Quite a Different Feel from Last Weekend's Book

Little did I realize when I took it out from the library, and then ordered my own copy, that half of Richard Howard's translation of Charles Baudelaire' Fleurs du Mal was written in English and the second part in French. So it took me little or no time this afternoon to finish the 176 pages in my native tongue. I could, I realize, send the book to Hammagrael or to my son of seven languages, both of whom will berate me for not reading it en francais. Oh well.

It is a book that needs to be read out loud, not as a book on tape, but by the reader so that he or she can become immersed in the poetry, the philosophy, the feelings. Here are poems you want to read to your lover in the afterglow; here are poems that you compose in your head after a full bottle of wine with no one around to appreciate your intelligence and wit; and here are poems for poets and writers who despair that their works will not live on, nay never be read at all.

In the first category, although CB is writing to beauty as a personified inspiration concept, he writes of a woman's irresistible allure in Hymn to Beauty:
"Your eyes reflect the sunset and the dawn;
you scatter perfumes like a windy night;
your kisses are a drug, your mouth the urn
dispensing fear to heroes, fervor to boys."

In Sed Non Satiate:
"... And yet
to wine, to opium even, I prefer
the elixir of your lips on which love flaunts
itself; and in the wasteland of desire
your eyes afford the wells to slake my thirst."

Ah, where were such cravings and emotion when the Slackers read lust last year.

In one called Suppose My Name, I hear echoes of my favorite poem, from a poet who wants his beloved to live forever by his quill:
"Suppose my name were favored by the winds,
my voyage prospered, and the future read
all that I wrote, and marveled ...Love, they're yours!
I give you poems to make your memory

echo the way archaic legends do,
so that by some incantatory spell,
haunting the reader like a psaltery,
you will be caught within my cadences;"

Could any woman not go delirious from such adulation!

There is much contemporary influences in CB even with his original lethargy and beautiful despair. Echoes of Poe, Coleridge and Hugo abound in his exploration of the beauty of poverty and low life, the ever-threatening cloud of crime and the lure of the tale of the seafarer. He writes of writing, something I strain to find in novels when I long to hear the author in the voice of the narrator or a lead character. A poet need not hid behind such veils. To quote at length from The Flask (a poem that evokes Proust as a neurologist):

"Some scents can permeate all substances --
even glass seems porous to their power.
Opening an Oriental chest
once the reluctant locks are pried apart.

or an armoire in some abandoned house
acrid with the dust of time itself,
may yield a musty flask that keeps t faith ;
out of it leapsa returning soul - live!

... like a fetid Lazarus rending is shroud,
the corpse of an old passion stirs and wakes,
spectral and rancid, charnel and charming still!

So it will be with me when i lie lost
to living memory, a used-up flask
tossed in a grim armoire, tarnished and cracked ..."

What an inspiration to keep the computer nigh at night, to write down the poetry of midnight, rather than the book reviews of seven o'clock.

Going Home Again: Songdogs by Colum McCann

Loved Let the Great World Spin so much, looked for another Colum McCann to read and selected his first novel, Songdogs. It is told by Conor, a half-Irish, half-Mexican man, who returns to the home of his aged father on the west coast of Ireland after years of looking for his missing mother in Mexico and the American southwest. Although a shorter and much simpler story than LTGWS, Songdogs introduces themes and techniques that I am assuming remain in McCann repertoire: characters in many different settings and these locations determining not only the patterns of their daily lives but also their ethos.

Although Conor never finds out what happened to his mother and although his at death's door da never dies, Conor can better define himself as an adult by reassessing his parents' loves, longings and disagreements. He is restless like his mother and drawn to warm, windy, open spaces; he is calmly philosophical like his father, pacing myself with a daily routine and rhythm that feels like the weather rushing on to the island from the Atlantic.

Many readers, here I'm thinking of the gosh awful recent trend to add book club discussion questions at the end of a novel, might over-focus on whether the story's theme is on the societal and family effect of pornography. Trying not to divulge too much of the plot, Conor's father wants to be a professional photographer and he takes many art pictures of his mother dishabille. These pictures are kept stored away but once in Mexico when the townsmen break into his dark room and discover them, the family is driven out of the country. Again later in life when Conor's dad meets a slick businessman who convinces him to publish them in a collection in Europe, although banned in Ireland, they make there way across the waters, and once again led to the destruction of the photography lab and family itself.

Both Songdogs and LTGWS leave me with McCann's sense of forgiveness and understanding of human foibles, temptations, and maturity. There is not a phrase of accusation in either book. It is the underlying faith of the Irish people, not there Catholic clergy, that becomes the moral yardstick. And then, once again, is McCann's lyric language.

I did a Wiki search this morning to learn more about him beyond his many laureled awards. He graduated from UT and currently teaches in the Masters creative writing program at CUNY. Would that he venture north to our Writers' Institute!

A New Genre: The eMail Memoir

Spooky, I concluded this book was witty but insipid, sort of like a well-read girlfriend's email, and lo and behold, in the acknowledgments of her memoir, Rhoda Janzen writes: "I would never have thought of writing this story had not my svelte red-headed friend Carla Vissers pointed out that my emails from California were sounding a lot like nonfiction." No, her nonfiction still sounds like email, email you wouldn't sort into save folders either.

And then there was the cover endorsement of another "well-known" author, Elizabeth Gilbert of chick lit Eat Pray Love fame: "I literally laughed out loud ... Rhoda's ... voice ... deadpan, sharp-witted ... slayed me." And why not, close to EPL, Janzen tells us more than we'd ever want to know about Mennonite recipes, church services and hatred of sex. Janzen -- who has a PhD in grammar from UCLA a feat counterculture to the past practice of only educating Mennonite girls to the third grade, far enough to read the Bible and figure out the grocery bill -- is still stamped with female inculcated Mennonite values. First of all her rampant timidity, her social naivete, and her zeal to make the best of a bad situation.

Janzen's bad situation is marrying Nick, a manic depressive abusive man, after knowing him for a few weeks, staying married to him despite the verbal barrages and property destruction, only to have him walk out on her after fifteen years for Bob, a guy he met on Gay.com. Left with a mortgage she couldn't afford on her professor's salary, Janzen decides two things: to go home to mama and her Pollyanna personality and high-cholesterol cooking, and shortly thereafter, to make some real money from the royalties of this biography.

Early in the book, Janzen confesses to which of Nick's accusations and taunts hurt her the most: 1. She has no intellectual insight behind her good memory; 2. She has no creative spark beyond her scholarly vocabulary; 3. She has no original taste beneath her aesthetic copycatting. Hey, wait a minute, Nick was right. And towards the end of the book, while she listens to Mennonite-approved music, the songs of loons, she discloses: "I am the type of person who invariably finishes a book, no matter how much I have grown to hate it." (Okay stop here Madame Blogger and ask yourself why are you finishing this book.) Janzen continues: "I always think, Eh, it's not so bad. I can stand it." This is the life vision her mother instilled, one that contributed 100% to her being domestically abused.

I'm not really sure what her doctorate is in. She admits to being able to translate several languages when that talent is discovered while she worked as the receptionist at a large law firm. Prior to finding out about this skill, she was valued as a grammatical editor. This is how she sees herself anyway, as the penultimate diagrammer of sentences not as a linguist (ooh that word must be way to close to a sexual connotation for an ex-Mennonite).

But like a good girl, I read on and did manage to find a couple sections where Janzen gets more intellectually interpretative and evaluative and less flippant of her life, family and faith. Of all, this one paragraph is the best metaphor for her osmosis of Mennonite religious view and her love of analyzing words:

"Since the players' hands must physically rest on the Ouija board at all times, it would be impossible to tell just who is conveying the urgent message. Poltergeist? ... Your own psyche? Following the pointer as it moves from one letter to the next must be an intensely slow, suspenseful process. A letter-by-letter spelling out of a ghostly message is a faithful reflection of the way we seek to impose meaning on chaos. Funny to have a board game, banned and censored for centuries, whose very punch line is the literal act or reading. You have to decode a message from the great beyond, the perfect metaphor for how we interpret those parts of ourselves that we cannot understand. Or that we don't want to understand."

At least is it a short read. And March's book is killer-bee.

French=Style; Italian=Food (or Love); Irish=Gift of Gab

I could read, listening in my head, Colum McCann forever. The book club selected Let the Great World Spin for its selection for March and because I was not sure I would like the February book, I dove into LTGWS. Within three pages I was hooked. Different from TC Boyle in that McCann is less ironic, but the lilt, ah the lilt, and the clever puns, and the rhythm. Maybe I should consider books on tape, providing that this one was read by someone with a brogue.

Not sure where this book would fall chronologically with the recent plethora of art (mainly movies, I guess) that are premised on concurrent lives during a given period of time, but this theme is a certain six degrees of separation ... several intertwined lives on the day that Phillipe Petit walked his wire between the two World Trade Centers. That selection of a day in the life itself sets the tone. The book club read Don DeLillo's Falling Man a while back and it garnered tepid comments; I felt it was strained and used 9/11 unnecessarily to set a more universal upper West Side marital angst. The day Petit waked was magic, hopeful, mythic, a positive memory for more than just New Yorkers.

McCann does a fantastic job in showing how this showmanship/miracle touched people who were simply going about their lives, doing their normal work, as judges, advocates, whores, and how this glitter fell on them but could not really change the course of their lives. The world spun on.

But it's the language and the echoing of parallel similes between characters that resound in the book. The black woman, whose three sons died in Viet Nam, who eventually ends up foster parenting the two orphan girls of the hooker who dies on the Tower walk day, who while walking home from the house of the judge who will preside at Petit's hearing, is described as walking as tentatively as Phillipe himself. Other character's thoughts about how their bodies are feeling resound to PP's hypersensitivity to his movements and coordination.

We have read plenty of books for our group that have flatly and with much strain tried to portray cross ethnic and interracial relationships. McCann pulls it off. He has his ear to the wind of NYC life. Brogues, Brahims, Blacks, Bronx-ites, Central Americans all sound real and as they do every day, manage to converse in the polyglot that is the City.

Here's to McCann, obviously a much deserving National Book award winner. I've already reserved more of his books. He may have started off list this year, but little did I know he was a gap in my literary knowledge I needed to fill.

Second Thoughts: There are a couple other themes in the book that have been knocking around in my skull. In addition to walking, there is the metaphor of the wire, as in everyone gets wired, and Joshua and the boys from California who call public phones near the Towers are meant to predict. The other theme is using one's talents and the personal need for people to love you because of them. Petit focuses his talents as personal physical disciple without co-workers or clients or one-on-one beneficiaries; however, his joyous work reaches more people than any of the other characters. Corrigan also has an internal sole battle with his God but decides to set this work among the most needy and unappreciative. When he is successful with his talents, they are directed towards one person, and with no long lasting effect. It is ironic that the last thing he sees before dying is Petit ... does he realize he shouldn't have measured himself against others, that talents are not meant to be an ordeal but a joy. Solomon likewise battles against his courtroom and only finds respite when Petit breaks the deadly routine. This largest theme of one's place and effect on the Great Spinning World is the idea that remains after the last page.