Category Archives: List of the Week

List of the Week: "Mr. Smith Goes to the Library"

Do we really care what our political candidates read? Well, as devoted readers ourselves, of course we do. And it seems the larger world does too. Some people are afraid of what the candidates read — witness the e-mail circulating that shows a photo of Barack Obama toting a copy of Fareed Zakaria’s The Post-American World. Some are afraid of what the candidates aren’t reading, as seen in reactions to Sarah Palin’s failure to name a major periodical that she reads. What would we like our presidential and vice-presidential hopefuls to read? The staff of The Missouri Review offer their own recommendations.

1. Joe Biden

Kris Somerville: Unlike Bill Clinton, Joe Biden was no Rhodes Scholar.  He graduated from the University of Delaware in Newark in 1965 near the bottom of his class:  506^th of 688.  He attended Syracuse University College of Law in 1968 and ran into a little trouble with a law review article he had written; five of the fifteen pages were plagiarized.  Today all is forgiven and his early academic foibles, his humble middle-class roots, and the fact that he’s one of the least wealthy members of the Senate endear him to voters.  Yet, there are two books that he should have carried in his backpack during his academic career:  Christopher J. Yianilos’ The Law School Breakthrough: Graduate In The Top 10% Of Your Class, Even If You’re Not A First-Rate Student and Ann Raimes’ Keys for Writers, 5th Edition  Today, to figure out how to fill his personal coffers he might hire “peak performance” coach Tony Robbins.  After all, only owning one home is hardly vice-presidential these days.

Joe Aguilar: From introducing his running mate as “Barack America” to proclaiming that in Delaware “you cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent” to stating that when “the stock market crashed, Franklin D. Roosevelt got on the television and…said, ‘Look, here’s what happened,’” Joe Biden’s mid-speech gaffes, accidental as they might be, form a wonderfully bizarre vision of an America where presidential candidates have secret superhero identities, only East Indians are legally allowed to shop at convenience stores, and presidents make nationally televised speeches long before television sets actually become household items.  Mr. Biden’s taste for the absurd makes me think that he would enjoy Tatyana Tolstaya’s novel The Slynx, the story of a post-nuclear-bomb Russia where people barter in mice and the KGB-like Saniturions rove the country in sleighs, dressed in red robes, confiscating books, while the dangerous screeching Slynx lurks in the woods, waiting.  If Mr. Biden likes this novel, he should also check out Tolstaya’s fantastic short-story collection White Walls, which contains some of the weirdest, prettiest stories in my recent memory.

2. Sarah Palin

Brittany Barr recommends: The Supremes’ Greatest Hits: The 34 Supreme Court Cases That Most Directly Affect Your Life by Michael G. Trachtman. Given her recent struggles with recalling Supreme Court rulings other than Roe vs. Wade, it looks like this potential Vice President needs to brush up on her history. This comprehensive guide to the 34 “most significant” cases should bring her up to speed.

Dustin Michael: I hate to admit it, but I’m a one issue voter. My one issue: dinosaurs. And though I’ll let some things slide (mispronouncing spinosaurus so that it rhymes with rhinocerus, for example), I find others (such as a baldfaced disregard for the fossil record) unacceptable. 

Originally, I thought of recommending my trusty dinosaur field guide to GOP veep pic Sarah Palin, but I recognized that it wouldn’t have the same sentimental appeal for her as it does for me, and that she would find it insulting instead of nostalgic, and that people would find it mean instead of sincere. So I’m recommending instead The Richness of Life: The Essential Stephen Jay Gould. This insightful work is handsomely bound, and more up to Palin’s reading level. She’s no dummy, after all; she’s just a little mixed up about how old the planet is, and about what kinds of animals roamed the earth when. A good dose of Gould ought to clear things up for her, doggone it. You betcha!

3. John McCain

Lania Knight recommends: If I Live to Be 100, by Neenah Ellis. No, this is not a tongue-in-cheek selection. Despite McCain’s age, past illnesses, and former imprisonment when he was a soldier, I hope that if he is elected president, not only that he lives to 100, but that he takes the time to reflect upon the wisdom of his many years on the planet in a way similar to what Ellis’ interview subjects have done in response to her gentle, but probing questions. In this book, Ellis, producer of NPR’s One Hundred Years of Stories, describes the interviews of her centenarian subjects with grace and candor, illuminating for the reader differences among older Americans, both nuanced and stark, and the ways in which growing up in an era very different from the present can enlarge one’s worldview and allow one to see solutions where there might only appear to be problems. In our modern culture, advanced age is too often seen as a liability; it is treated with an indifference reinforced by segregation. How will we know or remember that our elders are wise if we don’t ever see them or take the time to listen to their stories? I’m recommending this book not only for McCain, but for the many adherents of youth culture (wittingly or not) in the U.S. who, because they have little meaningful contact with members of older generations, can easily overlook the power of thoughtful reflection and a long lifetime of experience.

4. Barack Obama

Speer Morgan: Yes, Obama gives great oration, delivering his rhetoric with grace and gravity.  Yet when he tries to shift into a folksy, storytelling mode he grinds gears.  Listening to him is a rough ride.  In fact, I have noticed during rallies poor Michelle’s eyes glaze over.  I can read her thoughts:  “How about a little narrative compression, dear husband?” 

And does he know a joke or two?  These are hard times, but lighten up, Mr. Almost Pres.  This Christmas, his staff should stuff his stocking with a mini-library of joke books-Craig Kirsner’s The Art of Telling Great Jokes & Being Funny!and Larry Getlen’s The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Jokes, with maybe something by Mark Twain to loosen him up.  With a little humor under his belt, he might be able to appreciate the “controversial” New Yorker cover.

Evelyn Somers: Barack Obama has been burdened with the same intellectual label that has hurt the Democrats’ nominees in recent history, Bill Clinton excepted.  For Obama, the only candidate for whom I wouldn’t recommend a Dummies guide, I’d suggest a short read on declining Presidential rhetoric by Elvin Lim, The Anti-Intellectual Presidency.  You can read Lim’s blog Amazon on the debate rhetoric here.

List of the Week: "Filthy Lucre"

                               Mammon led them on,
Mammon, the least erected Spirit that fell
From Heav’n, for ev’n in Heav’n his looks and thoughts
Were always downward bent, admiring more
The riches of Heav’n's pavement, trodden gold,
Than aught divine or holy else enjoyed
In vision beatific: by him first
Men also, and by his suggestion taught,
Ransacked the center, and with impious hands
Rifled the bowels of their mother earth
For treasures better hid. Soon had his crew
Opened into the hill a spacious wound
And digged out ribs of gold. Let none admire
That riches grow in Hell; that soil may best
Deserve the precious bane.

[Paradise Lost, Book I, ll. 678-92)]

As the economy continues to plummet like a falling angel, we thought we might take a moment to consider some books that have the love of money or the catastrophe of debt at their heart. Many of our staff were too busy stuffing their mattresses and minting bullion to contribute this week, but we welcome your own contributions in the comments below! (Note: if you’re a newly registered user, your comments will appear after the first one has been approved by our webmaster.) 

1. Katy Didden, Poetry Editor

Two books of poetry came to mind when we decided on this week’s list:  Capitalism, by Campbell McGrath, and The Displaced of Capital, by Anne Winters.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t track down Capitalism at the library, which could be a confirmation of its pertinence right now, as someone has probably sequestered it in their study carrel for close reference.  I looked it up on Amazon yesterday, and one copy was selling for around $80.00, but today the prices have gone down–a strange phenomenon which I find delightfully ironic, given the title of the book.  In any case,  I did find McGrath’s Road Atlas, which might be just as relevant to this list.  McGrath writes a series of prose poems about specific places, most of them cities in the US.  I’m a fan of the way McGrath uses consumer language in his poems-while I guess there’s an inherent irony in a line like “While Elizabeth shops at Costco, Sam and I play hide & seek/ among the bales and pallets in that vast warehouse of pure things,”  I think McGrath does not just critique capitalism, but admits its seductiveness.  Anyone who writes a line lamenting the theft of his “Incredible Hulk piggy bank” has something funny and insightful to say, I think.  Winter’s book, The Displaced of Capital, is also concerned with maps, though it is not panoramic America, but a close-up of New York City: Brooklyn, and Manhattan.  In “An Immigrant Woman,” a poem in ten sections, Winters recounts a personal history of Williamsburg tenements, and the neighborhood’s attempt to mobilize against the construction of a wider bridge ramp into Manhattan that endangers the tenement residents, and ultimately results in tragedy.  The book is a profound, elegiac history that traces the brutal effects of urban poverty, both  financial and cultural, mixed with the resiliency of those who live inside that poverty.  Check out the fourteen sonnets in “A Sonnet Map of Manhattan,” and the title poem, with its echoing line: “The displaced of capital have come to the capital.” 

2. Patrick Lane, Web Editor

I’ll start with a thoroughly unvetted pick — a pick whose quality is as uncertain as a batch of mortgage-backed securities. That is to say, a book a haven’t read. But it sounds both interesting and timely, and the selections I’ve read have been intriguing. The book is 1923′s Reminiscences of a Stock Operator by Edwin Lefevre. It’s a portrait of the early days of modern Wall Street, which (as we sometimes forget) had seen plenty of panics and disasters before the Great Depression. Here’s a tone-setting excerpt:

Another lesson I learned early is that there is nothing new in Wall Street. There can’t be because speculation is as old as the hills. Whatever happens in the stock market today has happened before and will happen again. I’ve never forgotten that. I suppose I really manage to remember when and how it happened. The fact that I remember that way is my way of capitalizing experience.

The book is available in reprint, or you can read it online here. My second pick is for those who need a little levity with their economic crisis. If you want a little stock-ticker-tinged confection, you must watch the Coen Brothers’ The Hudsucker Proxy (curretnly dirt cheap on Amazon). A comedy that begins and ends with a corporate president jumping from the 44th floor (not counting the mezzanine) has to warm the cockles of even the most miserly heart in this troubled time. The film also features a wonderful performance by the late, great Paul Newman.

Here’s a particularly brilliant sequence that to my mind is one of the greatest marriages of music and images in cinema:

 

3. Marc McKee, Graduate Advisor

As we make our rocky way through some of the extreme turbulence of late capitalism, maybe it’s a good time to reflect on work that reminds us of value that is less affected by the whimsy of the market, but that so often gets subordinated to the lucre-foraging seemingly endemic to our kind.  The first thing that this topic suggests to me is the late William Matthews‘ book of poems, Time & Money.  It’s been awhile since I paged through Matthews, but a return to this book is a jolt to the system.  In poems like “Mingus at the Showplace,” and “New Folsom Prison,” the way in which human beings are caught up in systems it is beyond their power to control is laid out in incredibly tuned language that achieves what I can only think to call a supple gravity.  “Art remember / a few things by forgetting many” Matthews says, in his poem “The Wolf at Gubbio.”  With these poems, Matthews’ poems forget not the dangerous machineries of our socio-economic systems, but the many ways in which these systems effectively work to silence or squelch the humans caught up in them.  Instead, his poems remember the humane responses of Art and community, as at the end of “President Reagan’s Visit to New York, October 1984,” a poem which finds the speaker giving a dollar to a black man with a squeegee as Reagan’s motorcade passes through midtown: 

Our creamiest streets were cordoned off so 

Pomp could clot them, and the walkie-talkies
sputtered each to each.  What had the black man
or I to do with this peacockery? 

The light turned green.  Under a soot-slurred sky
we gave each other a parting glance. 
What nation you can build on that, was ours.

Say what you will, under the circumstances, it seems brave to say that a nation is built between people more than money, even if contemporary feeling pulls the other way entirely.

List of the Week: "Where I Write"

Popular perceptions of writing often fixate on the image of the writer at work, and these images are, at their heart, images of place. We see the writer scribbling away by candelight with a quill pen in a mouldering garret, or typing idly while sipping a latte at a hip coffeeshop, or hunched over a bestickered and graffitied journal wiht a flashlight under the bedclothes. Well, some of these images certainly have roots in reality, but following on Dustin’s recent blog, we thought we’d ask where we do our own writing.

1. Robyn Allen, Intern

As an English undergrad focusing on literature and critical studies, not endeavoring to write the Great American Novel or just publish a modest book of poems, I often wonder about the diverse, particular and eccentric creative writing practices of my peers, mentors, and even the big names. I’ve read about the processes of some of my favorites–Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bishop, Toni Morrison–and observed those of my friends, but find it difficult to share in the zealousness of particularities, such as the all-important “place.”

Though the writing I do is of a different sort–mainly academic–I aim to fuse the scholarly with the literary and substance with artfulness, a challenge that satisfies my need for creative expression. . . Most of the time. However, I am merely a pioneering novice with high ambitions, still in the early stages of honing my technique and establishing a more systematic routine.

Because I do not have a designated space where I work, at least not one of relative frequency, I cannot share in the sacredness of those who do; those whose place sets the stage for inspiration, provides comfort and familiarity, and fosters the drives of discipline. I naturally resist regularity and rigidity (for better or for worse) and have a penchant for spontaneity and the unpredictable. So, one important prerequisite to productivity involves a constant change of scenery: propped up by pillows on the bed (insert any number of variables such as fan whirring, blinds parted, black tea ready and within reach), Ellis Library’s third floor desks bathed in light, Lakota’s un-EZ Boy furniture and heavenly coffee haze, or simply the floor. I’m a floor-sitter, what can I say?

The idea of this nomadic exercise correlates with the need for new perspectives (and shuffling between destinations keeps things fresh). The unpredictable nature of my writing environment encourages the essential activity of the mind. Keeping me on my toes, literary and metaphorically, changing places–and thus, mental spaces–helps to kindle creative energies. But though I may burn intensely for one long evening or afternoon, there is too much ash at the end of the day. I do envy those with more stable, selective, and, by virtue of ritual, sacred niches. I seem to thrive by wandering, but lack the discipline to wander internally without having to move my feet.

I often wonder if lacking a tangible “room of one’s own” detracts from my development as a more serious and successful (on my own terms) thinker and writer. And if so, how much. . . Now is when I stop theorizing and enter another stage in this learning process: researching the behaviors of literary mammals. Yes, there is a distinct sub-species. And, though the wild is ripe with exemplary models, I need only look out back to discover creatures of unusual creativity prowling McReynolds Hall.

2. Katy Didden, Poetry Editor

I saw of photo of Robert Frost last year and he was sitting in an armchair onto which he’d rigged a drafting board that fit over the chair arms-he was snug in the armchair-cage like a kid in a high chair, or like the Jetsons in their one-seater airplanes.  I always think of him as an upright man, so I thought maybe this was his secret for good posture.  When I write, I am always battling the “professorial c-shape” that you can observe on any college campus, where the shoulders of scholars round forward with the weight of their fact-heavy heads.  I spend so much time sitting and staring at my computer screen that my chin has an LCD patina.  So, I try all kinds of ways to be comfortable when I write, and lately I’ve been trying Frost’s method.  A person who rented my apartment before me left some make-shift radiator covers (sturdy slabs of wood, painted white), and I set one of these over the arms of an armchair in my living room.  Not only does this align my elbows so that I don’t have to lean down, but it also keeps me focused, and less inclined to jump up from my chair every five minutes.   Now if I could just build a Vermont outside my window…

3. Lania Knight, Editorial Assistant

I usually sit cross-legged on my 70′s-era pink sofa in my basement office to write. I have a view out to Hinkson Creek, which meanders at the far edge of my back yard. On clear, warm days, I write in the hammock that hangs between two oak trees near the creek, but most days are spent typing away on my sofa.

Several years ago, I had to complete a full-length play while on vacation camping at the Gulfshores National Seashore in Florida during Spring Break. Each morning, after eating breakfast burritos cooked over an open fire, I’d head to the stone wall that surrounded Fort Pickens, a fort built after the war of 1812, but which never actually saw battle. I’d sit on the stone wall every day while the rest of my family and the families we’d traveled with from Missouri played on the beach or snoozed in hammocks back at the campsite. Looking out on the Gulf of Mexico was a lovely way to complete my script.

The campground can only be reached by boat now–most of the roads were wiped out during Hurricane Ivan, including the long thin road from Pensacola to Fort Pickens. A year later, Katrina brought further damage. According to friends who went back last year, the wall is still intact, as well as the fort, but most of the trees are gone, and only a small portion of the campground is habitable. Someday I’ll go back too, but for now, my old pink sofa and the hammock in the back yard will have to be good enough.

4. Patrick Lane, Web Editor

I’ve always had a powerful attraction to places of transition. Waiting rooms, lobbies, insitutional hallways, train stations, airport terminals, and the like. Perhaps I have some energy-vampire tendencies, because I find I get the most writing done when there’s a lot of energy and activity around me, a place where people are coming and going, exuding a purposefulness that I can leech off of for my own productivity. These environments are energizing rather than distracting for me; indeed, my mind wanders far more in the casual, laid back vibe of coffee shops and cafes. Recently, I’ve done some of my best work in airports. The fact that I don’t fly especially frequently probably explains the glacial progress I’ve made on my current projects.

5. Marc McKee, Graduate Advisor

It’s tough to say where I write.  I grew into the practice of writing by reading my gods, people like Frank O’Hara, Dean Young, and Mary Ruefle in coffee shops.  I had to begin outside of the spaces where I lived, making notes on paper, waiting for something to catch in my head as I split my focus between coffee, books, and the bustle of the human beings as they made conversation at nearby tables or sassed baristas.  Writing for me is an engagement and a practice that begins well before putting pen to paper or fingerprint to keypad-some shape or energy has to be pawing or stirring, bull-in-a-china-shopping my interior.  Otherwise, I won’t have the energy to get through an entire draft, and the poem has little chance of surviving.  Back in the days of my coffee shop starts, I lived nearby, a block or so at most, so packing up and getting to my computer at home was not really an issue.  This was in Houston, where often I’d start at Café Brasil before hustling home to type out some piece of work generated by a stray thought, an overheard sentence, or a line from one of my books that seemed to open a door.  Then, it didn’t seem important where I wrote.  My desk was in what would have been the dining room of my apartment.  When I moved in with two friends, my desk was in the corner of my enormous room right by the window, upstairs.  When I moved to Tucson, our apartment had an office where my girlfriend (now wife) kept her drawings.  I had left my Houston desk behind, and operated on a weak table from Target that, after two years of writing and supporting the fluffy weight of my thoughts, bent a little in the middle.  In Tucson, we were lucky enough to have a patio where I could sit with a few books and a cup of coffee or blood orange sorbet from nearby Time Market before going inside to type something up.  Usually on my desk there is a coffee can from Café Du Monde in New Orleans with pens, pencils, and other stuff in it.  Always there are papers and books in precarious piles, piles which grow until I can no longer write and must clean instead.  Now that we’re in Missouri, we have another office, a little bit smaller, a lot more crowded with books, but I have a set-up that has become increasingly charged with meaning.  There’s a paperweight with a quote from Aristophanes on it: “Let each man exercise the art he knows.”  It was a gift from the first middle school class I visited as a creative writer in Houston.  There’s a carved rhinoceros that I took from my grandmother’s house after she died.  I sit in an office chair that I asked for from my grandfather’s house after he died.  The desk I use was once the desk of a dear friend’s beloved step-father, taken for $10 at the behest of his widow.  There’s a fire engine my friend Josh gave me, since he knows that fire engines are the closest thing I have to a spirit animal.  There’s a framed broadside my friend Murray gave me, a poem by David Clewell called “Jack Ruby Talks Business with the New Girl: Carousel Club, November 21, 1963.”  Recently, after looking at this desk, my friend asked me if I ever just started writing and then threw in all the things that surround me.  The answer of course is yes, because even if lately I’m not writing much down, I’m always writing.  But when I come to try to make the exhilarations in my head real on paper, I come back to this office, surrounded by this meaningful clutter, and try to arrange it in ways that make it nearly glisten.  And when this process is actually happening, where I am falls away, and this place, this noun, becomes a verb instead.

6. Dustin Michael, TMR Blogger

My writing space feels like a fossil dig. There are remnants of ancient things jutting to the surface here and there, lots of faint impressions. The desk, for example, belonged to my great, great grandfather, a Lutheran minister. It’s sturdy enough, even though the wood isn’t the best. There was a time when I considered becoming a Lutheran minister, myself; there was also a time when I considered becoming a scientist, which explains the microscope — still handy for those moments when the writing just isn’t working and the only thing to do about it is see what a nose hair looks like close up. The lamp, which doesn’t throw off much light, is from the office I shared with a now-deceased coworker and friend, and the shadows it dispels are mostly figurative.

I’ve been a dinosaur nut since I was a little kid, and I grew up watching those PBS dinosaur specials in which the host inevitably leads the camera through an empty museum display of fossilized skeletons and says something like, “…And if we listen, we might just hear the echoes of these magnificent creatures.” In some ways, I get that. I can sit down to write here and imagine myself to be like my ancestor, hunched at this desk, squinting by candlelight to put the finishing touches on the next day’s sermon; I can imagine myself back in the little office lit just by two monitors and this lamp, waiting for friend who isn’t coming. I can hear those echoes if I listen. It’s better for me, though, to sit down to write and become like the kid who wanted to be the dinosaur scientist — excited by the idea of a huge past with both looming monoliths as well as tiny fragments to examine by microscope in a landscape where everything reaches forward silently to connect with this moment right now.

7. Evelyn Somers, Associate Editor

In my head. 

That’s where I write, and then eventually I sit down and type it out and mess with it until it sounds good.  About 30 percent of the time the thinking is done in front of the computer (I used to write longhand first and then type it up later, but then I figured out it was a waste of time).  Even when I’m “writing” at the computer, much of the thinking has already happened.  Ideas don’t just pop out; they have to be chewed on and digested for a while-part of the thinking part: rumination  The thoughts that nag more or have an aura of rightness about them get written down in a long, free-form document that’s effectively a digital notebook of things too good to forget.  Later I go through and look at them if I’m stumped or if I want to incorporate them into whatever my current project is, but most of what I’m writing is simply present in my head when I sit down to type.  Sometimes I don’t know it’s there until it comes through my fingers, but then I recognize it because I’d already thought of it, not always intelligibly or logically.   

My home is a big, uncomfortable old dilapidated renovation project; there’s no such thing in it as an office.  The computer is in our bedroom, and I get up very early, while Brett is asleep, and type up the things I’ve already thought about.  There’s no glass of wine, cup of coffee, patch of sunlight or purring cat.  If the kids get up early I make them go away or go back to bed.  I can get pretty mean about it. The two essentials are food and motion.  I write best when I’ve just eaten.  Bread is the best thing in the world to eat if you want to think things up.  Most of what I think of happens when I’m walking or standing at a sink washing dishes.  Those are places/moments when my mind separates from the person walking or washing and comes up with surprises.

Next week: we consider literature in the light of economic crisis…

List of the Week: "Remembering 9/11"

Today at the University of Missouri, the bells on the Quad and in the student union rang at 8:46 a.m, in commemoration of the victims of Sept. 11, 2001. A mass-email announced this plan to the faculty and students yesterday, but today, some of us who teach between eight and nine were a little unsure how to proceed. Should pause the lesson for a moment of silence? How long should that moment be? What if we can’t hear the bells from our room on campus? Should we stop the lesson, or should we carry on in a spirit of unflappability? This small dilemma, trivial though it may seem, nonetheless speaks to the still uncertain status of 9/11 as a significant day in our national culture. It has not been officially designated a day of memorial (or at least not in a capacity that carries any real weight), and yet it carries with it an aura of solemnity. But we haven’t yet fixed for ourselves a clear ritual response. 9/11 is a day whose meaning and legacy is still very much in flux. And as we each consider for ourselves how we might respond to this day and its memory, some of the staff of The Missouri Review would like to offer some works that might help shape that response for their readers.

1. Martín Espada, “Alabanza”

A friend of mine emailed me this poem three years ago, and I was amazed by it.  You can find a copy on Martín Espada’s website: http://www.martinespada.net/alabanza.htm.   

In my experience, choosing to write about September 11^th is controversial.  Especially right after the tragedy, many of my friends felt it was insensitive to treat the subject directly in a poem.   That year, I heard David St. John give a lecture in which he spoke of his surprise by the demand for poetry in the wake of 9/11.  As I recall, his argument was that people needed a new kind of language in order to come to terms with what happened.   Martín Espada treats the subject directly, and with great sensitivity.  He imagines the Local 100 workers at the Windows on the World restaurant, who were prepping food for the day when the planes hit.  I can’t explain why this poem is so magical.  Part of it has to do with his use of both Spanish and English, and how the combination does seem to invent a new language.  Part of it is the litany form that echoes like a prayer.  The lines are a chant invoking the ones who passed away.  No matter how many times I read this poem, I am always incredibly moved by it.          –Katy Didden

 

2. Haruki Murakami, After the Quake

After the Quake by Haruki Murakami is not about 9/11, but it comes from another tragedy, the 1995 Kobe earthquake in Japan.  The book consists of 6 short stories, each with a unique reaction to the event.  There are moments that are hauntingly similar to what we experienced after 9/11, one example being a man whose wife stares at the television constantly for five straight days without speaking.  The stories look at the tragedy from a variety of angles–that of the businessman who has lost “something” intangible, or the artist who tries to discover something in the fire he uses, or the man whose mother believes him to be a messia, or a man who is visited by a giant frog determined to save Tokyo from a similar disaster.  The stories range from serious to surreal to comical, displaying Murakami’s gifts as a writer, but also his thoughtful consideration of the many ways such an event impacts our varied souls.            –Darren Pine 

 

3. National Commission on Terrorist Attacks, The 9/11 Commission Report

I do not have much to say about the literary stylings or content of The 9/11 Commission Report, but reading it does give one an added sense of participation in the national attempt to comprehend this moment of history. But my real pitch here is not so much for the book itself as it is for a unusual and memorable way to experience it.

The 9/11 Commission Report is one of the recording projects of Librivox.org, an online volunteer organization dedicated to creating free (and public domain) audio recordings of public domain works. Librivox recordings are largely homemade, introducing a range of audio quality (some as intimate as as listening to someone read to you in their living room with a bit of light traffic noise outside and a pinging radiator, and some as carefully recorded as professional audiobooks) as well as a range of voices (young, old, and accents from every corner).

The 9/11 Commission Report is still a work in progress at Librivox, currently going through its “Proof Listening” stage. But you can listen to all of the different recorded sections uploaded so far, made by no fewer than 18 different volunteers. You can listen, entirely free of charge, from this link.          –Patrick Lane

 

4. Francine Prose, Goldengrove

I’m currently reading Prose’s most recent novel.  Unlike some of her previous books that are essentially comic satire, Goldengrove is a direct and sensitive illustration of grief from the perspective of an adolescent girl narrator, Nico, whose older sister, Margaret, drowns at the outset of the novel.  It’s partly a story about how children-because Nico is really a child-can fall through the cracks when the adults they depend on are beyond helping or paying attention to them. In this sense it’s about a kind of danger that in the safety of exurban America is more frequent and threatening than a terrorist attack. The novel’s post 9/11 setting is explicit and deliberate, though for the most part it does not seem central to the narrative: Nico’s family lives in a remote spot in New York in what was formerly her mother’s family’s summer home.  In the wake of 9/11, Nico observes, the area has seen an influx of yuppies from the city, apparently to escape the potential dangers of urban life.  The town is so remote that there are no nearby cell towers, so cell phones don’t work, and the teens in the story are strikingly disconnected from technology.  Nico and her dead sister’s boyfriend, Aaron, criticize the adult population, who appear to them to be in denial about global dangers, obsessing instead about small-scale threats such as local environmental issues-or the drowning of a local teen.  That’s what Nico and Aaron think, but Prose is suggesting the opposite: that most of the time it’s the small tragedies that have the power to hurt us and throw our lives off course.          –Evelyn Somers

 

5. Art Spiegelman, In the Shadow of No Towers

Art Spiegelman’s first book since Maus is a swirling cloud of debris kicked up after history collided with his personal life and the collapse of his mental stability that soon followed. That collision is mirrored graphically by his colliding of essay into cartoon, with shards of digitally manipulated images scattered throughout. It’s a colossal mess, but so was Speigelman, as he admits in his introduction, having grown to fear Al-Quaeda and the U.S. government equally, and struggling just as hard to connect with new flag-waving Midwesterners as with other New Yorkers at post 9/11 mixers and poetry readings.

The cover image – high-gloss silhouettes of the Twin Towers on a matte-finish background – will be immediately recognizable to many readers, but the illustrated disintegration of the artist’s sanity on the pages inside might not. The drawings summon back those feelings of helplessness, paranoia, and outrage many of us felt during fall ’01. The ceaseless barrage of images is chillingly familiar, too. So is the frantic search for something simple and comfortable to escape with. In Speigelman’s case, that took the form of comic strips from a century ago, and he devotes the last section of the book to some particularly poignant ones that became his lifeline.

Check out In the Shadow of No Towers not for its success in making sense of 9/11 – in that regard it is a miserable failure – but for its success as a portrait of an artist who, like the rest of us, looked at what happened and couldn’t make any sense of it at all.          –Dustin Michael

[Next week: Some of our favorite bookstores and booksellers...]

List of the Week: "What I Read on My Summer Vacation"

Welcome to a brand new feature of our blog, our List of the Week. This week, our staff would like to share some of the books they read over the summer of 2008. We welcome our readers’ own recommendations and reactions in the comments below!

1. Joan Acocella, 28 artists and two Saints

Joan Acocella’s collection features essays about writers, dancers, and saints which were originally published in the New Yorker over the last few years.  Most of the writers are “writers’ writers” such as Maqrguerite Yourcenar, Primo Levi, and Dorothy Parker, and thus may be more interesting to litterateurs than to general readers.  Some of the essays were originally written as book reviews, for example “The Frog and the Crocodile,” which reviews A Transatlantic Love Affair, a book of letters from Simone de Beauvoir to Nelson Algren that she wrote in the late 40s and early 50s.  De Beauvoir of course had fallen in love as a young woman with Jean-Paul Sartre, and over the rest of her life — even during her relatively brief affair with Algren — remained a virtual slave to the priest of existentialism. Her affair with Algren affected the writing of The Second Sex, the book that marked the beginning of the modern women’s movement.  Acocella can be both amused and empathetic as she describes this woman who was at once a prophet of women’s liberation and at the same time enchained to Sartre, whose life was a boil of drink, amphetamine-taking and chasing girls, even after he went blind.  Her letters to Algren are particularly entertaining in their depiction of the chaotic and sometimes silly life on the Left Bank, where the postwar intellectuals of France were dancing their delicate dance between capitalism and communism.

 

In all, Acocella’s collection is highly readable and leads one to want to learn more about writers like Joseph Roth and Italo Svevo and dancers like Jerome Robbins.           –Speer Morgan

 

2. Frank Bidart, Watching the Spring Festival

I got turned onto Frank Bidart by my thesis advisor, Liz Arnold, who was always trying to get us to imagine a new music beyond the iamb.  I still don’t know if it’s possible, but I do know that I am in awe of Bidart’s musicality-here is just the first part of the first two lines:  “Intricate to celebrate still-delicate/ raw spring…”  I read this and it’s like I’m hearing violinists when they hold their bows and pluck the strings-internal rhymes, plosives, unexpected stresses!  To me, Bidart’s use of words has the purposefulness of placing notes.  My mother bought this book at Grolier’s Books in Cambridge, where the bookseller told me his favorite in the book is “To the Republic”-a great pick.  Like Bidart’s other books, this one delivers re-imaginings of historical events and performances; it gives unflinching gravitas, a little shock, and mind-shifting insights that come from his steady look into the dark-depths of human motives, or into what betrays our hope to be good.  This book will absorb you!         –Katy Didden

 

3. Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union

My favorite novel of the summer was Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. The novel’s setting is Sitka, Alaska, and homeland to displaced World War II Jews-an alternate history in the tradition of a sub-genre of science fiction and fantasy. It’s also a murder mystery. This novel brings to mind another literary genre-bender, Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem. (I confess, I’ve been a science fiction fan ever since I read L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time as a kid.) Other science fiction fans also found The Yiddish Policemen’s Union to their liking, recently bestowing it the Hugo award [http://www.thehugoawards.org/], science fiction’s highest honor.          –Richard Sowienski

 

4. Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

A memoir/travel journal/extended spiritual meditation. This is an easy, enjoyable read that I treated myself to this summer after taking my PhD comprehensive exam. The structure is well thought out — three sections for three countries: Italy, India, and Indonesia, and 108 brief writings divided equally among her experiences in each country. I loved Italy. It’s obvious she suffered tremendously during and after her divorce, and it was a privilege to accompany her as she ate and savored her way through Italy. India was intense, but rightfully so — it’s the most inward-seeking section of the book as she shares with the reader her deepest spiritual struggles. The Indonesia section wasn’t as strong as the other two. Here, the structure of the book might have forced her to focus on a part of her travels that didn’t need so much space. Much of her suffering has passed by the time she gets to Bali, and unfortunately, what makes for a good story is the pain. Of course I’m happy that she’s happy, but for the sake of the book, the happy ending went on a bit too long. Highly recommended.          –Lania Knight

5. Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking

I actually experienced Blink as an audiobook (it’s available at Audible.com), read by the author. Blink is just the right kind of audiobook for those commuting/exercising/dog-walking parts of the day; it is the kind of popular science writing that is engaging without requiring deep concentration, anchoring discursive chunks within entertaining narrative anecdotes. The subtitle makes Blink sound like a terrible self-help book, but the premise is far more compelling. Gladwell explores the idea that our brains and powers of perception are structured to make optimal snap judgments, extrapolating from tiny, specific, and often subconciously perceived details. Gladwell spends about half the book describing research (in the form of those winning little anecdotes) that shows how the powers of intuition can in an instant reach better conclusions than can long, logical reasoning processes. Then, for the second half of the book, Gladwell looks at the ways in which this same intuitive faculty can go wrong and deceive us.

Though its prime audience would seem to be “decision-makers,” Blink is actually quite an interesting read for creative writers. Not only does it explore some aspects of intution that are clearly part of the creative process, it also reinforces how much readers rely upon little details and subtle cues to draw quite large conclusions about characters and situations. Gladwell ultimately provides one of the best arguments for using immersive concrete detail in your writing that I’ve encountered.         –Patrick Lane

 

6. Cormac McCarthy, The Road

I read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which I picked up because I was curious to read something by the author whose novel No Country for Old Men was turned into an Oscar-winning film last year.  Its tone is relentlessly bleak, but with an undercurrent of hope, following a father and son who are trekking across America after something has happened to destroy civilization as we know it.  What this “something” was is never explained, nor does it seem that the novel is interested in how the world destroyed itself, but is instead focused on the father and son and their desperate need to survive and keep their humanity in a world in which hunger has trumped morality.  The book asks whether the father would have been more inclined to lose his humanity if not for his son, who is constantly questioning the decisions that his father makes, particularly when they seem callous.  While the book can sometimes feel “heavy” — despite McCarthy’s spare style — especially with scenes that involve little more than the father scouting out houses, taking inventory of their contents, the father-son relationship keeps the story moving.  All of these little inventories are about love, we come to realize, about trying to sustain what you care for.    The Road is soon to be a movie starring Viggo Mortenson.  While Mortenson seems well-cast, I’m curious as to whether the book will translate to the screen as well as No Country for Old Men, given that it is so bleak, and its beat-to-beat action not as dramatic.          –Darren Pine

 

7. Alan Moore (author) and Dave Gibbons (illustrator), Watchmen

A very close friend of mine grew out his hair and beard over the summer, and by the middle of August his appearance had devolved into that of a caveman or bridge troll.  He had become more hair than man.

“You look like Alan Moore,” I finally told him.

He tugged at his kinky beard.  “Exactly,” he smiled. 

Alan Moore has become an icon, “an eccentric genius,” whose comics and graphic novels (such as V for Vendetta, From Hell, The League of Extraordinary Gentleman, and so forth) have all become award-winning critical darlings and popular successes.

So having read so much Alan Moore over the years, why did I neglect to read Watchmen, his most acclaimed work of fiction, until this very summer?  I saw Watchmen on my friends’ bookshelves and coffee tables and in their opium dens, propping up uneven candelabra.

I had read nothing but rave reviews about Watchmen.  I was aware that it had won countless awards and was selected as one of Time’s “100 Best Novels” in 2005.

And yet I never read it until this summer. Such things have a way of slipping through the cracks, I suppose.  Perhaps I avoided Watchmen much like I continue to avoid Moby Dick, daunted and slightly turned off by its reputation.

Given the hype, given the high expectations, I was afraid that I’d be let down.

As it happened,  I cracked open Watchmen on a Sunday morning, read the first line — “Dog carcass in alley this morning, tire tread on burst stomach” — and I couldn’t put it down until I had finished reading the entire fair-sized graphic novel through to the very end.

I was driven by the page-turning plot.  I was stunned by the complex psychological profiles.  I let my eyes linger over Dave Gibbons’ illustrations.  I was haunted by the perennial and contemporary themes of war and the threat of global annihilation at human hands.

All this from a book about superheroes, or “costumed adventurers,” as they’re more accurately known in the text.

Before I sat down to read Watchmen, my caveman-like friend said to me: “Oh, you’ll love it. Alan Moore is like the James Joyce of the graphic novel.  Watchmen is like his Ulysses.”

My friend is wrong on this point.  Perhaps the sheer literary audacity and, yes, pretension that permeates Watchmen can be likened to Joyce (after all, Watchmen does quote Nietzsche), but Moore’s intricate style of storytelling and voluminous characterization reads much more like Charles Dickens.

[NOTE: If anyone deserves of the moniker, "the James Joyce of the graphic novel," then it's Chris Ware.  Indeed, Ware's Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth can be considered his Ulysses.]

There is a revealing similarity between Moore and Dickens.  One must recall that all of Dickens’ novels were originally published in serial installments.  In a similar fashion, Watchmen was originally published by DC Comics as a monthly limited series from 1986 to 1987.  Only later was it republished as a trade paperback or “graphic novel.”

I am hesitant to reveal anything about the plot or characters in Watchmen for fear of spoiling it for others.  All I can say is: Drop everything and go read Watchmen.  Don’t wait for the movie to come out next year.  Read it first.  Because despite Hollywood’s increasing success with transferring comic books to the big screen (think Iron Man and The Dark Knight), the film medium has yet to effectively capture Alan Moore (V for Vendetta was simply average and The League of Extraordinary Gentleman was simply terrible).

In final, I do not believe that comic books or graphic novels need to be defended any longer for their abilities to penetrate the “adult intellect.”  Such a debate is old hat.  It should be accepted by now that graphic novels can deliver a poignant story with riveting characters immersed in themes both “literary” and “timeless.”          –Eric A. Thomas 

8. Jodi Picoult, My Sister’s Keeper

This summer, I succumbed to my mother’s insistence and read a Jodi Picoult novel, My Sister’s Keeper. I’d heard of Picoult’s work before; her practice of taking hot contemporary topics — school shootings, Catholic sex scandals, teenage pregnancy, suicide pacts — has drawn the attention of readers across the nation, and several of her books have topped the bestseller’s list. For this reason I was skeptical when I first picked up her book. Her whole process seemed like a recipe to me, a gimmick that somehow worked over and over again: take a current issue, a pinch of characterization, throw in some different points-of-view, stir in a surprise ending, and let it boil. Just listing the topics of her sixteen novels will make you realize how improbable her whole operation is. How could an author possibly continue spinning big issues into fiction and still wow her readers? Aren’t they tired of this trick yet?

My Sister’s Keeper features a 13-year-old girl genetically engineered to be a donor for her leukemia-stricken sister — certainly another hot political issue. Yet as I read the novel, I couldn’t help but get invested in the characters. In the end, Picoult somehow manages to make their experiences the heart of the story, instead of letting the politics take over. There is a warmth and realism to the protagonist, Anna, and Picoult never lets her become more than she is: a confused teenager struggling to assert her individuality. I enjoyed the book, but I still wish that Picoult would branch out from her method of brainstorming plots — partly because I think she would fare well elsewhere, given her talent for characterization, and partly because I know there are stories with emotional and intellectual weight that she could tell without relying on these hot topics.          –Brittany Barr

 

9. Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth: From the Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration 

The most challenging book I read this summer (and this year, for that matter), is Pope Benedict’s Jesus of Nazareth, the first part of his effort to bridge, in writing, the gap between numerous recent portrayals of the historical Jesus and the divine son of God who is the foundation of Christianity.  The Pope’s thesis is not complicated: he acknowledges that Jesus the man lived in history and that a historical approach to understanding his ministry is valuable, but, he says, that’s not enough.  What gets lost in the many historical readings of Jesus is that he was in communion with God, a communion that was his essence, “the true center of his personality.”  It is not possible to make sense of Jesus, says Ratzinger, unless one understands that he was God and that his chief work — really, his only work — was to bring God to humanity.  So far, things seem clear.  But what does that mean, to bring God?  In ten chapters that address ten critical aspects of Jesus’ ministry, the Pope does not so much elucidate as provide glimmers of what that means — or just as likely, my limited theological knowledge makes the illumination seem like glimmers.  I found myself fascinated, nevertheless, by almost every insight, from his exegesis of the Lord’s Prayer (which includes a discussion of why in the words “Our Father” there is no corresponding feminine implication of the maternal) to his readings of several major parables.  Literary type that I am, I was very interested in his argument for reading the parables on a level that goes beyond the generally understood allegorical correspondences.  The parables, he says, are revelatory of the mystery of the Cross and must be read that way.  Here, at least, I was on comfortable ground, and I found the light shed by Ratzinger’s interpretation to be consistent, welcoming and truly profound.          –Evelyn Somers

 

10. Evelyn Waugh, The Loved One

This summer, I read The Loved One at the recommendation of my former creative writing teacher, Marjorie Sandor. Marjorie and I both have a taste for macabre humor, and this short novel by Evelyn Waugh (of Brideshead Revisited fame) filled the bill. Set in the funeral industry in L.A., The Loved One tracks a love triangle between Aimee Thanatogenos, a cosmetologist for corpses at Whispering Glades funeral home; Mr. Joyboy (yes, really), the expert embalmer; and Dennis, a British expat and poet who works at the Happier Hunting Ground, a funeral home for pets that models itself on Whispering Glades.

Whispering Glades has developed a specialized vocabulary so that the grim facts of death and decay never enter the minds of its customers. In the world of Whispering Glades, corpses are Loved Ones, the owner of the funeral home is the Dreamer, funeral directors are Mortuary Hostesses, and bodies can be disposed of by inhumement, entombment, inurnment, immurement, and even insarcophagusment. They are never just buried.

Mr. Joyboy woos Aimee by ensuring that all of the corpses he sends her way have beatific smiles on their faces. He tells her, “Miss Thantogenos, for you the Loved Ones just naturally smile.” Other cosmetologists receive corpses with grave or studious expressions. Dennis seduces Aimee in a slightly less creepy way by sending her famous poetry he passes off as his own. For good reason, Aimee cannot decide between the two men, and turns for help to the Guru Brahmin, a newspaper advice columnist who is in reality a heavy drinker named Mr. Slump. As one might expect, Mr. Slump gives her awful advice, and what has so far been a comedy takes a turn toward tragedy. I won’t spoil the delightfully profane ending for you. Give this book a try. You can read it in a weekend, but it will stick with you for much longer.          –Kate McIntyre

Next Week’s List: “Remembering 9/11″