Anatomy of water

Depleted by a week of reading more than 400 tiny blue books full of responses to the same two writing prompts that oscillated between heartbreakingly naive, unintentionally hilarious, and Just Plain Wrong. All written in the vaguely off-key notes of just-out-of-high-school Test English, which is not unlike the struggling plonks of a dilapidated carousel or the maddening strains of the "It's A Small World" Disney ride.

So I retreat into cheesy, accordion-driven love song waltzes and Matthea Harvey poems and over-priced vintage stores and ridiculous hat fashion shows to re-boot. Jumbled up in my post-blue book thoughts: the tantalizing decision to leave behind the moderns for the messy, sprawling vistas of Contemporary Fiction. I am squinting to see it better.


Last weekend I tried to read Lauren Groff's Delicate, Edible Birds on the beach before the fog fell out of the sky like a brick. Or something really heavy. And sneaky. Until it falls on you.

Reading through the collection, indoors, in the ensuing week of rain, it struck me how present water is in the book: humid indoor swimming pools and rainstorms and lakes and flooded rivers. And then, as I'm having this thought, Groff gives me this paragraph, in the middle of a love story that turns out to be a jagged tale of loss, self-forgiveness:

There is no ending, no neatness in this story. There never really is, where water is concerned. It is wild, febrile, kind, ambiguous; it is dark and carries the mud, and it is clear and the cleanest thing. Too much of it kills us, and not enough kills us, and it is what makes us, mostly. Water is the cleverest substance, wily beyond the stretch of our mortal imaginations. And no matter where it is pent, no matter if it is air or liquid or solid, it will someday, inevitably, find its way out. (192)

I want to say that the other, complementary thing in the book has to do with little tragedies (absences, denials, misunderstandings, surrenderings), familial or creative or intellectual struggles that loom large on our personal horizons and so tiny on any other natural scale.¹ But those little tragic moments of giving up or letting go (sometimes to positive effect), fit so perfectly there amidst Groff's soundless depths, strung up in that "wild, febrile" tension between the quotidian and the monumental.

And there are some thoughts about To The Lighthouse floating around in my head. I am squinting to see them better, too.

---

¹ The phrase 'little tragedies' klinks a little bit wrong in my head, as the Germans would say. But it's a matter of translation and there's no fixing it tonight.

Books of War. Warbooks. Books not Bombs. Bookbombs.

Perhaps because I have been in a Class A Funk about grad school/Amherst/grad school in Amherst, the pile of Books to Read around my bed looks like a hilarious-grim mixture of books concerned with war or the aftermath of war.

To wit:

Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut (apparently I've been committed to the 9th layer of Hell for English majors/conscious people under the age of 30 for not having read this already...oh, well.)
Catch-22, Joseph Heller (9th layer of Hell redux)
Falling Man, Don DeLillo
Suite Française, Irène Némirovsky
Tree of Smoke, Denis Johnson
and, on order, the new book about Artists Against Hitler, Red Orchestra, Anne Nelson.

I would add Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, but I'm trying not to kill myself here. What with all the talk of Ulysses being thrown around, and trying to finish Infinite Jest after a three-year off-again on-again fling, Pynchon might just do me in.

{Edit 23 July: Just looked down and re-noticed my abandoned copy of Murakami's Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, which may be the culprit of this whole disturbing phenomenon.}

Summer like a fire sale -or- I'm feeling kind of list-y

Summer means big books and ridiculous pop music...as soon as I can pay attention long enough to do anything about the pile of novels I've been meaning to read and (imaginary) CDs I've been meaning to crank through my nifty globular speakers. Also on the summer agenda:

• vegetables
• Zumba
• Research Assistant-ing
• apartment hunting
• my Southern Odyssey (Lancaster/Philadelphia [whatever; it's the Mason-Dixon line], Virginia, and Florida [twice!])
• silly French movies

Since I can only seem to think in lists right now, here's the line-up for summer reading here at paper alphabet:

The Fortress of Solitude
Jonathan Lethem

My friend Jessica swears by this book, and I love Jessica, so I'm reading it. Despite my reservations about the whole Brooklyn publishing phenomenon. Also, I like superheroes.




A Fraction of the Whole
Steve Toltz

Recommended months and months ago by the great Maud Newton (who also lives in Brooklyn...). I've been itching to read it all year. Jail. Australians. I have to do something now that House isn't on anymore.




The Manual of Detection
Jedediah Berry

Jed Berry is a UMass MFA alum, so I've had the opportunity to listen to him talk a few times since being here. He was especially encouraging about working with/for small presses, which I think is admirable and exciting. Also, Jensen wants people to read this book, and I love him, so I will.


Delicate, Edible Birds And Other Stories
Lauren Groff

I've sort of had a girl crush on Lauren Groff ever since I met her at the Emerging Writers Festival in Lancaster two years ago. Her novel, Monsters of Templeton, hadn't even come out at that point; I've been following her ever since (you know, on foot, and everything. [I probably shouldn't joke about these things on the interwebs.])


Pretty Monsters
Kelly Link

I've been meaning to read Kelly Link for two years now, and I think I'll start with her YA collection of stories, since the summer makes me want to write stories with magic and monsters and people carrying their own heads. Her other collection, Magic for Beginners, is available for download (for free!) over at Small Beer Press--also where Jed Berry works as an assistant editor (the world is a small place.).


The Withdrawal Method
Pasha Malla

I think Pasha Malla is great. I think this interview with Pasha Malla, conducted by his mother, is possibly greater.

Did I mention that I love Canadians?




Super Natural Cooking
Heidi Swanson

Heidi Swanson knows how to make great food--and how to take beautiful photographs of the great food that make cooking look glamorous instead of time-consuming, and, if you're me, kind of a messy, tasty disaster. What I've read of this book has since become an indispensable resource for many of my cooking endeavors. A lot of these recipes are available for free on her website, 101 Cookbooks, but the book is worth getting--even if I don't think I'll ever purchase quinoa flour, she makes developing a pantry sound like quite the adventure.

I also plan to read lots of George Eliot. And Virginia Woolf. And July will be devoted to finally reading Ulysses cover to cover. Because I wouldn't be in grad school if I weren't a huge, huge nerd.

Remember that $20/month on books rule?

Now I won't be able to get my hands on G.C. Waldrep's new book Archicembalo (Tupelo Press) until 2012, at the earliest. Clearly, I have a problem that is not strictly monetary. But I do have a birthday...in four months...


{Edit, 5 May: Totally caved and bought a $10 copy at the Juniper Festival. Worth every penny.}