Books, Boston, October

October 26, 2015October 26, 2015 / Carolyn O / 19 Comments

Well, Dear Readers, I’ve had quite the literary month, getting out and about much more than I usually do in my quiet life. Perhaps you’d like the rundown? If so:

Hamlet: Yes, that one. I thought, London travel not exactly in my budget, that Benedict Cumberbatch as the brooding Dane was not a performance I’d be able to see. And then by chance I heard it was going to show in movie theaters, after which I promptly bought the last two tickets for that showing.

Verdict: Very good. Mr. Cumberbatch was intense, thrilling, athletic, funny, outshining most of the cast with the exception of the fabulous Ciarán Hinds (aka Frederick Wentworth in the only film adaptation of Persuasion you need to see) as Claudius. I wasn’t sold on this production’s take on Ophelia (played a bit unhinged before Polonius’s death), but her final exit was remarkably well done. I agree with the review my husband told me about later that suggested the play was overproduced after intermission. Still, nice set design, and I liked the costuming, which seemed like a bit of an homage to various earlier interpretations of the play. Funniest Rosencrantz (or was it Guildenstern?) I’ve ever seen.

I hear it’s coming back to theaters; if so, do go.

Nick Offerman: Okay, technically he was doing his humorist act (sans spouse Megan Mullally, sigh), but I’m calling this literary since he’s written two books (one of which is waiting on my nightstand/bookshelf to be read) and he’s in rehearsals for a Boston theatrical adaptation of A Confederacy of Dunces.

Verdict: Very Good. Funny (of course), with ridiculous songs, anecdotes, life advice, talk of woodworking, etc. Basically, it was like watching an alternate-universe version of Ron Swanson who actually enjoys the company of others. Best moment: He didn’t mention Parks & Rec until the very end (and you know how much I love that show, right?), but then had the entire audience singing along to “Bye, Bye Lil’ Sebastian.” Yeah, it was amazing.

Boston Book Festival

This is the first year I’ve been able to spend more than ten minutes at the BBF, and I’m very glad I did, though I din’t see much of the vendors (magazines, small presses, etc.) since they tore down pretty early on Saturday evening (just after 5). However . . .

Margaret Atwood in conversation with Kelly Link: So happy I got tickets this summer, because the crowd was huge (and appreciative).

Verdict: Excellent. Margaret Atwood is hilarious–just truly, wickedly funny, and Kelly Link was understatedly comic as she asked really interesting questions. I was expecting the conversation to focus mostly on The Heart Goes Last, Ms. Atwood’s most recent book, but instead it ranged over her childhood reading habits, how she approaches writing (like going into a dark wood, and with a character or scene in mind, not a message), reading the Victorians, and more. Wonderful. And bonus: both writers did a signing afterward, and Ms. Atwood signed my 1970 copy of an early book of poems (yes, I did tell her that I liked her Milton references in the new book, and she said “I’m glad.” Swoon).

James Wood: Mr. Wood is a professor at Harvard and a literary critic for the New Yorker; some would argue (and have) that he’s the foremost literary critic writing in English. His approach is aesthetic rather than, say, historical or psychological.

Verdict: Very good. I haven’t heard an academic talk in quite some time, and this one was geared toward a wide audience, but one that would understand references to Flaubert and Nabokov, for instance. Mr. Wood talked about detail in fiction—why details stick with us after we read, how they function, why they function. Fascinating (and just when I was starting to worry that he wasn’t going to mention any woman writers, he referred to nearly half a dozen). He also did a signing at the end of the event, which was delightful since I’d just picked up his new book (The Nearest Thing to Life).

Colum McCann in conversation with Claire Messud: Amazingly, given how popular these two authors are, this event wasn’t ticketed, but there was once more a lively and interested crowd (great job by the BBF organizers in making sure the audio was top-notch). Colum McCann’s most lauded book to date is probably Let the Great World Spin (I haven’t read it, but loved Everything in This Country Must). Claire Messud is an acclaimed novelist, most recently of The Woman Upstairs (she also happens to be married to James Wood, who spoke just before this event).

Verdict: Good. The writers are friends and former colleaugues, which made for a relaxed rapport. Mr. McCann read from his new book (Thirteen Ways of Looking), and while his reading was very well done and affecting, I though it slowed down the pace of the conversation. I was interested to learn about the charity called Narrative 4 that he works co-founded, and saddened to hear of a terrible incident in which he was brutally beaten for trying to stop a man from beating his wife.

Amanda Palmer interviewed by Neil Gaiman: I’ll be honest with you, Dear Readers: I came for Neil Gaiman, one of the most reliably readable authors working today. And charming and philanthropic and all that good stuff. To be honest, I had, before hearing this talk, almost no opinion on Amanda Palmer (Mr. Gaiman is her husband), though I know she provokes Feelings of all sorts in various people (generally love or hate, from what I can tell).

Verdict: Very good. Ms. Palmer talked about the process of writing her memoir, The Art of Asking, and seemed no more self-indulgent than anyone else who’s interested in writing a memoir. She was genuine, honest (as far as this listener could tell), amusing, and shared a charming rapport with Mr. Gaiman. At the end of the talk, I decided I’d rather like to read her book, so well done there. Bonus: An appearance by Maria Popova (of Brain Pickings, which I commend to you; Ms. Popova has every metaphysician/Jeopardy nerd’s dream job), tempered slightly by I think a too-rosy view of Thoreau. Bonus 2: Ms. Palmer sang, and I loved her voice, which I was hearing for the first time (yes, your friendly neighborhood blogger was not cool enough to be listening to the Dresden Dolls in high school).

[Boston book blogging friends: Meet up next year at the 2016 Boston Book Festival?]

Whew. And that’s all she wrote. For now.

“answering through the vastnesses”: Kathleen Jamie’s “The Whales”

October 22, 2015November 2, 2015 / Carolyn O / 5 Comments

Photo by Christopher Campbell via Unsplash

Lately I’ve been reading Kathleen Jamie’s superb book The Overhaul, which landed on my radar months ago thanks to Graywolf Press‘s delightful habit of posting a poem of the week on its website.

I read “The Whales” and just couldn’t get it out of my head for weeks. It’s a bit funny, very beautiful, and then unsettling (with that Dickinson dash in the last line), all in just sixteen short lines. It’s one of my new favorite sea poems.

I hope you’ll take a few minutes to read it and tell me what you think!

“the way a matronly merchant / Might brush off her lap, at the iron end of the market day”: Monica Ferrell’s “In the Grips of a Sickness Transmitted by Wolves”

October 8, 2015 / Carolyn O / 2 Comments

I’ve wanted to visit Italy for years—the descriptions of the light and the scenery and the food are always so delicious, don’t you think?

I just came across Monica Ferrell’s “In the Grips of a Sickness Transmitted by Wolves,” an atmospheric, creepy sort of poem set in Sorrento that calls up a different kind of association; it made me think of Webster’s Duchess of Malfi, actually. I love the poet’s use of sound, both in description and in the almost-rhymes, which give a sort of off-kilter quality to the lines. And the image of the merchant dusting off her lap at the “iron end” of the day is just wonderful. I wish I better understood the poem’s allusions though—if you do, please enlighten me!

In other poetry-related news, October8 was National Poetry Day in the U.K.; here’s a link of the Prince of Wales reading (rather well, I might say) one of his favorite Dylan Thomas poems some time ago.

“something brighter than pity for the wingless ones”: Derek Walcott’s “The Season of Phantasmal Peace”

October 1, 2015September 26, 2015 / Carolyn O / 1 Comment

Photo by Rowan Heuval via Unsplash

Recently I read Derek Walcott’s 1984 collection Midsummer (which I highly recommend–it’s heavy and heady with summer and heat, like a ripe peach). This week, when it’s finally starting to feel like autumn around here (I nominate 2015 for Boston’s strangest year of weather award), I’m reading his poem “The Season of Phantasmal Peace,” which you can find here.

This poem is an interesting contrast with last week’s featured poem, which was “Light” by C. K. Williams. It’s a pairing that makes me miss teaching; I’d love to discuss with students how the two poets approach light and darkness, expand on a small moment, use imagery and form. Ah well.

P.S. True story/shameless name-dropping: Derek Walcott is the only Nobel Prize winner I’ve met. I had the privilege of sitting in on one of his playwriting courses, and once he held the door to the English department open for me.

On Margaret Atwood’s The Heart Goes Last and Milton

September 29, 2015September 28, 2015 / Carolyn O / 19 Comments

In Margaret Atwood’s The Heart Goes Last*, Stan and Charmaine live in the Northeast in the years after a terrible economic collapse that has affected that part of the country more than any other. They are eking out a meager living, sleeping in their car, avoiding roaming gangs, and looking desperately for work.

Increasingly despondent about their chances of raising their standard of living (they cannot afford enough gas to get them to a region with better economic prospects), Charmaine and Stan apply to and are accepted by the Positron project. Positron is a prison located in its sister town, Consilience. Every month, half the citizens of Consilience go about ordinary lives—ordering furnishing for their houses, going to work, enjoying the movies and music of the 1950s; the next month, they become inmates in Positron prison, where they attend to jobs like knitting and feeding the town’s chicken supply. There is zero unemployment in Consilience, almost no crime, and no hunger.

But of course things are not what they seem, and soon Stan and Charmaine are sucked into a vortex of secrets and plots and come much too close to learning the truth behind the Positron system (which seems like a thinly-veiled critique of the company town).

In many ways, The Heart Goes Last is your standard dystopian thriller:

Evil institution interested in exploiting the populace
Characters forced by circumstance to join evil institution
Social breakdown and collapse of economic systems
Power of human relationships fundamental to resolution of tale
High tension, cascading plot revelations, and an unsettling denouement

But The Heart Goes Last also offers a heaping portion of satire; this is the genre taken to its limit, complete with sexbots, brain-wiping, sinister knitting, and more Elvises than have ever appeared in a novel (to my knowledge). And it’s Margaret Atwood, so throw in plenty of sex and gender politics as well.

Until I realized it was satire, I found the novel hard to like; neither Stan nor Charmaine, nor any of the supporting characters, are particularly likable; there’s no Offred to cheer for (well, maybe one minor character). I don’t require likable characters to enjoy a book, but it’s harder to stick with a novel when you don’t much care whether such-and-such lives or dies.

And it’s not just satire; it’s a riff on Milton’s Paradise Lost. The poem is mentioned explicitly once, and the novel’s last lines are lifted from the end of Milton’s epic in an amusing fashion.

[If you want a quick refresher on Paradise Lost, I’ve got posts for you: Books 1&2, Books 3&4, Books 5&6, Books 7&8, Books 9&10, Books 11&12.]

Milton’s purpose in Paradise Lost is to “justify the ways of God to man.” A tall order, but Milton’s like that. Essentially, his epic poem is an attempt to explain why God would create humans only to watch us sin and suffer; put another way, the poem tries to solve the problem of evil. But it’s more than that; it’s about poetry itself, marriage, psychology, history, freedom, education, the environment (Milton might call it stewardship),and choice. (And more.)

The Heart Goes Last is rather like Paradise Lost set in the dystopian future, without an omnipotent God running the show.

On one level, paradise is already lost, thanks to the economic collapse that’s sent Stan and Charmaine into the arms of Positron.

Consilience, the supposed paradise of full employment, no hunger, and perfect happy homes (and, Stan notices eventually, no gay citizens) is of course a prison too, a prison of constant surveillance; Stan and Charmaine have traded their freedom for security, and that’s a bad choice. In Milton’s poem, Eve and Adam have security–all their needs are provided for, though, like Stan and Charmaine, they are expected to work. Crucially, Eve trades that security for freedom–choosing to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And for Milton, that’s the bad choice, the wrong one that leads to humanity’s fallen history.

But in each case, it’s the woman’s choice, and her husband, for good or ill, goes along with it; the ebb and flow of partners’ satisfaction and interests in the marriage is a key theme in The Heart Goes Last, just as marriage-making is a thread that runs through Paradise Lost.

Then there’s temptation. One of Charmaine’s most interesting characteristics is her susceptibility to suggestion, a trait she shares with Eve, though Charmaine might be just a touch more self-aware. Milton’s God contends that he created humanity “sufficient to have stood, though free to fall,” and that’s one way of describing Stan and Charmaine, both in their choice to sign the Consilience contract, and in their personal sexual choices.

There are several other parallels (I think I see Ms. Atwood grappling with Milton’s views on women, for instance), but what struck me as I thought about the two texts is how Ms. Atwood’s book brought something about Paradise Lost into focus for me: Milton’s version of Eden is a surveillance state. Eve and Adam are watched constantly–by the reader and the speaker, in some sense, but also by Satan, the angels, and God (Father and Son). How free are you if every choice you make is monitored, and occasionally someone is sent by to educate you about your choices?

Putting these books in conversation is a fascinating exercise, and now I’m eager to read more of Ms. Atwood’s work with Milton in mind. Meanwhile, for those of you who aren’t terribly excited at the idea of reading a poem that’s thousands of lines long: give The Heart Goes Last a try if you like Margaret Atwood, satire, or creepy books about marriage.

*I received a copy of this book from the publisher for review consideration, which did not affect the content of my review.

In Memoriam: C. K. Williams

September 24, 2015September 21, 2015 / Carolyn O / 1 Comment

Photo courtesy Elijah Hail via Unsplash

Poet C. K. Williams died this week; you can read a brief obituary here. He himself wrote a moving tribute at the death of his friend Galway Kinnell late last year in the New Yorker; I commend it to your reading, since a eulogy often says as much about the eulogizer as the eulogized.

I’ve read his poems from time to time, and certainly come across them in anthologies and classes on poetry, but I don’t know his work well. But here is “Light,” a poem of his I’m fond of, a poem with Dante and bats and these gorgeous lines:

[. . .] having to know for us both that everything ends,

world, after-world, even their memory, steamed away

like the film of uncertain vapor of the last of the luscious rain.

I hope you’ll enjoy it too.