The OA’s Spring Library
BOOKS WE LOVE: In which we editors gush about some books (old and new) that have knocked our respective socks off.
ABBOTT AWAITS
by Chris Bachelder
(Louisiana State University Press, 2011)
Is there anyone more adorably hapless than the middle-aged, middle-class white man? Well, no, especially if said fellow oozes suburbia, teaches at the local university, and has three months of summer break to obsess over the pangs of daily existence. Chris Bachelder takes one such figure, Abbott (whose name alone suggests cloistered, contemplative eunuchs as well as the pun in a knock-knock joke) on a road-hugging spin of the mind in the idyllic (but for academics, mentally destabilizing) interlude of June, July, and August. The book's calendrical structure offers up a snippet per day (a sentence here, a few pages there) from Abbott's meandering intellect. He collects acorns and pebbles with his wee daughter, replaces a broken doorknob, watches the neighbors stride in unison to their mailboxes, hogs the marital privilege of the Bad Mood, diagnoses his aching joints on the Internet (hepatitis or Lyme Disease), and "discovers an idiom in his yard." Abbott Awaits is a very funny book that dissects the untethered brain on vacation while also smartly probing the underside of marriage and fatherhood.
LINES WE LIKED: "The rain gutter is an apt synecdoche of domestic existence. From the ground it appears practical, functional, well conceived. But when you stand on a borrowed ladder and peer into it, you realize what a gutter is. A gutter is a flimsy trough of sludge, secured by rusty hardware. Rainwater is not so much channeled and diverted as collected and absorbed."
—CAF
"Why does the library get rid of so many books?" I asked the librarian.
"When people die, we often get books at their estate sales or their families donate the books. There was an uptick this spring. After the big snowstorm, people donated a whole lot of books. Spring cleaning and such."
I was at the "Friends of the Central Arkansas Libraries Used Book Sale," held from February 24 to February 27. In the basement of the Main Library, there were more than 100,000 books—I asked the librarian—for sale, old or out-of-date or falling apart volumes that the library no longer wanted. I was one of few shoppers, dressed in a suit and tie for my Saturday stroll.
"Are you from out of town?" the librarian asked me.
"No," I said. "Well, sort of." I had recently moved to Arkansas from New York. I was living in a small cinderblock house in North Little Rock. I had just walked across the Junction Bridge from Argenta, over the Arkansas River and into downtown.
"You look like you're from out of town," she said, smiling. "We've got some great books here. Take a look around."
Here's (some of) what I found:
FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF THE PARTISAN REVIEW, edited by William Phillips (double issue, 1984/1985)
This collection of writing from the esteemed political and literary quarterly that folded in 2003 includes Norman Podhoretz on "The Future of America" (it didn't turn out as he predicted), poetry by Robert Penn Warren, a short play titled "The Grand-dad" by Nabokov, the first printing of Clement Greenberg's classic essay "Art and Culture," among others. But my favorite is an essay by Muriel Sparks, "On Love." "Love is not blind, and it is also not deaf," she begins, expounding on the erotic effectiveness of a supple tone. She proceeds to a more dubious but charming proposition: "One often sees how a husky, sexy voice takes a raddled face further in love than does a little-girl twang issuing from a smooth-cheeked nymph."
HERE AT THE NEW YORKER, by Brendan Gill (Random House, 1975)
Written by longtime (and now-deceased) New Yorker contributor Brendan Gill, this reads like a 395-page "Talk of the Town" piece about life inside the dusty halls of America's most celebrated magazine. Gill's gossipy tone distinguishes him from the magazine's other memoirists including James Thurber, Lillian Ross, and Ved Mehta. But this is also what makes Here at The New Yorker fun. And just like the extended "Talk" piece the book explicitly aims to be, buried in the breezy banter is the occasional bit of wisdom. For instance, take Gill's description of William Shawn and board member R. Hawley Traux locked in a silent and motionless duel of politeness. "The very act of leaving the office presented difficulties [for Shawn and Traux]: which of them would consent to enter an elevator first? Moments went by, and so did elevators. Age has its bitter privileges," Gill concludes, "precedence among them."
DICTIONARY OF POETIC TERMS, by Jack Myers and Don C. Wukasch (University of North Texas Press, 2003)
This is a terrific, if esoteric, book-length list of poetical terms both utilitarian and obscure, assembled by an oddly appropriate pair: a poet and a medical doctor. There are many gems here, and the casual etymological histories may be the most brilliant. For example, an entry on "anagogical vision" reminds us that Flannery O'Connor first introduced the term into literary criticism by way of theology. An entry on the "jongleur" explains that what distinguishes it from a troubadour is that, in 15th century France and Norman England, the troubadour wrote his own tunes whilst the jongleur simply sang others'. Or, take Myers and Wukasch's entry on "Triggering town":
Triggering town a SETTING or LOCALE that acts as a catalyst to the imaginative impulse for creating a poem. According to Richard Hugo, who coined the term, an integral part of his creative process is to visit a town, usually one ruined by poverty or one relatively uninhabited because of climate or inaccessibility, then to take on the MASK of a long-time resident of that town. From this perspective of consciousness (SEE LOCATION), Hugo finds his VOICE, SUBJECT MATTER, and THEME, and pressured by the weight of the ATMOSPHERE, the creative process begins. This contemporary version of DIVINE AFFLATUS works for Hugo who says in A Trout in the Milk (1982), "Decaying shacks, abandoned ranches, desolation, endless spaces, plains, mountains, ghost towns: they're ready-made for my sensibilities."
—WGE
THE UNNAMED
by Joshua Ferris
(Little Brown, 2010)
Another hapless married white man spiraling into chaos? What is going on in the literary male brain these days? Like Chris Bachelder (above), Joshua Ferris takes masculinity—that symbol of puissance and reason—and smudges it. In Ferris's accomplished new novel, corporate America again forms the backdrop for a tale of the soul-crushing, suit-and-tie life. Ferris, who grew up in Key West, proves that a writer need not be satisfied with youthful success (his debut novel, Then We Came to The End, was a National Book Award finalist) by carving more deeply into the modern psyche, this time foregoing the easy laughs. Enter Tim, the Harvard-educated trial lawyer who commands big bucks from his office overlooking Central Park: He's the dude who's paid his dues and is reaping the benefits—and yet, ugh, he's about to lose it all because he can't stop walking. It sounds funny, right? Wrong! This dastardly condition (dubbed "benign idiopathic perambulation" by one MD) causes him to lose toes and fingers (frostbite) and to pass out from exhaustion in dangerous places as he "walks" across the country. His long-suffering wife waits for him to return (his kid has pretty much given up on him), but his mind-body struggle extinguishes romance, commitments, health, and hope. This dance of disaster is all pretty harrowing and strange—if, at times, overwrought—but Ferris imbues it with tenderness.
LINES WE LIKED: "Kronish [Tim's colleague] was famous inside the firm for once having billed a twenty-seven-hour day. This was possible only if you plied the time zones. Kronish worked twenty-four hours straight and then boarded a plane for Los Angeles, where he continued working on West Coast time.... This made Tim want to leap across the desk and eat his lucky, healthy heart."
—CAF
GRAPHIC CLASSICS: EDGAR ALLAN POE
edited by Tom Pomplun
Eureka Productions, 2010)
Populating the pages of Graphic Classics: Edgar Allan Poe are a dozen works by the classic gothic author, each brought to life, in black and white, by some of the weirdest and most detail-oriented comic-book artists and authors. J.B. Bonivert's "Annabel Lee," for example, is rendered in ink pen, all the lines of happy scenes ending in curlicues and exclamation points, but gradually the thick black lines used to symbolize Annabel Lee's hair consume the background. It shows the medium of the graphic novel at its best: The visual effect makes this dark tale even darker.
Glimpse "Annabel Lee," here. And look out for the second Poe installment from Graphic Classics, out August 1, 2011.
—MTP
MY LIFE IN CLOTHES
by Summer Brenner
(Red Hen Press, 2010)
These vignettes—some autobiographical, some about Brenner's family members, and all true—are like watching a family's screaming match in a swanky restaurant. The tension and edge in Brenner's short recollections belie her cushy upbringing by a grandmother whose tailor is her greatest confidante and a mother who "[curses] her dead husband, who, unlike her own father, never made enough money to hire a chauffer." On a rite-of-passage tour of Europe, Brenner's erratic mother buys her a coat from Harrods and later publicly blames Brenner for stealing a hotel room's porcelain chaud and froid water taps—when it was her mother, in fact, who stole them. My Life in Clothes paradoxically (and masterfully) describes a family's deepest hurts and flaws.
—MTP
