Month: October 2013

Scary Read: Rabid: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Diabolical Virus, by Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy

/ Carolyn O / 9 Comments

RabidA tip o’ the hat to my friend Kate, who pointed me to a podcast about the most fascinating story in this already-fascinating book a couple months ago.

Rabid, by veterinarian Monica Murphy and her husband, Wired editor Bill Wasik, examines rabies from a cultural standpoint — but you probably got that much from the title. I went in with the my knowledge of rabies confined to that one episode of The Office, something about twenty shots in your stomach, and a settled dislike for raccoons.

Now on the other side, I’ve got a better handle on the whole subject. The rabies vaccine is only four shots in one’s arm, for one thing. And rabies is the most deadly virus identified, with 100% human mortality (as far as we know) if the disease goes untreated. And 55,000 people die from rabies every year. I guess it’s only a joke if you live in Scranton.

The best chapters in Rabid deal with Pasteur, who invented the rabies vaccine, and with human survivors of rabies, Jeanna Giese in particular (whose case is the subject of that podcast), and how an island community like Bali deals with a sudden outbreak of the disease.

Less mesmerizing are the book’s forays into literary subjects the authors associate with rabies (the bit about the Iliad is particularly unfortunate); the authors are much better equipped to deal with the scientific and veterinary aspects of the disease’s history. Based on the last three chapters alone, Rabid is worth a look. And you’ll definitely look twice the next time you see a raccoon. Or a skunk. Or a stray dog.

Recommended Reading: The Niagara River, by Kay Ryan

/ Carolyn O / 2 Comments

Back in late July, I featured a poem called “Thin,” by Kay Ryan.  I liked it so much that I went to the library that week to find a full-length book of hers, and the library obligingly provided The Niagara River. As a child, I spent many happy summer afternoons jumping into the Niagara River from my Uncle Bill and Aunt Mary Kay’s dock, so the whole thing seemed beshert.

Image courtesy of George Stojkovic / Freedigitalphotos.net

Image courtesy of George Stojkovic / Freedigitalphotos.net

I love these poems. They’re unlike any others in my pretty extensive poetry library. They’re short, rarely flowing from one page onto another, and the lines are short as well, often just three or four syllables in length. I found the rhythm, and the occasional rhymes, jarring, but not unpleasantly so. Many of the poems end with a subtle twist, a line that forces the whole poem into sharper focus. These poems call for slow reading and then re-reading; I wanted to savor and remember them.

Some of my favorites in this volume are “Carrying a Ladder,” “Sharks’ Teeth,” “Green Hills,” “Ideal Audience,” “Hide and Seek,” and “The Well or the Cup.” I hope you’ll have a look at them for yourself.

November News

/ Carolyn O / 6 Comments

Winner-180x180Hiya folks. This November, I’m going to act like a crazy person and do NaNoWriMo again. Let me know if you’re on board too, and then we can commiserate about word counts like a couple of college sophomores during finals week.

I have the usual array of posts stacked up for the month, but I’ll be a bit slower on the uptake with comments and reading your lovely blogs, so please do forgive.

Also, if anyone has a spare plot lying around . . . ?

 

“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

/ Carolyn O / 10 Comments

Halloween approaches, friends, and what better way to ring it in than with the scariest freakin’ poem in the English language? That’s right: we’re bringing out W.B. Yeats’s “The Second Coming.”

Collected Yeats

You know it’s bad when “Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world” (l.4). I mean, anarchy is bad, not just “mere,” right? Really bad, à la The Dark Knight Rises? Turns out that’s just the start:

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity. (ll.5-8)

 

And then there’s the Big Bad, as fellow Joss Whedon fans* might say: a thing, its gaze “blank and pitiless as the sun,” “A shape with lion body and the head of a man.” It’s the formlessness that’s frightening; there’s no sign of intelligence in the blank eyes. It’s inexorable, this shape. It’s not a lion with a man’s head, but a shape. And get this: it’s “moving its slow thighs.” It’s in no great rush to destroy the world, because the destruction is inevitable.  If that doesn’t give you the creeps, I don’t know what will.

Wait a second. Yes I do. This will:

The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

*First Evil, anyone?

[Honorable Mention, Children’s Category: “Seein’ Things,” Eugene Fields]

What’s your pick for scariest poem?

Recommended Reading: Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury

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Yes, it’s another installment in Books Carolyn Is Utterly Embarrassed Not to Have Read by Now.

Image courtesy of Manostphoto/ Freedigitalphotos.net

Image courtesy of Manostphoto/ Freedigitalphotos.net

As a voracious reader and lover of sci-fi, it’s pretty amazing that Fahrenheit 451 has missed my to-read pile for so long. Maybe it’s because the contours of the story are so familiar; I felt going in as if I already knew the plot.

Something that startled me was the sheer number of technological advances that Bradbury saw coming in 1953 (because of his long career, I’d always assumed that Fahrenheit was a late 60s/ early 70s book — quite wrongly): wall-sized TV screens, in-ear headphones, drones. I wonder if Suzanne Collins was thinking of the Mechanical Hound when she created some of the monsters in The Hunger Games trilogy.

I’ll skip the plot summary, since you’ve probably got the gist of it, and instead highlight my favorite section: Montag’s meeting with Grayson and the other people of the book, who remind themselves, “we’re nothing more than dust jackets for books, of no significance otherwise.” Grayson goes on to tell Montag how great works of literature are preserved: “Why, there’s one town in Maryland, only twenty-seven people, no bomb’ll ever touch that town, is the complete essays of a man named Bertrand Russell” (179; the grammar’s a little off, but I can’t tell if that’s Grayson’s overexcitement or a faulty edition at work). I found the work of memory, the instinct to preserve ideas and language, deeply moving.

I wonder, though, if regarding oneself as merely a dust jacket for a book is entirely admirable. Certainly there’s a sense embedded in this idea of taking a larger, longer perspective (I’m reminded of Carl Sagan and the blue dot, or Rick’s speech at the end of Casablanca), a way of realizing our individual insignificance over the span of time. On the other hand, one person with a great deal of insight, or fortitude, or kindness, can change the world for the better. But I suppose you do need the world.

“There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch, / Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.”

/ Carolyn O / 8 Comments

Tougas farm, apple season Photo by CR OliverI remember assigning Robert Frost’s “After Apple Picking,” along with “Birches” and “Mending Wall” to my first-ever college class. I was twenty-two, and at least one of the seniors in the class was older than I was. A clerical error had given me a class of thirty instead of twenty, and we were assigned a narrow, windowless room on the second floor of the library. The heaters clanged on in August and the noise of campus construction somehow reverberated in that room.

It was glorious.

I loved being a newly-minted teacher, choosing readings and building a course that I wanted to teach (and take). I loved practicing my students’ names so that they would feel comfortable in class (one Thai last name was a real tongue twister!), and I loved watching their ideas spill onto the chalkboard. There’s no better job than being a tour guide through literature.

I chose to teach Frost because we’re in New England, after all, and he’s THE New England poet, and I encouraged my students to get out of the city and see the beautiful blend of colors in the trees. I’ve gone apple picking each fall with Mr. O since we started dating, and there’s nothing like the blue sky and the fiery trees and the red, red rows of apples.

“After Apple-Picking” is a dreamy meditation on life and death, sleep and wakefulness. Maybe we too will look back on moments both missed and remembered, and think,

“There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.”

Updated: Dragon Bound, Part the Third: Pregnant Unicorns and Other Things I Wish I Never Had to Read About

/ Carolyn O / 17 Comments

dragonboundreadalongbutton-01I feel as if I’ve gone through all the stages of grief reading this book:

Denial:  I’m not really doing this, right? 

Anger: See Part 1 reaction, please.

Bargaining: “If I read one more chapter, I can have a glass of wine, and this will all go away and I can go back to reading real books . . . ”

Depression: “Oh my god. This was published and people read it. Like, for fun. For enjoyment. What’s the point any more? I can’t believe I brought a child into the kind of world where people like reading about emotionally abusive, repulsive relationships. Where’s the wine again?”

Acceptance: “It’s over, it’s really over! I still have to write about it, but I never have to read it again! I don’t care that other people read this, right? And that maybe feminism is dying?”

So here we are at last. I’ve accepted that Pia is a unicorn, that she’s carrying Dragos’s über-weird dragon-baby, and that Dragos is just going to inform her that they’re getting married after yet another bout of ultra-aggressive and strangely boring sex, and that the book will end with her slipping a giant diamond on her finger. For realsies.

I hate this book with the fiery passion of a thousand exploding suns, if you needed it spelled out.  I hate it so much that I don’t really have anything productive to say about this last third. It was predictable and infuriating at the same time.

I can tell you with assurance, dear readers, that it will be many a year before I read another romance novel. I loathed Dragon Bound and even the tiny bits that were amusing couldn’t save the gag-inducing whole.

I’m glad I read it, though, because I like to uphold my claim to be an omnivorous reader (even though omnivorous is taking on all kinds of new meanings thanks to the spectacularly awful ‘devouring’ scenes in Dragon Bound), and because now I’ll never wonder if I’m missing out by skipping the Romance Buffet.

To entertain you, I will now cast the movie version of Dragon Bound. You’ll have to click the links for pictures because I am way paranoid about posting copyrighted images. My apologies to all of you, dear actors, for associating you, even fictitiously, with this book.

Pia: Kate Mara

Dragos: Jason Momoa (Khal Drogo on Game of Thrones. I don’t watch Game of Thrones, but good lord is hard to not know about it.)

Rune, Dragos’s second-in-command and best bro, despite the episode in which Dragos almost kills him for conducting self-defense training with Pia: Brad Pitt circa Legends of the Fall

Tricks, the perky, tiny, Fae PR person: Kristin Chenoweth. Honorable Mention: Kristen Bell.

Graydon, another one of Dragos’s bros, the one who actually likes Pia, despite annoying habit of calling her “Cupcake” : Tyrese Gibson (yeah, I’m ignoring the physical description. I’m bored with all the tan/tawny-haired guys.) Honorable Mention: Tahmoh Penikett.

Urien, the Dark Fae King or Lord of the Sith or whatever: Tom Hiddleston (extra apologies to you, Mr. Hiddleston, because of all your fine Shakespeare work.)

Aryal the Harpy, by far the most interesting unexplored character: Eva Green.

Pia’s dead unicorn mother: Connie Neilsen

Quentin, Pia’s only friend, dreamy, mysterious, and possibly half-Elf: Lee Pace

That was pretty fun! Like I said, I’m glad I read this, even if I hated it. I liked the whole reading-with-others-separately experience, so much so that I’m going to host my own (VERY DIFFERENT) read-along in 2014. All of 2014. Guess what has twelve parts and a few characters who fly?

Stay tuned, dear readers.

In the meantime, perhaps the other readers-along have something more intelligent to say about this last third of the book:

A Novel Idea: Saving Independent Publishers, One Pre-order at a Time

/ Carolyn O / 4 Comments

vernon downsJaime Clarke’s new novel, Vernon Downs, will be published in 2014 by Roundabout Press. But you don’t have to wait ’til then — Roundabout will ship the book directly to you in December.

The catch?

Don’t preorder the book on Amazon — order directly from the publisher. You can read Jaime’s personal message at his aptly named website, http://pleasedontbuymybookonamazon.com/.

A disclaimer here: Jaime and his wife Mary are friends, and also co-owners of Newtonville Books,  an independent bookstore here in Boston which I like to link to (you may have noticed). But even if Jaime weren’t a friend (and a great writer, and a great curator of the written word — see Baum’s Bazaar), I’d still be writing about his excellent plan. It’s a gutsy move that’s gotten some press, and I hope it reaches a wider audience.

If you order Vernon Downs directly from Roundabout before its official April release, perks abound:

1. You’ll receive your copy in the mail in December — five months early.

2. You can enter the name of your favorite independent bookstore in the Special Instructions section at checkout, and Roundabout will send 50% of the monies (excluding shipping) to that store.

3. Jaime is forgoing all royalties until April, so your entire purchase supports independent publishing and bookselling.

And, as a special treat, if you order before midnight (EST) on October 28th, Roundabout will send you an audio clip of Chris Cooper (!) reading a selection from Vernon Downs. I’ve been pretty much entirely in love with since Chris Cooper October Sky, so . . . yeah.

I’m excited. I hope you are too.

If you have any other great ideas or news items about saving independent presses, please share! 

Recommended Reading: The Red Queen, by Margaret Drabble

/ Carolyn O / 7 Comments

Since I’ve read two books by A.S. Byatt so far this year, I thought it would be only fair to give one of her sister’s novels a try. Sister, you say? You haven’t heard of another novelist with the last name of Byatt?

The Red Queen

Well, that’s because A.S. Byatt’s non-pen name is Dame Antonia Duffy (she was born Antonia Susan Drabble), and her sister’s name is Margaret Drabble.

Both writers have been laureled and lauded many times over, but they do not see each other often and do not read each other’s novels, the result, apparently, of their rivalry as writers and their disagreement over the portrayal of their mother and the use of the family tea-set in a novel.  It’s a real shame, not only because their novels are so good, but because in all the interviews I’ve read, both women seem like lovely people.

Enough about that. Let’s talk about the book.

The back jacket of The Red Queen claims that it’s “a rich and playful novel about love, about personal and public history, and what it means to be remembered.” Readers may recall my feelings about unattributed jacket copy, and I do think that this is better than most, with one slight problem. “Playful” implies that the novel is funny, or piquant. It is not.

It is, however, excellent. What’s playful about the novel is its structure. In the first part, our narrator is the woman known, inaccurately, she tells us, as Lady Hong, a Korean princess of the eighteenth century. The Korean Crown Princess is known in Korea (less so in the rest of the world) for her memoirs, written for different audiences over a period of some time. The version of the princess that Ms. Drabble presents is an unreliable narrator, to be sure, sometimes blinded by her own interests or those of her family. She drifts into long digressions, circles around issues, leaves out salient details. She’s also dead, knows she’s dead, and has the advantage, with some limitations, of looking over history to fill out her own story. What she wants is to be remembered, to reach a wider audience (she won me over — I have to find those memoirs!).

In the second part of the novel, she succeeds. We switch gears entirely to follow Dr Barbara Halliwell in the present day as she attends an academic conference, makes a friend, and embarks on an affair in Seoul. Throughout her time in Korea, she’s drawn to the tale of the Crown Princess, unsure who gave her the memoirs and what she should be taking away from her visit, her affair, her very life. I’ll stop here, because you know I never offer spoilers. Let’s just say that the story keeps spiraling outward and inward, and the last few pages are a treat, so very clever. It’s a novel I’d be pleased to have on my shelf, and I hope you and A.S. Byatt will read it too.

“though chimneys smoke and blue concedes / to bluer home-time dark”

/ Carolyn O / 4 Comments

Sandwich Marsh in Fall, by CR OliverA very apropos poem this week: Jacob Polley’s “October,” which you can read here. I love formalist poetry (you might have noticed), and I think this poem is just lovely. In the first stanza, the speaker describes the change of the seasons, the way the sky-blue of summer six o’clock becomes the midnight blue of autumn six o’clock, graciously giving way (my favorite image in the poem, which I’ve quoted in this post’s title).

It’s a poem about change and continuity, perfect for a fall day. I hope you’ll read it and tell me what you think!