don’t surround yourself with yourself Monday, Apr 28 2008

I must say: I was very successful with reading this weekend. I finished Drown by Junot Diaz and The Din in the Head by Cynthia Ozick. Both were very cool. I am done with college!!! Congratulations you! Going back to books: Junot Diaz is the man. I can’t wait until he writes more stuff. These are short stories, along the same lines as Brief, Wondrous but more autobiographical and coming of age. The stories connect loosely and are irreverent and sometimes electric. There is a lot going on about family relationships, love relationships, immigration, etc. The Din in the Head, by Cynthia Ozick was very awesome as well. This is a collection of essays written on a variety of topics. The ones I most enjoyed were about Helen Keller, Robert Atler, and John Updike. The way she writes is very inviting, even if you aren’t familiar with the subject matter. I will read everything else by her. I am also wanting to read all of Jane Austen soon, and I probably will. In the meantime, here is a passage from Proust, which I am diligently still reading…

“Two hypotheses that arise again in relation to all important questions, the questions of the reality of Art, of Reality itself, of the Eternity of the soul: we have to choose between them; and in the case of Vinteuil’s music, one was faced with the choice at every moment, in a variety of forms. For example, this music seemed to me something more true than all known books. Sometimes I thought that the reason was that the things we feel in life are not experienced in the form of ideas, and so their translation into literature, an intellectual process, may give an account of them, explain them, analyse them, but cannot recreate them as music does, its sounds seeming to take on the inflections of our being, to reproduce that inner, extreme point of sensation which is the thing that causes us the specific ecstasy that we feel from time to time and which, when we say ‘What a beautiful day! What beautiful sunshine!’, is not conveyed at all to our neighbor, in whom the same sun and the same weather set off quite different vibrations.”

My next three library picks are Joy Williams, Gabriel Josipovici, and Nora Jablonski. Happy trails!

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Cross Cultural Blogging Tuesday, Apr 22 2008

Partly because this is an abandoned library in Russia, I will be quoting a passage from Derek Walcott’s Omeros about a Polish waitress (and it’s a book set in so many countries via poetic imagination, but mostly set in the Carribean), I am reading the Dominican Republic’s transplant Junot Diaz, France’s darling Proust, and I just finished an entertaining book about a second generation Korean immigrant. The fact that I actually finished a book is surprising…and at least my house doesn’t look like the picture to the left…

Here is that passage I promised before I start talking about other things…

“Acres of synonymous lights, black battery cells

and terminals coiling with traffic, winked out. Sunrise

reddened the steel lake. Downstairs, in the hotel’s

Canadian-fall window, a young Polish waitress with eyes

wet as the new coal and a pageboy haircut was pouring him

coffee, the maples in the glass as yellow as orange juice.

Her porcelain wrist tilted, filling his gaze to the brim.

He hoped adoration unnerved her; the sensible shoes

skirting the bare tables, her hand aligning the service

with finical clicks. As if it had tapped her twice

on the back for her papers, she turned with that nervous

smile of the recent immigrant that borders on tears.

A Polish Sunday enclosed it. A Baroque square, its age

patrolled by young soldiers, the flag of their sagging regime

once bright as her lipstick, the consonants of a language

crunched by their boot soles. In it was the scream

of a kettle leaving a freightyard, then the soft farms

with horses and willows nodding past a train window,

the queues in the drizzle. Then the forms

where her name ran over the margin, then a passport photo

where her scared face waited when she opened its door.

She was part of that pitiless fiction so common now

that it carried her wintry beauty into Canada,

it lined her eyelashes with the snow’s blue shadow,

it made her slant cheekbones flash like the cutlery

in the hope of a newer life. At the cashier’s machine

she stood like a birch at the altar, and, very quietly,

snow draped its bridal lace over the raven’s-wing sheen.

Her name melted in mine like flakes on a river

or a black pond in which the wind shakes packets of milk.

When she stood with the cheque, I tried reading the glow

of brass letters on her blouse. Her skin, shaded in silk,

smelt fresh as a country winter before the first snow.

Snow brightening the linen, the pepper, salt domes, the gables

of the napkin, silencing Warsaw, feathering quiet Cracow;

then the raven’s wing flew again between the white tables.

There are days when, however simple the future, we do not go

towards it but leave part of life in a lobby whose elevators

divide and enclose us, brightening digits that show

exactly where we are headed, while a young Polish waitress

is emptying an ashtray, and we are drawn to a window

whose strings, if we pull them, widen an emptiness.

We yank the iron-grey drapes, and the screeching pulleys

reveal in the silence not fall in Toronto

but a city whose language was seized by its police,

that other servitude Nina Something was born into,

where under gun-barrel chimneys the smoke holds its voice

till it rises with hers. Zagajewski. Herbert. Milosz.”

If you got through that and are interested, the book is called Omeros and it is a 300 page lyric poem loosely based on The Odyssey… bringing in echos of James Joyce, Africa, slavery, love, the Carribean, etc. I read it for class, so I read it quickly…but may one day go back and read it slowly and more carefully. It is the last book I had to read for my comp lit degree so in that way it is special.

I started Junot Diaz’s “Drown” on the bus this morning, but cannot read on the bus… I like it so far.

I also find it completely hilarious that the janitor lady is vacuuming the floor while people are watching movies here in the media department and asking them to get up so she can vacuum under their feet. I am giggling to myself.

All for now.

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