Watching War and Peace

I recently read this article, which told me ten things I should know about War and Peace.  One of the ten things is that it isn't really that long.  Anybody could read the book in ten days, claims the author.  Ten days?  I guess if you did nothing else.  It took me two months to read it, but then I had a full-time job at the time.  (Here's what I wrote when I finished reading it, and here's a more realistic view of how long it takes to read it, written by a guy who watched the first episode on TV and then tried to finish the book in time for the second episode.)

I didn't read the book in ten days, but I watched the six-part miniseries with my daughter in less than ten days.

(I got that photo from this article, entitled "War and Peace: Director Tom Harper on being nervous he has ruined the story and *that* nudity scene".)

You can see from the photo that the costumes are spectacular.  So much so that the men look a bit ridiculous to modern eyes, bedizened as they are with braid and sparkle.  But in addition to the clothes, the look of this series is just amazing.  The cinematography is gorgeous from beginning to end.  The casting is also great.  Best of all, this version leaves out Tolstoy's opinions on many, many things: Russia, Napoleon, bees, Russian peasants, History, etc.  When you take out all those hundreds of pages, you are left with the memorable characters and the wonderful story.  I'm glad I read the book, but I also really enjoyed the miniseries, and I recommend it.

Poetry Friday: Summer Mowing

I've been reading summer poems at Poetry Foundation, and finding many lovely ones.  I love this one for the intimate picture of a father and son spending time together.  That's what my summer is about this year: focusing on moments with my family.  If I were looking at the world around me, I'd choose "things fall apart; the center cannot hold." Instead I'm deciding to enjoy this day and mow the part of the world where I can have an influence.  My mower may be a "makeshift contraption," but it's going to be a beautiful day anyway.

Summer Mowing

Jennifer Gray

 

He has transformed

his Tonka dump truck

into a push mower, using

 

lumber scraps and duct tape

to construct a handle

on the front end of the dump box.

 

One brave screw

holds the makeshift

contraption together.

 

All summer they outline

the edges of these acres,

first Daddy, and then,

 

behind him

this small echo, each

dodging the same stumps,

 

pausing to slap a mosquito,

or rest in the shade,

before once again pacing

 

out into the light,

where first one,

and then the other,

 

leans forward to guide the mowers

along the bright edges

of this familiar world.


Here's today's roundup. 

Reading Update

One of my favorite parts about summer vacation is the time to read.  Since my last update, I have been reading constantly, and here's what I've finished.

Book #76 of the year was Rules of Civility, by Amor Towles.  Set in New York City in 1938, this wasn't as wonderful as I'd been led to believe, but it was a fun read.

Book #77 was The Song of Achilles, by Madeline Miller.  In this retelling of the Iliad, Achilles and Patroclus are not just friends, Thetis hates Patroclus, and Achilles has no interest in Briseis, but keeps her around to please Patroclus.  Everything turns out the same as the original.  If you're a lover of the Iliad, like I am, you'll enjoy seeing how Miller handles the story. 

Book #78 was Home Life: A Journey Through Rooms and Recollections, by Suzanne Fox.  I'm not entirely sure of all the reasons I love this book so much.  The last time I read it was 2014, but for a while in my thirties I read it every year.  The book is a series of essays about rooms, in long-lost houses, the author's current apartment, and even in a museum.  Fox explores the meaning of home, growing up, being alone, decorating, and many other topics.  Every time I read it, I find new things.  I thought about it again recently when one of my childhood homes, in a country I haven't visited in thirty years, burned down, and I saw a YouTube video of the fire.  Why do houses stick in our minds so much?  I lived there when I was four years old.  Chances are, I would never have gone there again.  But it was my home, and I grieved its loss.  This book has helped me think about home at many points in my life, and I'm sure I'll read it again.

A friend from graduate school has started writing romance novels, and book #79 was her second, Chasing the Heiress, by Rachael Miles.  Check out her blog, where she gives interesting insights into her research, including how she finds out what vocabulary she can use to keep the authenticity of the Regency period she's writing about.  I liked Jilting the Duke, the first one in the series, and this one was also good, and very eventful!  I'm looking forward to the third one in the series, coming out in October.

Book #80 was About Grace, by Anthony Doerr.  Everyone is reading and talking about Doerr's more recent book, All the Light We Cannot See.  I loved that one, but honestly I think this one is even better.  The gorgeous writing, the long trajectory of the story, and the entirely convincing character and relationship development: all were completely satisfying.

Book #81 was The Arrival, by Shaun Tan.  This is a wordless graphic novel.  I don't really know how to read a book like this, since it's all pictures.  The pictures are amazing, but I wished for words.  My daughter says I just have to read more graphic novels.

Book #82 was When You Were Here, by Daisy Whitney.  In this YA title, Danny has lost his mother, and he's trying to figure out how to continue his life.  I liked the Japanese setting of a large part of the book, and I also liked the different kinds of relationships Danny had in his life.

Book #83 was Kindred, by Octavia Butler.  Dana, an African American woman in the seventies, is ripped back to the time of slavery, again and again.  She can't control when it's going to happen, and the fact that she sees slavery through the sensibility of a modern woman intensifies the reader's experience of the horror of life for Dana and the other slaves.

Book #84 was lighter fare, but still quite thought-provoking in its own way: What Alice Forgot, by Liane Moriarty.  Alice has an accident at the gym and hits her head; when she wakes up, she's forgotten the last ten years of her life.  The last thing she remembers is being in a happy marriage, contentedly waiting for the birth of her first child.  Now she and her husband are getting a divorce, and she has no idea why.

This post is linked to the June 25th edition of the Saturday Review of Books.

Poetry Friday: love is more thicker than forget

[love is more thicker than forget]

e.e. cummings

 

love is more thicker than forget

more thinner than recall

more seldom than a wave is wet

more frequent than to fail

it is most mad and moonly

and less it shall unbe

than all the sea which only

is deeper than the sea

love is less always than to win

less never than alive

less bigger than the least begin

less littler than forgive

it is most sane and sunly

and more it cannot die

than all the sky which only

is higher than the sky


What can I add to this?  "Love is as strong as death," as King Solomon wrote thousands of years ago. It is more thicker than forget.  It cannot die.
  
Here's today's roundup.

Poetry Friday: Ozymandias

As we toured Sans-Souci Palace, the home of Henri Christophe, King of Haiti, my daughter quoted Shelley's poem, "Ozymandias."  The picture above was taken in Henri Christophe's throne room; as you can see, it is roofless.  It has been ever since the palace was destroyed in an earthquake in 1842, but Christophe's own life ended twenty-two years earlier when he shot himself in this room, saying that a great man should not survive longer than his glory.

Sans-Souci was compared in its day with Versailles, and it is still impressive to see.

Shelley's poem was inspired by a statue from the thirteenth century BC, acquired by the British Museum and on display in London.  The statue depicted Ramasses II of Egypt, known also by his Greek name of Ozymandias.

All human power is temporary, the "traveller from an antique land" tells us.  When we look around us today, this is a good thing to remember.



Ozymandias
Percy Bysshe Shelley

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

Here's today's roundup.

Reading Update

Halfway through 2016, I've read as many books as I read all last year.  I've had plenty I wanted to escape from, and I ended my last Reading Update post with my plans to reread Pride and Prejudice, that ultimate escapist novel, both for its predictability and for the reassuring way it all works out in the end.  I did read it, but first I made a rather more counterintuitive choice. 

Book #56 of the year was The Passage, by Justin Cronin.  Yep, it's post-apocalyptic.  Yep, there are vampires (the condition is caused by a virus).  Yep, I found it oddly mesmerizing.

Book #57 was Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen.  See above.  All I hoped for, and more.

Book #58 was The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, by Elisabeth Tova Bailey.  This book is just plain wonderful.  Bailey develops a mysterious and debilitating illness, and a friend gives her a plant, in which there's a snail.  In the newly small world of her sickroom, Bailey focuses her attention on the snail, observing it closely and finding it a miracle.

Book #59 was Survival Lessons, by Alice Hoffman.  This is what Hoffman learned from crises she faced in her life, particularly her breast cancer.  It's inspiring, and full of ways you can choose to deal with what happens to you, rather than just folding under it.

Book #60 was Every Bitter Thing is Sweet: Tasting the Goodness of God in All Things, by Sara Hagerty.  This is Hagerty's memoir of marriage, infertility, adoption, and other bitter things that turn sweet when she allows them to bring her closer to God.

Book #61 was Donald Miller's Searching for God Knows What.  Miller's territory is a lot of what we've been talking about at my church - that God deals with us through our stories, not through bullet points of systematic theology.  Miller really is a good writer, even though sometimes he gets on my nerves.

Book #62 was The Blue, by Lucy Clarke.  I really enjoyed this book about sailing and murder.

Book #63 was a gift from my daughter, who knew I'd enjoyed all the other Lauren Winner books I'd read.  This one was Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis, Winner's memoir about the time after her divorce when God felt very far away.  My daughter says this is Winner's best book so far.  I prefer Wearing God, but I liked this one, too.

Book #64 was The Space Between Us, by Thrity Umrigar.  This is a novel about a maid and her employer, both struggling with Dickensian life challenges in modern Bombay.

Book #65 was also about dreadful struggle, responded to poetically and bravely: in When Breath Becomes Air, by Paul Kalanithi, a doctor describes his own battle with, and death from, cancer.

Book #66 was Happier at Home: Kiss More, Jump More, Abandon Self-Control, and My Other Experiments in Everyday Life, by Gretchen Rubin.  In this sequel to The Happiness Project, Rubin tries more ideas to boost happiness.

Book #67 was The Twelve, by Justin Cronin, the sequel to book #56.  The third one is coming out any day.  I'm not sure why I'm enjoying this series quite as much as I am.

Book #68 was The Last Boy and Girl in the World, by Siobhan Vivian, a YA title about friendship, loss, and a town being gradually destroyed by flooding.

Book #69 was Still Life: A Chief Inspector Gamache Mystery Book, by Louise Penny.  This is the first Inspector Gamache book, and it looks as though I've found a new murder mystery series to add to the ones I already enjoy by P.D. James and Elizabeth George.

Book #70 was Before I Fall, by Lauren Oliver, another YA title.  We know from the first line of the book that Samantha dies, but she is given the opportunity to see the effects her choices have on others as she relives her last day again and again.  Will she eventually get it right?

Book #71 was Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster, by Jon Krakauer.  I read a novel with my seventh graders this year about climbing Everest, and supplemented it with this real-life story.  Warning: this is so vivid that you won't be able to breathe while reading it.

Book #72 was Thirteen Moons, by Charles Frazier.  This is a historical novel about the removal of Native Americans to reservations in the west in the time immediately before and after the Civil War.  It's about identity and loss.  Lately everything I read seems to be about loss, one way or another.  This is a brilliant book, just as good as his first book, Cold Mountain, which I read back in 2009 and reviewed in this post.  The protagonist, Will Cooper, is a true American original, abandoned by his blood family and finding family wherever he can.  He is self-taught, captivated by a woman who keeps disappearing, and larger than life.  His story is unforgettable.

Book #73 was Tropical Fish: Tales from Entebbe, by Doreen Baingana.  I thought until almost the end that I hadn't finished this book before, but I read it back in 2011.

Book #74 was The Passion of Artemisia, by Susan Vreeland, a historical novel about Artemisia Gentileschi, a Renaissance painter trying to survive as a woman in a world dominated by men.  I loved reading about her friendship with Galileo.

Book #75 was another Gretchen Rubin book, her study of habits, Better than Before.  I enjoy Rubin's voice (I also listen to her podcast, and she writes just the way she talks), and I found this book useful and interesting, just like her others.

I just started my summer vacation, and I have some epic reading plans for the season, so stay tuned!

This post is linked to the June 4th Saturday Review of Books at Semicolon.

Poetry Friday: Back from Vacation

I haven't posted on this blog in a while, but now that summer is here, I hope to change that.  I finished school, graded feverishly and wrote comments and spoke at eighth grade graduation and then we left for five days of vacation in northern Haiti.  Since we got back yesterday, John Updike's poem seems appropriate for today.



Back from Vacation
John Updike

 

"Back from vacation", the barber announces,
or the postman, or the girl at the drugstore, now tan.
They are amazed to find the workaday world
still in place, their absence having slipped no cogs,
their customers having hardly missed them, and
there being so sparse an audience to tell of the wonders,
the pyramids they have seen, the silken warm seas,
the nighttimes of marimbas, the purchases achieved
in foreign languages, the beggars, the flies,
the hotel luxury, the grandeur of marble cities.
But at Customs the humdrum pressed its claims.
Gray days clicked shut around them; the yoke still fit,
warm as if never shucked. The world is still so small,
the evidence says, though their hearts cry, "Not so!"


My vacation brought me back with loads of photos and memories, and here's hoping I'll write some poems soon.  It's been too long.   No more gray days clicking shut around me.  I don't care how sparse the audience is - time to tell of wonders.

Here's today's roundup.

And it's a poem!

Here's the completed poem, along with an illustration.  For the fourth time, thirty writers have worked together to make a Progressive Poem for National Poetry Month.  Click over to read Donna's line, or look below to see the whole text. 

Thanks to all the participants (listed below).  It's been fun!  Same time next year?


April

1 Laura at Writing the World for Kids

2 Joy at Joy Acey

3 Doraine at Dori Reads

4 Diane at Random Noodling

5 Penny at A Penny and Her Jots

6 Carol at Beyond LiteracyLink

7 Liz at Elizabeth Steinglass

8 Janet F. at Live Your Poem

9 Margaret at Reflections on the Teche

10 Pat at Writer on a Horse

11 Buffy at Buffy's Blog

12 Michelle at Today's Little Ditty

13 Linda at TeacherDance

14 Jone at Deo Writer

15 Matt at Radio, Rhythm and Rhyme

16 Violet at Violet Nesdoly

17 Kim at Flukeprints

18 Irene at Live Your Poem

19 Charles at Poetry Time

20 Ruth at There is No Such Thing as a Godforsaken Town

21 Jan at Bookseedstudio

22 Robyn at Life on the Deckle Edge

23 Ramona at Pleasures from the Page

24 Amy at The Poem Farm

25 Mark at Jackett Writes

26 Renee at No Water River

27 Mary Lee at Poetrepository

28 Heidi at My Juicy Little Universe

29 Sheila at Sheila Renfro

30 Donna at Mainely Write



Thoughts Take Flight

A squall of hawk wings stirs the sky.
A hummingbird holds and then hies.
     “If I could fly, I’d choose to be
      Sailing through a forest of poet-trees.”
A cast of crabs engraves the sand
Delighting a child’s outstretched hand.
     "If I could breathe under the sea,
      I’d dive, I’d dip, I’d dance with glee."
A clump of crocuses craves the sun.
Kites soar while joyful dogs run.
     "I sing to spring, to budding green,
     to all of life – seen and unseen."
Wee whispers drift from cloud to ear
and finally reach one divining seer
who looks up from her perch and beams —
     "West Wind is dreaming May, it seems."
Golden wings open and gleam
as I greet the prancing team.
     "Gliding aside with lyrical speed,
     I'd ride Pegasus to Ganymede."
To a pied pocket, the zephyr returns.
Blowing soft words the seer discerns
     "from earthbound voyage to dreamy night,
     The time is now.  I give you flight!"
Yet I fear I am no kite or bird –
I lift!  The world below me blurred
by tears of joy.  I spiral high,
     "I hum, I dive, I dip, I hive!"
     "Behold, Spring is but a dance away!"
I grasp my pen, then capture this day.

 

Line Twenty-Nine

Almost finished!

Line Twenty-Eight

It's here.  And there's a title now, too!

Line Twenty-Seven

Mary Lee wrote the next line!

Line Twenty-Six

The poem continues.

Line Twenty-Five

Here it is.

Line Twenty-Four

Amy has it here.

Happy birthday to me!

Ten years ago today, I started blogging.  When I look back at all that's happened in my life since then, it feels as though I am not even the same person who first worked on figuring out the intricacies of Blogger and felt proud to know how to add a hyperlink.  I am thankful for the way this blog has helped me express ideas and make new friends.  Shakespeare wrote that his love would not die, because he had immortalized her in his words.  I have no such illusions about how long any words of mine will continue to be read, but I am glad to have preserved thoughts at least for longer than the moment when they flashed across my mind.  I often go back and check on what I was reading and thinking at a given point in the past, and if I have any other readers (and sometimes I do), that's a bonus.  Thanks for reading, if you're here.  High five and happy birthday to me.

Line Twenty-Three

Here's today's line.

Poetry Friday - Dennis Craig

I have been reading nature poems with my eighth graders in preparation for Earth Day.  I don't remember where I found this poem, but I used it with my students for a few years before I realized that the poet, Dennis Craig, was from the Caribbean (Guyana).  I love this poem because it's about nature in the city, and I can imagine that many young people growing up in the city where I live (Port-au-Prince, Haiti), have a similar experience.

This is a Petrarchan sonnet.  I love the juxtaposition of that highly academic, fancy form with the stark reality of the life described in the poem: the persona of the poem lives in a nasty urban environment.  His first exposure to flowers comes when someone puts in a park.

Flowers

Dennis Craig

I have never learnt the names of flowers.

From beginning, my world has been a place

Of pot-holed streets where thick, sluggish gutters race

In slow time, away from garbage heaps and sewers

Past blanched old houses around which cowers

Stagnant earth.  There, scarce green thing grew to chase

The dull-gray squalor of sick dust; no trace

Of plant save few sparse weeds; just these, no flowers.

One day, they cleared a space and made a park

There in the city’s slums; and suddenly

Came stark glory like lightning in the dark,

While perfume and bright petals thundered slowly.

I learnt no names, but hue, shape and scent mark

My mind, even now, with symbols holy.

There is so much here: the way nature relates to the spiritual, the way exposing a young person to beauty can change everything, the lightning and thunder of new thoughts, a new way of seeing the world.

I live in an urban environment, too, and one of the things I love most is getting weekly flower deliveries from a merchant in my neighborhood.  When I shared this poem with my eighth graders, I told them that the flowers in the poem were "almost holy."   Then I looked back at the poem and saw that Craig hadn't qualified "holy" the way I had.  There was no "almost" about it.  For him, the flowers were "symbols holy."  And for me they are, too.  They remind me that there is still beauty even in the midst of difficulty, that riotous color still exists in spite of everything.  They remind me to "consider the lilies," which Emily Dickinson wrote was the only commandment she always obeyed.  Here is a recent bouquet from my "flower guy."

Here's an article I found about Dennis Craig and this poem.  I posted this poem once before, in 2012.

Here's something I wrote about flowers  when I was in the States after the earthquake.

And here's today's roundup, hosted by the incomparable Jama.

Line Twenty-Two

Robin has the twenty-second line here.

Line Twenty-One

Line twenty-one is here.

Progressive Poem is Here Today

I have struggled all day with my line.  I don't have a clear mental image of what's going on here.  We have some birds.  We have a beach scene.  We have a springtime riot of crocuses and kites and green.  We have the whispering wind.  And then we have some...horses?  Winged horses?  Hippogriffs?  I'm not really sure, and I don't know who is greeting them - that is, I can't picture the person in my mind.  Most serious of all for my line, I don't know who is gliding aside - is it the horse-like creatures or the narrator?  I do know that the narrator longs to fly, to dive, to run with dogs - she (I think it's a she) would definitely grab the opportunity to ride these winged creatures, if she could.  Then there's still that divining seer on her perch from the previous stanza.  Who or what is that?  Since the seer is on a perch, I thought maybe it was a bird, and maybe the golden wings belong to that bird.  More and more, I'm thinking that the persona of the poem is immobilized somehow, watching birds and a beach and a nearby park where children fly kites, imagining but not able to get up and go.  Is it an elderly person?  Someone who is ill or disabled?  She's dreaming, she's thinking of life, "seen and unseen."  So many things still to figure out in the last ten lines.  And meanwhile, I have to write something...

I decided to give our persona another wish, keeping it in the unsatisfying "I'd" form instead of letting her act on her wish, keeping the action imaginary.  I hope Jan thinks I've made the right decision.

A squall of hawk wings stirs the sky.

A hummingbird holds and then hies.

If I could fly, I'd choose to be

Sailing through a forest of poet-trees.

A cast of crabs engraves the sand

Delighting a child's outstretched hand.

If I could breathe under the sea,

I'd dive, I'd dip, I'd dance with glee.

A clump of crocuses crave the sun.

Kites soar while joyful dogs run.

I sing to spring, to budding green,

to all of life - seen and unseen.

Wee whispers drift from cloud to ear

and finally reach one divining seer

who looks up from her perch and beams --

West Wind is dreaming May, it seems.

Golden wings open and gleam

as I greet the prancing team.

Gliding aside with lyrical speed,

I'd ride Pegasus to Ganymede.   

April

1 Laura at Writing the World for Kids

2 Joy at Joy Acey

3 Doraine at Dori Reads

4 Diane at Random Noodling

5 Penny at A Penny and Her Jots

6 Carol at Beyond LiteracyLink

7 Liz at Elizabeth Steinglass

8 Janet F. at Live Your Poem

9 Margaret at Reflections on the Teche

10 Pat at Writer on a Horse

11 Buffy at Buffy's Blog

12 Michelle at Today's Little Ditty

13 Linda at TeacherDance

14 Jone at Deo Writer

15 Matt at Radio, Rhythm and Rhyme

16 Violet at Violet Nesdoly

17 Kim at Flukeprints

18 Irene at Live Your Poem

19 Charles at Poetry Time

20 Ruth at There is No Such Thing as a Godforsaken Town

21 Jan at Bookseedstudio

22 Robyn at Life on the Deckle Edge

23 Ramona at Pleasures from the Page

24 Amy at The Poem Farm

25 Mark at Jackett Writes

26 Renee at No Water River

27 Mary Lee at Poetrepository

28 Heidi at My Juicy Little Universe

29 Sheila at Sheila Renfro

30 Donna at Mainely Write