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I had time, just now, that quiet time, of reading the magazines that came in last week. Oh, the stolen deliciousness of it all. In The New Yorker, I read of Oliver Sacks on his years dedicated, in large part, to experimenting with large doses of amphetamines, morning-glory seeds, LSD, morphine, and all other manner of neuro-shifters. I thought of all the Sacks I have read these many years, of the seeming innocence of his beguiling childhood memoir, Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood, of his great empathy for patients and ferns and other earthly beings. His New Yorker essay delves, skips, and buries time before it rushes, headlong, toward its hard stop. Sacks had discovered a book on migraines and it had become important to him. He had a revelation about migraines. He ...
... had a sense of resolution, too, that I was indeed equipped to write a Liveing-like book, that perhaps I could be the Liveing of our time.
The next day, before I returned Liveing's book to the library, I photocopied the whole thing, and then, bit by bit, I started to write my own book. The joy I got from doing this was real—infinitely more substantial than the vapid mania of amphetamines—and I never took amphetamines again.
Writing books, Sacks suggests, saved him. The next story I read, an excerpt from D.T. Max's much heralded biography of David Foster Wallace (in Newsweek), suggests how writing would and would not save this genius. The excerpt, which focuses on Wallace's early correspondence with Jonathan Franzen as well as his infatuation with Mary Karr, suggests that this book is well worth reading as a whole. I've always been a huge D.T. Max fan, and I'm certain I will learn from these pages.
In between the Sacks and the Wallace, I found two poems of interest. Joyce Carol Oates has a chilling, compelling poem in The New Yorker called "Edward Hopper's '11 A.M.,' 1926"�worth reading from beginning to end. Oates was one of several authors who contributed to one of my favorite poetry collections (a gift from my sister) called The Poetry of Solitude: A Tribute to Edward Hopper (collected and introduced by Gail Levin). Clearly this project, all these years later, continues to inspire.
Finally, within the pages of this week's New Yorker is a poem by C.K. Williams, one of my favorite living poets. I had the great pleasure and privilege, years ago, of interviewing C.K. in his Princeton home for a magazine story. Later, I saw him read at the Writer's House at Penn. He remains vital, interesting, experimental, and honest, and his new poem, "Haste," is a terrifying portrait of time. From its later phrases:
No one says Not so fast now not Catherine when I hold her not our dog as I putter behind her yet everything past present future rushes so quickly through me I've frayed like a flag
Unbuckle your spurs life don't you know up ahead where the road ends there's an abyss? ...
My first corporate interview isn't until 1 this afternoon. I'm sitting down to read Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. I figure it's time.
(That above, by the way, is my cat Colors, who lived with me for many years. She's climbing into my bedroom window. I'm eleven or twelve years old. And I'm reading on my bed as she pokes her pink nose in.)
4 Comments on Oliver Sacks, David Foster Wallace, D.T. Max, Joyce Carol Oates, C.K. Williams: A morning spent reading, last added: 9/8/2012
Writing and reading totally saves me. Writing keeps the dark away. Reading is the infusion of light.
Much to ponder here.
Not sure you will be able to concentrate on your corporate interview after being immersed in In Cold Blood. You might want to put back some light by reading some poetry.
I have not read In Cold Blood either. I'll wait for your impressions. I'm ready the book club book and woefully behind in it...since the meeting is tomorrow and I'm only halfway done
A boy stares down his biggest fear in the forest by refusing to believe it's real, in this clever, remarkable book.
With subtle, artful cues, award winners Williams and Swiatkowska show readers that if they choose not to be afraid of monsters, none can ever get to them.
Once upon a time, despite all of the scary things he'd heard about the forest, a boy decided to walk through it, though we don't know exactly why.
Maybe he was on an errand or he lived nearby or he just wanted to go from here to there. But it didn't really matter because there he was.
He was in the very place everyone said had big, dark trees that block sunlight and cliffs that he could fall off.
You know, a regular, ordinary forest where there are probably bears who growl and wolves who howl.
And how does everyone know this? "Because if you listened very hard you could almost hear them," Williams writes.
And don't forget big snakes that slither right next to where people walk.
For a scary forest, it was pretty typical, except for the fact that it also had a monster. At least that's what people said.
They said the monster was huge and it was green…or was it blue?
"Or maybe it changed colors. It had long, sharp claws, for another thing," Williams writes, and big teeth, fangs, and a prickly tall so much bigger than a porcupine's.
And, of course, its favorite thing to do was scare little children. Really scare them.
But the boy wasn't like many people. He didn't believe any of it. Well, most of it he didn't believe.
0 Comments on A Not Scary Story About Big Scary Things as of 1/1/1900
The books continue to pile up around here, and I remain a weak reading sister—too consumed with tying up corporate projects while trying to pierce the veil of a manuscript in progress, two things not best done at the same time. Lousy excuses—selfish, self-involved—and it is time to sit up straight, to get on with things, to declare on this blog, at this time, that I thoroughly enjoyed my read of C.K. Williams' On Whitman. It's a pocketbook-sized book done up in a symphony of greens. Personal and provocative, exhorting and deliberate, a hint of the long, feral stride about it, On Whitman is Williams on Leaves of Grass—the great poet's take on the great poet's music and light.
On Whitman is declarative and sure footed. It leaves the reader with a new kind of knowing. "... there had been no poem in literature before him that had anything approaching the wildness of Whitman's language and structure," Williams writes. And: "Just reading it, the brilliance of the moments of inspiration are like raw synaptic explosions, like flashbulbs going off in the brain, in the mind: pop, pop, pop." And: "... rather than using mind to alter reality, he finds ways to enlarge the underused senses of the mind, to fling the eyes and ears open wider, to make more sensitive the endings of the nerves."
On Whitman sounds every inch the C.K. Williams I once had the privilege of interviewing for a magazine story—alive, assertive, remarkably well illuminated. Indeed, after finishing the book, I returned to the story I had written, to remind myself of that day's details. I dwelt, for a moment, in the story's start. I thought (and lately I have needed to be knocked about a bit with this thought), Kephart, You have lived a lucky life.
Here is Mr. Williams, esteemed and estimable, on the day he invited me in.
On a street not far from Princeton University, in a place of Mexican storefronts and crowded-close stoops, of porches burdened like attics with so many nearly discarded things, C.K. Williams, one of the country’s greatest poets, makes his stateside home. He’s taller than you expect him to be, though you’ve been warned. Younger seeming than his photos make him, and gentle, extraordinarily gentle, in the way he invites you in. He takes your coat. He leads you through the immaculate downstairs rooms and back, into the kitchen, where his wife’s paper whites are still in bloom. You confess that you haven’t been successful with late-stage paper whites yourself. He forgives you for that and then you both take your chairs while the sun, through the window, heats the room.
1 Comments on C.K. Williams On Whitman/Reflections, last added: 6/11/2010
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Writing and reading totally saves me. Writing keeps the dark away. Reading is the infusion of light.
Much to ponder here.
Not sure you will be able to concentrate on your corporate interview after being immersed in In Cold Blood. You might want to put back some light by reading some poetry.
I have not read In Cold Blood either. I'll wait for your impressions. I'm ready the book club book and woefully behind in it...since the meeting is tomorrow and I'm only halfway done
I've not read In Cold Blood either, but I'm so glad you had some time to yourself this morning to really read. :)
What wonderful reads. I have loved many of Sacks' books. I wasn't aware of his earlier drug use.