letters and sodas: booknotes

Mog Winter is the printer’s devil: “the youngest apprentice in a printing shop,” (or, in this case, the only apprentice), and an orphan who lives in a small room above the shop in Clerkenwell, not far from the New Prison and the stinking River Fleet. Despite the long hours and low pay, Mog’s job has its perks—it’s better than not having work at all, and it means being in the know about the life of the city: “If there was any meeting called, or play to be performed, or auction to be held, or curious object to be displayed, or items stolen, or convicts escaped, or persons to be hanged, or corpses found drowned, or loved ones gone missing, chances were we’d know about it. It used to make me feel quietly important, walking through the streets of London and seeing the huge inky letters of my own posters plastered across brick walls and wooden fences. They made people happy, and curious, and afraid; they made people talk” (p 3).

Speaking of the city, Bajoria’s descriptions of London are really pleasing: I love the dark alleyways and narrow streets, where “the houses on either side of the lanes leaned inwards at the top until they almost touched, so the sunlight could hardly get through” (p 10), and the crowds and noise of the docks by the Thames, where Mog goes to see a ship called the Sun of Calcutta, just back from India. The docks are full of thieves, and Mog follows a pair of them, which leads to some mysteries and (mis)adventures. I remembered that Megan had read this book a few years ago, and had liked it but not loved it, though I couldn’t remember why. But oh, right, it was the plot. I agree that it’s not clear why Mog gets so involved in the affairs of the thieves and the Sun of Calcutta (and Mog even says as much, at one point), but the descriptions, both of the city and the details of everyday life in and out of the printer’s shop, are good enough that I didn’t much mind. How could I, with passages like this one, describing a golden lantern Mog sees?

It was the most beautiful object I’d ever laid eyes on. Its flame extinguished, it was revolving slowly with the motion of the ship, firing sparkles of golden light back at me as the daylight struck its intricate surface. I couldn’t imagine how any goldsmith could have made this: surely it must have been created, like the sun, by something or someone beyond the scope of our knowledge. It was breathtaking, magnificent, a dense basket of fine, glinting, crisscrossed lacework, made entirely of gold, sending its bright reflections over the furniture and walls of the little cabin. For a moment I stood spellbound, hypnotised by its beauty. A jewelled globe; a ball of bright tears. (p 88)

Letters to a Stranger starts with the quiet dream-like images of “Waking Up”: “curls of dark grass,” “a lake of dark petals” (p 5). The poems continue full of quiet, full of dreams and death. There are some exquisite bits early in the book, like “a few perfect flakes of snow/When the season is just breaking./They strike the water and are nothing at all” (p 14), but I wasn’t too interested in these poems at first. The blank verse felt overly mannered, the subjects too dreary. But as I kept reading there kept on being more to like: the meter started to feel like grace, like just enough rather than too much, and there kept on being gorgeous images, turns of phrase. I’m not sure how much it’s that the book really does get better as it progresses, and how much it was me becoming immersed in James’s voice and tone, seeing his work’s facets differently.

I like the poems with literary or classical references, “The Moonstone,” for instance, or “Jason,” with its golden images, the wonderful line, “I learn the lion color of these hills,” (p 20), or the fairy-tale-ness/un-fairy-tale-ness of “Frog.” Later, “Two Aunts,” with its images of the narrator’s odd prairie forebears, (”sidesaddle, gowned in lemon silk”) (p 67) is odd and wonderful, and I like bits of poems like “Wild Cherries,” lines like “June fastens everything in a silk repose./Lilacs have dropped their stars with little effort” (p 47), or “Peonies,” which says, of the flowers: “They are arranging themselves in a green jar/And shatter like expensive glass/Over an inch of cold tapwater” (p 62).

The flap copy of this book calls it “a season-by-season account of a year in the life of its narrator,” and says it’s “not a novel in verse, not a poetic journal, but a lyric chronicle,” all of which sounds promising—though really, it was the cover that caught my eye when I saw this book on a table in McNally Jackson sometime over the winter. (It’s a print by Hiroshige: “Mannen Bridge, Fukagawa.”)

I like (some of) the journal-ish prose-ish poems best, the clear and solid images of them. Elsewhere, I feel like there’s often this over-the-top-ness to McGrath’s phrasing, something show-off-ish, a pulling back from the beautiful or “poetic” image: but I like the beauty more. In one poem, for example, he describes the plantar fascia as the “inverted hammock/on which the body rests its burden”— a pleasing image—then follows it with “like a red-faced tourist/in the shadow/of a coconut palm” (”Ode to the Plantar Fascia,” p 8). Bashō and his poems come up a few times in the first of the seven notebooks, and I like McGrath best when he’s seeing the world in a Bashō-esque way: luminous images. In poems like “January 17,” there’s play and playfulness, but also a willingness to let the image sit: “Flocks of ibis on old tractors in cleared fields,” or “pickups selling roasted corn or watermelons” (pp 10-11). This whole poem is great, full of growing things (strawberries, eggplants, snapdragons) and the details of place, the changing landscape of South Florida, bits like this:

From here the city is everything to the east, endlessly ramified tile-roofed subdivisions of houses and garden apartments, strip malls, highway interchanges, intransigent farmers holding their patchwork dirt together with melons and leaf lettuce—the very next field has been harrowed and scoured and posted for sale— (p 14)

I love some of McGrath’s descriptions of the everyday, like the bit in “Dahlias” where the narrator talks about “Life in the surface of things, artifactual energy, layer upon layer, room after room,” and then: “Shoes piled in a basket by the door. Umbrellas, a lunchbox, a brown paper shopping bag, the familiar loops of its handles, arc of the string like the curve of the skater’s trajectory and the steam from the cooling towers blown west” (p 40). Also satisfying: the poems that describe the landscape as seen from airplane windows, the forms of the earth and the forms of the things people have built on it, and “April 26,” the funny and sweet conversational tone of it: kids and a playground and ivy on stone walls. In the “Dawn Notebook” section, there are many haiku, some of which are too funny/gimmicky, but some of which have grace, like the last bit of “Night Mist” and all of “August.” Toward the end of the book, “Eclogue,” which juxtaposes Hiroshige and Miami, is great, and so is “Hiroshige,” a few pages later. (Read both here.)

If I were to see a painting or sketch by Watteau in a museum, I’m not sure if it would catch my eye. I might look at it and think, “people, yawn,” and move on. I tend to like abstract art or minimalist art, art that is about color or shape, or else I like certain landscapes, certain still lifes or interiors: it’s rare for portraits or group scenes to really grab my interest. But this book had me interested. It starts with two things: looking and exuberance, and I am a sucker for that particular combination, for exuberant observation. Of the figure in Watteau’s Mezzetin, Perl writes that “he is a whirligig of a man”; his legs “explode in feet shod in slippers with pink rosettes, describing two points in the swing of a pendulum or two hours on a clock” (p 3). This almost feels a bit much for the first page of words in a narrative, but Perl makes it work, and keeps on making it work.

The structure of this book suits the subject, or perhaps just the author, wonderfully: it’s an alphabet book, with several entries for each letter, each entry ranging in length from a sentence or two to several pages. Some of the entries are explicitly about Watteau or his art, while others are more loosely related. Most of it is really pleasing and satisfying, though sometimes Perl’s tone irks me: he often says things are “surely” or “certainly” happened one way or another, or were one way or another, and sometimes it feels like bluster rather than a fully reasoned argument. When he writes of Nijinsky and Massine (pp 88-89) that “both men were essentially heterosexual,” it annoys me: maybe they were, and maybe they said as much themselves, but I don’t know, and Perl doesn’t elaborate: is he saying they were straight because their diaries or letters said so, or because, as he says, “Nijinsky married Romola and Massine, even in the years when he was living with Diaghilev, was sneaking off to brothels”? Later, in an entry under the heading of “Men,” he writes about an old man in a laundromat “carefully folding his jeans and sheets and towels,” and says that there is “something disturbing about his improvised domesticity, but something cozy as well, a sense of a life with its own curious shape, and who would really care to judge that, who can know how it feels from inside?” (p 115). That “disturbing” and that “improvised” make me raise my eyebrows: why is it unusual for a man to wash and fold his clothes? (Though I do like the idea of “a life with its own curious shape.”)

That said, there is so much in this book that made me grin, so much that is smart and playful and broadly interested in art and life and the world. I like the way Perl explores the idea of the arabesque in Watteau’s art, the idea of circling and meandering to get to the point, and I like the way he talks about Watteau’s paintings as full of possibility and ambiguity. (In the entry on “Cappriccio,” he starts with this: “Not the construction but the unfolding or unfurling of a world, a mysterious movement, delicately meandering, full of S-curves and zigzags, forever decentering, snaking and circling, leaping forward in great arcs and pulling back in tight curls—this is the impulse behind Watteau’s art” (p 31).”) I like how he describes Watteau’s work as having “the quality mingled insouciance and seriousness; the “Oh, it’s nothing” that is another way of saying “Of course, it’s everything” (p 8). The entry on backs and the back view in Watteau’s art is really pleasing, as is the entry on beginnings, and I love the entry on evening, a paragraph about flirtation and dusk and conversation in bars: this is linked to Perl’s idea, as he puts it in the entry on flirtation, that Watteau’s art is “a never-ending plot of come-ons, importunings, seductions, rejections, equivocations, retreats” (p 66). There is just so much that is good in this book: a little bit about Virginia Woolf walking to the National Gallery in London, thoughts about grace and lack of self-consciousness, readings of paintings that are about looking closely but also about thinking and feeling. One of the best bits is on a painting called Gersaint’s Shopsign: you can read that entry in its entirety on the Columbia College Today website.

Until the last story, which is the title story and the last that Storm wrote, I wasn’t enraptured by this book. Each story had its satisfying bits, but mostly they were too self-consciously stories, too concerned with doomed love, too nostalgic.

But I liked this, from “In the Great Hall,” the last bit especially:

[she] often stood near the glass door in the winter and breathed on the frozen panes; then she would peer through, down into the snow-filled garden, and dream of the lovely summer, the gleaming leaves and warm sunlight, the robin that built there, the ripe apricots that once rolled across the ground; then she would dream of summer days generally and, finally, she dreamed of nothing except the one day of all days, and her mind was all summer. (p 20)

And this, from “Aquis Submersus,” the solid everyday detail of it:

And yet, how friendly I found the rooms of that old house! In winter I liked the small chamber to the right of the vestibule, and in summer the large room on the left, on whose white-washed wall, in mahogany frames, they had hung some pictures cut from the Reformation almanac. From the western window of that room, all one could see was a single-far off windmill; but there was also the whole broad sky, which every evening absolutely filled the entire room with radiance! The pastor’s beloved family, the easy chair with its red plush cushions, the ample old sofa, and resting on the table in the light of the sunset, the teakettle, humming with reassurance—everything was bright, friendly, alive in the present moment. (p 121)

And then came the last story, which I liked too much to pick out one thing: the wind and the weather, the images of the sea and the light over the mudflats, the determination and pettiness of the various characters, the coziness of the story (in the story) being told in a warm room on a cold night.

I was reading this book on a Brooklyn-bound F train one evening, and could tell that a man a few seats over was staring at the cover. He scrambled for a pen and wrote the title down on the paper shopping bag he was carrying, then stood up at the next stop and stood in front of me and asked what this book was about, how it was, if I’d read the Narnia books, said he loved them. His interest and enthusiasm made me smile, and it was one of those great subway moments, where even heading home with a sore throat and a foggy head, I was glad to be living in this city and not anywhere else.

As for the Narnia books: I read all of them as a child, and thought The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was especially magical and wonderful, but it wasn’t one of the books I read over and over and over again, like A Wrinkle in Time and its sequels, or Harriet the Spy. Laura Miller’s experience was different: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was her first literary love, and that’s what this book is about: love, and also disillusionment, and then a reconsideration, an attempt to find some of that old wonder again. It’s conversational and smart and really satisfying.

Miller describes her relationship to Narnia as “a story of enchantment, betrayal, estrangement, and reunion,” which seems a promising start: her own language captures the magic of reading (p 3). A page later, she writes of reading as escape, the idea that books can let us leave this world for “another, better one, a world fresher, more brightly colored, more exhilarating, more fully felt” (p 4). But she doesn’t see the Narnia books as escapist, or if they are, they’re no more so than any other story. She writes of why she loved the book and its sequels:

The youngest part of my child self loved Narnia’s talking animals. The girl I was fast growing into fiercely seized upon the idea of possessing an entire, secret world of my own. And the seeds of the adult I would become reveled in the autonomy of Lewis’s child heroes and the adventures that awaited them once they escaped the wearying bonds of grown-up supervision. (p 25)

She goes on to discuss each of these elements in greater detail in the next several chapters, beginning with the talking animals. And then comes the middle section of the book, “Trouble in Paradise,” in which Miller grows up a bit and feels betrayed by her childhood loves: not only by Lewis’s Christian symbolism, but also by what some see as his sexism, his elitism, and his mistrust of foreigners (which she discusses in the totally great chapter “Garlic and Onions”). I like the way Miller writes about the multiplicity of readings and meanings, and her point that more than one reading can be valid:

[...] the child readers of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe who do not recognize its parallels to the biblical story of the Crucifixion and the Resurrection are not necessarily mistaken. Our particular, immediate experience of something is as true as the conclusions we reach after we have sorted out all the details, figured out which ones match a pattern we’ve observed before, and discarded the rest. (p 89)

This, coupled with the idea of “the other way in,” the idea that if we can’t regain innocence, we can gain grace through knowledge, leads to the final section of the book, about Miller’s decision “to know even more, to learn more, about how the Chronicles came to be written and all the various ways they have been and can be read” (175). Sometimes the way Miller recounts conversations with people like Neil Gaiman, Philip Pullman, and Susanna Clarke feels stilted, but mostly I’m pleased by the presence of these other readers and writers in Miller’s book; I’m also especially pleased by the start of the final section, the discussion of Narnia-as-place, the consideration of its landscapes and the landscapes that might have inspired it, or might remind readers of it.

(edited to add: This book was on my to-read list anyhow, so I was delighted to get a free copy of it via goodreads!)

Most of these poems center on, or circle around, the speaker’s mother. “I maul her into memory,” the first poem says, but warns us, too, that “no story is true” (p 3). There is strain and violence, violence against the speaker’s mother, and then her responding violence against the world. I think my favorite of these poems is “Portrait of My Mother as the Republic of Texas,” which is ballsy and funny, a way to capture an outsize figure, super from the first phrases: “After my mother won independence in 1836,/she dysfunctioned as her own nation,” then continuing with twists and perfect turns of phrase (p 5). I like “A Fact Which Occurred in America” lots, too, the blending of the personal—the fifth grade teacher who “kept saying We lost, we lost” about the Civil War, the boy kissing another boy in the trees behind the playground—with larger cultural histories, and with the struggle between those who have power and those who don’t (and how that struggle can end up pitting those without power against each other, too) (p 14). “Parthenogenesis” is another pleasing poem, with its blend of Homer and beauty pageants, its juxtaposition of “omen-eyed” Cassandra and Miss New Jersey (p 22). The six sections of “Portrait of My Mother as Victorine Meurent” are excellent, too, and not just ’cause I’m often a sucker for poems about paintings: I love the clear images of these, the imagined thoughts of artist and model, the way that these poems, like others in the collection, play with power dynamics: here is the artist fixing his model in paint; here is his model, walking away. The collection’s final poems, all of which involve difficult love, are satisfying, poignant without melodrama: I liked “We Exult in Your Pain,” and “The Enemy,” and “Naming the End,” and “Love the Shattered Thing.” (I liked this whole collection much more, on re-reading it, than I did after reading it for the first time. Maybe I over-poetried in April, and needed the break of reading a novel and a few issues of The New Yorker as breathing-space, before more poems.)

This is the story of crumbling house in Warwickshire, the family who lives in it, and a doctor, whose first name we never learn, who finds himself increasingly entangled with the family’s affairs. It’s a story about class tensions, and also a ghost story, quite creepy and hard to put down, but at the same time, not entirely satisfying. I think part of the problem is the fact of it being a ghost story: for much of the book, I found myself thinking ahead to the ending, wondering how Waters would resolve (or not resolve) things, wondering what would be explained rationally, and what wouldn’t be. And then there’s the narrator, who’s a bit too rational and well-spoken, and the plot, with its moments of obviousness, and the whole post-war British landed-gentry mood, the stiffness and the distance between characters. I think I liked the period details best, the Tortoise stove and the kerosene lanterns for when the house’s generator is turned off, and the doctor making his round of calls, and there are some wonderful moments, like when the daughter of the house explains how she and her brother set the old broken clock by the stable to twenty minutes to nine, after the time that Miss Havisham’s clocks are stopped at in Great Expectations. But as Sarah Waters novels go, I much prefer the queer Victorian ones to this and to The Night Watch.

When I saw Mark Doty read at The Center, someone asked him, after the reading, if he could recommend a few other poets—this was one of the books that he mentioned. There are three sections of poems in this book, with each section titled after a button on a stereo, though obviously they’re also words with resonance: REPEAT, and PAUSE, and POWER. Music, both as trope and as thing, the idea of song and actual songs and musicians, figure heavily. (Since my musical knowledge skews towards white girls with guitars, I had some fun after reading this sitting at my computer and finding YouTube videos of songs like Billy Strayhorn’s “Lush Life” and “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going” (from Dreamgirls) and “Memory Lane” by Minnie Riperton.)

As for the poems themselves, I like how they’re smart and conversational, I like their wryness, and I like that they’re poems that tell stories. There’s casual violence in these poems, a father beating his son with a leather belt, a backhanded slap across the cheek, and racism and dirt and grit and cockroaches teeming in the kitchen, but that isn’t to say they’re unpleasant to read. I like “Track 3 (Back down) Memory Lane” lots, the way it creates the world of a city/neighborhood, Friday-night gambling in Shreveport in the narrator’s grandmother’s house, guns and drugs outside, but inside, a sort of cozy chaos, Minnie Riperton on the stereo. I like how Diana Ross narrates one poem, Janis Joplin another; I like the way poems focused on these cultural figures are interspersed with poems that are highly personal, all about the narrator’s family (mother and child leaving a violent father, but just walking a few blocks then coming back; grandmother scrubbing the narrator’s sister’s neck ’til it bleeds, to get the dirt off, not realizing the “dirt” is just her skin color). Other favorites are “Lunch,” “I Have Just Picked Up a Man,” and “Betty Jo Jackson,” the last of which is about the narrator’s parents when they were still dating and his mother was still “fierce,” “when she still/Wanted a fight” (48).

Megan said she read this book in one sitting at the best bookstore in Chelsea and loved it, so I decided to get it from the library, and am glad I did. At the start of this book we learn this: “Averno. Ancient name Avernus. A small crater lake, ten miles west of Naples, Italy; regarded by the ancient Romans as the entrance to the underworld.” This collection of linked poems is about passing between worlds: childhood and adulthood, death and life, existence and memory, and seasons, too; it uses the myth of Persephone to play with some of those passings. I like this image of Persephone and the start of spring: “Come to me, said the world. I was standing/in my wool coat at a kind of bright portal—” (p 9). Elsewhere, autumn is “an allegory of waste,” (p 11), dry fields that can be burned to ash, the world on the verge of death. Also pleasing is the mix of mythic and not, lines like this, which Megan had quoted to me, about riding the subway and reading: “you are not alone,/the poem said,/in the dark tunnel” (p 14), and then the wry humor and intelligence of the mythic poems like “Persephone the Wanderer,” which reminds the reader: “You are allowed to like/no one, you know. The characters/are not people.” (p 16). Other highlights: the wintry world of the second section of “Landscape,” “A Myth of Innocence” and “A Myth of Devotion,” the first stanza of “Telescope,” which describes the moment of disorientation after looking through a telescope, coming back to earth when you’ve been among the stars—which isn’t too dissimilar to the moment of emerging from a book you’ve been lost in, and the matter-of-fact-ness of the third part of “Averno,” which includes this:

Some young girls ask me
if they’ll be safe near Averno—
they’re cold, they want to go south a little while.
And one says, like a joke, but not too far south—

I say, as safe as anywhere
which makes them happy.
What it means is nothing is safe. (p 64)