Poem of the Week: "The Island," by A.A. Milne

During the dregs of winter, I really begin to miss the ocean. When I was growing up, my father's extended family would rent a house on the beach for one week every July in Hilton Head Island, South Carolina. Most of my fondest memories come from those vacations, when my cousins and I would run wild on the beaches, eating ice cream and watching dolphins follow the shrimp boats in the early morning. To this day, I am still ridiculously nostalgic when it comes to the ocean. So today, I'm posting a happy little children's poem by A.A. Milne (he of Winnie-the-Pooh fame) about this subject.

The Island, by A.A. Milne

If I had a ship,
I'd sail my ship
I'd sail my ship
Through Eastern seas;
Down to a beach where the slow waves thunder -
The green curls over and the white falls under -
Boom! Boom! Boom!
On the sun-bright sand.
Then I'd leave my ship and I'd land,
And climb the steep white sand,
And climb to the trees
The six dark trees,
The coco-nut trees on the cliff's green crown -
Hands and knees
To the coco-nut trees,
Face to the cliff as the stones patter down,
Up, up, up, staggering, stumbling,
Round the corner where the rock is crumbling,
Round this shoulder,
Over this boulder,
Up to the top where the six trees stand....

And there I would rest, and lie,
My chin in my hands, and gaze
At the dazzle of the sand below,
And the green waves curling slow
And the grey-blue distant haze
Where the sea goes up to the sky....

And I'd say to myself as I looked so lazily down at the sea:
"There's nobody else in the world, and the world was made for me."

Rest in Peace, J.D. Salinger

In case you haven't heard, J.D. Salinger passed away today at the age of 91. As cliche as it is, The Catcher in the Rye was one of my transformative reading experiences as an adolescent. Although that book means less to me now, it's still one of the great important American literary works.

And although I may not be as enamored with Catcher any more, I still go head-over-heels for Salinger's short stories. His collection, Nine Stories, never ceases to amaze me. I've read it multiple times, and each story becomes more resonant and complex with each reading. So, in honor of Salinger, I am including a passage from my favorite Salinger story, "For Esme - with Love and Squalor."

This passage takes place after a meeting between an American soldier and an adolescent British girl during World War II. The soldier/narrator promises to write a story for the girl, and she reminds him of this before they part ways.

From "For Esme - with Love and Squalor," by J.D. Salinger

Esme was standing with crossed ankles again. "You're quite sure you won't forget to write that story for me?" she asked. "It doesn't have to be exclusively for me. It can -"

I said there was absolutley no chance that I'd forget. I told her that I'd never written a story for anybody, but that it seemed like exactly the right time to get down to it.

She nodded. "Make it extremely squalid and moving," she suggested. "Are you at all acquainted with squalor?"

I said not exactly but that I was getting better acquainted with it, in one form or another, all the time, and that I'd do my best to come up to her specifications. We shook hands.

"Isn't it a pity that we didn't meet under less extenuating circumstances?"

I said it was, I said it certainly was.

"Goodbye," Esme said, "I hope you return from the war with all your faculties intact."

I thanked her, and said a few other words, and then watched her leave the tearoom. She left it slowly, reflectively, testing the ends of her hair for dryness.


RIP, Salinger. Maybe now we'll get to see all that secret work you've been hiding away...

How Would I Describe Anne Tyler's New Novel? Meh.

You all know that I love Anne Tyler and consider her one of the great underappreciated novelist. But I have to admit that I was not so in love with her new book. Noah's Compass, which is Tyler's 17th novel, isn't bad. It just isn't particularly good either. It was one of those books that provided a nice time while I was reading it, but which ultimately frustrated me when I put it down for the last time.

The book has a very Tyler-ian plot. Liam Pennywell, 61, is attacked in his new apartment not long after losing his teaching job. The blow to his head ends up not being particuarly serious, but the fact that he can't remember anything about the attack and its immediate aftermath really bothers him. Meanwhile, Tyler shows his relationships with his ex-wife, daughters, and grandson to be riddled with failures to connect. A new love interest, the goofy Eunice, finally shakes up his boring life a bit. But (SPOIL ALERT) nothing quite works out the way Liam imagined it would. In the end, Noah's Compass is a book about memory and personal failure and how the term "growing old gracefully" is a bunch of crap.

Although she gets lumped in with loads of other women writers who concentrate on domestic life, Tyler has never been as sentimental as many of her peers. She obviously loves her characters and treats them with care, but she isn't afraid to end things on a sour note or leave people feeling lost and unhappy. I've always liked this aspect about Tyler. Her novel Saint Maybe, which is one of my favorite books, just lets its characters be without forcing them into schmaltzy endings or sentimental confrontations. Sometimes, people die still being mad at each other. Sometimes, they remain unaware of their impact on other people for the rest of their days. But for some reason, this exact sense of human honesty that I loved so much in Saint Maybe really turned me off in Noah's Compass.

I think I mostly disliked the book because I didn't really like any of the characters. In fact, now that I'm thinking about it, not a single one of them particularly piqued my interest or compassion. Tyler drew them well enough, without judgment, but I just didn't really care what happened to them by the end. Liam is kind of an asshole, and even though I think we're supposed to find his love interest Eunice charming and quirkly, she mostly got on my last nerve. And then, in the twist about Eunice towards the end, I began to actually hate her, even though I don't think Tyler meant for me to feel that way. It's hard to read a book where you don't want to spend any more time with any of the characters than necessary.

This doesn't mean Tyler has lost her touch, though. In fact, I think if she had pared the book down to a 40-page short story, it would have been quite wonderful (actually, one of my few complaints about Tyler is that she doesn't seem to realize the potential of the short fiction form). Where Saint Maybe was masterful in its use of narration and its handling of time and space, Noah's Compass felt padded and a little too uncontrolled. In fact, about half-way through the book, Tyler makes a mistake in the novel's timing (not matching up character's ages to events that happened to them) that I couldn't believe an editor or proofreader never noticed. This kind of thing always depresses me when I read a book; I really like my authors to have tight reins on what they're doing.

So to conclude, I didn't hate it or love it. It just kind of exists. Although, I have noticed the book is getting good reviews in other places. So maybe it's just me.

Poem of the Week: "Academic Discourse at Miami: Wallace Stevens and the Domestication of Light," by Jay Hopler

One of the few contemporary poets that I follow is Jay Hopler. He did a reading at my alma mater a couple years ago, and I've been hooked on his strange, beautiful, ruin-drenched work ever since. I picked this poem for the week because it connects back to last week's post, Wallace Stevens's "The Snow Man." Stevens wrote a lot of poems about Florida, and this is Hopler's response to those poems (it should also be noted that Hopler is often compared to Stevens for his slight absurdism rooted in loneliness and contemporary anxiety). I also chose this poem because I like pieces where poets seem to be talking to each other across time and space, and this is one example of that. Enjoy!

Academic Discourse at Miami: Wallace Stevens and the Domestication of Light, by Jay Hopler

I have no beef with Wallace Stevens
Even if some of his poems do feel like so much tropical slumming.

I only wish he could have lived here, in Florida, instead of simply
Visiting once in a while -; how much more essential his summer-

Minded poems would have been! Not that a poem like "Farewell
To Florida" is solely summer-minded or is, somehow, inessential -

Only, that there exists a difference between the tropical light one
Finds beaming in a Stevens poem and the tropical light one finds

Burning in the tropics. Florida's light is far more aggressive, far
More violent, than Stevens knew -

It gets inside your head and shreds
Things, dismantles memory, shorts out the will; even now, at six

O'clock of a Friday evening, the light here in Florida is clanging,
Banging, rattling buildings, burning through the park's green pelt.

This never happens in a Stevens poem.

Favorite Passages: Good Omens, by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett

This might be one of the nerdiest Favorite Passages entries I've ever posted. For one, it's centered around a novel beloved by nerds, written by two writers who are themselves a bit nerdy. Secondly, you have to have a somewhat decent knowledge of classical composers to get just how funny this really is. But I can't help it. I love this book, and I love this passage.

This takes place towards the beginning of the book, when the angel Aziraphale and the demon Crowley, who have both been roaming earth since The Beginning, get together to figure out what they're going to do about the coming Apocalypse. Remember that neither of them really wants it to happen, as they have grown to love their worldy lives. Enjoy!

From: Good Omens, by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett

[Aziraphale] turned and faced Crowley.

"We'll win, of course," he said.

"You don't want that," said the demon.

"Why not, pray?"

"Listen," said Crowley desperately, "how many musicians do you think your side have got, eh? First grade, I mean."

Aziraphale looked taken aback.

"Well, I should think -" he began.

"Two," said Crowley. "Elgar and Liszt. That's all. We've got the rest. Beethoven, Brahms, all the Bachs, Mozart, the lot. Can you imagine eternity with Elgar?"

Aziraphale shut his eyes. "All too easily," he groaned.

"That's it, then," said Crowley with a gleam of triumph. He knew Aziraphale's weak spot all right. "No more compact discs. No more Albert Hall. No more Proms. No more Glyndbourne. Just celestial harmonies all day long."

"Ineffable," Aziraphale murmured.

"Like eggs without salt, you said. Which reminds me. No salt, no eggs. No gravlax with dill sauce. No fascinating little restaurants where they know you. No Daily Telegraph crossword. No small antique shops. No bookshops, either. No interesting old editions. No" - Crowley scraped the bottom of Aziraphale's barrel of interests - "Regency silver snuffboxes..."

"But after we win life will be better!" croaked the angel.

"But it won't be as interesting. Look, you know I'm right. You'd be as happy with a harp as I'd be with a pitchfork."

"You know we don't play harps."

"And we don't use pitchforks. I was being rhetorical."

Beth's Top Five Fictional BFFs

Right now, I'm reading Anne Tyler's new novel, Noah's Compass. It's okay so far, but it's centered around a lonely, somewhat self-centered older man. It makes me miss the camraderie between angel Aziraphale and demon Crowley in last week's read, Good Omens. Missing my love of a good literary friendship, I began to think about my favorite friend characters in some great books. So this list is centered around that friend; that wonderful side character who anchors his or her best friend to the world around them.

I must note that I did not include fictional friendships that don't work out, even though that means I had to get rid of some heavy hitters (including John Singer from The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter). Rather, these are the BFFs that make the world better - not worse - for the protagonists.

1. Razumihin (Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoevsky): Admittedly, it's been about seven years since I read C&P, but the thing that still sticks with me all these years later isn't the tortured protagonist, Raskolnikov. Rather, it's his trusty BFF, Razumihin. While reading the book, I was struck by how down-to-earth Raz. was in such a high-brow book. Reasonable and with a much better sense of humor than his friend, I enjoyed the book a lot more when he was around. Also, I always thought his relationship with Raskolnikov's sister was kind of adorable. So there you go. I just called a plot point in Crime and Punishment "adorable."

2. Rachel, Stephanie, and Alison (Just as Long as We're Together and Here's to You, Rachel Robinson, by Judy Blume): I had to include all three friends since they take up a couple books where they switch the protagonist role. Judy Blume was the most formative author of my childhood reading experience, and her depiction of the friendship between these three junior high girls really shows how friendships work at that age. It helps that the friendship between the three reminded me of the BFF threesome I was part of when I read these books more than a decade ago. Also, one of those real-life friends was totally the living, breathing version of the Rachel character.

3. Hand (You Shall Know Our Velocity, by Dave Eggers): Eggers has always written friendships really well, but the relationship between Velocity's protagonist Will and his co-traveler/BFF Hand is probably the best example. Hand can be annoying at times, to both Will and the reader, but he's loyal to a fault and provides some nice comic relief. And in certain editions of the book (there are several, actually), he gets his own 50-page section in the middle where he completely reverses everything we know in the book so far. There's a few lines in this section where Hand goes to clean out Will's storage unit that completely break my heart every time I read them.

4. Bruno (The History of Love, by Nicole Krauss): Nicole Krauss is a deplorably under-valued contemporary writer (and, in my opinion, a much better novelist than her more famous husband, Jonathan Safran Foer, who I strongly dislike). In The History of Love, protagonist Leo Gursky has only one real connection left in the world: his friend from childhood, Bruno. As the book goes on, we learn some shocking things about this friendship that don't at all take away from the poignancy of the friendship between two boys who grow up and become lost, figuratively and literally.

5. "Dill" Harris (To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee): There's really nothing you can say about Dill that hasn't already been said. The epitome of a childhood friend, Dill is loyal and funny and brave. Knowing he was based on Harper Lee's actual BFF as a kid, Truman Capote, only adds to his charm.

Poem of the Week: "The Snow Man," by Wallace Stevens

Suddenly, out of the blue this weekend, I decided I need to read more Wallace Stevens. When I was younger, I hated Stevens with his absurdism, his big words and showy line structure. But now that I'm older and smarter, I am finding his stuff stirring and honest. So expect to hear more about my quest to get to know Wallace Stevens better in the next few months (along with my quest to read more W.H. Auden and Robert Lowell; apparently this is the Winter of Dead White Male Poets). In the meantime, here is one of Stevens's most well-known poems, "The Snow Man." Obviously, it fits the month quite well.

The Snow Man, by Wallace Stevens

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.