Pandemic prose and poetry, part two

One way to help keep your sanity in these pandemic days is to travel on guided tours...in your mind and imagination at least, through the pages of books you've meant to read, that you discovered, that discovered you.

My fiction reading

This week, I finished the 19th book--Ray Bradbury's October Country eerie short stories-- in the 19 weeks since the end of June, bringing to 43 a total this year--all part of my do it yourself schooling, and art school.

You can tell I like essays and shorter works where I can skip around and choose which stories I want to read first--though I mark them off and eventually get them all--I know, attention deficit disorder. I also read by keeping track of the pages  and the amount read--I know, anal. But hey, it works.

I also like books where there are words I have to look up...it's part of learning and discovery. I circle them and come back, finding new words and meanings. 

You can also tell that I prefer non-fiction, and the vast majority of these were purchased at my local independent bookstore, Best of Books in Edmond. 

Art--I crave learning from other artists of all kinds, especially how they create, their ideas. I'm old, have so much to learn in a short time.

• Living Color, Natalie Goldberg--about writing and art. I've had this book for a while, but never read it all. New Mexican, writing teacher whose books, especially Writing Down the Bones, I've used in teaching.
• Watercolor with O'Hara, Elliot O'Hara--an old classic--part of my DIY art school curriculum.
• Color Theory for Watercolor--Ditto.
• Architect of Light, Thomas W. Schaller--The most influential art book so far, by a current master, who has answered my e-mail questions. Read three times, one to read, two to mark up, three to take chapter by chapter notes.
• The View from the Studio Door, by Ted Orland--Inspiration by co-author of Art and Fear.
• Keep Going, Creativity in Bad Times, Austin Kleon, of Austin--One of the most creative people I know. I  have all his books and read his weekly newsletter for ideas and inspiration.

Poetry--I'm fortunate to know local poets and then discover others, whose sparse language and fresh images open  my imagination and widen my world. When possible, I buy direct from the poets.

• Sunlight & Cedar, Ken Hada of Ada--Oklahoma awakenings, and more.
• Dunce, Mary Ruefle--Someone I'd never heard of, an "erasure" artist (I had to look that up), recommended by Kleon in his newsletter. Esoteric, mind opening
• In the Days of Our Seclusion, Nathan Brown, formerly of Norman, daily surviving pandemic poems also broadcast on his Firepit sessions, from prompts sent by viewers.

Fiction

• Next to Last Stand, Craig Johnson's latest Longmire book...a quick, fun and educational novel about a relic of the Custer saga. Johnson gets better and better. A real Western.
• October Country, Ray Bradbury, short stories read long ago and forgot about it, perfect for Halloween month. One so scary I almost couldn't finish it. Last book read so far.

Non-Fiction--Obviously my preference, because again, there is so much to learn, so far to travel, so much of the craft of good writing to enjoy.

• Say Yes to Life, Victor Frankle--Just published from his lectures post-concentration camp after the end of WWII. Author of Man's Search for Meaning which I reread earlier this year. Astounding new book!
• The Word Pretty, by Elsa Gabbert--Essays by someone else I'd never heard about, recommended also by Kleon.. Interesting thoughts on writing and much more
• Classic Krakauer, John Krakauer. Excellent journalism stories from 20 years ago about human drama around the world.
• 
  Bluebird Effect, Uncommon Stories about Common Birds, Julie Zickefoose. Narratives about the different birds she's helped in Ohio and northeast, with her great watercolors too.
• Vesper Lights, Helen MacDonald of Cambridge, author of H is for Hawk and Falcon, essays about birds and nature, first person writing like a newspaper column. Lots of words to look up.
•  Mentioned below  is the Art of Loading Brush, Leave It As It Is, and Roadside Geology of Oklahoma.

Unfinished--Four I didn't get through, for various reasons

• 
  Leave It as It Is, David Gessner--About Teddy Roosevelt and his conservation efforts. Read the biographical sections, some of the other  pro-environmental parts about the national parks under attack by Trump.
• The Art of Loading Brush, Wendell Berry--Important, excellent writing of essays, fiction and poetry about agrarian issues for America. I skipped one longer academic piece. Second book of his I've read this year.
• Moby Dick, Melville--One you're supposed to read, but long and wordy. First movie is much better. I got about half through it.
• Roadside Geology of Oklahoma, Neil H. Suneson--didn't intend to read all of it, just the areas I've been on or want to travel. Didn't cover Beaver Creek area near Waurika.

Notes

• The only book I bought that was a waste was a graphic (cartoon)  novel, part 2, of American Gods. My mistake. I thought it was a new book, but no, and I've already read Neil Gaiman's novel. It's out in the garage.
• The only pre-pandemic book I'm getting back to is John Grisham's The Guardians. I started it, got bogged down, and now that I've finished all these, I'm about half way through it.
• "Pandemic poetry and prose, part one" : http://clarkcoffee.blogspot.com/2020/06/pandemic-poetry-and-prose.html

Unfinished pages in a drought

Hoping for rain, 8 by 10 watercolor

Drought. It sneaks up on you, and then dries up more than just the physical landscape--your mind, your soul, your creativity.
Just because you start a book, doesn't mean you have to finish it. That excuse helped me a little early this month when I was feeling sorry for myself for not reading enough during the last half of last year. I pride myself on trying to have read at least a book a month, but it seemed my mental drought of the last six months of the year matched the drought Oklahoma and the country is in. My reading, blogging, writing and painting dried up.
Scrounging through the house this week for books soothed my parched air somewhat as I counted nine unfinished books.
I got bogged down in Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!  I shouldn't feel too bad--I mean page long sentences just war me out.
Then there were Stephen Hawkin'gs Illustrated Brief History of Time and The Universe in a Nutshell. I tried, really tried, but I just can't keep up with that level of thinking. Some of it made sense, and I could read a few pages at a time. But then he'd write something that I just couldn't understand.
There were a couple of sorta New Age books, Counter Clockwise and On Becoming an Artist by Ellen Langer. Some good ideas, but somewhat dry and a little too out-there for this skeptical journalist. One paperback book  I picked up was L.L. Barkat's Rumors of Water, thoughts on creativity and writing. I scanned a few pages, underlined a few passages, and thought "Nothing new here. I've wasted my money."

'When you're in a drought you have to keep looking for water, or you won't find it.'

I started rereading and old paperback of Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes, and I will probably finish it, when the mood strikes, some dark and stormy night.
At year's end, I was reading Bernard DeVoto's Across the Wild Missouri, about the American fur trade, and I will finish it. It's a old hardback 1947 First Edition that my Dad owned, and I'd just never picked it up. Lots of photographs of the art of the time, showing and telling about a short time in the rapidly disappearing frontier American West.
The lessons are--some books you just can't read, some are too deep, some are not worth reading, some are just too far-fetched to devote serious time to. And two are worth finishing.
When you're in a drought you have to keep looking for water, or you won't find it..
+++
For the record, I did read six books the last half of the year, adding to the 12 I read the first half. I'll tell you about those soon. Here's the link on two I wrote about in the middle of my drought-stricken October, refreshed only by a trip to the aquifer of New Mexico:
http://clarkcoffee.blogspot.com/2012/10/an-oasis-for-spirit-in-lifes-desert.html. Here's the link to the watershed of 12 read during the first half of 2012:
http://clarkcoffee.blogspot.com/2012/06/turning-pages-of-first-half-of-2012.html

Freedom, failure--turning pages in January

Freedom--two books this month, about different kinds of freedom.


Hillerman country...if you're from New Mexico, or Oklahoma, I suspect you've read a lot of Tony Hillerman, his mystery novels of the Navajo Nation. I've got lots of first editions and a few signed ones. 
But  I found two I hadn't read, that are broader in interest in case you don't have the passion for New Mexico I have. I've finished them both since ordering them very late late last year.
I've already commented, about his memoirs Seldom Disappointed.


Just finished Finding Moon, set at the very violent end of the Vietnam war about a "mediocre editor at a mediocre newspaper" in Colorado, who goes searching for his death brother's child in SE Asia and finds freedom from self and the past and for others. Hillerman mentioned this novel in Seldom Disappointed. (Lots of terminology and narrative about the rigors of putting out a newspaper to spice it up for you journalists).

 Great line from the master storyteller and descriptor from the book: 
"Beyond her in the clearing skies beyond the skeletons of the murdered trees along the riverbank, the moon was rising."

 BTW, you can find these books on abe.com--an "aggregator" of used book stores and offerings you don't want to miss.


The second book is by Mel Stabin, renowned watercolor artist--Watercolor--Simple, Fast and Focused--about a different kind of freedom, the freedom to create and not control. http://www.melstabin.com/

My watercolors are stuck. I'm not growing as an artist. Most of that is my fault for not painting enough, but I need help--since I didn't go to art school, I've had to improvise my own, and there's not been much lately.


So I started looking at summer workshops to attend. I need to get outside of my comfort zone, so an art trip to New Mexico probably isn't the answer. I started searching, first at Cheap Joe's cheapjoes.com  in North Carolina. Joe is my kind of guy. Quit pharmacy in mid-life and now runs a huge supply store for art, and he's a terrific watercolor artist. But none of the workshops I'm interested in fit my schedule (late July, very early August).


I kept looking and found some up on the coast of Maine, and one in upstate New York, one taught by Stabin. He's also my kind of guy--mixing a career as an advertising art director in NYC with his painting. So I bought his book--also from abe.com, and already have ideas.

I particularly liked one sentence of his book--"If my watercolors are more successful than yours, it is because I have failed more often than you have."


Not quite true, since there are so many degrees of talent--but the lesson I even preach to my writing students. But if there's anything I as  "seasoned" type-AAA Capricorn needs, it's direction into what I love about watercolor...the freedom and lack of control that keeps me humble and allows me to paint great skies.  I've already taken his advice on big brushes trying to paint the picture at the top of this blog of moonset--and failed twice. I will keep trying.


And I'm trying to figure out how to afford the week-long workshop of Stabin's this summer.
The pages keep turning.

Pages of January

Three books with others underway, have helped warm the days of a cold month, completing my 67th circumnavigation of the sun.

First was completing "Atlantic' by Simon Winchester. http://simonwinchester.com/ I'm more impressed than ever with this author, a journalist who was in an Argentine jail during the Falklands war. He's traveled the length and breadth of The Atlantic and the story is long, but compelling. My kind of book..history, but more than that, the story of people.

Other words I had to look up as I moved from December into the last half of the book: cartouches,  paten, ineluctable, godowns, barbicans, cis-altlantic, scutched, envoi, gibbet, execrable, fettle, furze, invidious, demersel, ablating, eiderdowned.

His tales of the horrors of the slave trade, the romanticism of piracy, the way the Atlantic changed naval warfare, the problems of pollution and global warming, and the science of it all, made the long journey--459 pages--worth the trip.

Second book was 122 pages, Mary Oliver "Blue Pastures," a Pulitizer Prize poet I'd never heard of, as a ignorant journalist I guess, writes of writing and studying Edna St. Vincent Millay. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Oliver It's like she cleaned out her notebook and put a few things together. It stretches the mind.  If I hadn't visited Full Circle Bookstore in Oklahoma city one Friday, I'd never have found her.http://www.fullcirclebooks.com/

Oh, Blue pastures refers to the ocean. She lives at Provincetown, on Cape Cod. She also teaches at a college in Vermont. But since she doesn't have a degree--dropped our of Vassar--she couldn't teach at UCO. (No doctorate--so inferior). Words I had to look up: squamation, quahog, tautog. Still she had me with the chapter, "My friend Walt Whitman."

And the thoughts from these essays, like snippets from the notebooks she keeps and jots stuff down in:

• "Look for verbs of muscle, adjectives of exactitude."
• "Since diction has taken off its fancy dress and gone sauntering through the countryside...."
• "Don't engage in too much fancy footwork before you strike a blow."
• "Hasn't the end of the world been coming absolutely forever?"

Third book, read last night, has been around the house a while. It's Susan's copy of "About Alice" , 2006, by Calvin Trillin, about his late wife.  http://www.thenation.com/authors/calvin-trillinThis 70-some old page book by a star writer for The New Yorker, traces his partnership with his wife and her eventual death from cancer.

One quote: "One of the most negative words she could use in describing someone was 'passive.'"

Oklahoma pages

Want to explore Oklahoma? It's a mental journey in "Ain't Nobody Can Sing Like Me," the anthology of new Oklahoma writing published by Jeanetta Calhoun Mish at Mongrel Empire Press. http://www.mongrelempirepress.com/Mongrel_Empire_Press/Welcome.html

Reading the selections in this book that makes you want to sit down and write.  I found three authors I knew, and a few others I'd met, and many more I wish I could.

I've met J.C. "Catfish" Mahan of Edmond at the Labor Day,  "Labor Fest," poetry reading in the Plaza District. http://www.facebook.com/OklahomaLaborfest His baritone voice matches the power of his written words. In this book, these lines from "Rural Oklahoma" grabbed me:
"Out here the towns are small and shrinking father apart
But the cemeteries are big and growing well organized."

Writers I'd like to meet:

• Poetry publisher from Cheyenne, Dorothy Alexander. In "State of the Arts in a Red State," she writes,

"...tiny bright clusters
of poets and artists, brander 'other,'
who persevere, huddled against ragged
winds of self righteousness and fundamentalism,..."

• K.L. Chapman of Norman, in "Summer Sunsets in Oklahoma":

"God's apologies for blistering days... ."

• Retired OU prof and architect Arn Henderson takes your mind on a  township and range divided trip with "Base Line and Meridian:

"at the juncture of two invisible lines
witnessed
through the glass of measurement
marking the directions I traverse the grid of ... "

• Award-winning Chickasaw author Phillip Carroll Morgan, whose "Aerial View" I cited in the last post. His humor is also terrific, and included a poem "Today's History Lesson: The Great Casino Treaty of 2012 (The Treaty of Riverwind)" about the Federal Government nationalizing Indian Casinos:

"The Social Security Salvation Act
of 2011 was an act of Congress
requiring all Indian gaming operators
to vacate their casinos ..."

Writers I know:

• Chase Dearinger, a former student of mine at UCO, finishing his MFA, in a short story, "Second Coming." The first sentence that makes you keep reading:

"Most would say it all began the day Sammy drowned in the Cimarron River."

• Former journalist and professor at Murray State College  Sharon Burris, in the conclusion of "Days of Birds and Touch":

"Wing-tip to wing-tip in flight,
dipping and swerving as if one
sinuous serpent, but
never touching.
Never touching.
Like us."

• My dean at UCO, Pamela Washington, about being a child in a small town, in "The Cache I Carry":

"Okies know, it,
West of Lawton,
Outsiders spell it wrong.
I carry it.

"I carry nostrils full of horse sweat and manure--... ."

Those ought to whet your appetite for exploring Oklahoma.

Oklahoma pages of December

rivers are
shining snakes
trying to hide
in bottomland woods.
    --Aerial View, Phillip Carroll Morgan

"Been there, seen that," I said, reading this poem in "Ain't Nobody That Can Sing Like Me," a new anthology of new Oklahoma writing, edited and published by Jeanetta Calhoun Mish of Mongrel Empire Press.

She's the poet who won the Wrangler Award for poetry last year at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum, with "Work is Love Made Visible" (See my Aug. 18 post). She helped organize the Labor Day "Labor Fest " poetry reading gig in the Plaza District of OKC. http://www.facebook.com/OklahomaLaborfest Since then, I've reviewed several of her published poetry books.

Then this 393-page book full of poetry, fiction and non-fiction arrives in my mailbox, for review. I started thumbing through it, thinking, "This is my kind of book. I can scan through it, pick and chose from almost any page, and not get bogged down." Put it down, pick it up again, and discover something new, every time.

The first place I stopped was the shortest entry, the poem by Morgan. (Journalistic habit--I look for writers who can get to the point, quickly.) The more pieces I read about various places and subjects in Oklahoma, the more I thought, "I've been there." This is what will make the book great reading for any Okie. The fresh images and original thoughts help you explore and discover  taken-for-granted Oklahoma.

Mish writes in her introduction that Oklahoma is unexplored land in the minds of most outsiders, and hopes the book will expand horizons by going beyond the state stereotypes. She divides the selections into writings that explore the outer and inner landscapes--Who/What and Why/How (I admit, using journalistic structure sold me the minute I saw it). I'll do the same for Okies.

A page from the table of contents

So don't assume the writing shows only the rural state. There is urban here too. Consider some of the subjects--Waffle House, Runway Cafe, Kmart, Fort Sill, I-44, Food 4 Less and the bombing memorial, for instance.The writers are all over the map.

I'll admit, my favorites portray the rural, but the writing that explores Oklahoma's inner landscape, where --as Mish writes in the introduction--it is difficult to be a writer or different, is intriguing as well. Her introduction gives perspective to the work--but I doubt you'll read it first. Flip through the pages and you'll be surprised. Go back and read her comments for a new view of the state. Turn to the end of the book for brief bios on all the writers. You'll discover another landscape of Oklahoma--the rich terrain of talented writers.

I want to highlight some of the selections, and that'll be in the next post. You can order the book and view other publications at http://www.mongrelempirepress.com/