Stern Men

I hadn't planned on blogging about Elizabeth Gilbert's early novel Stern Men, which I read over the summer while in Maine. But this morning the Sunday New York Times is featuring a front-page article on the lobster wars in Matinicus, Maine, and I was reminded about how much I enjoyed the book and Maine itself. The lobster industry up there is FASCINATING. Gilbert's book about two small Maine islands at war for decades over lobster territory is also fascinating, although I'm not sure I could have gotten through it without experiencing this whole Maine lobster phenomenon firsthand. It's all about territory and boundaries. Although anyone in Maine can get a license to trap lobsters, the territory has been staked out since lobsters existed. Each professional lobsterman can set up to 800 traps, but he (or she) had better do it in his territory. If encroachment occurs, buoys are cut, trap lines get knotted, or - worse - someone gets shot, which is what happened off Monhegan Island earlier this summer. See "In Maine, Tensions Over Ailing Lobster Industry" by Abby Goodnough for more details. I heard about this shooting on my cab ride from Owls Head to the Portland airport. The driver confirmed everything I had learned from Gilbert's novel and my short time on Owls Head, including the fact that tension over territory just comes with the lobster business. A lobsterman is either a pusher or a cutter (aggressively pushing into new territory or aggressively defending status quo). Here's a snippet from Gilbert's prologue on the subject:

"Lobsters do not recognize boundaries, and neither, therefore, can lobstermen. Lobstermen seek lobsters wherever those creatures may roam, and the this means lobstermen chase their prey all over the shallow sea and the cold-water coastline. This means lobstermen are constantly competing with one another for good fishing territory. They get in each other's way, tangle each other's trap lines, spy on each other's boats, and steal each other's information. Lobstermen fight over every cubic yard of the sea. Every lobster one man catches is a lobster another man has lost. It is a mean business, and it makes for mean men. As humans, after all, we become that which we seek. Dairy farming makes men stable and steady and reliable and temperate; deer hunting makes men quiet and fast and sensitive; lobster fishing makes men suspicious and wily and ruthless" (5).

Obviously there is some generalizing here, but I don't think anyone would deny that lobstering is a hard, tough, rough life. Definitely makes for good plot in her a novel.

When not reading...

Mad Men is my new favorite show (and everyone else's old favorite), just barely edging out HBO's The Wire. The Wire deserves its own blog entry - one of these days! A friend and I were recently calling it The Moby Dick of television. Mad Men is something else entirely. I'll have to think of a good literary parallel; but in the meantime, read "Mad Men Crashes Woodstock's Party by New York Times columnist Frank Rich to get the gist.

Season Three starts tonight! 9 p.m. Tennessee time

Why we love memoirs

Frank McCourt, author of Angela's Ashes, 'Tis, and Teacher Man, died last week. I could never bring myself to read Angela's Ashes, but I adored 'Tis and Teacher Man. McCourt's ability to find humor in the worst and best of circumstances is what made both of these books so readable for me.

I'm linking to an interesting New York Times article here on McCourt and his influence on the memoir genre. Following is a quote from Jay Parini about why Americans are wild for the memoir (think Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love or James Frey's A Million Little Pieces):

"We should keep in mind that memoirs have always been the central form of American literature. I mean this. From Governor Bradford’s memoir of the original settlers in Plymouth — “Of Plymouth Plantation” — through Benjamin Franklin’s fabulous autobiography, Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden,” Mary Antin’s “Promised Land” or, say, “Up from Slavery” by Booker T. Washington or any of a thousand wonderful immigrant memoirs from the 19th and 20th centuries, this has been our most essential form.

The reason for this, I suspect, is that the United States has always been about singing one’s self, as Walt Whitman might say. The individual stands in for society. His or her story is rapidly taken as democratic." ~ Jay Parini

I would love to hear about other people's favorite American memoirs, so do write in if any come to mind. I'll just start by listing Ann Patchett's Truth and Beauty...

Summer Reading

Clearly I am not doing enough of it, since I haven't blogged since May. Honestly, I feel like my students probably do. I have "required reading" this summer, and I can personally attest to it being the biggest killjoy. Every day I look over at my copy of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and sigh. No offense to Hawthorne's genius, but it is just not where my heart is right now. Instead, here is what I just ordered from Amazon:

The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane by Katherine Howe
The Forever War by Dexter Filkins
The Help by Katherine Stockett

Earlier this summer I did read Loving Frank by Nancy Horan, which I would highly recommend. I knew almost nothing about Frank Lloyd Wright's personal history before reading this book, and it definitely makes for a page-turner. Almost every character in the book is controversial; book clubs should have a heyday with this one.

Oh and I absolutely loved loved loved reading Confederates in the Attic by Tony Horwitz! I'm a little late to the game on this one; it has been out for awhile now. Had me laughing aloud at every other page. Horwitz chronicles his travels throughout the South to find out why folks still obsess about the Civil War. The chapters are divided by state, and I would suggest skipping around rather than reading sequentially. The highlight of Horwitz's journey is meeting Robert Lee Hodge, a superhardcore Civil War reenactor who takes Horwitz under his wing as he travels around to various battlefields. In order to stay true to the time period, Hodge doesn't shower, eats hard tack, and sleeps outside in ditches in order to get as close as possible to real Civil War experience. Horwitz tries in vain to keep up. Incidentally, Hodge - as Horwitz discovers - is famous for the bloat. This means that he can come eerily close to looking like a dead Confederate body lying in the middle of the road. For this special talent he is sought after as an extra in movies and photographs. He also has an uncanny ability of converting reenactors into hardcores and organizing the troops for special reenactments. My favorite of these is Hodge's reenactment of Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg: picture a handful of mock Confederate soldiers charging up a hill with ten times the number of tourists charging after them, wild for a photograph. Horwitz said dodging tourists during the charge was like dodging mines in a field; they were everywhere, cameras flashing.

I mostly read Confederates in the Attic while on airplanes or in airports, and I found it a little uncomfortable. No one asked me about it, but Hodge's picture on the cover is so disturbing that I'm not surprised. However, nothing that can't be solved by a good book jacket.

"The Trees" by Philip Larkin

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again?
And we grow old? No, they die too.
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say.
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

-1974

Love Letter to Spring

Delphiniums in a Window Box
by Dean Young

Every sunrise, even strangers’ eyes.
Not necessarily swans, even crows,
even the evening fusillade of bats.
That place where the creek goes underground,
how many weeks before I see you again?
Stacks of books, every page, characters’
rages and poets’ strange contraptions
of syntax and song, every song
even when there isn’t one.
Every thistle, splinter, butterfly
over the drainage ditches. Every stray.
Did you see the meteor shower?
Did it feel like something swallowed?
Every question, conversation
even with almost nothing, cricket, cloud,
because of you I’m talking to crickets, clouds,
confiding in a cat. Everyone says,
Come to your senses, and I do, of you.
Every touch electric, every taste you,
every smell, even burning sugar, every
cry and laugh. Toothpicked samples
at the farmers’ market, every melon,
plum, I come undone, undone.

Wendell Berry: from Sabbath: Poems (1979)

I go among trees and sit still.
All my stirring becomes quiet
around me like circles on water.
My tasks lie in their places
where I left them, asleep like cattle.

Then what is afraid of me comes
and lives a while in my sight.
What it fears in me leaves me,
and the fear of me leaves it.
It sings, and I hear its song.

Then what I am afraid of comes.
I live for a while in its sight.
What I fear in it leaves it,
and the fear of it leaves me.
It sings, and I hear its song.

After days of labor,
mute in my consternations,
I hear my song at last,
and I sing it. As we sing
the day turns, the trees move.