Iris Murdoch and her husband, John Bailey

The last time I visited Auntie’s in Spokane, I nearly ran into a pillar.  Thankfully, no one seemed to be watching.  Also, that pillar was covered with staff-recommended books.  The one closest to my head, which would have left its imprint on my forehead if I hadn’t snapped out of my daydream in time, was The Bell by Iris Murdoch.

I’d seen the movie Iris a couple of times (it features three of my very favorite actors–Judi Dench, Kate Winslet, and Jim Broadbent–who were, incidentally, all nominated for Oscars for their performances in this film) but had never encountered any of Dame Iris’s books before, so naturally I was curious.

For a book written by a noted philosopher, The Bell is surprisingly easy to read.  The prose bears the marks of its time (some overwriting, adjective stacking, etc.) and at times, Murdoch does use some of the trademark tools of the philosophical novel (long speeches delivered by characters, stretches of philosophical internal monologue).  But overall, she lets the reader figure out the message for him/herself–and I appreciated that. Read more »

Frank Zafiro is the author of the River City crime novels and also writes mainstream fiction under the name Frank Scalise, which is his actual name. Born and raised in Spokane, he joined the U.S. Army after high school graduation and served in Military Intelligence. He’s been a Spokane police officer since 1993 and has served as patrol officer, corporal, detective, sergeant and lieutenant. His current title is captain.

Zafiro has written seriously since he was thirteen, starting out with short stories and poetry. Last week I reviewed his River City series. If you didn’t read that post, let me summarize: I’m a big fan.  As Frank’s latest stalker groupie, I emailed him with a bunch of questions about his journey towards publication and being a writer while working full time.

Here are the questions and his answers. Enjoy!

When and why did you begin writing? 

When?  Well, like most writers, I began pretty early.  Maybe eight or so?  But by ten, I knew I wanted to be a writer, so that is the age I usually give in response to this question.  To be honest, I don’t ever remember I time where I didn’t want to be a writer.

Why? The same reason almost each of you write…because I’m a writer.  

I know that sounds like I’m being a smart alec, but I’m really not.  Much in the same way that a musician plays music or a carpenter works wood, I write because it is who I am.  I’d write even if I couldn’t get anyone to read what I’ve written.  I am a writer.  I write.  I suspect that most of the people reading this understand perfectly.  The rest probably think I’m being pretentious. Read more »

Frank Zafiro is an author that many people have recommended to me, but for one reason or another I never got around to reading his stuff. At a recent book signing I finally purchased Under a Raging Moon, the first book in the River City Crime series published by Gray Dog Press. (Coincidentally, this is where our own Marcus Corder now spends many of his working hours.) I finished the novel in one sitting and then rushed down to Auntie’s to purchase Heroes Often Fail and Beneath a Weeping Sky. Now I’m impatiently waiting for the fourth book, End Every Man Has to Die, which won’t be out until March 2011.

River City is fictional, but readers familiar with Spokane will recognize street names and landmarks mentioned in the books. The novels have fast paced plots and fantastic characters. As many of you know, I’m a fan of women’s fiction with strong female leads, but my other weakness is police procedurals and crime/legal thrillers. (My TiVo also have season passes to all flavors of Law & Order.) I love these plot driven books, but they won’t keep my attention unless I’m invested in and care about the characters. In a recent Willow Springs interview, Jess Walter talked about how crime fiction often focus too much on plot but that the complaint about literary fiction is that there isn’t enough story. He thinks there’s a “sweet spot in the middle” that an author can aim for. Zafiro’s novels hit right at that perfect spot and this is one of the reasons why I’m such a huge fan. Read more »

Gil Adamson’s book, The Outlander, took me by surprise. It was a recommended book at Powell’s bookstore, and I had heard that Adamson was by trade a poet. It brought to mind other books written by poets, the most famous of which was Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, a sprawling, glacial eight-hundred pages. The Outlander clocked in at around three hundred and seventy pages, and I put off reading it for a few months. When I finally did sit down to read it, I expected a turgid, image driven book that suffered from a dearth of character. I was completely wrong.
The plot (a dirty word to most literati) is established in the first four paragraphs. The widow murdered her husband and she is running from her brother-in-laws—twin red heads that feel like they came straight from a Cormac McCarthy novel—who are hunting her: simple, straightforward, and spare. Once the broad strokes of the plot have been established, Adamson subtly fills in successively finer details in a way that doesn’t feel like she’s withholding critical information.
In many ways, this book has the immediacy of James Dickey’s (also a poet) Deliverance, the spare, diction driven prose of McCarthy’s The Road, and the hallucinatory nature of Mempo Giardinelli’s Sultry Moon. It’s a quick, rewarding read that is difficult to put down.

I’ve officially climbed out of the tower. I finished my third degree, and I’m done with academia, at least as a student. And I have to say, I kind of feel like I want to give my brain a bath, get all that academic nonsense outta there. Only the nonsense, not the good sense. But sometimes it’s difficult to tell the difference.

Example: My boyfriend and I have been writing language arts lessons for a website for pay this summer. The way it works is you write a lesson, turn it in to the online submission manager, and wait. They give the lesson to three reviewers who then give you feedback. You’re supposed to take that feedback and use it to revise your lesson. Pretty simple really. But yesterday Dylan received reviews of his very first lesson. Two of them were very positive, didn’t want him to change much, but one of them was kind of scathing (if something can be kind of scathing) as if this reviewer (who we’ve decided is a little old lady who hates creativity and fun) was out to get him from the start. Everything was wrong, according to this reviewer, the whole lesson a failure.

Unfortunately, this reminded me of graduate poetry workshops. Read more »

Poems that Open the Summer of Your Mind

The best reading experiences seem to happen in summer. You’re finally free from the overbearing school year. You get to pick up the books whose petticoats you’ve been peeking up. Yesterday I turned in my grades for the science fiction class I was teaching and felt my first afternoon of summer. I picked up The Dragonfly, the poems of Amelia Rosselli translated from the Italian by Deborah Woodard and Giuseppe Leporace, published by Chelsea Editions.  

I was lucky enough to receive a copy of this beautiful book from Deborah who was one of my literature professors at the University of Washington in 1995 and who has remained a generous mentor to me ever since. And though Deborah is worlds beyond me intellectually—and, therefore, so are her interests and her work—I found The Dragonfly to be accessible. If I read it in winter or even this fall, maybe I’ll dig further into the philosophical layers and poetics, but now, in a summer state of mind, it purely entertained and infused me with the delirious logic that I love to soak in when reading poetry.  

Roselli uses repetition to dizzying effect. Do you remember how delicious it is to roll down a grassy hill? Roselli’s hills are covered in wildflowers, cottonwood puffs, feathers, leaves, grasses, strings, and as you roll you collect, becoming nestly and wild. She does this best in the title poem, “The Dragonfly,” which was originally published in Yale Italian Poetry. Here’s an example of what I mean:  

I don’t know if I rhyme from bliss or beleaguered
pain. I don’t know if I rhyme for enchantment or for reason
and don’t know if you know that I rhyme exclusively
for you. Too much sun has the sea drunk in its
placid prison, where the embroidery of the
sea refuses to lay a hand on sunken vessels.
Dawn shades to gray in the distance… (95)                               

The world of “I don’t know” rolls from intense feeling to intimacy to untamed natural imagery that is stuck in the confines of needlepoint and perspective. Here’s some more rolling and wild gathering: Read more »

Dawn Raffel’s third book, she tells Michael Kimball in a great interview, is “at its heart…about what we do with loss.” She strips the language down to its essentials to reflect her mourning characters’ desperation. They manage what they can. Sometimes they can only handle nouns.

The past never changes materially—visit and visit, Eliana thinks. Her head is in the basin. The dead are still dead. She splashes the water onto her face; she towels—absorption.

Slippers, headache, ever so slight. The cells that must wriggle and wriggle and wriggle inside her. “One, two…”

A seed, a wretched pellet.

She smells Jerome’s skin as she lies down beside him, divided, awake, and wonders, will she miss him?

Once inside their worry, I felt similarly to the way I did reading Mary Robison’s Why Did I Ever, a little manic but heavily invested. Read more »

Andre Aciman Knows What You Don't

I usually don’t read “The Mail,” letters to the New Yorker from readers. I did once, though, and the letter I read from the March 1, 2010 issue still haunts me.

It begins with a hard to resist hook, “Although, as an author, I know not to quibble with book reviewers, I should point out a misleading suggestion in your review of my most recent novel, ‘Eight White Nights’ (Briefly Noted, February 15th and 22nd).”

Right away, I’m intrigued by what would provoke an author to take issue with the representation of his book in a review. He acknowledges that he is entering forbidden territory; I trust he has a good reason for what he is about to do and I want to find out what it is. He continues, “The reviewer quotes a passage—‘in two hundred years would, if it was cold in the icy silence of the tomb, so haunt my days and chill my dreaming nights that I would wish my own heart dry of blood’—as an instance of my style. I am flattered by the compliment, but the real author of the passage…” At this point in the letter we realize that there has been a gross oversight on the part of the reviewer. Do you know who Andre Aciman was quoting in his book? If you do, you win. You win all that is worthy in the world of abstract, virtually unacknowledgeable reward.

For the rest of us, we just have to read on to find out who was being quoted, “but the real author of the passage in question, perhaps unbeknownst to your reviewer” (OUCH) “is John Keats. Similar quotes crop up in my novel whenever the narrator tries to grasp what is happening to him.” It looks like one person’s career as a reviewer could be over. Read more »

They were dead all along.
Hurley was still fat. He liked opening cans. There should’ve been more hunting on the island. More boar hunting with spears. Shirtless men following the beast into the jungle, surrounding it, thrusting their spears, a final killing blow. I would have watched another season if the producers stocked the island with other animals to hunt: panthers, Kodiak bears, Wallace Stevens. If the show was more like Cabela’s Big Game Hunter on Wii. I love that Goddamned game.
There should’ve been more broads too, but on a separate island. I liked the dark-headed one. She was feisty. I wonder what she would look like in jodhpurs, polishing my rifle. The blonde one with the bad hair reminds me of my second wife.
The last episode was sappy, a candy-ass convention, everybody kissing and embracing each other. I almost changed the channel to watch some UFC. Ken Shamrock was a god. Now there was a man. He settled his problems the way a man should, half naked and choking his enemies into submission. LOST should’ve been about courage. Sawyer and Jack drinking aperitifs, and complaining about women. If only Sawyer would cut off that lady hair of his.

This isn’t a review because I haven’t finished reading yet, or looking. But I figured I’d say some things about this book that is folded like an accordion into a box.

I’ve profoundly admired Canadian poet/classicist Anne Carson ever since I found her book Autobiography of Red in a stairwell in the East Village several years ago (in the same pile, in fact, as another book that thereafter became one of my favorites– Journey to the End of the Night).

Though Carson is known for keeping her personal stories private, Nox is an art book/scrapbook of sorts that pieces together bits of letters, old photos, and words relating to the disappearance of her older brother in 1978 and his eventual death in 2000. The thread holding these bits of gathered information together is a poem by the Roman poet Catallus, which Carson translates word by word in litany-like “lexical entries.” The book is essentially a high quality photocopy rendition of a notebook Carson began to staple things into after her brother’s death–collecting what she knew about him.

Read more »