David Pratt's Blog - Posts Tagged "desert-island"
What to Curl up With (Part One)
What do you take to a desert island? Say you’re allowed ten books. They should be…what? The ten greatest ever written? Anna Karenina? Remembrance of Things Past? I’d kill myself. Or the ten most inspiring? What inspiration do you need? It’s a desert island! So maybe we want the ten most comforting books. But those might be ones you had as a kid. They would take between three minutes and three hours each to read. Whatever the case – comfort, inspiration or genius – one thing is certain: these would have to be books you could read over and over. Depending on what else there is to do (does this island come with shelter? what’s the food situation?) you will be reading each book once every two weeks for the rest of your life. Here is what I think I would take. Part one.
1.) My Norton Anthology. Kills a couple hundred birds with one stone, dunnit? And to be clear, it would indeed have to be my Norton Anthology, the one I used in Introduction to English Literature at Hamilton College in the fall of 1976. The one with which I learned to read. And quite possibly write. In high school, the teachers’ questions ran to, “Why does Atticus mean when he says that?” and “Why does Pa Joad do that?” They’re trying to sharpen your mind and mold your character. Fat chance. In my case. But in the big, bright room in Hamilton’s Root Hall, Professor Austin Briggs took Chaucer and Shakespeare and Pope apart, line by line, often word by word, to reveal simply how literature works and what it does. It was my first sustained encounter with poetry, which high schools, at least then, thought students thought was boring, so they avoided it. Then suddenly Beowulf. Suddenly Spenser. Suddenly sonnets. Grown-up stuff with a grown-up purpose. Why had no one told me? I did not write back then, except for assigned papers. But I believe Austin Briggs’s impassioned, witty, detailed exegeses of these writers made me wish secretly to do the same thing, and those exegeses gestated and eventually, well, Bob the Book is not The Faerie Queene, but then, The Faerie Queene is not Bob the Book. At any rate, I am packing my Norton Anthology, complete with the scribblings of a suddenly energized 18-year-old in the margins.
2.) Spenser and Pope are fine. More than fine. But at the end of a long day, you can’t quite sit down by the fire and have a whiskey with those towering and ancient intellects. E. B. White’s essay “Home-coming,” the first in his collection One Man’s Meat, is actually about the end of a long day, a day of driving up Route 1 to North Brookline, Maine, where the Whites had a house and, more importantly, a barn that became the setting for perhaps the greatest work of children’s literature ever. “Home-coming” is witty and sharp-eyed, as is everything by White, and what is more, it calms the soul: sunset along tacky Route 1 and the woods and fields and marshes beyond; the arrival at the empty house; the whiskey by the fire; and a curious and amusing event that suddenly brings a gaggle of neighbors – aka the volunteer fire department -- into White’s parlor. I would happily take just “Home-coming” (yes, the hyphen belongs) to my desert island, but of course I am going to take the whole book. One Man’s Meat also contains such White classics as "Clear Days," "Salt Water Farm," "The Flocks We Watch by Night," "Once More to the Lake" and the lovely "First World War." Life amused White, and it made him anxious, and he is frank about both. Of Route 1 he says, “There is little to do but steer and avoid death.” And so I know I shall have at least one perfect soul mate on my island.
The next installment of my desert island books shall be revealed soon!
1.) My Norton Anthology. Kills a couple hundred birds with one stone, dunnit? And to be clear, it would indeed have to be my Norton Anthology, the one I used in Introduction to English Literature at Hamilton College in the fall of 1976. The one with which I learned to read. And quite possibly write. In high school, the teachers’ questions ran to, “Why does Atticus mean when he says that?” and “Why does Pa Joad do that?” They’re trying to sharpen your mind and mold your character. Fat chance. In my case. But in the big, bright room in Hamilton’s Root Hall, Professor Austin Briggs took Chaucer and Shakespeare and Pope apart, line by line, often word by word, to reveal simply how literature works and what it does. It was my first sustained encounter with poetry, which high schools, at least then, thought students thought was boring, so they avoided it. Then suddenly Beowulf. Suddenly Spenser. Suddenly sonnets. Grown-up stuff with a grown-up purpose. Why had no one told me? I did not write back then, except for assigned papers. But I believe Austin Briggs’s impassioned, witty, detailed exegeses of these writers made me wish secretly to do the same thing, and those exegeses gestated and eventually, well, Bob the Book is not The Faerie Queene, but then, The Faerie Queene is not Bob the Book. At any rate, I am packing my Norton Anthology, complete with the scribblings of a suddenly energized 18-year-old in the margins.
2.) Spenser and Pope are fine. More than fine. But at the end of a long day, you can’t quite sit down by the fire and have a whiskey with those towering and ancient intellects. E. B. White’s essay “Home-coming,” the first in his collection One Man’s Meat, is actually about the end of a long day, a day of driving up Route 1 to North Brookline, Maine, where the Whites had a house and, more importantly, a barn that became the setting for perhaps the greatest work of children’s literature ever. “Home-coming” is witty and sharp-eyed, as is everything by White, and what is more, it calms the soul: sunset along tacky Route 1 and the woods and fields and marshes beyond; the arrival at the empty house; the whiskey by the fire; and a curious and amusing event that suddenly brings a gaggle of neighbors – aka the volunteer fire department -- into White’s parlor. I would happily take just “Home-coming” (yes, the hyphen belongs) to my desert island, but of course I am going to take the whole book. One Man’s Meat also contains such White classics as "Clear Days," "Salt Water Farm," "The Flocks We Watch by Night," "Once More to the Lake" and the lovely "First World War." Life amused White, and it made him anxious, and he is frank about both. Of Route 1 he says, “There is little to do but steer and avoid death.” And so I know I shall have at least one perfect soul mate on my island.
The next installment of my desert island books shall be revealed soon!
What to Curl Up With (Part Two)
More desert island books…!
3.) Book #2 was by E. B. White, partly because a man so amused by yet so anxious about life is a kindred spirit to me. But for a real kindred spirit I need a gay man. Funny how, as gays gain more “acceptance,” I feel a greater need to be something of a separatist. I didn’t like the closet, but I continue to love what’s left of the gay demimonde. I loved “gayborhoods” and I mourn their passing. So to recall those times, and to have some more terrific writing with me, I’d take to my desert island Felice Picano’s True Stories: Tales of My Past. Picano has a way of crossing paths in funny, serendipitous ways with great gay literary figures like Tennessee Williams and W. H. Auden. The essay about Auden leads off True Stories, and it is beautifully detailed, warm and hilarious. But the real genius of the book is in its portraits of everyday people, including Picano’s father, his publishing partners (in addition to being an author, he founded Seahorse Press) and most touchingly, a friend known simply as James, with whom Picano bicycled all over New York City. Just bicycled. The essay on James contains one of the most touchingly told moments in all the gay lit I have read. I am hoping the Commissioner of Sending People to Desert Islands will let me bundle Picano’s sequel, True Stories, Too, along with the original. I haven’t read TST yet, but I know it will be a great summer 2014 treat.
4.) Gay and bisexual women made a huge difference in my life, especially just before and after my coming out, and one in particular made a huge difference to me many years later. In 1995, at the OutWrite Conference in Boston, I heard Leslie Feinberg speak (on a panel with Kate Bornstein; does it get any better?), and I bought her famous first novel, Stone Butch Blues, in the old Firebrand Press edition. I adored it from the first sentence. Every evening for the next two weeks I rushed home from work to read more. Eventually I came to consider it the greatest LGBT book I had ever read. It flabbergasted me that it actually fell out of print at one point. It is written in the most beautifully rough-hewn, emotional language I think I have experienced. But I do have one reservation about taking SBB to my island. I loved it so much, could a second reading ever equal the first? For twenty years I have avoided re-reading it, so anxious was I to preserve that thrilling original experience. A few years after I read it, Feinberg signed my copy of SBB—“in the spirit of Stonewall.” That made the physical book a whole other thing. Whether I ever re-read it or not, Stone Butch Blues is going with me as a totem or amulet. It will go under my pillow and give me strength on those long, lonely nights when I might otherwise lose myself.
5.) Speaking of “blues,” I bend everyone’s ear so much about William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways that I am not going to bend yours. I am just going to say that the genius of this tour-by-van of U.S. backroads in the spring of 1978 is that the author mixes his curiosity and wonder at new places with history often acquired later, so that, with his reverent and amused voice in your ear, you see the everyday of each place simultaneously with the broad sweep of history. There is no one Heat-Moon won’t start a conversation with, and many of them, also immortalized in the author’s black-and-white photos, will stay with you forever. It also helps that the author is running—from a crumbling marriage and from unemployment. As much of an authority as he is—or, rather, as he became during subsequent rewriting—he’s also a struggling regular guy like us all. As with the Norton Anthology, this would have to be my own Blue Highways, which I gave my dad in the 1980s and took back when he died. It has his margin notes and it has mine from successive readings every few years.
Next time: I go all erudite on you!
3.) Book #2 was by E. B. White, partly because a man so amused by yet so anxious about life is a kindred spirit to me. But for a real kindred spirit I need a gay man. Funny how, as gays gain more “acceptance,” I feel a greater need to be something of a separatist. I didn’t like the closet, but I continue to love what’s left of the gay demimonde. I loved “gayborhoods” and I mourn their passing. So to recall those times, and to have some more terrific writing with me, I’d take to my desert island Felice Picano’s True Stories: Tales of My Past. Picano has a way of crossing paths in funny, serendipitous ways with great gay literary figures like Tennessee Williams and W. H. Auden. The essay about Auden leads off True Stories, and it is beautifully detailed, warm and hilarious. But the real genius of the book is in its portraits of everyday people, including Picano’s father, his publishing partners (in addition to being an author, he founded Seahorse Press) and most touchingly, a friend known simply as James, with whom Picano bicycled all over New York City. Just bicycled. The essay on James contains one of the most touchingly told moments in all the gay lit I have read. I am hoping the Commissioner of Sending People to Desert Islands will let me bundle Picano’s sequel, True Stories, Too, along with the original. I haven’t read TST yet, but I know it will be a great summer 2014 treat.
4.) Gay and bisexual women made a huge difference in my life, especially just before and after my coming out, and one in particular made a huge difference to me many years later. In 1995, at the OutWrite Conference in Boston, I heard Leslie Feinberg speak (on a panel with Kate Bornstein; does it get any better?), and I bought her famous first novel, Stone Butch Blues, in the old Firebrand Press edition. I adored it from the first sentence. Every evening for the next two weeks I rushed home from work to read more. Eventually I came to consider it the greatest LGBT book I had ever read. It flabbergasted me that it actually fell out of print at one point. It is written in the most beautifully rough-hewn, emotional language I think I have experienced. But I do have one reservation about taking SBB to my island. I loved it so much, could a second reading ever equal the first? For twenty years I have avoided re-reading it, so anxious was I to preserve that thrilling original experience. A few years after I read it, Feinberg signed my copy of SBB—“in the spirit of Stonewall.” That made the physical book a whole other thing. Whether I ever re-read it or not, Stone Butch Blues is going with me as a totem or amulet. It will go under my pillow and give me strength on those long, lonely nights when I might otherwise lose myself.
5.) Speaking of “blues,” I bend everyone’s ear so much about William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways that I am not going to bend yours. I am just going to say that the genius of this tour-by-van of U.S. backroads in the spring of 1978 is that the author mixes his curiosity and wonder at new places with history often acquired later, so that, with his reverent and amused voice in your ear, you see the everyday of each place simultaneously with the broad sweep of history. There is no one Heat-Moon won’t start a conversation with, and many of them, also immortalized in the author’s black-and-white photos, will stay with you forever. It also helps that the author is running—from a crumbling marriage and from unemployment. As much of an authority as he is—or, rather, as he became during subsequent rewriting—he’s also a struggling regular guy like us all. As with the Norton Anthology, this would have to be my own Blue Highways, which I gave my dad in the 1980s and took back when he died. It has his margin notes and it has mine from successive readings every few years.
Next time: I go all erudite on you!
It's Getting Hot Out Here! (Desert Island Books, Part Three)
Three more desert island books…
6.) I promised I’d go all erudite on you. And I promise you this is legit. I love James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. I have actually read James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. A few times. Have I understood James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake? To a degree. I can find some if hardly all of the references and motifs in a given excerpt. There’s a lot of, you know, recursive…recursiveness. And stuff. Also, a lot of it’s really hilarious and a lot of it’s really beautiful. So, am I taking Finnegans Wake to my desert island? Not quite. I want a twofer. I am taking Finnicius Revém, Donaldo Schüler’s translation into Portuguese of Joyce’s work, published by Ateliê Editorial in São Paulo, Brazil. Schüler, you see, places the translation next to the original, so I get to enjoy Joyce and then enjoy Schüler’s sometimes completely made-up equivalents of Joycean wordplay. (My partner is Brazilian is how this, including me collecting all six volumes of Schüler, got started. To date I have four. They are not easy to find.) Joyce’s multilingual puns are often untranslatable. Reading Schüler we may marvel at what he has managed to recover or transform, or we may regret what is lost. Kind of like life. By the way, have I mentioned that I want this desert island to be off the coast of Brazil?
7.) If I’m going to have Joyce and that Norton Anthology, I should also have a dictionary. But why waste one of my ten choices on a book I’m only going to use for reference? Well, I’m also going to read that dictionary. No, seriously. My dad did that all the time. Try it. It’s kind of addictive. And I want it to be the OED. All twenty volumes, please. Girlfriend is not going to lie around on the hot sand clutching a magnifying glass.
8.) I once again appeal to the Commissioner of Sending People to Desert Islands. I am hoping that, for number eight, His Honor will let me stretch the definition of a book. I want a big ol’ pile of travel magazines. I want page after slick, colorful page of boutique hotels I can’t afford, castles I’d never get to, and hikes and climbs that would tax my plantar fasciitis. I love the luxury of the places and I love the luxury of the language. In travel magazines you never labor to find anything (the way I had to search half an hour for the Rembrandthuis, which my map told me was RIGHT THERE!). You are “whisked” to places. You “hop” between islands. You “swing” and “jump” and “sail,” whether you are sailing or not. Beaches and trails are nearly empty. Bars are just full enough to be cozy. Festivals are never crowded or smelly. You just hop from escape to escape to escape. Actually, I wonder if the Commissioner would get me a bunch of subscriptions, so there will always be something new, and I will never have to come back to where I have been.
Last two desert island books soon!
6.) I promised I’d go all erudite on you. And I promise you this is legit. I love James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. I have actually read James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. A few times. Have I understood James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake? To a degree. I can find some if hardly all of the references and motifs in a given excerpt. There’s a lot of, you know, recursive…recursiveness. And stuff. Also, a lot of it’s really hilarious and a lot of it’s really beautiful. So, am I taking Finnegans Wake to my desert island? Not quite. I want a twofer. I am taking Finnicius Revém, Donaldo Schüler’s translation into Portuguese of Joyce’s work, published by Ateliê Editorial in São Paulo, Brazil. Schüler, you see, places the translation next to the original, so I get to enjoy Joyce and then enjoy Schüler’s sometimes completely made-up equivalents of Joycean wordplay. (My partner is Brazilian is how this, including me collecting all six volumes of Schüler, got started. To date I have four. They are not easy to find.) Joyce’s multilingual puns are often untranslatable. Reading Schüler we may marvel at what he has managed to recover or transform, or we may regret what is lost. Kind of like life. By the way, have I mentioned that I want this desert island to be off the coast of Brazil?
7.) If I’m going to have Joyce and that Norton Anthology, I should also have a dictionary. But why waste one of my ten choices on a book I’m only going to use for reference? Well, I’m also going to read that dictionary. No, seriously. My dad did that all the time. Try it. It’s kind of addictive. And I want it to be the OED. All twenty volumes, please. Girlfriend is not going to lie around on the hot sand clutching a magnifying glass.
8.) I once again appeal to the Commissioner of Sending People to Desert Islands. I am hoping that, for number eight, His Honor will let me stretch the definition of a book. I want a big ol’ pile of travel magazines. I want page after slick, colorful page of boutique hotels I can’t afford, castles I’d never get to, and hikes and climbs that would tax my plantar fasciitis. I love the luxury of the places and I love the luxury of the language. In travel magazines you never labor to find anything (the way I had to search half an hour for the Rembrandthuis, which my map told me was RIGHT THERE!). You are “whisked” to places. You “hop” between islands. You “swing” and “jump” and “sail,” whether you are sailing or not. Beaches and trails are nearly empty. Bars are just full enough to be cozy. Festivals are never crowded or smelly. You just hop from escape to escape to escape. Actually, I wonder if the Commissioner would get me a bunch of subscriptions, so there will always be something new, and I will never have to come back to where I have been.
Last two desert island books soon!
