Oliver Sacks, David Foster Wallace, D.T. Max, Joyce Carol Oates, C.K. Williams: A morning spent reading

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.)

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Adding two new books to my scattershot world, including A Northern Light

I was escaping on Thursday as I made my way to the bookstore.  The heat, a particular conversation, a pedigreed failure.  In the summer, at bookstores, I tend to stand among those tables dedicated to middle- and high-school reading lists—looking at all that I've missed, scorning my own piecemeal education, regretting my only partially successful autodidactism.  I studied the history and sociology of science at Penn.  I teach memoir.  I review (mostly) adult literary fiction.  I have (most recently) been writing young adult fiction that is perhaps not really young adult fiction.  I started out as a poet.  I am currently researching the heck out of Bruce Springsteen.  My triple-stacked bookshelves reflect my scattershot world.  Despite the fact that I have tried, since I was a teen, to read at least three books a week (and, later in life, The New Yorker, New York Times, Newsweek, Vanity Fair, and the book review sections of The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, and the Philadelphia Inquirer), I have a whole lot of gaps, always, to fill.  I am embarrassed, often, by my own not-knowingness.  I could not pass any test that might be given.

Thursday, ignoring the criminally ignored two dozen as-yet-unread books stacked on my office floor, I bought two more—A Northern Light, which Melissa Sarno recommended, and Truman Capote's In Cold Blood.  I have read all of Capote except In Cold Blood.  Don't ask why; it just happened.

Yesterday, between bouts of Springsteen research, I read A Northern Light, a young adult novel written by Jennifer Donnelly, which was a Printz Honor Book when it was released ten years ago, earned numerous additional citations, and continues to be extremely well read today.  Set in 1906 and featuring Mattie, a sixteen-year-old farm-bound girl who loves words, A Northern Light is, I found, an instructive book—thoroughly researched, strategically structured, seeded with the right kind of issues for young readers of historical fiction (feminism, race relations, the value of education and literature).  I loved, most of all, Donnelly's Weaver, an African American adolescent.  Weaver has much to say, and Donnelly, wisely, gives him room—to be smart, to be angry, to be hopeful, to be Mattie's truest friend. Boy-girl friendships that are honest and meaningful and yet not tinged with erotic desire are so rare in books, and especially rare in young adult literature, and so I was happy to spend some time on this warm weekend making this acquaintance.

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The Thanksgiving Visitor/Truman Capote (illustrated by Beth Peck)

I've had a heck of a morning working on highly technical client stories (I think I got up just a tad too early for this stuff, even for me) and I—well, I needed a break.  So I went to my shelves and dug out one of my favorite Truman Capote stories, The Thanksgiving Visitor, illustrated by Beth Peck. 

It always softens my edges, this well-spun tale about Buddy and his closest friend, Miss Sook, who is not just a friend but an elderly cousin.  They're getting ready for a big Thanksgiving meal and everything is just fine this November 1932 until Miss Sook decides that Buddy should invite his nemesis, Odd Henderson, for the turkey meal.  Capote is in fine form throughout the story.  Here's our first glimpse of Odd:

Tall for his age, a bony boy with muddy-red hair and narrow yellow eyes, he towered over all his classmates—would have in any event, for the rest of us were only seven or eight years old.  Odd had failed first grade twice and was now serving his second term in the second grade.  This sorry record wasn't due to dumbness—Odd was intelligent, maybe cunning is a better word—but he took after the rest of the Hendersons. The whole family (there were ten of them, not counting Dad Henderson, who was a bootlegger and usually in jail, all scrunched together in a four-room house next door to a Negro church) was a shiftless, surly bunch, every one of them ready to do you a bad turn; Odd wasn't the worst of the lot, and brother, that is saying something.

The question is frequently asked:  Who are children's books for?  I say the best of them are for all of us, at every age.  And I can't think of a better family tale for this time of year than The Thanksgiving Visitor. 

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English 145 (6): The Art of the Interview

In English 145, we talked about the art of the interview. About framing the conversation without boxing it in. About listening for the tangent and knowing which tangents count. About never pretending to understand more than one actually does. About follow-up and follow-through. We had the fabulous Paris Review interview of Truman Capote as a model Q and A, and then we turned to one another, or the students did, for trial interviews.

I took a walk while the students dialogued. Found my way to a garden that I'd never seen before —a place tucked behind the Penn medical buildings and dedicated to a son. It was damp and chilly out, and there was just one young man sitting on one bench, looking out over the garden-wrapped pond. I missed, I realized, my students, asking and listening a mere ten-minute walk away, and soon I was hurrying back toward them, to that warm hearth that is the Kelly Writers House. Their interviews were done. There'd been some homework; we discussed it. The conversation then could have gone a thousand ways, but it went toward the personal—toward their lives, their decisions, their ideas about ethical living. For thirty minutes, perhaps more, they were the teachers. I listened.

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