What I'm Reading Now

"InWalking On Water, Madeleine L'Engle addresses the questions, What makes art Christian? What does it mean to be a Christian artist? What is the relationship between faith and art? Through L'Engle's beautiful and insightful essay, readers will find themselves called to what the author views as the prime tasks of an artist: to listen, to remain aware, and to respond to creation through one's own art."

Madeleine L'Engle

"Madeleine L’Engle (1918–2007) was born in New York City and attended Smith College. She wrote more than 60 books, the most famous of which is A Wrinkle In Time (1962), winner of the Newbery Award in 1963. L’Engle continued the story of the Murry family from A Wrinkle In Time with seven other novels (five of which are available as A Wrinkle In Time Quintent from Square Fish). She also wrote the famous series featuring the Austin family, beginning with the novel Meet The Austins (1960). L’Engle revisited the Austins four more times over the next three decades, concluding with Troubling a Star in 1994. The story of the Austins had some autobiographical elements, mirroring Madeleine’s life and the life of her family. Madeleine L’Engle’s last book, The Joys of Love, is a romantic, coming-of-age story she wrote back in the 1940s, and is being published by FSG."

A Little Confused

I got an email from a student the other evening:

"On this assignment for tomorrow. I probably should already know this, but one inch margins is what Microsoft Word does, right? And double spaced, that means between the lines, right?"

Yeah . . . . right.

Acronym FAIL

Booking It--Recent Big

What’s the biggest book you’ve read recently?

Every summer I try to choose at least one long book from my "Should Have Already Read" list. This past summer it was Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook. I certainly wouldn't move it over to my list of all-time favorites, but it's an important book, and I'm glad I read it.

Much to its author's chagrin, The Golden Notebook instantly became a staple of the feminist movement when it was published in 1962. Doris Lessing's novel deconstructs the life of Anna Wulf, a sometime-Communist and a deeply leftist writer living in postwar London with her small daughter. Anna is battling writer's block, and, it often seems, the damaging chaos of life itself. The elements that made the book remarkable when it first appeared--extremely candid sexual and psychological descriptions of its characters and a fractured, postmodern structure--are no longer shocking.

Nevertheless, The Golden Notebook has retained a great deal of power, chiefly due to its often brutal honesty and the sheer variation and sweep of its prose.This largely autobiographical work comprises Anna's four notebooks: "a black notebook which is to do with Anna Wulf the writer; a red notebook concerned with politics; a yellow notebook, in which I make stories out of my experience; and a blue notebook which tries to be a diary." In a brilliant act of verisimilitude, Lessing alternates between these notebooks instead of presenting each one whole, also weaving in a novel called Free Women, which views Anna's life from the omniscient narrator's point of view. As the novel draws to a close, Anna, in the midst of a breakdown, abandons her dependence on compartmentalization and writes the single golden notebook of the title.

In tracking Anna's psychological movements--her recollections of her years in Africa, her relationship with her best friend, Molly, her travails with men, her disillusionment with the Party, the tidal pull of motherhood--Lessing pinpoints the pulse of a generation of women who were waiting to see what their postwar hopes would bring them. What arrived was unprecedented freedom, but with that freedom came unprecedented confusion. Lessing herself said in a 1994 interview: "I say fiction is better than telling the truth. Because the point about life is that it's a mess, isn't it? It hasn't got any shape except for you're born and you die."

Yes, She Can!

What I'm Reading Now

"In this eloquent and persuasive book, Neil Postman examines the deep and broad effects of television culture on the manner in which we conduct our public affairs, on how "entertainment values" have corrupted the very way we think. As politics, news, religion, education, and commerce are given expression less and less in the form of printed or spoken words, they are rapidly being reshaped and staged to suit the requirements of television. And because television is a visual medium, whose images are most pleasurably apprehended when they are fast-moving and dynamic, discourse on television takes the form of entertainment. Television has little tolerance for argument, hypothesis, or explanation; it demands performing art.

Mr. Postman argues that public discourse, the advancing of arguments in logical order for the public good-once the hallmark of American culture-is being converted from exposition and explanation to entertainment."

Barbara's Back!

Barbara Kingsolver's one of my favorite authors. Her The Poisonwood Bible is on my all-time favorite list. She's finally coming out with a new novel, and I'm so excited. Maybe I'll have time to read it over Christmas break:

The Lacuna, described by London's Bookseller as "the first novel by The Poisonwood Bible author Barbara Kingsolver in nearly 10 years," is set for a November 2009 worldwide release. The book will be published in the United States by HarperCollins and via Faber in the U.K. Kingsolver is a 1977 graduate of DePauw University.

"Set in Mexico and the U.S. during the 1930s, '40s and '50s, the novel tells the story of fictional Harrison Shepherd, who works for Mexican painter Diego Rivera," notes Bookseller. "Shepherd becomes the confidante of Rivera's artist wife, Frida Kahlo, and then secretary to her one-time lover, Trotsky, until his assassination. Shepherd later flees Mexico for the U.S., where he becomes a bestselling author before coming under a McCarthy-style investigation. The Lacuna is told through Shepherd's diaries and letters, as well as newspaper cuttings," notes the publication.

Faber's Hannah Griffiths says the upcoming book is "without doubt the most extraordinary novel I have read for years. The interesting thing is the way she interweaves real documents and real lives into the story. The word ‘lacuna' itself has many different meanings and she manages to encompass most of them in the book: a cave, a missing text, a gap -- all these things are really relevant to the story."

Barbara Kingsolver's twelve books of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction include the novels The Bean Trees and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, which was listed among the ten best nonfiction books of 2007 by TIME magazine. Translated into nineteen languages, Kingsolver's work has won a devoted worldwide readership and many awards, including the National Humanities Medal.

Found Poem

Here's the latest tagging thing on Facebook--a Found Poem from your ipod. Here are the instructions:

1. Put your Mp3 player on shuffle
2. Write down the first line of the first 20 songs
3. Repost them in a poem
4. Play a 21st song, that is your poem title and what you title the journal.


Here's my Found Poem:

You Always Had an Eye for Things That Glitter

If it was in your mind to really cut me down
I am a pilgrim, a pilgrim of sorrow
Come on and dance.

That’s all I wanted, something special, something sacred in your eyes.
You say that somewhere over the rainbow . . .
Pardon me.

She would meet me in the morning on my way down to the river.
Has she got naughty eyes?
I am a man of constant sorrow.
I am living in danger.

I can hear your heels clicking on the sidewalk—
Oh what a dream, oh what a dream!
I fell, fell around the world.

How many of you people out there have been hurt in some kind of love affair?

I brought flowers to your door last night.
Don’t worry about me, I’ll get along
How do you solve a problem like Maria?

In the face of the unexpected, you never know what’s gonna happen tomorrow.
Long ago my heart and mind got together
When we come down we’ll be dreaming safe and sound.

Try it. And if you'd like, share the results.

Female Etiquette

Here in the English Department, we have a table in the hallway with a sign over it announcing "Free Books." Anybody can put books there that they don't want, and anybody who's interested is welcome to take them. There are usually a lot of old composition texts, old anthologies, and dog-eared paperback classics like Lord Jim, The Mayor of Casterbridge, or The Works of Goethe. It's a popular place because English majors are always interested in building their libraries.

I've put a few books there myself, and being the book lover I am, I can't help but stop and look when I see that someone has weeded their library. Usually, it's nothing of interest or something I already have. But not today. No, sir. Today, I snagged this beauty:

No Nice Girl Swears by Alice-Leone Moats, copyright 1933. It's a conduct book, and if the title makes you laugh, look at the chapter headings:

1. No Nice Girl Swears
2. Should She Ask Him In?
3. You're the First Man I've Ever Kissed
4. Keeping an Amateur Standing
5. This Casual Era
6. May I Call You Up Some Time?
7. Out for No Good
8. Joining In
9. Launching a Belle
10. Chaperons Do Exist
11. Between Courses
12. The Inevitable Details
13. Lunches and Teas; or, Scarcely Worth the Trouble
14. Coming Out to Music
15. Cutting In and Sitting Out
16. That Certain Something
17. The Great Step
18. In a Cloud of Tulle
19. Twice Shy--?
20. Travel Broadens the Mind
21. Never Speak to Strangers Unless They Speak to You
22. Out of Town
23. Summer, Winter, Spring
24. An Old English Custom
25. In a Strange Bed
26. Pity the Poor Working Girl
27. Serious Business
28. Hot Footlights
29. The Hiccuping Fifties
30. Our Plastered Friends

No, I'm not making this up. If it hadn't been published in 1933, I'd assume that at least some of those chapter titles were intended as double-entendres. And I can't help but wonder whose library this came from.

I'm thinking this book deserves to be prominently displayed in my office.

Classic Understatement

I was listening to the radio the other day and heard this news story. A British woman's house caught fire while she was away from home. Firefighters determined that the sun, beaming through a crystal ball on the window ledge, had caused the TV to get too hot and explode. The exploding television caught the sofa on fire, and the fire quickly spread to the rest of the house.

In an interview after the fire, the woman said (you have to imagine the British accent here), "I used to like watching the sun shine through the crystal ball into the room. Now, I'm sorry I ever bought it."

You don't say.