It’s a very literary set of readers on the 70 bus. I was reading over the shoulder of my busmate and I saw the name Gabriel Betteredge. Couldn’t remember why it sounded so familiar for awhile, and then I realized he was reading THE MOONSTONE. I love Chicago. Last week there was someone reading Walter Benjamin.
It is one of my rules in life, never to notice what I don’t understand.
– Gabriel Betteredge, THE MOONSTONE (Wilkie Collins)
Early in my life I determined not to teach because I like teaching very much. I thought if I was going to be a real poet – that is, write the best poetry I possibly could – I would have to guard my time and energy for its production, and thus I should not, as a daily occupation, do anything else that was interesting. Of necessity I worked for many years at many occupations. None of them, in keeping with my promise, was interesting.
Among the things I learned in those years were two of special interest to poets. First, that one can rise early in the morning and have time to write (or, even, to take a walk and then write) before the world’s work schedule begins. Also, that one can live simply and honorably on just about enough money to keep a chicken alive. And do so cheerfully.
This I have always known – that if I did not live my life immersed in the one activity which suits me, and which also, to tell the truth, keeps me utterly happy and intrigued, I would come some day to bitter and mortal regret.
– Mary Oliver, “Conclusion,” A POETRY HANDBOOK (Great October Reread of 2008, 1/90)
Having unpacked the ninety books I own, I have been rereading them, one at a time. I think I will make this a yearly tradition if I can, to at least open if not completely reread every book I own, and to quote from it on this blog. If I cannot find anything worth quoting or commenting on, or don’t care about the book enough, I will get rid of it. To this end, this post begins a new category, the Great October Reread. For my own facetiousness I will also note that I am not blogging about these books in the exact order of rereadership. I devoured ON BEAUTY first, and dipped into the Norton, and was browsing through CODEPENDENT NO MORE before I got to this one.
My mother gave me A POETRY HANDBOOK when I was in high school, and those words – particularly the “bitter and mortal regret” – have rung in my ears since then. I did not realize until now, on this reread, how seriously I have taken Oliver’s admonition to avoid interesting work – and how strangely guilty I feel for the interesting occupations I have pursued, such as directing, for diverting my energy from my truer, older calling. However, since she ultimately did become a teacher, I think I may safely say that I aspire to do the same, and sooner than her, without damage to the poetry.
I also think that it is safe, even necessary, to have interesting occupations as a writer, as long as they do not become preoccupations which prepossess the poetics. That will always be a danger, but for someone as desperately determined to write as Oliver was and is, it cannot be greatly feared. (I have been watching too much PRIDE AND PREJUDICE – I sound like plaigarized Austen. “Yes, vanity is a weakness indeed. But pride – where there is real superiority of mind…”)
We are all in danger from many things, Dara, Darcy, and every prideful person and poet on the planet. But let’s (and by us I mean me) not be in danger of letting the fear of that danger drive us to doing nothing.
Robert brought the boxes with my books in them up from Indianapolis today. (That line feels like some kind of very-long-winded meter, but I can’t match it. Less peripatetic, more ptero-dactylic.)
This was a surprise. I didn’t expect them until later on. But all of my books are here in the same city, in the same place, with me. If I wanted to, I could ride my bike a mile east, lakeward right now, break open the black Isuzu Trooper, and read every one of them. Right now. I could sit on the bumper, in the light of the open door, with Tom Stoppard and Flaubert and Brian Teare spread all around me and read until morning. They will wait there like eggs in their box-shells, waiting to hatch, until Ee and I move into our new apartment, on Sept. 1st. So soon!
I haven’t seen them from April 2007 on. For the whole year of assistant directing, they lived in Menlo Park, and I lived everywhere but there.
Existing without them hurt very much at first, and I have to write something more on that subject. But it was ultimately a powerful choice to let them all go. Helped me to understand their role in my life. I will write more on this.
I worked at a grocery store and they paid us in cash every week. I would just stick the money in my pocket and never go to the bank. I bought Tutti a giant stuffed animal, a Mickey Mouse telephone, sheets and pillowcases with cats wearing running shoes on them, and I bought a kit and made her a Christmas stocking with her name on it. I can’t remember what else I bought. Anytime I saw something, I bought it. This past year was our eleventh Christmas together, and I bought her a plastic rack for inside the kitchen pantry door, where she can put her rolls of food wrap.
She is lying in bed beside me right now, with her back to me. I think she has finally gone to sleep. I came back from a meeting where I had just been elected to the board of directors and I came home in the rain, and there she was, on the couch, watching TV.
Now we are up here in bed and I am wide awake. I think she’s asleep. But she might just be pretending she is asleep so she doesn’t have to listen to me anymore. She might, at some point, have said to her self, “I can’t listen to this anymore,” closed her eyes, and pretended to be asleep.
I don’t think she’s pretending. I really don’t.
But, the thing is, it occurred to me. There was a time when something like this would never have entered my head.
– from the novel DAD SAYS HE SAW YOU AT THE MALL, by the Canadian author Ken Sparling, who has the prose style I want to be when I grow up.
There is not now, nor I suspect will there ever be, a le Carré novel with ninjas in it. Most serious novelists are wary of including ninjas in their writing. That’s a shame, because many much-admired works of modern fiction could benefit from a few.
-Nick Harkaway on his new novel, The Gone-Away World. Via Bookslut.
“I knew what was about to happen, but I did not stop to think, except to think that I knew what was about to happen.”
-Michael Chabon, THE MYSTERIES OF PITTSBURGH
Coming home today from interviewing a series of candidates for a job-share arrangement whereby we can partage in an administrative position and still pursue theater, I took the wrong train to the wrong stop and had to walk from Spring Street Station to the identically named Spring Street Station. On the way, I passed by people speaking French, several groups of them, and two young men at a table full of paperback books. It was about to rain. This did not deter them. I looked over the table with the deliberation of someone who knows she is going to have to buy a book. I walked slowly down the table, very slowly, but didn’t pick anything up until I picked up this one.
I picked up this one and opened it to the page where I read ” I admit I have an ugly fondness for generalizations, so perhaps I may be forgiven when I declare that there is always something weird about a girl who majors in French.” I bought it immediately, read it on the C, read it on the G, read it on trains full of other young men from New York reading Michael Chabon, Kavalier and Clay in their hands with their arms wrapped around the striptease-surfboard poles, read it walking home and read it until it was over. It’s over but I’m still there. I am floating now, somewhere in Pittsburgh.
“No doubt all of this is not true remembrance but the ruinous work of nostalgia, which obliterates the past, and no doubt, as usual, I have exaggerated everything.”
We are on stage early this weekend – the carpenters finished the towering behemoth of a set quickly, and we’re spacing. Tech begins Wednesday.
I’m reading a book by Alan Lightman that a physicist friend recommended, GREAT IDEAS IN PHYSICS. It’s a survey non-majors kind of thing, but not dumbed down. I’m skimming through the conservation laws now. Lightman’s writing is refreshingly clear. I haven’t had physics since 9th grade, so this is all new to me, or seems so.
My father is a social scientist, and my mother is a scientific humanist – a librarian, but with a pragmatic approach to the world of the humanities. They both have feet in both worlds. I think their two children, in response, went to the opposite ends of the spectrum: theater and computers. We find ourselves pretty far apart in terms of our fields of work, but Z and I both take a lot of pleasure in bridging the gap between the two cultures whenever possible.
It feels like when I read science books, I’m doing something in connection to my family, and to our most firmly held belief – which has to do with education, and how you can never have enough of it, and how there is no excuse for not knowing everything there is to know, or trying. I think, although I don’t know for certain, that Z may feel the same way about his explorations of the arts. It’s in honor of our upbringing that we both religiously explore the other fields.
My desire to be well-rounded in this aspect used to be a drawback – I would go to the extent of not taking the classes I most wanted to take, usually in the English department, because “that was what everyone does” and I needed to also know about everything else. This is how I got through school without ever taking a Shakespeare class. I showed up on the first day of several, and decided that this was something I was already familiar with, and it would be “better for me” to suffer through something less exactly what I loved. Big mistake. I both know much less about Shakespeare than I should and also have a lingering resentment of certain other subjects.
I no longer feel that way, having given myself the luxury of specialization, and surfeited on theater to the extent that I sneeze and produce a ground plan. These days, reading physics is pure joy. Taking a break.
During spacing today, one of the actors referred to the “Z axis,” and I had to take way too long to remember what that was – a string of memories that took me back to ninth grade, to graph paper, to math that I enjoyed, math involving things like “line segments.”
I actually had to remember the cover of my old graph-paper pad, a green and burgundy thing, before I could remember the “Z axis.” I miss geometry. (Lightman says geometry was da Vinci’s favorite.) I was never patient enough to be good at it – but I did like it, and I think it more than any other discipline of science or math stayed in my brain.
Geometry was also where I developed the one joke which I actually made up myself – a joke about a protractor which achieved legendary status in that particular math class, in my junior high. (You had to be there.) I have never since been able to create a math joke, or any kind of joke, but geometry seems unmathematically playful, and works with my mind.
That made me think about staging a scene for SIAW a couple years back, when I was still struggling to get out of my tendency to over-block everything. I let the actors do what I considered to be a very free process, with lots of improv, and (for me) relatively little shape-based intervention.
When one of my friends saw the scene, he said, with total honesty, “I never would have thought of staging it that way – with all the triangles.” I guess it wasn’t as free a process as I’d thought.
I do hope that this is all somehow leading back to FLATLAND. I blogged a few months back about the incumbent destruction of Meyer Library, and how I feel like before they destroy it, they should let me and J.W. stage that book in and around its hallowed halls. I’ve done exactly nothing about this, but now I’m mentioning it again, and maybe it’ll happen.
(Created a “science” category with this post.)
The preservation of self: that could be the motto for all of Sacks’s writing on neurological disorders. The so-called normal case is highly contingent, he seems to be saying, depending on the physical integrity of the brain beneath, and in what we refer to as the abnormal case we are still dealing with a self in the fullest sense. There is always an “I” there, someone to whom things matter; so long as there is consciousness at all, there is a subject of that consciousness. Even if you can’t tell your wife from a hat, there is still a you that must deal with this disability. Ultimately, then, Sacks’s clinical case studies are exercises in love and respect.
From Colin McGinn’s NYRB piece on Oliver Sacks’s new book about music.
Off topic but on subject, I rented a guitar yesterday. I went in for a banjo but couldn’t bring myself to do it. The two I could afford weren’t any good. So, for a very small amount of money, I have an Ovation around the Portland apartment now.
Kim and I had breakfast this morning and went to Half Price Books. I got lost in brilliant, wonderful Anthony Lane‘s Eric Bentleyesque anthology of film criticism, NOBODY’S PERFECT. I adore his writing:
“On a broiling day, I ran to a screening of Contact, the Jodie Foster flick about messages from another galaxy. I made it for the opening credits, and, panting heavily — which, with all due respect, is not something that I find myself doing that often in Jodie Foster films — I started taking notes. These went “v. gloomy,” “odd noir look for sci-fi,” “creepy shadows in outdoor scene,” and so on. Only after three-quarters of an hour did I remember to remove my dark glasses.”
I had some momentary sadness about not being able to buy the book, due to being s.d.f. The only book I’ve allowed myself to acquire in the last year is Kate Christensen’s THE GREAT MAN – I took a paperback pre-release readers’ copy from a laundry room in Denver. But the day reminded me that I need to keep wandering through bookstores, and that my ideal life (which I have not arrived at yet) will include both living out of a suitcase and having a place in which to accumulate a library. An apartment is secondary. Just a library.
If I were wealthier I would buy every book I want in every city I go to, and give them away upon leaving, thereby reading everything and also disseminating bookage. Which is a lovely plan, but about as practical as the advice I read for prospective pet-adopters in a magazine today: “If you want to adopt a pet but have no time to spend with them, but have a lot of money, adopt the pet and pamper him with visits to doggie day care.” Somehow I think that the “but have lots of money” clause is going to be a problem.
More Anthony Lane in a profile: “The truth is, that if you’re working on a piece at three in the morning, you’re not Keats; you’re just late. The glitch in this argument is that I’m not a creative writer. I don’t write poetry or novels or drama but criticism, which is the eunuch of the family. I watch other people doing it and talk about what they’re doing in a squeaky, high voice.”
goes to an enormous 544-page graphic novel, The Invention of Hugo Cabret. “Orphan, clock keeper, and thief, Hugo lives in the walls of a busy Paris train station, where his survival depends on secrets and anonymity.”
I have been out of touch with the world of kids’ books since I stopped working at Kepler’s in Menlo Park. Like all other interests in my life, it’s gone the way of theater. When I first got to LA, I landed a great job at Children’s Book World (where Toby used to work) but after one day of the commute from Hollywood to midtown West Side, I knew it was going to leave me too drained to rehearse in the evenings. So, very reluctantly, I had to quit.
But listening to the Golden Compass on audiobook has made me miss that universe. I wonder if there’s an opportunity for a theater company to do a new release of a straight-to-audio book, one that doesn’t have a printed version.
Dara Weinberg 