Rats are people, too. ]]>
Minaret ]]>
But your name's Rob, not Phil. ]]>
bookshelves: finished-in-2009, teaching
This one I'm browsing in a lazy, take-your-time kind of way. A perfect "dip in and out" book while reading another! ]]>
"All happy families are alike. Each unhappy family is more entertaining to read about in its own way."
Tolstoy, I think. ]]>
Adoring prepositions? What's the over/under on that? ]]>
"I've moved my updates to the regular review box so as not to be limited in words. The lot of you would love this book."
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bookshelves: currently-reading
Update #1: from p. 51
Karr writes of her first poet/mentor, Etheridge Knight: "He was lumbering and black, with a scraggly mustache and a soul patch under his chin. His jaw was lumpy and uneven, with patches of white skin edged in pink -- ragged and tear-shaped, as if acid flung in his face had eaten away his color."
On her own poetry: from p. 53
"What I wrote was mostly unintelligible, except for one bit about a suicidal dog. The first line went, alliteratively enough, Don't do it, dog.. The stuff I was fighting to avoid sometimes slipped out in vague disguise: a kid raped, a lost father, a woman on the shock treatment table But because I refused to use sentences -- just strung phrases willy-nilly -- nobody understood it anyway. The word cerulean, I believe, was used.
"It's experimental, I argued to the baffled readers arranged on Etheridge's furniture.
"It's in-fucking-comprehensible, he shot back."
Most enjoyable is the description of the mentally-handicapped women she worked with. She'd read two poems to them every day -- one classic and one horrid. Without fail, even if it were challenging as hell, the classic was picked by the women 80% of the time. It's a heartwarming and touching sequence. Then back to Etheridge's critiques of her poems:
"It drove him crazy how I'd stick in fancy names and references I thought sounded clever. Etheridge used a pen to poke the fedora back on his head. Looking at me with bloodshot eyes, he asked with frank curiosity, Now why is a little girl from Bumfuck, Texas, dragging Friedrich Nietzsche -- kicking and screaming -- into this poem? Like you're gonna preach. You ain't no preacher, Mary Karr. You're a singer.
"When I bristled that I'd been a philosophy major in college, he said, And that's all you're telling anybody. What you took in college. You're pointing right back at your own head, telling everybody how smart it is. Write what you know.
"But according to you, I don't know squat.
"Your heart, Mary Karr, he'd say. His pen touched my sternum, and it felt for all the world like the point of a dull spear as he said, Your heart knows what your head don't. Or won't."
Oh, yeah. It's slowing me down -- so as to better savor it all. Good stuff, this. On p. 71.
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"Poetic writer, Karr being a poet as well as a memoirist. Early going treats the family, the bottle, and her college daze."
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