Tea-Time Reading -- and Rereading

 

A recent discovery and an old friend.

Travis McGee Deserves A Statue

Salvage expert.
Formative influence:
Thank you, John D. McDonald.

Visible Again

For five bookcases, I moved all of the books on all of the shelves, shifting upper to lower, lower to upper, discarding or adding, and reordering each one, just so that those books would become visible to me once again.

Have you ever noticed how after a while you don't even see the pictures or the art you have hanging on the walls where you spend your time each day, home or office?

Same concept.

Next, maybe, I'll move the pictures and art around.

Reading Notes

Sometimes, I will read any style if the subject is what I want.

Or, I will read any subject if the style is what I want.

Best practices, right?

Tools of the Trade

Shelf-love.

Reading Around

Reflections: 5 + 9

Reflections on Turning 59:

Sometimes I am arrogant enough to think my death will mean that no one will be reading books the way I do--and the world will suffer--and I mean that far less selfishly and less egotistically than that may sound.  Feel free to laugh.

I mean that I have read and have trained and have practiced to be a Reader, so I should be able to recognize and understand what is true and what is not true--and others will not have trained so long or so hard or so well as I have.

That's been my motivation as a teacher since 1990 (and even before, as a friend): to share, to guide, to model.

Reading well takes practice and guidance and more practice.

I think I have been a true reader since my early teens, and I have worked at it for decades and decades, trying to teach my own students to Read Like Readers, but more importantly to Read Like Writers.

I still need to write the books I want to write.

Not done yet.  That's the battle-cry.

Reading Around

Morning!

SIP: Reading Around

A few books in process.  I like to read a bit here and a bit there.

Moya Cannon: "Eavesdropping"

I was reading around, the way I do, and then I hit upon this poem by Moya Cannon.  I have been there, have listened to the barnacles myself, and she captures the scene.  Beauty.  

What's-the-Story?

Story: characters in action in a setting through time.

That's how I process everything.

Give me a poem, any poem, and I look for the story in the lines, behind the lines, and/or after the lines. Give me a photo, and where some see a static tablieau, I see dynamism, before-and-after, presence-and-absence. Give me a problem, personal or societal, and I look for the story in the same way.

On the upside, I look for motivation and context and nuance. On the downside, some people think I am wasting my--or their--time with this approach, with my concern for accuracy and understanding of plot, POV, and narrative shading.

I'll be 59 soon, but that mostly means I've had a lot of practice with stories and story-telling; I think I am (still) in tune most of the time. Yet I know I may be wrong in my emphasis in certain circumstances and with certain texts, and that encourages me to be humble, which is always good.

Still, what's the story is my favorite question.

Epic Ambitions: "Notes From a Bottle Found on the Beach at Carmel"

Three or four times in the past, I have read around in this poetic labyrinth from Evan S. Connell, first published in 1962, and I have often enjoyed following the lines of thought a few steps or, plunging further, have gotten lost. I am going to attempt reading straight through, which may or may not be the proper path.

I first looked at the book purely because I was born in Carmel, CA, and am taken with message-bottles found on beaches and such. The poetry led me to purchase the volume--which is either a work of genius or a trickster's hoard of bits and pieces. Either may prove compelling.

I can't tell yet how many different narrative voices or personae Connell is utilizing; certainly, while some "notes" are in the first-person, many are in the third-, and the overall narrative voice is Legion.  The interwoven narratives involve multiple historical periods or moments.  Exploration, geography, history, mystery, divinity, humanity, life, death, loss--coins--philosophy, alchemy, heresy, punishment, fear, greed--coins--exhilaration, awe: these are the key words I'm noting on the endpapers as I work my way into this literary place, this world-out-of-a-bottle.

Here is one passage that caught my eye:

Some say the tuna swims around the world
searching for a better life because he is not at home
in the sea. It may be we have met, this obsessed fish
and I, somewhere beyond the Pillars of Heracles.

(I love the use of "Pillars of Heracles" for the antique feeling, like reading an L. Sprague de Camp novel about the ancient world from my youth.  Even more, I love the "obsessed fish / and I".  This is an idiosyncratic choice of quotation, but that's also one joy of not being in the classroom, of being off-duty: I can please myself--and be reminded that the individual response matters, that the social or communal or universal responses grow from the responsible, attentive individual ones.)

And here is a passage I have found particularly compelling:

We know of Saint Dionysius
that when his head had been chopped. from his body
he picked it up and carried it;
and walked to the place where he wanted to be buried.
To what prayer will you listen, if not to this?

Off-duty, as it were, I retreat to the poetic and intuitive, if only for the sustenance to shoulder the burdens of teaching once more. (But not only "if only", you know?). The power of that last line in the passage: "To what prayer will you listen, if not to this?"  How is the foregoing a prayer?  How could it not be, on reflection and assertion?  The power and movement of art and the mind of the reader, in this case.  This is a book made up of a thousand poetic fragments, possibly more, and reading these pieces requires mental ordering, assessing, connecting--requires a willingness to suspend knowledge, even comprehension, in the moment for the sake of an emerging pattern.  The process is certainly immersive; the experience can feel overwhelming, a drowning, or feel more positive, upwelling and fulfilling.

Reading the first forty or fifty pages in order so far, attuned to resonance and pattern-making, has led to a familiar reflection.  I can not-know exactly what something means and yet know that something carries meaning, is pregnant with meaning, and standing as a witness feels true and useful. Many of my students take their cues from pop culture and expect meaning to be delivered, upon demand, and to be consumed. So often, however, meaning must be discovered, must be explored, may be missed or mislaid, may be sweated out, must be uncovered--partially, gradually--and may or must be resisted.  Grist for the mill of the mind.

I don't fully know how to teach the absolute sneakiness of art, but I try, I try, I try.

Epic ambitions--Connell's, mine; writer's, reader's--afoot.

Reading Around

Amateur Home Haircut

An amateur home haircut only really counts as such when something goes wrong, right? I grew up with short hair, and though every so often I attempt to grow it longer, my hair grows up and out, never long. 70s big, at best/worst.

In times of stress, I enjoy getting a haircut. Something about sitting in that chair and handing over responsibility for even a short time is freeing for me. (I found that thought -- but traveling on a plane with the pilot in control, I can't be blamed -- in a novel I first read over 40 years ago and recognized my barber chair version about 30 years ago. Peter Gent's North Dallas 40, a worthy read about football and integrity, though perhaps not in obvious ways.)

Now, in this time of stress, I am cutting my own hair. Not the same relief, not the same release. (Something, because I did want that hair cut, but not what I hoped.) So you can imagine that after trimming my hair successfully I might still chase that feeling of relief by cutting a bit more. And I have done so. Felt good too. Snipped a little more and a little more.

Perhaps, I should have stopped sooner, but I don't know. I don't mind short hair. I might agree about the uneven edges though.

Planning The Class

We’ll start the semester with a viewing of Ridley Scott’s first feature film The Duellists, and then proceed to the following texts in an order I haven’t quite fathomed or fashioned yet:

Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing;

Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac;

Byron’s Selected Poems;

143 rather short poems; 

a handful of stories by de Maupassant;

a handful of tales by Poe;

Shelley’s Frankenstein;

and Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon.

Recent Reading

Restless Rereading

Much of my reading falls into the category of rereading, for I've been a serious reader for a long time.  I'm teaching Homer's Iliad this term and how many times, how many translations, have I read?  Many.  And yet I must reread to be there with my students, to know the text intimately, to be a reader.  And so I do; I reread.

When I am relaxing at home, I read, which often means rereading.  For I read as others listen to music.  Seriously.  And, so, I often reread restlessly, as I think of it.  I don't quite want to read the whole book, but I do want to live in the music of that book.  So, I read a chapter here in one book and a chapter there in another book and even glance into a third.  That's when rereading becomes restless.  Still good.

You can see such from the photo above: four books that offered different music, compelling music.  A heroic fantasy, a literary novel about deep swimming, a thriller with sailboats, and a crime novel with a compelling protagonist and a compelling antagonist and a compelling setting, the mountainous area of Montana.  Different tunes; different music.

All good; all appropriate; all wonderful.  I just wanted a bit of each.

What music am I listening to, reading from, now?

Rereading Byron's "Don Juan": Canto III

Lord Byron’s third canto is a long study in suspense—as we merge with pirate Lambro as he returns to his pirate-isle only to find all think he is dead, his daughter is having party-time, and some young man is wooing that daughter—and a detailed character-study of Lambro (displaced father, displaced authority, displaced pirate).  So much to notice while rereading.

We ought to teach rereading so much more.

Bookish