American Poets in the 21st Century
Eds: Claudia Rankine and Lisa Sewell
Wesleyan Press (2007)
Check out my review of this collection of contemporary poets and writings about them. Online at Artvoice.com.
Jazz & Twelve O’Clock Tales
Wanda Coleman (Black Sparrow Press, 200 
Check out my review at the Brooklyn Rail.
Eat, Pray, Love
Elizabeth Gilbert
(Penguin, 2006)
I have an inner cynic that I’ve cultivated over the years. I don’t do “chick flicks,” romantic comedies, or Renee Zellwiger. Eat, Pray, Love sort of gave me that vibe, so I wasn’t too interested. But a friend gave it to me, along with glowing reviews of it, when I was visiting for a weekend. And I’d finished the book I’d brought. And I needed something light. And so I picked it up.
And then I couldn’t put it down. The good thing about my inner cynic is that it’s humble. It admits to being wrong when it is. This was a really wonderful–and fulfilling–read. It’s a memoir in which Gilbert narrates the experience of a deep depression (divorce, failed love, the aftermath) and then her “year off” afterwards, with travel and soul-searching on the agenda.
She begins her trip in Italy, and writes a wonderful, exuberant section in which she basically eats her way through the country, while learning the joys of the Italian language on her tongue. Having spent a year in Italy myself, and still holding a good dose of nostalgia for my time there, I absolutely loved this section. It was celebratory. It was revelatory. It made me call to mind my own sense of discovery and wonder at being there when I was 21 years old. She has gelato for breakfast and lunch and dinner and gains 30 pounds, and somehow it seems an utterly wonderful thing to give this to yourself: this indulgence in pleasure; this enjoyment of life without guilt or obligation. So much of life, realistically, is about mediating that desire for pleasure. I loved reading about someone who was just giving that to herself, even if only for four months. It also seemed perhaps like a necessary part of her healing process.
The next portion of the trip takes her to an ashram in India, where she goes to the opposite extreme: She strips herself of worldy pleasures and attempts to explore her mind through serious meditation for four months. There was a lot of talk of God/divine, so how much each reader will relate will obviously vary a great deal. But this chapter, too, had much wisdom into the nature of searching. Because she kept her journey very personal, her revelations are insightful, not dogmatic. Along the way she meets many friends and characters, and readers are given a glimpse at how different personalities try to find meaning in life.
And finally, she ends up in Bali, looking for balance. Attempting to integrate pleasure with spiritual discipline, she carves out a life for herself that has friendship, exploration, and ultimately, love. She befriends a medicine man who is good at, in broken Balinese English, teaching her to look at things more simply.
It’s hard to write about the book in an entirely literary way. The writing is good, and sucks the reader into an intimacy with the author. But it is ultimately a personal book, and its resonance, for me, was on a personal rather than literary level. Of course, you have to acknowledge that it’s an immense luxury to take a year off to travel, one that not everyone can afford (she pays for it through an advance for the book itself). But I think the methods she uses to question what she’s looking for in life are really useful. I found myself–at least temporarily–feeling better while reading it, remembering to think about my life more with context in mind.
After releasing their 100 notable books of 2007 recently, the New York Times recently pared that list down to their top ten books of the year.
They all seem like great books, but Denis Johnson’s National Book Award Winning novel Tree of Smoke seems to be the must-read book of the year. Every critic I know called it a masterpiece. Christmas present anyone?
Just in time for Christmas, the The New York Times released their 100 notable books of 2007. It includes many of the usual suspects, Don DeLillo, Philip Roth and Michael Chabon, but it also makes many unexpected but great selections.
For example, the Times had the wherewithal to choose Adriane Tomine’s Shortcomings, an impressive graphic novel previously reviewed by myself on this blog. Who knew the it could be so progressive with its choices?
Also, I was shocked to learn that I had actually read 3 of the notable books– Shortcomings, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and Imperial Life in The Emerald City. But there are 97 other books I still haven’t read yet. So I say to the 4 or 5 friends and relatives who read my blog, I’ll take any of those as a present for Christmas and be happy.
Textual Flavors– i.e. Kate and I– would like to wish everyone a Happy Thankgiving.
Best Thanksgiving book ever written: A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving of course.
Norman Mailer, maybe the most famous American writer of the past 50 years, died on Saturday. He was 84.
During his storied career, Mailer won two Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, helped found the Village Voice and along with Truman Capote was responsible for making the nonfiction novel into an art form. Not too shabby…
Haven’t read Moby Dick? Never managed to get through On the Road because you thought the writing kind of sucked? Never read anything by Tolstoy because reading a 1,000 page book just seemed to daunting? Well, you’re not alone. Recently Slate.com surveyed several contemporary authors about which of the “great” books they haven’t read. So if you never managed to read Ulysses, don’t fret. You’re in good company.
Great novel that I’ve never read but really should: To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. I’ve never made it past page 5. It’s sad really considering how much I loved Mrs. Dalloway. (I believe my blog partner in crime, Kate, said she would include any of the great Russian novels, like Crime & Punishment & Anna Karenina, on her list.)
Now I throw the question out to any of you who may read this: what great books haven’t you read?
The Dharma Bums
Jack Kerouac
About halfway through The Dharma Bums, Jack Kerouac’s charismatic and meandering 1958 adventure novel, Ray Smith, Japhy Ryder and Henry Morley sit around a fire on top of Matterhorn Peak. As they discuss their day climbing the mountain, Ryder, based on the poet Gary Snyder, begins to speak excitedly about Walt Whitman,
“I’ve been reading Whitman, know what he says, Cheer up salves, and horrify foreign despots, he means that’s the attitude for the bard, the Zen Lunacy bards or old desert paths, see the whole thing is a world full of rucksack wanderers, Dharma Bums refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming, all that crap they didn’t really want anyway such as refrigerators, TV sets, cars, at least new fancy cars, certain hair oils and deodorants and general junk you finally always see a week later in the garbage anyway, all of them imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume. I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of ‘em Zen Lunatics who go about writing poems that happen to appear in their heads for no reason and also by being kind and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures.”
The speech is a wonder. Yes, it rambles; but it’s also passionate and thoughtful, and may be the best example of why so many love Kerouac and the Beats. Like many young people, Kerouac saw the so called “real world” and it didn’t make sense him. What he saw was a spiritually empty world. A culture that valued “all that crap they didn’t really want anyway” but didn’t value anything of importance like love. He saw most people were “imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume” for stuff “you finally always see a week later in the garbage anyway.” What Kerouac valued above all else was freedom, and the world of his parents was slavery. And through his new found faith in Zen Buddhism infused with some regular guilt-laden Catholicism, Kerouac gives us glimpse of freedom that many of us never see. It is this spirit that permeates throughout The Dharma Bums and makes it an important book.
The novel, however, is not without its problems. Plot was unimportant for Kerouac, and it shows in The Dharma Bums, as it essentially recycles the plot of On the Road, his most famous novel. Like On the Road, the main character Ray Smith, a thinly veiled cover for Kerouac, travels the country back and forth through the country in search of life and adventure. Early on he meets Japhy Ryder, the great Zen Buddhist poet, and Smith idolizes him throughout Dharma Bums, just like Kerouac worships Dean Moriarity in On the Road. The pair drink, climb mountains, enjoy a Buddhist orgy called “Yab-Yum” and generally have a great time. This wouldn’t have been a problem except that passages become predictable in their unpredictability. (You mean the characters drank a whole lot of booze, rambled about life and tried to hit on girls all in the same night? I thought I read this book already?)
And like the On the Road, there are long, sprawling passages about nature, life, hitchhiking and women, which never fly by so quickly that the reader barely takes a breath; they are beautifully written and whisk you into unknown worlds and scenes as we get a taste of life through the prism of Beat-style Zen Buddhism. But these passages often go on too long, leaving me bored at times and wishing that Kerouac had just listened to a real editor.
And lastly— and this may just reflect how square I’ve become to the Beats message— but at times while reading The Dharma Bums, a thought would occur me: To Kerouac freedom and irresponsibility are the same thing. (There were times I wanted to yell “get a job, you hippie.”) It seems to me a real spiritualist believes quite the opposite. The poet understands that freedom doesn’t come in adventure and drinking but comes with seeing the beauty in the mundane and everyday. There is no doubt Rilke understood this as he once said “If your everyday life seems poor, don’t blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches.” And there are times Kerouac seems to understand this too. But most of the time Kerouac’s version of freedom just seems like a child’s fantasy, the wishful hopes of a lost soul.
Checkout this interview Kerouac gave to Steven Allen in 1958:
As much as I enjoyed the Harry Potter series, I didn’t want to get involved in the announcement that famed Harry Potter wizard Dumbledore is gay because the whole thing seemed much ado about nothing. (He’s not real, people!)But of course now it’s a political issue and the Christian right has stepped in:
“Roberta Combs, president of the 2.5 million strong Christian Coalition of America, said she was disappointed that Rowling chose to label Albus Dumbledore, the headmaster of fictional Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, as gay.
‘It’s not a good example for our children, who really like the books and the movies. I think it encourages homosexuality,’ said Combs, who has called for a ban on the seven-book series.
‘I would never allow my own children or grandchildren to read the books or watch the movies, and other parents should do so too,’ she added, according to the U.K.-based Daily Mail newspaper.”
Just like most Christian thoughts on homosexuality, these comments are just intolerant, stupid and unnecessary. Do they really think a children’s book will do that much damage? I’d argue that the Bible has been far more harmful to the world– from the Crusades to the justification of slavery– than Harry Potter ever will be.
