Sleep

Utterly exhausted, I resolved to get a good night’s sleep yesterday.  I got in bed shortly before 11:00 p.m.

I awoke at 3:30 a.m. when the cat decided to roost in my hair — claws out.

I awoke at 4:30 a.m. when C got home from work.

I awoke at 5:00 a.m. when the cat upset a glass of water on the nightstand, drenching me and the bedsheets.  I got up for a towel, which started the dogs barking.

I awoke at 6:30 a.m. when C came to bed.

I awoke, finally, at 7:00 a.m. when my alarm went off.

Hello Wednesday.  I hate you.

À la recherche du temps perdu

Score.  I found a two-volume set of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time for only $15.  I’d only previously read Swann’s Way, so after a brief plot refresher, I’ve plunged headfirst into Within a Budding Grove.

I know, I know: you’re wicked jealous.

And on the theme of time, I shall leave you with this quote from David Ulin’s recent article in the LA Times about the lost art of reading:

…without time we lose a sense of narrative, that most essential connection to who we are. We live in time; we understand ourselves in relation to it, but in our culture, time collapses into an ever-present now. How do we pause when we must know everything instantly? How do we ruminate when we are constantly expected to respond? How do we immerse in something (an idea, an emotion, a decision) when we are no longer willing to give ourselves the space to reflect?

Bad wives and bitches

I’m rereading bits of Rachel Zucker’s The Bad Wife Handbook and a collection of essays called The Bitch in the House, edited by Cathi Hanauer.  Both of these books have new resonance for me now that motherhood is imminent.

For example, this part of a long sequence poem called “Squirrel in a Palm Tree”:

I am equally and at once estranged from the person I knew as I and from the mossy being made so carefully

the child becomes a wedge between actions and self like a cyclone of gauze wraps himself around my mothering / and makes a hollow form

shape: human

cocoon around a maelstrom

Or this one, called “Autography 8,” which strikes me to the core in a quiet, chilling way:

What the mother will not
[myriad] say.  Many

to secret.  This is not just

about being a woman.  No one
believes mothers are, anyway.

They want to know how many
her love is

and want more.

Silence keeps them
safe so she

gives it
away: mute.

Mute, mute, muter (her
mouth’s a busted clasp).

As Louisa Thomas says in her very good review of The Bad Wife Handbook, “This is classic Zucker: pessimistic, but ultimately affirming.”

At the end of “Autography 17,” she remarks, “A reader, anonymous, suggested my poems would be better / if the marriage/motherhood stuff wasn’t so literal. / Life too, I’d say.”

The Bitch in the House can be much less affirming, though its twenty-six authors cover the gamut of emotion from bitterness to joy.  There’s also a certain comfort in knowing that one’s struggles, doubts, fears, desires, experiences, victories are shared.  We are not alone.

“Dear Chicken” by Gabriel Gudding

This is one of those poems that I don’t “get,” but it delights me, so I share it with you.  It’s published in the current issue of the Carolina Quarterly Review.

[Edit: I just read a great quote on Gudding's blog that speaks quite well to this poem: "The purpose isn’t to be strange for the sake of strangeness. The point is to slow down the perception of the reader, so that the reader is not experiencing the poem automatically. Once our perceptual habits become automatic, we’ve dampened our innate capacity for wonder. So, one enstranges language not to put on a gratuitous display, but to allow again for wonder, to make, as Shklovsky says, 'the stone stony again.'"]

Dear Chicken,

I’m sorry the farmboy punts you. Our housecat is a racist and considers you a brand of Arabian sparrow. Most butterflies are just hinged shabby paper. I don’t get your feet: you are such this dressed up lizard. What if I were to plug the tail of a cow into its rectum? Would its hooves frizzle and short-circuit? Is the pumpkin a Catholic or a Lutheran? The evangelist exploded on my mother. There was missionary-slurry all over her.

Yesterday I inserted a frozen caterpillar into my urethra. It thawed and crawled out. I am punching the bunny in the head. I am not going to put the bunny in my mouth. Won’t fit. Even a small bunny won’t fit in my mouth. You are my chicken. I will send you some nail polish, you can paint your beak with it. That way you can be a pretty chicken.

Sincerely,

Gabriel Gudding

Newser

I was hopping about the Interscapes this morning.  Bookforum had a link to a moderately entertaining Newser article.  As I’d never been to Newser before, I perused the site after I was finished with the article, and I was a bit aghast to see their slogan: “Read less.  Know more.”  Whaaaa?

I understand the gist of their message.  Newser is much like The Daily Beast, a site I frequent, in that it compiles and distills the top stories of the day, so the reader doesn’t have to do all that silly, arduous work of research and reading and forming one’s own opinions.  (Though I much prefer The Beast for layout, site design, ease of use, and content.)  But come on — we have enough of a crisis in literacy and readership these days without adding to the problem with this sort of drivel.

Fact: one cannot know more by reading less.

Breakfast

There’s a comma splice on the back of my Post Shredded Wheat, and it bothers me every morning.  It says, “Life is complicated, your cereal shouldn’t have to be.”  Would it have been so hard to use a period or — gasp — a semicolon?  What a bunch of chumps.

On coffee

I miss coffee.  I was drinking quite a bit there before I gave it up.  Always black.  Always scalding.  Never sweetened, diluted, or lukewarm.  Perfection.

I used to drink two black, viscous cups each morning when I arrived at work, and generally another in the afternoon.  I can still have a bit, if I want, half a cup maybe, but if I’m going to do a thing, I want to do it right.  Besides, I already drink a cup of jasmine tea (sweetened with just a touch of demerara cane sugar) each morning, and it has a bit of caffeine.  I could drink decaf, but there’s something about it that keeps me from really enjoying myself.  It’s because I know I’m drinking decaf.  The whole thing is ruined.

What I wouldn’t give for a slice of cheesecake (the dense, Old World style cheesecake, original, no syrupy fruit toppings) with a cup of hot black coffee to wash down each bite.

Or a demitasse of thick, cloying café cubano.

Balzac said coffee roasts your insides.  Bring it on, coffee.  Bring it on.

Unai Elorriaga’s Plants Don’t Drink Coffee

Elorriaga’s slim little book Plants Don’t Drink Coffee is very cute.  Almost too cute, if you know what I mean.  I loved reading along with our precocious narrator, Tomas, and the shenanigans of his goofy Uncle Simon trying to paint a rugby field on a golf course under cover of night.

Tomas has an adorable way of documenting and cataloging his world for us.  The book begins: “Plants don’t drink coffee.  They don’t like coffee, and neither do flowers or trees.  Birds don’t like it either.”  In another place he tells us, “It is summer now, and in summer we go out at nighttime too.  We go out for a walk come nighttime. … And we go for a walk all the way to the school or the soccer fields, and all the streetlights are lit and there’s no one around, and it smells like grass in some places, and in others it smells like soup.”  And yet later: “It’s very hot in Africa.  Dad told me.  And you can see it in movies.  In movies in Russia you see cold and in movies in Africa you see heat.  But sometimes it rains in Africa and the lions get wet, and the turtles as well, but turtles don’t care, because they are just as happy in the water or in the desert or on a roof.  Turtles sometimes are in the kitchen in some houses.  But only in a few.  Mostly they are in Africa.  And places like that.”

Cute, right?  But it gets really, really old.  A few other family members get POV chapters, which breaks up the monotony of Tomas’ narration, but even those sections are written quite simply and filled with repetition.  I’m aware that Elorriaga wrote this way on purpose, but it absolutely couldn’t have been a bit longer.  It’s 200 pages, but it’s small — smaller than the palm of my hand with my fingers outspread.

The last few chapters are labeled with the different characters’ names and the words “Last couplet,” as though each person’s story had been a poem.  This was one of the most intriguing aspects of the book for me, which is a shame because it was clearly not the story itself.  Tomas’ father Erroman has been in the hospital throughout the novel, and his illness comes to the forefront of the story toward the end, but even then the pathos did not build sufficiently to bring the story all the way home.  As Tim O’Brien says in his article “Telling Tales” in The Atlantic, “Another element of a well-imagined story, in my view, is a sense of gravitas or thematic weight.  Inventing a nifty, extraordinary set of behaviors for our characters is not enough.  A fiction writer is also challenged to find import in those behaviors.  Cleverness, in the end, is a sorry (though common) substitute for thematic weight.”

Gardner’s The Art of Fiction

I’m not sure how I made it through an entire graduate program in creative writing without having read John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction, but I did, so I’m remedying that now.

An honest opinion on race

Desire Grover posted this really well-done editorial video on the Gates debacle.  I like what she has to say.

For me, the issue is not as much about race — although it has overwhelmingly become so, thanks to the ranting of Dr. Gates — as it is about the constant negative portrayal of law enforcement in the media.  Sure, I’m biased, but it makes me mad that everyone complains about cops until they have an emergency and then they are only to happy to call 911 and ask for help.