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Tuesday, February 1, 2005 |
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Bedtime reading: I finished The New York Trilogy last week and was quite satisfied with it--so much so that I promptly sold it and all the unread Auster novels I'd been saving to read later. Enough, already. I did keep back his writer's memoir Hand to Mouth: A Chronicle of Early Failure, though. It may provide future clues. (He's very popular in Europe. One of the five books I sold went to France, and Leviathan, in hardcover, went out today to Berlin.) I'm still taking small bites from Nothing Left Over, Toinette Lippe's extraordinarily uninteresting personal guide to daily life; it offers a nugget here and there. I also have The Seth Material going, and James Wright's Collected Prose. I'm in the middle of his explorations into Gary Snyder's poetry (as of 1962), and I find it fascinating. Last week Hayden Carruth taught me to love Emily Dickinson's poems, at long last, by showing me how to read them. This week I learn to appreciate Snyder's poems (which I've been reading since high school), as opposed to Snyder's persona, which I always have loved, and have met him and heard him read a couple of times. I never knew how to read his poetry, though, and now I have insights into that, thanks to Wright. *** Life anymore is so tense and strange. I recognize nothing. Even this landscape is alien to me. Stripped of my mother/grandmother/lover/editor identities, among others, I wobble and totter and do not know what to grasp for balance. And all unfolds as it will. I accept it. I can see now why the past six months have meant such a disastrous limbo for me: I'm 52 years old, and I'm starting over from zero. I always have thought that I yam who I yam no matter what, but surprise! Function defined identity far more than I ever realized. And it feels like a new human growing in my heart, and a bizarre new world taking shape around me.
Where's the Tivo? I don't want to miss a single episode. It's the final season, and I've gotta know how everything turns out. |
