Thursday, October 24, 2002

The seasons are changing... trees start to turn golden to match the dried grassy hills. Dark dark mornings as we try to stay in bed just a few more minutes. Kids trying out their halloween costumes ahead of time, prepping themselves for the candy marathon, the best-day-of-the-year-to-be-a-kid. Red-ringed blackbirds are grouping, prepping themselves for their migration as they dip and swoop over the fields. Large Vs of geese stretch their wings and hone their formation procedures as they flap noisily over the house.

The world series is tied. I remember watching the series every year with mom - it didn't matter what teams were playing. We always rooted for the underdog. This year, all the teams in the playoffs were underdogs, and so when it turned out that my own hometown underdog was going to play, I got interested! Go GIANTS!
Leah Brooks at 4:02 PM

Wednesday, October 16, 2002

From Barb

Here's another thought: the novelist Margaret Atwood just published a nonfiction book called "Negotiating with the Dead"--it's based on a series of lectures she gave on the subject of writing. Well, eventually she turned her thoughts to the reader, too. She said:
"Picture, therefore, a triangle, but not a complete triangle: something more like an upside-down V. The writer and the reader are at the two lateral corners, but there's no line joining them. Between them...is a third point, which is the written word, or the text, or the book, or the poem, or the letter, or whatever you would like to call it. This third point is the only point of contact between the othe two.

..."The writer communicates with the page. The reader also...Pay no attention to the facsimiles of the writer that appear on talkshows, in newspaper interviews and the like. They ought not to have anything to do with what goes on between you....an invisible hand has previously left some marks for you to decipher...the reader is, among other things, a sort of spy. A spy, a trespasser, someone in the habit of reader other people's letters and diaries....the reader does not hear--he overhears.

"...We all know that a book is not really a person. It isn't a human being. But if you are a lover of books as books--as objects, that is-- and ignore the human element in them -- that is, their voices -- you will be committing an error of the soul..."

Finally she writes:

"...books must travel from reader to reader in order to stay alive....the little book is the object of consumption in a communion meal -- the food that may be devoured but never destroyed, the feast that renews itself as well as the feast-guests' link with the spiritual. The angel [another way Atwood describes books] must not only be grappled with, it must be assimilated by the reader, so that it becomes a part of him or her."



























Leah Brooks at 11:13 AM

This is from Barb:

It is interesting that so many of us have selected books from our childhood or books that touched us emotionally. It seems almost parental and protective-to save not only stories as if they were fragile beings but also our most cherished memories. Because you could expand this discussion from "what books would you save" to "what movies would you save?" "What song would you save?" And finally, what memory would you save?

There was a movie out only a year or so ago from Japan that posited the idea that after death, you could choose one memory from your life and stay within it for eternity. I wish I could remember the name of this movie. But the idea of staying within one memory is too limiting. I prefer staying within one book. That is something that has enough texture to hold the restless human spirit.

The books I would choose all seem to come from times of awakening and transition. I'd pick "Raise High the Roofbeams, Carpenter!" by J.D. Salinger because it showed me how writing can be as intimate and real as a human voice sitting next to you. I'd choose Doris Lessing's Stories (about South African post World War II) or The Four-Gated City because I read them right after meeting Leah and it spoke to our questions of being female and political and adventurous in the 80s.

Or how about from high school-another time of great awakening: I'd pick Tom Stoppards' play "Travesties" because after seeing it with my class (in repertory with "The Importance of Being Earnest') I was drunk on the beauty of words. Or my discovery in junior high school that political campaigns made amazing narratives after reading Theodore H. White's "The Making of the President, 1960." Or those early feminist classics that changed my life: "Sisterhood is Powerful" or "Gyn/Ecology" or Kate Millet's "Sexual Politics" or Andrea Dworkin's "Woman Hating." For a long time I divided the world into people who had those books on their shelves and people who didn't.

Finally, there are short stories I've read that are like the perfect memory-short moments that linger deeply, like an evening with your best friend who lives far away, in which the meal is tasty, the weather inviting, the living room cozy, and the conversation and laughter lasts for hours. Short stories are like that: they are the life equivalent of a perfect evening rather than a lengthy vacation or journey. I'd have to do more research to put together the definitive list, but it would include "Spyglass" from "Mama Makes Up Her Mind" by Bailey White, a story called "Getting the Facts of Life" by Paulette Childress White from Memories of Kin, essays on American politics by Gore Vidal, short stories by Carson McCullers and even Truman Capote. I'd have to be a literary jukebox-one from each, short and sweet like a chrome tabletop jukebox in a highway diner.

Leah Brooks at 10:58 AM

Becoming a book

I sent this essay out to friends and have been musing about books that I could become. There a variety of factors to consider while deciding about this - my first instinct is protective: which book would I least like to become extinct, which one saved me and now I must save it. The next consideration is more personal: which book could I imagine BECOMING, which is most like me, of my essence, my flavor.

I'm thinking of

Always Coming Home by Ursula K. Le Guin.

Blue Highways by William Least Heat Moon.

The Diaries of Anais Nin.

The Secret Garden by Frances Burnett.

I've gotten some great email on the subject. I am going to bring the essay to my bookclub and see if we can make a good reading list based on our inspirations. We are meeting on Friday to discuss the fabulous book Bel Canto by Anne Patchett.

Here is one from Rick Mead:

King John was not a good man,
He had his little ways.
And sometimes no one spoke to him
For days and days and days!
And when he went out walking
The men he saw in town
Gave him a supercilious stare,
Or passed with noses in the air,
And bad King John stood dumbly there -
Blushing beneath his crown...

King John was not a good man,
And no good friends had he.
He stayed in every afternoon -
But no one came to tea!

Etc. I love this for its own sake, and because it was an all-time favorite of my mother. Funny... so many books have unique associations I would rather not (and would rather the rest of the world would not have to) part with. Favorite children's book: The Phantom Tollbooth. Greatest mock-romance novel: Cold Comfort Farm. Book which convinced me my partner can read me: The Botany of Desire. Favorite poem about death: "With you, a part of me has passed away" (Santana). Favorite "Thank God I read-it-once-and-loved-it-but-don't-ever-make-me-do-it-again!" book - ooooh, hard to tell - Swann's Way, Anna Karenina, or The Brothers Karamzov. Book that told me I am forever from the West and need never think of myself as an East Coast guy: My Antonia.

Perhaps you can help me choose? But my favorite would NOT be Farenheit 451!

And then from Nance Koike:
I really enjoyed this too! It is something that you or I could easily have dreamed up...... The book that keeps flashing in my mind is actually a science fiction book called Last and First Men by Olaf Stapleton. I think it was the first time my eyes were opened to the idea that humans were innately prone to self destruction and yet capable of rejuvenation. The story begins now and continues eons into the future. This was not some hokey science fiction book either, it was a masterly written piece by one of the early science fiction pros.

If I could sneak in a second choice, it would be Zorba the Greek. I completely identified with Zorba, and to this day still ask myself "Would Zorba do this or think this way?"!!
Leah Brooks at 8:52 AM