Tobias Wolff, Sylvia Plath, Vendela Vida, and yes, John Gardner

So, it’s been awhile: I’m still reading Collected Poems by Sylvia Plath, but that’s because I lost it for about two weeks. It lay lonely and abandoned in the car. But anywho, during the past month or so I’ve read a couple of fantastic short books while continuing to trudge through The Sunlight Dialogues by John Gardner.

The first and perhaps most enjoyable was Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name by Vendela Vida (editor of The Believer), a stark tale of searching for ones identity and past in the arctic wastes of Lapland. It’s in paperback at the moment, so take a look if you like writing that has a keen since of rhythm and doesn’t pull its punches.

I also read The Night in Question, a story collection by Tobias Wolff. I had previously read his novel, Old School back in the spring and thought it was one of the best I’ve read in a long time, and I felt the same way about his stories. He has a very intimate connection between language and story that many literary authors fail to grasp.

Which leads me today’s purchases: the current issue of Poets & Writers; a marked down hardback copy of Eleanor Rigby by Douglas Coupland (whom, though at times absurdly quirky, is one of my favorite novelists – he also has an essay in the current issue of Granta), and In the Garden of the North American Martyrs by Tobias Wolff, another story collection. So that’s what’s on the plate currently.

One of my goals this year has been to work on reading some classics of American fiction during the past century; so far I’ve gotten through some of J.D. Salinger, some of Plath (poetry, but oh well), still working on Gardner. I hope to read some Kerouac as well as Raymond Carver at some point, but I’m not in too big a hurry. I’ve got Seperate Flights by Andre Dubus waiting in the wings at some point, as well as debut novels by Mischa Berlinski and Olga Grushin.

Spending the day with Nick Hornby (and other wonderful writers)

…is one hell of a way to spend a day. Recently I’ve been reading through some weighty stuff, and I needed a break. The Polysyllabic Spree came shipped used from an Amazon seller and I started in on it at about 3 or so this afternoon and just ploughed through all fifteen or so essays in basically a day-long sitting. Time spent with Hornby is always time well spent, always very funny and at times shockingly insightful. He’s sort of a modern-day Wodehouse, at least when it comes to downright pithiness. Polysyllabic is the first collection of his columns in the Believer, on his (hillarious) book-buying and -reading habits.

In other reading news, John Gardner and I are in a prize fight (to use one of Hornby’s metaphors) over The Sunlight Dialogues. I’ve got a hardback version of the first edition (seventh printing), and it is a very, very large book – clocking it at 660 of the literally largest and word-filled pages you could ever ask for. (I saw a paperback of the book and it was at 1000 pages – and in tiny print!) I read thirty pages in a day and I feel as if I have landed a knockout punch, but after that I’m so worn out I can’t muster a single page for three days. He comes with a right hook – the densest, most complex prose a thinking person could ever ask for. However, I’m convinced that I’m going to be positively jubilant after I’ve climbed this mountain of American literature – I already feel as if my mind has been hit with an atom bomb.

And besides, who wouldn’t like a novelist who played the banjo?

Among other things, I’m reading the Collected Poems by Sylvia Plath, which are excellent (especially the latter poems, right before she committed suicide in ‘63) as well as a biography of her marriage with her poet-husband, Ted Hughes, aptly titled, Her Husband, by Diane Middlebrook.

summertime is here part II

Perhaps even better than sitting on the back deck in the shade reading a good book would be sitting inside listening to music made in Seattle, reading the same book, while it rains oh-so-softly. Coffee in hand. In the half-light that Mom always tells me will ruin my eyes. Yes. It is.

sumertime is here

Let me just say that there’s not much more pleasurable than sitting on the back deck reading a book in the shade. On a warm (but not too warm) sunny day and a cup of coffee (Starbucks Pike Place brew). Currently working on The Inhabited World by David Long.

Calvin Festival of Faith & Writing

So I had been looking forward to the Calvin Festival of Faith and Writing for the past two years, ever since I’d heard about it on Mark Bertrand’s blog. I marked it on my calendar… and waited. I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect, but honestly, whatever I thought before got blown away.

Seldom have I ever had three such wonderful days! The lectures (for the most part) were great, and of course of these getting to hear Michael Chabon twice (twice!) was the highlight. Very funny guy, and a brilliant writer.

Meeting the Relief people was awesome (I had a story in Coach’s Midnight Diner last year). They’re probably the most down to earth group of editors you could ever meet. We had a great little party one night, although they told me I was going into the Witness Protection Program afterward. Hah. Also awesome was meeting the folks at Seattle Pacific University (where I’ll be attending this fall) as well as film critic and author Jeffrey Overstreet.

It is really a beautiful thing, when you’re in your place with your people, isn’t it? I just couldn’t get over feeling that all week. I stayed with a couple of other conference attendees and we had our own “private reading” the last night. I read a short story and they read poems. Good times.

And of course I bought too many books, waited in much too long a line to have one of them signed by Chabon; the titles of my purchases ranging from Fieldwork by Mischa Berlinksi, The Dream Life of Sukhanov by Olga Grushin, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union by Michael Chabon, Through a Screen Darkly by Jeffrey Overstreet, and I got a free copy of The Organic God by Margaret Feinburg.

Beautiful days. I’m currently in Michigan this week and Illinois next week, but I can’t wait to get home and start putting stuff on paper again.

Mining the book racks

So on my trip into town today I ended up going into Books and Such, a local used bookstore that specializes in lots and lots of trade paperbacks (with a few scattered hardbacks here and there, unless you’re Stephen King or Anne Rice, in which case there are plenty of hardbacks), and walked out with a few purchases:

The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh. I’ve seen a lot of his quotes, but never read him. Found a thirty-seven year-old Dell paperback.

Appointment in Samarra by John O’Hara. I seem to remember reading somewhere that this was a great work of noir so I thought I might as well, for the price of a dollar. The Bantam copy I bought, pub’d in ‘66, had the price marked $.75 on the cover.

Great English Short Stories: selected and introduced by Christopher Isherwood. This Dell paperback, pub’d in ‘57, was marked $.50… I laid a buck on the table for it. It features stories by Conrad, Lawrence, Chesterton, Forster, Kipling, Mansfield, and Maugham to name a few. The greenish colored pagers are cool.

From there I went over to the PCDC – a thrift store – and found a nice tweed jacket for dirt cheap and a first edition of Tom Wolfe’s A Man In Full. I’ve never read Wolfe, and judging by the size of the tome, he’s got a lot to say.  

being awake and other such things

Starting these things is always a pain. You feel like you’ve got to start with a certain amount of pomp and grandeur, and I suppose sometimes you lose sight of the fact that you’re writing a blog, not the next great work of literature. So I won’t do that, but I will introduce myself, if I may.

I’m a writer and an artist at heart. I want to be stirred, harrowed, moved, shaken. I’ve read that great art makes your world bigger, and I believe it. So this is going to be mostly blogging about books and art and sometimes music and the stuff I buy at the book store, and then perhaps what I think of them after I’m done. I’m also prone to staying up till rather ungoly hours of the night. I’m a self-imposed insomniac. Just so you know… the only thing I don’t allow is morning-people here. (That means if you’re the kind of person who knows how to smile before 10 a.m.) 

Drop me a line, have a cup of coffee, recommend me a book. This is, after all, a place for insomniacs.