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Blogging, But with More Self-Promotion

I'm not sure what this newsletter's going to be or how it's going to look, but I want to start compiling some of the curios I come across week to week. Some of it will be digital and some of it culled from actual books and life and stuff. I've benefited a lot from other people's willingness to share their opinions and interests, and you know, enough of that. My turn. Listen to me. I have ideas. (I'm on a digital island. Let's archipelago this drifting existence.)

For Example, I Have a Baby

Her room is decorated in owls, and this was one of the first poems she heard. RIP Wilbur:

A Barred Owl, By Richard Wilbur

The warping night air having brought the boom
Of an owl’s voice into her darkened room,
We tell the wakened child that all she heard
Was an odd question from a forest bird,
Asking of us, if rightly listened to,
“Who cooks for you?” and then “Who cooks for you?”

Words, which can make our terrors bravely clear,
Can also thus domesticate a fear,
And send a small child back to sleep at night
Not listening for the sound of stealthy flight
Or dreaming of some small thing in a claw
Borne up to some dark branch and eaten raw.

What Other Poems Does Annabelle Rose, Genius in Making, Enjoy?

- To R.B. by Gerard Manley Hopkins

- As Kingfishers Catch Fire by Gerard Manley Hopkins

- Uh, some others which are also definitely by Hopkins but which she chose, these are her favorites, she picked them, I am a neutral arbiter and executor of her preferences.

I welcome other suggestions.

She's Also a Big Fan of Bach and St. Vincent

Open Culture lead me to this great video of Bach's Crab Canon. Maybe you've heard of Bach? Maybe he's a genius? Let this YouTube clip decide things for you. He uses one line of melody, variously and (eventually) simultaneously approached to create a playful masterpiece.

Bonus St. Vincent in a video in which she shows off her guitar chops (ignore the goober interviewing her; focus on her casual, dazzling riffs).

Is Bellow Now Underrated?

Yes. Seize the Day is a brilliant book, anticipating Something Happened by Heller and certainly preempting all subsequent sad, middle-class men stories (can't totally speak to its predecessors). Look, it's a tired genre by now, perhaps, but it's hardly the content that makes most social realism thrum. A sample.

Every other man spoke a language entirely his own, which he figured out by private thinking; he had his own ideas and peculiar ways. If you wanted to talk about a glass of a water, you had to start back with God creating the heavens and the earth; the apple; Abraham; Moses and Jesus; Rome; the Middle Ages; gunpowder; the Revolution; back to Newton; up to Einstein; then war and Lenin and Hitler. After reviewing this and getting it all straight you could proceed to talk about a glass of water. "I'm fainting, please get me a little more water." You were lucky even then to make yourself understood.

It's short, too. Read-in-a-sitting short.
 

Opinion

People need to stop telling me their ages. People need to stop publishing their ages. Folks considerably more successful than me must always be older. I'm recommended a book, a wonderfully-reviewed and enticingly-described novel by Helen Oyeyemi, and this is a person I'm even familiar with - I was confused and dazzled when I tried to skim-read Mr. Fox for a class last year, she's brilliant - but someone has to point out she's a prodigy, she was published at 20, she is another Rimbaud (who'd already quit at 21), another Zadie Smith. How many Mary Shelleys do I have to contend with? I still haven't read White Teeth. I refuse. I was also 24 once, and a failure. When I was in high school I boycotted Eragon for reasons limited solely to chronological jealousy. Its quality didn't matter. The success of it stained me. I'm a greyhound. Lures only, or I won't run.

P.S. On That Note

Congrats to George Saunders! He's a great professor, a wonderful writer, and didn't get going (publicly) until he was 7 years older than I am now. My reigning feel-good champion remains Penelope Fitzgerald, however. She was first published 23 years after George (age-wise), and won the Booker twice. Be inspired. Failure can take even more of your life than you thought! Some simply die.