The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones by Anthony Bourdain. 

I’m on a bit of a non-fiction spree here.  And frankly, it’s because of my strange book-shelving system.  There are the to-be-read- shelves and the read-shelves.  The read shelves are further divided and organized, and the non-fiction section has more empty space.  Crazy way to pick what to read, but whatever.  I have a lot of homework to do, you know, and I’m doing it.  And, pat me on the back here: I’ve made it over a month without buying books. 

Right.  Bourdain.  Love him.  I love his taste in music, his brash demeanor, his more obnoxious habits, from which I’m insulated, since I don’t have to smell his cigarettes or hear his drunker banter.  He’s a character and a half.  And, also, he tends to be right about food most of the time.

This particular book is a collection of articles and stories he’s written for a variety of publications over the years.  It was a great break from the books about murder I was toting about, it was easy to read on the metro since the pieces are short.  It was also a bit tough to read on the metro, because it made me laugh a lot.  And when you laugh on the metro, people assume you’re nuts.  Which is fine–makes it easier to have a seat to yourself.

So, it’s a fun read.  It’s not Bourdain at his best, but a book of articles is rarely anyone’s best.  La. 

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote.

This is one of those classics, you know, and everyone is supposed to read it.  Somehow, as is true of many classics, I sailed through my extensive liberal education without reading this book in class.  So I read it after reading The Burning of Bridget Cleary, figuring two true-crime books right on top of each other would be some sort of enjoyable penance. 

It was.  Though I think I expected more of Capote.  It’s a good book–don’t get me wrong.  But how can it possibly measure up to the hype, or to his other work?  Capote was a masterful writer, but the combination of unsavory material and some writing tics that now seem outmoded–like using "quotes" to denote "questionable material" over and over again–took some of the shine off the work. 

Still and all, it’s a good book and I would not dissuade anyone from it.  I just don’t know if I’ll feel the need to read it again, when Breakfast at Tiffany’s is such a delicious offering each and every time.

Here I go, using any excuse to evangelize about a poet I like.  Medbh McGuckian is fantastic, and she has a great sense of compression.  I posted a lovely poem of hers over on the quasi-knitting side of my interweb presence.  Both are about love, of course, but in very different ways.

Blood-Words
Medbh McGuckian

Your silk-dry
mate cry
is a name I would cord
to my tongue,
eye-locked
in an eyelet
where the abrupt knot
of your bloodline
touches the bed-edge shore.

The greenest journey
is a torrent
of oxygen,
acres of water
eagle your arms
from scuffing the slim
room of death
to the self-told
faces from two lifetimes.

It would be pretty lame if a poetry blog couldn’t get its act together to participate in the Blogger’s Silent Poetry Reading, huh?

I’m going to cheat, because I’m like that. At first I was going to post my favorite Lauterbach, but I already have an excuse to do that, so then my brain started exploding with possibilities. So then I narrowed it down to my two favorite Ashbery poems, which appear consecutively in The Double Dream of Spring. The first Ashbery is really long, and I don’t want to type it, but I really want you to read it, so here. Yeah, go ahead, go read it.

That’s the cheating part. Below is my Official Bloggers Silent Poetry Reading Poem.

The Chateau Hardware

It was always November there. The farms
Were a kind of precinct; a certain control
Had been exercised. The little birds
Used to collect along the fence.
It was the great “as though,” the how the day went,
The excursions of the police
As I pursue my bodily functions, wanting
Neither fire nor water,
Vibrating to the distant pinch
And turning out the way I am, turning out to greet you.

I will force poetry down your throats one way or another.  At least with this yearly feeding, I have Jane to blame.  This little annual ritual was dreamed up by some other blogger to celebrate Imbolc.  Which makes me ridiculously happy–because it means I’m just one of many people studying up on how people used to celebrate Brigid–an Irish craft/wisdom/creation goddess associated with poetry, fire, smelting, etc–way back in the way back. 

Imbolc means "in the belly" in Irish.  It’s the holiday dedicated to warming the bellies of  pregnant ewes, seeking eased birthing and the protection of their lambs. My Mom was born on Imbolc 60 years ago.    Serendipitous, eh?  My grandmother, who knew nothing of Irish culture, having her first child on an ancient holiday all about pregnancy and creation, and that woman having a daughter with a paddy, and that daughter developing this particularly strange obsession with Celtic culture . . . and somewhere in there Mom developed that strange, unwanted ability to cause floods.  I don’t have an explanation for that bit yet, but the rest of the story seems good to me. 

So in celebration of Imbolc and of my Mama, it seems most appropriate to celebrate my Mom’s mother, who I miss immensely, and who accidentally celebrated Imbolc in a very literal way 60 years ago today.

To My Grandmother
by Medbh McGuckian

I would revive you with a swallow’s nest:
For as long a time as I could hold my breath
I would feel your pulse like tangled weeds
Separate into pearls.  The heart should rule
The summer, ringing like a sickle over
The need to make life hard.  I would
Sedate your eyes with rippleseed, those
Hollow points that close as if
Your eyelids had been severed
To deny you sleep, imagine you a dawn.
I would push a chrysanthemum stone
Into your sleeve without your noticing
Its reaching far, its going, its returning.
When the end of the summer comes, it is
A season by itself; when your tongue
curls back like a sparrow’s buried head,
I would fill your mouth with rice and mussels.

Books to read in my house.  376 books we already own, which I have not yet read.  I blame Scott, because a great number of the books on the unread list are books on history and Asian philosophy and Manly-Man brand fiction and such that he brought into the house.  And while the chances that I will actually read The Sword Polisher’s Record: The Way of Kung Fu are quite slim, I’m not ready to strike it from the list yet. 

What really strikes me, though, is what a racket my particular line of study is for book sellers.  We Celticists know that the books in our field will only be available in the US for a short while, so we jump to buy them as soon as possible.  About 100 of the books I’ve yet to read are Celtic Studies books.  Another dozen or so are Appalachian Studies books, and then there are the mythology and Classical Studies books–all told, those rare tomes that I must must must buy before they go out of print make up more than half of my personal unread books.  And you know what?  I’m not going to beat that game.  They have me, and I can’t fix it alone.  In this market, we folks who like less popular subjects are screwed.

Technicians of the Sacred: A Range of Poetries from Africa, America, Asia, Europe and Oceania by Jerome Rothenberg

This is an anthology of sacred poetry from around the world; much of it from tribes in Africa, Asia, and the Americas.   The translations are tight and electric, and the variety of material presented is impressive.

I’d try to explain how fascinating the book is, or how moving, or how it makes my dirt-worshiping soul sing.  But I can’t.  It has stoppered my mouth over and over as I’ve been reading it.  So let me just paste in an example . . .

Birth of the Fire God (from Armenia)

heaven and earth labored
the crimson sea labored
and in the sea
from the reed’s tip
smoke rose
from the reed’s tip
flames rode
and in the flame
a youth was running
he had hair of fire
a beard of flame
and his eyes were suns

Get it? Got it? It’s good. Really good.

The Very Stuff: Poems on Color, Thread, and the Habits of Women by Stephen Beal

Damn it, I wanted this book to be good.  It’s not.

It’s twee.  It’s precious.  And most of the poetry between the covers is doggerel.  I should have known by the concept–Beal used the colors of DMC embroidery floss as a stand-in for a Muse.  I hope Calliope and the girls don’t hunt the poor guy down–I’m sure he meant well.

I’m sure Mr. Beal is a fantastic embroiderer, but he’s not so much of a poet.  To quote that old meanie Truman Capote, whom I love: "That’s not writing.  That’s typing."

Finally, my camera and I are in the same place as the sun.

That happy accident came about only because I led a discussion about creation myths over the weekend, and it filled my noggin to bursting.  So I had to leave work at lunch time and come home to decompress.  Which allowed me to be in my living room while the sun was in the sky–that’s not a common occurrence these days.

And before you say it, yes, Muse-induced migraines are soooo last-millenium.  Whatever–call me old-fashioned.  I won’t deny it.  After all of the discussions of Athena–birthing and Ilmatar’s 700-year plus Väinämöinen-producing, Earth-creating pregnancy, I’m feeling damn fortunate to only experience some head-pain associated with artistic creation.

Scott’s sweater, in the corrected stripey pattern.

And the growing blanket, looking particularly fetching in dappled light.

This is proof of how a badly injured clown can be rehabilitated.  Ground-up-clown brand yarn, post-surgery:

So much better without the garish bits.

And this . . . dammit I need to know what it is.  A few friends have been kind enough to give me their leftover sock yarns.  Rachel sent a huge pile of goodness (befriend Rachel and get her to make you socks if at all possible.  She has very good taste in yarn).  This hazy blue  . . . I love this hazy blue.  I think I love it enough to make a circus tent out of it.

The Antelope Wife by Louise Erdrich

I’ve been working through Erdrich’s oeuvre for the last year or two, and she has turned into a go-to author for me.  I don’t know if any of her books can match the mastery of The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse in my eyes.   But she continually impresses me. 

The Antelope Wife follows two particular Ojibwe families, the Roys and the Shawanos.  The novel particularly plays with ideas of naming, bead-work, fidelity, parenthood, and surviving tragedy.  As usual, point of view shifts from character to character in the book’s chapters.  I was particularly pleased with the chapters written from the dog Almost Soup’s point of view.  I know that doesn’t hook everyone, but I’m a sucker for pooches and I’m not afraid to admit it. 

Coincidentally, the book opens with a fragment of a creation myth, which again appears at several points in the novel.  I was in the midst of a big study of creation myth when I plucked this one off the to-read shelf, so that aspect of the novel was  a nice surprise.   There are a few low points in the book–Erdrich occasionally lets her prose get away from her, and a few of her characters are not quite as well-realized as they could be.   But, overall, it’s a good book, and it elucidates another part of the Ojibwe community Erdrich is building for us.