Emerald City Winning Out
The books in my life, right now:
- Caramba! -- I bought this book in November of 2005 when L. and I were at the NCTE convention in Pittsburgh. It's a novel about two Chicana women in southern California, I think. It bounces around a lot. For the time being, I've bounced out of it.
- The Wild Braid -- I've been reading this book by/about Stanley Kunitz off an on for a while. It's written in bits and pieces, so it has been convenient to read it in fits and starts. I actually read the last bit of it this morning before I sat down to write this post. Kunitz had a near death experience (he's now dead) and he talks in the book about the feeling of an out-of-body experience.
- Unveiling the Prophet -- I saw Lucy Ferriss at the NWW Convention in Hartford a few weeks ago and was very much impressed. I picked up her book yesterday and began reading it on the bus ride back to Sunderland from Amherst yesterday. I can tell I'm going to like it already. She blends historical research into memoir, which is a kind of nonfiction writing that I'm interested in, perhaps to inform my own writing.
- Imperial Life in the Emerald City -- This is the book that has pushed the other ones out of the way for right now. I saw Rajiv Chandrasekaran at the NWW Conference in Hartford and I was very impressed by him. He was very humble about speaking, but his book, which is about Iraq, takes a very interesting approach. Instead of following the headline news accounts, he gives an account of what happened from the perspective of the Americans living in the Green Zone. It reminds me in a way of Graham Greene's The Quiet American. The whole adventure is loaded with graft, profiteering, ideology and corruption.
- Robert Frost: A Life -- I'm about halfway through Parini's book. I bought it at the Troubador some time ago. Frost is an interesting personality. Prickly. He talks about getting "Yankier and Yankier" as he grows older. He's probably in his thirties or fourties where I am now in the book. He was not a native New Englander, but was born in California. He dropped out of both Dartmouth and Harvard, and in his first stint at Amherst College, he tried to get a colleague fired for being a homosexual, but the dean decided to look the other way instead. Frost was at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor before W.H. Auden was there in Charles Miller's account. It will probably be between Frost and the Prophet when I finish with the Emerald City.
- The Clearing -- I also got a book of poems in the mail the other day. I had seen my old friend Phil White's poem on Poetry Daily and saw of this new book. It's supposed to be about loss, especially the death of his first wife, LeeAnne Smith White. I rode by the Mt. Pleasant apartments yesterday on the bus, where Leanne and Phil used to live, and where I remember going for wine tastings among the English Lit crowd, which was quite distinct from the MFA crowd. Phil and Rob Hayashi were among the PhD candidates who had a creative writing background. Phil's poems are more East Coast traditional than the standard run of the MFA set at UMass. He's blurbed by Richard Wilbur and John Hollander. I'm sure I'll have more to say about this book over time.