DOWN and OUT

What—exactly—makes a good beach read? I pondered this question with gal pal Arika (pictured right) on a recent weekend jaunt that included a trip to her local beach near Holland, Michigan. At this time of the year, the “beach reads” lists are cropping up all over the place (i.e. Amazon.com’s This Summer’s Best Beach Reads List!!!!). Some of these lists are more sympathetic to those of us living in landlocked states, substituting the word “summer” for “beach,” such as the LA Times 2008 Summer Reading List. Lists aside, Arika and I decided that the best beach book depends a lot on the person doing the reading. “Theology is pretty much the only thing I don’t bring to the beach,” she says, which is understandable since she works editing theological texts for an academic publisher.

I happened to be equipped with a book that I was reading for an upcoming review, but when I really thought about it, I would have rather been reading an anthology of Victorian poetry. Yep. That’s my pick for this summer’s eager readers. Victorian poetry. A lot of the subject matter in Victorian poetry seems perfectly suited for beach landscapes; the Victorians aren’t as hopeful as the Romantics, and they seem to have a more realistic respect for nature. Victorian poetry is at once beautiful and powerful, like the ocean in many ways.

If I were to pick one, just one, Victorian poem that illustrates this idea, I’d choose Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” (1867). Click here to read the entire poem (it’s only 37 lines long), or have a moment with its final two stanzas:

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-winds, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confus’d alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Thanks to Bartleby.com for the online text of Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” as it appears in:
Stedman, Edmund Clarence, ed. A Victorian Anthology, 1837–1895. Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1895; Bartleby.com, 2003. www.bartleby.com/246/.

“Where there is nothing, absolutely anything is possible, and this thrilled me. It gave me hope.”
-Augusten Burroughs in A Wolf at the Table

Augusten Burroughs’ newest book, A Wolf at the Table: A Memoir of My Father –St. Martin’s Press, 2008–is probably not the best book to give your dad this Father’s Day. But it may make you feel thankful if your father does not resemble the one in this story. In A Wolf at the Table, Burroughs tells yet another story of his family’s history, and in this one, his father takes center stage. A man whose offenses include starving a pet to death, being calculatingly cold, and skipping out on family vacations, Burroughs’ father is this book’s villain. This memoir will likely inspire more sympathy than rage in its readers, however, as they come to see the sadness that permeates Burroughs’ childhood and continues into his adult life. Burroughs may be best known for the tales of his darkly comic upbringing, as they are told in Running with Scissors (2002). Little of that comedy is found in his latest book; this one takes a deeper, darker turn into the subject matter that Burroughs has proven he already knows so well.

CLICK HERE for a link to my review of this book’s audio version on the About.com Contemporary Literature site.

I’ve got a book for you science buffs out there: Michio Kaku’s Physics of Impossibility: A Scientific Exploration into the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation, and Time Travel. Theoretical physicist Kaku’s latest book was published in March and recently spent a few weeks on The New York Times Bestseller list in the nonfiction category. Kaku is a media star, of sorts, and has written several other books including Hyperspace, Parallel Worlds, and Beyond Einstein. In Physics of Impossibility, Kaku considers the likelihood that today’s impossibilities may become possibilities within our lifetime. He explains the scientific basis behind technologies such as Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak, teleportation (as in, “Beam me up, Scotty!”), and phasers (hand-held ray guns, of course). If you have a general interest in science or a specific interest in science fiction, you will enjoy this book. Otherwise, if you have no interest at all in science, this book might just be the one to open up this subject area as a new realm of possibility for your future literary explorations.

To read my more formal, feature-length review of this book in Sacramento News & Review, click here.

“A Warrior knows that the farthest-flung star in the universe reveals itself in the things around him.”
-Paulo Coelho, in The Warrior of the Light

I vowed to read more Paulo Coelho this year, so when I saw his Warrior of the Light: A Manual (2004) on the bookshelf of a friend, I snatched it straightaway. I expected it to be like his other books that I have read so far: simple, but possessing some kind of deeper meaning. Coelho creates characters we can identify with because they mess up like we do or get sidetracked on the way of pursuing something bigger out of life. Warrior of the Light does these things as well, but instead of being a continuous narrative, it is more like a collection of meaningful sayings that each identifies some aspect of what it means to be a Warrior of the Light. At the beginning, Coelho says that a Warrior is “someone capable of understanding the miracle of life, of fighting to the last for something he believes in.”

For the next 130 or so pages, this idea is developed so that each reader can identify with the ways of the Warrior. By the end of the book, we see how this ideal person is similar to the person that we are striving to emulate and that a Warrior also endures failures, as we do, along the way. Some aspects of the Warrior that I liked the most are:

• “A Warrior does not spend his days trying to play the role that others have chosen for him.”
• “A Warrior of the Light makes decisions. His soul is as free as the clouds in the sky, but he is committed to his dream.”

• “The true companions of a Warrior are beside him always, during the difficult times and the easy times.”
• “A Warrior of the Light is not afraid of disappointments because he knows the power of his sword and the strength of his love.”

• “A Warrior of the Light views life with tenderness and determination.”
• “A Warrior of the Light has learned that God uses solitude to teach us how to live with other people.”
• “If he thinks only of the goal, he will not be able to pay attention to the signs along the way. If he concentrates only on one question, he will miss the answers that are there beside him.”

Note: These photographs are of a full moon rising near Arches National Park, Utah. I discovered that if I moved, the image blurred all over my screen. I was frustrated, at first, that my camera could not capture the beauty of such a massive yellow moon rising over the desert landscape. But then, I just had fun playing with the light.

Away! away! for I will fly to thee, / Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards, / But on the viewless wings of Poesy…
-John Keats, in “Ode to a Nightingale”

Ah. The sounds of spring are finally in the air. The birds are singing, which of course brings to mind some of my favorite poems in the English language, including “Hope is the thing with feathers” (Emily Dickinson), “To a Skylark” (Percy Shelley) and—of course—John Keats: “Ode to a Nightingale.”

“Ode to a Nightingale” is 80 lines long (eight 10-line stanzas), and you can read the entire poem by clicking on this link to Bartleby.com. I am not going to summarize it all here, but I would like to make a few comments on the final two stanzas. Keats takes a pretty gloomy tone at the beginning of the poem and admits that he has been having thoughts of Death and dying, but a bird that he sees singing in a tree seems to bring his thoughts back to life. This is the theme that I pick up on when I read the poem: how something so simple such as a singing bird can have the power to elevate our moods or to “toll” us into living. The final two stanzas, in which Keats addresses the bird and then reflects on its power to transform his thoughts read:

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the selfsame song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that ofttimes hath
Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self.
Adieu! the Fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is famed to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hillside; and now ’tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades.
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:—do I wake or sleep?

Thanks to the following source for the above quotations from John Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale”–
Palgrave, Francis T. The Golden Treasury. London: Macmillan, 1875; Bartleby.com, 1999. www.bartleby.com/106/. [April 14, 2008].

“…it seemed that her love was unrequited, but what did that matter? Anyone who loves in the expectation of being loved in return is wasting their time.” –from Paulo Coelho’s The Devil and Miss Prym

In 2008, I told myself that I’d read more fiction, generally, and more Paulo Coelho, specifically. I’ve been reading a lot of fiction, but it’s already April, and I’ve only finished my first Coelho novel for the year: The Devil and Miss Prym (2000). This book is subtitled “A Novel of Temptation,” and it reads like a modern-day morality tale in which the forces of Good and Evil are pitted against each other. The story takes place over a seven-day period during which a stranger visits the remote village of Viscos and offers its inhabitants enough gold to sustain itself indefinitely in return for the murder of one of its members. The stranger first confronts the young Miss Prym with the proposal and puts her in the position to decide whether or not she will tell the village members or simply walk away with a portion of the gold herself. As in Coelho’s The Alchemist, this story is simple and general enough so that readers will easily identify with struggles that the main characters are experiencing. Overall, I found this book to be a meaningful read, as it challenges us to look at the ways in which temptation shows up in our own lives. The Devil and Miss Prym will inspire readers to look at the ongoing tensions between Good and Evil in their current situations, and it tells a captivating story in the process. One thing I like about Coelho’s books (the Harper Perennial editions, at least) is that they contain “about the author” and “about the book” sections at the end. Coelho is a fascinating character, himself, and on the topic of learning some of life’s lessons through reading fiction, he says:

“I don’t think that life’s lessons are in books or music or whatever. I think that true lessons are in experience. So when you read a book or listen to music or talk to someone, you share some of your thoughts and have the feeling that you are not alone.” –Paulo Coelho     

“For this, for everything, we are out of tune…”

“Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers: / Little we see in Nature that is ours,” says William Wordsworth in a sonnet he wrote in 1806. The poem’s opening line suggests that the reason why we’re disconnected from Nature is that “The world is too much with us.” I’ve been quiet on “Down and Out” for about a week now, which is abnormal, and I think that Wordsworth identifies one of the life-tensions that has been causing that silence. And it’s not just my tension—it’s a tension, I think, that most people in—ahem—civilized societies experience. It’s the tension between work (what Wordsworth would call “getting and spending”) and pleasure (what Wordsworth would probably call taking long walks in the woods). Not all of us associate pleasure with Nature, but Wordsworth has a way of seeing deeper meaning in natural experiences, seeing the beauty for instance in “The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon” or in “The winds that will be howling at all hours.” If we’re “getting and spending” all of the time, Wordsworth reminds us, we’re missing out on the other things that this world has to offer. Wordsworth ends his poem saying that he’d rather be a pagan so that he might be able to take some solace from the glimpses of beauty he sees in nature. Saying this was quite radical coming from Wordsworth, who was known to be conservative in his later years. I’m posting this poem today as a reminder of what it means to be “in tune,” as Wordsworth would say, with what in Nature is ours:

The world is too much with us; late and soon, / Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers: / Little we see in Nature that is ours; / We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! / The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon; / The winds that will be howling at all hours, / And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers; / For this, for everything, we are out of tune; / It moves us not.–Great God! I’d rather be / A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn; / So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, / Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; / Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; / Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.  

-From The Complete Poetical Works, by William Wordsworth, with an introduction by John Morley. London: Macmillan and Co., 1888. Posted online at Bartleby.com.

“Lightning first, then the thunder. And in between the two I’m reminded of a secret.” -opening lines of The Invention of Everything Else

If you’re at all fascinated by science, you’ll be interested to know that a fictional book about real-life inventor Nikola Tesla’s last days was published earlier this month (Houghton Mifflin). Samantha Hunt’s The Invention of Everything Else brings to life a story of the talented (but often overlooked) inventor of radio by telling about his fictional meeting with a young hotel chambermaid named Louisa. Besides radio, Nikola Tesla (1856-1943) invented radar, remote control, fluorescent lighting, the x-ray, the AC motor, the Tesla coil, and much more. But despite his brilliance, most Americans don’t learn about Tesla in school, and while he was alive, the inventor was not particularly well known. Instead of capitalizing on his work, he gave away his patents, believing that his inventions belonged to the whole world. In The Invention of Everything Else, chambermaid Louisa encounters the destitute and virtually forgotten inventor in 1943, as he is living in one of Hotel New Yorker’s rooms on the 33rd floor, and they strike up a friendship based on their shared love of pigeons. This book’s chapters alternate between Tesla and Louisa, whose stories develop within a narrative that also includes several other eccentric characters: Arthur (a brainy young man who remembers details from Louisa’s past), Azor (a man who has spent the past two years building a time machine in Far Rockaway, Queens), and Louisa’s father (a man who aspires to fly away with Azor in said time machine). While reading this book, be prepared to let your imagination run away with the story. Hunt toys with time and voice, and she succeeds in resurrecting one of the world’s greatest inventors who may have otherwise been left forgotten.

Click here to read my feature-length review of this book, which ran in Denver’s Rocky Mountain News on Friday, October 22, 2008. Thanks! And enjoy…       

“Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” –Michael Pollan

Just in case I don’t already read enough, I’ve started to read food labels. Mostly in response to reading Michael Pollan’s latest book, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto (Penguin Press, 2008), I’ve been scanning packaging labels to make sure that the things I’m eating don’t contain loads of ingredients that I can’t pronounce or that high fructose corn syrup isn’t the first (or second, or third) item on the list. I don’t diet, and I’m not overly obsessive about what I eat, but after reading this book, I feel justified in being concerned about what I put in my mouth. Pollan’s manifesto, which reads like a few lengthy but related essays, has topped the New York Times bestseller list for the past few weeks in the hardcover nonfiction category, and it’s not hard to understand why. First of all, the book is easy to digest (pun intended). Pollan takes a slew of conflicting and confusing diet/nutrition/health advice out there and looks at what’s wrong with it in the first place. He also offers some very simple advice: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” The fact that we need be reminded to eat “food” is further evidence of how far the things stocked on our grocery stores’ shelves have strayed from meeting our nutritional needs. American cheese slices wrapped in plastic, Go-gurt, and Twinkies are just a few examples of things that our great-grandmothers would not even recognize as food and things that we could replace with more healthy alternatives. Pollan’s slim volume is an important one because it reminds us that we can make sustainable choices at any point in our lives and that those choices can benefit our health, the environment, and the health of those around us. To read my more formal-type review of this book published in last week’s Sacramento News and Review, click here.

“Write right. Write good. Right Wrong. Write on!” –Edward Abbey

James J. Cahalan’s Edward Abbey: A Life (2001) tells the story of one of my personal heroes in a very real way. Edward Abbey (1927-1989) authored some twenty books, including two of my favorites: Desert Solitaire (196 and The Monkey Wrench Gang (1976). Abbey was an environmental activist, a champion of the desert landscape, a cantankerous old man. Edward Abbey is regarded as one of America’s finest “nature” writers—even though he both embraced and distanced himself from that categorization, depending on his mood. Instead of glossing over the less desirable aspects of Abbey’s life, Cahalan’s biography searches for the facts that may help explain them, and it also addresses criticisms of Abbey as racist, as misogynist, and as a stretcher of the truth. Abbey had five wives and many more affairs. He drank so much that his late-life health problems probably stemmed from his habit, and he sometimes told stories that mingled too much fiction with fact. What struck me about Cahalan’s telling of Abbey’s life was how he portrayed Abbey as a normal person—as in, just like you and me—despite the extraordinary things he did during his lifetime. In biography, I find this refreshing, and maybe it’s not so much about Cahalan’s telling of Abbey’s life but more about how Abbey really was. As I have been reading more biography lately, I find it almost depressing to hear about how person X achieved thing Y by age 5, or how so-and-so overcame Z in order to become the best at A, B, and C (by age 30). Edward Abbey failed frequently—even in his writing, but he somehow just kept going in his life and in his work. Cahalan’s story isn’t a story about success; it’s a story about perseverance, breakdown, and a wild commitment to living life in the midst of it all.

Other “Down and Out” posts on Edward Abbey include:  

Literature: Abbey’s Road

Literature: Abbey’s Vox Clamantis in Deserto

Literature: Abbey’s Desert Solitaire

Literature: Abbey on Thoreau