Fridays at The Variegated Life: on what I’ve read or am reading …
So maybe (probably) my friend Melissa was right, and at the root of my commitment problem is that I’ve been committing (or trying to commit) to the wrong books.
This week I put all other reading aside for How Long, by Ron Padgett. Just the poetry for me, with its mixture of joyful play and deep seriousness. I want to quote entire poems! But alas. How about this bit from “Walking with Walt,” in which the narrator considers Whitman’s “expansive America” — which might actually never have existed:
It’s funny that America did not explode
when Whitman published Leaves of Grass,
explode with amazement and pride, but
America was busy being other
than what he thought it was and I grew up
thinking along his lines and of course now
oh well…
I think
he was just carried away
as we all are, if we’re lucky
enough to have just walking
buoy us up a little off the earth
to be more on it
What are you reading?
***
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All blogs all the time.
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I need to check out your blogroll, if you have one….
Midnight’s Children – which is a wonderful, sweeping, huge story about India with a lot of mischief. I can see why Salman Rushdie gets in a lot of trouble with a lot of people, but goodness, what stunning writing!
Although I admit I never actually finished The Satanic Verses, I very much want to read Rushdie’s upcoming (or just-published?) memoir. The excerpt in The New Yorker got me hooked. I like that it’s in third person. Very Writers Studio of him, actually. (The Writers Studio is where I teach. Or — the school with which I teach. The “where” of it is actually often my couch, as I teach online classes.)