Interior

What delights me is this: sitting on my bed with a cup of coffee in a yellow cup, planning what I'll read next, what book, what collection of essays, what poetry, what to download and what to hold in hand. I'm finishing Updike's Couples, have devoured its smutty pages even while walking. The story has made me feel lonely in the best way. I've got Lily King's Euphoria next -- she was a college classmate of mine, an old friend with whom I've lost touch, but I love her novels. Helen Oyeyemi's Boy, Snow, Bird sits beside my bed, the cover green with a snake and a pink rose. I've read a few of the chapters but will start over because I was distracted by the same loneliness with which Updike seduced me. I read an interview with Oyeyemi this morning (my yellow cup at my mouth), and she spoke of Maggie Nelson's Bluets, a book about the love of blue.  I read a bit of that, know I'll read the rest.  These things delight me, yellow at my mouth, blue breath.

Reader, what will you read next?

The Funk That Doesn't End All Funks

Daydream
Andrew Wyeth

I had to stop myself from looking through the photos of Sophie's birth when I looked at one of myself and noted how "awful" I looked. I was rummaging through for a picture to publish with this post. Obviously, I didn't find one.

I teared up today, right before I went on a walk with Sophie. Henry asked me what was wrong, and I told him that I felt burdened. The words came out before I could stop them, and Henry said by Sophie? And I said, yes, and he said, we all are, and I told him that was true but I wanted to hold it for him and his brother, too. The burden, that is. Then I went on the walk with Sophie and cried some more, in the sunlight, behind my green glasses. I'll always have to pay someone to help me with the burden, I thought. That's an awful thought, for those of you who don't know what it's like, but it's an awful thought even for those who do.

Why do we loathe our graveyard thoughts? Why not let them rise to the surface, simmer there and evaporate without mockery? Why at the very least not treat them lovingly? I should say I, not we, as I can't speak for you.

I'm re-reading Updike's Couples. It really is scandalous, but I really do like it.

Here's a sentence that would knock my socks off if I wore them:

Harold believed that beauty was what happened between people, was in a sense the trace of what had happened, so he in truth found her, though minutely creased and puckered and sagging, more beautiful than the unused girl whose ruins she thought of herself as inhabiting.

On Your Bedside Table

I had a book buying bonanza the other day with a forgotten-about Amazon giftcard. Last night, I poured myself a cold beer in a frozen mug and lay on my bed with books and magazines all around me. I then proceeded to watch three episodes in a row of the new season of Call the Midwife. Have ya'll watched that show? It's fantastic -- and the perfect antidote to a day spent in Placentia as well as my recent binge of the last season of House of Cards which, though compelling, is repellent enough that I felt almost dirty when I finished it. After Call the Midwife, I read some more of Life After Life (which I'm still enjoying, overjoyed to learn that I can indeed get through a gigantic novel).

So here's what's on my bedside table, along with the beer:

Begley's new biography of John Updike, Updike (I'm not a big biography reader -- I think the last one I read was probably about the poet Anne Sexton --  but am looking forward to this one)

Eleanor and Park by Rainbow Rowell (an uncharacteristic YA purchase -- I generally can't abide YA -- that I made on the recommendation of one of my favorite bloggers, The Diamond in the Window)

Gabriel Garcia Marquez' short stories Strange Pilgrims (that I bought on the recommendation of another amazing blogger who is also a butcher.   Stay tuned, because I have An Idea that has to do with a salon and food and cake and books and me as a moderator who makes a bit of money).

Chinesy: The New Way to Read Chinese by Shaolan (Have I ever told you that I studied Chinese for two years in college? At the time, I had the insane idea that I would learn the language and read the poetry of Tu Fu and Li Po. HA! HA! HA! I learned about four hundred characters and have since  forgotten them. In fact, the only thing I remember is the expression Ni hao ma? I don't think I've ever told you, either, that I got myself a job teaching English in Taiwan for the year after I graduated but was convinced by The Boy I Loved to blow that off and stay in Chapel Hill while he finished his master's degree. HA! HA! HA! Some of you know how that all turned out!).

Yes, we all have pasts, don't we?

Anywho.

Reader, what is on your bedside table, including drinking beverages?

The Bookworm Thrills

The Bookworm, circa 1974 or 1975***

I've just been reading The New York Times Book Review, have downloaded several new books, added a couple to my Amazon wish list and spent several hours dipping into the old reviews of Gabriel Garcia Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude and a few of his other novels. That made me search for my old copy of the book, which I found and which I'm thinking I should re-read. Marquez loved Joyce and Woolf, and just the other day I was talking to an old and dearest friend, and he reminded me of Joyce's short stories, how amazing they are, how you can pick up anything of his and just dip in wherever, start reading, re-reading, whatever. I had told him that I couldn't get through the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Goldfinch, that it bored me and I wasn't sure why. I'm wondering if I can get through the Marquez, this late in the game or whether I should stick to shorter novels. I haven't read a biography in years, so I'm pretty sure that I'll be buying the hard copy of the new Updike one by Adam Begley. The review made it sound fantastic, and while I came late to the Rabbit books, I fell in love with Updike over the four summers I spent reading each of those books, culminating in my seeing him at UCLA right before he died. I can still remember my surprise at his warmth (I'd thought he'd be patrician and snooty), at how long and thin his fingers were, how I wanted to jump from my third row seat right into his lap. And then there's Barbara Ehrenreich's Living with a Wild God (that's the one I downloaded), described by the reviewer as electric, but then later as discursive, repetitive and claustrophobic, but Ehrenreich fascinates me, and so do people's lives and their mystical experiences so I'm going to read it. When I was a child, I'd walk into a library, move toward the children's section and have to kneel down, my foot wedged in my crotch, such was the urge to pee. This ridiculous side effect of book titillation carried on well into my adulthood when I still frequented bookstores, and even now, as I click and download and order, I feel the same sort of urgency and excitement at the prospect of so much to read, so many books. There's still time.






***Really, one can't exclaim enough over this perfect shot that my mother took one Christmas when I was ten or eleven years old. She always claimed that she'd practically shout at me such was my reverie when immersed in a book. I think she made that maxi dress for me, and I'm struck by my hair grown out and curled, evidently, with a curling iron. There would be several painful years of adolescence still to get through when the hairstyles got even more scary, and let's just say that being a bookworm was not a ticket to popularity and ease at a fancy private middle school in Atlanta, Georgia in the seventies. Oh, and let's not even talk about the couch fabric.

I've posted this before***

Religious Consolation

One size fits all. The shape or coloration

of the god or high heaven matters less

than that there is one, somehow, somewhere, hearing

the hasty prayer and chalking up the mite

the widow brings to the temple,  A child

alone with horrid verities cries out

for there to be a limit, a warm wall

whose stones give back an answer, however faint.

Strange, the extravagance of it—who needs

those eighteen-armed black Kalis, those musty saints

whose bones and bleeding wounds appall good taste,

those joss sticks, houris, gilded Buddhas, books

Moroni etched in tedious detail?

We do; we need more worlds. This one will fail.

John Updike

***a sort of companion piece to my post Sunday Morning the other day where I muse on faith, gods and humans.

How We Do It: Part XXXV in a Series: Normal

Henry, March 2012

This is a meditation on normal. Last night, Henry asked me for help with his Honors English homework. I had to read the short story assigned to them, a John Updike titled A&P, that I'd never read before. I found it exciting and the questions that Henry needed help with, exciting, too. Henry is an incredible reader and a pretty damn good writer, but he currently states that he hates writing and Honors English. He hates getting so deep into a text for annotation and study that the actual reading of it is no longer enjoyable. We talked for a bit about that last night, and I told him about the time I saw Updike at UCLA a couple of months before he died, how his fingers were so long and tapered, how he loved his craft, how I wanted to jump onto the stage and into his lap. We also talked about the upcoming Homecoming Dance, about the girl he invited and what he needs to wear to the dance. I need real slacks, he told me, and shoes. I sat in rare normal, lay in it like a pig in mud. Those of us who are extreme parents generally shush those of you who are not when you counter your normal with comments like oh, I know this is nothing compared to what you go through. We don't want to be any more isolated than we are. We are told that normal is relative. There's no such thing as normal, I've told my sons. My friend who has a son who was normal at two and is now neurologically devastated by a rare disease grapples with a new normal. Last night I recognized normal for what it is. Normal.

Eighteen-armed black Kalis

The Annunciation by Fra Angelico (my favorite painting)

Religious Consolation

One size fits all. The shape or coloration

of the god or high heaven matters less

than that there is one, somehow, somewhere, hearing

the hasty prayer and chalking up the mite

the widow brings to the temple,  A child

alone with horrid verities cries out

for there to be a limit, a warm wall

whose stones give back an answer, however faint.

Strange, the extravagance of it—who needs

those eighteen-armed black Kalis, those musty saints

whose bones and bleeding wounds appall good taste,

those joss sticks, houris, gilded Buddhas, books

Moroni etched in tedious detail?

We do; we need more worlds. This one will fail.

John Updike

Books

I'm finishing up John Updike's self-professed "favorite book I've written" The Centaur. It's weird, weird, weird and very wonderful. I bought a second edition for $22.00 at a fabulous bookstore in Venice (that's Beach, not Italy), so it has that crinkly cover and smells good. I've come to John Updike and fallen in love late in life, I think, for someone who considers herself pretty damn well-read. The novels of Updike that I've read are so of their time, of the social mores of the forties through the seventies, and the awful banality of work and marriage, the onset of corporate culture and concomitant loss of identity. Some would say they're misogynistic in tone and the women aren't completely fleshed out, but I'm seduced by the language, the old-fashioned style of it, the craft and industry that appears effortless. There's a hardness to the male intellect in these books that I'm drawn to right now in my life -- but...

when I'm finished I'm dashing out to Chevalier's (see my sidebar for the link) to pick up a copy of Lorrie Moore's new novel, the first in eleven years! I came to Lorrie Moore when I lived in New York City and read her short story "People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk" in The New Yorker. Sophie had already been diagnosed when I read it, a story of a small boy who has cancer and the wry, devastated voice of his mother telling it, and I was so taken by it that I ripped it out of the magazine and carried it around with me for years. It became a touchstone of sorts, something that I referred to over and over as I navigated our own treacherous journey. It sits, now, in a folder in my file cabinet, dog-eared and thin, the file marked "Important Articles." The short story went on to win an O.Henry prize, I believe, and then appeared in Moore's last published book Birds of America. The new novel is something I can happily (albeit nerdily) say that I've anticipated for a long time!

All this....just because. It's not ALL FIRES, ALL HELLFIRE and ALL GO TO HELL around here ALL THE TIME!

Words

The miracle of turning inklings into thoughts and thoughts into words and words into metal and print and ink never palls for me

said John Updike who died today. I came to Updike relatively late in my life when I picked up the first Rabbit book one summer and read it voraciously. And then each summer thereafter it became a sort of mini-tradition for me to read another. I felt like I was discovering him and it was such a relief at the time to read such stately prose. Fine, old-fashioned stuff that didn't mask the often vulgar material, just enhanced it.

I saw him last fall, here in Los Angeles, and marveled at his easy depiction of writing as industry. I had gone to hear him speak thinking that he'd be impossibly effete, New Englandy, haughty. And he wasn't. He was charming and witty and so, so literate. I wrote about it here.

I'm sad that John Updike died today and that his voice is gone.