A Poem from TAKING MESOPOTAMIA, by Jenny Lewis

Jenny Lewis’s collection, Taking Mesopotamia (Oxford Poets, 2014), is such a powerful book.

It is part memoir, part excerpts from family history, part interview, everything written out in the tersest of poetry.  From the Preface, self learned that Jenny’s father, Second Lieutenant T. C. Lewis, participated “in the Mesopotamian campaign of World War I as a Second Lieutenant in the 4th Battalion, the South Wales Borders, now the Royal Regiment of Wales.”

The Hawthornden reunion with two of her fellow writers (who self hasn’t seen since June 2012, but who remained in touch) in Hawthornden was at the British Museum, April 27, when Joan and self caught Jenny’s passionate and altogether mesmerizing reading (She’s the ex-girlfriend of Michael Palin, and self kept looking around the theatre on the off-chance she’d get to see this Monty Python regular in the flesh. But no dice.)

Here’s the poem “October 1916”:

Two lots of mail from home with some letters
for me, at last, giving news from Glamorgan.
Mother unwell for the past few weeks, although
she puts on a brave face as usual. Sister Betty is
still on her drive to collect wool for the knitting
of balaclavas: I said they’ll be back to front no doubt!
Here we are stuck in the desert while their lives
keep on almost as usual there in dear old Wales
except it’s now a place where there are no young
men and people tell each other no news is good news.

Self makes a promise: Next time she is in London, she will make it a point to visit the Imperial War Museum.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.

1st Saturday of April (2014) Reading

First, there is The New Yorker of January 16, 202 (Don’t ask.  Self just can’t explain), a short story by Said Sayrafiezadeh called “A Brief Encounter with the Enemy.”  This story is the first post-“Things They Carried” war short story self has ever read.  And since she first read Tim O’Brien ages and ages ago, she thinks it’s high time!

Here’s the narrator describing a mission:

To get to the hill you have to first take the path . . .  I was loaded down with fifty pounds of equipment that clanged and banged with every step.  I might as well have been carrying a refrigerator on my back.  But after the first month the fear dissipated and the path started to become fascinating, even charming.  I was able to appreciate the “beauty of the surroundings” . . .  even the trees that I was constantly bumping against.

Oh, that is fabulous writing, simply fabulous. Hilarious. She wonders (since she hasn’t yet finished reading the story) if it ends in tragedy.

The other thing self is reading is of course Hunger Games fan fiction.  She landed on this story just yesterday.  It’s no use hiding the fact from dear blog readers:  in the past few months (probably since last December), self has completely surrendered to the charms of Alternate Universe Narratives.  She reads one every night before she goes to bed.  Her filters are “Angst” and “Peeta.”

In the one she is currently reading, charming Miss Katniss Everdeen has been summoned home to America, a country she had not seen since the age of eight (Self is all too cognizant of the fact that the tone of the particular piece of fan fiction she is reading — it’s set in 1832 — is beginning to bleed into her blog post, but anyhoo), not since she was enrolled by her parents in a very ritzy London private school called Panem’s Better School for Girls.

The ship she books passage on is called the Mockingjay.  Her chaperone is a ditzy woman named Miss Effie Trinket.  Just as she boards, however, Katniss discovers that Ms. Trinket has to go, and there is no other female presence on this dastardly ship.  Worse, the captain’s name is CORIOLANUS SNOW. The first mate, a man with mutton chops and “dark, glittering eyes” is called SENECA CRANE.  Before you can say BOO, our heroine encounters yet another unsavory sort, a sailor named ROMULUS THREAD.  Sailor after sailor attempt to warn her that she would be best getting off the ship and embarking on another — say, The Virginian.  But our Miss Katniss is an extremely stubborn soul.  It appears she is more terrified of appearing weak than of actually experiencing any sort of physical (or moral, or emotional) harm.  The last doleful warning comes from a rheumy sort who begins addressing her as “Sweetheart.”  Still our plucky Miss Katniss refuses to budge.

Self’s heart was pounding a mile a minute — that is, until Miss K happens to make the acquaintance of the cook.  This man — or boy — happens to have eyes of cerulean blue and the longest eyelashes she has ever seen.  At which point, self felt like standing up and screaming:  KATNISS, STAY ON THAT SHIP!  YOU DON’T WANT ANYONE TAKING YOU OFF THAT SHIP!  BELIEVE ME!

Stay tuned, dear blog readers.  Stay tuned.

First Thursday of December (2013) Already!

Where does the time go?

January 2013 was just yesterday.  She remembers settling down happily on the couch, which is piled with many fluffy pillows, to lie on in case she decides to take a snooze in the middle of watching CNN.  How happy she was to imagine a whole, blank year ahead of her, a year which meant (self thought) 80 books at least.

And here it is the end of 2013, and she’s read 29 books — far, far below her yearly average.

She loves the book she is currently reading:  Gulag:  A History, which won the Pulitzer Prize several years ago.  She loves it because it gives her occasion to say, over and over:  Self, you are not being monitored.  Your mail is not being opened.  You are not confined to a warehouse for 12 hours a day.  It is winter but not cold.  You have half a ham left in your refrigerator.  Your bank account is still at a comfortable level.

Then, because it is such a beautiful day, and because self is happy, she turns to the literary journal War, Literature & the Arts.  What better time to read about war than when it is a beautiful day in December?  She begins reading a personal essay by David D. Butler called “Long Time Gone:  The Year Dirty Harry was Shot.”  Here’s how it opens:

In December of 1970, I turned twenty-five.  Seven years earlier, I could have made war fighting the Viet-Cong.  With my twenty-fifth birthday, the insurance carrier thought I was now old enough to drive for the San Francisco Municipal Railway (MUNI).

Stay tuned, dear blog readers.  Stay tuned.

In Honor of the Day: War Literature or Matters Related Thereto

Below, books self has recently read that touch on some aspect of war.  The list contains a mix of fiction, memoir, and nonfiction:

102 Minutes:  The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers, by Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn

Agent Zigzag, by Ben Macintyre

A Life in Secrets:  Vera Atkins and the Missing Agents of World War II, by Sarah Helm

A Long, Long Way, by Sebastian Barry

Atonement, by Ian McEwan

Dunkirk:  Fight to the Last Man, by Hugh Sebag-Montefiore

Eichmann in Jerusalem, by Hannah Arendt

Falling Through the Earth, by Danielle Trussoni

Homecoming, by Bernhard Schlink

Human Smoke, by Nicholson Baker

Imperial Life in the Emerald City, by Rajiv Chandrasekaran

Legacy of Ashes:  The History of the CIA, by Tim Weiner

Loot:  The Battle Over the Stolen Treasures of the Ancient World, by Sharon Waxman

Out Stealing Horses, by Per Petterson

Sepharad, by Antonio Muñoz Molina

The 9/11 Commission Final Report

The Annals of Imperial Rome, by Tacitus

The Assault, by Harry Mulisch

The Bookseller of Kabul, by Asne Seierstad

The Coming of the Third Reich, by Richard J. Evans

The Emperor’s Children, by Claire Messud

The Great War and Modern Memory, by Paul Fussell

The Quiet American, by Graham Greene

The Reader, by Bernhard Schlink

Virgil’s The Aeneid, translated by Robert Fagles

Reflections, Prompted By Sunday, 11 August 2013 Issue of The New York Times Book Review

The review of Dossier K., Imre Kertesz’s latest book and his first nonfiction, is by Martin Riker, an English professor at Washington University in St. Louis.  His review begins:

Two of the great pessimistic proclamations of 20th-century literature —  Adorno’s “To write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric” and Beckett’s “I can’t go on, I’ll go on” —  have at least one thing in common.  They both address the inadequacy of language to articulate reality.

At the end

More Reading: Last Friday of June 2013

The New York Review of Books, Issue xxx:  Who knows?  A long, long time ago.  Oh, all right:  the Nov. 8, 2012 issue.  (Self’s Pile of Stuff is a monster.  And has grown leaps and bounds since April when, added to the general disorganization of self’s life was a trip to Venice, a trip to southern California, son’s moving in for the summer, and the incredible HEAT, today)

Self will post excerpts from Robert Gottlieb’s essay on James Jones (What a name!  There are so many American “James”!)

Since 90.9 % of dear blog readers will probably have no idea who James Jones is (No, it is not the actor famous for playing Othello:  That is James Earl Jones.  Furthermore, James Jone is not African American), some context:

James Jones was born in 1949.

He was the author of From Here to Eternity, a book about quote the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor unquote.

Jones sent the manuscript to his publisher (Scribner’s) with a note:  “I, personally, believe it will stack up with Stendhal’s Waterloo or Tolstoy’s Austerlitz.”

The book was made into a movie starring Burt Lancaster.  In one crucial scene, Lancaster (playing a character named Seargent Milt Warden) tells his men:

“The CQ will unlock the rifle racks and every man get his rifle and hang on to it.  But stay inside at your bunks.  This ain’t no maneuvers.  Yo go runnin around outside you’ll get your ass shot off . . .  Stay off the porches.  Stay inside.  I’m making each squad leader responsible to keep his men inside.  If you have to use a rifle butt to do it, that’s okay too. ”

“What if the fuckers bomb us?” somebody hollered.

“If you hear a bomb coming, you’re free to take off for the brush . . .  But not unless you do.  I don’t think they will.  If they were going to bomb us, they would of started with it already.  They probably concentratin all their bombs on the Air Corps and Pearl Harbor.

“Yeah,” somebody hollered.  “But what if they ain’t?”

“Then you’re shit out of luck.”

Robert Gottlieb writes of James Jones:

Always you feel that he knows what he’s talking about, whether it’s the savagery of the stockade, life in a rough whorehouse, the anguish of love, or the most mundane minutiae like a “can of milk with its top sliced open by a cleaver butt.”

Stay tuned, dear blog readers.  Stay tuned.

The New York Review of Books (7 March 2013)

Below are the books self is interested in reading after perusing the 7 March 2013 issue of The New York Review of Books.  Her choices are nothing if not idiosyncratic:

Former People:  The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy, by Douglas Smith:  reviewed by Michael Scammell (Self admires the title of this book tremendously; she, too, has felt, many times, like a “former people.”)

Now All Roads Lead to France:  A Life of Edward Thomas, by Matthew Hollis:  reviewed by Helen Vendler.  In a nutshell:  “Thomas meets Frost in London in 1913, begins (for the first time since Oxford) to write poetry, feels guilty (in complex ways, including the fear of cowardice) about watching others die while he remains at home, decides to enlist, trains as an officer (in part for the higher pay), volunteers for the front, and courts death.  When the death arrives (from a bomb blast in Arras) it is both shocking and unsurprising.” Tragic.

Several books about General David Petraeus, reviewed by Thomas Powers:

• The Insurgents:  David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War, by Fred Kaplan
• The Fourth Star:  Four Generals and the Epic Struggle for the Future of the United States Army, by David Cloud and Greg Jaffe

In the course of the review, Powers cites three other fascinating books:

• The Centurions, a novel by Jean Lartéguy, about the lessons learned by French army officers captured by the Vietminh at Dien Bien Phu (“You’ve got to have people on your side . . . if you want to win a war.”)
• Street Without Joy, a “history of the long French failure in Vietnam,” by the French writer Bernard B. Fall
• Hell in a Very Small Place, also by Bernard B. Fall, about “a set-piece battle at Dien Bien Phu in 1954.”

And now, self must get going if she wants to catch the Menlo Park Farmers Market.

Arrivederci, dear ones.

The Cherry Tree

The cherry tree in the backyard started blooming a few days ago.

Self is preparing for a busy week gardening!

Other beginnings:  Put aside The Black Count without finishing.  Began devouring Anna Karenina.  Took advantage of HBO’s $10/month enrollment offer, just in time to watch the premiere episode of the BBC adaptation of Ford Madox Ford’s World War I trilogy, Parade’s End (this Tuesday, 9 p.m. — just before Justified).

Tuesdays will be self’s Red Letter Day for the next five weeks!

Stay tuned, dear blog readers.  Stay tuned.

Wall Street Journal Weekend Edition (Saturday/Sunday, Dec. 15 & 16, 2012)

Today self is peaceful and content.  Which means she is happy.

She managed to get a mani/pedi from Belle Nail Spa on Broadway.  She left before fingernails and toenails were quite dry, but she wanted to collect The Man and make it to the first screening of “Silver Linings Playbook” (Only $7 per ticket).  Despite all the hectic running around, she somehow managed to avoid getting the slightest nick on any of her fingers or toes.  Quelle magnifique!

Second, she really liked that movie.  Even though it only got a wan endorsement from Eric B. Snider.  And even though, OK, she’ll concede this point:  the odds are pretty slim that two people that good-looking, both emotionally damaged, live in that close proximity to each other . . .  OK!  So what!  Self knows this movie is totally in the land of make-believe!  She’d rather see Jennifer Lawrence end up with someone who looks like Bradley Cooper than with someone who looks like, like —  John C. Reilly?  Even though chances are the right man for her would look just like John C. Reilly? (Not to knock John C. Reilly —  self thinks he is a WONDERFUL WONDERFUL actor.  But given the choice between John C. Reilly and Bradley Cooper —  oh, NEVAH MIND!)

Jennifer Lawrence is a wonder.  This is the first movie where self actually believed in a Bradley Cooper character.  But, back to Jennifer Lawrence:  Self cried at the end!  She actually cried!  Something she hasn’t done in a movie theater since watching Eric Bana and Rachel McAdams in treacly The Time Traveler’s Wife!

And then, when she and The Man got home from the movie, she got to peruse the Wall Street Journal weekend edition and —  Holy Cow!  —  it’s the one where they list Books of the Year!

But it’s not Books of the Year that self wants to post about —  Ixnay!  (BTW, it took self almost an hour to speed-read the entire books section.  But more about that later)

They interviewed all kinds of celebrities to get their lists of favorite books of 2012.  Self found a few choices enlightening.  Also, she was surprised at WHOSE choices she liked the most.  And here’s the list of people whose book choices self found the most intriguing:

• Judd Apatow, Director and creator of the phenomenon that is Seth Rogen:  He said he wanted to read Henry Wiencek’s book about Thomas Jefferson and his slaves, Master of the Mountains.  He also recommended Dave Eggers’s latest novel, Hologram for the King.
• Craig Brown, British, writer of satirical columns:  He recommended Robert Caro’s latest installment of his life of Lyndon Johnson, The Passage of Power (like almost every other person interviewed by the Wall Street Journal), and Mimi Alford’s tale of having sex with JFK when she was a White House intern, Once Upon a Secret.
• Susan Cain, author of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking:  She recommended a first novel, The Song of Achilles, by Madeline Miller, and Jack Kennedy:  Elusive Hero, by Chris Matthews.
• Joseph Epstein, essayist and cultural commentator:  He recommended a novel, Only Yesterday, by S. Y. Agnon, and Once Upon a Secret (also recommended by Craig Brown, see above)
• Gary Giddins, author of Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams: He recommended Robert Caro’s book on LBJ, The Passage of Power; John Keats, a biography of the Romantic poet by Nicholas Roe; several classic westerns:  Saint Johnson and Goodbye to the Past, both by W. R. Burnett; a novel about telephone linemen, Slim, by William Wister Haines; That Winter, by Merle Miller, a “pre-Kerouacian group portrait of the disaffected generation of the postwar 1940s”; Ian McEwan’s Sweet Tooth and The Innocent; and Louise Erdrich’s The Round House.
• Robert Harris, bestselling novelist:  He recommended Soldaten, a book by Sonke Neitzel and Harald Welzer, “based on secretly recorded tapes of German prisoners of war held in Allied camps during World War II.”
• Thomas Keller, chef:  He recommended Killing Kennedy, by Bill O’Reilley and Martin Dugard, which “is not about a conspiracy.  It’s about how a presidential assassination can be at once a tragedy and a human-interest story.”
• Ted Leonsis, Founder and Chairman of Monumental Sports & Entertainment:  He recommended The End of Illness, by David Agus, “a smart look at how to extend a life of vigor by playing offense with life.”
• Joe Maddon, Manager of the Tampa Bay Rays:  He recommended Ken Follett’s Pillars of the Earth (Self has been meaning to get to these books, for quite a while), and the first two books of Follett’s Century trilogy, Fall of Giants and Winter of the World.
• Hilary Mantel, Booker Prize-winning novelist:  She recommended The Yellow Birds, a first novel by Kevin Powers, an Iraq war veteran; and The Lifeboat, a first novel by Charlotte Rogan, “set in the summer of 1914” and centering “on a shipwreck in the Atlantic.”
• Karl Marlantes, author of What It Is Like to Go to War:  He recommended The Snake Eaters, by Owen West; Blackhorse Riders, by Philip Keith; Hotels, Hospitals, and Jails, by Anthony Swofford; and Westmoreland, by Lewis Sorley.
• Sylvia Nasar, author of Grand Pursuit:  The Story of Economic Genius:  She recommended Gulag, by Anne Applebaum, a book which “takes readers back to the events that triggered the half-century long standoff between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.”
• Arthur Phillips, author of The Tragedy of Arthur:  He recommended The Vanishers, by Heidi Julavits, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, by Mark Leyner, Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn, and A Partial History of Lost Causes, by Jennifer DuBois.
• Marcus Samuelsson, chef:  He recommended This Is How You Lose Her, by Junot Diaz, and The Click Moment, by Frans Johansson.
• Colm Toibin, novelist:  He recommended Edmund Spenser:  A Life, by Andrew Hadfield and Robert Caro’s The Passage of Power.
• Jim Webb, senator from Virginia:  He recommended The Last Lion, by Paul Reid (the last installment of a trilogy begun by William Manchester, on the life of Winston Churchill), and Stilwell and the American Experience in China, by Barbara W. Tuchman.

Self is pretty sure she can get to these books in about five years.

Self was going to make a count of the men who recommended women writers, but, alas, today self is very — and she does mean VERY — short of time!  She thinks Jim Webb did.  Yup, he most definitely did.  And Arthur Phillips.  Yes, most definitely Arthur Phillips.  In fact, the good man recommended three books by women writers.  Good for you, Arthur! And Gary Giddins recommended Louise Erdrich.

(She won’t single out women who recommended women writers because — hey, just because!  Let’s get on with it, or self will never get free of this post!)

Stay tuned, dear blog readers.  Stay tuned.

The Economist Reviews Junot Diaz

From an Economist review of Diaz’s This Is How You Lose Her (Riverhead), 8 September 2012:

The men cheat on their women; the women usually vanish, never to be seen again.  Most of the tales are narrated by Yunior, the alter ego who forms the backbone of much of Mr. Diaz’s fiction, circling around one relentless question:  Is he, as one girlfriend asserts, “a typical Dominican man:  a sucio (pervert), an asshole?”

These are stories about the difficulty of love:  how hard it is to recognise or hold onto.  In one, Yunior tries to save a relationship he has torpedoed yet again by cheating, on a beach vacation to his homeland.  In another, he seeks solace from his brother’s death with an older woman, and wonders if she ruins him for girlfriends his own age.  Some are bittersweet accounts of the fragile relationships between other recent immigrants.

On the next page is a review of a very different book:  A Very English Hero:  The Making of Frank Thompson, by Peter Conradi.

Frank Thompson was killed in 1944 aged 23, younger even than Rupert Brooke had been when he died in 1915, and in similarly futile and tragic circumstances.

Peter Conradi first became interested in Thompson while researching his acclaimed biography of Iris Murdoch.  The two had been contemporaries at Oxford the year before the war.  Thompson fell in love with the future novelist and with communism in the same week:  “two flights of irrationality . . .  two simultaneous conversion experiences.”  Their love could never be fulfilled.  But for Murdoch, “Frank grew to combine the roles of heroic martyr, potential husband and lost soulmate.”

Stay tuned, dear blog readers.  Stay tuned.