Now :: August 2024

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Hello friends,

Outrageously, it is August. Month of sun and smoke. My state continues its annual burning, though we are far away from any flames or damage here closer to the coast. I have been in classes this summer, trading stories with gentle-souled young people. My classmates are beautiful, like rocks you pull glistening from a riverbed, quietly colorful and laced with sparkle. Their stories are full of emotion, all with this reaching, searching quality that makes me want to be good to them and tell them everything will be okay.

Everything will be okay. Maybe we all need to hear that now.

Last night I was standing on my deck as the sun went down and the little bats were coming out to forage. I never have the patience or energy for star-gazing; my night sky pleasure is the little brown bats. I love the way they emerge at twilight and flit like secrets across your view. They live very neatly in the eaves of my house and the canopy of fir trees, but they are not just country creatures. They flutter through city and suburban skies without prejudice. Sometimes when I feel nearly smothered by the pollution of the internet outrage factories I think that every day the bats or the bumblebees or the wood ants are living in an incredible now, without worry, without outrage, or smugness, or despair.

Democracy can be in peril and the cedars dying and the state burning and relationships fractured and cancer licking at the door, and everything will be okay because I am alive, we are alive, now.

This idea settles me somehow. When I was younger, we lived for a day when we would fly away to glory. Here and now was a desolate place, twisted by sin and sharpened at the edges. Pray, wait, endure, long for that some day in the sky. I can look back and see the smudge of days I thought were ugly or beneath my notice, years that I wished away. Now, I just live. Gratefully.  

Now there are blackberries, and a free day, and a little dog who has adopted us. Now there is a kiss in the kitchen and dahlias in a vase. A call from a grown child. Good coffee. Time to write. All this tangled in with the grief and pain and weariness, of course. It is always a tangle. But which one will I stay with?

Soon my class will be done and my new young friends scattered again. I will get a few weeks of summer before I go back. There’s a tree I want to climb, a pasture I want to nap in, so many books I want to read. I would like to write here a little. Be quiet a little.

Do you have any plans for your now?

Birdy

 A little of this and that:

~ Reading the last of the Cromwell trilogy with Simon Haisell. I’ve been putting this one off because I know what’s coming, but the slow pace and the company of a group helps. Simon is a terrific host and offers so much insight into these dense, intelligent novels.

~ Listening to this repeatedly.

~ Been mixing things up by avoiding the streaming services and getting old-school DVD’s from the library on a Friday night. Sometimes it’s helpful not to have so many options. In the current stack: 

First Reformed,

Drive My Car,

Trainspotting

~ Just about to start The Perfectionist’s Guide to Losing Control

~ Why I Hate Instagram Now.

I’ve been off Instagram and all other similar platforms since 2019, but I sometimes scroll my husband’s very boring (sports-algorithmed) IG feed, so I can recognize this frustration. Remember when we thought we were using these platforms to connect with each other?

“Meta, Instagram’s parent company, still says its mission is giving people “the power to build community and bring the world closer together.” As it thwarts my efforts to see all the photos posted by people I know and chose to follow, I call bullshit. Injecting Reels in my feed, then refusing to let me abolish those diversions, hasn’t just put my loved ones in competition with viral nonsense––it has repeatedly subverted my attempts to ensure that my loved ones win.”~Conor Friedersdorf

~It’s the magnificent James Baldwin’s 100th birthday. Here’s a nice article about where to start with his books.

~Are Novel Covers Alienating Male Readers? These covers are alienating me, so I can see it!

OK! That’s about it for this month. Shall we meet here again soon?

Peace keep you, friends.

tonia

 

 

of reading and roaming :: February 12, 2024

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Halfway.

We are poised between winter and spring now. Around Brigid’s Day I joked a bit about it being my real New Year, but I discovered that my mind and body were in firm agreement with this. I didn’t fuss about the 1st of February or anything like that, I just sat with my journal that first week and dreamed some dreams. Suddenly all these little green shoots were wanting to emerge, things I might let grow and blossom in 2024. The first? I want to make friends with the sun and follow her around the year.  I’ve begun a 100 day project of greeting the dawn outdoors. Every morning, out for a walk in the dark while the sun slowly emerges over the horizon. On the days I can’t walk, I will take my tea to the porch and greet her there. Today was my fourth dawn and I can’t wait for tomorrow.

But there are still so many dark hours to enjoy as well. I am finding a lot of joy in reading this winter. Especially re-reading books I’ve loved before. I have a large selection of books on my To-Read shelves, but I don’t feel urgency about them. I will get to them eventually. Or maybe not. They aren’t passing fancies I’ve lost interest in, they are placeholders in a stream of thought, reminders to follow up on authors and ideas, fuel to stoke the writing fires. Every one of them means something to me and my intellectual journey.

part of the to-Read Shelves

What to read and how to know what to read are some of the things people contact me about the most. I absolutely love it when people want to talk about books, so I’m always glad to get your notes and happy to explore ideas with you. But I thought we might talk a little more generally about that subject in this space this month.

As many of you know, though I am currently working on a university English degree, most of my reading disciplines I developed entirely on my own. I say this because I am often surprised by the timidity people have in talking about the types of books they like or the books that feel accessible to them, etc. Reading is so common to most of us, I think we forget that it is a skill that evolves with use. The more you put yourself in contact with challenging texts, and the greater the variety of texts, the better you will be at understanding and retaining them. I have always read absolutely anything that interested me, from young adult genre novels to literary fiction, from nonfiction to academic commentary that was/is way over my head. I have consistently and intentionally attempted books that were too difficult for me. My early Goodreads reviews often went: “I mostly didn’t understand this book, but I liked what she had to say about ___.” It didn’t matter if I understood it all; I almost always came away with some new thread of understanding that I didn’t have before. I’ve done this all my adult life, but it is essentially how my classes work now too. I wade through an enormous amount of literature, talk about it, write about it, and occasionally retain something. The learning comes when this is repeated over many books or many classes. A poet shows up in a history class, a political theorist turns up in a novel, an essay about writing illustrates a technique in a short story. You dive into a deep pond and swim; slowly you become a fish.

But how do you find these books to swim in? There’s absolutely nothing wrong with just reading bestsellers or beach novels. My first rule for a reading life is that it should be pleasurable. But if you want to challenge yourself and develop your ability to find pleasure in new kinds of books there are many ways to go about it. You could use a formal approach, like following a university literature list (here’s one from New College Oxford) (and one from Berkeley) or a library list (The Library 100). I love a good list, but I often find that reading one selection after another from a list like that leads to a feeling of disjointedness. I prefer an interest-led approach that allows me to make connections and follow them, something I think of as roaming.

In a roaming approach, I might start with a list, but as soon as something starts catching my attention, I wander off the path and follow it. It might go like this: a character in a novel quotes Sylvia Plath: “I eat men like air.” I look up the poem, I look up the book, which I read and find vaguely disturbing, but also, who can ever forget “Out of the ash/I rise with my red hair/And I eat men like air”? I read articles about Plath. I read a biography of Plath. I discover Plath is a lot different than I originally thought. The bio tells me she liked Auden. I buy a collection of Auden but I don’t read it. I think about Plath’s hunger to be both a mother and a serious writer. I read Rachel Cusk’s  A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother. I read Rachel Cusk’s Outline Trilogy. Cusk has a short story on “the self in visual art” in the New Yorker which takes my breath away. I think about art and artists. There’s an article in the Guardian about the painters Celia Paul and Lucian Freud. I look up Paul and am mesmerized by her portraits. I order her new book, Letters to Gwen John, even though I know almost nothing about either of the artists. The book goes on my To Read shelf with Auden. Celia Paul was 18 when she met Lucian Freud (54). I read Claire Dederer’s  Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma about what we are supposed to do with artists whose personal lives make us cringe (or worse). And on it goes.

       This roaming and enrichment can go on forever. The first thing I do when something begins to sparkle at the edges of my attention is start googling. What else has the author written? Is there a documentary? A well-written criticism of their work? A movie adaptation? A People magazine article where they reveal the music that inspires them? What other books get recommended to me if I plug this title into Goodreads?

        Do this over and over and you find that you are suddenly recognizing a current of connectedness that links artists, writers, and thinkers from every part of life. It’s a lovely pond to swim in. Of course none of this even touches the other riches available through re-reading, marking up books, keeping commonplace books, writing your own summaries or thoughts about what you read, doing a deep dive into a time period, or an author’s oeuvre, or exploring a niche genre (how about Afrofuturism or Native American Horror?) , reading author biographies, listening to book podcasts, joining literary book groups, taking classes, etc. The pond reveals its depths, widens into a sea, and you discover you will never reach the opposite shore.

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Phew! That was a lot! I don’t know if any of it was helpful or not, but often, it seems people just don’t know where to start. I say start where you are now. See what is sparkling at you, research your favorite author, find their influences, find early writers in their genre, or look for new writers that are experimenting and taking the genre in new directions. Most of all, you should feel excited by what you read and not worried about if anyone else likes it. I guarantee you someone somewhere does. Perhaps in your travels you will find that person, or a group of people, who feel the same. And then you can swim even deeper.

I hope February is being good to you. Let me know what you are reading and exploring, and let’s enjoy the last of the dark season while it is with us!

tonia