I'm having one of those days during which I just completely fail to get it together. Okay, week. Okay, month. I'm still holding out hope that it'll happen one of these days though & it might just start here. You never can tell.You'd also be forgiven for thinking that I don't read a lot of books for someone who works in a bookshop & has named her blog after a group of 1950s poets (/one of her favourite root vegetables) You'll have to take my word for it that I have been reading books but without, err, writing about reading those books. My last dedicated literary lately post was, to my shame, aaaall the way back in August when I was immersed in the Lydia Davis collection that I got for Christmas (some things don't change) & the less sunshine-y Albert Camus. Since then I've written an essay on the former & finished one whole quarter of my MA degree that I started back in August, as well as starting on another: 20th Century American Poetry. Accordingly, I have been reading a lot of dry 1990s literary criticism borrowed from the library on the likes of Theodore Roethke & A. R. Ammons to established the free verse/formalist traditions at the heart of modern American poetry. Four weeks in & we're finally getting into the more intriguing figures such as Elizabeth Bishop & Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath & John Ashbery. My seminars are just two hours a week so I've no excuses not to pore over the chapters in anthologies on Lowell & the luridly lilac cover of Anne Sexton's 'The Awful Rowing Toward God'. The time spent establishing these poets in contexts both critical & biographical I've found to be very valuable when it comes to contributing in class.
That said, not having to read two novels in the space of five days also leaves me with a lot to consider outside of the syllabus. There's something of a buzz around Ben Lerner, one no doubt causing long-term fans to heave a heavy 'at long last', as he's brought out his second novel '10:04' by the ever-brilliant Granta Books. I got to talking to one of these fanatics in my seminar who urged me to read his first 'Leaving The Atocha Station', the story of a young poet on a fellowship in Spain. I went straight to the library following our seminar that day & disturbed a considerable number of people as I laughed & grimaced my way through its length & took it home with me to finish before bed. Lerner has a wry wit that I recognise in the work of other American authors such as Lorrie Moore & A.M Homes & his view of human relationships is similarly astute. From the protagonist's delusional belief that his Spanish language deficiency lends him profound mystique to his repeated failings to comprehend the world that he views from the roof of his apartment, often with a joint in hand, 'Leaving The Atocha Station' has such a distinctive voice & hopelessly unsympathetic speaker that left me surprised at having enjoyed it so much. I've already earmarked a copy of his latest to nab from a friend.
'Insofar as I was interested in the arts, I was interested in the disconnect between my experience of actual artworks and the claims made on their behalf; the closest I'd come to having a profound experience of art was probably the experience of this distance, a profound experience of the absence of profundity.'
The other novel that I've been reading in between poems for class is from the aforementioned Lorrie Moore & titled ' The Gate At The Stairs'. Having become belatedly possessed by her (I now realise) well-known shorter fiction, I was interested to see whether her style would carry over a significantly larger amount of pages. Suffice to say that it did. Described as 'set in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks' & depicting the story of a 'twenty-year old Midwestern woman's coming of age', I was so captivated by this character, Tassie, in whom I saw so many shades of myself. Through the prism of Tassie's college education & it's varying fluctuations of vacation & term time, the novel charts her encounters with a harsh world outside of that she's inhabited from childhood - becoming entangled in the lives of the family she serves as nanny for, enduring a failed love affair & reconciling her lives at home & away from it. Moore's descriptions of temperamental or precarious domestic arrangements & the listlessness of higher education & its reasonably small lack of demand on your time, most of the time, really resonated with me.
'On the night table there sat some mint tea that had been steeping there since morning, stone cold and medicinally brown. I sipped a little, its soggy bag falling against my mouth; then I gargled and drank the rest.'
I have a couple of my favourite literary journals to be reading in spare moments: the latest issue of Granta that features India (an exceedingly under-explored area both in my study of geography & literature) & the latest from The Paris Review that features some pieces from Karl Ove Knausgaard. Now to actually read them & not indulge my ridiculous habit of delayed gratification.
Have you read any Ben Lerner or Lorrie Moore?
What've you been reading lately?
Speak soon - O.
Speak soon - O.
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