USA & Canada Archives - Page 11 of 27 - A Geography of Reading

Reading Edith Wharton Against Henry James

August 2, 2015 by Isla McKetta, MFA 4 Comments

How many times in life do we really get to devote ourselves to tomes anymore? One of the projects I’ve been working on as I prepare to have my first child is getting through my to-read shelf, and, not surprisingly, some of the thickest hardbacks are the very last ones I’m getting to. That includes The Selected Short Stories of Edith Wharton (390 pages) and a collection of five novels by Henry James (Daisy Miller, Washington Square, The Portrait of a Lady, The Bostonians, and The Aspern Papers) (892 pages). Admittedly, I’m still working on the James collection, but after facing a truly embarrassing confusion between the two writers, I knew I had to write about it here.

Biographical Comparisons

Both transatlantic writers writing about a certain social class in the northeastern US and in England, I was a little surprised to learn (though I shouldn’t have been) that James (1843-1916) and Wharton (1862-1937) knew each other and that James was a mentor of sorts to Wharton. Both were American and spent considerable time abroad although I would have sworn that James was British. Their writing shares a similar sensibility cultivated by a social class where there are a lot of tacit rules to be followed and this gives the work of both writers a lot of subtext.

The Portrait of a Lady vs. The Age of Innocence

Was that biographical snippet included here just to absolve myself of the embarrassment I’m still feeling over conflating the two writers? Maybe. What happened was that late one night I started reading The Portrait of a Lady and, having watched more film adaptations of the work of Wharton and James than there could ever be books, I assigned Winona Ryder to the character of Isabel Archer. I was a little confused that the story was taking place on the wrong continent (in England) and eventually started to get annoyed that the introduction was so very long and became impatient to see the character of Countess Olenska.

I had completely conflated The Portrait of a Lady and The Age of Innocence.

My excuse (besides the fact that I’m sometimes a very poor reader) is that I strongly remember Ryder saying “Archer” a lot in the film (which makes sense because it’s her husband Newland’s last name). But it’s a pretty poor excuse considering I actually have read The Age of Innocence (though it’s been nearly a decade).

Not surprisingly, my relationship with The Portrait of a Lady changed a bit once I started reading it for itself. The book still feels overly long (I’m still reading it), although it’s a relief to read for what is happening on the page rather than what I think will happen. I can’t quite place Nicole Kidman in the book (that’s one adaptation I actually haven’t seen), and maybe that’s for the best.

I haven’t completely learned my lesson, though. I “watched” the miniseries for The Buccaneers this weekend while needlepointing a stocking for my son. God help us all if I ever pick that book up and try to remember if I’ve read it 🙂

Roman Fever

If I were to write a dissertation on James and Wharton, I’d no doubt find countless similarities (and differences) in their work. What struck me most, though, in reading these books so closely together is when they both brought up Roman Fever. I’d never heard of this curious thing before, but it seems to have been a fear that tourists had of Rome and particularly the area near the Colosseum that could prove deadly.

James wrote about the phenomenon in Daisy Miller, but Wharton’s treatment of it in “Roman Fever” is even more interesting where the fever has multiple meanings. The story really is quite wicked (in the most wonderful ways) and merits a re-read when I’m finally done with all these Jamesian novels.

Scary Stories

Both Wharton and James wrote ghost stories, they lived in a time where mediumship and the supernatural were part of high society. James is of course famous for The Turn of the Screw which I have not read but I’ve seen at least one film of. Wharton wrote enough ghostly short stories to devote an entire collection to them and while reading The Selected Stories I have to say that those ghost stories were still some of my favorites. “Mr. Jones” in particular chills me every time.

My Real Love

I’m probably always going to be team Wharton. Although both writers carefully observed the manners of their time, there’s something warmer and perhaps more human about the way Wharton portrays her characters. I believe she actually has sympathy for them, whereas I don’t think James always does.

It’s funny, I actually wrote about Wharton in my graduate school application essay because I so admired her work. I thought in my reading of all of this contemporary fiction since that I’d moved on from my somewhat archaic tastes, but in re-reading Wharton I found I still love and relate to her work whereas reading James feels more to me like wandering through a show of John Singer Sargent portraits—there’s beauty and I can relate to the pictures a little, but the characters and their time seem so far away.

I’m officially on maternity leave right now and it’s about 90 degrees in Seattle, so while I have loads of time (at least until the little one decides he’s ready), I can’t really go outside and no excuse not to read. I might actually finish this James collection. Although I’m not sure I’ll make it through that Peter Nadas book I’ve been looking forward to (1100+pages)…

If this review made you want to read turn of the last century literature, pick up a copy of the Henry James collection or The Selected Short Stories of Edith Wharton from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Spiraling through The Incredible Sestina Anthology

May 31, 2015 by Isla McKetta, MFA 2 Comments

I have a confession to make. I’m only halfway through The Incredible Sestina Anthology so I really shouldn’t be reviewing it here yet, but my brain is so wrapped up in the book and the form that I wanted to share my feelings about it now both so I don’t lose the threads of what’s so exciting and so I can delve deeper into understanding the nature of that excitement. Since it’s a book of poetry, let’s bend the rules a little today, shall we? At least I know the plot won’t shift radically when I turn the next page.

What’s a Sestina?

If you’re like me, you did not get much of an education in the forms of poetry in school so “sestina” aside from being a pretty word, could sound a little like gibberish. I feel that way about a lot of poetic forms—especially the ones I haven’t read many examples of yet. A sestina is based on repetition of the last words of a stanza in a particular order. There are six stanzas in which this occurs and then a final, shorter stanza where those end words are mixed up all over again. Cribbing from Daniel Nester’s intro, that form of repetition looks like this:

Stanza 1: 1 2 3 4 5 6
Stanza 2: 6 1 5 2 4 3
Stanza 3: 3 6 4 1 2 5
Stanza 4: 5 3 2 6 1 4
Stanza 5: 4 5 1 3 6 2
Stanza 6: 2 4 6 5 3 1
Envoi: 2/5 4/3 6/1

But you only really need to know the form in that kind of depth if you’re going to write one. To enjoy sestinas, it’s more essential to understand that the repetition is intentional and that there’s no other set rhyme or rhythm in the form (although most poets find their own rhythm. As with most formal poetry, the fun in being a spectator is seeing what each poet unleashes from within those walls.

Relishing Repetition

Blah blah blah stanzas, right? It’s hard to appreciate the form of a poem without getting inside it so let’s look at the first stanza of “Mother Worries” by Shane Allison:

Lord, how we gon’ pay these bills in this
How we gon’pay these bills,
Lord. How we gon’ pay these bills in
We gon’ pay these
We gon’ pay
Lord how we gon’ pay these bills in this house?

Looking at just the last words of each line, the end words that will repeat (in a different order, of course) in the next stanza are: this, bills, in, these, pay, house. Poets take a lot of leeway in how they repeat their end words and sometimes substitute the noun version for a verb or shift the tense of a word or use a homonym. The lines can be short or long.

What I love about Allison’s piece is that the entire poem is really built on the repetition of the line “How we gon’ pay these bills?” It takes many many forms, but if I counted how many different words he uses in this poem, I wouldn’t guess it’s more than 30, which, in a 39 line poem, is not a lot of words. This total repetition (and the subject matter) lends the most gorgeous lament to this poem.

Variations on a Form

There are poems by sestina purists in this book (Like Ashbery, Auden, and Bishop), and that’s all well and good, but where I started to learn most about the form (and what can be done with language) is from poets like Geoff Bouvier and Casey Camp who redefined the form for themselves. Bouvier’s “Refining Sestina” condenses the entire stanza structure down into six lines where the end words are instead repeated inside the lines. And Camp turns his poem into a graphic sestina where each line of the poem gets its own illustration.

Others, like Denise Duhamel, use a double sestina form where they’re playing with twelve end words. This means they get thirteen stanzas in which to explore their topic. I found, because I’m not the best reader, that I actually lost the end words in these longer sestinas and would sometimes be surprised halfway through with thoughts like “Have I really already read the word ‘seesaw’ six times? How did that fit in.”

There’s also an incredible variation in subject matter in this book. Some poets take their work so seriously as to write ars poeticas – sestinas about writing sestinas. And some, including writers I have admired in other contexts like Steve Almond and Jenny Boully, are obviously playing as they are writing about Elton John and the missed connections part of the newspaper (respectively).

Your Brain on Sestinas

I read about thirty pages of sestinas last night (approximately fifteen separate poems) and another seventy pages this morning. What I can tell you is that those end words, which sometimes feel very random, become embedded in your mind. They suddenly feel very important. And, if you read them before bed, you might compose dreams that pull together all that randomness. It’s a wonderful exercise to shake up those sleeping hours.

In general, reading sestinas is making me pay more attention to the ways language can be worked and how very much can be accomplished within the constraints of form. I suppose that’s why poets across the ages have continued to write in particular forms (at least some of the time).

I don’t know if I’ll be writing a sestina in the near future. But I am carefully thinking about the way I use repetition and enjoying the possibility of writing in a new form. Because The Incredible Sestina Anthology is arranged alphabetically, I’m looking forward to seeing how the rest of the poets can surprise me and stretch my thinking.

I’d love to hear about your investigations into form and repetition. Please tell me more about your projects or what you’re reading in the comments.

If this review made you want to read sestinas, pick up a copy of The Incredible Sestina Anthology from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Family Dysfunction and Narrative Tension in Bloodline, the Netflix Original Series

April 5, 2015 by Isla McKetta, MFA 1 Comment

Remember the old days when we’d all gather around the water cooler and discuss who shot JR or of Rachel and Ross were ever going to figure things out? Nowadays we’re all watching our own shows at our own paces and unless you’re a fan of Game of Thrones or Mad Men, you mostly miss out on this cultural sharing moment. Well, I finished a fantastic new series on Netflix last night and I want to share it with you here at our virtual water cooler. Let me tell you about Bloodline.

Building Tension

When Danny Rayburn comes home to the Florida Keys to help his family celebrate the dedication of a pier in their honor, the balance of that prominent family is upset and things start to go wrong almost immediately. It starts small as Danny (Ben Mendelsohn) ducks his brother John (Kyle Chandler) at the bus stop only to show up directly at the inn their family manages. But these little upsets are keys to the tension underlying the family dynamic and (as in all good narrative) that tension develops and soon explodes.

The tension seems to center around Danny, the black sheep who wants to be the prodigal son, but Danny is really not just a source of tension but also the Iago—the key to unraveling the smooth facades of everyone around him. Within the first few episodes we see that successful lawyer and youngest daughter Meg (Linda Cardellini) is in a serious relationship with someone else than the guy she is screwing in the backs of cars. Kevin (Norbert Leo Butz) is barely holding on to the pretension that his marriage isn’t headed for divorce. And John is finding it harder and harder to be the upstanding boy scout of a detective that he so desperately wants to be.

I can’t tell you how the story develops (it would spoil all your fun) but I can tell you that after watching an episode or two at night I felt all balled up with tension (and couldn’t wait to watch more). The writers have a very subtle way of focusing each episode around one character’s relationship with Danny even while advancing the story as a whole and it never feels formulaic.

Dysfunctional Families

No matter what Tolstoy said about unhappy families, there are similarities in the threads of dysfunction and one of the things I enjoyed most about watching Bloodline was trying to tie the characters in this show to members of our own families. It was also instructive to watch the master manipulation of characters like Papa Rayburn (Sam Shepard) as he pits his children (oh-so-subtly) against one another and Mama Rayburn (Sissy Spacek) as she feeds the conflict.

What deliciously complicates the dysfunction is the nuances in the character of Danny (and the excellent portrayal by Mendelsohn) that made me hate him, pity him, fear him, and then flat out wonder. To have a character where our understanding shifts and evolves that completely is pretty much unheard of and it’s the main reason I recommend this show.

As Danny’s poking at his siblings and parents, the whole family starts to unravel and secrets are revealed that make you look at all of the characters in a different light. This is such a gorgeous mirror of how small (and big) changes in life shift and re-shift our family relationships. It’s something I’m thinking about a lot as my pregnancy changes my relationship with some family members (I haven’t felt closer to my dad in a long time) and helps me see others more clearly.

I could go on and on about other amazing craft elements in Bloodline (like characterization) but I’m bound to reveal something I’d rather you get to discover on your own. If you like a good mystery and a well conceived and acted show, go watch Bloodline already. Then come back and tell me what you thought.

Alzheimer’s, Her Beautiful Brain, and the Art of Memoir

March 15, 2015 by Isla McKetta, MFA 4 Comments

Alzheimer’s is in the news again this week with the death of beloved novelist Terry Pratchett. I say again, but it seems as though Alzheimer’s is never really out of the news. And while my own life has (thankfully) not been touched by this terrible disease, reading Her Beautiful Brain, a memoir of a daughter’s struggle with her mother’s early onset Alzheimer’s by my friend Ann Hedreen, I see how personal and how consuming the disease is both for those who are suffering from it and for each and every one of their family members.

Reading Books by Friends

I only know the post-Alzheimer’s Ann. She had already lost her mother when we met. She was already volunteering for research to help others and she was already advocating for awareness and funding to fight this terrible disease. I met the Ann who was writing this very memoir on the first day of grad school as we both sought to get our chops up and find the writer within.

So reading this book at times felt like a revelation—learning about the story of Ann’s family and her life, watching her become the person I came to know—and at times it felt overly intimate—like I was skipping ahead in our friendship to stories she wouldn’t normally reveal for years to come—stories of adultery and spousal abuse. All of these essays together form the picture of one woman’s life as she grapples with the hand dealt to her and her mother.

I’ve resisted writing a review of this book for a long time (so long that I had to re-re-read the book before sitting down to write) because reviewing books by friends is an impossible task. I can’t be objective. I don’t even want to be. That’s not to say it isn’t an honestly good book. It is. I’ve bought extra copies and pressed them into the hands of caregivers I love. It’s also a very personal book, and I struggle to separate the book from the person I know.

Searching for Impossible Answers

In many ways this book is a quest for answers—an exploration of “how could I not have seen what my mother was suffering earlier?” and “is there any way this could have been avoided?” All of that is moot, of course, but it’s so very human.

As Ann recalls a trip to Haiti where she “should have” noticed her mother’s failing brain, we see signs noticed in retrospect, but in Arlene (Ann’s mom) we also get to know a schoolteacher who not only raised the kinds of kids who venture off to Haiti in the Peace Corps and as filmmakers, but also visits them there despite recent lapses in memory she’s started to find troubling.

When Ann delves into her mother’s early childhood in the blighted mining town of Butte, Montana, we see the environmental devastation that may (or may not) have contributed to the Alzheimer’s, but we also get to understand a life much different from our own—one that bred hardy people.

We don’t know what causes Alzheimer’s or how to stop it, that’s part of the frustration. And Ann does a wonderful job in this book of showing how maddening and important that search for answers is.

On Motherhood

(Aside here, my dad says all I write about is pregnancy these days, to which I respond, duh… 🙂 )

One of the things I related most closely to in this book is Ann’s story not just of being a daughter but of becoming a mother in this time where she was watching her mother decline and eventually waste away. It’s a particular space in life where you get to see aging, birth, and the essence of who you yourself are becoming, and I was grateful for the window into that time (especially at this time for me).

In many ways I think this book is more about those relationships between mothers and daughters than it is about the disease (which makes the book all the more universal).

The Art of Memoir

I’m not a memoirist and any attempts I’ve ever made in that direction have been failures, so I often wonder what makes a good memoir. In Her Beautiful Brain I learned about telling a bigger story than what you think you’re telling. I learned about staring hard at the particular to ground a reader in the moment. And I learned about building analogies between the “small” stories of your life and the “large” stories that make the memoir universal.

I am grateful to Ann for revealing herself in this memoir. I am grateful that she shares how hard caregiving and watching a parent subsume to a disease like Alzheimer’s can be. I am grateful that she also shows how much of the joy of life continues no matter what else is going on.

If someone you love has been affected by Alzheimer’s or you just want to know more, pick up a copy of Her Beautiful Brain from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Reading The Blue Jay’s Dance: A Memoir of Early Motherhood

February 22, 2015 by Isla McKetta, MFA 4 Comments

Pregnancy is a weird time. My body is changing radically but only incrementally. I can’t bear to be out of sight of my husband. The world is full of advice and stories of their own experiences (which I need but is mostly misplaced). I’m full of worries that seem ridiculous but mean everything—if I can’t feel the baby moving is it okay? will I ever write again? And I’m too tired, mostly, to read properly and too tired to do anything but read.

So when someone recommended The Blue Jay’s Dance: A Memoir of Early Motherhood by Louise Erdrich, it sounded like the answer to all my needs, and as I read this book, I realized its open, meditative nature makes it a book that can be enjoyed by parents and non-parents, writers and non-writers, and anyone who loves nature.

Conceiving a Life

“To make love with the desire for a child is to move the act out of its singularity, to make the need of the moment an eternal wish. But of all passing notions, that of a human being for a child is perhaps the purest in the abstract, and the most complicated in reality.” – Louise Erdrich

I wanted this baby so much. My husband and I have been talking about starting a family for a couple of years now and in many ways the last nineteen years have been us getting ready to be parents. But neither of us had any idea that we’d get pregnant so easily. So I felt less prepared embarking on this adventure than I wanted to, even acknowledging that there wasn’t going to be much I could do to prepare. Hell, I’m still convinced that conception, rather than science, is magic.

I very much enjoyed that many of the essays in the book are actually an amalgam of Erdrich’s three pregnancies. She never names which daughter a section is about, but acknowledges how different her children are. This gives the book a stunning openness because it’s non didactically about what a pregnancy or parenting should be, it’s about that moment with that child. But because the child is never named, the essays can be about any child, and unlike so much of the advice offered by others (which carries an air of justifying that person’s own choices) these stories and fragments can be taken in part or in whole—however the reader wants.

Fear

“The self will not be forced under, nor will the baby’s needs gracefully retreat…. To keep the door to the other self—the writing self—open, I scratch messages on the envelopes of letters I can’t answer, in the margins of books I’m too tired to review.” – Louise Erdrich

Fear is the biggest harbinger of the unknown, and for me that fear has centered around blend of losing myself and of being inadequate. I know (pregnancy has already shown me) that my relationship with the things I love—my writing and reading—will necessarily change, but if I let them go (or if they are wrenched from me or change into unrecognizable beings), I don’t know who that makes me. At the same time I will be responsible for the care and well being of another human in a way that seems so all consuming…

So reading about the way Erdrich balances the parent self and the writing self—and the ways she copes with what will not balance—was extremely helpful to me. This book showed me it’s possible, at times, to write with a baby in one arm when neither urge will retreat. It showed me too how much the act of raising a child can feed the writing self, even when writing is not possible. Perhaps the hardest part of this—my biggest fear—has been about losing myself to the pregnancy, to the child, to parenting, but Erdrich has shown me that I will make this my own and that who I am actually shapes my own experience. It’s reassuring.

Advice

“Most of the instructions given to pregnant women is as chirpy and condescending as the usual run of maternity clothes…. We are too often treated like babies having babies when we should be in training, like acolytes, novices to high priestesshood, like serious applicants for the space program.” – Louise Erdrich

I believe in the well meaning nature of others. I believe I have the power (and sometimes responsibility) to witness their stories in order to help them feel whole. I know how healing and validating that can be. But right now, I want to—can only really—focus on me. Because this thing that is happening to me and my body and my husband and my home and our family—it is the biggest thing that will ever happen to us (at least until death) and while some people have the gift for sharing their experience without trying to smother mine, most don’t. Which is challenging for me, because I believe in the well meaning nature of others…

Writing

“Part of a writer’s task is to put her failings at the service of her pen.” – Louise Erdrich

My biggest fear throughout this pregnancy and really in life is that I will at some point fail to be a writer (and thus lose myself). Because writing is the one way in which I express my true nature. The page is the place where the complexities, ambiguities, and conflicts of my thoughts can coexist and complement and make sense. Writing helps me think. It calms me. It’s made me who I am.

I stepped down from the board of Hugo House to prepare for having a family. My reading slowed down when I got pregnant because all I could do was sleep. I even felt like I stopped writing except for these silly scraps of what I thought were drippily sentimental pregnancy poetry. Now I’m finding that pregnancy has given me a new vocation, one I tried at in high school and then abandoned—pregnancy is turning me into a poet. And while I don’t yet have the skills to polish those scribblings, I cherish this new project and the idea that while my writing might be changing, I am still a writer.

Sleep (Where I’ve Been)

“Sleep is the only truly palatable food at first. I sleep hungrily, angry, needy for sleep, jealous for sleep, devouring it and yet resentful of the time it takes away from conscious life.” – Louise Erdrich

I’ve had a couple of inquiries in the past couple of days about where I’ve been and if I’m okay—inquiries that meant the world to me. I am okay, if you call okay spending most of my available hours either napping, sleeping, or planning when next I’ll get to do one of the two. Turns out that growing another human is EXHAUSTING. But I’m a champion sleeper from way back, so I’m trying to relish the excuse. Even when it takes me away from things I love.

That’s to say that these reviews will continue to be erratic. And they may continue to focus on pregnancy for awhile. See, I tried to write a review that wasn’t about pregnancy (because I know other people have other things on their minds) but it’s where I’m at. It’s the biggest thing going for me right now. And I can’t really think about anything else.

We heard our baby’s heartbeat for the first time on Friday. A rapid little 130bpm. And afterwards I couldn’t think of any other thing.

I’ll be back here when I can because you matter to me and writing these reviews matter to me. I’ll even continue to strive to write the non-pregnancy review. But if you need something to keep you occupied and inspired in the meantime, go read The Blue Jay’s Dance, it’s worth a read and a reread and another reread. You might even discover how much of the book speaks to the non-pregnant 🙂