the cassandra pages

It's that time again: my book list for 2016

Without further ado, here are the books I read during the past year, in reverse chronological order. Commentary begins below the list.

* indicates books read as e-books

2016

"The Golden Bough," an oil by Joseph Mallord William Turner, shows the scene from The Aeneid that began Frazer's exploration in The Golden Bough.

 

The Golden Bough, James George Frazer (in progress)*

Beethoven: His Spiritual Development, J. W. N. Sullivan (in progress)

The Hour of the Star, Clarice Lispector*

Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, Elena Ferrante*

A Most Wanted Man, John le Carre

The Days of Abandonment, Elena Ferrante*

The Story of a New Name, Elena Ferrante*

The Whole Field Still Moving Inside It, Molly Bashaw

Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami

Conversations with a Dead Man, Mark Abley

My Brilliant Friend, Elena Ferrante*

Outline, Rachel Cusk

The Faraway Nearby, Rebecca Solnit*

The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami (re-read)

Known and Strange Things, Teju Cole

Ice Mountain, Dave Bonta

Lunch with a Bigot, Amitava Kumar*

The Inugami Mochi, Jessamyn Smyth*

Pastrix, Nadia Bolz-Weber*

Traveling Mercies, Anne LaMott

A Whole Life, Robert Seethaler*

Monster, Jeneva Burroughs Stone

A Strangeness in My Mind, Orhan Pamuk** (dnf)

Poems, Michael Ondaatje

M Train, Patti Smith

Just Kids, Patti Smith*

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Horrors, J. K. Rowling

Thesaurus of Separation, Tim Mayo

Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, Cesar Aira*

The Sound of the Mountain, Yasunari Kawabata*

Leaving Berlin, Joseph Kanon*

The Savage Detectives, Roberto Bolano

The Japanese Lover, Isabel Allende*

 

First, the stats: 33 titles, of which 17 were e-books, either from Kindle or downloaded on OverDrive from the Bibliotheque nationale. I'm pleased to see an almost-perfect split between books by female and male authors, too.

There were so many outstanding books this year, that I might be better off to say which ones I don't recommend -- but I'd rather be positive. My vote for best-book/should-last-forever would have to be Roberto Bolano's The Savage Detectives, but I also particularly liked the beautifully written M Train, by Patti Smith, the quirky and detailed Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter by Cesar Aira, Murakami's brilliant Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and the Elena Ferrante Neapolitan Quartet, of which I've read three and am anxiously awaiting #4, on hold from the library.

Most of you know that I'm a Murakami fan and have read most of his books; I also know he's not to everyone's taste. Wind-Up Bird held up very well the second time around. Kafka on the Shore, which I also read this year, is a fine novel too but not (for me anyway) on the same level as Bird or IQ84, probably my favorite so far of his novels.

Then, what can I say objectively about books by friends, or books I read in manuscript and then published? Of the former, I greatly enjoyed Jessamyn Smyth's The Inugami Mochi, the story of her dog Gilgamesh and their remarkable relationship. I was privileged to take a long walk with the two of them, some years ago, so I felt like I had already had a small window into the material she wrote about after his passing; it's a beautiful book that challenges many people's assumptions about communication and relationship between humans and animals, but for me it was not a big leap. I've already written about Dave Bonta's Ice Mountain: An Elegy, which I liked enough to want to illustrate and publish. And while many illustrious readers and critics have chosen Teju Cole's Known and Strange Things for their own top-ten-of 2016 book lists, and I totally concur, I'm also quietly proud that a couple of the included essays had their origins here on this blog. Jeneva Burroughs Stone's Monster and Tim Mayo's Thesaurus of Separation round out this paragraph, the first by a poet and essayist I met, like Jessamyn, through qarrtsiluni, and the second by a Vermont poet I had never met, but whose work and friendship I now value very much.

The very best book of poetry I read this year was Molly Bashaw’s The Whole Field Still Moving Inside It (The Word Works, 2014.) I recommended this for Dave's crowd-sourced compendium of favorite poetry books of the year, writing, "The poems, ostensibly about farming and farm life, are of course — as Heaney showed us so convincingly — about life itself, in all its beauty, bewilderment, and violence. I was impressed by Bashaw’s use of language, and deeply moved by her ability to describe but not over-explain, because so much of what she talks about defies explanation or even analysis. She leaves things as they are, but also leaves a great deal of room for the reader. Barhaw grew up on small farms in New England and upstate New York, but graduated from the Eastman School of Music and worked for 12 years in Germany as a professional bass-trombonist — so it’s probably no surprise that her poems resonated with me. She’s young and her work has won a bunch of prizes but that doesn’t matter to me; I certainly wish I had published this first book of hers myself and hope to meet the poet someday so I can tell her."

But it's the Ferrante books that have a real hold on me. She manages that rare feat of writing a gripping  story that seems absolutely true to life, and writing extremely well. There's a conversation between the elusive Ferrante and author Sheila Heti in the latest issue of Brick, in which Heti remarks that these books make her lament the number of unwritten or unknown books by women, about women, throughout the centuries - what a loss this is for literature, and also for our knowledge of ourselves. I have found them absolutely riveting for the same reasons I love Virginia Woolf: her ability and desire to enter into the heads of her characters and bring their thought processes, and therefore themselves, to life.

So, let me know what you think, and also what you've been reading - I always look forward to the annual lists that some of you share with us here, too! And I hope everyone is having some extra time this week to curl up with a book.

 

John Donne, Annunciation and Passion

"Departing Wings." Linocut by Elizabeth Adams from Annunciation, Phoenicia Publishing 2015

It's rare for the Feast of the Annunciation and Good Friday to occur on the same day. In the 21st century this only happened in 2005 and 2016 and won't occur again for a century. When this happens, the Church usually separates the observances; the nnunciation will be celebrated later in April. However, John Donne pondered the convergence of these events in 1608, as I did yesterday during the long, solemn services, my awareness of the Annunciation and of Mary herself - young naive girl, and sorrowing mother - having been sharpened this year by the book project I completed in December.  I always find it easier to read Donne's poetry out loud, and enjoyed doing that with this extraordinary poem that I had never read before, sent to me yesterday by a friend on Instagram.

Upon the Annunciation and
Passion Falling upon One Day.
John Donne, 1608

Tamely, frail body, abstain today; today
My soul eats twice, Christ hither and away.
She sees Him man, so like God made in this,
That of them both a circle emblem is,
Whose first and last concur; this doubtful day
Of feast or fast, Christ came and went away;
She sees Him nothing twice at once, who’s all;
She sees a Cedar plant itself and fall,
Her Maker put to making, and the head
Of life at once not yet alive yet dead;
She sees at once the virgin mother stay
Reclused at home, public at Golgotha;
Sad and rejoiced she’s seen at once, and seen
At almost fifty and at scarce fifteen;
At once a Son is promised her, and gone;
Gabriel gives Christ to her, He her to John;
Not fully a mother, she’s in orbity,
At once receiver and the legacy;
All this, and all between, this day hath shown,
The abridgement of Christ’s story, which makes one
(As in plain maps, the furthest west is east)
Of the Angels’ Ave and Consummatum est.
How well the Church, God’s court of faculties,
Deals in some times and seldom joining these!
As by the self-fixed Pole we never do
Direct our course, but the next star thereto,
Which shows where the other is and which we say
(Because it strays not far) doth never stray,
So God by His Church, nearest to Him, we know
And stand firm, if we by her motion go;
His Spirit, as His fiery pillar doth
Lead, and His Church, as cloud, to one end both.
This Church, by letting these days join, hath shown
Death and conception in mankind is one:
Or ‘twas in Him the same humility
That He would be a man and leave to be:
Or as creation He had made, as God,
With the last judgment but one period,
His imitating Spouse would join in one
Manhood’s extremes: He shall come, He is gone:
Or as though the least of His pains, deeds, or words,
Would busy a life, she all this day affords;
This treasure then, in gross, my soul uplay,
And in my life retail it every day.

--

 

Scenes from a Park, Before Snow

I looked up when the branches swung.

White gulls were eating black cherries.

-Tomas Transtromer

It is the sky's being so grey

that makes the ground begin to shine.

-Tomas Transtromer

Maybe this is the only way to avoid fear

Settle into fear like one inhabiting slowness

Ghosts we all possess

Simply waiting for someone or something in the ruins.

-Roberto Bolano

 

A new book from Phoenicia!

Poetry by
Ivy Alvarez,  Rachel Barenblat, Jeanne Marie Beaumont, Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Chana Bloch, Leila Chatti, Luisa A. Igloria, Mohja Kahf, Vivian Lewin, Vinicius de Moraes (Natalie d'Arbeloff, trans.), Roderick Robinson, Nic Sebastian, Claudia Serea, Purvi Shah, Rosemary Starace, and Marly Youmans

Illustrated and Edited by
Elizabeth Adams

Over at Phoenicia, we're excited to announce that Annunciation is now available for pre-order (at a special price through November 20), and that books will be shipping toward the end of November, in time for the holidays. The website also contains  process notes written by the contributors, and they are pretty fascinating.

For me, it's the first time I've illustrated a book with linocuts, and represents the culmination of nearly a year of thought and artwork (see the links below), as well as the editing challenge of inviting and working with many talented poets on a single project.

Many of the poets will be familiar to readers of this blog; I got to know some of them back during the qarrtsiluni days. Others are new acquaintances who I'm very happy to know, and feel privileged to publish. Because part of my incentive for the book was to look at Mary from an interfaith, as well as secular, perspective, the poets are Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, and secular, and they've brought an amazing breadth to this volume. I am moved by the way in which each poet has managed to identify with Mary, and express some personal point of connection with clarity, emotion, and immediacy. It could have turned out to be a "religious" book but it's much bigger than that -- it's a human book.

So please take a look - I hope some of you will take advantage of the special price. (The pre-orders really help me to gauge how many books to print, too.) Thanks very much for your encouragement during the year as some of the illustrations unfolded here. I hope you'll like the result; it's been a labor of love for all of us and something I think we can all be proud of creating.

Related articles

Around the World Blog Hop

Gabriel's Lily

Meeting Magda

 

(cross-posted from Phoenicia Publishing's blog)

 

In June, I had the pleasure and great good fortune to make a trip to Berlin, as the guest of my friend Teju Cole. Our mutual friend Magda Kapa came into the city by train to meet us, and we had a great time visiting museums together, eating some good food and drinking the fine local pilsner, attending an evening of the Berlin Poetry Festival, and expanding our literary friendship into a more personal one. Like me, and like Teju, Magda is a photographer as well as a writer; we all had our cameras at hand. She prefers not to be photographed directly, but I think she'll allow this one. Since she is Greek, we were kidding her about all the paintings that had grapes in them, so it seemed appropriate to photograph her this way!

Magda and I have known each other through our blogs and Twitter for a long time, and we've had a very fruitful relationship as writer and editor during the publication of her book, All the Words. But we were just delighted to finally meet each other in person. We spoke about internet relationships and how we both see them as absolutely real, but also how it helps to meet those people in person, and that this time spent face-to-face always changes and deepens the friendship.

I am determined to get back to Europe soon - it was such a treat to be in the vibrant city of Berlin, new to me, and to be surrounded by its art, music, and architecture, both old and new, and by people from all over the world. Our evening at the Berlin Poetry Festival was for a presentation titled African Voices; we heard strong performances/readings by Kwame Dawes (Ghana/Jamaica/USA), Warsan Shire (Somalia/UK), and Natalia Molebatsi (South Africa.)

As a child of the Cold War, I grew up under the cloud of the Iron Curtain and the sense of Berlin as a grey, divided city. This year is the celebration of the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall; the city's revitalization, energy, and cultural richness were not only visually obvious, but could be felt.

And I hope that this won't be the only time I meet Magda, but the first of many such meetings. As she wrote in All the Words,

Friend: We touched each other in that photograph, now we'll always touch each other.

and

Memories: at the end of the year they hang together like grapes, some sweet, some sour, and wait for us to taste.

Gabriel's Lily

The new project here at Phoenicia is Annunciation, an illustrated book of poems by a diverse group of contemporary women. The project began in my mind after I did this relief print, back in December of 2014. About 15 poets who I've invited will be contributing poems; I'll be designing the book and producing a set of relief-print illustrations to go with the texts.

This week I finally got going on the new prints, and thought you might like to see the first one in process. This is "Gabriel's Lily." It started out with the pencil drawing, above, to which I added a hand grasping the stem.

The translation from pencil drawing to a block print is worked out in pen and ink; I usually end up with a pile of drawings and worked-over photocopies. Once the idea is fairly set, I reverse the drawing and transfer it to the linoleum, and ink it to minimize mistakes in cutting.

Starting to carve. I use the drawing as a guide, but the vigor and expressive energy in a print comes through the cutting itself: I have to trust myself to add that intangible element through my hands, and a certain amount of freedom and letting-go. This is something I hope I'm getting better at as I gain experience in the medium.

This is the back side of a print as it starts to emerge. I'm using a new ink, Akua, that cleans up with soap and water and doesn't have any odor, so I had to do a lot of experimenting to find the right consistency and thickness on several different Japanese papers. It's pretty different from my usual oil-based ink, but I came to like it.

The block went through several revisions too, until it arrived at this state. That's the scariest part: I wanted to simplify parts of the design, but knew if I went too far, I'd wreck it. Here's my table with the rolled-out ink and baren, the block, and a finished print. What you don't see is me saying "whew!"

A bunch of prints hung up to dry.

And the artist's proof. The book will be coming out in late fall, 2015, and I'll be sharing more of the process as it comes together. It's possible that this particular print won't even make the final cut; what was important was to get started. I'm thrilled about the poems I've received so far, and inspired by them: so many different interpretations and responses to this story, by excellent poets of different faiths and backgrounds. All the texts will be submitted by July 1, and then it's up to me to finish the work of making it all into a book.

It also makes me so happy to see how the collaborative publishing efforts that began with the Ecotone Wiki and carried on into the online literary magazine qarrtsiluni, co-managed for years by Dave Bonta and me, continue to spawn new projects and new relationships. Dave has just started a really cool new project that I'll tell you about in another post, and most of the poets who are working on Annunciation are people I met through qarrtsiluni or other online venues. I sometimes forget to stop and trace the lineage of those relationships back, since all this has happened over just one decade, but it strikes me as a sort of rapid evolutionary process, where creativity and human relationships have partnered with advances in technology and communication, changing all of our lives and probably our brains as well.

The Water-carrier

Still life with Mounir's ceramic donkey, wedgewood pot, and Turkish tiles.

Eid Mubarak to all my Muslim friends.

I find myself thinking a lot about what to paint or draw these days. With Gaza and our chaotic world so much on my mind, it's hard to focus on simple beauty: it somehow seems trivial, oblivious to reality, self-indulgent. And yet simple beauty and simple pleasure are what nearly every human being desires, and deserves.

The little ceramic donkey in this drawing belonged to my father-in-law, so it's precious to us. I think it came from his native Syria, though I'm not sure; to him it was a reminder of the donkeys that used to bring fresh cool water from the mountains into Damascus. In the later years of his life, he had a whole menagerie of small animal figures: birds, monkeys, camels, an elephant, snakes: a veritable Noah's ark. None of them were to scale, which gave the arrangement an even quirkier air. When he still lived in a house, they were arranged around, and in, a large houseplant. After he moved to a retirement home, they were on a wooden stand, and he sometimes liked to rearrange them for his own amusement. His favorite was a tiny mouse made of ivory. One day it disappeared and he was disconsolate. We searched everywhere but never found it. He blamed the housekeeper, saying she must have knocked it onto the floor and vacuumed it up. After he died I hoped it would turn up as the apartment was emptied, but it never did: I like to think it scampered away to live behind the bookshelves, exactly as long as he did.

Last night I began reading Elias Khoury's Gate of the Sun ("Bab al-Shams"). It's been on our shelf ever since we heard Khoury read at the Blue Met literary festival in Montreal some years ago, when he was interviewed and spoke about his close friend Mahmoud Darwish. Afterward we went up and met him, and he inscribed this copy to J., whose grandmother's maiden name was also Khoury. The novel is a story of relationships that contain Palestinian and personal histories; it is woven together rather clumsily - as the NYT reviewer notes - from snatches of stories, but this was a deliberate device by the author, who tried to write in a way that mirrors Palestinian reality: the history of the nation and each person seeming torn and patched together.

The novel is written in the voice of a surrogate son sitting at the bedside of his "father," an elderly freedom fighter who has had a stroke and lies in a coma. The son, a medic in a hospital in a refugee camp, spends most of his days bathing and caring for the dying man, refusing to believe he won't regain consciousness, and then at night, like Scheherazade, tells him stories, hoping that the words are still penetrating. I've been afraid of reading it, and now, even though I've started, I still am.

In addition to the tragic and horrifying events it recalls, the book of course also reminds me of my own dialogue with my very alert, very aged father-in-law, and of the last few months when he slipped in and out of present time and space as we sat by his bed, talking to him and listening to his own stories. When he died, at 99, a door into our family's life and history closed forever; now we too must patch it together out of fragments. Last night, when the narrator began reciting bits of verse by al-Mutanabi, perhaps the greatest of all classical Arab poets, I felt myself back in the familiar room with its blue and yellow silk carpet, the books lining the walls, the statue of Socrates on the stand in front of the old shortwave radio, and my father-in-law, leaning back in his chair, eyes shut, smiling at the ceiling as he recited poetry.

Terrible times can paralyze us, or we can use them, turning their negative energy into something better. Perhaps the time has finally come for me to pull out those dialogues that were collected here under the title The Fig and the Orchid, and see what can be done with them. As sad as my father-in-law  -- a former UN administrator of a refugee camp in Gaza, among his many positions through a long life of teaching and ministry -- would be over the events today, he always believed in the power of education, beauty, literature, noble ideals, and -- most especially -- reason and truth. He often spoke about their remarkable ability to endure across the millenia, lifting people above the worst.

"The desert knows me well, the night and the mounted men.
The battle and the sword, the paper and the pen.

--al-Mutanabi (915-965)

Al-Mutanabi, I have just learned, was the son of a humble water-carrier.

Double tanka for Ash Wednesday

Pietro Perugino, Moses Leaving for Egypt, fresco from the Sistine Chapel

 

My poetic Lent
began in the dentist's chair.
The drill whirred and struck
an un-numbed crevasse of bone:
sublime sharp sliver of pain.

I thought of Mozart,
so young, the Sistine --
Allegri's lament
piercing his soul: a dagger
he transformed into a pen.

 

Allegri's Miserere mei was first heard by Pope Urban IV in 1630. He was so struck by its beauty that he declared it could only be sung in the Vatican's Sistine Chapel. The music alternates plainchant with verses for two choirs, one choir singing a simpler version and the other, a quartet, "commenting" on each verse with an ornamented variation which includes an ethereal, extremely high ornamentation sung by a boy soprano. In addition to allowing the music to be sung only at certain services, it also became forbidden -- on pain of excommunication -- for the music to be written down or transcribed. According to tradition, which is corroborated by letters, the young Mozart, at age 14, visited the Sistine Chapel in 1770, heard the music, and was deeply affected by its mystery and beauty. That evening, he wrote it down from memory, making a few corrections after a second visit to the chapel. In 1771 he gave a copy to a British historian, who had it published in London. The Pope summoned Mozart to Rome and praised his genius, and the ban was lifted.

Our choir sings the Miserere mei twice during Lent: once on Ash Wednesday evening, and once on Good Friday afternoon. So we sang it last night, along with a beautiful mass setting by Herbert Howells and William Walton's Drop Drop Slow Tears: the novocaine was worn off by then!

 

Phoenicia Publishing News

Over at Phoenicia today, I was delighted to announce the forthcoming publication of Night Willow, a collection of prose poems by Luisa A. Igloria. Readers of The Cassandra Pages may be familiar with Luisa's work through her daily writing project, poems that are published and archived at Dave Bonta's Via Negativa.

I still remember reading, with that sense of excitement and surprise editors always look for, the first poem Luisa sent to an issue of qarrtsiluni that Dave and I were co-editing. We were pretty blown away by that poem, and by many subsequent ones too. That was the beginning of a long association which has continued on FB, where I see Luisa's regular posts. I've hoped to publish one of her books for a long time, and am proud that we've signed an agreement for Night Willow.

In addition to being a very hard-working and prolific poet, a teacher, wife, mother, and daughter, Luisa is a collaborator with other artists: her poems at Via Negativa are usually inspired by one of Dave's posts at The Morning Porch. Maybe it was fated that we'd work together on this book, because the title poem was inspired by a painting of mine, and a post I wrote here. Now I'm excited about making a beautiful book for her poems to inhabit.

That painting was dreamlike, and these prose poems of Luisa's are too. Like much of her work, Night Willow employs memory and associations as well as the ingredients of the everyday, but goes beyond the narrative and the purely lyrical to create a dream-like atmosphere that contains beauty and bewilderment, along with many other emotions.

In writing Night Willow, Igloria said she wanted to stretch both herself and her craft, asking her prose to do "the same hard muscle work I expect in every poem that I write."

"It was an experience that felt almost like trying my hand at musical composition," she said. "I wanted to create mood, tone, networks of memory and echo so that the poems could speak to each other across and within the collection - but at the same time achieve a level of language that is also precise and thoughtful."

Before beginning to work with Luisa on this project, I didn't realize that she was the first Filipina woman of letters installed in the Palanca Literary Hall of Fame in the Philippines, and is an eleven-time winner of that country's highest literary award, the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature (in poetry, non-fiction, and short fiction) as well as having a very long list of American poetry awards to her credit.

Like many other immigrant artists and writers, she is sometimes put into an ethnic classification: Carlos Angeles wrote, "“[Her] poetry inhabits the heart first, then the mind, and the soul…her work contains some of the most extraordinary and most polished poetry written by a Filipino poet in English today.” I absolutely agree, but think there's no reason to limit Igloria's strength by comparing her to one country's poetic output; it's extraordinary and polished poetry by any standard.

NaBloWriMo

Still trying to decide whether to try to post something every day this month or not. I admit that my blogging-drive has taken a bit of a dive this past year, due to the decrease in readers and comments; it just isn't as much interactive fun as it used to be. But I'm a lifelong journaler, and this medium suits me, so I'm still here, asking your indulgence for these notes on a life that would otherwise end up in a dark drawer!

Last year, I wrote a poem a day, each one built on a color.

It would be fun sometime to do a drawing a day based on a color. But I think that's not going to be this November: too little color around, and too much upcoming travel, rehearsal, work, and busyness.

I've done several month-long haiku/tanka stints, and by the end of the month it's really difficult. Good practice though.

For superhuman feats, surely my friend Dave Bonta's review/appreciation of a poetry book every day of the month, a few years ago, took the prize, though Luisa Igloria's poem-a-day practice has shattered that ceiling many times over.

This fall has felt like a whirlwind of design work, rehearsals, travel, church and family stuff, along with the normal daily routine, and it's been too much -- which is probably why I got sick. Many of those responsibilities aren't nearly finished, either. I think my practice this November is going to be being less demanding of myself, not more, and to focus on the restorative practices that help me: being outdoors, playing the piano, meditating, having quiet time at home. The relaxed expectation might even result in a better outcome -- we'll see!