new additions to my library

When my American Express bill came in this past month, something odd and spectacularly unprecedented occurred: I owed a mere ninety-nine cents.  True, I have been so holed up here, so focused on work, that I've been operating as a blinkered horse, my eyes on the finish line (s), my mind shutting out all purchase-able distractions.  Also true: Except when it comes to buying gifts (I buy many, many gifts) I have never been exactly profligate.  Malls drive me batty.  Excess crowds me in.  My decorating aesthetic is whatever lies between homey and uncluttered, warm and just enough.  My wardrobe features three pairs of jeans, some turtlenecks, some sweaters/coats, an occasional skirt, and some dresses, for when I have to wear dresses.  My mother used to buy me my most interesting, most meaningful clothes.  She passed away several years ago, and I never rose to the challenge.

(I do like shoes.  By my count, I have too many shoes.)

Still, what I do buy is books—I buy a lot of books—in support of an industry, in specific support of specific authors.  Thus, I rectified my no-buying spree yesterday by adding a number of titles to my personal library, all of them, I realize, falling into the nonfiction camp.  That's nonfiction the way I define it, and not the way John D'Agata wishes I would.  (For more on the D'Agata controversy, I suggest you read the Gideon Lewis-Kraus RIFF in the New York Times.) 

Among the titles that will (at one point) be reported on here are the following:

Rough Likeness: Essays (Lia Purpura)
Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work (Edwidge Danticat)
Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, death, and hope in a Mumbai undercity (Katherine Boo)
Winter: Five Windows on the Season (Adam Gopnik)
House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East (Anthony Shadid)
Istanbul: Memories and the City (Orhan Pamuk)
The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist (Orhan Pamuk)

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Story by way of indirection

It was from "Spire" that we read yesterday, Lia Purpura's four-page essay in On Looking.  We had been speaking about the ways that stories can and do get told.  We had listened to pages from Jill Bialosky's History of a Suicide and I'd been tempted to carry in Kathleen Finneran's The Tender Land when, at the last moment, I shuffled Lia's book into my bag.  Like Bialosky and Finneran, Purpura writes of suicide in "Spire," but Purpura works by way of indirection, leading us toward feeling not with biographical detail, not with the facts, per se, but with an astonishing series of images.  Here is the story's final paragraph:

Once while I was working I looked up and saw a woman digging her window box out with a fork.  It was cold.  Late November.  She dug and pulled the dry stalks up, shook the roots and put the old flower heads into a little basket. Then she hit a tough spot—it must have been frozen—and had to dig hard.  The fork caught the plant's root and flipped it in air.  She watched it go down.  Put her hands on the rail and watched as it fell.  Then she stopped altogether.  Left the fork in.  Left the window box like that, half-finished, all winter.

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Joshua Bennett: Beyond Poetry

We began class by listening to Sylvia Plath and Etheridge Knight read their work—tape recordings from years ago played out loud to a quiet room so that we might understand long lines, short lines, loud inside soft, the daring image inside the purposefully mundane, the right repetition, the empowered list.  We had listened to that, and then we had read out loud.  We had dreamed about our memoirs, closed with lines from Lia Purpura, packed our things; we were almost gone.  Except that B was still there, his laptop open.  You were speaking of poetry, he said.  You should hear this. 

I have watched and listened to this three times now.  I share it with you.  A former Penn student in a scream sing from the very top, as he says, of his fingertips, while President Obama looks admiringly on.

Remarkable.

Thank you, B.

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First Class Day at Penn

Yes, this is a photo of San Francisco, just beneath that great and golden bridge, and yes, Penn is urban and east coast and miles from any bay. But this photo is the right photo for my present mood, for I've just returned from the University of Pennsylvania, my alma mater, where I travel now not as student, but as teacher.

Those of you who follow this blog know how many different ways I've danced the syllabus through. You know how many books I re-read before selecting passages to share ("Autopsy Report," by Lia Purpura; a snatch of Livinia Greenlaw: the opening homage to a photograph in Jayne Anne Phillips' Black Tickets). You know how much music I listened to before I chose the songs that would inspire a piece about weather and mood, (a Soweto Gospel Choir classic) or the jib and jab of conversation ("Arrimate Paca" by Eliades Ochoa). But what you didn't know, perhaps, was how eager I was to meet the students, whose work I had the privilege of reading over this summer.

Today I met the students. They are as fine as the weather we were granted.

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