Knowing I had to give a reading in Devil’s Den but overwhelmed by the task of selecting my own work before I left town, I decided to read excerpts from Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck, the ideal book for reading around a campfire, which I did often in the year that Robb and I traveled around the United States like bums. Read it aloud to anyone who would listen. So in the days before departing, I began reading exerpts aloud again, and all who listened enjoyed, as all who read should. A great American journey story — and, no two being alike, just as Steinbeck writes, none quite a new invention either. He captures the spirit of the people he meets so well, and every time I read this book I want so badly to crawl into the back of his truck with him and sit down for a cup of coffee and twenty or thirty minutes of conversation. This book is the closest any of us will ever get.

I ended up reading my own poetry at the reading, along with three poems by Bishop, Carruth, and Mueller, but have happily returned to Travels with Charley to finish reading it again. Perhaps I have read it fifteen times. Last night, I flipped randomly to a passage and found myself laughing out loud, particularly at the “highway sign” part, a passage closely related to something I wrote just weeks ago in the short story I’m working on, although certainly Mr. Steinbeck wrote it better and smarter:

… It isn’t hunger that drives millions of armed American males to forests and hills every autumn, as the incidence of of heart failure among the hunters will prove. Somehow the hunting process has to do with masculinity, but I don’t quite know how. I know there are any number of good and efficient hunters who know what they are doing; but many more are overweight gentlemen, primed with whiskey and armed with high-powered rifles. They shoot at anything that moves or looks as though it might, and their success in killing one another may well prevent a population explosion. If the casualties were limited to their own kind there would be no problem, but the slaughter of cows, pigs, farmers, dogs, and highway signs makes autumn a dangerous season in which to travel.

Although no serious researcher would use only the Google Book Search, one would be dismissive not to. And I LOVE it. In using it lately for 1 topic in particular, I’ve come across a few gem sources I otherwise may not have found, in that the reference to my topic is so minor — but then the reference opens up an unexpected and gigantic room in the cave. Two pieces worth reading about the digitization of books: Anthony Grafton’s “Future Reading: Digitization and Its Discontents” in the 11.5.07 New Yorker and the Columbia University Libraries’ statement on why it has joined the Google digitization project (link to come as soon as I can find it again).

mortal kombat ringtone

There have been reports that warning lights on cellular masts, TV-towers and other high structures can attract and confuse birds.

 
New British Poetry
Don Paterson and Charles Simic (editors)
Graywolf Press, 2004

This semester I’m reading contemporary British poetry. There’s a depth to the work that (warning: about to insert huge overgeneralization!) we’re missing in contemporary U.S. poetry. As you may recall, I’ve begun building word lists, quasi-concordances, of poems I read. Even did this for one of Matt’s poems during workshop at residency. What I find when I compare the lists generated from my own work to those of, say, Elizabeth Bishop, is that I have a horrifically limited vocabulary. I’m fascinated, of course, by the obsessions in my work (sure is raining a lot), but I can also see at a glance that my language simply isn’t close to that of Bishop’s world. I had this same sense of alarm when I started reading New British Poetry and seeing how consistent the poets are in their language skills regardless of their unique styles and tones. There’s a broader awareness of culture and history, of politics (without being dreadfully political!), and of art — even a genuine understanding of U.S. culture. And, yes, you’re right: this doesn’t surprise me. But it does make me happy to have discovered this anthology (at Debra’s recommendation). Cheers for Graywolf Press!

And because I cannot leave you without a poem by my new hero, John Ash (page 13):

The Ungrateful Citizens
John Ash

It occurs to me that I would like to write a poem about Naples.
Perhaps I have always wanted to do this, and only realized it just a moment ago,
but, alas, I have never been to Naples, and yet my desire to write about the place
becomes more insuperable by the second. I become convinced that my writing desk
is on the same latitude as Naples: I have only to lean back in my chair,
and I incline toward the city of my dreams, and in my dreams my feet
rest in Manhattan while my hair rustles against the wharves of Naples,
and the wharves are bristling with galleons, feluccas, sloops, and schooners,
and how blue the sea on which they sway and jostle, how blue the sky
above them, except for some small clumps of cloud so white they are like
roses that have seen ghosts! And one could wander forever in the streets
that are as narrow and crooked as the wrinkles on the face of a wise and beautiful
            old woman.
Here all the shop signs are like the titles of arias by Alessandro Scarlatti.
The streets and squares are always busy, yet no one is ever too hurried:
at the slightest opportunity a man or woman of Naples will sit down with you
on some weathered marble doorstep and engage you in the most animated conversation
concerning art of politics, your origins, their mother, the latest songs or scandals.
A citizen of Naples will say: ‘Oh, you are from Brooklyn? I have a cousin there.
He tells me it is a very beautiful place’ He will say this out of pure courtesy.
In no other city have I seen so many fragrant pots of flowering bergamot,
or such luscious leaves of basil, or so many balconies overhung by noble bosoms.
In the late afternoon it is customary for singers to leave the opera house,
and go about their business in full costume: here is the Orfeo of Monteverdi
haggling over the price of some pomegranates, and over there Dona Elvira
is sipping an espresso in a cafe while sharing a secret with a dishevel;ed Desdemona;
Don Carlos leaves a haberdashers in a fury, while Pinkerton enters a tobacconist’s,
and Melisande (still in character) weeps beside a baroque public fountain
and here is Poppaea, and Dido, and Ariadne, and Judith, and Violetta
and there goes Madame Butterfly’s child eating a fruit like a setting sun
as he saunters down toward the waterfront. There, on the broad esplanade,
with its prodigious statuary, many restaurants are to be found,
and they are at once elegant and welcoming. During the heat of the day
their cool marble floors and gently rotating fans are a delight,
and in the evenings entire families go out to dine dressed in the finest clothes,
and how charming are the pink and white dresses of the young girls,
who resemble gardenias or oleander flowers as they settle lightly into their seats.
The families are very large, which is why the restaurants are so spacious—
stretching away into shimmering distances in which the fans stir the torpid fronds of
            palms—
and why the menus are so long and as varied as the colours of autumn.
Here the generations are nightly conjoined in perfect amity,
and even shy lovers may find corners in which to commune unnoticed
except by some musician, who wishes only to urge their love forward
from a tactful distance. The food, it goes without saying, is delicious.
In Naples the taxis drivers have, of necessity, become expert in the negotiation
of long flights of stairs resembling formalised cascades,
and the buses constantly circling monuments to heroes of the Risogimento
seem to be dancing a siciliano as the sunlight rebounds from their windows
and shatters against the high walls of tenements. Beyond those walls, however,
in some lightless courtyard a skinny child is crying under lines of washing
that repeat, day after day, the same doleful sentence, and I am reminded
that this is the city in which songbirds were once blinded so they would sing
more poignantly in churches on saints’ days, beating against the domes and the vaults …
and it seems that despite the cheerful beggarwoman and roguish merchants
bowed down by enormous, tufted turbans, despite the bravado
of virile gentlemen dressed like eighteenth-century courtesans that I had imagined for my Naples,
despite the numberless palaces and paintings, the extravagant churches, theatres,
and festivals, and the flowers that perfume even the poorest quarters,
it seems that all but the richest and most conservative of citizens cannot wait to leave my
            Naples.
They wish to go to the north or far to the west. They crowd the quays and the airport
            lounges,
and exhibit the horrible condition of their skin, the rags they are forced to wear,
the few possessions they drag behind them like so many coffins filled with stones.
They glare at me and say: ‘This is not Naples. This is place on which the world has
            turned its back.
A cloud of lies covers it. The mansions that you saw are hovels, the churches tin shacks,
the parks and gardens vegetable plots and stony fields in which we scratch for a living.
And this is not even the site of wars and massacres, only a place of ordinary
            wretchedness.
No, we cannot be the amorous ballet the tourist requires for a backdrop—
O take us away, perhaps to the island of fragrant grasses mentioned in a fragment of
            Petronius.’

The Online Photographer posted a list titled “Ten Best Living Photographers.” A fine list; readers’ comments quite endearing:

> “It’s a good list, but I guess anyone outside the US will just have to prepare their own if they want to see some of the best of the rest of the world in there. However, we do know about US photographers over here in Europe so maybe we’ll include one or two of ‘yours’…”

> “Salgado is missing!”

But my favorite comment:

> “Oh, and did Lee Friedlander die recently?”

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