I’m currently listening to an audio version of A Walk in the Woods.  It’s my favorite memoir and has been a staple of my reading life since the first time I cracked it open in the late ’90’s.

About a year ago, I heard that Robert Redford was thinking of producing and starring in a film adaptation of the book (costarring Paul Newman, awww), but I haven’t heard anything lately.

I wrote this post in the summer of 2005 and published it on my first blog, which, for inexplicable reasons, was extremely unpopular.  The blog only got about 900 hits in the first year (and about 850 of those were mine), so my entries became more and more sporadic until I quit posting altogether.  This is one of my better pieces of writing from that unfortunate blog:

It’s difficult to find a good literary humorist.  Mark Twain was a great humorist, and James Thurber was funny too.  Some people think Garrison Keillor is an amusing fella.  Others go for Bill Bryson, athough he seems to have branched out quite a bit and become like a librarian—he knows a little something about nearly everything, so he isn’t writing his snarky travelogues as much anymore (more’s the pity).

I always thought that if I became a writer, I’d try to be humorous like Douglas Coupland or maybe Carl Hiaasen, who is the master at writing subtly hilarious satire.  (Boy, do I love me some Carl)!  The problem with writing funny material is it’s really hard.  You may think you’re funny, but believe me, hardly anybody else will.  Being a humor writer has to be more difficult than being a stand-up comedian because you can’t use anything but written words to amuse readers. Nobody can hear your spoken voice or watch your facial and body expressions.  I have what I call my “fuzzy blanket” voice that I use to make people laugh.  It has helped me out of several rather sticky situations, and I think it’s probably my only real talent.  I can’t write in my “fuzzy blanket” voice though!  It would be awesome if I could because I might be rich and famous by now!

So, now that I’ve rambled on long enough, it’s time to introduce my favorite humorist of the writerly persuasion: Jean Shepherd (1921-1999).  Actually, Jean Shepherd wasn’t just a writer—he was a personality.  Mr. Shepherd hosted several midwestern radio talk shows before heading to New York City where he was a late night host for many years.  He wrote and recorded other radio shows for other stations, i.e., “Shepherd’s Pie” for a New Jersey and some midwestern affiliates.  Marshall McLuhan called him “the first radio novelist,” and Time Magazine proclaimed that he “…pretty much invented talk radio.”  He wrote short stories too, with many of his stories published in Playboy magazine in the ‘60’s.   He wrote the screenplay for “A Christmas Story” and narrated it as well.  If you want to find out more about Jean Shepherd, go to this website: www.flicklives.com.  It’s one of the best tribute sites I have ever seen. You can read some of his stories and essays there.  You can also listen to a bunch of his radio broadcasts.  It’s quite amazing, and I need to write to the host and thank him for creating such a brilliant space.

I just reread Shepherd’s In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash (1966, 264 p.), and I also read A Fistful of Fig Newtons (1981, 265 p.) for the first time.  They are short story collections, and In God We Trust…is the better of the two, but both are well worth reading.  Interspersed throughout the pages of In God We Trust… are many of the scenarios from which Shepherd based his screenplay for “A Christmas Story.”  It’s all there: the “you’ll shoot your eye out” phrase, the Little Orphan Annie decoder ring disappointment, and the leg-shaped lamp battle between Ralphie’s parents.  More “Christmas Story” vignettes can be found in Wanda Hickey’s Night of Golden Memories and Other Disasters, published in 1982.

Jean Shepherd’s greatest strength was his writing style.  He wasn’t a very sophisticated writer, but he was an exceptional describer of people, places and events.  He started off most of his semi-autobiographical stories with long-winded lead-ins to the meat ‘n potatoes of the plot.  You’d think this would be annoying, but it isn’t.  It’s mesmerizing. It envelops you and immerses you in the time and space Shepherd was describing.  You become an active participant in his world.  Here’s an example from In God We Trust…, entitled “Hairy Gertz and the Forty-Seven Crappies” (p. 71-72):

“And in the middle of the lake, several yards away, are 17,000 fishermen, in wooden rowboats rented at a buck and a half an hour.  It is 2 a.m.  The temperature is 175, with humidity to match.  And the smell of decayed toads, the dumps at the far end of the lake, and an occasional soupcon of Standard Oil, whose refinery is a couple of miles away, is enough to put hair on the back of a mud turtle.  Seventeen thousand guys clumped together in the middle, fishing for the known sixty-four crappies in the lake.”

Now Shepherd goes on to describe the crappies in an amusing way (p. 72):

“Crappies are a special breed of Midwestern fish, created by God for the express purpose of surviving in waters that would kill a bubonic plague bacillus.  They have never been known to fight, or even faintly struggle.  I guess when you’re a crappie, you figure it’s no use anyway.  One thing is as bad as another.  They’re just down there in the soup.  No one quite knows what they eat, if anything, but everybody’s fishing for them.  At two o’clock in the morning.”

He then writes more about the lake; how it’s filled up with sludge from chemical plants and sewage spilloff to the point where it makes a “gruel composed of decayed garter snakes, deceased toads, fermenting crappies, and a strange, unidentifiable liquid that holds it all together.” (p.72)

These descriptions effectively prepare the reader for the rest of the story.  By the time the (still-living) crappies rise up from their mythical underground cavern to jump into Ralphie’s boat, you’re in the zone.  You sit there grinning from ear-to-ear as you read the conclusion.  Shepherd has caught you; hook, bobber and sinker, and this happens with practically every story he writes.

I’m going to have to quit interlibrary loaning these books to myself.  It would be nice to have copies of these so that I can open one when I’m kind of bummed and enjoy sharing Ralphie’s thoughts on the beauty of brown gravy, or learn to appreciate the finer points of setting off huge deadly fireworks displays before home fireworks celebrations were sanitized and the big rockets became illegal.

Those were the days! 

“The only journey is the one within”
~Rilke

Alrighty then, you know you’re a total geek when you’re unable to decide whether you’d rather write a post about Heine or Rilke.  I mean, Heine and Rilke are just so exciting, aren’t they?  They’re right up there with winning the lottery on the excite-o-meter.  I guess I must be pretty low-maintenance or maybe just low in general.

I’ve chosen Rilke for now because I know more about him.  In fact, I went through a “Rilke phase” for a couple of months in the early ‘90’s when I would read some of his poems almost every night.  His words seemed to fit into what I was feeling at the time.  Looking at what I’ve been reading and writing about lately, I think he’ll fit just perfectly again.

His mother wanted (and dressed him as) a girl until he was around five years old, and this is why one of his six middle names is Maria.  Why didn’t he choose one of his more masculine middle names, like Josef, to be part of his moniker?  I guess we’ll never know.

Rilke was an early existentialist, although if he were here speaking to me today, I’m pretty sure he’d deny it.  He was often depressed, but he often embraced his depression.  He was often lonely, but he often reveled in his loneliness.  He was a complete, yet very flawed person.  He loved art and sculpture and was Auguste Rodin’s secretary in Paris for awhile.  He fought in WWI for the Austrian army.  Rilke was 51 years old when he died.  He had leukemia, and pricked his finger on a rose thorn which led to sepsis and death.  How apropos for a poet to experience such a poetic demise, especially Rilke!  In his poems, he often imbued inanmimate objects with a kind of innate, living cruelty.

Rilke was one of the lucky few poets to become at least moderately famous during his lifetime, but he was still poor.  It didn’t seem to bother him too much if the next poem is any indication:

Among so many people cozy in their homes,
I am like a man who explores far-off oceans.
Days with full stomachs stand on their tables;
I see a distant land full of images.

I sense another world close to me,
Perhaps no more lived in than the moon;
They, however, never let a feeling alone,
And all the words they use are so worn.

The living things I brought back with me
Hardly peep out, compared with all they own.
In their native country they were wild;
Here they hold their breath from shame.

I think the title says it all in this poem.  Rilke is aware of his individuality and separateness.  Other people can’t stand to be alone; they eat together gluttonously and they emote and they babble and they live in their “cozy homes.”  Rilke is above all this.  Even though he is just a poor poet, the “living things” in his mind’s eye must “hold their breath from shame” for they are far superior to the superficiality and acquisitiveness of the common man.  He sees beyond the trivial and reaches for the sublime.

How would Rilke feel about our current consumer-driven culture?  If he were to see how we’re destroying so much that is precious due to greed and corruption, how would he react?  I’m pretty sure he’d snicker and say something akin to “I told you so!”

The inscription is Rilke’s own.  It says:
“Rose, oh pure contradiction, joy
of being No-one’s sleep, under so
many lids.”

Ironic isn’t it?  Did he choose this epitaph before or after he was infected by the thorn?  Maybe he had a strong pre-death premonition.  Whatever the case, the words of the inscription are lovely, and they perfectly describe the multi-layered persona of Rainer Maria Rilke.

**I wrote this in 2006 after seeing Capote, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman.

I’ve always wondered why Harper Lee never wrote another book after To Kill a Mockingbird.  Was this really all she had in her?  There have been rumors for quite awhile that Truman Capote was a ghostwriter for Ms. Lee because she was having trouble with her manuscript.  I find this a bit hard to believe because their writing styles were so different, but it’s fun to speculate that it could be true.  After all, Capote was an accomplished writer.  Why couldn’t he have changed his technique to suit the occassion?

Maybe Dill Harris was totally Truman Capote’s creation.  He wanted to be immortalized in the book, so he wrote Dill in.  When you think about it, Dill wasn’t totally essential to the plot of the novel.  He was a catalyst for Jem and Scout’s risk taking–events like sneaking up on the Radley porch and snooping during Tom Robinson’s arraignment, but Jem and Scout could easily have chosen to do those things on their own.  Perhaps Capote helped Ms. Lee complete her masterpiece by inserting Dill into some of the scenes she was struggling with.

Whatever the case, To Kill a Mockingbird is, in my humble opinion, one of the best novels ever written.  I don’t really care who wrote parts of it; I’m just glad it was published!

By the way, John Megna, who played Dill in the movie, died in 1995 of AIDS complications.  He was 42 years old.  

Did you know that Leonard Nimoy has recorded more albums than The Beatles?  He has also published several books of poetry.  Here’s an example of one of his poems:

I love you
not for what
I want you to be
But for what you are

I loved you then
For what you were
I love you now
for what you have become

I miss you
And not only you

I miss what I am
When you are here…     

 -Leonard Nimoy

Now, I’m not going to be cruel, because it’s Leonard Nimoy, and you can’t be cruel to Leonard Nimoy.  I’ll just say that this poem is not exactly Pulizer material, is it?  You have to give the guy kudos for trying, though.  At least he had the guts to do it.

A long time ago, I heard him sing a cover of “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town,” and it was pretty good.  I can’t find it online, guldurnit!  One of these days, maybe I’ll locate it and provide a link. 

For now, the following You Tube video of Nimoy singing “The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins” will have to do.  Since Bilbo is a beloved fictional character, the video fits neatly into this blog.  Watching this reminded me of how much I adore Leonard Nimoy.  The dude has always known how to have fun (or maybe in this case it was some good drugs helping him along).

As an undergraduate, my major was English Lit., and my dream was to get a PhD in comparative literature and immediately become a fully tenured professor at a top-rated university like Oxford or Harvard.  Once I began teaching at this great institution, I would quickly be published and receive the highest accolades from my peers.  I would be considered to be the preeminent lit scholar of my generation and become a household name among the literati.  At literary functions, I would be hounded by adoring fans.  Whenever I opened my mouth to speak, people would crane over to listen to my brilliant words as if we were in one of those E. F. Hutton commercials.

Some of my classmates felt the same way.  We were the elite of the liberal arts college.  We ambled around campus nonchalantly and smoked nonstoppedly and argued about Eliot nonsensically.  We wore black clothing and black expressions, for we were way too cerebral to enjoy the more colorful aspects of living.  The only colorful thing we carried was a pink book of poems entitled Ariel.  Nearly all of the girls and a few of the boys toted Ariel to almost everything.  We had it with us in coffee shops and lecture halls and at sporting events.  Some of us probably slept with it under our pillows.  When we were pretending to be bored at college functions, we’d make a show of pulling it out of our bags and flashing it so that everyone would see that we were very deep and introspective and sad.  Everyone would know that we were an intellectual force to be reckoned with.

We never discussed the book with each other, which seems incredibly strange in retrospect.  Why didn’t we?  Sylvia Plath was our goddess; don’t people usually like to worship in groups?  Perhaps some forms of spirituality are too personal to share.  Perhaps I ran with a bunch of pretentious nincompoops who didn’t really care about Plath, but only wanted to seem like they did.  Perhaps my classmates went through the motions of reading her poems, but were really thinking about sex or shopping while they were doing it.  Yep, I’ll bet that’s it.

Whatever the case, I enjoyed the Ariel poems many times during my undergrad experience.  Eventually, rereading them started to seem like a bad job you dread driving to every day.  Sometime during my senior year, I put the book aside and never picked it up again.  I don’t think I have it anymore. 

A couple of days ago, I was listening to a podcast of “Poetry off the Shelf” at this website: http://poetryfoundation.org.  In this podcast, Sylvia Plath reads “Fever 103°” and a Seattle poet named Carrie Wayson interprets it.  Ms. Wayson does an excellent job, by the way.

Sylvia’s voice is downright scary, and I mean totally frightening during this reading, and it fits in perfectly with the cadence and meaning of the poem.  It gave me the shivers, and I began to remember what it felt like to connect with her back in college.  I’d forgotten how amazing her poetry is. She was and always will be one of the best poets ever.

Fever 103° by Sylvia Plath

Pure? What does it mean?
The tongues of hell

Are dull, dull as the tripleTongues of dull, fat Cerebus
Who wheezes at the gate. Incapable
Of licking clean

The aguey tendon, the sin, the sin.
The tinder cries.
The indelible smell

Of a snuffed candle!
Love, love, the low smokes roll
From me like Isadora’s scarves, I’m in a fright

One scarf will catch and anchor in the wheel.
Such yellow sullen smokes
Make their own element. They will not rise,

But trundle round the globe
Choking the aged and the meek,
The weak

Hothouse baby in its crib,
The ghastly orchid
Hanging its hanging garden in the air,

Devilish leopard!
Radiation turned it white
And killed it in an hour.

Greasing the bodies of adulterers
Like Hiroshima ash and eating in.
The sin. The sin.

Darling, all night
I have been flickering, off, on, off, on.
The sheets grow heavy as a lecher’s kiss.

Three days. Three nights.
Lemon water, chicken
Water, water make me retch.

I am too pure for you or anyone.
Your body
Hurts me as the world hurts God. I am a lantern —-

My head a moon
Of Japanese paper, my gold beaten skin
Infinitely delicate and infinitely expensive.

Does not my heat astound you. And my light.
All by myself I am a huge camellia
Glowing and coming and going, flush on flush.

I think I am going up,
I think I may rise —-
The beads of hot metal fly, and I, love, I

Am a pure acetylene
Virgin
Attended by roses,

By kisses, by cherubim,
By whatever these pink things mean.
Not you, nor him.

Not him, nor him
(My selves dissolving, old whore petticoats) —-
To Paradise.

Okay, I’m not proud (well, maybe a little).  I’ve been hesitant to admit that I’ve read these novels because they’re bestsellers and I’m supposed to be above bestsellers.  Wait, who am I trying to kid?  This blog’s reading level is elementary school, so I should be reading (and enjoying, heaven forbid) writers like Erica Jong and Nora Roberts.  No Martin Amis for me!  Beverly Cleary is about my speed. 

I put off reading The Kite Runner until the end of 2007 because of my snobbery about mainstream fiction.  Right before Thanksgiving, I was bitching to one of the baristas at my favorite coffee hangout about not having any good reading material and she handed The Kite Runner to me.  With a heavy sigh I sat down and began reading, and I read practically nonstop for the rest of the morning.

I loved it.  The problem is, I didn’t know why I loved it.  The structure is simplistic, the writing is plain and childish, the plot is predictable and it’s extremely melodramatic.  In spite of this, though, when I think about some parts of the story, I still get all misty.  It’ll be a book I’ll reread and cry over again several times.  It’ll be placed in the hallowed section of my favorite bookcase where all my “hall-of-fame” books are.  I won’t even hide it in my bedroom with my treasured Harry Potter and Wizard of Oz collections. 

I just finished reading A Thousand Splendid Suns.  It didn’t appeal to me as much as The Kite Runner, but it was a worthwhile read. It was poignant and moving and melodramatic, and by the end I felt emotionally exhausted.  Those poor women!  This poor world!

I think Mr. Hosseini’s novels are so appealing because he’s an emotional alchemist.  He’s magical.  He knows how to tap into the deepest areas of our brain where we hide our ”humanness” and bring all those hidden feelings bubbling to the surface.  There’s something about the way he writes that is primitive and visceral and seems very genuine.  He is a consummate storyteller, and I hope he continues to write similar unsophisticated yet significant novels for many years to come.

The Kite Runner ♥♥♥♥1/2

A Thousand Splendid Suns ♥♥♥

I promised myself when I began posting on this new blog about a month ago that I wouldn’t do this–I wouldn’t let it consume so much of my life that I start to find it difficult to do anything else.  Well, looky here.  Ever since reading about the new Amis book (The Second Plane) on John Self’s excellent blog: http://theasylum.wordpress.com, I’ve been obsessing about all things Amis.  Dammit!  Now I’ll have to write something about him, even though I don’t have anything earth-shattering to say.

I really liked Amis way back when.  His novels disturbed me and made me guffaw at the same time.  Nothing delights me more than a well-turned phrase, and Amis was the undisputed master of the written word during the ’80’s and ’90’s.  Love him or hate him–you had to admire his literary chops. 

My favorite Amis novel is Success, even though it’s incredibly misogynistic and self-congratulatory.  (I could picture Amis smirking and snickering malevolently while writing some of the more visceral phrases contained in this little novel).  The book is totally nasty, and absolutely perfect.  I hated Gregory and Terence and their rotten little attitudes and the disgusting way(s) in which they dealt with their lives but I absolutely adored this novel.  It’s another one of those psuedo-nihilistic ”to hell with the world” books that make me sigh with pleasure. 

I’ve also read London Fields (excellent) Money (very good) and Yellow Dog (confusing).  I think he was trying too hard when he was writing Yellow Dog.  The youthful anger seemed to be gone.  He’d lost his edge.

I looked up a few things about Amis today.  I know there are many people out there who can’t stand his arrogance, but I’ve always looked at him as kind of a demented prophet.  It seems like a great deal of what he has said in the past has been pretty accurate. 

Here are a few Amis snippets from the early 1990’s:

“The theme that the good is gone is as old as literature.  Everything has been cheapened; the accumulation of experience is causing decay.”

“I think there is a lot of romaticism in my work, but it’s thwarted by distortion and perversity, false commercial images in TV, literature, porn…Like Philip Larkin’s poetry, love is conspicuous by its absence.” 

I won’t be reading The Second Plane.  The old Martin Amis that I knew and loved is gone.  I don’t want to ruin my memories of him.

Paul Auster is one of the greatest writers of the 20th/21st century.  I don’t apologize for this bold statement, nor do I think it presumptious of me to make it.  In fact, let me reiterate: Paul Auster is one of the greatest writers of the 20th/21st century.  I just heard him read from Travels in the Scriptorium on KQED, and was amazed at how quickly I was drawn into the story.  Now I must read Travels very soon because I absolutely have to see what happens next.  Who other than Mr. Auster can make everyday inanities like urinating and defecating seem beautiful and pleasurable while imbuing them with an overwhelming sense of sadness and loss at the same time?  Who other than Mr. Auster can immediately suck you into the mind of a single character in such a way that you actually feel that you are becoming that person?  Who other than Mr. Auster can write a story within a story within a story with such majesty that you feel like you are part of an otherworldly dream while you are engrossed in his novel(s)?  Reading Auster is an all-encompassing experience; you feel it from the top of your head to the tips of your toes.

I have read The Brooklyn Follies and Oracle Night.  I’m not sure which I prefer–probably Follies because it was more dystopic and I groove on dystopic novels.  I think I’ll characterize both books as existential noir, even though putting tags on his novels seems to be too limiting.  Follies also had tons of symbolism and humor, but I wasn’t laughing.  I was too enthralled to laugh.  Damn, now I’m going to have to read those novels again as well!

I don’t know how to classify Mr. Auster’s philosophies, and this bothers me because I dearly love to put things in boxes.  There are existential elements in his novels, but they contain so much more than just angsty existential hoohaw.  I hate to label anything postmodern because it’s such a trashcan term.  I think Mr. Auster defies labeling, so from now on I’m going to call his novels (and similar works by other authors) Austerian ™ literature.

Who knows, it might even catch on someday!

 

After much contemplation, I have decided that my favorite ‘05 novel is this one.  In case you can’t read the title, it’s The Ha-Ha, and the author is Dave King.  This is Mr. King’s first novel, and he’s already brilliant.  Envy threatened to rear its ugly head while I was devouring this book.  If I could write this well, I’d quit my job and take up writing for a living, for sure!

I hardly ever buy books because I have the technology to interlibrary loan them, but I made an exception with this one and ordered it from Amazon to give to my father for Christmas.  He loved it, and that’s really saying something because he’s the pickiest reader I know.  The book’s hero is a disabled Vietnam veteran named Howard Kapostash.  His brain was damaged by a land mine in ‘Nam, and as a result of his injury, Howard is unable to speak.  Sylvia Mohr, his narcissistic ex-girlfriend, saddles him with Ryan, her 9 year old son, while she trots off to rehab to kick her cocaine habit.  The plot centers on how Howard and his roomates deal with having this kid in their lives, and how Howard deals with everything else as well.  There are so many layers to this novel: there’s the current story, there’s the backstory and there’s the story inside Howard’s mind.