gerald yelle's blog

Ansary on Hosseini

2011-11-25T19:48:00.000-08:00

I recently finished listening to Tamim Ansary read his book West of Kabul, East of New York while driving back and forth to work. I feel I have been given a wealth of ideas to complement my reading of The Kite Runner, which I will do with students in the next few weeks. From the sheltered privacy of Afghan life to the philosophical stances dividing Muslims, form the pain of leaving family in a far country to the sense of not quite fitting in --these two books have much to say to one another. Toward the end of his, a work of nonfiction, Ansary describes a meeting he attended along with Hosseini, who had probably already completed The Kite Runner. I had to smile when he describes him as a highly energetic physician who wrote short stories in his spare time, "horror stories," (I'm paraphrasing here) "in the tradition of writers like Ambrose Bierce."

Nocturnes --Ishiguro

2011-04-25T17:02:00.000-07:00

A striking example of how the same people whose novels make life worth living write short stories that leave me luke warm. I laugh out loud at "Come Rain or Come Shine," and very much enjoy "Malvern Hills" and "Nocturne," but I miss the emotional connection that comes from spending time with the characters in When We Were Orphans and Never Let Me Go. It seems as though I have a problem with the form, because I could say the same about Roth and Murakami. Then again there are others whose sense of humor carries the day, even with stories over ten pages long: Franz Kafka, Roald Dahl, and Stephen King. Poet James Tate wrote an excellent collection of short stories. Faulkner wrote some not so memorable, but "Two Soldiers" and the stories that extend or continue the lives of characters in his novels are iirreplaceable. Then there are people who write stories of five pages or less that serve up the same kind of impact as a good poem: Lydia Davis, Shirley Jackson, Heinrich Boll, Luisa Valenzuela. So there are short stories I wouldn't want to live without, but nothing stays with you like The Sound and the Fury or The Windup Bird Chronicles.

Great Expectations

2010-11-07T07:32:00.000-08:00

I don't remember if it was 9th or 10th grade. I don't remember much beyond Miss Havisham, Pip, a "conwict" and something about a scary staircase that turns out to be either the memory of an illustration or a scene from a movie version with Robert De Niro. One thing I do remember is that I didn't like it.

Forty years later I listen to Great Expectations in my car --and the reasons why I didn't like it back then are obvious. Its frank and relentless expose of adolescent insensitivity, embarrassment, cluelessness and ingratitude is not something an insensitive, embarrassed, clueless and ungrateful adolescent is ready to countenance. Too much like looking in the kind of mirror that shows your soul instead of your face. Too much like confession. That Pip becomes a sympathetic character by the end of the novel was no consolation: the prospect of a future helping others reach their goals wasn't much fun at 15 either.

Forty years later I think I get it.

There's a lesson there for high school teachers. Or maybe just for me.

The Color Purple

2010-04-25T11:19:00.000-07:00

Students suggested we tackle this after I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and A Raisin in the Sun. I had to confess that I had never read it. But rather than just say no, I thought I'd check it out. Turns out it tackles some of the most difficult questions of race in America, and of life on earh --and it does it with grace, intelligence and compassion. So thank you, students, for helping me fill this gap in my education. And thank you, Alice Walker.

The More We Know

2010-03-19T19:20:00.000-07:00

the more complex and mysterious the world becomes. The more we know, the more we find how much there is to know, how much work there is to do, if only we didn't have to worry about getting paid or recognized for doing it. Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything makes me think I'd be willing to help with catalog building, classification, pattern recognition, speculation, and maybe I wouldn't be unhappy about not winning a prize or being listed as a reference. Anyway, Bryson ought to win a prize for this. We ought to be proud that our day and age gave rise to such work.

Anna Karenina

2010-01-27T15:12:00.000-08:00

I seem to remember an old joke that it wasn't so much about marital infidelity as about agronomy. Turns out, after 30 CDs --something like 34 hours spread over December and January --it's not so much of a joke after all. Russia liberated the serfs at roughly the same time as Lincoln ended slavery in the US. I read a lot about sharecropping from the sharecropper's point of view, but I never read about an owner trying to come up with an agricultural system that would be productive, profitable, AND fair.

12/19/09 What I saw while grading papers

2009-12-19T19:12:00.000-08:00

The History Channel, for about five hours. Two hours of "Black Blizzards," a story I've been fascinated by since listening to Tim Egan's The Worst Hard Time last spring: The choking clouds of Black Sunday, the barbwire sparking, the people refusing to move. Then "102 Minutes That Changed America," raw documentary enhanced with quiet anxious drumbeat and ambient drone. Again the dust clouds. The fight for survival. I was a hundred miles away on 9/11, in Massachusetts. We watched CBS in the school library and lobby. The superintendent said our lives would never be the same. I felt disoriented, but I wanted to believe he was wrong. I was glad to get home later that day and see my kids. Today, between those two dust-ridden programs, The Beatles on Record. A breath of fresh air. Afterwards, Einstein.

Martyr & Pessl

2009-10-31T11:51:00.000-07:00

Two books: slightly annoying for different reasons --although both seem to go on a bit too long, but one has a first person narrator with a genius for citing the publication dates of every book she's ever encountered and the other mixes a strangely unmusical prose style with an unfortunate knack for making extraordinary lives seem tiresome. Both, however, manage to overcome their defects for long stretches somewhere in their middles: John Irving's Until I Find You through the creation of a tragically comic character named Emma, and Marisha Pessl's Special Topics in Calamity Physics through flirtatious association of a character named Hannah Schneider with the likes of Charles Manson. Thus in the one case you get something beside wrestling and tattoos, and in the other something beside chicklit snottiness and nerdy snobbiness. They also have this in common: working very hard to have their main characters discover secrets about their parents that the reader may or may not have seen coming. In neither case, however, was the main character as interesting as the parents --and that's not saying much. At any rate, you spend your time reading something that's not as good as other things you've read, and you're left with something like memories that stay with you, learning from experience --learning from mistakes, your own and others'.

Look Who's Got a Big Heart

2009-04-27T14:06:00.000-07:00

James Tate's The Ghost Soldiers eschews many of poetry's traditional concerns. It indulges in "he said, she said" repetition, refuses to consider compression and line --it even allows ordinary people, places and objects to remain strangely ordinary. The focus here is all on human relationships. These are poems in which people have fallen into one or more of the traps society constructs for us: news reports, rumors, fashion, paranoia, miscommunication and war. These are also poems in which the first person narrator takes on the task of holding it all together, mostly countering insanity with common sense and good humor, sometimes able only to save himself, but nearly always showing compassion, concern and respect. In "Special Operations" the narrator comforts a woman who's lost her son's goldfish. In "The Nether World" he helps a man deal with his broken dreams then agrees to go on a date he doesn't remember making. I have to say I come away from this book feeling like I've learned some sorely needed new strategies on how to be a better friend, neighbor, total stranger, acquaintance, parent, spouse. Since when does poetry have the right to be so practical? As far as that goes, when was the last time a book of poems was a page turner? I have to go all the way back to Tate's last book, Return to the City of White Donkeys.

Spring is the Michief in me

2009-04-13T16:48:00.000-07:00

Q&A, the novel Slumdog Millionaire is based on, is quite a bit better than the movie --I listened to the audio book. The central conceit is maybe a little more heavy handed in the book than it is in the movie, but I liked it more anyway. Having a first person narrator in a book --you feel like you met a real person --which didn't happen when I watched the movie.

The current issue of APR vol38/no2 is one of the best in a long while. David Wojahn's essay "On Capaciousness," Michael Ryan's essay on Dickinson, poems by Albert Goldbarth, Carl Dennis, Rob Talbert, Jenny Browne, and C. Dale Young are well beyond the usual fare.

spring 09

2009-03-26T13:36:00.000-07:00

Madame Bovary and A Lesson Before Dying: I can't think of two sadder stories. Regarding the latter, students wanted to know why people didn't fight to free Jefferson, why they settled for creating the illusions of strength and dignity instead. Were the citizens of Bayonne fatalistic or would their attempts to free Jefferson have led to more imprisonment and killing?

reading ear 3

2009-02-15T05:21:00.000-08:00

I saw A Clockwork Orange back in the '70's --I know I got a kick out of it though time and all the knives in my milk left me with very little memory of it. The soundtrack was a Columbia record of the month club selection and I spun it many times --I still remember the Time Steps theme --but it wasn't until the last few weeks that I listened to Tom Hollander read and create the perfect voice of Alex, oh my brothers... As I write this, Biography is telling the story of Meatloaf --how he became the perfect voice for a songwriter named Jim Steinman. Well the same sort of story happens here. Disk 7 of the audiobook I "read" had Burgess reading excerpts, but for these ears, Tom Hollander will always be Alex, making this a book I'll remember for a long long time.

Yet another good audio read: Dennis Johnson's Tree of Smoke. Reviews compare the Colonel to Conrad's Kurtz, but I heard him as closer to the character Maurice on Northern Exposure.

Reading with the ears --Part 2

2008-12-29T13:36:00.000-08:00

I'd read A Wild Sheep Chase and After Dark and found that neither of them was up to Murakami's Windup-Bird magic. But listening to Dance Dance Dance was. I don't think it was the fact that I was listening rather than reading. I think it had more to do with the theme of the haunted hotel --and the romance.

Talk about romance and sheep in the same sentence and you're liable to talk yourself into trouble, but I've always been fond of the BBC's rendition of All Creatures Great and Small and it was nothing less than the best thing I could have done to listen to All Things Wise and Wonderful --read by none other than Christopher Timothy, who played Herriot on TV. There's something about the combination of humor, landscape, hard work and social interraction in James Alfred White's best work that warms me cockles.

High hats-off also to Junot Diaz: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao deserves every bit of praise and success --period.

reading --summer 08 so far

2008-08-09T07:24:00.000-07:00

Face of a Hero --Pierre Boulle: This is the author of Bridge on the River Kwai. The main character is repellent in the extreme. The book is worth reading as an exploration of the degree to which we can deceive ourselves. There's something about the style that makes the first few chapters slow going.

Into Thin Air and Into the Wild --John Krakauer: Nonfiction equivalents of good Tom Robbins. (I mean in the sense of hard to put down)

APR July/August 08: Dana Levin's and Maxine Scates's poems are definitely worth the effort.

Wuthering Heights --Emily Bronte: Glad I finally got around to it. Romance is not sweet here: it's painful, angry, deadly. Again, something about the style made me read it slowly. In this case, though, I think I was savoring it, not vexed by the slog. Did Emily Dickinson read this?

reading with ears

2008-06-09T07:08:00.000-07:00

Some people have difficulty listening to books. I think you need a decent block of uninterrupted time. Maybe it depends on the book. I most recently listened to King's Duma Key. I have to say I was really looking forward to it, having thoroughly enjoyed On Writing and Lisey's Story. I found it hard to listen to, however. Maybe I'd have read it faster. Maybe Lisey's love story made the characters more sympathetic. I'm leaning toward the latter.

A few books that were easy (actually fun) to listen to:

Blink

All the Pretty Horses

Collapse

The Castle in the Forest

The Plot Against America

The Bonesetter's Daughter

The Red Tent

The Road

Never Let Me Go

When We Were Orphans

And there are quite a few others.

June and everything leading up to it

2008-06-03T05:15:00.000-07:00

The current issue of APR (May, June 08) has an intriguing longish poem by Harold Schweizer about stones and angels. Normally I don't pay much attention to angels, but rocks are hard to ignore.

There's also an essay about Dunya Mikhail, Iraqi poet I was glad to hear about, and an exchange of letters regarding a Kevin Prufer poem, "National Anthem," well about a brief essay Prufer wrote about his poem.

The current issue of Rattle has a poem, "You Might," that author John Yohe says he wrote in response to a Kim Addonizio poem in the May/June 2007 issue of APR, "The Matter." These are both interesting and entertaining, but Yohe's note of explanation combines with the Prufer poem letter exchange to make me feel even more viscerally something I always believed --that no song or poem should need to be explained --unless the explanation itself takes the form of another song or poem. Do it and you risk being drawn into pointless argumentation, that very often makes you come across as petulant, agrieved, or not quite as bright as you might have appeared at first blush.

what's in the news what's in the news what's in the news

2008-03-26T06:41:00.000-07:00

It's getting to the point where I can't wait to finish what I'm reading before I respond to it. Mark Rudman's article on Carlos Williams in APR is ok, but somehow even harder to understand than Reginald Gibbons's on Apophatic poetics (that actually, was quite easy to understand, a triumph on Gibbons's part, considering the possibilities). Was he really such a quantum leap? He was an outsider. He was desperate. He was influential. Rudman's essay reminds me that I should read more Williams. Maybe that's what he wants.

Frank McCourt's Teacher Man is good stuff. Finished listening to it on the morning of March 27. His description of an old beat friend reminded me of something in Augustin Burroughs: the one about the house cleaner from hell. But the stories about teaching are as exhausting as the job itself. Hearing McCourt read it has to be an added bonus. Makes me want to read or listen to Angela's Ashes, something I haven't done yet.

Also in the middle of "Seymour, an Introduction." A remarkable bit of sustained enthusiasm and brotherly affection, though I'm glad he's not providing any of those double haikus. "Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters" was also very engaging. I have a lingering sense of deja vu about it.

the expanding universe

2008-03-03T06:59:00.000-08:00

It takes a lot of gas to get to the edge. I've been listening to Down and Out in Paris and London. So different from Animal Farm and what I remember of 1984. Funny that reading Orwell as a kid might have shied me away from this gem, even though I'd heard it was good. I'd heard the description of Parisian restaurant work was the best part, but I also love story of the screever named Bozo --someone who could be both intellectual and poor. The gypsy scholar. I suppose that makes me a sucker for the romantic. Oh well. Britain in 1930's, tens of thousands of tramps. Of Mice and Men, but more reminiscent of Never Let Me Go. People on the go. Never Let Me Go. Maybe it's the voice of the reader.

Hass n Stevens

2007-10-07T08:20:00.000-07:00

Recent APR article by Leisl Olson on Hass, Stevens, and Rilke makes me painfully aware of how little I know. Does beauty become terrifying if pushed beyond a certain tipping point? Is formlessness ugly? Is overly "formal," over-articulated beauty what causes us to wake from our trance and run for our lives? Is any of this relevant? Is this the same as asking whether Stevens is relevant? Is being relevant philosophically and musically that much better than being relevant musically? Is the neglect of philosophy a tacit vote for the ideology of the status quo? Yes yes yes yes --I don't know.

2007-10-06T07:58:00.000-07:00

In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.
--Yogi Berra

If the world really is as flat as Freidman say's I wish to greet myself here and now at the start of a flat career. I'd thought the world would shrink so that you could get your hands around it, but if it's flat can you see both sides?

Would it be possible to set this up as an open source litmag? Publiish what you want in reader comments. I take no responsibility unless I wrote it myself.