April Book Review

Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert by Terry Tempest Williams


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I love the red rock wilderness of Southern Utah, and this is the entire subject of this book. The book itself is a collection of random writings: poetry, personal essays, political readings and letters, journal entries: The kind of random book only an experienced published author can get away with writing. For me, I like TTW's personal essays the best.

Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar: Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes by Thomas Cathcart


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
An interesting book that reminds me of a miscellany or hodgepodge. You're not going to really get a good introduction to philosophy this way, but you will learn how to analyze and break down jokes according to different theories (so the subtitle should really be "Understanding Jokes Through Philosophy," not the other way around). Fun to read in spurts.

The Happiest Baby on the Block: The New Way to Calm Crying and Help Your Newborn Baby Sleep Longer by Harvey Karp


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This book covers the five S's of soothing an infant: swing, side/stomach, suck, swaddle, and shhh. Great advice, especially for new parents. It also has lots of helpful little blurbs like how to burp infants. Because I didn't begin reading it until after my baby was born, I was a little impatient with all the cultural history and theory at the beginning - for those more practically minded, don't read this book chronologically, just skip around to the relevant parts.

Why I Wake Early by Mary Oliver


My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This is the first full Mary Oliver collection I've read. I loved it. Fabulous natural imagery, New England imagery, the ocean, the woods. Themes of spirituality and God. To view selections, see older blog posts where I've pulled out pieces of her poetry:

Hello, Sun in my face.
Hello, you who made the morning
and spread it over the fields and
into the faces of tulips
and the nodding morning glories
and into the windows of, even, the
miserable and the crotchety-

best preacher that ever was,
dear star, that just happens
to be where you are in the universe
to keep us from ever darkness,
to ease us with warm touching,
to hold us in the great hands of light-
good morning, good morning, good morning.

Watch, now, how I start the day
in happiness, in kindness.

View all my reviews >>

Gethsemane

The grass never sleeps.
Or the roses.
Nor does the lily have a secret eye that shuts until morning.
Jesus said, wait with me. But the disciples slept.
The cricket has such splendid fringe on its feet,
and it sings, have you noticed, with its whole body,
and heaven knows if it ever sleeps.
Jesus said, wait with me. And maybe the stars did, maybe
the wind wound itself into a silver tree, and didn't move,
maybe,
the lake far away, where once he walked as on a
blue pavement,
lay still and waited, wild awake.
Oh the dear bodies, slumped and eye-shut, that could not
keep that vigil, how they must have wept,
so utterly human, knowing this too
must be a part of the story.

- Mary Oliver

March Book Review

Olive Kitteridge: A Novel in Stories by Elizabeth Strout


My rating: 5 of 5 stars
A novel in short stories surrounding the residents of Crosby, Maine, and more specifically, Olive Kitteridge. The literariness of the novel (the themes, symbols, and characters) appeal to the nerdy side of me and makes me love novels like this.

After the first story, I was pretty disappointed that Olive's character was the focal point of the rest of the novel. But with eash subsequent story, the depth of her character hooked me in. She's not the kind of person I would want for a friend or a mother, but maybe someone I'd like to go to church with or have as a teacher. The cover describes the narrative as "deeply empathetic," which is a great way of describing my experience. To see Olive through so many people's eyes, including her own at various stages of life, is to learn to understand someone who I would have judged (and did judge) harshly on the surface.

Half Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Fun novel about the life of a spunky woman raised in the harshness of the American Southwest. Enjoyed the voice of the novel especially. It's not often there's such an unapologetically strong female voice, and because I'm in love with the region she spends most of her life in, I felt a closeness to her trials and successes.

The Piano Tuner by Daniel Mason


My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This was a surprisingly captivating novel about a piano tuner from Victorian England who has been sent to tune a piano deep in the jungles of Burma that belongs to an infamous army doctor. I enjoyed the way it was written and loved the characters. I'm a little disappointed in the ending and almost gave it 4 stars because of it, but I loved the rest of the novel enough. Part Victorian detective story, part Heart of Darkness, and part romance.

View all my reviews >>

A Birth Poem

Twelve days ago, I gave birth. As I labored in the hospital, I was aware that I would be missing my dear old friend’s great big birthday bash that night. Diagnosed eight months ago with neuro-endocrine cancer, my friend recently learned she probably has less than six months to live. Deciding not to wait for her birthday later on in the year, a huge party was organized in her honor.

While I am overflowing with joy at the birth of my son, and the birth of my motherhood, I hardly know how to begin to say goodbye to someone who has always been there with me, through nursery, primary, junior high and high school, boyfriends, weddings, and more. I am struck by how seemingly polar opposites can hit our lives at the same time.

The Trimurti

I wore a necklace throughout my pregnancy
A trinity charm, swirled into one
Creator, Sustainer, and Purger

For all three sometimes come at once
And they often do at a birth, I suppose.
I crouch upward—breathing, pushing, exhaling
With all I have and more, then sink back,
Eyes shut, catching my breath
All of the moment in my heart.

I smile then—truly
Because I know nothing but love and intensity
For this baby boy

While I lay there
Another birthday is celebrated—
Really, it isn’t exactly her birthday
But if you had less than six months
You’d celebrate early too

Thirty years, her last milestone.
Shiva, do you know you take a mother of five babes?
What do you want to purge? I dare not ask why.

The Creator smiled on us that day twenty years ago
She and I sat over our cross-stitch, two merry misses
When Mother called from two houses down
To witness a birth
My calico calm, near serene, purred her kitten into life
With her hypnotic humming

And I, struggling to do things right
Hastened to tie the thin, red thread around the chord,
When he began to chirp, hardly a mew.

The Sustainer is come to stop time.
I never watch the ticking clock
And beheld with ecstatic surprise,
When they place his warm, slippery body on my chest.
And the weather is so mild

February forgot its season
At my back door a crocus pushes its tender leaves upward
Childhood is not unlike motherhood: gently aware of only now

Motherhood is not unlike the yoke
Of rainbow connections and pulsing sensations
I love, I feel, I know, I heal
As we vibrate to the lullaby
I sing in the key of present tense

Boarded the train there's no getting off

I'm a riddle in nine syllables,
An elephant, a ponderous house,
A melon strolling on two tendrils.
O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!
This loaf's big with its yeasty rising.
Money's new-minted in this fat purse.
I'm a means, a stage, a cow in calf.
I've eaten a bag of green apples,
Boarded the train there's no getting off.
- Sylvia Plath

There tends to be quite a bit of discussion on whether or not Plath was happy about pregnancy when she wrote this poem. There's all kinds of analysis available (that bag of green apples means she's suffering from Eve's curse, etc. etc.) I don't think it has to show either happiness or misery or be looked into too much beyond the fabulous metaphors - at this stage in pregnancy, it is what it is.

Beyond Composition

It's 6:00 pm on Tuesday night, and I'm avoiding grading research papers. I've read through the stack, and I have only to match them up to my rubric. What that's done, I'll submit grades, and enjoy the week and a half before class starts again. I've never taught two classes during one 4-month period before while working full time, and it's kept me more than busy (thank you, oh fetus, for not making me too sick to teach). It will be nice to be back to just one long night a week.

People ask me why I do this. The answer is because I think it's what I'm meant to do. In fact, one of the recommended careers for my Myers-Briggs personality type is English teacher. I love mentoring others. I love discussing ideas. It's more satisfying than staring at a cubicle wall, and since I need to have my cubicle job to survive, I also teach on the side.

There's a reason I only need a master's degree to teach my class. The tenure-track professors are bored by general education classes, and even though students pay as much for my class as they do for any other three credits, they can pay faculty with only a master's a lot less to do it. That being said, I love my students. I have some of the hardest-working, sincere students. They know that English is not their best subject, so they come ready to learn. It's fulfilling that way.

But sometimes I dream of something more. Over the weekend, I popped into the bookstore on the SUU campus. I am always tempted to see what other schools are teaching in English, so I went through the shelves. I found a class on coming of age in the Pacific Islands. I found another on the Southwest desert with Wallace Stegner and Terry Tempest Williams, among others. One was a seminar on Willa Cather. But the one I found so intriguing was on graphic novels. They were reading Batman, the Incredible Hulk, America's Greatest Comics, a novel in woodcuts, and a theory book on Reading Pictures. Oh, how I would love to teach (or take!) a class on that. While I loved studying the classics, if I could do it all again, I would dive into the world of excellent contemporary literary art.

You know, I miss that. The exploration. English majors have all the fun.

The Pond

You think it will never happen again.

Then, one night in April,
the tribes wake trilling.

You walk down to the shore.

Your coming stills them,
but little by little the silence lifts
until song is everywhere
and your soul rises from your bones
and strides out over the water.

It is a crazy things to do—
for no one can live like that,
floating around in the darkness
over the gauzy water.

Left on the shore your bones
keep shouting come back!
But your soul won’t listen;
in the distance it is unfolding
like a pair of wings, it is sparking
like hot wires. So,
like a good friend,
you decide to follow.

You step off the shore
and plummet to your knees—
you slog forward to your thighs
and sink to your cheekbones—
and now you are caught
by the cold chains of the water—
you are vanishing while around you
the frogs continue to sing, driving
their music upward through your own throat,
not even noticing
you are something else.

And that’s when it happens—
you see everything
through their eyes,
their joy, their necessity;
you wear their webbed fingers;
your throat swells.

And that’s when you know
you will live whether you will or not,
one way or another,
because everything is everything else,
one long muscle.

It’s not more mysterious than that.

So you relax, you don’t fight it anymore,
the darkness coming down
called water
called spring,
called the green leaf, called
a woman’s body
as it turns into mud and leaves,
as it beats in its cage of water,
as it turns like a lonely spindle
in the moonlight, as it says,
yes.

- Mary Oliver

Your place in the family of things

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

~Mary Oliver (posted on First Fig)

After discussing new Spock's eyebrows

Dad: I've been noticing eyebrows lately. Like in that movie, what's it called? Getting Mad about Stuck-up Guy.

Me: There's a moving called that?

Dad: Yeah, that snooty guy in old European times with all the daughters.

Me: Captain von Trapp?

Dad: No, you know, they're all getting married. Well anyway, they go through the door with the time warp...

Me: What time warp?

Dad: And the girl, she's upside down. And she's got weird eyebrows. And then Darcy turns into Leopold.

Movie Review: Elizabeth Gaskell

What do you do when you run out of new Jane Austen movies? When you own all the good Jane Austen films and have watched them over and over? Well, I explore other BBC drama and move on to film adaptations of another author. I have been delighted to view three Elizabeth Gaskell movies recently: North and South; Cranford; and Wives and Daughters.

I embarrassingly embrace at least one popular genre besides animated sitcoms: I can't get over a good 19th-century romance. There's something about the focus on conversation, social subtleties, unstable political and economic environment, and the mesh of reason and romance (sense and sensibility, anyone?) that wins my curiosity. And it doesn't hurt that there are often gorgeous, intellectual men with quiet strength who bear their suffering in such a manly way, and are great dressers to boot.

(Image from Amazon.com)

Move over, Mr. Darcy, there's a new passionate, brooding man on the scene. In North and South, John Thorton is first seen by the heroine, Margaret, when he's beating the tar out of a factory worker who was caught smoking inside the cotton mill. Thorton is a self-made man, a survivor of poverty, and the man on whom all of the hopes of his mother hang (sense some meddling?).

(Image from Amazon.com)

Margaret, on the other hand, is a vicar's daughter from the country and is appalled by the brutishness she sees in city factory life. In essence, this film is about the move from country to city (a huge shift in 19-century England), but it is also about feminine (the country) and masculine (the industrialized city). While I think I will always prefer a Regency ballroom to the Victorian child-labor factory, the romance and intrigue is just fun to watch with these two main characters.

(Image from pbs.org)

Based on only the image above, Kevin began referring to Cranford as my "old biddy movie." And I guess it really is, but this is my favorite of the three. Merged from three stories from Mrs. Gaskell, this series of TV episodes is about a small town on the verge of the arriving railway. It focuses on female characters and their unique moral code. Simon Woods, of P&P fame, plays the new town doctor and love interest for, well, practically the whole town.

Dame Judy Dench was fabulous in this, and the movie is centered in her character's middle class home and follows her friends and acquaintances through the course of a year. I think what I loved about it was enjoying the fleeting moments of a town on the verge of upheaval. We don't see too much of the enormous disruption coming, but we get to see the great intimacy between the town folk that is about to be changed forever.

(Image from pbs.org)

Wives and Daughters was the longest of the three - five hours. Now, I'm the first one to defend the five-hour Pride and Prejudice, but that was Pride and Prejudice. While this story is intriguing, it sometimes gets a tad painful. Especially because the main actress sometimes fell apart in her role.

As the daughter of a widower doctor, Molly Gibson moves more freely through society, socializing with the humble as well as the great lords and ladies. Like Anne Elliot in Persuasion, she bears much with her duty, her integrity, and the seemingly unattainability of the object of her eye.

(Image from pbs.org)

But this man, Richard, redeems the show. He's the misunderstood second son (read: poor son) of a squire. He's a geographer and a naturalist. He's sensitive, calm, and forgiving. He also walks around for a good time with his shirt off and gets dirty while remaining pleasant to look at.

The Holy Ghost over the bent world broods

Spring has officially arrived at our house. Hyacinths, daffodils, and tulips abound in every garden. My crab apple tree is in full bloom, and our neighborhood is full of tulips at every house and alive with spring.

Kevin is very proud of these white daffodils. So to celebrate, here's a little official Gerard Manley Hopkins:

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

"God's Grandeur"

We all can love Earth Day

although this poet said that the writing pen was
a man's persuit of the virgin page
never dreaming of instruments suggesting
strokes, clicks, taps, and rolls
his words draw me out for celebration
because he said GLORY be to God for dappled things
and Ah! bright wings

Ancestral Picture

I dreamt last night of
the home of my childhood friend
whose mother told me she learned of my father and
illness
a pained, remorseful face
not quite connecting in the eyes

today: two dings, two clicks
two messages
how sorry she was to learn of
illness
from her mother

another friend, backpacking
withstood rain, cliffs, wind,
a waist too small to support her pack
gave birth - fourth child, first boy
while I was moving backward
to the place we had slept after that storm

elegant portrait from the past
face of my father, but soft
face I never knew that gave birth to
another face I never knew
from which he sprang
a realization of what grows
out of such eyes and cheekbones
a face my children may know

As the light within the lantern

It's been a hard day, but I am comforted by the beauty I saw on my walk around Temple Square. I picked another leaf of lamb's ear, noticed the cherry blossoms, and saw a bird's nest. These are some Temple Square tulips. And as I walked the gardens in the rain, I listened to this:

As the ruby in the setting,
As the honey in the comb,
As the light within the lantern,
As the father in the home,
As the eagle in the mountain,
As the sparrow in the nest,
So, Lord, art Thou to me.

- Johannes Tauler (1300-1361)

This is one of my dad's favorite hymns, and it has been memorable to sing this in church with my family. The line comparing God to "the father in the home" has always resonated with me. There's a special feeling when my dad is in the same room as I am, and I love his conversation, insights, and yes, corny jokes.

My dad recently got some serious health news. I want to preserve his privacy and not get too detailed, but I thought I'd let you know so you can send all your warm thoughts and good energy his way. I remember so many of you pulled together for him 4.5 years ago when he first got sick and helped make miracles happen. I also know the power of community.

Mi corazón se desató en el viento

I don't have much to add to this poem, other than a delicate picture from my backyard and an emerging realization that intuition, insight, poetry come at the strangest times, searching for us.

POETRY

And it was at that age...Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don't know how or when,
no, they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me.

I did not know what to say, my mouth
had no way
with names
my eyes were blind,
and something started in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering
that fire
and I wrote the first faint line,
faint, without substance, pure
nonsense,
pure wisdom
of someone who knows nothing,
and suddenly I saw
the heavens
unfastened
and open,
planets,
palpitating plantations,
shadow perforated,
riddled
with arrows, fire and flowers,
the winding night, the universe.

And I, infinitesimal being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
I felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke loose on the wind.

- Pablo Neruda

True Colors and Shapes

Because I simply cannot resist the beauty that manifests each new day in my garden:

By this time, like one who had set out on his way by night, and travelled through a region of smooth or idle dreams, our history now arrives on the confines, where daylight and truth meet us with a clear dawn, representing to our view, though at a far distance, true colours and shapes.

- John Milton

The Road Not Taken: My Alternate Reading

I realize that I posted on this just last April, but a friend reminded me of it, and I started thinking more about the questions I had then on this poem.

I am not convinced that this poem is about the merits of pursuing the alternate path, but instead is about questioning the decision to travel the unworn path. At the end of the poem, the narrator sighs and thinks about that other road that he always had intended to go back and take, but life got away from him before he was able to travel back.

May I indulge in an alternate reading? Even though the title usually is understood as the road the narrator took, the more I think about Frost's title, "The Road Not Taken," the more I become convinced that the road not taken is the one the narrator did not take. Both paths were roads, which by definition must have some passage and travellers to keep their status (he wasn't bushwacking through the brush). And Frost never says that his road was the one not taken, but only "want[ing] wear," "grassy," and "less travelled by." That leads me to conclude that the title and focus of the poem is the other road, the road of conformity, which keeps its place as an absent presence through the poem.

What if this is the pensive meditation of the non-conformist on what could have been? What if it is the uncertainty that is granted about battles that were fought against the mainstream, and the questioning if that path was worth it in the end? The poem doesn't seem to answer these questions for me, but raise them.

As far as I can tell, this is quite a drastic change from the way this poem is touted by outsiders and minorities of all kinds. But now that I see it this way, I can't help myself in thinking that it is the artist that wonders what life would have been like if he'd been like everyone else instead. In the words of a Christmas carol, Do you see what I see? Does that ruin it, or add new meaning to you?

The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

An ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us

If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read it? [...] What we must have are those books which come upon us like ill-fortune, and distress us deeply, like the death of one we love better than ourselves, like suicide. A book must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us.

-Franz Kafka, as quoted in The Promise by Chaim Potok

This is not a post about the books we read for fun, for guilt, for pleasure. This is about the novels that shape us, sometimes in painful ways.

What are the novels that have torn you up, that have cracked the ice within you? The first fiction I remember that was really meaningful was A Wrinkle in Time. It changed my perspective on many things. As you think of your own soul-shattering novels, here are a few of mine. I had long explanations on each of these, but I've decided that these books are just too personal to explain in a few sentences and share with the world. So you get the revised high-level list:

• A Wrinkle in Time

• To Kill a Mockingbird

• Beloved

• Heart of Darkness

• My Name is Asher Lev

As I look over this list, I realize that all of these books were read between the ages of 12-18. It's a transformative time. Yes, as I was earning two literature degrees in college I encountered many far-reaching novels that I assume have shattering potential equal or greater to the ones I've listed (The Color Purple and Jude the Obscure come to mind). Yet in some ways these were variations on the themes of the previous books. The foundation had been laid, torn down, modified, rejected, and remodeled through each of these reads. Now with that, I could build a palace with other uncomfortable, strange, new, and sometimes disturbing reads.

What about you? What novels/fiction did you read that shattered your universe and molded you into who you are?

Something Better

And to make up for posting that nasty foot photo, here's my favorite one from the garden Saturday.

Here come real stars to fill the upper skies,
And here on earth come emulating flies,
That though they never equal stars in size,
(And they were never really stars at heart)
Achieve at times a very star-like start.
Only, of course, they can't sustain the part.

-Robert Frost

The Curious Incident of the Arch in the Nighttime

I used to backpack up through Landscape Arch before boulders feel from it in 1991. Since then I've been resigned to take the Devils Garden trail past Wall Arch, but now that area is in peril and the trail is closed. Or should I say that, as of two weeks ago, Wall Arch no longer exists?

So my question is this: If an arch crashes 71 feet to the desert floor, but no one is around, does it make a sound?

T.S. Eliot has this answer:

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

-The Hollow Men (image from Arches National Park)

So what is left for us is the evidence of an unobserved, but supposedly violent transformation. And maybe I should try to make my next post about something besides the end of the world.