Uncategorized

I admit, I never listened to her music, or saw any of her drawings, or ingested any of her art in any form, until I read Just Kids, her memoir. It’s so wonderful and I’m now fully convinced of her authenticity as a literary artist. Her writing is  lyrical and concise, two qualities that rarely co-exist. She writes with such economy about such huge subjects;pregnancy, art, growing up, drugs, having children, death, ghosts are all treated to her plain, straightforward prose, spiked with adjectives or just the right allusions, only when absolutely necessary. There is no adornment, only a vividness, almost akin to what a musician would call pitch. She has perfect pitch  for her own experience and the kaleidoscopic ingestion of her times. More than that, we’re treated to various ideas about what makes art or an artist–hard work, poverty (or money) extreme desire to be one, that elusive thing, talent–are all up for grabs. It’s also a love story of sorts between she and Robert Maplethorpe and she makes it clear it’s a love story in a conventional sense about a boyfriend and girlfriend once upon a time, and also about being in love with one’s vocation. He and she both must make things. They are constantly creating. He does it with a total sense of grandiosity and destiny and she–and we believe her in this–because she simply has to make things. She’s also subject to ego, particularly when she falls into being a musician, but is still remarkably humble. I really liked her and love this very sweet, elegant, heartbreaking book.

Emily Gray Tedrowe is a superb writer gracefully weaving in minute detail while maintaining the pace of this fantastic, naturalistic novel.  Authorial voice simply vanishes providing a beautifully transparent lens through which we see the members of two families in a small, NYC commuter town at a moment of marriage and crisis. Sure the book is “quiet,” yet it’s gradual accretion of achingly real gesture and dialogue build to a very powerful, memorable story of–let’s face it–the truly sensational and always the most interesting subjects, love and money. She reminds me of a contemporary Edith Wharton stripped of even a trace of malice or satire, in the way her story illustrates an entire, complex, socaial world. She has a whole-hearted, almost earnest, affection for her characters and as readers so do we. It’s so refreshing not to be laden with irony and the thinly veiled ideology of a given writer, and just be given what’s here, given life.

Of course you know about the power point presentation within this text. (If you don’t there is one and it’s brilliant, funny and eerily collapsible as a way of seeing how writers may think.) But there’s artistry of a much more subtle kind, everywhere in this book. I’m awed by the way Egan shuttles in time and space giving us pure mind at various ages and in both sexes. She moves the camera so that ,Mindy , for example,  is both the too pretty, bimbo girlfriend of an older, much divorced, rich man and a thoughtful, caring, graduate student with plans far beyond her current beau. A gaggle of punk rock kids in San Francisco in the early eighties are spiked and pinned and blue-haired and they are also fragile, self-conscious about their freckles and spend afternoons eating one mother’s homemade sweet yogurts after school,  and giving head to said older divorced man. A punk rock boy becomes a seasoned music producer with a kleptomaniac assistant. The situations are interesting enough but the time travel is masterful. In it, we can compare past and present, and understand although we only see impressionistically, how time both ripens and warps.

People are types and they are also much more than that (or less than that as the case may be.) Characters attest to be real but they can’t be any more real than the types that we allow ourselves to see. Authors go beneath types, inside of them and sometimes they don’t. Is one mode better than another? Does it matter? It may not matter, that Patty Berglund is a type that we know and that we can’t get inside of  (any more than her spouse, children or anyone else she knows can.)  If the type shimmers with a resonance that is huge, cultural, imbedded and infinite (in terms of how many individuals could be packed inside of it) which hers is, than that type works. And so I believe the hype….and also the criticism. But I think Franzen is brilliant at alluding to a world that is by nature unknowable, and limning all the ways the thicket of our world tricks us and keeps us at bay. The tragedy, after all, is not knowing who we are.

By turns lyrical and colloquial, Michael Cunningham’s prose gracefully elucidates ways of thinking, specifically the ways of Peter and Rebecca, a long married couple, which are imbedded in the ways of New York intelligentsia in 2010. The novel offers unusual insight into ordinary lives, and suggests that our aesthetic impulses, our need for beauty is universal, damming and redeeming. I love his writing so much, the musicality that is always undercut with casual, almost deprecating language and the way he lets us in on the secrets we keep with ourselves. Within pages Cunningham eludes to Joyce, Woolf, Tolstoy, and Styxx thereby illustrating how art– both high and popular–illuminates our own lives. Oh, and we’re also treated to a detailed description of cunnilingus from Peter’s point of view within chapter one! Peter thinks “Does she ever fake it? Better not to know.” Yet, we are so grateful to know what these palpably real characters are thinking.

Hotel Insomnia by Charles Simic

These poems juxtapose grand proclamations about eternity, the divine, and immortality with lines like, “It doesn’t matter.”  With earthy reminders like this and an incremental, almost stealthy, building of complexity from line to line we are transported to understanding. In poems like “Clouds Gathering,” we understand the wordless woe at the heart of domesticity, and in “Evening Walk,” we see the odd way that memory and allusion fuels our waking life of the concrete and visible. Simic is also a master of ordinary lists of observable things like “very good olives,” and great at evoking a whole world with one perfectly placed word like, “Sicily.” I loved these poems of the grand and the ordinary.

Dime Store Alchemy by Charles Simic

This book is about the art of Joseph Cornell. Simic pays tribute to him, emulates him, is inspired by him,  and offers his appreciation as well as showing us how artists are moved by one another. The poems here are evidence of Simic’s inheritance and the power of influence.

The Dead and the Living poems by Sharon Olds

I’m reading poetry to reconnect to language (above story) and to emotion that fuels writing. My bookshelf contains poetry books from the late 80’s and early 90’s so this is where I went first. Sharon Olds writes about topics like incest, bloody birth, sex, the passionate connection to one’s children, and the inescapable quality of one’s own childhood.  I like to call them “honest” rather than “confessional.”( Somewhere along the line, her territory became over-saturated and uninteresting but these poems are totally fresh.) Of course she’s using material from her own life, but she finds its gold and moments of fascination in daily, ordinary things. I love the sharp, precise, and , somehow untethered use of language.  She writes with a colloquial melody yet manages to turn our expectations (about content) upside down. She reminded me of the joy of my own medium and its power.

Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon

I’m riveted by this novel’s fractured and deceptively simple structure. It’s both sensational—there’s a severed hand lying in ice within the first five pages—and totally earthy and quotidian.

The Master by Colm Toibin

Can you imagine Henry James sharing a bed with Oliver Wendell Holmes? (Toibin has.) This book is an amazing entry into the mind and life of Henry James and his process as a writer. I loved its unexpected familiarity and its historical accuracy. It’s so different in scope from books like Blackwater Lightship or Brooklyn.

The Philosophical Baby by Alison Gopnik

Alison Gopnik, a developmental psychologist, happens to be Adam Gopnik’s sister and she writes breezily too with a personal lens on the subject of infant consciousness. Babies know more than we think they do. This book shows us how, in some ways, they’re smarter than we are.

This is what I’m reading these days:

Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon

I’m riveted by this novel’s fractured and deceptively simple structure. It’s both sensational—there’s a severed hand lying in ice within the first five pages—and totally earthy and quotidian.

The Master by Colm Toibin

Can you imagine Henry James sharing a bed with Oliver Wendell Holmes? (Toibin has.) This book is an amazing entry into the mind and life of Henry James and his process as a writer. I loved its unexpected familiarity and its historical accuracy. It’s so different in scope from books like Blackwater Lightship or Brooklyn.

The Philosophical Baby by Alison Gopnik

Alison Gopnik, a developmental psychologist, happens to be Adam Gopnik’s sister and she writes breezily too with a personal lens on the subject of infant consciousness. Babies know more than we think they do. This book shows us how, in some ways, they’re smarter than we are.

This is what I’m reading these days:

Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon

I’m riveted by this novel’s fractured and deceptively simple structure. It’s both sensational—there’s a severed hand lying in ice within the first five pages—and totally earthy and quotidian.

The Master by Colm Toibin

Can you imagine Henry James sharing a bed with Oliver Wendell Holmes? (Toibin has.) This book is an amazing entry into the mind and life of Henry James and his process as a writer. I loved its unexpected familiarity and its historical accuracy. It’s so different in scope from books like Blackwater Lightship or Brooklyn.

The Philosophical Baby by Alison Gopnik

Alison Gopnik, a developmental psychologist, happens to be Adam Gopnik’s sister and she writes breezily too with a personal lens on the subject of infant consciousness. Babies know more than we think they do. This book shows us how, in some ways, they’re smarter than we are.