2005 Reading List

As best as I can recall...

Fiction
Stone of Farewell, Tad Williams
Galapagos, Kurt Vonnegut
Close Range, Annie Proulx
Texas, James Michener
The Last Picture Show, Larry McMurtry
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, Susanna Clarke
Life of Pi, Yann Martel
The Brothers K, David James Duncan (re-read)
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, Mark Haddon
A Complicated Kindness, Miriam Toewes
Rockbound, Frank Parker Day*
The Double Hook, Sheila Watson*
Barometer Rising, Hugh McClennan*
They Shall Inherit the Earth, Morley Callaghan*
The Second Scroll, A.M. Kline*
Swamp Angel, Ethel Wilson*
By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, Elizabeth Smart*
Selected Stories & Selected Plays, Anton Chekov*

Non Fiction
Cash: The Autobiography, Johnny Cash
Friday Night Lights, H.G. Bissinger
Hard Scrabble, John Graves
In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas, Larry McMurtry
Dakota, Kathleen Norris
Canada, A People's History (can't remember the author)
The Polysyllabic Spree, Nick Hornby
The Way of the Heart, Henri Nouwen
The Way of the Pilgrim, Anonymous
Another Beauty, Adam Zagajewski

Plus quite a bit of poetry, especially that of Andrew Hudgins, Mark Jarman, Dave Smith, Jane Kenyon, Adam Zagajewski, and Czeslaw Milosz.

The over-arching theme of the year seems to have been baptism in Canadiana and nostalgia for the homeland.

* read for class

# posted by Daniel at 10:13 AM.

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A question

I want to post here with more regularity, but have been feeling aimless and uninspired for topics to write about. Furthermore, I'm trying to post less poetry, as I've been doing lots of submissions to journals/reviews/etc. Near as I can tell posting poems here actually counts as a form of publication, which technically means I shouldn't be sending them out.

So here's your chance: what sort of thing do you want to read? And those of you who feel the urge to respond "Whatever you want to write about!" please refrain from saying anything. Specific topics or questions only, please.

# posted by Daniel at 1:44 PM.

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Poem

THE DEAD DON'T GIVE A DAMN

i.

It's not the dead we hear after midnight,
dragging themselves through the attic,
drunken raccoons. They're not

the ones who appear when summoned
in the mirrors of darkened bathrooms
or who spell our names in spilled flour.

They don't care if we find the murderer
or the box of coins in the backyard
or even if we know how much they loved us.

Not the dead. They lie composed
like finished songs for anyone to sing,
their many crises resolved

or unresolved. Whatever. They've waited
long enough to lie down undisturbed
for longer than a single night.

They're not coming back. Not ever.


ii.

No--it's our children and their children
and so on nested into each other

like Russian dolls, restless
in their incorporeality as kids behind
the curtain at a school play, lined up

waiting for bright lights, a stage, applause.
They look over our shoulders,
shake their translucent heads at our mistakes.

We know they're there, remember perching
with them on our own parents' heads,
promising to be much better. And now

we've let them down, shown ourselves
mortal, which is why they shift the furniture
while we sleep, swirl freakish lights

in midnight woods. So we'll remember
we were going to fix everything.
How we were going to be perfect.

# posted by Daniel at 4:17 PM.

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A History of Poetry, pt. 1

Not "the" history of poetry. "A" history. My history; or, how I came to the folly and craft of the writing of poems.

During sophomore year of high school a friend of mine, one Aaron Winter, wrote the last three lines of Matthew Arnold's "The Buried Life" ("And then he thinks he knows/The hills where his life rose/And the sea where it goes") on the chalkboard in Nate Monroe's English classroom, where some of us would hang out after school. It was probably in reference to a girl. We did a lot of writing on chalkboards for the sake of young and unrequited love in those days. It was during the same semester I scrawled my devotion to an unwilling young cheerleader aquaintance of mine on many a chalkboard. Fortunately I did so in Latin. Extremely poor second year Latin I might add, so that even if someone schooled in the classics had happened by they would have been unable to translate my complaint.

This is what we did in Latin class when we weren't deciphering Caesar's account of the Gallic wars ("Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres...") or the first lines of Virgil's Aenead (Arma virumque cano Trojoae qui primus ab oris"). We'd figure out sweet, sexy things to say to women, or perversly scatalogical things to say to each other. Or we'd just translate R.E.M. lyrics.

We didn't go on many dates. At least I didn't.

But back to Matthew Arnold. After looking at the tail end of Buried Life for a couple of weeks curiosity got the best of me and I hunted it down. I'll save you the trouble--read it here. I read it compulsively for weeks, loved everything about it: the rhythm and immediacy of the language, the way he took a pretty complicated discourse and made it rhyme. Most of all, though, I loved the subject. Sixteen years old is a pretty great time to come across a poem whose basic thesis is, "We're all alone and isolated from other people, but sometimes when we're with someone we love we don't feel alone and isolated any more, and it's pretty cool." I liked the poem enough to forgive words and phrases like "limpid eyes," "Alas!" and the repeated use of the word "breast" in reference to male anatomy. For someone barely old enough to drive, this is saying a great deal.

So how well does the poem stand up now? There's some aspects of Arnold's style that drive me nuts--the obvious rhymes, the contorted syntax. The sharp dichotomy he draws between Ah! the maddening world and Ah! love our tender respite reads as fairly juvenile now, and not nearly as insightful or striking or original as I remember. But I still read the poem with pleasure.

At sixteen, of course, I wasn't going to music or poetry for pure aesthetic pleasure or for an appreciation of artistic merits. Like anyone that age I was looking for something to explain and legitimize my turbulent emotional life, and it didn't matter if it was Matthew Arnold or Matthew Sweet. Of course, that also meant that when I started writing poems myself (which happened around this time) the results would be pretty ugly. And forlorn. Oh so forlorn.

Coming soon: Up all night with J. Alfred, and Flashback: Reciting Frost and Longfellow in Fifth Grade

# posted by Daniel at 3:37 PM.

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New blogs

I've recently become involved in a couple of new group blogs. The first, Poasis, intends to wrestle with issues pertaining to Christianity and the Arts, Christians in the Arts, the Arts in Christianity, etc. This a follow up of sorts to the Telling the Truth Conference I participated in a couple months ago.

The other is a reincarnation or transmigration or something of Socrates' Front Porch, which Michael Moreland and I founded lo these many years ago. My good friend Jonathan Hunter of Way of the Tiger fame has with our permission appropriated the name to use for his new undergraduate philosophy blog. Other than myself the participants are all University of Texas philosophy students, and will no doubt kick the ass of my logic all the way from First Principle to In Conclusion.

Should also give a shout out to Matt Bingham, who rants, raves, and recommends all manner of things Canadian and otherwise over at Home of the Bing.

# posted by Daniel at 2:56 PM.

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Poem online

Just got word that my poem "Foreign Policy" is online in the latest edition of Red River Review. A much earlier draft of this poem appeared here at some point in the last year and a half. You can read the shiny new other-website version here.

# posted by Daniel at 12:24 AM.

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There's something very wrong with the world

I might've been in Kindergarten, though I'm not sure. We moved back to town when I was five or six, and it happened while we were still living in the trailer north of Abilene on a narrow quarter acre of land. Our trailer faced the road; the back side of the property, abutting a field, had an old barn or house in an advanced state of falling-in. Our driveway was white caliche gravel that, with age, had begun to take on the color of the surrounding dirt. Approaching cars made a distinctive crunch turning in off the county road.

The Merritts* were a family from church. Our church home during the early eighties was any one of a series of non-denominational, quasi-charismatic churches that flourished, fought, split and vanished in and around Abilene during that time. The Merritts were white trash. Ignorant, needy people. I knew that even as a child; my mom was friends with Moira, the mother of the family, and her son Donald was my age, so we spent a fair amount of time together. There was something strange, something vicious about the kid. He gave off the same vibe as a guy I later knew in middle school who bragged about running over cats with a lawnmower.

We were playing out in the front yard one day while my mom and Moira were inside. Front yard in July or August meant drought-split dirt marked with weeds and a few stunted mesquite trees. Temperatures in the nineties at least. We had my red plastic baseball bat out, swinging disinterestedly at a softball.

Grasshoppers were everywhere, and enormous. That summer was particularly bad for them. They could grow as long as two inches; they'd swarm up out of the yard you when you walked to the car, landing on your clothes, making a nasty mess whenever you stepped on one. I hated them.

After awhile Donald took the bat and wandered over by the cars in the driveway. He started smashing grasshoppers, grinning every time he brought the bat down.

I'm not, nor have I ever been sentimental about insects. I kill spiders, flies, and roaches unapologetically. I spray Raid into wasp nests without the slightest twitch of guilt. As a child I dismembered crickets and dropped roly-polys into red ant beds with a sort of scientific curiosity. The destruction of grasshoppers isn't per se something I care much about, and it didn't alarm me then.

What disturbed me about Donald smashing the grasshoppers was his grin. The kid was clearly taking a great deal of pleasure in smashing them, and it upset me in a way I couldn't have begun to express at the time. "There is something very wrong with the world," I might've said. "I don't know what it is, but his smile is part of it."

The point here is not that Donald was a sick kid who's probably serving jail time. The point is that he's in all likelihood a perfectly normal, well-adjusted adult. The flicker of savagery I saw on his face isn't different in kind from what I've felt in some degree at other times--the sharp pleasure of watching justice crush an offender, the rush that comes with exercising power, the comforting sensation of giving an insulting name to someone who's offended me, and by naming them controlling them, at least in my own minds. I'm just usually better at concealing (or justifying) the feeling than Donald.


* names changed for the sake of deceny

# posted by Daniel at 12:47 PM.

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I don't like the BCS either, but...

Congress calls hearing on 'deeply flawed' BCS

A House Energy and Commerce subcommittee, charged with regulating America's sports industry, announced Friday it will conduct a hearing on the BCS next week, after this season's bowl matchups are determined.

"College football is not just an exhilarating sport, but a billion-dollar business that Congress cannot ignore," said committee Chairman Joe Barton, a Texas Republican. Barton's panel is separate from the House Government Reform panel that tackled steroids in baseball.

"Too often college football ends in sniping and controversy, rather than winners and losers," Barton said. "The current system of determining who's No. 1 appears deeply flawed."

Anyone want to bet that Congressman Barton's an SEC fan? Gimme a break. I'd like to think that our nation's legislature can find better things to with its time than this.

Don't let Dubya hear about this, though. Otherwise we'll find ourselves embroiled in a 200 billion dollar mission to "liberate" college football faster than you can say "Pasadena".

And he calls himself a Texan. And, for that matter, a Republican. Sheesh.

# posted by Daniel at 5:44 PM.

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