If shadows are a metaphor for the partial representations or projections of ourselves that we offer to the world, three shadows play a grim game of tag in Louise Erdrich’s “Shadow Tag.” Two of the shadows are the two diaries kept by Irene America, a mother whose husband is a successful painter.
When Irene learns that her husband reads her diary, she begins to write in a different way, intentionally including remarks to humiliate him and to coax him to leave her. This is her red diary. At the same time, she begins her blue diary, in which she speaks the truth. This is an innovative structural technique, reminiscent of the old epistolary novel and also of the old theme of the doppelganger. Here the Jekyll and Hyde are the two diaries. Read the rest of this entry »
I think it was Flannery O’Connor who said that all of the best American literature is regional. Connie Wanek’s “On Speaking Terms” certainly supports that claim. The region is the Midwest and primarily northern Minnesota with its wildlife, rivers, and lakes. Viewed through Wanek’s wise and imaginative eyes, the places and scenes she describes become windows on many of our most basic human concerns, among them the passage of time, care of the environment, and the restorative power of nature. In Wanek’s world, your canoe awaits you like a favorite dog on a leash, and later the wake smoothing behind it tells you that the planet too will heal after we are gone. In addition to her nature poems, Wanek writes about daily life, about a woman putting on lipstick or kids doing the splits, with an easy grace and a sly sense of humor. Without ignoring poetry’s responsibility to think deeply about who we are, “On Speaking Terms” offers a welcome alternative to America’s literature of urban angst.
Don DeLillo’s Point Omega is a slim whim of a book totaling 114 pages, two of which are blank and all of which have abundant white space. He and Scribners call it a novel. Of course good things can come in small packages, but not this time.
Point Omega has no plot, just three characters and a lot of talk. One character is an elderly academic who was supposedly called into secret meetings at the Pentagon in order to provide an outside opinion (as if!). This unlikely pretense allows DeLillo to mention Iraq and thereby give his book a slight patina of social significance, but the Pentagon thing is merely mentioned once or twice and is not central to the story.Read the rest of this entry »
Recently, I mentioned the intent of Lost Hills Books to publish Charmaine Donovan’s poetry collection later this year. Another book in the works is a collection of poems and prose pieces by various hands that respond to photos to be supplied by the editor, Stephani Schaefer. Stephani is a poet and photographer, and the photos will be her own. If you are interested in submitting, contact Stephani for guidelines and pics at steph@chiconet.com.
Here is a recent poem by Stephani that is based on one of her photographs.
We are suspicious of surfaces. People conceal their motives, ads are a pack of lies, things aren’t what they seem, and truth hides between the lines. The writer today can do well to consider ways to create dialogue that suggests the unsaid, the unacknowledged intentions and the anti-social feelings that lurk behind so much of our talk. This is a topic brilliantly discussed in Charles Baxter’s The Art of Subtext, where he offers the useful distinction between “statement” and “inflection.” The thing said on the surface, the socially acceptable thing, is the statement. The darker intentions and motives are hinted at in the inflection.
Two excellent supplements to Baxter are passages in Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink (especially the first chapter)and in the work of John Gottman, to which Gladwell refers. Blink argues that our first impressions are often uncannily accurate, since we usually take in more than we realize and process it at unconscious levels. John Gottman has pursued this thesis by examining slices of language for hidden indicators of feelings and attitudes. Gottman’s focus has been on marital relations, and in his “marriage lab” he has taped and analyzed hundreds of brief and apparently innocuous conversations between couples. From looking at a few minutes of tape, Gottman can predict with a 97% accuracy (!!) whether a couple will remain married for another 5 years. Read the rest of this entry »
If you enjoy discovering new poets who are worth discovering, why not support a good cause at the same time? The Heart’s Content is an excellent collection, and all of the proceeds go to a non-profit dedicated to helping children (and their families) with severe congenital heart disease. The book is available from the website of Lulu (a print-on-demand publisher), it is reasonably priced at around $15, and it is beautifully presented with cover photography by Stephani Schaefer, who is also one of the editors.
So what’s the big plan? For Lost Hills Books, pretty much a one-book-a-year publisher, the plan is to make Charmaine Donovan’s first poetry collection available between two attractive covers this fall. Charmaine is President of League of Minnesota Poets and one of the editors of a wonderful anthology called County Lines, reviewed a couple of months ago on this site. People who follow the Minnesota poetry scene are well aware of her work, and her book is eagerly awaited.
Also, Jonathan Blunk is working on a biography of James Wright, a poet very dear to my heart. He is interested in gathering facts and impressions about Wright’s years in Minnesota, especially at UMN and Macalester College. People who would like to correspond with Jonathan can start by emailing me at info@losthillsbooks.com. I’ll pass on your contact information to him. I don’t know who Jonathan’s publisher will be, but it will be major.
And a book that has just come available is Homecomings by Paul Edward Johnson. Beginning as a loving and often humorous depiction of Paul and his friends during their high school and college years in Minneapolis, the book moves on to talk about the rewards and frustrations of trying in later life to stay in touch with old friends. Especially moving is an address to a wonderful person who died way too young. I’m one of Paul’s old chums, so of course I’m biased, but this is a charming memoir. It is not a Lost Hills publication, and interested readers should contact Paul at paulandtracy@comcast.net.
I’ve long admired Albert Camus’s “The Stranger,” and I’ve just finished James Cain’s “The Postman Always Rings Twice.” The similarities are remarkable, and I’m told that in fact Camus acknowledged a debt to Cain. Both writers create criminal characters who live on the outside of their worlds and who act with a strange detachment. Camus’s character shoots an Arab, seemingly without much thought or intention. Cain’s killer uses more premeditation, and his detachment is modified by his passion for his victim’s wife. Curiously, he sort of likes his victim too, but he lacks free will and a moral center. We see in Cain’s portrayal something of the famous “absurdity” that moved Camus, although Camus found it appropriate to make his character less passionate. Read the rest of this entry »
I was led to Lorrie Moore’s new novel, A Gate at the Stars, by the NY Times Book Review, and I plan to go back to see just what the reviewer found to like. This is a padded, overly cute novel that would rather give us long lists of foods in a restaurant, flowers in spring, or songs in the narrator’s head than give us any serious thought about the issues that the sporadic plot alludes to. Read the rest of this entry »
You might think that an anthology that sets out to collect poems from each of Minnesota’s 87 counties would at best be uneven. In fact County Lines, published in 2008 by the League of Minnesota Poets to commemorate the 150th year of Minnesota’s statehood, is a wonderful testimony to the versatility and depth of our poetry and to the richness of our state’s cultures. Read the rest of this entry »
