Juvenile Nonfiction

60. Indignation

jnonfiction — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 19:43:03 +0000

I’ve not read any of Roth’s classic works: the Zuckerman books, American Pastoral. I’ve only read Everyman, The plot against America, and now this, and I’d say the title and its concern encapsulates my feelings about Roth and his writing: he is a deeply angry man, incredulous at much he sees around him. He looks back in anger. Indignation follows the tragic career of a young co-ed at Winesburg College in Ohio during the Korean War, a Jewish Butcher’s Son who can make no sense of the traditionalism of White Christian America and is hard pressed to deal with the many stereotypes he finds there. He runs there from a suddenly overbearing father, and falls in love with a troubled, beautiful young woman, but cannot infer from her many cues that she’s been sexually abused. Everyone he meets there makes him angry. He jumps to wrong conclusion after wrong conclusion until he is expelled, drafted, and destroyed in the War. Roth seems to be dealing with the currently-fashionable anger over our ‘rights,’ and the bluster it spawns, and saying that we need to be careful what we get indignant about, since “banal, incidental… choices achieve the most disproportionate results.” I’m still curious about Roth’s earlier, well-regarded works, but I don’t anticipate that reading them will be pleasant.

59. The best of it: new and selected poems

jnonfiction — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 20:14:05 +0000

Ryan is the former Poet Laureate of the United States, and this book anthologizes the best of her small, sure, surprising poems from the past decade. She writes poems about leftovers, lacunae, empty spaces. Lost places. Limits—limited quantities, limited measurements, limited abilities—are all over these poems, as if she’s trying to describe what nothingness looks like, feels like. For instance:

Silence

Silence is not snow.
It cannot grow
deeper. A thousand years
of it are thinner
than paper. So
we must have it
all wrong
when we feel trapped
like mastodons.

You can see that the concern with limits is reflected in her spare style, her rationed syllables. Everything is stripped down to its essence, resulting in the surprising punch of the final lines, over and over, in each poem. Her sly humor comes out in this way, here and there, especially in the interior rhymes. Sometimes she approaches cleverness, but more often she tips over into the profound revelation, giving insight into something the reader has never spoken but always known. The terseness and sharp focus of her poems gives her voice authority: the poems come off like proverbs, or koans. This is enhanced by her refusal to use the first person, except in the rarest of instances.

These are wildly accessible and fantastic poems, so consistently revealing that they approach the spiritual. Her unique dedication to her form, and the quality and development of her themes, truly earn her work the designation: masterful.

58. HTML5 for web designers

jnonfiction — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 19:52:12 +0000

Ordered this pretty much as soon as it was announced. A good, concise, readable, concise, short introduction to the elements of and thought behind HTML5. Did I say concise? It’s not really a liability, though– I think it’s clear that browsers aren’t there yet, and so Keith’s describing what will be rather than what is, and hence doesn’t have pages and pages of existing practical knowledge to relate. Really, just the spec and the new stuff, but it’s all very encouraging, and a good way to begin getting your head around what’s coming.

57. Waking the dead: the glory of a heart fully alive

jnonfiction — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 19:49:03 +0000

Though I was unmoved by the narrow Wild at heart, my friend Tim highly recommended this book, so I agreed to read it. Eldredge advances the argument that the life of Jesus actually sanctifies your heart, and so the belief that your heart is desperately wicked is a lie; and in fact, a chief aim of spiritual warfare is to recapture your heart from this lie so that you can experience life to the full. To this end, Eldredge recommends Four Streams, one of which is spiritual warfare and the others of which he details unremarkably. I felt like the central premise of the book was valuable- that we could do with a look at our self-loathing and begin to ask whether this is how God sees us. And Eldredge does a good job describing the ways in which our view of things plays into the Enemy’s schemes to keep us and those around us in bondage. Much of the “self-help” aspect of the book, though, I could do without. The verdict? Encouraging, not necessarily essential.

56. Wild gratitude

jnonfiction — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 19:39:50 +0000

After having so enjoyed Hirsch’s How to read a poem, I was curious to read his own efforts. Wild Gratitude shares a title with his meditation on Kit Smart’s ode to his cat Jeoffrey, which poem was featured in his book of appreciation as well. The collection swings between poems of this kind, poems of appreciation for grace and beauty in the natural world, and poems of striking anger, despair and fatalism. Most of them are formal, and you can appreciate the hours he must have spent conforming them to strict meter. They also skew longer than many I’ve read recently, and so the read is more challenging, though I welcomed the exercise. Hirsch is deft with image, and with plain-speak, elevating the everyday with his poetry, though often in the service of a dark view of the world. Slipped in the pages of this used-book-store-copy was a clipping from what looks to be The New Yorker, the last lines of which are a good example of the skill – and tenor – of the rest of the book:

Let five o’clock come
with its bandages of light.

A life buoy in bruised waters.
The first broken plank of morning.

55. Self-portrait as Jerry Quarry

jnonfiction — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 19:41:57 +0000

We played “But For You Who Fear My Name” at church this weekend, and I thought I’d order this book of poems by songwriter Aiuto and find out from whence he came. I think you’ll agree, given the Morrison/Tweedy/even-Dylan caveat that I had much to fear, but Aiuto is at worst an interesting poet and at best speaks the language of men in the refinement of verse. He has a delightful habit of enjambed lines that lead you to jump to conclusions, over and over, and that then double back and surprise you with a new association. His associations—the act of repentance is like being thrown from a crashing car, a panting dog drops a coin from its wet tongue and dies, “The lake shaking itself free from the dog’s coat / and hurrying back to the earth, eager not / to raise an eyebrow”—can be revelatory. Some of the poems are willfully opaque, but they have an quality of aggressive regret that’s disarming. The standout piece, ‘Horse Stories,’ examines his father and his childhood through the lens of the heavyweight fights his father watched on the TV, and is devastating:

15.
You come back from work. There is silence, then
sleep, and still you do not want to talk. You
are not fully present. A part of you is always
catching up, arriving home
later, never really getting there. You
want very much to be idle, to want
nothing.

You sleep on the floor after work, jeans
or work pants, T-shirt, white cotton socks.
You sleep on your stomach, arms outstretched,
Sprawled, spread-eagle, like a boxer knocked
out, a hero fallen.

This follows 14 other entries, one a particularly affecting villanelle. The poems that follow this are all equally accomplished, miles beyond most of the poems that precede it. It’s as if the book opens up in the last third. Worth the price of admission.

54. American poetry: wildness and domesticity

jnonfiction — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 16:31:50 +0000

A collection of essays, poetry criticism and interviews, dating from the mid-sixties through the eighties. Bly laments the direction of American poetry as “away from the center,” lacking the life, spiritual intensity and connection to the unconscious of the Latin American and Spanish poets. He also thinks the contemporary era of poetry instruction is creating too many poets, and too similar to each other, poets who have learned at too little price and so can write nothing earthshaking. He loves, everywhere, this concept of the “deep image,” when the poet accesses the unconscious and writes something true from it. He praises: Neruda, Wright, Lorca, Levertov, Etheridge Knight, John Logan, Thomas McGrath. He tears apart Robert Lowell, James Dickey, Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot. I find Bly both fascinating and a little repulsive. His poetry is good, and I was thrilled to be a fly on the wall for an extended conversation with this practicing and established poet. But he references psycho-spiritual nonsense as if it were established fact, and I was left with a weird feeling, as if the Sixties had overlaid the current decade, and Bly was the result.

53. The light around the body

jnonfiction — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 13:21:43 +0000

Bly was a friend and champion of James Wright, the ‘friend’ featured in ‘A Blessing.’ I picked up and am reading a book of poetry criticism by Bly, and thought I’d read some of his poems; somewhere, this volume was suggested (it won the National Book Award). Bly is apparently a champion of ‘image,’ that poetry should be deeply concerned with looking inward and with a language of the subconscious. Often he titles his poems very forthrightly: ‘Watching Television,’ or ‘Listening to President Kennedy Lie About the Cuban Invasion,’ and then approaches the subject sideways through language. He imbues businessmen, accountants and politicians with natural, predatory characteristics— they bore into trees for grubs, their wings buzz fitfully. Many of these are protest poems, against the Vietnam War specifically, and Bly uses well an image of decay and darkness:

We long to abase ourselves

We have carried around this cup of darkness
We have longed to pour it over our heads

We make war
Like a man anointing himself

(from ‘At a March Against the Vietnam War’). As the book moves through five sections, it becomes steadily less concrete and more truly inward, until the final poems are all image and make little objective sense. But they are, all of them, striking poems. I find myself feeling contradictory about Bly—he’s a prickly fellow: reaching farther, maybe, than his grasp, but deeply invested in what he’s doing. I’m a little turned off by Bly’s criticism, so I had expected his poetry not to resonate, but I was wrong. As the poems steadily descend into pure ‘image,’ Bly proves he can navigate a forthright emotional poetry without lapsing into the vapid trippiness that characterizes some of his ideas.

52. Cloud atlas

jnonfiction — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 16:45:24 +0000

I read this six years ago, right at the beginning of this meme, and dug it out again to loan to a friend who had read the casting rumors about the upcoming (possible) movie. Couldn’t remember more than that I’d enjoyed it, so I read it again. Imagines the death of Civilization through snapshots of its decline; our choices, good and bad, determine our outcomes, including the extinction of both our nobility and our species. The characters reincarnate from story to story; the stories form a nested V, bisecting each other one by one with the central story being farthest in the future and the novel’s beginning and end being farthest in the past, those two stories essentially mirroring each other to form a bookend. It’s ambitious, as is Mitchell’s determination to write in multiple voices and genres in a single book, and to make the entire narrative a sort of palimpsest of documents. Still a remarkable book, but I feel like I have perspective on its outlook that I didn’t have then. Frighteningly good, woefully unhopeful for humanity, desperately in need of a glimpse of Salvation. I highly recommend it.

51. Unincorporated persons in the late Honda dynasty

jnonfiction — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 16:29:46 +0000

A much, much stronger collection than the last one I read, What narcissism means to me. Hoagland exults, almost, in the space where guilt and desire meet in middle age. He bayonets everything awful about modern life, clear-eyed. But his core obsession is pain:

it is the old intelligence of pain
that I admire:

how it moves around inside of him like smoke;

how it knows exactly what to do with human beings
to stay inside of them forever.

(‘The story of the father’)

I believe in the compound fracture
served with a sauce of dirty regret

(‘Personal’)

The final section turns elegiac, and ends on a wonderful poem, ‘Voyage’, in which he lights out with all his pain, his ‘marvelous punishment,’ and turns the hurting world somehow into something still hurting but good. Hoagland is a poet to celebrate; is three collections enough to justify a ‘Collected Poems’?