This came in the mail today and I am just so happy — so, so happy.

Anne Carson’s new book of poems, Nox.

March 29th, 2010 | Category: book | Leave a comment

I read Lorrie’s Moore’s newest fiction,  A Gate at the Stairs, and for the first half I was enthralled. Completely, uncritically enthralled. I wish I could be her in some ways, because she must have the coolest brain to be able to write the way that she does. She has so many earthly details — this contemporary world with a stream of conscious of coca-cola cans and flowers and funny facts all mixed up in one fast-thinking but slow-talking narrator. I can’t be as funny as Lorrie Moore, nor as articulate, nor as quirky or free to write whatever pops into my head. There is certain genius that can see the world that way.

But she’s a short-story writer, and I think the novel is clumsy in its plot and character development. Like a short story, the metaphors are more conspicuous throughout, but they felt heavy-handed to me. The plot overall, after getting halfway through, really stopped moving. There was a point where I really thought the book must be over — it felt like big stuff all happened at once, then we extracted ourselves from the narrator and floated away as if we were leaving the book — we saw the world with her eyes, but it didn’t feel like we were in her anymore for some reason. But then we were plunged back into more plot frenzy that didn’t feel earned. I felt detached from what the narrator was going through, and she was going through a lot surrounding 9/11. I found myself unable to feel for her or care for her well being.

Then the book was over and I felt used. I felt like I had fallen in love and then learned halfway through that it was an unwise investment. It left me in a bad mood, even, for over a day. But if I were to open the book and turn to one page or another, any page at all, I could find some idiosyncratic detail that makes me want to keep the book on my shelf. She captures a life experience in the details, just not in the authentic movement through time.

March 16th, 2010 | Category: book | Leave a comment

from Our Babies, Ourselves by Meredith F. Small (pp 8-12)

Unlike apes, who hang from the trees with long arms and walk along the ground balancing their weight on the surface of their knuckles, individuals in the human line stood up on their back legs. … [H]umans, and our ancestors, have used bipedal walking as the primary form of locomotion. That switch to bipedalism eventually brought us the pain of childbirth.

…

The sacrum, the lower back, is wider and thicker and it angles into the pelvic opening to help support the internal organs in a creature with a shifted center of gravity. And so, right in the middle of what should be a clear hole for infants to pass through, there is a point of the sacrum coming radically close the the pubic bones of the front of the pelvis–a detour sign for emerging babies that arose when humans stood up on two legs.

…

And so the infant enters the birth canal at a side angle, twists to accommodate the midsection, flexes the head down to bypass the squeeze at the sacrum, and ends up coming out face down. Since the outlet faces more backward than downward, the baby also has to bend a bit and thus comes out at an angle facing the mother’s back. The shoulders follow a similar path, dipping and twisting; but since the head is then already out, this requires the execution of a head-body twist…

January 26th, 2010 | Category: book | Comments (1)

Steve and I have been working on our manuscript more intensely in the past two months — my hope is to get it out and in its home before January 1. Which means I go to my studio each day and stare at it and try not to stare at it and avoid it and then rush to the writing desk and work on it before I can notice that I’m working. It’s good to take time away from it, because when I come back I see in a way I haven’t seen it before. It’s sculptural, like I can be right up close to it for months and then step away and realize that there’s a whole other part of the sculpture that I haven’t even addressed yet. There’s so much to think about at once when working on a big piece, so many facets, it feels bigger than my body.

I decided in July that the manuscript needed photographs, but I’m chickening out these days — or rather I can’t feel if that impulse is coming from a true space or from that frantic space that I see Rosie in sometimes when we’re in Ikea or the grocery store, that sudden impulse to have everything and so the craziest thing suddenly seems best. So there’s more waiting, more thinking to be done.

But I was looking through our photographs, and I selected some that I thought might work or might-might work, and then I desaturated the photographs so that they’d look the way they’d most likely have to look in a book (oh which makes me realize ten-fold that my photographs grab color, while my drawings grab line, and I’m not sure when/if those two worlds will ever cross). I found this photograph I took last year of my mom’s vegan coconut cake wrapped in saran wrap, and I can’t get enough of it. A very plain photo, plain composition, no color, but it’s so crinkly and yummy and important, those toothpicks like Stonehenge.

September 17th, 2009 | Category: book, photograph | Leave a comment

My brother gave me a book many months ago, Nature and the Human Soul, and I didn’t crack it until now. Partially that was because I was going through a phase where I needed fiction, and partially it’s because the title of the book made it something I couldn’t read in public. But the book is much smarter than the title belies. And in many ways it revives God to me in a way that I need to hear right now.

I’d say a year of wanting something badly, so badly, and having that want come from a place I couldn’t articulate, it just felt like a biological need, and then having to wrestle that something into my life in a painful, unintuitive way that by the way is banned by the Catholic church, that has been enough for one girl. All the while raising a teenager, who is chin-deep in a materialistic society and who half the time lives in a house that is wonderful but that has many different values than ours, and so watching her split more than most teenagers are. Raising a teenager, who by nature is questioning and defying and entering territory that sometimes conjures her darker side and sometimes turns her into a stranger to even herself, that right there is enough to experience.

Then those two together: wanting to believe I am meant to have a baby, then forcing it to be true, and then wanting to believe in the beauty of children, while also raising a teenager who is so done being innocent. When I’ve been thinking of having a baby these past five months, I’ve been very aware that what I’m having is a human being, a complicated person who will someday be a teenager.

But the book puts it all so beautifully. It believes in the necessity of all of us, and it puts the dark stage of adolescence in the greater scope of a purposeful life. The book posits that what we need is nature in order to be whole — in order to gather the wonder of this world as children, and to feel connected to so many mysteries as adolescents, and to connect to our creative purpose as adults. Yesterday, after reading the section of the book on the wonder of children, I felt truly excited about having a kid. It felt meaningful, and actually joyous, and like a powerful life lesson. I then spent the better part of the day researching elementary schools that could support this ideology — which is an absurd way to spend a day when the prospective student is negative-four months old. But that’s how excited I was; how much meaning and trust I felt again, finally.

August 27th, 2009 | Category: book, house | Leave a comment

By now it’s apparent how deeply I’ve fallen for Lawrence Weschler’s Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: Over Thirty Years of Conversations with Robert Irwin. (Weschler’s name is more commonly associated with his Pulitzer Prize-winning Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonders).

I had thought when I first picked up the book that it would be a series of formal interviews, but it’s nothing like that. Instead it feels like you’re in Irwin’s car right beside him, Weschler in the backseat, and you’re passing the California landscape and listening to Irwin talk, and Weschler’s holding Irwin’s words and directing them at the landscape, at his paintings, and drawing lines to the past and future. I confess that I didn’t know much at all about Robert Irwin before I read the book, and in some ways I still don’t care about him in particular. He asks me to look past him toward my own hopes and observations, to see the world again.

What the book does is it gives me permission. Again and again, the book here in my studio with me, it gives me permission to be here, doing whatever, regardless of whatever. Irwin lives the questions. He can spend a month staring at a line he painted on an otherwise blank canvas, staring at it, napping, staring at it, napping. And by the end of the year maybe he’s made five paintings, five lines, and maybe he doesn’t even care about them anymore, that’s not the point. Maybe that takes him to the desert for a few weeks, and maybe he returns with nothing but a new sense of light. He is pushing himself in ways that only he can see, trying to understand human perception. And by the end of his life he is even more in love with the world. At eighty years old, when the book closes, he can’t live long enough to celebrate in his own quiet way the power of human perception. How many can say that? Being beside him in the car, it’s huge and it’s also — strange word for an art book — comforting. In some ways he lives the life of a monk, secluded in his studio caring about questions that almost no one else can see, and he’s a good person — a good man. And he’s also normal. He loves Coca-cola.

I could quote from the book all year, but here’s one more beautiful passage that captures both Irwin’s energy and Weschler’s writing (p. 235):

If you spend any time with Irwin, you’re likely to notice that he has two quintessential gestures. He’ll be rolling along, expounding at length, and then, at a certain moment, he’ll bring his hand up, thumb and fingers bunched together, like a tulip, which he then proceeds to open out, in a blossoming — his whole face opening, his eyebrows riding up his broad forehead, a bemused grin spreading across his face. It’s an easy gesture of openness and release. You’ve got to keep your sense of humor, he may say; at a certain point, you’ve just got to let things go. The tulip opening. All I’m saying — ppfff, the tulip opening — is that the wonder is still there. Then, at other times, his entire being will seem to focus, to concentrate: his face will scrunch up, his eyes will narrow, he’ll seem to throw all his body weight behind his arm as it screws an imaginary anchor into an invisible massif before him — a gesture gritty with determination. In fact, sometimes he’ll even grunt — mmmff. I mean, either you’re going to do it or you’re not going to do it, and if you’re going to do it you’ve got to get in there and — mmmff — do it. You’ve got to take all that and somehow, man — mmmff — you’ve got to nail it. You really have to bite the bullet if you’re going to do philosophy; halfway doesn’t count for anything and there are no excuses. There are all sorts of excuses, and good ones, for not beating the shit out of yourself, but if you’re going to pursue certain lines of thought, take on certain tasks, well — mmmff — you’ve really got to make the commitment.
———————————
I talk about Irwin’s contradictions, and, in a sense, this is one of the core ones. Because here’s an artist who tries time and again to nail down beatitude. He wants to take all that bliss, all that serenity, all that wonder, and — damn it — he wants to batten it down. He wants to batten it down tight and then — ppfff, the tulip opening — to simply let it go.

August 12th, 2009 | Category: book | Leave a comment