them browsing at their local farmers’ markets. I’d love to pass along to the couponers Marion Nestle’s guide to shopping at supermarkets.

Pollan recently asked New York Times readers for their personal rules for eating, and he posted a list of some of his favorites (he received more than 2,500 responses). One reader said, “Eat foods in inverse proportion to how much its lobby spends to push it,” and another quoted his Italian grandmother as saying, “It’s better to pay the grocer than the doctor.”

I wish I’d never seen the show, but the damage is done. I think I need a grapefruit.

Eat well, my friends.