Writing

A goddess’s eyes, a museum’s treasures, and the fall of civilizations

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The old man laughed indulgently, holding in check a deeper, more explosive delight. “Rome was destroyed, Greece was destroyed, Persia was destroyed, Spain was destroyed. All great countries are destroyed.  Why not yours. How much longer do you think your own country will last? Forever? Keep in mind that the earth itself is destined to be destroyed by the sun in twenty-five million years or so.”  Catch-22, Joseph Heller


I spent the day yesterday in The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.  Part of a photographic-mural, the woman above looks over you as you enter the Mid-Eastern galleries; her almond eyes seem those of a goddess, knowing, far-seeing, beautiful.  And then one wonders, what might she have actually seen in her life. What is her life like?  Is she still alive? Still in her native land?

Afterwards, when I was thinking about the various galleries in the museum that  I had lingered in, I was struck by this: I had visited Persia, Greece, Rome, Mexico, Egypt–high-points of human civilization and, in 2012,  flashpoints of suffering and discontent, violence, confusion and uncertainty.

The poets are helpful here–though not necessarily hopeful–and the photos I took seemed to have their own poetic soundtrack in my mind.  Here is Yeats:

THE SECOND COMING                                                                                              

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere                         
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

And then here’s Shelley on the same tack although not as apocalyptic:

Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away”.

“If the world sees all these pictures, what are they going to say about Iran? I’ll let you know tomorrow.”

“Where did the good old days go? Are they in the story books or just gone from here.”

“A new sorrow has been added to my sorrow. The thought of darkness and this destruction.”

“My love has gone underground. The taste of night is nothing but awareness.”

“God, if you’re there and you hear us, come now. God, we need you now. God, give us an answer.”

The Persians have long been known for their poetry. Lush, emotional, spiritual and clear. The poems to the left were tweets sent during the contested elections in Iran in June 2009.  It is evidence of my theory that poetry–in fact all written expression– is an innate desire, beaten out of children by well-meaning but misinformed teachers. While the immediate world seems to be spinning out of control (see Yeats’ spiral above), these young Iranians find the need to put their thoughts on paper–or onto some kind of device in 140 characters or less.

GREECE — Poor Greece, so beautiful, so lovely, and so fragile to economic decisions that seem far removed from the people themselves.

Headless Statue by  Kyriakos Haralambdis
(translated by Kimon Friar). Hellenic Quarterly, Summer, 2000.

I have heard that your head
has been sent as a sacred skull to Constantinople.
Byzantine emperors manfully
placed you in red and gold.
The star of God’s Holy Wisdom
studies you and covers you.
And you, a woman, in a late hour
open your closed eyelashes.
You look fruitlessly, for we have gone away on a journey,
and you call out to us “come to my guest room.”
But we, artful head, seek your whole body,
in a city that resembles you. If we succeed,
we shall call this bone our own.

Poor city, ten years in bed,
without the lamp stead at our head,
as headless and cold as lead.

I don’t want to be distressed by seeing you, my bird.
I know you are absent, all has been heard.
Your skill in a huge box
embellished with small serpents and small stars
all made of paper, seed of manliness
travelled around the world to be placed
in houses of ill repute and cabarets
in the sky of the city where it reigned.

You who hear me, do not misunderstand me.
Such things serve the natural remembrance of mortals,
others the cleansing of memory.

MEXICO— one murder is always too many. Poor Mexico is  far beyond too many, far beyond human understanding, far beyond humanity.

“And every time they opened, it was night and the moon, while they climbed the great terraced steps, his head hanging down backward now, and up at the top were the bonfires, red columns of perfumed smoke, and suddenly he saw the red stone, shiny with the blood dripping off it, and the spinning arcs cut by the feet of the victim whom they pulled off to throw him rolling down the north steps. With a last hope he shut his lids tightly, moaning to wake up. For a second he thought he had gotten there, because once more he was immobile in the bed, except that his head was hanging down off it, swinging. But he smelled death, and when he opened his eyes he saw the blood-soaked fig­ure of the executioner-priest coming toward him with the stone knife in his hand. He managed to close his eyelids again, although he knew now he was not going to wake up, that he was awake, that the marvelous dream had been the other, absurd as all dreams are-a dream in which he was going through the strange avenues of an astonishing city, with green and red lights that burned without fire or smoke, on an enormous metal insect that whirred away between his legs. In the infinite he of the dream, they had also picked him up off the ground, some­one had approached him also with a knife in his hand, approached him who was lying face up, face up with his eyes closed between the bonfires on the steps.”  from “The Night Face-Up” by Julio Cortazar

ROME–And on a happier note, this from Catallus:

–5–

Let’s you and me live it up, my Lesbia,

and make some love, and let old cranks

go cheap talk their fool heads off.

Maybe suns can set and come back up again,

but once the brief light goes out on us

the night’s one long sleep forever.

First give me a kiss, a thousand kisses,

then a hundred, and then a thousand more,

then another hundred, and another thousand,

and keep kissing and kissing me so many times

we get all mixed up and can’t count anymore,

that way nobody can give us the evil eye

trying to figure how many kisses we’ve got.

I spent the majority of my visit in the Greco-Roman-Estruscan galleries, though I took a guided tour through the Meso-American gallery and the Southwest American gallery.  These dealt with the ancient peoples of the Yucatan peninsula and the southwest corner of what is now the United States.  Current theories claim that these wide reaching people actually traded and influenced one another over the centuries: the Incans, the Mayans, the Hopi, the Pueblo.  Yet they too–the Mayan cities seem so much more advanced than the Athens, Roman, Cairo counterparts–all were subsumed by human violence and  human greed.

It is an impressive museum, The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.  But it left me feeling a bit desperate…a little hopeless…a little sad.  Sad, except for the women in the photographic mural whose eyes are so beguiling. Perhaps the poets are right all along, and it is beauty and love that will carry us through.

Susan Sontag

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I have always been fascinated by Susan Sontag. I envied her seeming crystal-sharp intelligence, her confidence in her opinions, her strength in writing, her omnivorous reading.  While I certainly have not read everything of hers, I have read quite a lot.  Once as a reader for The Franklin Library’s First Editions, I read the galleys of The Volcano Lover, her historical novel about the triangle between Sir William Hamilton, his wife Emma and Lord Nelson. It was the first piece of fiction of hers I had read. Like all of her writing it was intelligent, sharp and incisive.  And it had a truth that can only be found in fiction. Her following novel, In America, was not as satisfying for me–it seemed undone.  Or perhaps overdone, might be a better word, for the brilliant characters and storyline are over-examined and over analyzed as if Henry James were writing the screenplays for MadMan.  The novel is crushed by the intelligence.

However, I have read much of her non-fiction: Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966),  On Photography (1977),  Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors (1978 and 1988) and Regarding the Pain of Others (2003). (The Illness as Metaphor book was revamped in 1988 in order to address the scourge that was AIDS in the 1980’s.)  It is this non-fiction, her essays that make her an major figure of the late 20th-century.  It is in these essays that the true brilliance shines. Hers is a hard intelligence, but a very clear intelligence.  Her Against Interpretation gave readers an argument “against what something means” and for “what something is.” It includes insightful–and new–readings of  Sartre, of Beckett, of Bresson, among others.  Illness as Metaphor moves us from the tuberculosis and consumption that affected so many of the 19th century’s literary characters and creators to the cancer that became the overriding metaphor of the twentieth.  On Photography discusses the relatively new art of photography–only since the mid-19th century– in a way that will change how even the most amateur viewer–myself– views photographs again.  And at the beginning of the second Iraq war, I once gave a section of Regarding the Pain of Others to a class of 18-year olds, and it surprised me how well it worked with theml.

A few years ago, I went to the Brooklyn Art Museum to see a photographic exhibit on Sontag by Annie Liebovitz, perhaps America’s most famous and celebrated portraitist at the time. Liebovitz–who had had a decades long romantic relationship with Sontag–captured Sontag’s final years, among family and friends. Many of them were during her final days, during her final battle with cancer. To this day I don’t know if I am more affected by the words Sontag wrote or the images of her that I saw that day.  Both, suggest an admirable toughness and wit.

What I also don’t know is why today, the NYTimes decided to publish a sampler of Sontag’s work in the Week in Review section of the Sunday paper. There is no anniversary that I know of. It just appeared.  But good, it made for a good read on a Sunday morning, and a good afternoon going through some old books. The excerpts are just that–excerpts–but they show the range, the depth and the honesty of her writing and her mind.  The article is below: enjoy it.

Sontag by Henri Cartier-Bresson

Opinion

A Sontag Sampler

By SUSAN SONTAG
Published: March 31, 2012

Art Is Boring

Schopenhauer ranks boredom with “pain” as one of the twin evils of life. (Pain for have-nots, boredom for haves — it’s a question of affluence.)

People say “it’s boring” — as if that were a final standard of appeal, and no work of art had the right to bore us. But most of the interesting art of our time is boring.

Jasper Johns is boring. Beckett is boring, Robbe-Grillet is boring. Etc. Etc.

Maybe art has to be boring, now. (This doesn’t mean that boring art is necessarily good — obviously.) We should not expect art to entertain or divert anymore. At least, not high art. Boredom is a function of attention. We are learning new modes of attention — say, favoring the ear more than the eye — but so long as we work within the old attention-frame we find X boring … e.g. listening for sense rather than sound (being too message-oriented).

If we become bored, we should ask if we are operating in the right frame of attention. Or — maybe we are operating in one right frame, where we should be operating in two simultaneously, thus halving the load on each (as sense and sound).

•

On Intelligence

I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces “intelligence.”

•

Why I Write

There is no one right way to experience what I’ve written.

I write — and talk — in order to find out what I think.

But that doesn’t mean “I” “really” “think” that. It only means that is my-thought-when-writing (or when- talking). If I’d written another day, or in another conversation, “I” might have “thought” differently.

This is what I meant when I said Thursday evening to that offensive twerp who came up after that panel at MoMA to complain about my attack on [the American playwright Edward] Albee: “I don’t claim my opinions are right,” or “just because I have opinions doesn’t mean I’m right.”

•

Love and Disease

Being in love (l’amour fou) a pathological variant of loving. Being in love = addiction, obsession, exclusion of others, insatiable demand for presence, paralysis of other interests and activities. A disease of love, a fever (therefore exalting). One “falls” in love. But this is one disease which, if one must have it, is better to have often rather than infrequently. It’s less mad to fall in love often (less inaccurate for there are many wonderful people in the world) than only two or three times in one’s life. Or maybe it’s better always to be in love with several people at any given time.

•

On Licorice, Bach, Jews and Penknives

Things I like: fires, Venice, tequila, sunsets, babies, silent films, heights, coarse salt, top hats, large long- haired dogs, ship models, cinnamon, goose down quilts, pocket watches, the smell of newly mown grass, linen, Bach, Louis XIII furniture, sushi, microscopes, large rooms, boots, drinking water, maple sugar candy.

Things I dislike: sleeping in an apartment alone, cold weather, couples, football games, swimming, anchovies, mustaches, cats, umbrellas, being photographed, the taste of licorice, washing my hair (or having it washed), wearing a wristwatch, giving a lecture, cigars, writing letters, taking showers, Robert Frost, German food.

Things I like: ivory, sweaters, architectural drawings, urinating, pizza (the Roman bread), staying in hotels, paper clips, the color blue, leather belts, making lists, wagon-lits, paying bills, caves, watching ice-skating, asking questions, taking taxis, Benin art, green apples, office furniture, Jews, eucalyptus trees, penknives, aphorisms, hands.

Things I dislike: television, baked beans, hirsute men, paperback books, standing, card games, dirty or disorderly apartments, flat pillows, being in the sun, Ezra Pound, freckles, violence in movies, having drops put in my eyes, meatloaf, painted nails, suicide, licking envelopes, ketchup, traversins [“bolsters”], nose drops, Coca-Cola, alcoholics, taking photographs.

This material is excerpted and adapted from the forthcoming book “As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980,” by Susan Sontag, edited by David Rieff.  A version of this was originally published in the NEW YORK TIMES, April 1, 2012.

Letter-writing, letters, Beckett and love

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About five years ago, I traveled to Durban, South Africa.  I flew direct from Washington, D.C. to Johannesburg and then a short flight from Johannesburg to Durban. It is a grueling flight–19 hours in the air and plenty more in airports.  But during the flight, I read volume one of The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1929-1940.  I must admit I was enthralled–and may be the only person to have read the nearly 900-page collection in one sitting. Nevertheless, three years later I am now reading volume two ( The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1941-1956).  Certainly there is a touch of the voyeur in reading another’s letters, and, for me, not a little hero-worship in reading the letters of Beckett as he casually mentions Jack Yeats, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Nora Joyce, etc.  (The first letter in this collection is a postcard that he had sent to Joyce, a pre-printed, government regulated correspondence limited to family news because of the war.  Beckett sent the postcard from Paris to the Joyces in Switzerland, saying that he and Suzanne were all right.  He wrote it on January 12, 1941 and it arrived in Switzerland on the 17th. Joyce never received it, however, having died on the 13th, the day after Beckett wrote it. )

Anyway besides the snoopiness and the adolescent-like hero worship, the letters have me thinking of correspondence in general.  Except for writing thank-you notes –a good habit I learned from my father and my uncle–most of my correspondence now is through e-mail. Even the majority of my manuscript submissions are done electronically with the cover letter included in the submission.  Yet there is something about letter writing I miss.

A love letter, or any kind of letter for that matter, is so much more intriguing to receive–and more fulfilling to write–than a text or an e-mail. During a 10-day trip to Paris, I once wrote fourteen letters back home to the love of my life. I can still see the thin hotel stationery, the blue, white and red airmail envelopes, the soft lobby light in the ragged hotel under which I poured out my soul. Today, those letters probably mean more to me than to the person that received them. They capture a unique moment in my life, an amber-encased slice of who I once was.

In that sense,  I take pleasure  in reading  letters that I have written or received in the past–they transport me to where and who I was at the time they were written.

(Perhaps  the most beautiful love story I have ever read is by an Irish novelist named Niall Williams entitled Four Letters of Love.  It is a wonderful novel that revolves around letter writing–as well as around painting, fishing, the Aran Islands, death, heartbreak and redemptive love.)

What about you? Have you  given up on snail-mail completely? I worry about the impermanence of all our correspondence, of the ephemeral nature of e-mail and texting. True, they say that every stroke of your keyboard can ultimately be retrieved and that nothing in cyberspace really disappears, but are the biographers and historians of the future going to have access to these? Is the estate of a future Samuel Beckett going to allow some academic to sift through the computer files –deleted and saved–of the person whose name is entrusted to them?  I cannot say. But I do know the thrill of opening an envelope, of slipping out a hard-stock card, sheets of creamy stationery, or ripped pages of loose-leaf.  Am I simply missing some golden-hazed memory or have we truly lost something special?

E-mail me what you think.  Hah!

Book Review: Remainder by Tom McCarthy and You and Three Others are Approaching a Lake by Anna Moschovakis

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My intention was to talk about one book a week, and originally I wanted that to happen on a Friday. But then, I realized that a large bulk of my outside reading–my non-class reading–is finished up over the weekend, so a posting on Monday makes much better sense. And since, this is the first venture out with a post about books, I figured I would start out with two.  Remainder by Tom McCarthy and You and Three Others are Approaching a Lake by Anna Moschovakis.

Tom McCarthy’s novel about a post-coma, post-trauma survivor who receives a “settlement” for eight-and-half million pounds is at times aggravating and at other times marvelous. The narrator has lost much of his memory after being hit by an untold object that placed him hospital and in a coma for an extended period. When he returns to “normal” life, he is given an enormous payout by the responsible parties. His only vivid memory, however, is one that involves an apartment house with a crack in the bathroom wall, a woman cooking liver in the flat below him, another tenant  playing piano in the room above, and a man working on his motorcycle in the courtyard. With an almost unlimited amount of money, he arranges to “re-enact” the entire memory, buying several buildings, re-doing them to the specifications that he remembers, and hiring actors around the clock to play the tenants that haunt his memory. From here, he begins to re-create other more recent occurrences.  McCarthy’s–and the narrator’s–attention to detail is precise and minute, a true feat of writing and observation, but Nicholas Baker did it much better in his earlier works.  The payoff for me, however, comes at the end of the novel. Early on, when the narrator first learns of his windfall, he is set in a circuitous route between a telephone booth and his home. He travels the distance back and forth three or four times within a short period, stymied by his forgetfulness and his demand for exactitude.  I enjoyed this scene; it verged on the slapstick; and I even related it to other people. At the end of the novel, the same type of scene is played out, though this time with more dire and impending consequences.  It brought the novel together. Remainder certainly contained moments of brilliance yet they were couched in much larger moments of cloudiness and frustration.

Anna Moschovakis’, award-winning book of poetry, You and Three Others are Approaching a Lake, is another work that has me of two minds.  The topics, the observations, the connections, all are intriguing, mind-jarring, fresh. Yet the poetry itself leaves me wanting. The book contains four long poems, plus a prologue and an epilogue.  They touch upon the contemporary and allude to the past. They are geographical and internal. They play with typography and they play with presumptions. They deal with our technological world and the examine our anthropological past.  Indeed, having read the collection at one sitting, my first reaction was to read it again, to try to wrap my head around the numerous ideas and permutations.

In the poem “The Human Machine” there is an extended conversation between “annabot” and “the human machine” which questions what we know about and how we love, questions the substance of spirit, dissects the more mechanical part of our being. In a letter to the Human Machine, Annabot writes:

Dear Human Machine,

Resolve, reason, ration, rational, rationale, rationalize

ratiocination, rationing, ratify, rather, rate,

ratios, ratio, rat

According to Peter Singer, a rat who is loved by a person

is more worthy of being pulled from a fire

than a person who is unloved by persons

This is taking into account Singer’s technical definition

of “person”

As I said, this is truly a marvelous book for thinking, for exploring, for discovering new ways of seeing the world.  It is a book that I have–and will again–return to.  However, I am not sure of the poetry of the pieces. I found them wanting.

“Modern Love”

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The word “modern” is such a subjective term.  The 19th century poet, George Meredith, wrote a poetic sequence of 50 poems and entitled it Modern Love. The poems, each having 16 lines in 4 rhymed quatrains,  describe the relationship between a man and his wife.  It is “modern” for him because it is describing his current life in the 1860s.  Yet, it is extraordinarily modern to us, in that it is timeless.  It doesn’t seem filtered by the past, but emotionally contemporary. The distant couple, the repressed emotions, the sleepless night, these all seem to be taken from the late-20th-century, early -21st. I swear I have seen countless movies where a modern woman and modern man lie on their backs, thinking, wishing, wondering–the very emotions that Meredith attaches to his “modern lovers.”  All it needs is a plaintive soundtrack by  Bonnie “Prince” Billy.

Here is the first poem in the sequence.  Notice the dread, the sadness, the angst; it seems all so very real, very contemporary.

By this he knew she wept with waking eyes:
That, at his hand’s light quiver by her head,
The strange low sobs that shook their common bed                                             
Were called into her with a sharp surprise,
And strangely mute, like little gasping snakes,
Dreadfully venomous to him. She lay
Stone-still, and the long darkness flowed away
With muffled pulses. Then, as midnight makes
Her giant heart of Memory and Tears
Drink the pale drug of silence, and so beat
Sleep’s heavy measure, they from head to feet
Were moveless, looking through their dead black years,
By vain regret scrawled over the blank wall.
Like sculptured effigies they might be seen
Upon their marriage-tomb, the sword between;
Each wishing for the sword that severs all.
——-
(For those who like the “biographical” strategy, check out George Meredith’s life. It makes the poem all the more poignant.)

Voice

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I am fairly new to this blogging thing, but I am not new to writing.  However, I am finding it very difficult to find my “Voice” here on these pages. Reading other journals and blogs, I find that the writers seem so confidant, so knowledgeable, so sure of what is important. And I am not. My writing–particularly my fiction–is informed by uncertainty. In the simple “boy meets girl” scenario, for instance, my characters are left hanging. That’s about it…”boy meets girl.”  Rarely does he get her, and if he never gets her, then he certainly can’t lose her.  It is perhaps my version of a Beckettian void (and probably more suitable to a shrink than to a blog.) So where does this void fit in with a regular blog?

Are bloggers just pretending that they know? Or do most of them feel that they are expert in some one thing or another? Is the internet a means for validation of their opinions, of the worth of their personal world view?  I don’t know.  It is difficult for me. For example,  I loved the movie The Beginners, but I know as many people who found it too slow and pointless. Why should I then write about its worth? To prove to myself that my judgement is correct? To initiate a conversation? I don’t know.  I need help here.

I guess, ultimately, my question is “What is the purpose of an individual’s blog?”–mine in particular. I have found that it is good for my thinking, for my productivity, for my thoughtfulness (not the same as “my thinking”). But wouldn’t a private journal do the same? The difference, I have found, between the two–the blog and the journal–is that I am more careful with the blog.  Knowing it is going “out there,” I am more careful with what I write, more careful in its correctness, more conscious of the language.  And I guess that is a good thing.  At least for my writing.   But again, why do it?

Can anyone help?  Are there people out there who can tell me?  Would love to hear your response to my questions.

Darwin’s Barnacles

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This is a page from Darwin’s journals on which he illustrated some of the barnacles he was working on. Before coming out with his Origin of the Species, Darwin had spent the previous eight years studying barnacles, publishing two monographs on the subject in that period.

In the actual drawings, the colors pop with much more brilliance and clarity, each barnacle delicately and exquisitely drawn.  The petticoat-like, pastel-colored illustrations are so different from the connotations that the word “barnacle” brought to my mind.  I had always associated the word, “barnacle” with roughness, coarseness, ugliness, but apparently I was mistaken, for these drawings are nothing but beautiful.  I saw them at an exhibit on Darwin at the American Philosophical Society Museum in Philadelphia.  The exhibit  was entitled “Dialogs with Darwin” and it included many of Darwin’s journals, scientific specimens, artifacts, personal effects and taxidermy.  Around the ceiling of the room was stenciled the words of a letter he wrote that began “There is a grandeur in this view of life … .”

The museum requested poetry to accompany the show, poetry inspired by one or more items in the show, poems that started a “dialog” with the items displayed and what they evoked.  I was drawn to the barnacles, to his life, to the death of his daughter, and to his discovery of emotion in animals.  The poem appears below:

There is grandeur in this view of life

There is grandeur in this view of life
where Victorian petticoats parachute along an ivory sheet,
barnacles floating on a women’s fashion page,
with precious pleats and twinkling color.

There is grandeur in this view of life
where elephants weep and moan and scream,
for the death of daughters, the loss of certainty,
where joy stretches true across a small chimp’s face.

There is grandeur in this view of life
where a captain’s gentleman unpacks
his crated books, his amateur’s tools
and sails to the bottom of a burgeoning world
beneath those stars from where these tracks begin.

Reading–or juggling–multiple books

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As a teacher and a writer, my reading schedule gets a little jammed at times. I certainly have enough to read for my classes (at the moment, Ellison’s Invisible Man and Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451), but I have my other reading as well. For instance, at home I have three separate books that I am dealing with.  Borges’  Collected Fictions next to my bed,  Tom McCarthy’s Remainders traveling back and forth with me on the train, and The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach in the living room.

The nice thing about Borges is that so many of the fictions are short–which is why they sit next to my bed. Because, although they are short, they are dense, and I usually get through one or two at the most before my eyelids start falling.

As I said, the train ride to and from work is when I am reading the McCarthy book, and reading certainly makes the commute go quickly. If the book is good enough, there is a real danger of missing one’s stop. And so far, Remainders is very good. I have an hour commute each way, so these “commuter” books usually are finished within a few days.

And finally, the book that is sitting in the living room, The Art of Fielding.  It is there for after dinner, before bed, before or after grading essays, marking tests, preparing classes.  It is this book–the living room book–that usually takes the longest to complete.  But I’ve learned it’s not a race, and more often than not the quickness of a read is not necessarily an indicator of the quality of the read.

Anyway, my question to you writers out there.  When you are writing, do you deliberately stay away from reading?  Do you read only for “research,” whatever that might entail?  Or do you find that you can continue your usual reading patterns without any interruptions to your writing?

Big Debut

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I spent much too long Saturday night–and far into Sunday morning–reading different writers’ blogs from the journals I was reading (Annalemma, The Coffin Factory, Pank, Cabinet des Fees etc.) I figure it’s about time I gave this blogging thing a try. Anyway, I am diving in completely unprepared. But, I have been on a bit of a roll lately–two poems, one short story published and another story finished and sent out–so I guess the time is right for me to begin this undertaking. As with all things, I appreciate any comments, any suggestions, any ideas. Cheers.