State of Wonder

Just finished Ann Patchett's new novel, State of Wonder, a title which describes exactly how I felt after reading it. Brilliant. That is the word that comes to mind when I think about how carefully she constructed her narrative, down to the very last sentence. Honestly - and I mean this as the highest compliment - it reminded me of the kind of critical writing we were all trying to do in graduate school. Weave strands of an argument together so convincingly that your readers have no choice but to believe you. Lead them to the edge of a cliff, and when they think they've arrived, ask them to look over the edge. That is how Patchett concludes this novel. While she convincingly winds down the narrative, our view of what has happened, what might happen next, ingeniously continues to expand.

Rather than describe the plot, I will just say that what I loved about this book was the lack of clear cut answers, beginning with page one. Characters in this novel are continually faced with challenging situations that cannot be easily righted. Indeed, it is difficult to discern right action from wrong when none of the choices seems clear or appealing. I like the title, State of Wonder, because it describes how the main character, Marina, moves between difficult contexts. She is baffled and stunned regularly (anyone in her situation would be), and yet she must act despite her state of wonder at what is happening around her.

Patchett sets this novel in the Amazon, and if you read this, you go there. You're on the pontoon boat wondering what is down there in the water beneath you; you're greeted by a tribe brandishing flames, another with poisoned arrows; and yes, you're wrestling with an eighteen-foot anaconda. Have fun. The writing is that vivid, that compelling.

The Dirty Life

This has been a theme of my summer and also some of the other books I've been reading lately.

After day 1 of my AT hike, I reveled in my grime-covered self. "I LIKE being dirty!" I exclaimed. The feeling of being covered in dirt and sweat with nothing to be done about it was wildly freeing to me. My hiking partner was not nearly so enthusiastic. While he took pains to clean up after each day's hike, I generally pretended that I lived in the Dustbowl and could be featured in a Dorothea Lange photo at any moment. I thought a lot about what life must have been like for women back then, cooking over a hot stove with few resources. Dirt would be the least of concerns, I imagined. In no way did I want to experience or glamorize poverty. I wanted to experience hard work and the essentials that rise to the surface when life is stripped bare.

Post-hike, I dug into Kristin Kimball's book The Dirty Life: A Memoir of Food, Farming, and Love. I am such a sucker for these memoirs about farming: See You in One Hundred Years, Animal Vegetable Miracle, and now The Dirty Life. It is generally easy for me to romanticize the difficult work of running a farm and growing one's own food. The idea makes so much sense to me, but there is a reason that few people actually take it on. Kimball's story is particularly appealing because she leaves behind a life I'm familiar with: the sometimes-glamorous sometimes-miserable existence of New Yorkers. Turns out Kimball lived on the same street in the East Village as one of my old friends, right across from the Hell's Angels headquarters. She cobbled together a living from writing and did the same things we used to do when there: ordered takeout; generally relegated the space in her fridge for ice, alcohol, and those bulky phone books; and hopped from one end of town to the other in search of...we were never quite sure. All this changes when she meets and falls in love with Mark, a man whose existence is about farming. And he convinces her to give everything up to make it her purpose, too.

Kimball doesn't sugarcoat anything in this memoir, and as I read about their life, it became clear that their gargantuan plan to run a farm that would feed their community could end in disaster, divorce. Maybe even death. But I ate up the passages about her own transformation because they touched on a truth that seems fundamental and also elusive in a digitized, virtual age:

"I had never in my life been so dirty. The work was always dirty, beyond what I'd previously defined as dirty, and it took too much energy to keep oneself out of it. I had daily intimacy not just with dirt dirt but with blood, manure, milk, pus, my own sweat and the sweat of other creatures, with the grease of engines and the grease of animals, with innards, with all the stages of decomposition. Slowly, the boundary of what I found disgusting pushed outward. The thought of bathing was unappealing at the end of the chilly spring day, with the unheated bathroom so far from the woodstove and morning milking so near. Some nights I would only peel off my outer layer of clothes before leaping under the thick comforter, leaving pieces at the foot of the bed for easy access in the morning dark. My wardrobe from the city had sifted down to one small drawer of unruined things, reserved for off-farm use, which meant they never got worn. The rest had been added, piece by piece, to the general-use bin. I discovered the insulating properties of silk, which gave my collection of lingerie new purpose. Some days I farmed in a black cashmere V-neck that I used to call my first-date sweater. In its youth I'd pampered it with dry cleaning and padded hangers. Now it was flecked with hay, two holes worn in the elbows.

I let my hair grow out, not by conscious choice but because making and keeping an appointment to cut it never reached the top of the priority list. I forgot to pluck my eyebrows. I hardly ever looked in the mirror, and when I did I saw that all the outdoor work was etching new lines around my eyes, weathering my complexion, bringing out the red tones, the freckles. I began to feel the weight of my skin on my brow, my cheeks folding down at the sides of my mouth. My new life was marking me. It was happening so quickly. There were intermittent spells of resistance, during which I'd pluck and moisturize and exfoliate, and then there was a period of grieving for my old self, who seemed to be disappearing toward the horizon, and then I relaxed into it" (129).

I liked this passage because it reminded me of what it was like living outdoors for a week. Beauty and hard work become connected and take on whole new meanings.

Commitment issues

I've been thinking about this blog, its purpose, and all the slacking I've been doing. I've read so many great books lately and when asked about them I can only utter a mild, "duh..." I'm sure I'm really instilling confidence in folks who know I've spent the past year teaching AP English. What can I say? My brain is on summer break.

In June I hiked a portion of the Appalachian Trail, which was quite possibly the coolest thing I've ever done (note: coolest, not the choicest diction out there. See above for summer break disclaimer). I had been planning this trip for six months prior, spending spare hours in REI after tennis matches and tournaments, rehabbing my bum left knee after practice, and reading Whiteblaze.net for all the trail info I could glean. The best and worst thing that I read in preparation for the hike was Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods. Let me say right now that this is the WORST account of hiking the AT out there. Having finished/skimmed to the end, I'm not sure why Bryson hiked it. He was not in it for any good reason, and the entire text of his book confirms this. Most of his trip was spent hauling himself to the nearest Motel 6 or steak dinner off of the trail. I'm not sure he experienced a single moment of transcendence on the trail, which is impressive in a soulless sort of way. The best reason for reading this book was to accidentally discover key information that changed the course of my hike: there is no camping in the Great Smoky Mountains. Now that you too know this crucial information, you never have to read that bestselling piece of junk.

The best book that I read - and serendipitously found in an Asheville bookstore the day I came off the trail - was Jennifer Pharr Davis's Becoming Odyssa: Epic Adventures on the Appalachian Trail. I loved loved loved Davis's story. In 2005 in her early twenties, she bravely and somewhat blindly set off to thru hike the trail. She hiked in sneakers and an ill-fitting pack; she never once filtered water; she ditched her stove about a month in; and she out-hiked just about everyone else that season. I loved the lack of pretension in her narrative voice and in her aspirations. I also loved reading her self-revelations, some of which I could relate to after my one piddly week. One habit she developed later in her hike which I admired was to sit for an hour on a rock or by a stream to listen and watch. I've realized recently that moving through woods (running or walking) is not the same thing as sitting in them. It is amazing how much I miss even when I'm surrounded by nature. Being still is the way to catch the best of what the woods has to offer. My hiking partner already knew this: he hunts, and so he sits for hours in the woods at a time. As a result he hears things that I am only just starting to hear.

There are many passages I shoulda woulda excerpted here if I had decided to blog sooner, but here is a section from Davis's Maine stretch:

"I ... knew that something deep within me connected with nature, hard work, and simplicity. I learned that I was both stubborn and tough, a lot tougher than I thought I was, especially when I let other people help me. I knew that I was beautiful, despite what other people said, and I appreciated my body based on what it could do instead of how it looked. I also knew that I was truly blessed, blessed with wonderful family and wonderful friends."

I felt tremendous gratitude on the trail, mostly for my childhood and my parents. When I was little my sister and I built forts relentlessly. We built them wherever there was a pine tree and patch of moss. We were obsessed with moss; we collected it to make carpets and pillows. We knew what made a good tree: the sturdy branches of magnolias or dogwoods or cherries. Pine branches were best for sweeping out the fort. Willows made the best curtains. I must have spent a lot of time walking in the woods as a child, because the feeling of deja vu swept over me the second we started our Appalachian Trail hike. "This is familiar," I kept thinking to myself. What a gift.

I don't have time to write this

Too bad, writing it anyway. It's been a remarkable morning.

After spending all night mulling over how to wrap up Gatsby with my seniors, I was still coming up short. Somehow I managed a few anxiety-fueled hours of sleep. I dreamed that I tried to teach "The Waste Land" in the morning instead and utterly failed at it. My attempt at winging it lead me to search for my notes the entire class. When I finally pulled them together, the bell rang. Also worth noting that an esteemed history teacher who normally resides two floors above was in attendance.

Miraculously at five a.m., it dawned on me to teach dramatic monologues. So my students are writing poems in the voices of Daisy, Tom, Myrtle, Gatsby, and T.J. We'll see how they turn out.

But the really remarkable moment happened later when my other senior class embarked on our study of Emily Dickinson. She never fails to work her magic on them. One of my most lackadaisical students (the Lady Gaga fan from an earlier post) latched on to "Hope is the thing with feathers" and wouldn't let go. She wanted to know when she could start writing an essay on it, and how many pages she was allowed to write. The others came around a little more slowly, but by the end of class they were exclaiming how "cool" Dickinson was. All because of this little epigram:


IT ’S all I have to bring to-day,
This, and my heart beside,
This, and my heart, and all the fields,
And all the meadows wide.
Be sure you count, should I forget,—
Some one the sun could tell,—
This, and my heart, and all the bees
Which in the clover dwell.

here I am

I thought I had better acknowledge the silence that has been this blog of late. I have been wondering a little about my lack of energy/desire to write because its not that I haven't read great things (check out Patti Smith's luminous prose in Just Kids). Its not that I haven't had interesting moments in the classroom this fall and spring (the students' modern-day Macbeth newscast; dancing with my freshmen down the hall to African drumming; watching a despondent student come to life when we read an editorial about Lady Gaga during class. She LOVED it; she read it aloud in its entirety; and she pronounced Jean Paul Sartre "Sartart" through the whole of it) that might be worth writing about in order to remember later. This blog has always been a natural outpouring of the work that I do, and the joy that I take in it. So what has happened to it?

My guess is that I have not adequately adjusted to my increased workload this year. Three preps, including AP English, has run me intellectually ragged. One sign of this would be the list that I've tacked up in my house titled "Summer." I can't get to things the way that I used to, and so I am relegating them all to the months of June and July.

What's happened to my love of writing? Something's got to give here. I need a new system. Think I'll put that on the "Summer" to-do list, too.

macbeth

This work never fails to move me. Today, it is these lines:

Macbeth: How does your patient, doctor?

Doctor: Not so sick, my lord,
As she is troubled with thick-coming fancies
That keep her from her rest.

Macbeth: Cure her of that.
Cans't thou not minister to a mind diseased,
Pluck from memory a rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain,
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart?

Doctor: Therein the patient
Must minister to himself.

Reading Lately

Here's the roll call for January, all of which I'd recommend:

First, pair the novels Wench by Dolan Perkins-Valdez and Property by Valerie Martin for a chilling look at slavery from two very different female perspectives. Eerily, these novels could be twins of each other.

On a lighter note (er, not really), throw in some Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. This I read with 30 adorable teenage girls who were obsessed with Harry and his quest. As dark as this book is, we had to lighten the mood with a chocolate wands, cauldron cakes, butterbeer, and a Quidditch match.

Then make a radical swing into Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, my new favorite novel. I read this in grad school when I didn't have a clue about what life held in store for me. Older, wiser, and weathered, I have to say that Janie Crawford's story resonated in a new way. Loved it. I think my kids were 50/50 on it, but just give them time.

Revisit Kate Chopin's The Awakening with another class. This, too, gets better every time I read it. My students had absolutely no sympathy for Edna this time around. Ruthless!

Make an almost impossible segue into Macbeth. But Nature has fouled up January and early February, so if for that reason alone, it seems like a fitting choice.

Delve further into the dark side of humanity and friendship with John Knowles's A Separate Peace.

And on that note, why not go even further into the darkness with Freedom, Jonathan Franzen's disturbing and brilliant new novel? This I read in snatches, usually when I can't sleep. Not that reading this novel helps with that problem any.