“Dear Derrida”

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Kirby, David. “Dear Derrida.” The House of Blue Light. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998. pp 16-20.

When I first read “Dear Derrida” I thought of the word childish. Read it out loud and you get the sense of someone who is hopelessly involved with gossipers, someone who is in a group always looking for the next thing to poke fun of and is never really able to escape. For example, the narrator and his classmates make fun of a professor with a stutter. They drop water balloons on an unsuspecting victim. Even when the narrator has “had it” with present company he finds himself in the company of new roommates; individuals with more swagger and bravado.

BookLust Twist: From Book Lust in the chapter called “Kitchen Sink Poetry” (p 138).

Great Fortune

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Okrent, Daniel. Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center. New York: Viking, 2003.

There is something to be said about a man with a vision, especially when that vision becomes the great and unparalleled Rockefeller Center in New York City. Great Fortune captures not only the man behind the vision and the epic journey of John D. Rockefeller and his team, but the society and political arena of their era. The 1930s are the beginning of urban sprawl going vertical in the form of skyscrapers. As the buildings start reaching higher and higher they become more grandiose and complicated; as do the people responsible for this growth at such an unlikely time in history. The founders of Rockefeller Center are egotistic, artistic, ambitious visionaries. Despite being mired in the Great Depression luminaries such as architect Raymond Hood believe in the grandeur of the project with unwavering faith.

The first thing I noticed about the copy of Great Fortune that came to the library was the cover. If you aren’t looking closely you would miss it. The cover with the ISBN of 0670031690 has a collage of four photos, all in tinted black and white. A photograph of a couple dancing. Below that, a picture of the Rockettes standing in a circle. Below that, iron workers presumably working on the construction of RCA building. Along side these three photos is a larger one of the RCA building. In my copy of Great Fortune the dancing couple featured in the upper left hand corner are Mary Rae and Naldi doing a waltz in the Rainbow room…except something is different about them. They do not hold the same pose. Mary Rae and Naldi are nose to nose in my cover shot. I’m not even sure they are the same dancers. Why was this one photo swapped out for another? Curious. For an illustration of what I mean click here. Take note of the photo of the two dancers. Look at their gentle pose. Then click on the cover and see how the photo changes. The dancers become more dynamic, more passionate.

BookLust Twist: From More Book Lust in the chapter called “Building Blocks” (p 38).

“Strip Poker”

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Kirby, David. “Strip Poker.” The House of Blue Light. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998. pp 3-5.

“Strip Poker” is a story wrapped in a memory. Kirby is donating blood when a picture of Ava Gardiner revives a lost memory. He remembers asking his mother if he would like to play strip poker. He is only eight and yet he knows that the strategy is to begin the game wearing as many articles of clothing possible. He can picture the different layers his mother would don. When she replies, “no, thank you, darling” he is struck by how there was no explanation for this declination. Nothing that would explain what was so wrong with his request. This leads to thoughts of other misrepresentations of the truth, each thought bouncing off another and another until Kirby is brought back to reality by the nurse taking his blood donation. She asks if he is a runner because his pulse is slow.

I liked this poem (the very first one in House of Blue Light because of the train of thoughts Kirby has while donating blood. It reminds me of my meandering ponderings and how when my husband asked what I am thinking about, before I can answer him, I have to ask “Do you want the whole train or just the caboose?”

BookLust Twist: From Book Lust in the chapter called “Kitchen Sink Poetry” (p 138).

A Drinking Life

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Hamill, Pete. A Drinking Life. Narrated by Jonathan Davis. Prince Frederick: Recorded Books, 2003.

As a first-time audio book listener, here are my perceptions: there are pros and cons to listening to an audio book. For the cons, it is less imaginative when someone fills in the voices and sounds effects of the story. You also can’t take note of a favorite line or phrase. Things that make you laugh out loud are between your ears and not on a page you can quote from later. You miss out on illustrations, photographs, the feel of paper between your fingers as you don’t get to turn the pages…
But here is the benefit to an audio book: you can walk for hours and hours on a treadmill and be thoroughly entertained. Such is my life in the middle of April. But, a review:

A Drinking Life is an odyssey. It is an autobiographical examination of alcoholism where the drinking escalates slowly, sip by sip, drink by drink. For me, it dragged on in places. Hamill spends two thirds of the book setting the stage for his lead performance as an alcoholic. Starting with Hamill’s early childhood in the early 1940s he recounts his formative years living with his Irish parents in Brooklyn, New York. His father’s own battle with the bottle is omnipresent, a constant in Hamill’s life. That lays the groundwork for the excuses Hamill will make and his ultimate drinking downfall. Bars and beer are in the background as Hamill describes other obsessions in his life: comics as a child, newspapers, art and fighting as a teen, sex throughout the ages, and later as an adult, traveling, politics and writing.  Alcohol is the one constant through it all.

I am going to sound like a prim, prissy, panties-in-a-wad puss, but I really believe A Drinking Life should have come with a disclaimer. Rap artists have to slap a sticker announcing “explicit” when they swear, mention drugs or sex, on an album and yet Pete Hamill can do all those things, describe sex scenes with detailed wild abandon, he can use every swear word (included the dreaded “c” word), and remember violent beatings he would receive and give…all without some kind of heads up to the reader.

BookLust Twist: From Book Lust in the chapter called “Lost Weekends” (p 147).

“By a Swimming Pool…”

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Collins, Billy. “By a Swimming Pool Outside Siracusa.” Nine Horses: Poems.New York: Random House, 2002.

I have to start off by saying every time I have a Billy Collins poem on my “read list” I know I’m in for a treat. His poetry is not the stuff of stuffy, if that makes sense. His poetry is the jeans and sneakers variety, hanging out just waiting to be approached. Take, for example, “By a Swimming Pool Outside Siracusa.” Here are the tags I jotted down the first time I read it, “first person, communication, language, weather, Italy.” Here are the tags I added the second time I read it, “vacation, alcohol, drunk, humor.” Because, as I read it, the narrator became less stringent about formality of words to the point of funny. You can almost feel the ooze of relaxation seep into the words.

BookLust Twist: From Book Lust in the chapter called “Kitchen-Sink Poetry” (p 138).

Journey Beyond Selene

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Kluger, Jeffrey. Journey Beyond Selene: Remarkable Expeditions Past Our Moon and to the Ends of the Solar System. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999.

If astronauts and spaceships fuel the imaginations of little boys, Journey Past Selene more than ignites the scientific minds of grown men. Kluger takes us back to the early 1960s – just before man walked on the moon. Back to the beginnings of Jet Propulsion Laboratory and its spaceships. These unmanned rockets were going on extraordinary expeditions, traveling to the unthinkable ends of the solar system. Journey Beyond Selene takes us to the moons of Jupiter and Saturn and Neptune and beyond. We get a first class trip to fantastical moons with names like Despina, Titania and my favorite, Ophelia. We get to meet the ambitious scientists and engineers and hopefuls behind the project. We get ensnared in the red tape of government funding. As readers, thanks to Kluger’s straight-forward, no-nonsense approach, we have the luxury of keeping our feet firmly planted on terra firma while our imaginations soar beyond Selene.

Author Fact: Kluger coauthored Lost Moon: the Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13 which was made into a movie starring Tom Hanks. Time Magazine has a bio on Kluger and their slightly outdated picture of Kluger reminds me of Steve Buscemi for some odd reason. Maybe it’s the stare…

Book Trivia: Journey Beyond Selene has some of the coolest pictures of moons.

BookLust Twist: From Book Lust in the chapter “The Moon’s My Destination” (p 158).

“Goodbye, Place I Lived Nearly 23 Years…”

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Young, Dean. “Goodbye, Place I Lived Nearly 23 Years / Almost Everyone Left Before Me.” Skid. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002. pp 50-51.

Just the title of the poem alone had me scratching my head. Where was this place? This place someone lived for nearly 23 years? At first (logical) thought, childhood home. Many people do not venture from the nest immediately after turning 18. Later, after I read the poem more than once I thought commune. Definitely some sort of hazy, free-love commune where drugs and music are involved. Still later I wondered if I was trying too hard to decipher something that didn’t need such analysis. I mean, how can one respond to the line, “When I told Scoot my father died, he told me he was gay. A trade? Yes but no” (p 50 -51). There is no real flirty funny in this and yet I was amused all the same.

BookLust Twist: From Book Lust in the chapter called “Kitchen-Sink Poetry” (p138).

Alice Springs

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Gemmell, Nikki. Alice Springs. New York: Viking, 1999.

If you have ever read The Bean Trees or Pigs in Heaven by Barbara Kingsolver you might be reminded of Taylor Greer when you read Nikki Gemmell’s Alice Springs. There are definite similarities between Taylor Greer and Phillipa “Snip” Freeman, the heroine of Alice Springs. For starters, both characters are fiercely independent; both have a wanderer spirit and a devil-may-care attitude about what anyone thinks of them. Neither of them can commit to a love interest. But, Snip is older, and takes more risks with relationships and sex than Taylor does. Snip rules her world with her body. She is used to loving and leaving the men she meets.

It is after her grandmother’s death that we first meet Snip. She has been given an inheritance check with the three word  instruction “hunt him down.” Snip knows the him is her father and hunting him down will be the easy part, for he isn’t hiding. It’s the why that has Snip puzzled. What is she supposed to do once the hunted has been successfully hunted? To get to her father, Bud, Snip travels to the Aboriginal  outback. Along the way Snip takes a traveling companion who gets under her skin more than she expects.Then, a surprising thing happens. The longer Snip stays rooted in one place the more she is exposed to the powers of belonging somewhere.

Gemmell writes like the ocean. The words flow with rhythmic intensity, pounding with violence, soothing with consistency. The storyline is liquid and slippery; it washes over you again and again.

Favorite lines (and there were a few): “No-one gets under her skin like her mother does, no-one hits on half-truths like her” (p 70) and “Some kids vanish from their parents’ lives , to rattle them into noticing” (p 120).

Author Fact: Gemmell anonymously wrote the erotic book The Bride Stripped Bare but claimed it as her own right before publication.

Book Trivia: On Gemmell’s website Alice Springs is explained as a novel that was born not with character or plot in mind, but with a place. I like that imagery a lot. In Australia Alice Springs was published under the name Cleve.

BookLust Twist: From Book Lust in the chapter called “Australian Fiction” (p 29). Simple enough.

“Blue Garden”

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Young, Dean. “Blue Garden.” Skid. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002. pp 18-19.

At first reading, “Blue Garden” seemed nothing more than an admonishment to the reader about what a poem should and shouldn’t be. Upon closer evaluation the interpretation falls away and the potential for something completely different is revealed. It all seems up to you. And yet. Yet, it comes back to words and seems to be about the words. What works for a word and what doesn’t. Imagery follows the lines like a movie, linked to the psyche. Powerful stuff. My favorite part was, “Never put an eclair in a suitcase or a poem” (p 19). It made me laugh and feel a certain sense of sadness all at once.What can’t you put an eclair into a poem, I’d like to know!

BookLust Twist: From Book Lust in the chapter called “Kitchen-Sink Poetry (p 139).

“At Marlborough House”

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Swift, Michael. “At Marlborough House.” The New Yorker June 18th, 1990: 40.

This poem is loaded with details; details easily visualized into a short story. There are little shockers peppered throughout the entire poem told from the point of view of a patient at Marlborough House. Imagine: it is early afternoon and the patients of a psychiatric hospital are languishing in their rooms awaiting nurses with medication. There are a host of characters besides the patients – Jake the gardener and Dr. Levitz, the man in charge, but it’s the speaker of the poem you want to know more about. You snatch details, more like hints, in the things he says. He is male, old enough to still have parents who visit. He likes to read, knows pop cultural references and has homosexual tendencies. He is smart and funny and sarcastic. You want to ignore his suicidal thoughts.

BookLust Twist: From More Book Lust in the chapter called “Poetry Pleasers” (p 188). Incidentally, Pearl called this poem “mysterious.”

Postscript ~ Every April I think the same thing. It is really unfair of Nancy Pearl to list poems she recommends for reading without proper citations. From what I can tell “At Marlborough House” was never published in a book. I found it tucked away in a 1990 New Yorker magazine. It might well have been the only place it was published. Here are the tags I would have used on LibraryThing: mental illness, hospital, first person, homosexuality, poetry, librarian, doctor, sex, paranoia, alcohol, suicidal, sarcastic”

House of Blue Light

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Kirby, David. The House of Blue Light. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000.

It’s really hard to call this book a book of poetry. Each poem reads like a short story full of interesting characters and plots. In one 77 page book the reader is transported across countries and cultures. It has been said that House of Blue Light is autobiographical. For example Kirby’s characters mention a Barbara and Kirby is indeed married to a woman named Barbara Hamby. I do not know if she is the same Barbara of House of Blue Light’s poetry. Maybe she is, maybe she isn’t. Regardless, Kirby’s poetry is funny, situationally (my word) real, and intensely soulful. In a word, substantial; this was poetry I could sink my teeth into and actually taste something.

BookLust Twist: From Book Lust in the chapter called “Kitchen Sink Poetry” (p 138).

“The Bells Are Ringing…”

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Winch, Terence. “The Bells are Ringing for Me and Chagall.” The Great Indoors. Brownsville: Story Line Press, 1995. pp 41.

Sexy. That’s the first thing I think when I read “The Bells are Ringing for Me and Chagall.” I want to know who is Chagall? and I want to know more about those bells that are ringing. Do they signify great sex and is Chagall the reason? The entire poem comes off (in the end) as a sage on the stage admonishment about relationships. There is a hint of warning and more than a little advice and it all boils down to this: if your sex life is over-the-top the relationship is doomed to fail. But, if the sex you are having is pleasant, and, in a word, satisfying, you are in a stronger commitment. Interesting.

I think the title of the poem is a play on words. Judy Garland once sang a song with the lyrics, “the bells are ringing for me and my gal” and it was all about getting married (or so I thought whenever I heard it). Marriage defines a level of commitment so it makes some sense to compare the two.

BookLust Twist: From Book Lust in the chapter called “Poetry Pleasers” (p 188).

Miss Timmins’ School for Girls

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Currimbhoy, Nayana. Miss Timmins’ School for Girls: a Novel. New York: Harper, 2011.

Disclaimer: When I first saw this was a Harper publication I balked. Not because I personally have a problem with the “26 e-book renewal” drama, but rather because, as a librarian, I should be standing with my fellow librarians and sharing in their boycott efforts. I’m not because this isn’t an e-book, I didn’t borrow it, and as far as I know, it won’t self destruct after 26 reads. But, I digress. Onto the review:

Miss Timmins’ School for Girls is intense! It’s a complicated romance ensnared with a murder (suicide?) scandal. Churu a new teacher at Miss Timmins’ School. Outwardly, she tries to fit in with the other missionaries. She wears her clothes properly and has civilized tea. After dark Charu finds drugs and friendship with a troubled, misfit teacher named Moira Prince. When Moira is murdered the school community is a whirlwind of chaos. After some time witnesses put Charu with Moira right before her death. Did she do it? When a shocking love affair is revealed the story becomes more complicated. When a birth mother is revealed the story takes another twist. It keeps twisting until the very end.

In all honesty, every time I put Miss Timmins’ School for Girls down I found it difficult to pick it back up. The story dragged on and on. In places I felt certain scenes weren’t necessary and I questioned why they were included. None of the scenes were overkill, they just added more to the story that really wasn’t necessary. Charu’s own personal conflict with her mother could have been a book in and of itself. Her relationships with Merch and Prince could have been another book. Combining this with the murder at Miss Timmins’ School for Girls made the book tedious.

“Two Tramps in Mud Time”

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Frost, Robert. “Two Tramps in Mud Time.” Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays. New York: Library of America, 1984. pp 251-252.

Too many people have tried to analyze Frost’s poem, “Two Tramps in Mud Time,” giving me license to not even try.  Long, rambling, didactic essays have been written explaining Frost’s position on charity, society, and the psychological differences between need versus want. I will refrain. Instead I will look at the poem for what it meant to me. At first blush I took the poem personally. The words “mud time” in the title made me think of Monhegan. We have a whole season dedicated to muck and mire and mud – early spring when everything is thawing more quickly than the sun can dry up. This runoff of excessive, exuberant water creates deep, thick, oozing traps of mud. The kind of mud you sink 4-5″ inches in; strong enough to suck a man’s Bean boot right off his foot.
Then, there is Frost’s description of a fickle spring. I can relate. Here it is, a week into spring and we have a snow storm on our doorstep. April Fools we are for living in New England. If you don’t like the weather, wait a minute – as they say.

Another aspect of “Two Tramps in Mud Time” that I took to heart is the concept of loving your work so much that work is not the operative word to describe your actions. The narrator is chopping wood. Not because it is a necessity – winter is over. It is April and presumably he wouldn’t need to light another fire again until fall. No. He enjoys the physical labor of chopping wood. Love what you do. Do what you love. It’s something my father has (countless times) drummed into my head. But, along come two unemployed tramps, looking to take the narrator’s work away from him. They need the work whereas the narrator wants the work. Herein lies the psychological babble about questioning obligation, confronting humanity with charity.

BookLust Twist: Book Lust in the introduction (p xi).

Bear Went Over the Mountain

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Kotzwinkle, William. The Bear Went Over the Mountain. New York: Doubleday, 1996.

If you remembered I had already tried a Kotzwinkle book and failed, kudos to you. Because I didn’t. At first glance I thought The Bear Went Over the Mountain was a book for kids. The cover sure looked that way and the plot definitely looked that way. I should have known this was something I wasn’t going to be able to wrap my brain around. Call me rigid. Call me StickIntheMud, but I really, really couldn’t enjoy The Bear Went Over the Mountain because I have no ability to half suspend belief.

Here’s the premise: Miserable University of Maine professor, Arthur Bramhall, has written a book he hopes will save him from teaching ever again. He thinks the manuscript is a winner and will make him millions. Unfortunately, the story goes up in flames when his secluded farmhouse goes up in flames. Never mind. He rewrites it practically word for word only this time it’s better. In order to avoid another book ablaze he hides it in a briefcase under a tree…only to have a bear steal it. The bear reads the manuscript and knows a good story when he sees it. He travels to New York to hawk the book and ends up making movie deals and having sex with humans. While the bear (Hal Jam) becomes more human, the professor (Arthur Bramhall) becomes more animal after the loss of his manuscript.

I will admit The Bear Went Over the Mountain solicited a giggle here and there but for the most part I found myself scolding the stupid humans for not being able to recognize a bear wearing pants and a clip-on tie.

Author Fact: William Kotzwinkle lives on a island off the coast of Maine, according to the inside flap of The Bear Went Over the Mountain. All I know is that island isn’t Monhegan.

BookLust Twist: From Book Lust in the chapter simply called “Humor” (p 116) and again, in “My Own Private Dui” (p 165) another chapter in Book Lust.