More Obsessed with Dragon Tattoo Than Lisbeth Salander is with Nils Burjman's Whereabouts

A few years ago, the husband made a rather astute observation about me: I treat pretty much everything in my life in an all or nothing way.  I get obsessed easily.  This was a time when I was ignoring him because I was focused on something else, and he was starting to get upset until it hit him that this is just who I am, and that it was not personal to him.  He could point out times when I acted with the same laser focus toward a range of people, places, and things.  I had never thought about it before, but he is completely right.

I only mention it now because anyone who has seen anything I have been doing online knows I'm obsessed with The Girl with the Dragon Tatto right now.  And what is so bizarre is that I had not read any book or seen any movie until two weeks ago this past Friday.  When I was flying to Houston, I was at home looking at my books and thinking that I really did not want to read anything that I intended to take seriously or was going to use in my research.  Add that to the fact that a few people had asked me what I thought of the novel, if it crossed the line into rape porn or if it handled the depiction of violence well.  So I decided to buy a copy at the airport and read it on the trip.  As I noted on Twitter, I finished it on my flight out of Houston to Atlanta, so I bought the second one in Atlanta and finished it in NYC before I returned home a week ago yesterday.  One week ago tonight, I watched the Swedish version of the first film.  And I've been reading all news articles related to the upcoming film that I can find.

I'm planning to see the film at 7:00 on Tuesday when it premieres (I'll be at the AMC in Plainville if anyone local is also planning to see it then).  This morning, the husband asked me if I was going to spend the rest of the week complaining about all the changes Fincher made in his film version (Fincher has already said he changed the ending, which has raised my ire).  I told him I would respond the same way he did when he first saw the first of the Star Wars prequels and could not shut up about Jar Jar Binks and the future Darth Vadar yelling "Yippee!" in the pod race.

I also told him that I'm now reading The Hunger Games, so my obsession should be switching soon.

Oh, and I do not think the book crosses the line into rape porn.  A writer, artist, or filmmaker has to tred a very fine line between revealing too much or too little.  I actually get just as annoyed at too little because I think it helps people ignore the seriousness of sexual assault.  To me, the book was a perfect balance.  The movie?  We'll see, and I won't be able to stop thinking about it for days, I'm sure.

The Book and Film Versions of My Sister's Keeper (major spoilers ahead)

Tonight, I led the last of three discussions at the Farmington Library on Jodi Picoult's novels. We ended with My Sister's Keeper, which is probably her best known novel since it was made it a major Hollywood film released last summer. I have some thoughts about the relationship between the book and the movie, but providing them means giving major spoilers about what happens in both of them. If you don't want to know what happens in either the book or the movie, stop reading now. Got it? Stop!

Wow, could an adaptation of a book into a movie ever be more different? Sure, I've seen lots of adaptations that leave out things in the book. Rarely can a film cover it all. But this has a completely different ending! I mean, different people live and die in each book, and that's pretty ridiculous.

The book does a pretty good job of delving into a pretty big gray area. Anna was conceived so that blood from her umbilicial cord could be used to combat her sister Katie's leukemia. But the procedures do not stop there. There are bone marrow transplants and all kinds of things taken from Anna for Katie. In the book, Anna is thirteen and is suing for the right to refuse to have one of her kidneys transplanted into Katie. The book follows the course of the trial. And the book does cover a variety of angles. Anna does not take this decision lightly, and everyone involved is conflicted. In the end, Anna wins her case. And as she and her lawyer drive to the hospital after the judge hands down his decision, they are in a car accident. Anna dies, and Katie gets Anna's kidney. The book ends with Katie in her 20s describing how they all have handled the years after Anna's death.

Now, a lot of us tonight felt that the ending was contrived. I admit that I didn't like it. I brought up the idea of deus ex machina and the ending feeling like a trick from God or something. Many of us were not fans of the ending. But seeing the movie changed all that for me and others.

In the movie? We never learn of the judge's decision because Katie dies in the hospital and Anna lives. The movie solely exists to make viewers cry. Small but sad scenes in the book take several minutes in the movie, and any sense of nuance is gone. Anna does not seem conflicted with her decision. Campbell, her lawyer, is just a smarmy stereotype in the movie when it's clear in the book that he has some dimensionality to him. I'm sure the book would annoy some doctors and lawyers who know more about some cases, but the movie lacks any complexity at all.

I'm curious what Jodi Picoult thinks of the film's drastic revision of her book. Maybe she just cashed the check and move on. Maybe she was upset but realized that she had no rights to the story once she released it to them. I've just never seen such a drastic revision. I enjoy a good cry at a movie, and this movie would have done it if I hadn't known the book's version. But I did know it, and the movie just pissed me off.

If you want to see a strong adaptation of a good novel, then see Precious. Push is an amazing book, and Precious is an amazing adaptation of it.

Professors are People, Too

Last night, I led another book discussion, this one at Avon Free Public Library. The book was Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler. It's a very experimental novel with different narratives interspersed within a meta-narrative about reading, writing, publishing, and translating. The woman who coordinates the discussions was in the room when I arrived, and we discussed whether people would show up or whether they might have given up on the book and skipped this time around. Several people did show up, though, and we talked for well over an hour. It was actually almost ninety minutes.

I've led a couple of other discussions there before on books I knew rather well. The last one was on The Bell Jar, which I could talk about in my sleep. This time around, I told the coordinator to let me know what she would like to have discussed. I was game for anything. This being such an odd, experimental text, I was a little concerned about what to say about it. I made it clear at the start that I'm not a Calvino expert or even all that knowledgeable about Italian literature, but I threw out some thoughts I had about why I think he might have written the book and what it was about his life that might have influenced this book.

Toward the end of our discussion, one of the participants brought up that he would not have finished the book if it weren't for the discussion, and he was interested in hearing what an expert would say about the book. I reminded him that I was an expert, and I told him how my background in rhetoric influences my reading of any book because it pushed me to think about such things as the cultural contexts in which books are written and how the author's life influenced the text, which is why I gave the speculations I did at the start.

He then asked me if I would have read this book on my own, and I said that I probably would have picked it up, found the beginning interesting, but stopped before the book was done. That gave everyone a good laugh, and he said he was glad to hear it. He'd said earlier that he wondered if he didn't get the book because he wasn't smart enough to get it, and I said that certainly was not the case.

It was one of those moments when I remembered that some people do look at university professors as a different breed of people, a group that is smarter and perhaps even more refined than the general population. Thoughts like that always make me laugh. Anyone who has earned a PhD knows many professors who want people to think we are a step above the masses, but we also know that's clearly not the case.  As much as it would annoy some of the professoriate to hear me say, it's not intelligence that makes us who we are. Our education makes us look at things in a certain way in the same ways that any training affects anyone, but it sometimes takes effort more than intelligence to get that education.

Shh, don't tell anyone.

Can't Wait to See the Search Terms That Lead to This Entry

For the NYU class I'm auditing, we're reading Catherine MacKinnon's Only Words, which is a short book that contains three essays on speech and equality. I'm still in the middle of the first one because I keep getting annoyed and have to stop. Anyone who has engaged with her work over the last twenty years or more can probably figure out why (check her Wikipedia entry if you want an overview of her positions). It's just so annoying that she creates a monolithic definition of pornography that ignores porn without women or without men, meaning gay and lesbian pornography.

Yet, she says that her ideas and activism should apply to all forms of pornography whatever their gendered makeup. For those with the book, see footnote 32, pages 121-2. And shall I note that she only comments on lesbian and gay porn in a footnote? She never says anything specific about how her analysis applies to non-heterosexual porn, and that just keeps pissing me off. She has examples from heterosexual porn, but she doesn't care enough about other forms to engage with them. She only wants throw out a blanket criticism and leave it at that.

I mean, she writes, "With pornography, men masturbate to women being exposed, humiliated, violated, degraded, mutilated, dismembered, bound, gagged, tortured, and killed" (17). Umm, what if there are no women in it? And that is nothing compared to "Empirically, all pornography is made under conditions of inequality based on sex, overwhelmingly by poor, desperate, homeless pimped women who were sexually abused as children" (20). It's the "all pornography" that gets me.

I can see how her argument fits a lot of heterosexual porn. I do believe that Deep Throat is quite possibly a film of Linda Boreman being raped. I have seen many examples of porn depicting the abuse and degradation of women. But to lump lesbian and gay pornography into the same category yet not say anything specific about why?

Sure, lesbian and gay pornography can celebrate abuse and degradation in the same ways that heterosexual porn can. But I think gay pornography especially has a unique history and grew out of particular contexts that are different than straight porn. And I do not think those histories and contexts should be ignored.

I don't want to dismiss her work, but the way she dismisses gay pornography makes me wonder if I should.

Jodi Picoult's Novels

If anyone is in the Farmington, CT, area on Thursday, come on over to the library at 7:00 PM when I'll be leading a discussion of Jodi Picoult's Nineteen Minutes. It's part of a series. On November 19, we'll be talking about Picoult's The Pact, and we'll tackle My Sister's Keeper on December 10. I don't read a lot of fiction anymore. When I have time to read, I want to pick up a memoir or theoretical text since I can usually see the benefit of giving it my time more easily. But I'm finding a lot about Nineteen Minutes pretty compelling so far.

If you aren't anywhere near CT but know the novels, I'd love to hear what you think. Anything I should raise in my discussions? Any thoughts on the books at all? I like leading discussions at area libraries. Usually, all I have to do is ask what people think of the major characters, and everything tends to fall into place from there. These are people who fully choose to be there, and they usually have a thing or two to say; some always have more than that, too. Post-tenure, leading these discussions is one of the things I've been wanting to do more of.

But I'd love any thoughts about Picoult if anyone has them.

Why I Loved Eat, Pray, Love

This is one of those entries that starts off with a sense of shame, yet I feel the need to say something publicly. It's probably something I should keep to myself, judging by other things I read online and comments I have heard in person. But, so be it. I love Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love.

See, as I have talked about this book over the last couple of years, I have heard a lot of criticisms. Some people have called the book emotionally manipulative. Some have hated the author for being self-centered. Some have criticized her because of her privileged background and perspective. Some hate her for being paid to go on the trip rather than having the experience and choosing to write about it afterward. I have been in creative writing workshops where the book has been mentioned to snickers and apologies by those who read it: "I know I shouldn't have finished it, but I did" and "I'm sorry I gave that woman my money." At Jezebel, you have a woman saying, "[I] was happy she was getting fat." Why just criticize a book when you can slam the author with personal attacks? Ha, ha, fatty!

I was encountering these criticisms while I was reading it for the first time, and I admit that those judgment made me feel a bit stupid and guilty. I felt stupid because I wasn't seeing what other people were seeing. I was missing the emotional manipulation, for example. I felt guilty because not only was I enjoying the book, but I was feeling a pretty deep connection to it when so many other people were trashing it.

What's interesting is how a lot of the talk I hear about the book has to do with why we should care about a whiny woman who cheated on her husband and then gets to travel for a year. I'm not saying everyone should like the book. I'm saying that the intensity and types of comments I was hearing seemed to be saying that no one should like this book. And that's why I stopped talking about it even as I taught it.

I taught it for the second time this summer, and this blog entry is the result of that teaching. My students had amazing conversations about it! This was an online class, so it was all written out, and I loved the comments they made. Many of them wrote about not wanting to read the book because they didn't know why they should care about some woman who won't stop complaining. But all of those students ended up getting really into the book. I'm not saying all of my students loved the book, but none of them hated it, and all of them could see the value in it. Granted, one class does not provide a definitive sample of standard responses, and this group might have been biased since many of them were nontraditional adults who have undergone or are undergoing divorce. But, pedagogically, the book worked well in my class (as it did the first time I taught it).

I think a lot of the criticisms miss the point of the book or make it easy to miss its value. If your focus is on a whiny woman who should just get over it already, then what she says will remain irrelevant to you. But what so many of my students and I felt drawn into was her discussion of spirituality. In each section, it seems like she is being driven to find where she should place her faith and hope. Each of the places she goes (Italy, India, Indonesia), has a passionate, deep sense of culture, yet there are intense differences between those cultures. Some people have criticized for thinking that she had to travel around the world to find an epiphany that she could have found at home, but I disagree. She had to travel to these places to have theses epiphanies.

I won't say a lot about the specifics of the book so that people can find out things on their own. The book did offer a view to me of lots of different kinds of people and places. Yes, Gilbert is the narrator, but I also learned a lot about other people and their places in and views of the world. And that's why I think should not be dismissed or generally trashed. If you don't like it, that's fine. But realize that some of us might just find it pretty damn meaningful.

I've been planning to write this entry for a while, but I hopped on it today because of the announcement yesterday that her next memoir will be out in January. It sounds fascinating, and I will buy it.

Ambulance Girl by Jane Stern

Night before last, I stayed up late finishing Ambulance Girl: How I Saved Myself by Becoming an EMT by Jane Stern. It became a TV movie a couple of years after it was published. If you're a foodie, then you also might know Stern's other writing as well as her radio work and her involvement with Roadfood. When Stern reached 52, she was depressed. She was obese (her word). She had lived a life filled with anxiety. She knew she needed a change. After driving by the fire station in Georgetown, CT, and seeing a sign calling for volunteers, she decided to become an EMT. She did something drastically different, something scary. And she did it. As of the end of the book, she's been an EMT for a few years.

It's an impressive story. I think any of us who have lived ordinary lives while also struggling with some inner demons can relate to need for change while also being confused about what that change should be. She does something pretty extreme, something that takes a lot of commitment and effort. Few actually make it, but Stern did. Once you read about the level of anxiety and depression she lived with, you become amazed when she becomes immersed in the life of an EMT.

In terms of writing style, it's not very poetic or flowery at all, which might be her journalism background at work. The structure is very linear. She starts at the beginning and moves to the end. Chapters focus neatly on such things as individual patients. All of this may sound more critical than I intend, but what I mean is that she is not doing anything that is particularly innovative or "literary" in terms of narrative structure or style, but she tells a compelling story. As a writer, I often feel like my creative work is too much "this happened and this happened and this happened." And Stern's narrative shows how that may not be such a bad thing.

At least when the story is as fascinating as this one.

The Tricky Part by Martin Moran

Just finished reading The Tricky Part: A Boy's Story of Sexual Trespass, A Man's Journey to Forgiveness by Martin Moran. At twelve, Moran was molested by a man he initially met at a Catholic summer camp. The molestation occurred later when Moran had traveled to help the man build a new camp at a ranch outside Denver, where Moran lived. Their relationship lasted for three years, but the scars ran deep, of course.

The book is divided into two parts, "Falling" and "Waking." "Falling" chronicles his adolescence, mostly, and "Waking" focuses on his adulthood. Personally, I found the second half to be the most compelling, which probably sounds horrible since the scenes of abuse are in the first part. But I was just drawn to his descriptions of the effects of the abuse and how he learned to live with it, how it affected his partner and family, for example. The book is framed with scenes of Moran visiting his abuser decades later, and that obviously pulled me in.

I have to laugh, though, because there were times early on when his sentence structures were starting to annoy me, with lots of clauses and commas and such. And then I realized that I write the exact same way! Ah, the pains of recognition.

But it's a good book. And for anyone disturbed by reading scenes of abuse, those are really kept to a minimum. For a survivor, I'm sure they would still be painful to read, but I thought he made what happened clear without falling into salaciousness or exploitation (even of his own experiences). He really focuses on the effects of the abuse and his process in dealing with it.

And that's what makes the book so valuable.

Jesus Land by Julia Scheeres

As usual, I had a book with me on this trip, Jesus Land by Julia Scheeres. I remember seeing this on the new paperback table at Borders when I had some leftover professional development money. I picked up all the provocative-looking memoirs, and this was one of them.

Wow, it is good. I'm not sure how much to say because it was a great experience reading it and being stunned when certain things happened. The biggest reason I read it as fast as I did was because I wanted to find out what happened to everyone and how they were going to get from point A to point B. Scheeres grew up in Indiana in the 70s and 80s in a conservative Christian household. Her family was white, and her parents adopted two black boys (separately). She was close in age to the youngest one, David, and they became best friends. He and the older boy were the only black kids in the entire school. And thier mother had the attitude of turning the other cheek whenever they encoutered racism. You can imagine how effective that was. And their parents were very strict. Actually, that is not the best word. Frankly, I think they were abusive. And when the kids did not behave properly, the parents sent Julia and David (at separate times) to Escule Caribe in the Dominican Republic. There, the abuse got worse.

That's why I read the book from start to finish and wanted to get it done so quickly. I wanted to know if it could get worse and how/when they got out. The details above are pretty much the same details that appear on the back of the book, so I haven't revealed much that most readers won't know when they start reading. I did get to the point where I skimmed the last chapter before I was halfway done, and I NEVER do that. But I was really feeling for these people. Racism and religious bigotry all at once.

On her website (linked to above), Scheeres has scans of several documents that were part of her research. The academic geek in me loved seeing them, and I just might refer to them in an article I'm writing on truth in memoir. She also helped start a website where alumni of the school and its affiliates could tell the truth about their experiences. It's painful to read. Frankly, I've never trusted those places, and reading the book and the website upset me even more. And I don't even have a personal connection. I notice that talk shows no longer have episodes where kids are taken to boot camps, and I wonder if that's because the truth about them has been coming out over the last few years.

That's just one reason why a book like this is so powerful.

Falling Through the Earth by Danielle Trussoni

On my trip to NYC last week, I read Danielle Trussoni's Falling Through the Earth. Since I knew my dorm room would not have TV or internet, I knew I'd need a good book for the nights, and this was perfect. I cannot remember how I heard of it. I must have read a review somewhere. But Da Man got it for me one Christmas from my Amazon wish list, and it's been on my shelf ever since.

It is a memoir that centers on Trussoni's relationship with her father, who fought in Vietnam. And he fought at the bottom of military strata. He was a "tunnel rat," crawling through tunnels lined with traps, weapons, and soldiers wanting to do nothing but kill him. When he came back to the United States, he tried to become a good father, I think. But the specter of Vietnam was always there. He drank a lot, taking his daughter to the local bars with him. Everyone knew her, and she knew everyone there.

As an adult, Danielle worked really hard to understand things from her father's persepctive, but he was beyond reticent (though he told a lot of stories, it seems, after he'd been drinking). She took her own trip to Vietnam, and she weaves the story of the trip with the story of growing up. I really liked how she wove the two together. I thought there was a good balance, which I don't always see with such tecniques.

My father was in Vietnam when I was born. He joined the army during Korea, so he'd gone high enough in rank not to be put on the front lines during Vietnam. But he was pretty damn close. He didn't suffer as Danielle's father did, but I know that it wasn't a walk in the park, either. He rarely talked about it, and I've never asked, so I get Danielle's desire to know more. I've often thought about traveling there myself. Da Man thinks I should go with my father, but that adds a lot of complicated layers. Still, I've thought about it.

And I am so glad I read Danielle Trussoni's account of it.

Eve Sedgwick Says What I Think

There are many reasons why I consider synchronicity to be one of the key driving forces of my life.

This afternoon, I was sitting on the couch with the window open behind me, reading Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, which I started last week after learning about Sedgwick's death. It's been on my shelf for years with a lot of other things I've barely touched. I was reading along and found the following paragraph in the first few pages of chapter three:

And to attend, as we have been here, to the spatialized role of witness in constituting the relational vicinity of the speech act: where does that get us but to the topic of marriage itself as theater -- marriage as a kind of fourth wall or invisible proscenium arch that moves through the world (a heterosexual couple secure in their right to hold hands in the street), continually reorienting around itself the surrounding relations of visibility and spectatorship, of the tacit and the explicit, of the possibility or impossibility of a given person's articulating a given enunciatory position? Marriage isn't always hell, but it is true that le mariage, c'est les autres: like a play, marriage exists in and for the eyes of others. One of the most ineradicable folk beliefs of the married seems to be that it is no matter-of-fact thing, but rather a great privilege for anyone else to behold a wedding or a married couple or to be privy to their secrets -- including oppressive or abusive secrets, the portable puppet theater of Punch and Judy, but also the showy open secret of the "happy marriage." Like the most conventional definition of a play, marriage is constituted as a spectacle that denies its audience the ability either to look away from it or equally to intervene in it. (72)

It immediately clicked with me for a lot of reasons. I have said many times before that I believe legal rights should be extended to all couples, but I question why society has to privilege marriage over so many other types of bonds and relationships. My reasons align with those offered by BeyondMarriage.Org, and I don't intend to delve into them here and now. But I read that paragraph from Sedgwick and felt the chill of recognition. It gets at why marriage can squick me out so much.

Soon after, Da Man arrived home. Before I even saw him, before he turned the corner into the living room, he asked, "Did you really want to get married this year?" We had our civil union in 2005 so we would get the legal benefits associated with marriage, but we did the bare minimum to make it happen. We went to a Justice of the Peace, and no one else was present but the three of us. If we could have signed the form without having to speak any words in front of power as embodied in the JP, we would have done that. And when the state supreme court said that the state had to start offeirng marriage and not just civil unions, we decided to get married so that our legal benefits could extend outside the state to other states that recognize gay marriages, just in case.

But back to tonight. Da Man asked, "Did you really want to get married this year?" I didn't think he was proposing that we break up since that would be the stupidest thing he could ever do (and vice versa). I just looked at him after he turned the corner. He continued, "I heard on the radio that the state is converting all civil unions to marriage next year." And that does turn out to be true. We knew the vote on the bill was happening in the state house and senate this week, but we didn't really know the details.

I won't recap the conversation that we had, but we decided quickly not to get married on our anniversary this year as we'd originally planned, and it's largely for the reasons Sedgwick discusses in the paragraph above. We don't want to do anything publicly. To the extent possible, we want to keep our relationship out of the panoptic arena, away from the eyes of witnesses. I then asked, "If we don't get married in a ceremony, should we still get rings?" Basically, we're going to put the money elsewhere. Unless something changes, we'll just wait for our civil union to convert.

And we'll be married when we wake up on October 1, 2010.

Ten Books that Stick with You

This is one of those Facebook memes that I think will make a good blog entry, so feel free to do your own spin in your own space. But Tria tagged me for this one where you list ten books that stick with you. All immediately came to mind. It took no effort to think of this list at all, which shows how each of these has truly stuck with me over the years.

1. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. Though I am not ranking this list, this one has to be first. It has literally followed me for years. I read it the day I graduated from high school. Yeah, I did. I woke up that morning, picked this up, and read it from start to finish. That was not perhaps the smartest move, to read a book about someone who has a seemingly bright future but who then falls apart. But I did read it fast since there was an instant connection. I wrote two papers on it in college, at least. I taught it, and I led a discussion of it at local libraries, one last year and one last month. I couldn't get away from this book if I tried, and I'm not trying.

2. Beloved by Toni Morrison. I read this in college and loved it so much that I was afraid to read it again and find out that I was wrong about it. But when I taught it a few years later, I found out that I clearly wasn't wrong. In arguments about what is the great American novel, I always say that this is my choice. It's the one, in so many senses of the word.

3. Angels in America (Part One) by Tony Kushner. I read this in grad school and chose to teach it the next year. What I have loved about it ever since is that I find it so easy to teach. There is so much in the text and so many ways to go at it. When I decided to teach it again years after last teaching it, I went to the file I had for it and found a ton of notes and articles and ideas. I love talking about this one.

4. Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place by Terry Tempest Williams. People always say that they can never choose just one favorite book, but I can. This one. She does an amazing job of weaving together the stories of her mother's death and the destruction caused by the rising of the Greast Salt Lake. This book is about intense, incredible pain, but it has such a tone of hope and joy. I love how this book makes me feel. I haven't read it since my mother died, and I'm thinking I should.

5. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction by Michel Foucault. I once quoted Foucault in an article, and one of the reviewers said that no one should ever quote Foucault because no one understands him. Whatever. I just know that this book really spoke to me and was one of the few texts to get me excited about critical theory (an excitement that has not lasted). At the end, when he writes, "Sex is worth dying for," I get chills. So much richness.

6. Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson. This book has come to me in my life at two points when I was in despearate need to process the pains and pleasures of being in love. Both times, I read it in one fell swoop and just let me feel everything it made me feel. It's such a sensual text.

7. In Memory of Angel Clare by Christopher Bram. I found this in a used bookstore in Houston about six months after Blane died. I read the back cover, which described a young man who had lost his older lover to AIDS and how the older lover's friends and families disliked the younger man, which made him feel more even more alone. That was my exact story in a nutshell. I bought it, went back to my apartment, and crawled into bed for the day to read it. Bram is more known for Father of Frankenstein, which became the film Gods and Monsters, but this out-of-print novel is the one that means the most to me.

8. The Dead and the Living by Sharon Olds. The summer after graduating high school and before starting college was a difficult one. But it was the events of that summer that led me to Sharon Olds. For the next few years, I would study and practice the craft of poetry, and the narrative, experiential poems of Olds always spoke to me more than the poetry of anyone else (including Plath). This was the first one, and it contains some of the work, like "My Father's Breasts," that still speaks to me the most.

9. Dry by Augusten Burroughs. I read Running with Scissors because I thought I should, and I liked a lot of it, but it also bugged me because he wanted to use humor to discuss something so serious. He wanted to do what David Sedaris did, but in Dry, which came out right after I read Scissors, he didn't try to be funny. He just told an incredibly touching story of loss and suffering. And I knew I'd read everything he ever wrote after it.

10. Between the Lines: Relating Composition Theory and Literary Theory by John Schilb. This is not his most famous book. In fact, it's out of print. But when I read it my last semester of coursework, I felt like I found the book that brought all of my previous thinking about the career I was about to enter together. I was amazed at how he wove all of English studies together in a way that argued for its place in a democratic education. I quoted form it heavily in my dissertation and think of it often.

Organizing the Books

As today's photo shows, I spent this afternoon organizing my books here at home. It's been at least a year--and probably about six months more than that--since I got them into some sense of order. I bring in at least one new book each week, and usually more than that. I had a few piles of books in various places. And it was getting difficult to find things. It once took me three days to find one. I scanned each shelf and pile here at home, then I did the same in my office, then I did the same here again and finally found it. That really pissed me off because I don't have that much time to spend searching for random books when I need them. Luckily, Da Man cleared off some shelf space for me in the bedroom by moving a few things into his office here at home. That gave me a whole new bookcase to play with, and I needed it. I put all the books into particular groups that make sense to me so that I would be able to find things when I need them.

That's what organizing is about, the psychological. That makes it sound like I'm a control freak, and I guess I am in some ways but certainly not in others. I think of it more as comfort. When I'm at home, I want to feel like I'm surrounded by safety and security. And I feel a lot better knowing what I have and where it is. But I will also admit that it's a bit depressing, too. I found some books that made me think, "Oh, yeah, I was going to read that and perhaps pursue a project where I explored this and that." I could still read those books and do those things, of course. But it started to feel like what-I-hadn't was starting to exceed what-I-had.

But it also got me thinking how I need to go over my books now and then, pulling out something that triggers a thought. And then keeping track of the thoughts. For now, though, I'll be reading a book that just arrived from Amazon yesterday.