But what can poets do about the missing words, gone even from those lips that longed to say them—like wishes floating off above the river, like coins tos
But what can poets do about the missing words, gone even from those lips that longed to say them—like wishes floating off above the river, like coins tossed from barges, bridges, bateaux mouches?
Where else is this happening? Is it happening at home? In a world reduced to billboards, he would be totally unnerved. The strangely exiled poet has been drinking for ten days but this has only sharpened his worry about the words...
from George Borisov in Paris
John Balaban, in this tender poem about an aging Bulgarian poet published in his 2006 collection Path, Crooked Path, touches prophetically on the worry so many of us who adore words, who write, create, publish, rinse, repeat, fret ever more about. It's not just billboards anymore: the world seems reduced to a thin, postcard-sized implement we are never more than inches from, from which emanates the urgencies, exigencies and shouts of the world over, leaving little room for words that heal. Words that matter.
I want you to know the worst and be free from it I want you to know the worst and still find good. Day by day, as you play nearby or laugh with the ladies at Peoples Bank as we go around town and I find myself beaming like a fool, I suspect I am here less for your protection than you are here for mine, as if you were sent to call me back into our helpless tribe.
from Words for My Daughter
In this exquisite collection of some of his most resonant poetry, essays and translations, John Balaban reminds us why words matter, and why we should stop and rest awhile with words, why we should listen to the gods.
Balaban was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, but he rejected his student deferment and travelled to Vietnam in the late 60s with the International Volunteer Services to teach at Can Tho University. He was injured during the Tet Offensive, but returned to Vietnam to care for war-injured children and later, to record and translate ca dao, a Vietnamese oral poetic form.
A tiny bird with red feathers, a tiny bird with black beak drinks up the lotus pond day by day. Perhaps I must leave you.
Passing Through a Gate invites the reader to pass through a threshold into the nourishing, poignant, sensual world of Balaban's poetry and the grounded, delightful humanity of his essays—from the time he and his wife, freshly landed from Vietnam and only in their twenties, hosted Jane Fonda, Tom Hayden and their entourage during Fonda and Hayden's anti-war tour, to getting terrifyingly lost in the desert of New Mexico — Balaban as an old man who simply thought to take an early morning walk around the landscape where he was alone, working on a book.
The poetry takes us from New Mexico to Vietnam, the Pacific Northwest to Greece, and to his parents' home country of Romania. Along the way, Balaban hitchhikes across America, an eternal restlessness stirring the poet's soul. His work is deeply rooted in landscape, his language as clear and refreshing as a mountain stream.
There is a timelessness about Balaban's work that makes these poems easy and necessary to return to again and again- my copy is dog-eared with the many that caught my breath and my heart. This is a necessary collection of a beloved poet.
N.B. Although I am a staff member of Copper Canyon Press —this book's publisher—any and all comments are strictly my own....more
For if grace woke me to God's presence in the world and in my heart, it also woke me to his absence. I never truly felt the pain of unbelief until I bFor if grace woke me to God's presence in the world and in my heart, it also woke me to his absence. I never truly felt the pain of unbelief until I began to believe.
A non-linear series of essays on what it means to be an artist of faith in the face of immense personal and existential suffering, My Bright Abyss plumbs the depths of ambivalence and emerges with glimmers of grace.
This is not a theological treatise; instead, it explores doubt and the struggle to believe in God. At times, Wiman can be bewilderingly opaque as he spins readers from quotes from Ulysses to poems by Mandelstam to Meister Eckhart mysticism and you find yourself rereading passages to catch up to his intellectual fever. Then he springs something like this, and clarity arrives like a sunrise: Faith steals upon you like dew: some days you wake and it is there. And like dew, it gets burned off in the rising sun of anxieties, ambitions, distractions.
I dogeared so many pages, highlighted several passages, and copied quotes into my journal, finding resonance in Wiman's return to his childhood faith after many years of eschewing religiosity. As a writer, I connected with his explications of literary texts in communicating faith, from the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins to the novels of Marilynne Robinson. I also found purchase in the struggle to overcome the inherent squeamishness of our post-modern culture for faith, including the stains of anti-intellectualism and harm. Wiman casts a side-eye to American evangelism, but counters the sneers of anti-religionists with the wisdom of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Simone Weil, Thomas Merton.
Ultimately, Wiman embraces the "motion of the soul toward God," and divine love—"Love which awakens our souls and to which we cling like the splendid mortal creatures that we are, asks us to let it go, to let it be more than it is if it is only us." This is a beautiful exploration of the mystery of faith, one I will return to for its many reflections, poems, and inspirations. ...more
Years after her son's beheading by ISIS became an international spectacle, Diane Foley reveals a mother's indescribable anguish at the murder and her Years after her son's beheading by ISIS became an international spectacle, Diane Foley reveals a mother's indescribable anguish at the murder and her courage in its aftermath. American Mother tells the story of James Foley's curious and courageous spirit, his capture, torture and eventual — perhaps inevitable — end at the hands of terrorists. It also tells the story of his mother's determination not to let the horrific death fade without consequence. Through Colum McCann's clear-eyed, searing prose, Diane's voice peals like a church bell on a winter morning, echoing with longing, warning, and hope.
Long after the headlines faded, the family and friends of James Foley — a freelance journalist committed to shining a spotlight on the atrocities of war — continued to seek justice for James and for all Americans held hostage by foreign entities, particularly journalists, who the U.S. government deems expendable. Diane Foley is unflinching in her criticism of the Obama administration and of the former president himself, who appears cold and perfunctory as he extends his condolences but refuses to accept any responsibility for James Foley's death (Foley, held hostage in Syria for two years along with journalists from several other Western nations, had to endure the crushing disappointment as French, Spanish and other European nationals were set free while he remained captive. A demonstration of the U.S. government's "we don't negotiate with terrorists"policy.).
Diane Foley also leans into her Christian faith to explore what forgiveness feels and looks like. The exploration eventually leads her to sit across the table from Alexanda Kotey, a British national turned ISIS radical, who was convicted of conspiring to murder James and three other journalist-hostages. Kotey is currently serving eight consecutive life sentences in a supermax prison in Colorado. Diane spent three days in conversation with Kotey, seeking to understand the man who was, in part, responsible for her son's murder, and to instill in him some understanding of a mother's grief.
American Mother is impossible to put down. McCann holds the tension like a live wire, weaving moments of grace with keening anger and sadness. It is a singular narrative that bears witness to the insanities of political extremism and the politics of justice. Beautifully rendered as both reportage and memoir, this is an exceptional read....more
There is a fragility to this slender investigation of poetry’s intersection with faith, underscored by the lingering question “what does one want whenThere is a fragility to this slender investigation of poetry’s intersection with faith, underscored by the lingering question “what does one want when one cannot stop wanting?” Poet and Yale professor of Divinity Christian Wiman, who served as editor-in-chief of Poetry from 2003 to 2013, reflects on his own reluctant acceptance of mortality as he navigates rare blood cancer. The diagnosis arrives just a year after beginning his tenure at the celebrated journal, when he is falling in love and planning to leave the job that is proving to be too little art and too much bureaucracy. The job interrupts his own artistic endeavors in a way that the cancer diagnosis will interrupt the expected progression of his future, but eventually, without being able to shake either one, he settles into an uneasy acceptance of both (the job, of course, was voluntary but he holds onto it far longer than intended).
Wiman is a believer in Christianity but not necessarily one who holds a biblical worldview. He expresses mild scorn for the typical American Christian, who eagerly recites scripture as a hex against the finality of death, yet he can't quite believe in the atheist either, who posits there is nothing beyond the mortal coil. Poetry, it would seem, as well as the creative process itself, in all its futility and humility, is evidence enough of the grace of faith and proof of life of God.
The chapters explicate poems that have profoundly affected Wiman as a poet and a man exploring his faith. Work by Donald Hall, in whose home Wiman would come to live, by A.R. Ammons, Mark Strand, and Wiman's beloved Seamus Heaney, as well as commercial darling Mary Oliver, of whom the literati love to speak condescendingly and yet Wiman finds himself coming to her defense. Philip Larkin's lament Aubade provides this memoir's cornerstone, in all its grave musing on wretched inevitability of death.
At times, Wiman's own language tripped me up: There are poets who take you to the edge of language, either with words that begin to ease out of their referents (Mallarmé, Mandelstam, Hopkins, Eliot, Crane, Stevens) or with abstractions handled so concretely that you are jolted into an uncanny receptiveness anterior to "belief" or "disbelief" (Dickinson, Wilbur, Eliot again, Stevens again).
Honestly, what does any of that mean? But despite the occasional indulgence in heady poetics jargon, Wiman writes lovingly, conversationally, and quite beautifully of poetry, poets, God, and encounters with his own morality.
In fact, my copy of this book is aswirl with sections underlined and parenthesized in blue highlighter. In reference to Susan Howe’s book That, This he writes
I read this passage over and over. It still seems to me a fresh and useful description of what poetry (“sound-colored secrets”) can do and why we read and need it (“proof against our fear of emptiness”). It is also a beautiful—and, I think accurate—description of what an experience of God can be and do in our lives… It’s also why poetry is so important in the world, even if few people read it. Its truth is irreducible, inexhaustible, atomic; its existence as natural and necessary as a stand of old-growth trees so far in the Arctic that only an oil company would ever see it…
This resonates deeply with me as I experience daily the tension between my desire to create and my sense of inadequacy as a writer, amidst a renewal of my Christian faith.
Wiman explores this tension but seems most interested in the tension itself, rather than the resolution of it. Yet, in his investigation of Larkin’s Aubade he concludes this:
The real issue, for anyone who suffers the silences of God and seeks real redemption, is that art is not enough. Those sorts of time are not enough to hang a life on. At some point you need a universally redemptive activity. You need grace that has nothing to do with your own efforts, for at some point—whether because of disease or despair, exhaustion or loss—you will have no efforts left to make.
This is a book I refer to time and again, for inspiration and for grounding. A beautiful read for anyone contemplating the nature of art and its impact on the soul....more
Over a period of 15 years, Stéphane Breitweiser, with the assistance of his girlfriend, Anne-Catherine Kleinklaus, stole an estimated $2 billion dollaOver a period of 15 years, Stéphane Breitweiser, with the assistance of his girlfriend, Anne-Catherine Kleinklaus, stole an estimated $2 billion dollars worth of art from regional museums in France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Belgium and the Netherlands. The thieves carried out their escapades in plain sight of guards and other museum patrons, Breitweiser using nothing more than a Swiss Army multitool to pop display case seals and to remove frame brads. They stashed their loot in backpacks, purses, down pants legs and up shirtsleeves. Favoring work from the Renaissance, they stole paintings, sculptures, tobacco boxes, goblets, a crossbow. Breitweiser even hauled at 150-lb wooden sculpture from a church and stashed it in the back of Anne-Catherine's hatchback.
All of these stolen works of art were displayed for the couple's pleasure in the attic rooms of Breitweiser's mother's home in Mulhouse, France, where he and Anne-Catherine lived, rent-free. An only child of divorced parents who was raised in comfort, Breitweiser is a narcissist, a self-taught aesthete, a preternaturally-skilled kleptomaniac and an emotionally stunted jerk.
Michael Finkel crafts a meticulous reportage of Breitweiser's crimes, building from hours of personal interviews with the thief, as well as investigative reports, psychological tests, and trial transcripts. The book excels with meticulous details of the audacious thefts. Less satisfying is the deep dive into Breitweiser's "why," but this is less a fault of the book and more a factor of Breitweiser's slippery personality and the bizarre nature of his crimes. Finkel does a terrific job of exploring the world of art crime in general, succinctly comparing Breitweiser's escapades to that of other famous thefts. The young Alsatian was unique in his hoarding of his spoils. Stolen art is typically trafficked, not collected for personal pleasure.
It's not a secret that Breitweiser was caught. What's astonishing is that it took so long. He exploited the vulnerability of small, regional museums that have scant security, and then there was the complexity of drawing patterns of thefts across international borders. His boldness was at the heart of his success, but ultimately arrogance was his downfall.
Despite the audacity and the caper-like adventures of Stéphane and Anne-Catherine, theirs is a pathetic and creepy story. Breitweiser is selfish, lazy, manipulative and weird. Anne-Catherine may have had occasional crises of conscience and tried to play off her complicity as some sort of emotional abuse by her boyfriend, but come on. She aided and abetted and ultimately got away scot-free.
A gripping and fast read, which is a relief because you really don't want to spend too much time in Breitweiser's empty world. Highly recommended!...more
Reviewing a memoir is tricky. You're inevitably poking around in someone's personal story, offering judgment on how the narrator has navigate3.5 stars
Reviewing a memoir is tricky. You're inevitably poking around in someone's personal story, offering judgment on how the narrator has navigated the hands dealt by life. Then again, the writer has put it all out there, telling stories they hope the public will read, at least as much for their own financial and platform-building success as for any truths they hope to convey. The best memoirs touch the universal in revealing the intimate, that no matter how distant your life may be from the author's, you feel an emotional connection.
I first encountered Rachel Louise Snyder in her staggering, vital No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us. This book made such an impression on me, resonated so deeply, I was primed to follow wherever Snyder led. I wasn't expecting to find that our life stories overlapped in strange ways. We're the same age, so our cultural references and filters mirrored each other. We were kids who lived idyllic lives in the 70s, only to see our worlds implode in the late 70s, early 80s. Snyder's life shock came sooner: her beloved mom died of cancer when Rachel was only 8 years old. While in my house, a tense, angry, occasionally violent marriage staggered to an end as I approached 11.
We were both raised in strict evangelical Christian homes and attended fundamentalist Christian schools. I was stunned to see Snyder write of the ACE curriculum—outside of my siblings and the schoolmates I lost touch with 40 years ago, I've never known anyone who was educated in this bizarre, self-paced system. Fortunately, my parents pulled us out after a couple of years-my brothers in jr. high, me in elementary. Snyder entered a similar school much later and was living in a home that gave up all rational thought to adhere to a cult-like approach to faith. That's where our stories diverge. Despite an unstable home, I kept to the relative straight and narrow: shaving my head and getting high before remedial math was a phase. Rachel went all in. Our paths converged again in college, when both the freedom and inspiration of university and pivotal study abroad experiences changed the direction of our lives (me, a year at a French university, Snyder with the Semester at Sea program, a 5-month cruise ship for coeds that visits ports of call around the world).
In between is a lost decade of sorts for Snyder and this period is the memoir's most compelling aspect. Her father remarried not long after being widowed and moved Rachel and her brother from Pennsylvania, away from her extended family, to the Chicago area. His new-found commitment to Christianity had a Jekyll and Hyde effect: he became distant and cruel, eventually physically abusive, excusing his violence with Scripture.
Rachel rebelled, turning to alcohol, drugs, and random sex, eventually running away from home multiple times before being kicked out of school—at this point she was in a public high school—and out of her house. Her spirit imbued with grit, she supported herself while couch-surfing or living in her car. She earned her GED and found her way to college. There the author found her voice and her vocation, leading to a career as an investigative journalist. It's a remarkable life story and at least initially, makes for fascinating reading.
What's missing for me here, despite the fantastic writing and vulnerability, is any deep reflection. There is a marked contrast between the first half of the book, which deals with Snyder's raw and painful coming of age, and the second half, which is more of a "this happened and then this happened" recitation of life events, while bizarrely glossing completely over her (recent?) divorce (we witness the courtship, the wedding, the birth of her baby girl, and then radio silence). The abrupt transition, both in subject and tone, from the deep dive of her Dickensian adolescence into more of a curriculum vitae of her young and middle adult years made me feel as though I were reading two different books.
Snyder holds religion at fault for the downturn of her childhood, but doesn't offer any exploration or examination of how this plays out later in her development. It feels like a deflection from her dad's behavior—a way to hold the confusion and anger at a remove, rather than holding her dad directly responsible for his own choices. She doesn't explain how she came into a space of forgiveness and reconciliation which plays out so poignantly in the end. I suspect it may be that's she still processing all of these emotional inputs and isn't yet ready to articulate these next stages of emotional growth. With the deserved acclaim of No Visible Bruises I can just imagine the agent-publisher conversations of getting Rachel's story into the world, to build her platform and firm up her audience. That sounds cynical, but it explains to me the somewhat incomplete and rushed nature of this memoir's second half.
Maggie Smith's series of vignettes about the end of her marriage triggered me in ways that make it nearly impossible to write an objective critique. SMaggie Smith's series of vignettes about the end of her marriage triggered me in ways that make it nearly impossible to write an objective critique. So this will be a mashup of thoughts on her memoir and my emotional reactions to it.
I find Maggie a delightful presence on social media (we follow each other on Twitter) but I've read very little of her poetry — for no other reason than I just haven't yet — but what little I've read, I've loved. I was not at all aware of the poem Good Bones that went viral a few years ago, even though she asserts that if I'm reading her memoir, I must know what happened (an assertion I found awkward and off-putting). And the virality (I made that word up) of the poem is significant: it's a turning point in her marriage, a downturn, really, as well as a turning point in her literary career - a huge uplift. I know something of that, which I'll get to in a moment.
Maggie has in fact turned her social media savvy into an art form, compiling her 280 character tweets into a sweet and loving book of artistic encouragement that I read earlier this year: Keep Moving. But her memoir is a far darker response to the events in her life: the revelation of her husband's affair and the subsequent ending of her marriage.
You Could Make This Place Beautiful is a stripped-down narrative. Some chapters are only a sentence or two, a quote from another writer, a question the author poses to her readers and to herself, making this memoir more a series of journal entries or extended postcards from the edge of her life at this particular period of time. It's skimmable and satisfying in its brevity. But given the five-minutes-ago publication of Keep Moving and now this book about such a recent episode in her life, it feels like the poet is working too hard to establish Brand Maggie, to have her literary pandemic moment before writing about one's pandemic experience becomes completely passé. This is less a memoir, because the memories are essentially too fresh for deep thinking into them, than a series of reflections to be pondered as time passes and their true significance is realized.
So said from a women whose own divorce is now nearly seven years old and who is still sifting through her marriage and all the reasons for its demise.
I was married far longer than Maggie Smith- twenty-five years to her fourteen, but we were the same age when our marriages collapsed (mid-40s). Unlike Maggie, who had the brutal shock of her husband's affair, mine sputtered to a stop. I considered how much easier it would have been to have had some defining crisis to provide a messy but convenient exit. Instead it came down to how hard we were willing to work to keep moving forward with what we had built together. As it turned out, not very hard at all. Like Maggie, my own creative star was rising toward the end of my marriage, which came six months after the publication of my first novel. This certainly wasn't the reason, but there is connective tissue that relates to me becoming something other than who I'd been, at least in my ex's eyes, that added to the unhealable wounds.
I'm going to be very raw and real here. As a childless woman who has experienced multiple miscarriages and failed attempts at adoption, I harbor a brutal resentment toward other women who express grief and anger over their miscarriages when they already have, or go on to have, children. It is an exquisite and execrable pain, irrational and unfair, but it is primal. I can own it, hold it with tenderness, and accept that it is my own. What I'm left with is a wrung-out exhaustion and very little room for empathy for those who have gone through the horror show I have, yet at the end of the day, still have a kid or two or more to press against their belly in a fierce embrace, kissing the top of a head, squeezing bony kid shoulders, before releasing them into the world.
What I'm thinking here is that I need to write a memoir of my own, instead of faulting Maggie Smith for writing about her own experiences in a way that triggered a painful response in me. And to express gratitude for the graceful and poignant ways she shares her humanity with us. I just hope she holds something in reserve for her poetry....more
This book's brilliance lies in its ability to unsettle the reader: It is fiction? Is it memoir? Why do we care? What is inherent in our nature that weThis book's brilliance lies in its ability to unsettle the reader: It is fiction? Is it memoir? Why do we care? What is inherent in our nature that we need to categorize an exterior thing in order to understand our interior reaction to it? And in this very way, Elizabeth McCracken challenges the reader to examine her expectations of what makes a story.
This is a book about grief and yet it is playful and wry. McCracken's protagonist, a woman who travels alone to London to trace the steps of one of the last happy times with her recently-deceased mother, is, like the author, a writer. She adroitly catalogues details as she travels through the city, giving this a Mrs. Dalloway energy of consciousness, rather than an unfolding of a plot.
I know much of why I adored and connected to the slim, punchy, resonant read is the narrator's musings on writing, a meta-meditation on storytelling. But the novel transcends an insider's tale of her craft and muses on the universality of a child's relationship to her mother and the tumult of emotions that follow when the physical mother is gone but the emotional bond remains.
Summer 1983, WTBS has just started airing Night Tracks, I'm turning fourteen and suddenly my world—at least on Friday and Saturday nights while I babySummer 1983, WTBS has just started airing Night Tracks, I'm turning fourteen and suddenly my world—at least on Friday and Saturday nights while I babysit around our apartment complex—is awash in Day-Glo and music. Duran Duran. Madonna. Huey Lewis and the News. David Bowie. And then, with an angry yowl, out of a snow-covered forest emerge four men on horseback to the military beat of a snare drum. It is the band U2, the song is New Year's Day, and I am transfixed.
For the next several years, music becomes the central force of my existence. It gives my life meaning and a way through the keen loneliness of being an introverted, creative kid in a small, conservative town. I leaned heavily into the weird and colorful parade of British New Wave and the shouty slag of post-Punk. At the heart of it all was U2. Those soaring anthems, hymn-like laments, and irresistible hooks grabbed me with such force. Here was a band that articulated my anger and longings by asking questions and demanding answers. All through a lens of deep faith that resonated with me, a kid raised in an evangelical Christian home that had grounded me in Biblical teachings yet left me with so many doubts.
This sprawling, chatty memoir by U2's frontman, Bono, born Paul David Hewson in 1960 to an Irish family of mixed faith (Protestant mother, Catholic father), took me back to my own origin story as a fan. I treasured learning about their early years and the advent of their fame, the crafting and recording of those first several albums that meant so much to my adolescent self: Boy, October, War, Under a Blood Red Sky, The Unforgettable Fire, Wide Awake in America, and The Joshua Tree. Although I enjoyed Achtung Baby, I looked askance at Rattle and Hum— my favorite band seemed to have sold out, indulging their egos in a rockumentary. For a few years, through the 90s as they abandoned their rebel rock and roll souls for weird electronic riffs and splashy production, U2 seemed to have lost the plot. They lost me. I stopped listening until they returned somewhat to their anthemic roots with All That You Can't Leave Behind in 2000 and How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb in 2004.
And then I stopped listening altogether, at least to the new material. Their sound had morphed into something that no longer resonated with me.
That's the journey this doorstop of a memoir took me on: from devotion to passive curiosity. Bono is a terrific writer, although the frequent purple ramblings can be annoying—a more astute editor would have demanded he speak clearly or get rid of those sections entirely. He can be deeply personal until he isn't, then he obfuscates with opaque meanderings when taking on a subject he wants to avoid or skirt around—mostly concerning his relationship with his wife and the effect of his ego on his bandmates. Understandably to protect all involved. On the whole, however, I enjoyed his effervescence, sweetness and heart.
Surrender is not a sexdrugsrocknroll tell-all. Bono goes deeply into the music, particularly in those critical early years when the band was searching for direction and a record deal. How the songs and the sounds were created by their longtime collaborator/producers, Brian Eno, Daniel Lanois and Steve Lillywhite. How the band was shaped by the politics in Ireland, the music of the times, and by the members' deep commitment to faith (outside of the committed secularist, bassist Adam Clayton). How they met (as teens at an alternative Dublin high school), how their friendships formed and deepened through forty+ years of being a band. How Bono's marriage to teen sweetheart Alison Stewart and parenting their four children has shaped him as a man and an artist.
As U2's celebrity grows, so does their cultural influence. Bono, a deeply curious soul with a keen sense of justice, leverages his fame to enter 10 Downing Street, the White House, and the Vatican. From the late 1990s he is part of one NGO after another, many of which he helped found, becoming deeply engaged in debt relief for developing countries, famine relief for Africa, providing medicine to AIDS patients. In many ways, the music becomes an afterthought and after finally listening to albums produced in the mid-2000s on, I would say it shows. I wonder what different collaborations or solo projects the U2's musicians—guitarist Edge, truly one of the all-time greats, bassist Adam Clayton, and drummer Larry Mullen—could have birthed apart from the U2 yoke. Instead, these recent albums feel like a group phoning it in.
Bono is the consummate frontman and he is honest about the pitfalls of his ego and impossible expectations. He demonstrates deep reverence for his bandmates, his family, and the many in U2's team of managers, handlers, producers who have carried the band through four decades of highs and lows. He also wants to be at the center of the action, to be seen on par with the cultural and political influencers of the moment. That's exhausting and hasn't always served him or the band well (see: release of Songs of Innocence in 2014, when anyone who owned an Apple device was suddenly force-fed this album). I admire that Bono has the receipts for his commitment to social justice: he studies the issues deeply before signing on and speaking up. Unfortunately, he has also supported — still supports — some highly influential political figures who I find villainous and the cost of their corruption is not unknown.
Late in the book, Bono describes a recent night out with the Irish actor, Cillian Murphy. A few drinks in, Cillian says to him, "I used to be such a big fan. I loved your early stuff. I loved The Joshua Tree..." Dramatic pause. "...but then I lost you. Where has your lyricism gone? You used to write about real love and real life..."
Two things struck me about this conversation: first, that I felt the same as Cillian Murphy. Second, and more importantly, that Bono had the self-awareness to include the conversation in his memoir. He realizes who his readers are: his true fans who aren't afraid to tell him the truth, yet still love him, and U2, despite all their flawed humanity.
I don't know that this book would appeal to anyone who hasn't harbored a true love for U2's music. But for those of us who can belt out every single U2 lyric written between 1980 and 1986, this one's for you.
A rich, immersive, charming, wonderfully written history of a life and a band. Highly recommended....more
Memoir is loosely applied here. This is the transcript of a recorded series of conversations between Paul Newman and screenwriter friend Stewart SternMemoir is loosely applied here. This is the transcript of a recorded series of conversations between Paul Newman and screenwriter friend Stewart Stern in the late 80s- early 90s that two of Newman's daughters published years after their father's death, with added bits and pieces from other friends, family and industry colleagues to round out the anecdotes and memories. In this way, it is mostly Newman's own words, but it's impossible to know if this is how he would have chosen to present his story and his voice.
Still, it's a fascinating portrait of an actor of preternatural beauty who worked extraordinarily hard at his craft. His complicated childhood and fraught personal life as a young man imprinted him early with a need to be seen and yet fiercely guard his true self. Understanding the irony that his looks would breed jealousy and suspicion in an industry where beauty opens doors, Paul Newman pursued gritty, hard-edged roles (Hud, Cool Hand Luke), but there wasn't a snowball's chance in hell that he would escape the sex symbol status that vaulted him to the top of the celebrity A-list.
The stories shared here mostly avoid the glamour grind of Hollywood and instead detour into Newman's relationship with Joanne Woodward, whom he met while both were breaking into the New York theatre scene. Newman was young husband and father, his marriage the result of a summer stock crush that moved far too quickly to the altar, not surprisingly given his mother's claustrophobic obsession with her angel-faced younger son. He and Joanna carried on a love affair, somewhat openly, for years. Newman and his first wife had three children together before they finally divorced. Tragically his eldest child and only son, Scott, would die of a drug overdose at the age of 28.
Paul Newman is also candid about his own alcohol addiction and the abandonment of his children from his first marriage, but he seems to have pulled it together after Scott's death, devoting more time to his philanthropic endeavors (yep, I've got a bottle or two of Newman's Own salad dressing in my fridge), his passion for auto racing, and his family. And still his acting roles just seemed to get better as he aged (The Color of Money, The Verdict)...
The celebrity crush I've had on Paul Newman, going on 50 years since I first saw Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (Paul was supposed to play Sundance but got pushed into playing Butch after his turn in Cool Hand Luke. Then Steve McQueen was tapped for Sundance until he and Paul quarreled. Along came a golden-haired newcomer, Bob Redford, and Sundance became his iconic role) as a little thing was in no way diminished with this raw, rough cut of a life....more
This elegant and lapidary collection of essays on the art and conundrum of literary translation spoke to me on so many levels. As a writer, I felt JhuThis elegant and lapidary collection of essays on the art and conundrum of literary translation spoke to me on so many levels. As a writer, I felt Jhumpa Lahiri's thoughts on process, theme and reason like connective tissue between the hand and heart muscles:
Writing is a way to salvage life, to give it form and meaning. It exposes what we have hidden, unearths what we have neglected, misremembered, denied. It is a method of capturing, of pinning down, but it is also a form of truth, of liberation.
As a scholar of French language and literature, I nearly wept in recognition of Lahiri's struggles and triumphs as she learned to express her essence in a newly-learned and beloved language:
Confronting a foreign language as an adult is considerable challenge. And yet, the many doors I've had to open in Italian have flung wide, opening onto a sweeping, splendid view. The Italian language did not simply change my life; it gave me a second life, an extra life.
This has been so true for me, as well: careers, travel, relationships- all the doors opened to me because of a degree and facility in French.
But this slim collection of essays is focused on a very specific aspect of linguistic exploration: the misunderstood and undervalued craft of translation. What enriches these essays is Lahiri's perspective as a translator that is informed by her own writing. She explores the difference between inhabiting a narrative as the author and the consuming de-and reconstruction of the words and meaning as a translator.
Three of the essays focus on more technical aspects of translation relating to the Domenico Starnone novels Lahiri has translated — they are the novels' introductions and are reprinted here. The other pieces are more intimate reflections on Lahiri's own work or serve as explorations into the meaning of translation.
What I still wonder, which Jhumpa Lahiri ventures toward but never arrives at, is Why Italian, specifically. Her answer is a universal appreciation of doors opened by learning other languages, but she never addresses with any specificity her attraction to Italy or the Italian language.
I can, however, at least as it relates to my own experiences.
I had been in France for several months, attending a university in the foothills of the Alps, struggling mightily to discover who I was in this language and to convey the essence of myself. It was humbling, frustrating, an experience perhaps wasted on a 21-year-old. Later experiences living in France and studying the language revealed a more mature, confident speaker who wasn't humiliated by her stumbles. At any rate, I was also taking an Italian 101 class, learning Italian in French. It was my best class; it not only helped my French skills and my confidence, it brought me to Italy. And there, using my halting Italian, I found delight and acceptance that I was missing at the university in France, despite having years more study under my belt and a facility in speaking and comprehension in French that I of course did not have in Italian. Thus began my love affair with Italy and my desire to continue studying Italian.
I reconnected with that desire a few months ago, an out-of-the-blue realization that I put on a high shelf until I picked up this collection. Reading Lahiri, inspired by her passion for the language and her dedication to its study, I'm dusting off that shelved desire and trying to find the space in my life to carve out where I could fit in an Italian class.
A lovely exploration of what it means to be a writer, a reader, and to giving one's self up to another language, culture and way of seeing and interpreting the world....more
I placed this dual-biography on my TBR list a few years ago and wondered if I would ever make time to read it. But there is a right time for everythinI placed this dual-biography on my TBR list a few years ago and wondered if I would ever make time to read it. But there is a right time for everything. I bought a paperback edition several months ago and during a lull in the steady stream of library book holds, I fell into this exceptional portrait of two of my favorite artists.
The initial spark for me was curiosity: I didn't know that the Bohemian writer and the French sculptor were friends. In fact, I knew next to nothing of Rilke's life—just his dreamy poetry and his endlessly quotable Letters to a Young Poet. Because of my experiences living in France, I was more familiar with Rodin, the taciturn and difficult man who seemed to exemplify every cliché about famous French artists: a womanizer and a genius, obsessed with his craft and his legacy.
These two men formed an unlikely bond. They were separated by language — Rodin spoke only French; Rilke was a native German speaker; by age — Rodin was Rilke's senior by 35 years; and by temperament. Rodin was a proud Gaul and gruff workaholic who wasted little time on self-reflection and chatter. Rilke was a navel-gazing intellectual who flitted from Germany to France to Italy, chasing a muse and fleeing his domestic responsibilities.
To call them friends, at least initially, is a bit of a stretch. In 1902, Rilke was commissioned to produce a monograph of Rodin. Rilke still was a struggling young writer; Rodin already a lion of French culture. Rilke left the artists' colony in Germany where he and his artist-wife, Clara Westhoff, were raising their infant daughter, and relocated to Paris. Rilke would live off and on in Paris for the rest of his too-short life. The city would draw him back time and again because it was the center of creative energy, the sun around which all stars of the arts revolved.
Rilke eventually became Rodin's secretary, managing an immense volume of correspondence until writing for Rodin consumed all of his time, overriding his own work. Rodin, deeply insular and jealous of attention paid to anyone but him, threw Rilke out after he discovered that Rilke had established separate correspondence with some of Rodin's benefactors. Their fractious relationship finally healed during the war years, not long before Rodin's death in 1917.
You Must Change Your Life is not just a portrait of a complicated relationship between two artists. It is an examination of artistic influence and of an influential city in transition. Not long before Rilke's birth in 1875 Paris was transformed from a medieval labyrinth dotted with Gothic behemoths into an industrial Mecca of wide streets, gas lamps and marauding bands of hooligans. This Paris first broke artistic convention with the wave of Impressionist painters; just a few decades later it shocked the world again as it embraced the fractured styles of Fauvism and Cubism.
It is also the story of an artist in the making: Rainer Maria Rilke, who defied his traditional Austrian family to become a writer. I struggled with my reaction to this portrayal of Rilke. A poet whose work I so revere was in fact a whining, insecure gadabout who abandoned his wife and child to pursue his own interests. He was clingy with lovers, a feckless husband, and dispensed artistic advice he himself scarcely followed. But to his credit, he used his insecurities to push himself to become a better writer and a more empathic human. In the final years of his life, he nurtured the creative efforts of the young son of his final romantic relationship. That young man became the celebrated French-Polish painter Balthus. And Rilke never wavered in his admiration for and support of Rodin; it was his monographs of Rodin that helped elevate a working class sculptor to a venerated symbol of Gallic art.
I read this dual biography intending to explore the difficult relationship between Rilke and Rodin as a potential path to a new novel. I found that path, but not in following the lives of its principal subjects. Rather, it was the women who played second fiddle to these men who captured my imagination: Clara Westhoff and her best friend Paula Becker in Germany and Camille Claudel in France. These artists defied convention and pushed through societal walls to pursue their art. Claudel paid the highest price: her doomed affair with Rodin overshadowed her own extraordinary work. She died in obscurity in an insane asylum. Westhoff and Becker were friends and artists before they met Rilke, and Westhoff would eventually marry him. It is their unconventional lives that fascinate me. I'm excited to see where this interest, and these women, take me next.
You Must Change Your Life is immersive, deeply researched and illuminating. Highly recommended....more
I came home from work a couple of weeks ago, sat down on the sofa in my partner's studio where he was painting and listening to Mark Lanegan, kicked oI came home from work a couple of weeks ago, sat down on the sofa in my partner's studio where he was painting and listening to Mark Lanegan, kicked off my shoes. Scratching behind the dog's ears, nuzzling her soft head, I expressed surprise that my sweetie was listening to Mark's music. He typically paints in silence. He said, "I wondered if you'd heard."
"Heard what?" I asked.
"Mark died today."
The bottom dropped out of my heart. Tears were instantaneous, even as disbelief had me shaking my head, whispering, "No." I always thought I'd have a chance to see another show, to capture a "remember me?" moment, a laugh and a hug.
You'll wonder, reading Sing Backwards and Weep, how Mark lived as long as he did. By all rights, he could have, should have, died several times over. But he survived decades of substance abuse and addiction, poverty and homelessness, carving out just enough sanity to remain a musician and poet. That he died sober, in a loving marriage, with a solid and prolific recording and publishing career, is the motherfucking rawest deal. The cause of his death is not yet known, but he'd been deathly ill with Covid early last year, taxing an already ravaged body. No matter the cause, the loss of this artist at just 57 is heartbreaking.
Sing Backwards and Weep is like being locked a squat toilet at some random truck stop in southern Europe in the middle of August. A true nightmare. I avoided it when it was published in 2020 because that year was already desperate enough; I needed escape and uplift, not a reminder of how shitty life can be. Not that the winter of 2022 is much of an improvement, but I craved the connection. It's a misery memoir, to be sure, but brilliantly written. I've read enough execrably-penned rock and roll tell-alls. This is on a different plane entirely: Mark is a gifted writer and storyteller.
He holds nothing back, not his contempt for Screaming Trees bandmate Lee Connor or Ministry's ego-tripped Al Jourgensen, nor his grief over so many friends lost to heroin, including Kurt Cobain—whose calls to Mark shortly before his suicide went unanswered—nor his self-loathing. He recounts his love-hate relationship with heroin and crack in brutal, precise detail. This is less an ode to the music that shaped him and which he created in the late 80s and 90s than a ballad to debauchery. It is radical honesty, with real regret expressed for opportunities wasted, relationships blown to hell, and a self-effacing sense of humor that leavens a heavy, heavy read.
Have I scared you away? Don't let that be: if the 90s Seattle music scene moved you, this is the Genesis of its Bible. A Seattle that no longer exists, for good in some regards, but deeply awful in others. I'm glad I knew it when and left before the city became what it is now. You will meet nearly everyone from that bygone era here, in grand and tragic style. Mark's stories are gritty, arch, fascinating and not a punch is pulled.
Mark fled Seattle for Los Angeles after double-crossing a drug dealer. Courtney Love, with whom he'd had many a troubled moment and implies here that Kurt's depressed state was due at least in part to his unhappy marriage, held out a hand to Mark, paid for his rehab and supported him until he got back on his feet, sober. The memoir ends with the 2002 overdose death of musician and best friend Layne Staley of Alice in Chains.
A friend of mine put together a Mark Lanegan tribute playlist on Spotify that's been on heavy rotation as I discover much that I had left untouched these past decades. He left a legacy of soulful, brooding solo albums and collaborations, in addition to the psychedelic hard rock of Screaming Trees and Queens of the Stone Age. Although he relapsed into drug addiction in the 2000s, his final decade—sober, married—was his most prolific. Solo albums and collaborations abounded, as well as several books, including two memoirs and a poetry collection. The world is smaller and sadder and more bitter without you, Mark. I hope you are truly at peace.
I met Mark in the summer of 1986, when I was sixteen and he was twenty-one. I had just moved back to Ellensburg from Olympia, where I spent my junior year of high school. I fell into the same small circle of friends I had before I left town—the weird new age/punk kids who were aspiring musicians or just wanted to hang around them. Some of those friends were in a new band, Screaming Trees, and their lead singer was an older local guy I'd heard about but never met: Mark Lanegan. Mark and I drank endless cups of coffee at the Valley Café and went for long drives into the arid hills surrounding the Kittitas Valley, talking books and poetry (well, he talked, I nodded sagely). Mark gave me his copies of Richard Brautigan's The Abortion and Trout Fishing in America to read. I devoured them, because I was so very in thrall to this soulful, sad, angry, sweet and beautiful man-boy with long auburn hair and eyes like tallow honey. Then I turned seventeen, started my senior year of high school, and by the end of September I was dating a boy my age who looked just like Axl Rose.
It was October 1986 (not 1988 as Mark states in the book, but I'll forgive this oversight–I get that the details became hazy in the intervening years), when a group of local bands played at the Hal Holmes Center, attached to the Ellensburg Public Library. My boyfriend's band, King Krab, was the opener. Their final song was Bauhaus's "Bella Lugosi's Dead" and the band laid down on the stage, playing their instruments on their backs. So goth. The last band playing that night was a group from Aberdeen. They had a cool name —Nirvana — and a magnetic front man with floppy blond hair and pretty blue eyes: Kurt Cobain. That was also the night Mark and Kurt met.
By the time so-called grunge hit mainstream, I was living abroad, and then married, overseas again, then graduate school, and I just lost the thread of those days, those friends. This was years before Facebook, so I was only tangentially aware of albums, the European tours, hit single from the movie Singles. The bewilderment and grief of Cobain's suicide was felt alone, in Ohio, strangely detached from the plaid, the boots, the rain and drear of the Pacific Northwest.
When I knew Mark, he was sober, an in-between time of calm. I will remember him this way and hold those memories close to keep the regrets at bay, singing backwards and weeping....more
Rather than a continuation of Crazy Brave, Joy Harjo's first memoir published ten years ago, Poet Warrior is an expansion of memory and art. Loosely fRather than a continuation of Crazy Brave, Joy Harjo's first memoir published ten years ago, Poet Warrior is an expansion of memory and art. Loosely formatted as a traditional chronological narrative, Poet Warrior tells the story of a Native woman and artist through a hybrid of poetry, dreams, impressions and characters. Harjo touches upon the tragedies and traumas of her childhood and her rapid, difficult rush into adulthood—becoming a mother and an alcoholic while still a teenager—but the main focus here is how she found her voice as a poet. Painting and theatre were her first artistic forays; it took mentors and failures to discover the medium of words.
I found her descriptions of and interactions with Native communities in Oklahoma and New Mexico deeply fascinating and gratifying. The connection between tribes of vastly different origins and traditions is a spoken through language that doesn't require words; it is an understanding at the soul level. Harjo weaves mysticism throughout, not as a playful theme, but as a point of fact in her experience. This is an artist who has experienced history on different timelines, and her ability to shift between worlds is evident in her deep compassion and expansive work.
I found myself jotting down story ideas while reading Poet Warrior and that seems so fitting: to her incredible generosity of spirit—Joy Harjo gifts stories to other writers. She is a magical human and a national treasure....more
A gorgeous meditation on a life. Artistry in writing that calls to mind the memoirs of Patti Smith, Eileen Myles, Joy Harjo. Intimate recollections ofA gorgeous meditation on a life. Artistry in writing that calls to mind the memoirs of Patti Smith, Eileen Myles, Joy Harjo. Intimate recollections of the past that become prose-poems as memories of time, place, family, art and emotion intertwine in a rich tapestry of language. Gabriel Byrne, long a favorite actor of mine, is also a brilliant writer. Hell, he's Irish- would we expect any less?
Eschewing a linear construction, his reflections are counterbalanced by the growing celebrity on stage and screen. An uncomfortable moment in a Venetian hotel hallway with Sir John Gielgud that later becomes a thing of joy. Managing stage fright. The sudden, shocking success of The Usual Suspects that pushed him deeper into already alarming alcoholism. But he doesn't dwell on fame or the prurient spectacle of celebrity. We are returned to the young boy in Dublin, eldest of six, watching his unemployed father fade and his exhausted mother cope. He recounts growing up in poverty in an extension of Dublin that was the countryside during his childhood, but which is now paved over into car parks and highrises. And there are deeper, more sinister recollections that shake his adoration for the church and thwart his plans to become a priest.
Yet this is not a "misery" memoir that has defined the genre in the recent past. There is wry humor and such a level of intimacy and self-reflection that his pain is shared by the reader with tenderness instead of flinching horror. Byrne writes not of events but of how those events shaped his soul.
Walking with Ghosts is a remarkable work of art: intelligent, humble and elegant. Highly recommended....more
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