The One and Only PWL Book Club

Verified blog of the "People With Looks Who Read Books" Book Club

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Today's Poem(s) for National Poetry Month

Application for a Driving License and Birds for Janet - The Heron.

Both published in There's a Trick With a Knife I'm Learning To Do: Selected Poems 1963-78 by Michael Ondaatje.

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A Literary Vortex Of Everything You Ever Wanted To Know (But Didn’t Know You Wanted To Know)

This is a review of Eliot Weinberger’s novel, “An Elemental Thing.” Weinberger’s approach is to carefully unveil each chapter in a unique essay-style format. His  only rule is that all information must be verifiable. With that in mind, I started my journey.

Imagine taking a university lecture with a professor who possesses a vast familiarity with world history, mythology, physics, indigenous peoples, and an assortment of obscure oddities and forgotten knowledge. In “An Elemental Thing”, Eliot Weinberger is your professor and he leads you, lecture by lecture, to discover a new facet of his seemingly infinite wisdom.

Each chapter transports you to a different mind space. Sometimes you are learning about lost cultures like the Incas and the Mayans, elsewhere it is about spiritual figures in Christianity, who are described somewhere on a spectrum between enlightenment and madness. Ancient Greek philosophers are the subject of several sections and through studying their queer practices and beliefs, the roots of some of our own modern science is revealed. Other chapters beautifully depict a portrait of the Prophet Muhammad, or explain the intricacies of what dreaming of a jaguar might mean.

The topics of culture, religion, philosophy, science, and the natural world are the basis of most essays within this novel’s collection, but so are abstract ideas such as life cycles and continuity. Ultimately, the all-encompassing theme of this novel is humanity’s attempt to attach meaning to the natural world, and our efforts to organize and create an understanding of phenomena such as the natural world, dreams, and communication. Weinberger ambitiously explores the connections between the cultural meanings humans establish and the traditions, beliefs, and archetypes that rise out of shared meaning.

Any reader will find a chapter or two that speaks to them. In my case I was enamoured with the story of a young woman who rose to prominence in a foreign kingdom through her ability to turn herself into a blossoming tree. A simple yet romantic and magical myth that keeps creeping into my mind and leaves me smiling and day-dreaming. 

Rating: 5/5

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Major book hangover after finishing Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch. It is long, sweeping, emotional and worth every minute of reading time. Highly recommended. 

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This is a Photograph of Me By Margaret Atwood

   It was taken some time ago At first it seems to be a smeared print: blurred lines and grey flecks blended with the paper; then, as you scan it, you can see something in the left-hand corner a thing that is like a branch: part of a tree (balsam or spruce) emerging and, to the right, halfway up what ought to be a gentle slope, a small frame house. In the background there is a lake, and beyond that, some low hills. (The photograph was taken the day after I drowned. I am in the lake, in the center of the picture, just under the surface. It is difficult to say where precisely, or to say how large or how small I am: the effect of water on light is a distortion. but if you look long enough eventually you will see me.)

  Published in Atwood's first major poetry collection, The Circle Game, which won the Governor General's Award.

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Dandelion by Patricia Young

Why can’t we be more like the dandelion, hollow-stemmed, milky-sapped? Wouldn’t sex be sexier if sex were asexual? Just because we possess stamens and pistils doesn’t mean we have to use them. Let’s fertilize ourselves. What’s the evolutionary advantage of going gaga and wobbly in the knees? Don’t you get tired of the complex human complexities? Why can’t we travel all night on an all-night train and wake up as something else, a taproot, say. Let’s be savvy and adaptive and flaunt our tiny florets. Wouldn’t you rather by-pass the awkward introductions and clone yourself? Don’t think invasive weed, think fairy clock, rosette of deeply-lobed leaves. It might be fun to pop up unwelcome and anywhere, the front lawn of City Hall. Why can’t we be more like the humble dandelion in a field of humble dandelions? Who says you can’t throw off your body and float like a filament in the wind? Let’s get drunk as puffballs in a roadside ditch, let’s make babies without reproductive organs or classes in synchronized breathing. Three days old, this one lies on a blanket beneath the maple tree: oh prince of the meadow, bright yellow flowerhead.

Published in Maisonneuve Reprinted in Best Canadian Poetry in English, 2009

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Male Thrust by Lorna Crozier I can take no pleasure from serious reading…that lacks a strong male thrust.                                                                      —Anthony Burgess This poem bends its knees and moves its groin. It does the Dirty Dog at parties. It pushes against cloth, against the page. It pokes between the lines. It breathes deeply, closes its one eye and wets its lips. It writes lewd words in the margins. Wherever you are reading— on a bus, at home in your favourite chair, in the library— it flips open its coat and flashes. It backs the librarian against the wall, it comes all over the stacks, over A Clockwork Orange, over The Naked and the Dead, over A Golden Treasury of Verse, over Sexus, Nexus and Plexus. This poem won’t stop. Even when you close the book you can hear it making obscene sounds, smacking its lips, completely in love with itself.

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Excerpt from Modotti by Adrienne Rich

In the red wash of your darkroom from your neighborhood of volcanoes to the geranium nailed in a can on the wall of your upstairs hideout in the rush of breath a window of revolution allowed you on this jaundiced stair in this huge lashed eye                                                   these footsteps I’m following you with

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Seamus Heaney

"Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests; snug as a gun."

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So Many Beats

Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac

Mountains and Rivers Without End by Gary Snyder

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Irving Layton

Newsboy Neither tribal nor trivial he shouts From the city's centre where tramcars move Like stained bacilli across the eyeballs, Where people spore in composite buildings From their protective gelatine of doubts, Old ills, and incapacity to love

- Irving Layton

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Lines Composed a Few Miles Below The Empire State Building Many of my best friends are Italian. I don’t know why, but anyway last year a friend of mine who’s more acquaintance than friend, more Italian than acquaintance, broke my arm. When I told another friend whose father is Italian, she said her father knew people who might be able to break the legs of the guy who broke my arm.

- First laughs of the first poem of Jonah Winter’s first book of poetry, Maine, which is kicking off my National Poetry Month.

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National Poetry Month

Getting out the goods.

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The 10 books you need to read this spring

Spring will be sprung! We promise! And when you are basking in the early spring sunshine, we know you'll

CBC Books has a list of 10 books you need to read this spring.

I'll definitely be reading Joseph Boyden (#hotauthor) but I'd pick him any day in any season...I'll probably also read the new Emma Donoghue (Room continues to haunt me) and Lorrie Moore's short-story collection Bark because short stories are my jam. 

What will you be reading to welcome in the warm weather?

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How to Cure a Book Hangover

There are books with which we all develop (un)healthy obsessions. A few chapters in and you begin to dread social functions, going to work, and having to eat because it means time away from your book. You begin to think like the characters, saying “so it goes” and calling people phonies. As you approach the end of the book, you read slower and slower to savour the last pages. When it’s over you can’t stop thinking about it.  You start to sober up but you still don’t feel quite right. The daylight seems harsh. You have a book hangover.

Here are our best book hangover cures:

1) Hair of the Dog The book is over but you need a little hit to get you through the day, so you read all the parts – the back cover copy, the acknowledgments, thank yous and dedications, even the copyright page.

Best used for: Books that are XL. Colum McCann’s Transatlantic spans lives, continents and emotions, creating an envelope of immensity that blankets you beyond the last pages. The best way to digest something this size is to pick it back up.

2) Go back to sleep

Can’t stand the daylight? Character nuances and plot twists pounding in your head? Go back to sleep. Pick up a book that will make your thirsty intellect flat line. We recommend something you would find in your apartment building laundry room.  

3) Serial polygamist (aka readaholic)

Immediately start reading the next book on your shelf, and when that’s done, move to the next one beside it. Rinse and repeat. Alternatively, juggle multiple books at once to avoid attachment.

Best used for: Books that deal with heavy emotion. For example, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. After suffering from a tender emotional connection to a nine-year-old protagonist who has brought something into your heart, drown those emotions with a variety of others until you’re a sopping wet, confused mess lying on the bathroom floor.

4) Binge compulsively

Go online. Google the book. Read reviews. Google the author. Read interviews. Google the publisher. Read upcoming titles. If there was a movie adaptation - watch it. Then IMDB it. Then IMDB the actors. Google what books the actors like to read. Read those books. Find out if the actors have ever written. Buy their books online. Check Goodreads to see who else has read these books. Find out if these people are on Twitter. Check who they follow on Twitter, especially authors. Check those authors’ Twitter feeds to find other fans/readers like you. See if those people have Goodreads bookshelves. Continue down the rabbit hole.

Best used for: Immersive books that leave you longing for their world. These books tend to be sci-fi or fantasy. For example, George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire (aka Game of Thrones) and Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale.

5) Talk about it

When a book is so dense and full that you could talk about it constantly to your hairdresser, the UPS guy or even the dying orchid on your windowsill, make the wise choice; you could go online and write a lonely blog post that no one will read, or you could join a book club and allow the book to live eternally by shoving it down your club members’ throats.

If all of the above fail you, maybe an actual hangover will take it off your mind. With the truly great books, though, they never really leave you.

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Ferlinghetti to publish his travel journals

http://blog.sfgate.com/bookmarks/2014/03/17/ferlinghetti-to-publish-his-travel-journals/

Photos from our visit to City Lights Books last summer.

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4 Books To Read As You Come to Terms With Your 30th Birthday

While some of us relish the passing of time and reflect on lessons learned and experiences gained, many of us dread the thought of waking up to find grey hairs and fine lines that seem to appear at the very moment our biological clock strikes THIRTY.

What follows is a list of books to read while coming to terms with your inevitable arrival into the third decade of your life. Most “books to read before your turn 30” lists are either full of personal finance books or Toni Morrison*; this list is short and sans-le-bullshit. Most importantly, the books are actually readable (I'm looking at you, Tolstoy). The books and authors on this list are varied, but they all offer one thing: perspective. From sitting at a cafe with Allen Ginsberg, to a dystopian future where middle America continues to be the strangest place on earth, these books will give you tangible life-lessons. You know, 30 is actually a wonderful age: you've made it through your emotional and awkward adolescence, probably had a relationship or two, and maybe even a job. Even if you've managed to royally screw up your life, you still have 30 more good years to turn things around. And with that tidbit of clarity and positivity, the list:

Just Kids, Patti Smith

After reading Just Kids I developed a deep obsession with Patti Smith despite not knowing any of her music. Her life was so full at such a young age and her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe was gut-wrenchingly powerful. Even when she didn’t have two nickels to rub together, Patti was fulfilled by her art and her passions. And the backdrop of New York City in the 70s with the grit, the grim and the potential of it all, doesn’t hurt.

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, Cheryl Strayed

Think things are tough for you? At least you didn’t just get dropped off at the tip of the Pacific Crest Trail, alone, with no experience, a residual heroin addiction, and a backpack that is way too heavy for you. Her story is one that champions the lengths we must go to find our own paths.

Tenth of December: Stories, George Saunders

This book is good. So good it makes your stomach kinda hurt and your chest feel tight. George Saunders’ writing is like a slap in the face. This book has little to do with turning 30 and more to do with people facing difficult, wonderful and often strange things in their lives; teaching us how quickly things can change, for better or for worse, and how fleeting and short time on earth really is.

The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien 

We could have named this blog post 4 Books to Read to Give You a Little Perspective and Help You Realize Things Aren’t That Bad, which is really just a polite way of saying that turning 30 is a blessing, so be grateful. Part short story collection and part Vietnam War memoir, this book sticks with you and gives readers who will never have to experience going to war, or losing a loved one to war, perspective on a life that could have been.

The Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger

… just kidding. You are turning 30, not into a prepubescent boy.

*Wanna check out other lists? Huff Post has a 30 Books You Should Read Before You Are 30 (Chabon, Munro, Kundera, Eggers, yes please! Tolstoy, Morrison…not so much). AskMen has a list just for men (in case any of you men out there were concerned that you had to read the same books as the rest of us) and it is hilarious. If you want to learn more about making cocktails, building a watch collection and pleasuring a woman, this list is for you.

Flavourwire also has a list of 30 Books Everyone Should Read Before Turning 30. If you haven’t read To Kill A Mockingbird by now then you’ve got way bigger problems than turning 30.

Tell us, which books are on your list to read before 30?