Brett's 2011 Favorites

These lists are unapologetically subjective and don’t even follow their own rules. I *tried* to keep the film list to those from this past year, but I know some are a year or two late. A lot of films I saw in January are old news, so although they might have been on my top ten, I disregarded them as listworthy—The King’s Speech, The Kids Are All Right, The Fighter, etc. Same with some of the older films that really blew me away in the past twelve months—The Third Man, High Noon, Hud, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (the original version was unexpectedly fantastic). As for novels, I just picked my five favorites and didn’t worry about time period.

Favorite Five Novels:
5. The Family Fang – Kevin Wilson (If you liked The Royal Tenenbaums, this is a book for you.)
4. All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost – Lan Samantha Change (A book about two poets at a midwestern writing program and their teacher.)
3. Mating – Norman Rush
2. Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Klay – Michael Chabon
1. The Border Trilogy – Cormac McCarthy

Dishonorable Mention:
Winslow in Love- Kevin Canty (Another book about a poet. I found this one on a list from The Guardian on the ten best books about poets. It sucked.)

Favorite Memoir/Nonfiction:
Another Bullshit Night in Suck City - Nick Flynn
Townie – Andres Dubus III
The Adderall Diaries – Stephen Elliott

Favorite Short Story Collection:
Knockemstiff – Donald Ray Pollack (Tough call between this and Jesus' Son, but ultimately the stories in Knockemstiff stayed with me in a way the other didn't. Neither collection is for the faint of heart. Also, the film version of Jesus' Son was a disappointement.)
Almost No Memory - Lydia Davis (Refreshing. Lots of the stories only a page or two, so easy to read on the bus or between classes.)

Favorite Books of Poetry:
5. What Work Is – Philip Levine
4. The King – Rebecca Wolff
3. Poetry in America – Julia Spicher-Kasdorf
2. A Green Light – Matthew Rohrer
1. Mule – Shane McCrae

Dishonorable Mention:
Mortal Geography – Alexandra Teague

The number one book of poetry was easy for me. I couldn’t put Mule down.

Top Ten Films:
10. Submarine
9. Nowhere in Africa (German)
8. Another Year
7. Win Win
6. 50/50
5. The Tree of Life
4. Blue Valentine
3. Incendies
2. Drive
1. Never Let Me Go

Dishonorable Mention:
Paul (Rented it one boring night, not expecting much. Devoid of fun. Ten times worse than my lowest expectations.)

For 2012 I'd like to read a few graphic novels (I didn't read any last year, but A bought me one for Christmas), more non-memoir nonfiction (Politics, Food, Parenthood), and continue to try and fill in gaps as far as 20th century American poetry. I still haven't made any concrete resolutions for 2012, but before I do that, I need to make a to-do list for tomorrow.

Blowin' in the Wind

In 2011 I watched 130 films and read 102 books. I’ve been recording what I read since January 1^st, 2011, but I didn’t start recording books on this blog until last April. You can click on the tab in the upper right hand corner if you're curious. Right now I’m watching A Fistful of Dollars because I can’t remember if I’ve seen it or not. Watching Clint Eastwood chew a cigar in his poncho, I’m starting to think I haven’t. When I was a kid I loved Westerns, though I don’t know how many Clint Eastwood films I saw. My favorite movies were The Cowboys and The Sons of Katie Elder (John Wayne), or movies about Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone and The Alamo, and later the Young Guns movies with Emilio Estevez and Kiefer Sutherland. I remember staying with a friend for a couple weeks and walking around collecting pop bottles until we had enough to turn them in for dimes at the grocery store and rent Young Guns II. At the time, I thought the classic rock soundtrack was awsome.

Here’s a poem I have up at Arsenic Lobster. It’s kind of a specialist’s poem until the last section. Shout-outs to Basil Bunting and Jack Spicer. I'm going to add another section for Marianne Moore and her imaginary gardens with real toads.

Last night I was watching Tiny Furniture on instant watch, and the main character said something like “Poems are like dreams—everyone likes telling their own, but doesn’t like hearing anyone else’s.” I had to laugh, because there’s some truth to that. Later, the same character confesses to a date that she hates foreign films, and I don't know if it was supposed to be endearing but I felt a little annoyed because a subtle pattern of anti-intellectualism was starting to develop. I should say the main character is pretty unlikable, so maybe it was supposed to strike me exactly like it did. Still, I wonder if the so-called pattern was conscious or not, and I think the truth is probably a mixture. I bet the director doesn’t go around saying she hates foreign films, but probably believes the words the character says. If that makes sense. By the way, Tiny Furniture is good, it reminded me of The Future except it was funnier and, in my opinion, more accessible. But not better.

Here’s a list of the books I read in December.

The last book on the December list, Manufacturing Consent, was helpful in thinking about how the mainstream media operates. I've always been curious, but never had more than a nebulous idea of why news corporations have more on their agenda than informing the American public. The authors, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, begin the book by talking about filters that every story has to go through before it reaches the public. For instance, the media doesn’t exist simply for the public good—it’s a profit making enterprise. Second, it’s too expensive for news corporations to have correspondents in every area of the world, so they rely on the U.S. government for a lot of updates and information. There are more “filters”: flak for instance (i.e., “how much flak will we receive from the public if we run this story”), but those first two are big. Information from the government that must generate a profit. That criteria certainly narrows down the sort of information we’ll hear, or the perspective news sources will take.

The book was written in 1988, so the information was dated, but I liked reading about events I wasn’t familiar with, such as the 1981 assassination attempt on the pope, or the murder of a Polish priest during the Solidarity movement. The book also made me think about the media’s coverage of the “Arab Spring”, particularly the coverage of Libya. I remember there was a week or two where this Libyan woman who was allegedly held captive and raped by soldiers was all over the news. On the one hand, yes, rape is terrible, and a crime, on the other hand, why was one isolated incident picked up and obsessed over as opposed to the other crimes being committed every day? Chomsky would say it was because the media considered that woman a “worthy” victim. The US opposed the Libyan regime, and that story was used to remind the US public that the regime was bad. After reading Legacy of Ashes, the history of the CIA, I also think the whole story could have been a CIA media campaign.

Also, I've been listening to a  lot of Bob Dylan over the holidays, and I'm hearing the song "Blowin' in the Wind" differently than before. I used to think of it as a coming-of-age song, probably because of the first line, "How many roads must a man walk down/Before you call him a man," but recently it's struck me as a song about social justice, or a resignation to the fact that it'll never come. I read an article on the day the troops left Iraq that estimated 150,000 Iraqis have been killed during the course of the war, four out of five of them civilians. That's a shocking number of civilian deaths, and there's no way Americans would stand for any kind of sacrifice like that here. Anyway, I was thinking of that article and how we was Americans respond (or don't respond) to violence overseas when I heard the lines "How many times can a man turn his head/Pretending he just doesn't see," and also "How many deaths will it takes til' he knows/That too many people have died."

It's kind of ironc that as I'm transcribing Bob Dylan lyrics and waxing liberal about the war as Clint Eastwood is fondling his six-shooter, gazing out a tavern window and talking about how much money he can make from killing. Anyway. I was going to write an end-of-year round-up on my favorite movies, novels, and poetry selections from 2011, but I think I’ll wait a day or two. I keep stopping to glance up at the movie. One of Clint's old amigos is explaining the gang situation, which sounds complicated. Two gangs, Ramon of the Rojos is kind of the big dog, smugglers are running liquor and guns to America, there is money to be made, and the military is coming into town tomorrow. Now Clint is walking toward another bar, telling the coffin maker he passed to “Get three coffins ready,” so I better start watching. Brett's Best of the Year to follow shortly.

The Adventures of Augie March / Popular Birds of Poetry

I’ve been reading so much these past few weeks that I worry I’m not giving myself time to process. I’m the kind of person who needs to let information settle. For instance, when I’m revising a poem or essay I often don’t have ideas for change until I’m in bed trying to sleep. But, maybe there’s something to be said for complete (temporary) reading immersion. I haven’t been running, or writing, or visiting friends, or really doing anything other than reading and fulfilling the basic responsibilities the end of the semester requires, such as finishing grading and meeting with students. 

One of the books I recently finished is The Adventures of Augie March, by Saul Bellow. It’s another ambitious coming-of-age novel from the mid-twentieth century in the vein of You Can’t Go Home Again, but I think it’s far superior to anything by Thomas Wolfe. One of the ideas from The Adventures of Augie March is “Your character is your fate,” which is really interesting, and while it’s an easy concept to understand, the argument is really driven home over the course of the novel. I’ll be honest, when I initially read the jacket my drive to read the book was deflated because I felt that I had the whole story in two paragraphs. A kid from Chicago goes on a bunch of adventures, spends some time in Mexico, than returns home. The jacket even went so far as to interpret the novel, explaining that it illustrates "man's restless persuit of an elusive evening." Thanks, Penguin Publishing.

It was like a movie preview that shows a clip from every significant scene, so in two minutes you know everything that’s going to happen in the film and you’ve probably heard the funniest lines. BUT, one thing I know from reading and writing poetry is that what is said is often not as important as how something is said. The form and the message are inseperable. So I decided to trust in form, and begin reading.

When Augie is a kid growing up in Chicago he’s basically motivated by noble intentions, but he also has a dishonest streak if he feels he can get ahead with minimal risk. Augie skips school and steals from a department store, but he also loves his brothers and wants to take care of his mother. After a quarter lifetime of mishaps—spoiler alert—Augie ends of working for a black market business, doing quite well financially and with a clean conscience; because by the end of the novel, Augie has accepted who he is. His character is his destiny.

It’s unpopular, this idea that we can’t escape ourselves, but I think it’s true more often than not. Even radical transformation is often just external factors. For instance, I was just watching a documentary called Running the Sahara, about three guys who…you guessed it…run across the Sahara, from Senegal to Cairo, and the guy who’s spear-heading the expedition is kind of a control freak. In the beginning of the film he talks about how he used to be a coke addict, and how he lived on the streets for a while and basically ruined his life, but then there he is, leading his team across the desert. I imagine someone might say, “He changed his life,” but really that guy hasn’t changed, he’s just redirected himself. Same guy, new addiction, albeit one that’s healthier and more socially acceptable.

What makes Augie March better than You Can’t Go Home Again is that I was emotionally invested in Augie as a human being, and not just as a vehicle for Bellow’s ideas. That was my big problem with George Webber in You Can’t Go Home Again—he was never really a person, no one in that novel was. They were just puppets.

I was also thinking about how one of my professor’s told me that the form of the novel was ideal for showing the effects of society on the individual, and how that never really rang true for me until I started reading these fat twentieth century novels. Like I said, sometimes I'm slow on the uptake. Some of my favorite novels from this past year, such as Mating by Norman Rush, are perfect exampls of that paradigm, as is Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris. In that novel, the setting of a modern advertising agency is just as important as the individual chracters.

I bring this up because one of Augie’s obsessions is how everyone is trying to manipulate him, or make them a part of their own plans. People try to adopt him, or marry him, or make him their business partner, and for a long time Augie has no direction so he’s just kind of caught up in these currents and swept along. But after a while he’s uncomfortable, and he moves on to something new. At one point, Augie’s employer Einhorn identifies Augie as having a spirit of “opposition,” that is, a kind of rebellious nature that will only allow him to be a part of something for so long before he becomes restless and has to leave. It’s a powerful passage, so I'll reproduce it. Here’s what Einhorn says:

But wait. All of a sudden I catch on to something about you. You’ve got opposition in you. You don’t slide through everything. You just make it look so.
This was the first time that anyone had told me anything like the truth about myself. I felt it powerfully. That, as he said, I did have opposition in me, and great desire to offer resistance and to say “No!” which was as clear as could be, as definite a feeling as a pang of hunger. (126 in the Penguin Edition)

I love this passage, and how it defines a part of Augie’s spirit, but I should probably admit that I also related to it in some way. During those times when Augie bails out onlife he often stows away in his apartment and reads, and in those moments I occasionally flashed back to when I was an undergraduate RA for summer session classes, and was supposed to be working on a university maintenance crew. I would stay up all night reading Graham Greene, or Ernest Hemingway, or I would walk through the muggy evening to the Family Video and check out three VHS tapes for my little TV/VCR combo.

One night I watched The Great Escape, Born on the Fourth of July, and To Sir, With Love, and when I finished the dark outside my window was washing out into gray so I drove to the airport where I drank chocolate milk and smoked cigarettes until the sun rose. That was the summer I went wild for Paul Newman and read Frank O'Hara for the first time after pulling Meditations in an Emergency off the shelf and buying it because I liked the title. Needless to say, I didn’t make it to work that morning, or a lot of mornings that ended in a similar fashion, and this continued off and on for a month or so until my boss sent word through a friend that I was fired.

As for poetry, I read James Wright’s first volume, The Green Wall. It’s easy to see why W.H. Auden picked it to win the Yale Younger Poets Prize, with its careful rhythms and religious imagery, but honestly, I wasn’t crazy about it. It felt sort of postured to me, and almost every single poem recycles the same five words: bough is the worst, I wanted to gag after the 29th time I saw it, but Wright also OD’s on stars, dark, and tanagers, a species of bird that comes up every third poem.

Interestingly, this seems to have been the popular bird to name drop in the 70’s because Robert Hass writes about tanagers in Field Guide (also a Yale Younger Poets Prize winner, though not selected by Auden) as did Michael Ryan in In Winter. Before writing about tanagers, poets stuck to generic but majestic birds such as hawks and eagles, sometimes mentioning falcons or seagulls. And you know what the cool bird is in poetry these days? It’s the starling. Everyone has a poem about a starling. But, I don’t want to dog on the Wright’s, James or his son Franz, because I like them both, and I’m actually in the middle of reading Shall We Gather at the River right now.

Also, Michael Ryan’s In Winter is extremely depressing. It’s a whole book of poems about death and loneliness and separation, and how sex is this selfish battle against death and no one can tell us how to be alone, and on and on, but what’s really funny is that the first depressing poem in the collection is called “Poem at Thirty.” Poem at THIRTY? Holy jeez, Michael Ryan needs to CHILL OUT, it makes me shudder to think of what kind of poetry he was writing at fifty.

November Reading

Yesterday I went with my wife, A, to her 7am ultrasound. She scheduled it early so we could both go. After a moment of the technician methodically gliding the handle around on her bare stomach, the dark screen was flooded with a silhouette of the baby that slid back and forth like mercury in a thermometer. When the technician paused, the yet un-fused vertebrae of the spine lit up electric white. The ribs, the four chambers of the heart, the stomach, the brain, the bones of the legs and arms—these also were illuminated in turn, star-bright and defined. A was far enough along that we could have found out the gender, but we’re going to wait until the birth.

Here’s a list of what I read in November.

A couple nights ago I was really tired, but instead of going to sleep I was going to try and push through a few chapters of The Adventures of Augie March. As I pulled myself off the bed—where I was gathering resolve—A told me I was being irresponsible with my reading this month, which I thought was really funny, and also made me feel like some kind of maverick, reading badass. Like my reading in November was real Top Gun material. You say The Adventures of Augie March can’t be read in three days? I did it in two. Or like I’m spending sleepless nights working on the cure for cancer or something. Nope! Just reading a lot! Poetry and fiction!

With grading, applying to schools, and trying to produce new work, it probably was a bit much, but I went on a King Library binge and couldn’t stay out of what I brought home. It’s interesting, looking back at the list, at what was the most enjoyable at the time I was reading as opposed to what I can’t quite shake at the end of the month. For instance, Poetry in America by Julia Spicher-Kasdorf (I grabbed it because of the ambitious title) was a fantastic read—something about Spicher-Kasdorf’s sensibility was uniquly intimate, and engaging, and perhaps also familiar—but now I keep thinking about Rachel Zucker’s Eating in the Underworld, which after reading, I didn’t even like as much as The Bad Wife Handbook. I guess the word for that is "haunting."

Jesus’ Son, a recommendation by my friend J, was good, and a lot like Knockemstiff. Profoundly, severely, disturbingly troubled narrators that surface in and out of the linked stories. Still, as unsettling as both those collections are, neither of them have lingered with me for days like Kazuo Ishiguro. Lord have mercy. When We Were Orphans, like the film version of Never Let Me Go, is absolutely devastating. Work by Ishiguro doesn’t make me want to start a book club, it makes me want to start a support group. Are you a reader traumatized by Ishiguro’s brutal and unrelenting vision of the human condition? Whiskey and commiseration each Wednesday night! It would probably be poorly attended because, as all readers of Ishiguro know—there is no help.

Mary Karr: Kind of Boring

Can someone mount a defense of Mary Karr? I read an interview with her in The Paris Review a year or two ago, and ever since I’ve been meaning to read one of her books. They sounded controversial, and I was curious. So while wandering the library aisles last week I came across her name and pulled The Liar's Club and Viper Rum (a selection of poetry) off the shelf and into my shoulder bag. I hate—really hate—to quit reading a book once I begin, but The Liar's Club was making me crazy after the first twenty odd pages. It was a combination of boredom and constantly being pulled from the narrative while Mary Karr explained how clear a memory was, or how fuzzy a memory was, or who else could confirm a memory. The writing felt very self-conscious and defensive.

So, I’m not going to finish, although I'll still sample Viper Rum and see if Karr’s poetry strikes me as any more interesting. In part, I feel a professional obligation to at least read a poem or two so I can talk about it if students ever ask, or, more realistically, if it comes up at a fancy cocktail party and I need to hold forth while furrowing my brow and sipping from an old fashioned.  

After I quit The Liar's Club, I started reading Then We Came to the End, a novel by Joshua Ferris, who I've never heard of (another random library grab), and so far it's satisfying the craving for fiction I developed last week. I also picked up The Adventures of Augie March, which I’m going to try and finish this month, although it’s a fat one. I read Henderson the Rain King several years ago and loved it.

My wife has an ipod touch that until recently I never used, but now I’ve started downloading apps, and when I read I keep the dictionary.com application open. It’s so awesome. For instance, in The Bad Wife Handbook Rachel Zucker has a line about a “duomo,” so I paused for a moment and looked it up. (It’s a cathedral in Italy.) Very helpful. In general, the poetry I've been reading this month has been amazing, and the prose mediocre. You'll have to wait to see the November list if you want specifics, although it's been a long time since I've reviewed a book on this blog, and those are the bread and butter of my random internet visitors (a.k.a. "cheaters").

Another week beginning, and I’m excited to revise some poems. Since my computer is on the fritz, I’ve had to email poems from my wife's computer, print them, then make revisions on paper, which is a pleasant method (mostly because it's new to me) but also a pain in the ass because then I have to plug in the revisions on a computer later. Actually, that's what I should be doing right now, but instead I'm going to put it on my to-do list for tomorrow, drink a glass of orange juice, and read some more of Then We Came to the End. Glug-glug-glug. Check you later.

It's Early Saturday Afternoon

and the November sun is white on the asphalt outside my kitchen window, fractured in places with shadows of tree branches that slowly drift back and forth along the ground. So far, I’ve eaten breakfast with my wife and watched two episodes of Malcolm in the Middle. I don’t think I’m going to do much writing today, I spent this past week grading 66 essays and I’m on the verge of brain-dead. 

Two poems accepted this month, and one journal asked for revisions on an essay, which was subsequently rejected after I sent the revisions. I knew it would be, the essay has issues I’m not quite sure how to fix, and my revisions were just paint and trim when walls needed tearing down.

One poem was accepted without reservation, the other acceptance came with a suggestion for revision, which really surprised me. I know prose editors sometimes ask for revisions, or provide commentary, but never for poetry. At least not in my limited experience. I have theories on why this happens. Poetry editors see more individual pieces than prose editors (a theory within a theory), and also, to suggest a change in a poem implies understanding, of either the poem or what the author is trying to accomplish, and I think many people are afraid they’ll miss something important about a poem, and a suggestion will reveal their stupidity. I don’t think that should be an issue, but I suspect it sometimes is.   

Here’s what I read in October. 

What this editor suggested for my poem was fairly drastic—a two page poem was cut down to…twelve lines, I think? I was happy to accept the changes, but I was also fascinated with them. I kept rereading my original version, than looking back at the suggested revision, trying to see it from the reader’s perspective.

Right now, I have a lot of poems that I like, but would like a whole lot more if the beginnings were a little more striking. So that will probably be my project for next week. Tweak some early lines, and get another batch of poems ready to send out into the world.

Friday Noir

I started watching The Third Man last night, but didn't finish it until this evening. It’s one of those movies that I've been meaning to see for years, and once I finally do I can't believe I waited so long. So good. I would have finished it last night, and I should have since it’s only an hour and forty minutes, but I started getting nervous because I had to teach the next morning and I become miserly about my sleep when faced with the prospect of less than seven hours.

The Third Man is about an American, Holly Martins, who goes to Vienna expecting to see his friend, Harry Limes, but Holly arrives just in time for Harry’s funeral. As Holly starts investigating Harry’s death, he realizes that nothing is what it seems. Not Harry's death, or Harry himself, or the city of Vienna. Writing about it I'm reminded of Chinatown, which I just saw for the first time last week. Now that I think about it, it’s kind of strange how the city in each film—Vienna and Chinatown—is its own reality where normal rules don’t apply. Like in Chinatown, when everything went horribly awry at the end and the cop just says something to the effect of, What can you do? It’s Chinatown. My writing career reminds me of Chinatown.

Yesterday my wife picked me up at King Library, where I was working on an essay because my computer crashed. As I walked to the passenger side of the car, a gold SUV revved past like it was in a big hurry, and as we followed it down the drive it pulled over about twenty feet ahead, put on its emergency lights, and a well-dressed woman stepped out. I was really mad, because the SUV blew past approximately two feet from me, so I rolled down the window and pounded on the side of our car and yelled, “Hey—slow down!” I wanted to add, “You old bag,” but I was on campus where I work, and it seemed over the top. I could tell I startled said woman because she skipped into a faster walk when I banged on the side door, but she wasn't overly traumatized because as we rolled toward the road she peeked over her shoulder and pointed a sidewise middle finger at me before turning quickly away.

The first book I read by Graham Greene was The Heart of the Matter. I read it over the course of a day and finished it in the early hours of the morning, and when I set the book on the hardwood floor beside the mattress I remember the total surprise of the novel's emotional impact. It could have so easily been boring. But years later (I read the book in 2005) I still think back to Scobie and his secret life. I guess the book is a lot like The Third Man. Scobie died with most of his secrets hidden from even his wife, just like Holly Martins didn’t know anything about his friend Harry Lime. That seems to be a theme with Graham Greene. What do we really know about anyone?

The film dialogue is so snappy (and often funny), especially in the beginning when Holly Martins is this cocky son of a gun who's going to dig up the truth, before he realizes what a mess he's in, but what struck me about The Heart of the Matter was the unflinching honesty about human weakness. Some of my favorite passages:

pg. 71: Scobie said sharply, “Don’t talk nonsense, dear. We’d forgive most things if we knew the facts.”

pg. 71: …for the first time he realized the pain inevitable in any human relationship—pain suffered and pain inflicted. How foolish one was to be afraid of loneliness.

pg. 215: Human beings couldn’t be heroic all the time: those who surrendered everything—for God or love—must be allowed sometimes in thought to take back their surrender. So many had never committed the heroic act, however rashly. It was the act that counted.

Walking to King Library today after my office hours, I passed three women who looked and dressed much like the impatient SUV driver from yesterday. Each time I thought it was the culprit. But they all wore long trench coats, each of their faces were unnaturally tan, their short hair was feathered and gelled, and in the gray chill of a late October afternoon they all looked resolutely grim to the same degree, marching down the sidewalk, only glancing up once before our paths crossed, their faces never cracking to reveal even the most basic signs of acknowledgment, let alone recognition.