Evening ~ Timing ~ Floating Poetry by Leonard Orr

WHY WE HAVE EVENING
by Leonard Orr
Publisher: Cherry Grove Collections
2010, 110 pp., $18.00
In case you have ever wondered Why We Have Evening, these poems by Leonard Orr offer a succession of beautiful reasons. We have evening for finding love and losing it and getting it back again; for breaking and mending and rebuilding, stronger than before; for cloud watching, stargazing, looking at old photographs, collecting rocks, updating our calendars, filling in blanks, marking time.

We have evening for learning lessons from the secret world of insects, more complex than we know:

"They seem so alike to us, these brood - ten cicadas, but
they have their passionate dreams and so filled with hope,
a lesson to me."

~ from "Cyclic" (15)

for reading in bed, in manner of Italo Calvino:

"Would we ever be so used to sharing a bed
we would spend the last half hour
reading our books and saying good night
without making love one more time?"

~ from "Asking" (17)

for joining in with the crowd, on a good day, on the way home:

"Inching along I mouthed to those around me,
'Record high temperature! Not bad!' showing
thumbs up, wanting to celebrate with my community."

~ from "Aftereffects" (21)

for dreaming, uroboros - style:

"You were reading the Tibetan Book of the Dead and I was finally asleep. . . . In my dream you were asleep beside me and I was lying on the propped up pillows reading the I Ching and I thought about chance and contingency, randomness and the shaping forces of the universe. . . . I watched your sleeping face . . . In the depth of your sleep . . . you dream you were reading the Tibetan Book of the Dead and I was finally asleep."

~ from "Reading" (23)

for contemplating the cosmos, with no heavenly body left unturned:

"Space exploration, what a waste, planet after planet,
the moon and the stars, comets and asteroids,
it is all a black hole, for you are somewhere on earth."

~ from "In Your Absence" (25)

for finishing manuscripts, yours, mine, ours:

"I place your page neatly on top of mine,
tapping the edges to line up perfectly,
taking a pleasure in this, our pages on the desk,
lying there together, glowing warmly, edges
aligned . . . "

~ from "Papers" (26)

for holiday dinners and delicious desserts:

" . . . the Persian eggplant
with tomato and yogurt sauce.

Anticipating your smile, your kiss,
I fill ramekins with whole wheat memories,
bake for an hour and melt dreams in a sweet topping.

I cut a thick slice of evening
and serve it fresh and steaming before you
on a dark blue plate with glazed yellow stars."

~ from "Thanksgiving" (27)

for synaesthesia:

"In your absence I swoon, overcome with synaesthesia,
my fingertips hearing the aroma of the yellow, a scent
of desire, I sniff the red grapes and hear their smoothness . . . "

~ from "Psychosomatic" (28)

for art appreciation:

" . . . just that perspective, all brown toned, pencil,
sepia ink, thousands of wavy lines as the wind
blow through the dry field, the undulations . . ."

~ from "Sun and Wheatfields" (30)

for practicing yoga, even if your mind wanders:

"I am instructed to count, to think
only inhale, only exhale, but my thoughts
sink and rise and search you out . . . "

~ from "Yoga Practice" (33)

for watching the geese fly overhead, like a prayer:

"I hear their foreign phrases
before their milling
gray black figures emerge
emerge from the mist, davening,
a minyan dutifully
gathering to say Kaddish."

~ from "Familiar" (46)

for grieving the death of pet:

"So I knew you would understand that when my sheltie died,
my first dog though I am so ancient, I knew you would not laugh
to know I recited the mourner's Kaddish, though he wasn't
strictly speaking Jewish; still he loved challah and leaped
ecstatically every time he heard the blessing over the bread.

~ from Grieving (54)

And, most importantly:

"This part of the day is to soothe
and calm, to wring out any unpleasant thoughts
to strain out the nightmares through the
holes in the black and blue sky.

That is why each night we have evening.
Unhappy extremes of day or night are wiped
clean . . ."

~ from "Why We Have Evening" (66)

TIMING IS EVERYTHING
Publisher Cherry Grove Collections
2012, 90 pp., $18.00
Looking for a book to read on a cold dark night when the light of day is hours away? This is it. Looking for some poems to read in the bleak midwinter when the vernal equinox is weeks away? These are they. When a loved one has gone never to return, or you yourself are never coming back. That's the time to read these poems because, as the poet says, Timing is Everything.

A time to be born, a time to die:

"When they approach dying in their mountain fastnesses
the exiles from Tibet have shamans reading urgently,
from long, loose woodblock printed pages, passages
urging the soul not to cling to the useless body, to
give it up, to accept the next phase, the new life. . . . "

~ from "Stubborn Soul" (13)

A time to embrace:

" . . . we turn
over and over in the rain, trying to keep the other dry,
trying to keep the other out of the mud,
trying to breathe deep into the lungs of the other.
How I love you! How I miss you!"

~ from "Cold Outing" (16 - 17)

"We leave only our tiny shadows . . . and jump
into some better other dimension where
everything is the way it should have been,
where there is no Bush administration and
President Gore stopped global warming,
and of course there was no war in Iraq
and everyone likes us. In that we new dimension
we are together every day, we spoon together
every night, not remembering that trillionth of
a trillionth of a second after Big Bang,
our expansion outward, our luminous
numinous bliss."

~ from "They Are Firing Up the Large Hadron Collider" (31 - 32)

A time to refrain from embracing? No! Please, no, not that:

" . . . O love, my teeth rattle with ululations;
how did it happen we are not together tonight?"

~ from "Empty" (70)

"I am the Mummy waiting for
someone to soak those dry leaves so I can
at long last embrace you again after these
twenty - five centuries we have been separated."

~ from "How I've Adjusted" (75 - 76)

The title poem, occurring second to last in the book, warns the reader of leaving things too late. Despite what we've been taught all of our lives, there will not always be time:

"You send note after note after note: Come to me, Love!
I'm ready now! . . .
. . . Then you learn
I died a decade or two earlier and you didn't
even realize, you heard nothing, your heart
didn't pick it up through the ether. . . . "

~ from "Timing is Everything" (86)

A FLOATING WOMAN
by Leonard Orr
Publisher: Cherry Grove Collections
2015, 92 pp., $18.00
If you would like to be transported by loveliness for an hour or so, might I suggest sitting down with a copy of Leonard Orr's third book of poetry A Floating Woman and listening to Brahms' Clarinet Quintet in B minor, Op. 115 -- you can actually do both at the same time (click here to enjoy the Quintet in the privacy of your own home).

I made the connection quite by coincidence a few days ago when I set aside my reading at the behest of my friend Katie to attend a concert of chamber music. Browsing through the program, I came across the following description of the clarinet quintet:

"The work as a whole possesses a unique collection of affects. It is an oversimplification to describe it as melancholy and autumnal, although this is part of the truth; in fact, there is a great depth of sadness in the piece, which may not be felt in every bar but is never far from the surface. At the same time, though, the music is constantly energized by rhapsodic, wild gestures and flickering textures; our tragic hero, if there is one, is driven to wander restlessly, not stay at home."
~ Misha Amory

Had the music reviewer been reading Orr's poetry? It seemed so! Just think "book" instead of "piece," "line" instead of "bar," "poem" instead of "music." I spent the remainder of the concert drifting back and forth in my mind from the sometimes keening, sometimes joyful clairnet to various poetic passages from Floating:

" . . . I swayed
rhythmically forward and back,
though I hummed a tune that seemed
given into my throat from the sun.
Telephone lines above were mandolin strings
I plucked and strummed to reach you
where you were, hemidemisemiquavers
rapidly expressing my Sehnsuch, the notes
floating out over the river where gulls
swooped in to grab them. . . . "

~ from "Rapture" (36)

The poems in this collection follow the mysterious trajectory of a narrator and an elusive lover who float through air, water, dreams, space; appear in photographs and manuscripts; travel highways and byways both real and surreal; wandering at last through your own backyard or perhaps drifting in a nearby marina:

"Perhaps all of this time you have been nearby
in one of those graceful white boats tied to a pier
in what had been our river. The white
sails are furled but can quickly be set
for the winds to take you away. The
anchor can be lifted in minutes, the lines
cast away, should you want a new episode.
The lights of the boats in the river are
festive, the bounce in the tide
matches your heartbeat. You are
here and not here. You are attached
so tentatively you think you are free."

~ from "A Floating Woman" (83)

See More:
Poems: "Past Tense, Future Tense" ~ "Yiddish for Travellers"
"The Loop" ~ "Desperate Times" ~ "Optimist" ~
"Sun and Wheatfields" & "Russian Olives" ~ "Monet's The Magpie"

Links to various paintings by Leonard Orr

Christopher J. Jarmick's review of Why We Have Evening

Facebook commentary and response

And Thanks To Katie!

Lovely As A Tree

Olive Trees with Yellow Sky and Sun
Vincent Van Gogh

Just about all you have to do is say the word "tree," and someone else will respond: "I think that I shall never see . . . ." In fact, this very morning when I mentioned to my friend Elizabeth that I was looking at some contemporary tree - themed poetry, she recalled the childhood music class in which she first learned the famous poem as a song. My siblings and I learned Kilmer's enduring and often parodied couplet -- part of a longer, serious poem, it turns out! -- early in life, from the Smothers Brothers.

Out of respect for Kilmer (1886 - 1918), who did not mean the poem to be a joke, here is his work, as written:

Trees

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the sweet earth's flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree. ~ 1913
Lately, it seems that every time I pick up a poetry book, I encounter a striking poem about a tree. It began a few months ago, when I came across Francine Tolf's poems, "Between You and Me" (see earlier Quotidian post) and then, a few pages later, "Kinship," which begins with a reference to the parable of the blind man and the saliva. I thought I remembered this passage fairly well from many gospel readings, but one detail suddenly came to my attention as never before: "people looking like trees and walking." Like trees! How could I have missed that incredible image all my life? Thank you Francine for applying poetry and making me see! Francine's poem concludes with the hope that we should feel "a quickening. / A kinship" with the trees; and I could not help but think of the quickening felt by William Wordsworth, the visionary gleam sparked by the the field, the pansy, and the tree:

But there's a tree, of many, one,
A single field which I have look'd upon,
Both of them speak of something that is gone:
The pansy at my feet
Doth the same tale repeat:
Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?
If you feel it's time for a new book of poetry to renew the visionary gleam, here are a few of my current favorites, along with a selection of tree poems for all seasons. Thanks again to Francine Tolf; and also Jim Barnes, Leonard Orr, Lee Perron and Donald Platt for sending your books into my life. And for writing poems that are every bit as lovely as a tree!

Kinship

"He took the blind man by the hand . . . Putting spittle
on his eyes he laid his hands on him and asked, 'Do
you see anything?' Looking up, he replied, 'I see people
looking like trees and walking.'" ~ Mark 8:24

I, too have seen elms and poplars
against December,
have imagined their poses as wonder,
or longing, or joy.

Their roots suckled life,
their stems pushed sunward
ages before we discovered fire,
invented sin.

A healer through whose rib cage
ride and gale rippled
would have felt this,
might have wanted to give a blind man
vision before sight --

a world where trees walked like men,
so that after reality dimmed understanding
that man could not press his palm
against the trunk of a cypress
without a quickening.
A kinship.

found in the book Prodigal, p 37
by Francine Marie Tolf

***********************
I like the way that Tolf ascribes "wonder, or longing, or joy" to the wintry trees, suffused with innocence and free from sin. Likewise, in Perron's poem, winter is near and the trees are filled with yearning. Two in particular -- one yellow, one orange -- not only stand like people but lean like lovers. I anticipated that "the curving trunks and their reflection" were going to form perhaps a heart. But, even better, Perron says they "make an almost perfect circle":

Fall At Spring Lake
Over the trees near the water's edge
at the very end of an autumn afternoon
the dying light is general

on the opposite bank two huge liquid amber trees
one with yellow leaves, one with orange
lean toward one another as if in yearning--
the curving trunks and their reflection
in the opaque water make an almost perfect circle

these early sunsets
pure as the undisturbed imagination.

found in the book Celtic Light, p 35
by Lee Perron

***********************
So the trees prepare for autumn beside a lake in California and, in the next poem, in a garden in Paris. Neither striding strong nor leaning like lovers, even so these trees are like people too, standing weary, with arms folded across their chests, preparing for a long winter's nap. Barnes describes what we deeply admire about the trees: the way they take winter in stride, paying the price of the seasons. As Lee Perron has written elsewhere, in his famous "Nose Poem": "the deciduous idea! trees die for half the year & take all else in the universe." Similarly, Barnes observes that "The trees have gone / to sleep early this year. Not one limb stirs . . . the price is dear: / winter is a hard fact:

Fall in the Tuilieries
The carp in the pond
are Japanese: katakana fins declare
war on the tame ducks

paddling this round
and simple inland sea. Two lovers' chair
tilts dangerously back

over the drowned
pebbles but rights again to show the bare
reflection of breasts slack

after the done
embrace. Nobody lingers long to stare
into the shallow lake.

The lovers' sun
shines upon their backs, and the sky is clear
enough at noon to make

the schoolboys run
down the graveled way. Now last flowers rear
their heads for beauty's sake

before the turn
of season, before the long garden blurs
under November's wake.

The trees have gone
to sleep early this year. Not one limb stirs,
bark and last leaves as black

as coats at pawn.
For the Tuileries in fall, the price is dear:
winter is a hard fact.
found in the book Paris
by Jim Barnes

********************
I picked the next poem, also by Jim Barnes, and the following two by Leonard Orr for their shared imagery of the olive tree: "grotesque" yet strangely elegant; ancient, commanding of attention, worthy of gods, and symbolic of peace. What a perfect world exists under those time - honored branches: "so happy to be sanctuaried there," writes Orr, in the cool, shadowy, aromatic olive grove! They may be "unlikely trees" but not unlovely:

Olive Grove ~ Vincent Van Gogh

On the Black Hill of La Ciotat
Poppies begin to bloom among
the wild rosemary and lavender
the red swath starts meandering
toward the sea. Olive trees belong

here where the wind twists the fruit firm
and trunks into such grotesque form
no normal axe will ever fell them.
We take the drive up slowly, turn

with caution on the narrow roads
whose walls are mostly fallen down
and even more down than we can
say since the hill is steep and broad.

Far down we see a house someone
called a home, or rather we see
more fallen stone the sea will claim.
Once a home but now a ruin upon

the hill few seldom climb. Poppies
lean against its remaining walls
as if to stall the last stones'
completely falling down. I will

remember to count my last days
by rock and flower: to end as smooth
as loose stone in a flow of poppies,
ah, what brilliance and what praise!

found in the book Visiting Picasso, p 68
by Jim Barnes

********************
Sun and Wheat Fields
Two Van Goghs I had never seen
made me overjoyed and then strangulated,
heated, excited, but cloistered and caged.
He committed himself to the asylum
and painted the asylum garden, gaudily green,
shiny surfaces, cool shadows, so you want
to feel those thick fronds between thumb
and index finger, thrusting, soothing,
palpable and overwhelmingly healthy, so
happy to be sanctuaried there, so peaceful,
and I thought of you with me in our groves,
our dells and glades, and those painted trees
made me feel cool and happy, smell our Russian olives
as the branches twisted above and around us;
I could hear again the sighing mourning doves.

The second picture was a large drawing,
Sun and Wheat Fields from his asylum window,
just that perspective, all brown toned, pencil,
sepia ink, thousands of wavy lines as the wind
blew through the dry field, the undulations
of the crop bending their tops, the brown sun
all crazed rays of nervous cross-hatchings,
all somehow hot and dusty, unable to escape
the sharp edges and corners of the field, the window,
the paper, the asylum window, the people
just beyond the edge watching Van Gogh,
watching us, keeping all those boundaries
straight, angular, tight, and sharp.

Constrained and edgy, I wanted to find you,
escape with you, you with your curves, with
your lush colors, exotic and earthy, and we¹ll take
your words, your happy dreams, we¹ll hide
under those beautiful wavy leaves in the first painting,
leaves thick as elephant ears, thrusting, soothing,
palpable, we'll find asylum just beyond the edges.

found in the book Why We Have Evening, pp 30 - 31
by Leonard Orr

also found in poemeleon 1.2 (Winter, 2006)
click for links to paintings

********************
Russian Olives
I love the shadows under the trees, all the trees,
the groves of Russian olive trees that form our bowers,
the sweet aroma filling the hazy refuge for us,
for the strange green spiders, for the magpies
whose great flapping entering our silences make us alert for spies,
the hanging twigs and brush poking our heads, leaves
later caught in our disreputable hair in the restaurant.
I love the way the shadows break and reform the sunlight,
taming it, blocking it, making artful chiaroscuro patterns
traveling across your smooth skin as we roll and turn,
as we position and reposition, the way it looks in
hot white spots silhouetting you, glowing in your hair,
now placing your in mysterious dark, now making your eyes
glow green gray green again, gaps in the foliage.
I love the shadows under the trees now because there are
shadows everywhere, it is a portable aid to memory.
There are shadows even at night by moonlight, by streetlights,
and the mottled, dappled shadows, the mixture of bright and dark,
now bring back those days we spent lolling together beneath
the low branches of the Russian olives, unseen, unlikely trees,
where we breathed heatedly together in the shadows,
and together throbbed, sweated, exclaimed, and pulsed.

found in the book Timing is Everything, p 46
by Leonard Orr

********************
And in closing, a poem of healing, in which the trees spring to life at the touch of two poets, the venerable Whitman and our own contemporary and neighbor, Donald Platt:

Walt Whitman Wrestling Naked With the Young Trees
Every time I pass
the old sycamore on our corner, I touch its muscled
dappled torso
where the smooth flesh emerges from the bark’s
rough scales.
Its branches drop on the ground their curled sheets

of old skin,
crumbled parchment or torn fine-grit sandpaper,
and where they were

the secret greeny-white flesh shines. Today I saw
how one of its highest
boughs had been blown down across the sidewalk

by last night’s
storm whose winds gusted over eighty miles per hour.
I stopped

and reached down to break off two of the twigs
with their three-pointed
maple-like leaves and examined the gash

where the limb
had been wrenched from its socket. Touching the ragged
splinters

of live wood wet with sap, I thought of
Walt Whitman
in 1877, after the two strokes that paralyzed

first the left,
then the right side of his body, and between them
the death of Louisa,

his mother. To heal his mind and fumbling
body, Whitman
at fifty-eight hobbled out to Timber

Creek, where he stripped
naked except for his boots and broad-brimmed
straw hat.

There he sunbathed and walked through “the stiff-
elastic bristles”
of chest-high weeds and bushes that “rasped arms, breast, sides

till they turn’d
scarlet.” He then would wade into the creek and sink his feet
into the mud’s

cool luxurious black ooze. Thus cleansed, every day
for two summers,
he wrestled hickory saplings naked, pulling down

the young trunks,
bending them into the shape of bows—his “natural gymnasia.” He swayed
and yielded

to the “tough-limber upright stems,” just as he wrestled
fully clothed
with Harry Stafford, the eighteen-year-old who helped to set

his book Two Rivulets
in type and who accepted his ring, then gave it back, then accepted
it again before

finally saying goodbye that summer. Those hickory saplings
and later beech
and holly boughs he bent until each muscle quivered

made him “feel
the sap and sinew rising through me, like mercury
to heat.”

Spanish moss-bearded father, you wrestled Harry and all those young trees
like Jacob
with his angel. Though you once pinned Harry

to the floor,
you couldn’t pin the trees. They sprang back up
almost as straight

as they had been before they met you. They left you
old and broken.
Old man, it’s you and my own life I touch

when I touch
the sycamore. Be whole again. Let your sap run through
the torn branch and into me.
found in My Father Says Grace: Poems, pp 55 - 57
by Donald Platt

also found on VQR: A National Journal of Litertaure & Discussion 79.1 (Winter 2003)

********************

New Blue Library

An Evening at Home, 1888
Sir Edward John Poynter (1836 - 1919)

Thanks to my friend and Patron of the Arts, Sir Igor
for choosing this beautiful blue library painting,
now on display in our new library, also painted blue!

See the painting on the shelf, just above
A Christmas Carol Pop-Up Book,
likewise a gift from Uncle Igor!

Just like the painting, the adjoining dining room
features an arched doorway and a gold ribbon mirror.
So, truly, this painting is perfect for this house!

Our Favorite Spot!
The library is lined with blue shelves,
upon which I have managed to alphabetize all the
fiction from Louisa May Alcott to Banana Yoshimoto.
With the non-fiction, I always have more trouble
sticking to the alphabet. In the end most of it
has made its way to various sub - categories
and groupings that may or may not make sense
to anyone else but me. But who's counting?

Also our favorite room for watching TV.
We went to the Habitat Re-Store,
found a 2nd - hand baby changing table;
and Gerry refinished it as a matching TV stand.

Configured differently than our previous
~ Magical ~ McCartney Addition ~
but an equally loveable space, in a different way.
Instead of a side porch - turned - nook, we have a
shelf - lined library - den - TV room - study - family room.
Or, as they say in England: The Snug

On the shelves . . .

A Note to my friend Kathie
[who sent me the Botero Set]
Can you see what's on the shelf just above the Botero? Books by Leonard Orr and his daughter Leah Orr. The dark blue Yeats and Postmodernism contains an essay by you and one by me; the orange one next to it, an essay by Joe Buttigieg! I bought Louisa May Alcott and Charlotte Bronte because the author refers to Celine Carrigan's work on the role of the governess in fiction. Right next to that is Victoria Amador's definitive bio of Olivia de Havilland: Lady Triumphant, Jan Donley's novel The Side Door, Terry Galloway's memoir Mean Little Deaf Queer, The Good Psychologist by Noam Shpancer, Lost Girls by Laurie Fox, and more!

P.S.
Reading in a Cozy Room

End of Year Book Migration

An Early December Segment of Kitchen Counter Books,
including titles by Leonard Orr and Leah Orr.
As 2018 draws to a close, I share the New Year's Eve dilemma described so aptly by my friend and colleague Len:

Classes begin next week. I must follow the urge I have every semester to make a massive move of my books from upstairs to downstairs, from downstairs to upstairs, from home to campus, and from campus to home. What had been alphabetically arranged before may be arranged now by chronology or sub-sub topics. Since I promised my doctor I would no longer attempt to carry armloads of books up and down the stairs or boxes of books, I bought extra sacks to carry the books safely. Perhaps these book-move patterns are similar to the return of salmon or the great migrations of birds. Perhaps thousands of English professors are subject to the same seasonal patterns.

Next, our mutual friend Kathie explained her system:

Indeed, this English professor seems to be subject to those very patterns. My challenge is that I seem to be hauling them from one continent to another repeatedly, though with regional variations, depending on the destination.

As for me:

The pattern I'm subject to is that every single book I have come in contact with throughout the year ends up on my kitchen counter, next to my laptop: recently read, purchased but not yet read, started but not yet finished, received as gifts, retrieved from shelf to track down remembered or forgotten references, needed for further analysis in near future. And so on so forth, until I end up with a collection 2 stacks deep and 6 or 8 stacks wide that need to be dealt with and re-shelved ideally on December 31st, but oftentimes not until well into the month of January.

*****************

Fuqua Helps With the Big Sort

My Strange Quest

Favorite Library Notice Ever!

The other day, in search of summer reading, I pulled My Strange Quest for Mensonge by Malcolm Bradbury down from the shelf. If you're unfamiliar with this brief, hilarious novel, here's a funny review to give you an idea of what's in store for the reader. This title came to mind recently, along with other examples of academic satire, and I have also included it on my Eclectic Course of Must Reads.

Adding to the sardonic humor was the post card that fell from the pages, where it has been lingering for the past twenty - eight years. I must have felt back then that it would be an appropriate bookmark -- or perhaps a footnote or an additional very short chapter -- for a book about a quest for a missing author and mislaid manuscripts.

" . . . the death of the Author leads of the rise of the auteur, showing that even in an ungoverned universe there is usually someone in charge. By having the scenery fall down a great deal and keeping other cameras in shot they proved that the films were fictions simply about themselves, and indeed this was a time when all art became about itself, books being about the writing of books and buildings about the building of buildings. Thus architecture became postmodern too and form stopped being a slave to function . . . . All art became a fund of eclectic quotations from all other art and it was clear . . . that we now lived in the age of the imaginary museum, when all styles were simultaneously available" (46).

If Powers of Horror by Julia Kristeva was truly "on a list of books that are so far overdue that it is doubtful they will be returned," where oh where could it have been? Did it ever make its way back home again?

I'm further mystified by own notation, faintly in pencil: "The Death of the Book." Another library request? Another lost text? A chapter or an article by Kristeva? A confirmation that Powers of Horror was dead to the Purdue Humanities Library? Or was I telling the future?

When I check google / amazon, the most likely possibility that pops up is a book that was published only last summer: The Death of the Book: Modernist Novels and the Time of Readingby John Lurz. Sounds like a good one for the perpetual reading list.

Long Live the Library Book!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

P.S.
Easter 2026

Don't bother to ask
For the Book at the library:
It's always checked out.
You'd have to conclude
No one ever returns it.

Better to put together
Your own version:
The poems and song
You love -- the ones
That saved you when
You were young
And suffered.
And also
Those that consoled you
When you were older.

~ Gregory Orr ~

See also: Book on Windowsill

Eclectic Course of Must Reads

The Little Prince, Most Dashing in his Traveling Scarf!
A few years back, several people all at once, each unbeknownst to the other, asked me what titles I would recommend to a reader who was starting at "Go." I mulled it over some, thinking about syllabi and reading lists. More importantly, however, I went with my heart and in an hour or so of brainstorming came up with the following list of "Must Reads."

Undoubtedly, you have only to glance down the page before a thousand omissions become apparent. No Shakespeare, for example...but maybe I wouldn't recommend Shakespeare at the starting line; better to run a couple of laps first. Not necessarily thematic or consistent or even rational, this list represents the titles that came to mind that day when I asked myself "What books are you really glad that you have read?"

I hope you will enjoy at least some of these suggestions:

VERY OLD FAVORITES FROM WAY BACK
These were the soul - searchers:

The Fantasticks
by Tom Jones & Harvey Schmidt

Our Town
by Thornton Wilder

The Little Prince
by Antoine de Saint Exupery

I Heard the Owl Call My Name
by Margaret Craven

Doctor Zhivago
by Boris Pasternak

The Good Earth
by Pearl S. Buck

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
by Carson McCullers

To Kill a Mockingbird
by Harper Lee

Stranger in a Strange Land
by Robert Heinlein

The Water is Wide
by Pat Conroy


MYSTERIES
If you’re in the mood for a thriller,
I think these are all above average:

The Daughter of Time
by Josephine Tey

Summer’s Lease
by John Mortimer

The 7th of July
by Jill McCorkle

Fatal Inversion
by Ruth Rendell

The Secret History
by Donna Tartt

Turtle Moon
and
Second Nature
both by Alice Hoffman

The Erasers
by Alain Robbe-Grillet


TRAVEL
As mentioned awhile back,
you should read everything by Bill Bryson;
also these American travelogues:

Blue Highways
and PrairyErth
both by William Least Heat Moon

Mama Makes Up Her Mind
and Sleeping At the Starlite Motel
both by Bailey White


WORLD WAR II
Loss, sadness, and European history:

Badenheim 1939
by Aron Appelfeld

The Tin Drum
by Gunter Grass

War Time Memories
by Louis Begley

The Remains of the Day
by Kazuo Ishiguro

How German Is It
by Walter Abish

Hiroshima
by John Hersey

Slaughterhouse Five
by Kurt Vonnegut

The White Hotel
by D. M. Thomas


MISC. WORLD LIT
Nearly all from my classes with
Professor Leonard Orr:

The Metamorphosis
and The Trial
by Franz Kafka

The Wanderer
by Henri Alain-Fournier

Death in Venice
by Thomas Mann

The Master and Margarita
by Mikhail Bulgakov

Out of Africa
and "Babette's Feast"
both by Isak Dinesen

Kitchen
by Banana Yoshimoto

If On A Winter’s Night a Traveler
by Italo Calvino


AMERICAN STANDARDS
Don't worry, I'm leaving out Moby Dick:

Bartleby, the Scrivener
by Herman Melville

My Antonia
by Willa Cather

The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Winesburg, Ohio
by Sherwood Anderson

The Sound and the Fury
by William Faulkner

In Our Time
by Ernest Hemingway

"Appointment in Samara"
by John O’Hara

Cat On A Hot Tin Roof
by Tennessee Williams

Catcher in the Rye
by J. D. Salinger


MORE RECENT AMERICAN NOVELS
Modern and post-modern despair:

Dangling Man
by Saul Bellow

Miss Lonelyhearts
by Nathanael West

The Universal Baseball Association
by Robert Coover

Edwin Mullhouse
by Steven Millhauser

84 Charing Cross Road
by Helene Hanff

Still Life With Woodpecker
and Another Roadside Attraction
both by Tom Robbins

Breakfast of Champions
Cat's Cradle
Slapstick
and Jailbird
all by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Ragtime
by E. L. Doctorow

Bright Lights, Big City
and Brightness Falls
both by Jay McInerney

Moo
by Jane Smiley


A FEW PICKS FROM MY GRAD SCHOOL READING LIST
Modern British and Irish fiction:

Far From the Madding Crowd
by Thomas Hardy

Sons and Lovers
The Man Who Died
The Captain’s Doll
all by D. H. Lawrence

Brideshead Revisited
by Evelyn Waugh

Anglo-Saxon Attitudes
by Angus Wilson

Lucky Jim
by Kingsley Amis

Hurry On Down
by James Wain

My Strange Quest for Mensonge
by Malcolm Bradbury

Brave New World
by Aldous Huxley

Keep the Aspidistra Flying
by George Orwell

The Ice Age
by Margaret Drabble

Dubliners
and Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man
by James Joyce

The Third Policeman
by Flann O’Brien

My Left Foot
by Christy Brown

Murder in the Cathedral
by T. S. Eliot

A Man for All Seasons
by Robert Bolt

The Importance of Being Ernest
by Oscar Wilde


SOME SLIGHTLY EARLIER BRITISH LIT
You can substitute other Dickens' titles if you want,
but I preferred these to David Copperfield or Oliver Twist:

A Tale of Two Cities
and Great Expectations
both by Charles Dickens

Frankenstein
by Mary Shelley

Books by Friends and Friends of Friends

. . . and Relatives!

Art at the Speed of Life:
Motivation and Inspiration for
Making Mixed-Media Art Every Day
by Pam Carriker

On Native Ground: Memoirs and Impressions
by Jim Barnes

The Conjurer
by Cordelia Frances Biddle

The Side Door
by Jan Donley

"secrets . . . everywhere . . . under carpets, in closets, in pockets, underground . . ."

The Lost Girls
by Laurie Fox

" . . . the moment we are born appears to be the very same moment we forget we are loved. Now isn't that awkward? Shouldn't the two things dovetail, love and memory? Shouldn't a feeling that powerful be carved on a tree so no one can ignore its message? To come so far to be in this world only to forget something all - important -- what kind of journey is that? I'll bet that 90 percent of the love that surrounds us is dismissed or discounted -- the cup of tea a friend makes, the letter from a faraway auntie. The fact that no one feels loved ~enough~ merely proves my point" (43).

The Witch's Boy
by Michael Gruber

Devil's Gold
by Julie Korzenko

Why We Have Evening
by Leonard Orr

Weeping: A Fritillary Quilter Mystery
by Shelly Reuben

The Good Psychologist
by Noam Shpancer