Category Archives: Books

In Praise of Short Stories

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The short story has been a neglected writing style in my reading. This summer, I made a point of addressing it when I read Ottessa Moshfegh’s excellent collection, Homesick For Another World. After I finished, I vowed to read more similar collections.

A perk of working with high school-age youth is having the chance to revisit writers and writing that you were equally clueless about when you were the same age as these young charges assigned to you.

Of course, being a tutor, sometimes you must scramble in reacquainting yourself with said writing from the past. A few of those writers? Try James Thurber, J.D. Salinger, George Orwell, and Shirley Jackson. Orwell and Salinger haven’t been tough. I read The Catcher in the Rye last year and have read it several times over the last decade. Ditto for Orwell, and in fact, I made a habit of annually rereading 1984 during the 2000s and the Bush presidency. Thurber and Jackson are less familiar.

A week ago, I was time-traveling back to Thurber’s “The Catbird Seat,” and dull little (or so we think!) Mr. Martin. Admittedly, I have never loved Thurber like some literary types have.

On Sunday, I was co-reading Shirley Jackson’s short story, “Charles,” and helping a student craft a paragraph about parents not recognizing flaws in a child. The discussion that ensued was meaningful to me on several levels.

Shirley Jackson, American writer (seen in this April 16, 1951 AP photo)

Save for “The Lottery,” few people who travel in non-literary circles know Jackson’s work. This New Yorker article is worth reading if you’d like to know more about a wonderfully (weird) and “haunted” writer.

“Charles” wasn’t particularly strange or odd. It was a story that had humor and was what might be called an “unsentimental” look at life as a mother during a particular time in America. In Jackson’s case, this would be the 1940s, a very different time period than our own. As a writer, Jackson shaped it with sly parental incredulity and humor, too.

Apparently, the story was published in Mademoiselle and later, was included in her collection, The Lottery/The Adventures of James Harris.

It begins thus:

The day my son Laurie started kindergarten he renounced corduroy overalls with bibs and began wearing blue jeans with a belt; I watched him go off the first morning with the older girl next door, seeing clearly that an era of my life was ended, my sweet-voiced nursery-school tot replaced by a long-trousered, swaggering character who forgot to stop at the corner and wave good-bye to me. . . . 

Like the parents Jackson is writing about, most think their child is the best. Love compels you to want to feel this way. This also opens the door to the possibility that you’ll overreach and have unrealistic expectations, too.

Of course, it’s special when parents of a child get to witness an adult who validates the faith they had in him or her.

Books and Reading: An Antidote

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I’ve written about subscribing to a “real American newspaper.” The paper that gets dropped at the end of my driveway every Saturday and Sunday is one of the “failing” papers that our always-aggrieved president regularly runs down for its “fake news.”

To call journalism “fake” exposes our bloviator-in-chief for the shallow huckster and carnival barker that he is at his essence. A man with small hands, a smaller heart, and who is totally clueless about the history of the nation he threatens to run into the ditch once and for all. For him, news is always “fake” when it’s not intended to flatter behaviors that are unflattering at best.

To malign reading and intellectual breadth and depth as “elitism,” is a solipsistic sleight-of-hand employed by lazy, shallow dolts who don’t, won’t, or can’t read. Bringing facts to these types is like arriving at a gunfight with a knife or worse: a sheet of paper.

But, to be well-read opens up a well-lit vista that is ever-expanding, rather than the world of the those striving at nothing. For the latter, their realm is a darkened square where the walls continue constricting, forcing out necessary oxygen.

I don’t expect every Saturday (or Sunday) to be a banner news day or one where The New York Times Book Review is bursting with books I want to run out and pick-up. Today, however, was a day when my book supplement had me jotting down notes and making plans to add to my ever-growing pile of “books to read.”

Saturday newspaper reading.

Continue reading →

Failures of Kindness

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I’m reading a book of short stories by George Saunders. The librarian that checked it out for me waxed effusive about Saunders. His stories are good, although they fall short of another book of short stories I just finished by Ottessa Moshfegh.

I picked up Moshfegh’s book because I got a Google alert and discovered something she shared about Mark in an interview for Vulture, including one of his 50-books-in-a-year as one of 10 works she’d take with her to a desert island. I’d never read anything by her. She was in his MFA cohort at Brown:

We lost this brave genius last year, and the books he gifted us while he lived are so wonderfully strange and honest and beautiful, I can’t believe he even existed. He was more than a poet or performance artist — Baumer’s life itself was a work of art. He was truly radical, and the most openhearted, unjaded human I’ve ever met.

That was kind of her. Continue reading →

The Sociological Thread

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Mary was going through some old boxes that had cards, letters, and other assorted paperwork. She has resumed efforts at downsizing that began prior to our move back in 2016.

Some of the boxes contained letters from her mom, sent during college. When we were both off at school back in the day, letters (not text or social media) were how parents communicated with their children who were off at school if they cared about remaining in-touch.

Yesterday was yet another sad holiday. I felt inadequate, knowing her sense of loss as a mother whose son was killed: she also lost her mom last fall, so the day was particularly tough for her. I’ll experience something similar on Father’s Day. Life is never the same for parents who’ve lost an adult child, and not everyone is celebratory on days like these.

An item Mary dug out related to me was an old book report. I’m not sure what I wrote it for (most likely a freshman English class at UMO). It was on Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain.

Reporting out on “Huckleberry Finn” (circa 1980 or 1981)

Reading through my writing from the past was interesting. It doesn’t quite match up to my writing today, but there were signature items in this 300-word review that made me smile.

In the report, I managed to report-out on the “sociological thread” running through Twain’s signature work. Apparently, my interest in that method of analyzing writing was present back in 1980 or 1981.

I wrote this:

His (Twain’s) creation of Huck Finn, the uncouth, ignorant character at the heart of the book, captured the hearts of countless readers. This is something in its own right. Twain goes a step further, though, and delves into the sociological makeup of Americans at this time period.

I’d  rewrite this paragraph today so that it reads a bit “smoother,” but I obviously had cultivated an eye for the “sociological,” because it was there, back in my late teens.

Dances With Bears

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I’d argue that books and reading (can) open us up to the wider world. While it’s counter-intuitive, social media seems to be making us smaller.

In a recent blog post, I shared about my subscribing to a real newspaper—in this case—The New York Times.

I am reading Witold Szablowski’s book about dancing bears after reading the review that appeared in last week’s Times’ Book Review section.

A fascinating book about how humans often hearken for things they shouldn’t, but do, because it supposedly makes their lives easier.

A book about “the good-ole days” of authoritarian rule.

The book’s introduction starts this way:

The guy with the wacky hair and the crazed look in his eyes did not appear out of nowhere. He was already known to them. Sometimes he said how great they were, and told them to go back to their roots: if need be, he threw in some highly unlikely but madly alluring conspiracy theory. Just to get them to listen. And to give them a fright. Because he’d noticed that if he scared them, they paid him more attention. Continue reading →

Fire, Then Fury

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Michael Wolff has made a career of skewering powerful people, newsmakers like Rupert Murdoch. That is his journalistic M.O. You can look it up. To expect anything different from him re: President Trump, is mistake number one in your thinking.

A profile of Wolff was written back in 2004 for New Republic. The writer, Michelle Cottle, wrote that he “is the quintessential New York creation, fixated on culture, stye, buzz, and money, money, money.” Perhaps better, Wolff might be a quintessential American creation of sorts, mirroring America’s obsession with flash, trash, and cultural detritus. A writer “willing to dish the dirt.” Of course, it’s dangerous to hold the mirror up to others—especially if the mirror reveals their idol/president/emperor is a cartoon cutout. It pisses them off, too. Say what you will about Mr. Wolff: he’s been laughing all the way to the bank for a while.

Since Wolff’s pretty well-known in what he does, the fact that the current handlers of Mr. Trump, and Trump himself, must have known that Wolff was going to write what he saw and what he thought he saw. And yet, they feign indignation. Didn’t something tip you off when he was playing a fly-on-the-wall, talking to a gaggle of inner-circle cronies? He spoke to Trump, too, for God’s sake!

Michael Wolff on the Trump White House.

That’s why for me, it rings incredibly disingenuous when ideological Kool-Aid-drinkers get indignant about Wolff’s book. Kind of lame, in my way of thinking. Continue reading →

A Year of Books (about grief)

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An annual habit of mine since I’ve been blogging has been to compile an end-of-year reading recap. Each year I’ve done it differently: some years I got really involved with my reading recap blog post. Other times, like last year (2016), I simply “dialed it in” because I wasn’t really feeling much enthusiasm for that writing “assignment.” My reading recap in 2014 still stands as “the bomb” in terms of detail, depth, and length.

Keeping a reading list is another lesson I learned from Mark Baumer. He thought it was important to keep track of the books he read and he encouraged his parents to do the same. Like him, I had a website, so I incorporated my annual reading compendium into my blog/website. Like son—like father. Mary kept her list in a journal/notebook, as well as noting it on the Goodreads site.

When Mark was killed in January, I couldn’t read for most of the next month following his death. Grief affects you in a host of ways, and I experienced a sort of cognitive dulling that made following a narrative difficult, if not impossible. This concerned me, especially if it meant that something essential in my life like reading would get snatched away from me, just like Mark had.

I was grasping (and gasping) for understanding without much success in the days and weeks following Mark’s death. This was when I picked up a book written by a friend and someone I had worked with (as had Mark) in helping her publish that book. Linda Andrews wrote a beautifully-honest book about coping with the death of her husband, Jim. Her own experiences with many people’s inability to cope with what you are going through was oddly comforting. Coming back to Please Bring Soup To Comfort Me While I Grieve offered me a much richer appreciation for what she accomplished in writing that book. It also offered me the ability to make my way back to an important practice of reading.

Grief and an existential sadness have become daily companions during 2017, the year I’d soon like to forget (Mark was killed on January 21), or perhaps be offered some kind of do-over. I spent the final 11 months looking for other books that might offer solace and support. My experience became one where books offering insight and understanding of my new landscape of grief and loss and a world turned upside-down weren’t as readily available as I would have thought they would be. Maybe a better way of articulating that is to say that the kinds of books that spoke to me, personally, weren’t something I could just look up online or pick off the bookshelf at the local library. Finding them necessitated work and investigation. I’m still not sure why. Maybe it’s that the books that dot the self-help section dealing with grief and loss simply aren’t addressing the kinds of things I’m living through. Also, as much as we try to apply a one-size-fits-all approach to “healing” the grieving, everyone grieves differently. I’m not looking to simply compartmentalize my feelings, or to make others more comfortable in my presence, which is often how it seems like we’re expected to process death in America. At times, feeling like I had to measure up to this unrealistic expectation made me angry. Continue reading →

Remembering Others

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I’ve written tributes about people in my life who were special to me. I think it’s important to discharge our debts of gratitude personally, and in some cases, publicly. I’ve tried to walk that out in my own life.

Having written two books about Moxie, the distinctly-different regional soft drink that has developed a cult following in parts of my native New England, I know a bit about the elixir’s history. I also recognize that there have been figures in that history that were essential in keeping Moxie’s brand alive.

If your curiosity about Moxie’s been piqued, I’d point you to a couple of blog posts. This one about Sue Conroy is one I’d highly recommend. Sue got me excited about Moxie and forced me to dig into the drink’s past. And then if you think you are good at math, there’s nothing quite like a little Moxie math. Continue reading →

Head On

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I’m pleased that copies of I am a Road are being snatched up. I want people to read Mark’s writing because it’s worthy of a wider audience. I haven’t been this busy shipping books since my own collection of essays came out in the summer of 2014. Of course, that may as well have been 100 years ago, given the events of the last eight weeks.

Our son, Mark, was a poet. I should add, an “award-winning poet,” as his walk was being partially funded by a poetry fellowship from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. The award likely became a factor, helping him again heed the road’s beck and call.

In 2015, Mark also won the Quarterly West Novella Contest, for Holiday Meat. I enjoyed finding this review by Mary-Kim Arnold, from last summer, and reading her obvious appreciation for the work and Mark’s writing.

Mark was just hitting his stride as a writer and poet. I can’t imagine where his commitment to craft might have taken him if he wasn’t tragically killed January 21, walking along a highway in Florida.

This thought is merely one of many that arrive daily, if not more often. Grief is packed full of questions relative to loved ones lost.

Packing books means that at some point, I need to bring them somewhere and ship them. Since we’re now in Brunswick, I’ve been a frequent visitor to the post office on Pleasant Street.

On Monday morning, I ran across the street after doing my book drop, and grabbed a stack of books about grief at Curtis Memorial Library. Out of six books randomly chosen, two might be rated as moderately helpful. I’m finding that most of the books occupying library self-help sections on the subject don’t offer much in terms of assuaging the pain associated with losing someone, especially a son that Mary and I loved more than life itself.

One book that I grabbed was pretty good, though. It was an older book, published by a small press in New York. It’s title, The Death of an Adult Child: A Book For and About Bereaved Parents. Definitely one that will never be considered an entry for “sexiest book title.” The book, published in 1998, isn’t one of the newer books on the topic, either.

The writer, Jeanne Webster Blank, lost a 39-year-old daughter to breast cancer three weeks after being diagnosed. Naturally, Blank and her husband were devastated.

Books about grief.

Continue reading →

Travel on Foot

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In 2010, Mark Baumer crossed America on foot in 81 days. While my research isn’t extensive (or exhaustive), I’m not sure anyone’s completed a coast-to-coast journey across the U.S. sans gasoline any faster than he did six years ago.

Mark is a writer and poet. He chronicled that first trek in a new book that has a very limited print run. The book, I am a Road, will be available to purchase for another week in print form, so don’t miss out.

Two weeks ago, Mary and I learned that our only son was being beckoned by the road once again. This time, his latest cross-country trip will be done for something larger than what motivated Mark during his first walk. Oh, and he’ll be doing this without shoes, too.

Since Mark’s taken the time to articulate and frame it in narrative form (much better than I can), I’ll send you directly to him, so he can explain the “why” of his latest journey.

Mark Baumer will cross America on foot, once again.

Mark Baumer will cross America on foot, once again.