Creepy Coraline

I decided to pick up a copy of Neil Gaiman's much-loved children's book, Coraline, based on two things: 1) He wrote The Graveyard Book, and you all know how I feel about TGB, and 2) my brother recently saw the critically-honored movie version of the book and highly recommended it. I am one of those people who prefers to read the book before a film has a chance to ruin my views on it, so I went ahead and got to the book so I could see the movie soon.

Coraline did not disappoint. It was exciting and packed with intense images. The heroine was a great character, very real and full of a child's misguided courage. And Gaiman's writing, as always, was full of fine moments. But here's the thing with Coraline: It's terrifying.

I'm not kidding. This has got to be one of the scariest books I have ever read. This is the stuff of my worst nightmares - lumpy dough versions of people, rats, bugs, blood, and violence. Some of the book's visuals (and even a few of its illustrations, done by Dave McKean, who often works with Gaiman) made my blood run completely cold. The plot of the book is pretty simple: Coraline finds a door in her family's flat that leads to a world that is like hers, but different. For example, her parents have been replaced by an "other mother" and "other father," figures with buttons for eyes who become scarier and scarier as the book goes on. Eventually, Coraline is completely trapped in this world and has to save the souls of her parents and three ghost children in order to escape. She does so, and with finesse, but things aren't necessarily all hunky-dory by the book's end.

I liked Coraline. It was a brief, entertaining read. But holy crap, I will not be able to get some of this stuff out of my head for awhile. Remember my list at Halloween about good scary reads? This would definitely make the cut. Yikes!


What's Next: Lev Grossman's The Magicians, which got some great reviews and is being called a "grown-up's Harry Potter." I'm excited to start it.

The Critic Meets the Poet: Anne Carson

I admit I'm not totally sure what to make of Anne Carson's book of poems and essays, Men in the Off Hours. I think Carson is a genius, and the way she plays with the ideas of poetry and criticism inspires me to think outside the box about my own work. But sometimes, her stuff is so heavy in allusion and wit that it takes away from the kind of emotionally compelling work I look for in other poets. Sometimes, it feels like Carson is a little too smart for her own good.

But even as I say that, I admit that I really, really liked this book. Some of the pieces in it were nothing short of amazing, with the way Carson builds on layers of meaning and language. The standouts in this collection are the long poem series. One, "Hopper: Confessions," was made up of 10 voice pieces centered around his artwork. Some of the lines in this series were quite wonderful and often surprising. Also, the entire set reminded me of going to the Indianapolis Museum of Art last winter with a good friend. The museum had a series of Edward Hopper's sketches for a single painting, so that you could see the piece build and change with time. The way these poems moved around his subjects reminded me of that exhibit.

The best poems in this collection come from the book's largest section, entitled TV Men. These long poems were centered around historic literary subjects. Many were about the subjects' lives but told through the perspective of someone intent on filming said lives. These poems were strange and extremely allusion-heavy (it helped to know a little about the subjects before reading the poem), but they were often beautifully written, addressing questions about humanity and love, politics and art. "Tolstoy" perfectly captured the often-contradictory strings in the writer's life, and as I mentioned in yesterday's Poem of the Week entry, Carson obviously struggles in understanding the man. The TV Men: Lazarus poems were also fantastic, with probably the best lines in the entire book.

But for me, the real standout was the TV Men: Akhmatova series. Anna Akhmatova, a Russian poet who struggled for artisitic control with the Soviet government, is a complicated figure, and Carson turns her into this beautifully complex, heartbreakingly tragic heroine. I read the "Akhmatova" poems at a busy hamburger joint during my work lunchbreak. It was strange balancing these sad, personal poems with the hubbub around me, but the effect only added to the idea of chaos that poor Akhmatova dealt with through her entire life. She was a writer haunted by loss and government pressure, and Carson really seems to "get" her. It was awesome to see such understanding between two important, hyper-intelligent female poets from opposite sides of the world, of the century.

That's what I like about Anne Carson. As a literary critic, she often cannot separate her work from her love for the work of others. For this reason, her poems become extremely personal essays about what it means to worship at the literary altar of writers as petty and complicated as ourselves.

Poem of the Week: "Lazarus (1st Draft)," by Anne Carson

This weekend, I finished Anne Carson's collection of poems and essays, Men in the Off Hours. I'll do a full write-up on it tomorrow, when I've had time to gather my thoughts on these often strange, often beautiful, extremely allusion-heavy works. This poem, "Lazarus (1st Draft)," is one of my favorite standalone pieces in the book. The figure of Lazarus, the man Jesus raised from the dead, repeats often through the book, but this is his first appearance. Probably the reason I love this poem so much is because it casually mentions Prince Andrei, my beloved philosopher/soldier/man-about-town from War and Peace. Carson clearly loves and struggles with Tolstoy as much as I do, which is just one of the many things I love about her as both a critic and a poet.

Lazarus (1st Draft), by Anne Carson

Inside the rock on which we live, another rock.
So they believe.
What is a Lamb of God? People use this phrase.
I don't know.
I watch my sister, fingers straying absently about her mustache,
no help there.
Leaves stir through the house like souls, they stream
from the porch,
catch in the speaking holes, glow and are gone.
Remember
what Prince Andrei said when they told him Moscow had burnt
right down to the ground.
He said Really?
A man who had been to the war! had seen our lives are just blind arrows flying.
There he sat
on his cot all the same, trying to get the string to the bowhorn.
Actions go on in us,
nothing else goes on. While a blurred and breathless hour
repeats, repeats.

Favorite Passages: The Road Back, by Erich Maria Remarque

If you were to ask me who I thought the single most underrated writer of all time was, my answer would be Erich Maria Remarque. Sure, his novel All Quiet on the Western Front is one of the most famous anti-war books of all time. But as a writer, he is extremely overlooked. He wrote at least ten other novels besides All Quiet, and they are nearly all out of print in America. In Germany, his home country, it's still possible to find a Remarque novel floating around, but over here, it's as if he was never more than a one-hit wonder.

Well, I won't stand for it. Remarque is one of my favorite novelists, and although all his work starts to look the same after awhile (all of it centers around the effects of the world wars for Germans), all his books are startlingly beautiful. They have the thinnest of plots, but the characters are all lovingly created. Most importantly, Remarque fully understands and sympathizes with the inability of the human mind to deal with tragedy. Nearly all his characters are dealing with some form of post-traumatic stress disorder, struggling to maintain connections with other people after losing so much. His books are extremely well-built, both emotionally and physically, with life building up to a character's breaking point. He's a master of internal turmoil.

My favorite Remarque novel is The Road Back. Written only a year after All Quiet, it is often called a "sequel" to that book (and it's true that most of All Quiet's characters get name-checked in the novel). The Road Back takes place as World War I comes to a close, as the narrator, Ernst, and his friends struggle to re-adjust to society. They feel alienated from their government, their families, and their hometowns. Unable to find work and feeling as though their country betyrayed them, they cannot cope with the new world order in Germany. The book is extremely haunting. I first read it in high school, and I still remember sitting on my living room couch, crying fiercely through the last 50 pages or so. And even though it's a sad book, it completely explains what happened to Germany between the world wars, leading to the rise of Hitler. In fact, Remarque's early novels were so disillusioned with Germany and the rise of fringe nationalist political parties, that the Nazis made sure all his books were destroyed when they came to power.

This passage from the book comes towards the very beginning, before Ernst truly learns the meaning of the word "jaded." Ernst and his fellow soldiers are headed on the long path home as the war comes to a close. Remarque often uses the beauty of nature to counteract the horror of uprooted humanity, and this passage displays how Ernst finds peace in his surroundings even as the dead and dying are all around him.

From The Road Back, by Erich Maria Remarque
Translated by A.W. Wheen:

As I marched on with pack and lowered head, by the side of the road I see an image of bright, silken trees reflected in the pools of rain. In these occasional mirrors they are displayed clearer than in reality. They get another light and in another way. Embedded there in the brown earth lies a span of sky, trees, depths and clearness. Suddenly I shiver. For the first time in many years I feel again that something is still beautiful, that this in all its simplicity is beautiful and pure, this image in the water pool before me - and in this thrill my heart leaps up. For a moment all that other falls away, and now, for the first time, I feel it; I see it; I comprehend it fully: Peace. The weight that nothing eased before, now lifts at last. Something strange, something new flies up, a dove, a white dove. --Trembling horizon, tremulous expectancy, first glimpse, presentiment, hope, exaltation, imminence: Peace.

Sudden panic, and I look around. There behind me on the stretchers my comrades are now lying and still they call. It is peace, yet they must die. But I, I am trembling with joy and am not ashamed. --And that is odd.

Because none can ever wholly feel what another suffers - is that the reason why wars perpetually occur?


That last line is probably one of my favorite in all of literature. I hope you might all feel brave enough to check out Remarque sometime. He never disappoints. What he wrote about really mattered, and not a lot of writers can say that.

Poem of the Week: "Meditation at Lagunitas," by Robert Hass

For the last month or so, I've been meaning to use this poem as my Poem of the Week. Robert Hass's "Meditation at Lagunitas" is definitely in my list of top five favorite poems. It starts out really highbrow and a little hard to understand, but those last eight lines are killer. Of all the poems I have ever read (including Larkin's "Talking in Bed," which I included a few weeks ago along with a discussion about the amazingness of its ending), the final line of this poem is hands-down my favorite final line of poetry EVER. And this is definitely a poem to read aloud, so that last line has even more beauty and impact. In fact, the first time I ever heard this poem, a professor was reading it to our class. And the way he read it runs through my mind every time I see it.

Meditation at Lagunitas, by Robert Hass

All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island minnows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

An Open Letter to Barbara Kingsolver

Dear Barbara Kingsolver,

I think you are, without a doubt, one of the best living American writers. I am super-excited about your new novel, The Lacuna, which I plan to buy as a present to myself as soon as my grad school applications are finished later this month. Also, we share the same alma mater, which is cool. But I have a request - nay, a suggestion! - to make.

Bring back Taylor and Turtle and Jax and the gang. The Bean Trees and Pigs in Heaven are two of my favorite novels, and I miss your versions of the American West and nontraditional families. More importantly, the characters from these books are truly fantastic. I asked Taylor Greer to fight zombies with me. And Jax Thibodeaux? I'm in love with the man. These books and these characters have felt like a part of my life since I first read them in high school. Every couple years, I return to them so I can be part of the universe again. But you know what? Two is nice, but THREE IS BETTER!

That's right. For years, I have been secretly wishing and hoping and praying that maybe, just maybe, you'd be interested in writing a third book about these people. I would love to see how Jax and Taylor are adjusting to the possible married life, or how Turtle is handling the shift between her real family and her adopted family. Or maybe we could see what LuAnn is up to, or Alice? I know you've gotten away from these early family-centered novels to explore more political work. You are very interested in the environment, which is great, but is there anyway you could maybe mix that interest in with a plotline involving Jax? Also, you could get some politics into such a book if you make it take place in Jax's hometown of New Orleans. Imagine a book where Jax returns there after the hurricane and sees his estranged family. That is a book I would seriously sit in line for days to buy, a book I'd read over and over again.

This is all just a possibility. As a writer, it would get really old to have to keep returning to old creations. But I never felt like Taylor, Jax, and Turtle's story was really finished. Sure, I have my own ideas about what happens to them after Pigs in Heaven ends. I lay in bed at night and fall asleep to the plotlines I create for these kick-ass characters. So maybe, just maybe, you might think about a Taylor Greer trilogy....

Because you know what? For some reason, no one is writing Bean Trees/Pigs in Heaven fanfiction.

Love, Beth

Poem of the Week: "We Never Know," by Yusef Komunyakaa

Yusef Komunyakaa is probably the first poet I really remember making me pause and think. I had always breezed through poetry in my teen years, not paying any attention to them. Then, in my first year of college, I was introduced to Yusef Komunyakaa, and suddenly I could no longer toss poems away as useless. His book Dien Cai Dau, about his experiences in the Vietnam War, is full of tragedy and meaning and loss. It's a great introduction to poetry in that it concentrates on a single topic but has surprising ruminations and gorgeous lines. It's a fantastic book that I'd recommend to anyone. This poem, one of the book's shortest, is also one of it's most powerful. "We Never Know" is the poem that made me realize that even the slightest of poetry could contain the same emotional capacity as a 400-page novel. The awesome thing about poetry is that it cares as much for what goes unsaid as it does it what's written. This poem is the perfect example of that power of suggestion.

We Never Know, by Yusef Komunyakaa

He danced with tall grass
for a moment, like he was swaying
with a woman. Our gun barrels
glowed white-hot.
When I got to him,
a blue halo
of flies had already claimed him.
I pulled the crumpled photograph
from his fingers.
There's no other way
to say this: I fell in love.
The morning cleared again,
except for a distant mortar
& somewhere choppers taking off.
I slid the wallet into his pocket
& turned him over, so he wouldn't be
kissing the ground.