Gratitude

From the most recent To the Best of Our Knowledge podcast comes Aaron James, who, while talking about the subject of his recent book, made one of the more profound statements about artists and the larger world that I've heard (any transcription errors are mine):

Often the big mistake [artists make] is not realizing how grateful they should be to larger society for giving them the gift of creative opportunity, without which they would have never achieved or been successful. I mean, artists who have to fend for food all the time, or fend off foreign armies, or whatever, aren't going to get a lot of art done. But many of them, when they are successful and produce great artworks, everyone's very grateful for that, and then they sort of just take credit for it, you know, I did it. And then they think even more should be coming to them, or something like that, [in addition to] the great benefits that they've already got.

I usually do feel pretty grateful to get to do what I do in the way that I do it, but after this gentle reminder I'm overflowing--thank you to everyone, especially the people whom I don't usually think to thank, from the road builders to the pilots to the food safety inspectors to the nice people who remove our trash. It also makes me think of Obama's much-maligned comment about the collective power of community--and the need to appreciate every level of specialization that makes our world, and our own individual endeavors, possible.

I won't argue that it's the best of all worlds in which we live; I've read too much Voltaire for that. But in the spirit of gratitude, I appreciate a whole lot of people these days, people whom, whether they realize it or not, allow me to carry on with my peculiar obsession. I hope to be able to pay it back, or forward, one of these days.

One More for the Road

In honor of the fiftieth anniversary of Robert Frost's death, links to a few of his best-known works that you may not have read in years:

"The Road Not Taken," 1922

"After Apple Picking," 1915

"Mending Wall," 1915

The NPR story that drew this anniversary to my attention begins with the line "Next, we'll recall a poet of the modern era who didn't seem modern at all." I was listening to this piece on my headphones while making soup, and I immediately exclaimed, "Frost!" 

My husband, watching a basketball game in the other room, was a little confused, especially as it was above freezing today.

But in all seriousness, during my junior year of college I took a modern poetry survey course that began with Frost, whom I knew as I knew of other canonical poets. But there was so much I'd never even considered--that the paths in "The Road Not Taken" actually look pretty damn similar, if you examine the text closely. Might it be an old man justifying his choices to himself? The oft-seriously-quoted "good fences make good neighbors" line from "Mending Wall" is very clearly not intended to be read literally. Why people don't quote the opening lines more often is beyond me:

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

Frost's poems begin so simply, follow what we all assume is the intended, rhyming and rhythmic, trajectory of poetry that it is all too easy to simply give them a surface-level read. Many, lulled perhaps by the mastery of the aural qualities and the easily-snipped-out lines, do. But they are even more beautiful, and subversive, when you look just a little bit closer. And Frost himself, as you will hear if you listen to the Morning Edition NPR story, valued his privacy in his personal life as well.

(All of this--the deceptively straight-forward statements, the quiet, deep calm, the fondness for rural northern settings--makes me suspect that he must go over well with the Swedes.)

This time around, "Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening" resonates with me most, for reasons that are probably both obvious and well-illustrated by this blog of late. In particular, I find myself reciting the last stanza, over and over. So here it is, in honor of the master:

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

BY ROBERT FROST

Whose woods these are I think I know.   

His house is in the village though;   

He will not see me stopping here   

To watch his woods fill up with snow.   

My little horse must think it queer   

To stop without a farmhouse near   

Between the woods and frozen lake   

The darkest evening of the year.   

He gives his harness bells a shake   

To ask if there is some mistake.   

The only other sound’s the sweep   

Of easy wind and downy flake.   

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.   

But I have promises to keep,   

And miles to go before I sleep,  

And miles to go before I sleep.

Rebecca Solnit is at it again

And when writing about her, there is nothing to do but go straight to the source itself. This time, she's in TomDispatch with a piece entitled "The Longest War."

Go read it. If my recommendation isn't enough, here she is on street harassment-turned-violent:

As for that incident in my city, similar things happen all the time.  Many versions of it happened to me when I was younger, sometimes involving death threats and often involving torrents of obscenities: a man approaches a woman with both desire and the furious expectation that the desire will likely be rebuffed.  The fury and desire come in a package, all twisted together into something that always threatens to turn eros into thanatos, love into death, sometimes literally.

Solnit is so very good at stating things so clearly, logically, and precisely that it is nearly impossible to look away. I don't usually try. That's saying something when faced with sentences like this: "Spouses are also the leading cause of death for pregnant women in the U.S."

Go read it.

In Which I Make a Confession

Despite being heir culturally to many, many of his concepts of the horror derived other worlds adjacent to our own, until this weekend, I had never actually read anything by H. P. Lovecraft. With great shame I confess that this was true even though I had even bought my husband one of those big Barnes and Noble nicely-bound anthologies that we all know are just a guise to make money off of non-copyrighted works of literature (but buy anyway, because they look kind of nice). At least this meant that when I finally came to my senses and decided to rectify the situation, I had the texts close at hand.

I started with "The Shadow over Innsmouth." From the first paragraph, it was clear that while I had never read this particular story before, I already knew it. Lovecraft has been so absorbed into our collective cultural consciousness that I had already experienced so many of the tropes and plot twists that he employs (not that I'm going to give anything away). I put the book down with great satisfaction, enchanted to be in the hands of this writer.

That said, from what I can tell as I page through the rest of the giant book, Lovecraft is guilty of overuse of his Lovecraftian self, a bit repetitive, and apparently was a really interesting guy (not that that casts shadow on his work in any way). Some of his stories sidle up really close to the too-florid-to-read line. 

But so much in this book I have never read is familiar, including but not limited to:

• Creepy inbred ("degenerate") New England towns
• Monsters with interest in humans ranging from nefarious to indifferent to haphazardly desctructive just for the fun of it, often at the same time
• Narrators who go insane based on what they've seen or experienced (shades of Poe are very evident here)
• Drunk informants who tell the truth that no one believes
• Arkham Asylum/Sanitorium
• The Ancient Ones

What really resonated with me is a concept that the introduction alludes to, the idea that true terror comes from imagining a world in which humans are nothing more than a speck of dust, or a fly to a curious child, simply irrelevant to the larger powers that we so often assume are invested in our lives in a very tangible way. How close this comes to your own (or my own) view is a post for another time, but I can easily imagine how frightening this concept would have been in the '10s, '20s, and '30s, in light of the incredible scientific advancement that was taking place. For the first time, this horrific idea was all the more horrific because there was evidence that it might be true. And we all know that the best horror works with what we are all actually afraid of in the realm of fiction, thus making it just safe enough to finally consider.

So a belated salute to Lovecraft. And I hear that Del Toro might be looking into adapting the novella Mountains of Madness for the screen. Seems an appropriate combination to me.

Books I've Loved Lately

Believe it or not, one of the quickest ways to catch me speechless is to ask me to name my favorite book. It's as though the very question makes all titles and authors vanish, instantaneously, from my brain, the opposite of the old "don't think of elephants" mind trick. And those of you who know me, as the kids say these days, In Real Life, know how hard it can be to get me to be quiet.

(No, Uncle Eric, I don't ever shut up. Deal with it.)

But now, alone in my quiet apartment, I can think of all sorts of things I've read and loved lately, and so, in no particular order other than non/fiction, here they are:

Fiction:

It's a shoo-in these days, high up on the best-seller list with all the fifty-shades-of-soft-core-porn, and it deserves every great thing that can be said about it: Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn. So high energy, so well-plotted, such great narrative voices--I know another writer who reads it between sessions on her own manuscript to keep herself going. 

And from 2011, another obvious one, but wow, I loved it: A Visit from the Goon Squad. It's not perfect, but most criticisms of it that I did have were tied to the structural decisions that I loved so much, so I won't even get into them. 

It might be cheating to list a book I'm currently reading, as I can't weigh in on it in totality, but Doris Lessing's The Good Terrorist has me just waiting to see what disaster is going to befall the characters next--in a good way. I haven't actually read any other Lessing beyond The Golden Notebook, which I finished only because I was in a Shanghai hotel room, alone, getting over a nasty cough I'd picked up in New Delhi. Didn't actually like it much. But this one draws on the same dissolutioned view of a certain type of Communist organizing, and in a more standard story structure, it's providing great character development and a lot of tension.

Non-Fiction:

By Deborah Blum, The Poisoner's Handbook is amazing. It's a history of the development of forensic medicine in New York during Prohibition, and as such combines two of my favorite things to read about: the interwar period and medical/scientific history. Very well written and researched. Can't wait for her next one, whatever it will be, and I really need to catch up on her previous books. 

I have The Great Mortality on my Kindle, but next time I'm in the States I'm going to have to rustle up a physical copy, I loved it that much. A social and cultural history of what we call the Black Death in medieval Europe, John Kelly confesses in his introduction that he didn't set out to write about a historic plague, but as he researched for his intended book on HIV/AIDS, he was so captivated by what he found that he changed course entirely. Love the focus on the implications of this disease, not just the medical details, from depopulation to social mobility to pogroms on the one hand and waning religious faith on the other. Absolutely fascinating stuff.

I'm also working my way through Beating Back the Devil after reading Maryn McKenna's most recent book, Superbug: The Fatal Menace of MRSA. McKenna is one of the best kind of popular science/health writers--the kind who doesn't get in her own way. (These books aren't for the squeamish, it should be noted. In case it's not evident, I actually enjoy reading about medical scares and historical plagues, although for some reason I draw the line at smallpox.)

Next up: Books I Plan to Love Soon, or What's in that Giant Stack of To-Be-Read.