“Happy New Year to the waxing moon, the telepathic sea.”
Patti Smith
What to do when a virus lingers? Why, read.
My reading list depends on what comes into the Library! This January, the books are long and immersive:
Michael Christie, Greenwood
Rachel Cusk, Coventry
Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants
Ben Lerner, The Topeka School
Delia Owens, Where the crawdads sing
Hannu Rajaniemi, Summerland
Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead: A Novel
Connections? The environment… epic descriptions and historical perspectives.
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Michael Christie, Greenwood
“Wood is time captured”
Recommending Michael Christie’s engaged & epic saga Greenwood
along with Richard Powers’s The Overstory
& Diana Beresford-Kroeger’s To Speak for the Trees
On family & forest
forest as family as forest
I love how Christie’s knowledge of the forest shines throughout.
On trees: “They stand. They reach. They climb. They thirst. They drop their leaves. They fall. You see, Jake? We make them human. With our verbs. But really, we shouldn’t. Because they’re our betters. Our kings and queens.”
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Rachel Cusk, Coventry
She has interesting things to say about self and community. Am connecting to Cusk’s Coventry: honesty by indirection. “a kind of fiction, an opportunity to become visible through disguise.” Have found Coventry very revealing… those essays on others’ writing speak more of her own work! I don’t trust her self abnegation, the opaque: the thirst for truth honesty is at once revealed / veiled. But was intrigued by her perceptions of mother/artist: all that you and I have lived through.
“Entering a house, I often feel that I am entering a woman’s body, and that everything I do there will be felt more intimately by her”
“To be an artist is to have your creation obey you, but as [Raymond] Carver points out, parenthood is the opposite of art”
“The artist is a person in whom there has been no caesura with the creativity of childhood: how, then will she herself become a mother? For the artist is a perceiver, and the mother the first and fundamental object of perception, the first image”
the woman writer “can find herself disowned in the very ac on invoking the deepest roots of shared experience. Having taken the trouble to write honestly, she can find herself being read dishonestly.
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Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants
Essential reading.
“In the Apache language, the root word for land is the same as the word for mind. Gathering roots holds up a mirror between the map in the earth and the map of our minds. This is what happens, I think, in the silence and the singing and with hands in the earth.”
“The word ecology is derived from the Greek oikos, the word for home.”
Three Sisters “inscribe what looks to me like a blueprint for the world, a map of balance and harmony.”
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Ben Lerner, The Topeka School
Recommending Ben Lerner’s impressive The Topeka School, for its huge scope of an era. Deft autofiction at its best. One section is a vivid (positive:)!) portrayal of his mother, Harriett Lerner, The Dance of Anger, etc… very influential psychologist a few years ago.
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Delia Owens, Where the crawdads sing
Enjoyed escaping into the marsh with Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens when down with bronchitis and ‘swamped’.
Close observations of marsh life:
watch out for those female insects.
Listen in audio if you can!
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Hannu Rajaniemi, Summerland
Stir well— tropes and spoofs and spooks from steampunk, science fiction, spy novel, allohistory and spiritualism— and up pops Summerland by Hannu Rajaniemi! Be ready for a wide interdimensional spree! Cambridge spire climbs included;)
Hannu Rajaniemi @hannu responds to my Tweet : “Thank you — and also thanks for teaching me about the word “allohistory”!”
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Patti Smith, The Year of the Monkey
How mind boggling to follow Summerland with a direct infusion of Patti Smith’s The Year of the Monkey. (Yes, I was born a Green Wood Monkey.)
The Year of the Monkey is Patti Smith at her most restless and elegiac.
“I could feel the gravitational pull of home, which when I’m home too long becomes the gravitational pull of somewhere else.”
“The fringe of dream, an evolving fringe at that! Maybe more of a visitation, a prescience of thinks to come… the borders of reality had reconfigured in such a way that it seemed necessary to map out the patchwork topography.”
“—Uncommon sense, replied the sign. And please! Uluru! it’s the dream capital of the world. Naturally you’re going!” The talking sign for the motel, “Dream Inn”.
On Sam Shepard: “He was standing, looking down at me just as always. … And I thought, as he reached down to brush the hair from my eyes, the trouble with dreaming is that we eventually wake up.”
“We used to laugh, me and Sam, about this disconnect: you write in time when time is gone and in trying to catch up you’re writing a whole other book”
“Happy New Year to the waxing moon, the telepathic sea.” Patti Smith
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Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead: A Novel
What’s not to love on a blustery winter day? Astrology! Epithets for each chapter by Blake! The unreliable narrator a madly determined old woman, as ferocious as she is tender. And does she love animals!
Penn Kemp 