Let's remedy the situation.

Does anyone ever play this game? where you mention a book or a movie or whatever--a flavor of Doritos--to a friend, and the friend shakes her/his head and says, "I've never read/seen/eaten that." And you're all, Whaaaaaa? And they're all, I know.

Sometimes the game develops a defense/offense flavor, as in:

Me: You've never seen Rushmore??????

Friend: Yeeeeeaaah, but you've never seen [X].

and then you're all, Well-played, Friend. Check, and mate.  

But seriously, there are plenty of movies I should have seen and haven't. Books I would enjoy but haven't read. What are they? You know, probably, but I may not.

Here are a few that are on my mind:

1. my son feels strongly I should see The Weather Man, starring Nicolas Cage. He has been saying this for literally years. (He has also been asking me to read Ender's Game, which I have now accomplished.)
2. My friend (see above) feels I should have seen Closer and also The Door in the Floor. The first, I think we didn't see because it looked depressing and upsetting. My son basically pshawed this reasoning away this morning (we were driving around, getting stuff taken care of so he could send off his visa application so he can jet off to China in a month).

"You guys are weird," he said. "You see sad and upsetting movies all the time."

True enough, I had to concede. "But you have to gear up for them," I said (in our defense).

"That movie was probably in theaters for a month. You couldn't gear up for it in a month?"

He wasn't even trying to say that he thought it was that great, just that it was up our alley. True enough, again. Well-played, Friend. Check, and mate.

So that's three movies that go on the list.

In a related matter: I cannot reconstruct the logic by which we did not watch West Wing. Another friend is watching this now on Netflix and is admiring its writing and acting and pretty much everything about it, which I recall was what people admired about it--everything, that is--when it was on television in the first place. But nope, we didn't watch it. Why? I don't know. What else might we have been watching instead? Who can say.

Anyway, the point is this: what books, television shows, and/or movies should I watch that you think I may not have seen? I'm making a list. I'm gonna check stuff off of it. I need your help!

As a favor to you, I'm going to tell you that you should see The Kings of Summer, The Way, Way Back, and Twenty Feet From Stardom. All are currently at the Salt Lake Film Society (some of them are elsewhere), and you won't regret them. Plus: movie A/C, which is the best A/C, because there is a movie to go with it, and possible popcorn.

Don't forget: help me rectify my terrible, unforgivable oversights! In the comments!

Spark.

Today I was working on the syllabus for my creative writing class. I had some ideas that I had noted on a piece of paper in my purse, cryptic little phrases ("shapes," "locations," "voices") that were just not giving me much momentum in terms of overturning the categories that had governed this course for awhile. It has been a good course. I've felt pretty proud of it. But I have the chance this semester to teach it in the Pedro Almodovar style ("Live Flesh!"), and I want to make the most of it. I don't want to do the same thing I've been doing.

So I wrote those words down on a new blank document. I thought about them. I took the sheets off the bed and put them in the washer. I looked at those words some more. I thought about going to Target. I realized with great fervor that my iPod needed a charge, so I went into my study and plugged it into my desktop. I organized some stuff on my desk like it was my job. I found another piece of paper that had some notes on it. I added those to the blank document and thought about it some more.

Then I started to look for this one book on the upper corner of my shelves. I couldn't find it. I looked again and again in that corner--I thought I remembered it there. Then, I looked on the shelves adjacent to that, and then I looked at all the shelves, my eyes raking those spines. No luck. The book is, I think (I'm not absolutely positive at this point that the book is a real thing as opposed to a fantasm, or else sitting on some shelves in my work office, which amounts to the same thing). Right: the book is an estimable creative writing textbook (I think). I was hoping to harvest some stuff from it. Ideas, exercises, assignments.

But what happened instead (since the book is either not real or else not on the present shelves) is that I began to get new ideas. I ran to the other room and got my little piece of paper and a pen, and looked over the books more carefully, and thought of new categories, and activities, and little writing prompts, and more. By the end of my shelf scan, I had the big shape of my syllabus, more or less, and the momentum to keep working on it. It seemed exciting and fun and worthwhile.

And that, the people, that is what books are for: the spark they hold of your experiences with them, the memories they're vested with. The actual physical artifacts, organized however the reader has organized them, so that they speak not only to you, but to each other.

Ideal Bookshelf.

The Guardian wants to know: what books would be on your ideal bookshelf?

I love this game, naming the top five things you'd take with you to some remote place, therefore the things you'd have to live with forever, or for a really really long time.

For me, I think the books would be, probably, and with no The Collected Works of, which I think would be cheating:

1. Leaves of Grass
2. Underworld (Don Delillo)
3. Housekeeping (Marilynne Robinson)

--let me pause to note, putting your list on display is like inviting people to your house and hoping against hope that your house is in order and that people won't judge you for your lapses of taste.


4. Harriet the Spy  (Louise Fitzhugh)
5. The Big Sleep (Raymond Chandler)
6. King Lear or maybe The Tempest 
7. King James Bible
8.  Perdido Street Station (China Mieville)
9. maybe Coming Into the Country (John McPhee)
10. Family Happiness (Laurie Colwin) or maybe Another Marvelous Thing
11. Winter Stars (Larry Levis)
12. One Hundred Years of Solitude  (Garcia Marquez) 

I picked books that feel large enough to use for purposes of imagination--that contain more than their own stories, if that's possible. But the truth is, and I am telling you the truth here, I think I would miss all the Harry Potter books. And even though The Big Sleep is an L.A. story, I should probably substitute a volume by Anne Carson or Yeats or Eliot. I would miss them too.

What would be on your ideal bookshelf? The historian says that on his shelf would reside American Minds by Stow Persons, The Communist Manifesto, Love and Capital by Mary Gabriel, the biography of Thelonious Monk by Robin D. G. Kelly, and The Making of the English Working Class (E. P. Thompson). He also said my book, but we agreed it was so slim it shouldn't count against the total.

For more ideas, you should click on the link and see what others said. It's a really interesting discussion. I wanted to take notes.

Powell's.

Spent some time today at Powell's downtown, the bookstore that is also a shrine to the reading life. Today, I didn't have a system for approaching Powell's, no list of books nor any real agenda. In my desultory way, I found 

• a translation of Sophocles' odes and fragments; 
• a book of late T'ang dynasty poetry; 
• a David Lehman edited anthology of prose poems; 
• a book for my dad on the evolution of cooperation; 
• a Danish police procedural that I'm pretty excited about; 
• and a few other thises and thats, which all added up to a fairly shockingly steep bill. Letter press greeting cards will do that, I guess.

I am packing all of these items into my tiny, tiny suitcase, which I will check, because I am a checker. Tomorrow I am jetting home to the SLC. Monday begins my transition into school mode, whoo hoo. Yep, way excited about that.  I would also maybe like to go swimming. And ride my bike and walk with Bruiser, have mostly quiet days for the school preparation. See some movies. Live simultaneously in another  dimension, Summerworld. Possible? We'll see, and I will let you know.

Variations on a book.

A few days ago on The Face, a friend commented that she was about to write by clearing a space on the table, reading a few pages from her "Bible" (which for her, that day, was The English Patient), turning off the internet, and writing. I loved this idea. I brought with me to Idaho a bunch of books that could serve the "Bible" role--for me, for a few days, it was Larry Levis's Selected--and I used this method to jumpstart my writing.

It was amazing to me, though, how deeply some of those poems have penetrated my...what, my tropes? images? paradigms? For instance, this:

I know this isn't much.
But I wanted to explain this life to you, even if
I had to become, over the years, someone else to do it.
You have to think of me what you think of me. I had
To live my life, even in its late, florid style.

That's from "My Story in a Late Style of Fire," from Winter Stars. I bought that book before the first meeting of the first workshop I attended, taught by Larry Levis. Evidently, I have been reading this poem for all the years since. It was, actually, shocking to me. I not only love this poem--it, in some sense, has become me. Or I have become it. I guess this happens with every book that, in some way, forms us.

I remember thinking quite clearly at one point in my life that I no longer wanted to keep having the same arguments. In a sense, I wanted to stop reading the same book. This is, of course, not possible, or at least I have not found it to be so. We keep reading the same books that have read us. These books--the ones that form us--are us. We are them. In this sense, we never really leave our old books behind--our old lives, our old ideas and commitments--we are always in them, they are always in us.

Right now, I am wondering if there's even a point to saying, of this phenomenon, this is terrible or this is true or any such judgement. I am wondering, what, in fact, the Bible is--the rotating cast of sacred books, or beautiful books, or searing, or visionary, or transformative books. Can you choose your Bible? or does it in some way always choose you?

My family used to love to play a little game, where we'd name the top five records, or books, or movies, or whatever--the ones you'd take with you to a place where you'd have those and no other. My kids would always joke with me that I acted like it was real--like I'd never be able to revise my list. I always put Leaves of Grass on my list of books, and I did always put the King James Bible. To me, whatever else it was, it was a book of beautiful language, and parts of it mean a great deal to me--words that feed me. Even when I'm choosing, my old book follows me.

If you are of the book--sacred or secular-- then books that choose you--or the ones that you choose--give you the frame for thinking and feeling. I feel I might never stop being able to read through the original books--the original books speaking, always, through every new text. At this point in my life, I'm not sure why I should even try, aside from understanding that mine--my reading, my writing--isn't the only way.

I am asking myself: what is it that my own poems are doing? what news do they have to deliver? what beauty of their own? what voice or beauty that isn't somehow ventriloquizing, quarreling with, revising, contradicting, singing the old books?

Larry Levis again, speaking in a borrowed voice--the voice of Whitman:

Now that I'm required reading in your high schools,
Teenagers call me a fool.
Now what I sang stops breathing. 

And yet
It was only when everyone stopped believing in me
That I began to live again--

O! Library!

Well, ever since the new year, when all the old leaves became irrelevant and it was nothing but new-on-new, in terms of leaves, and I was just turning them over and over, the leaves, nothing but good intentions!, I have been checking books out of the library like a madwoman (so that I could "Read all the time," or whatever the resolution was, exactly). Checking books out of the library, as readers of this blog know, is of late made super-cinchy because of the library robot and its machinations, now deliverable entirely through the interwebs. So first I saved up my lists of books, to wit:

• Jo Nesbo bookery. Recommended by several.
• A Karin Fossum book--Norwegian, policery, good if it's as good as the others. 
• Another Scandinavian police procedural, picked up entirely on the merits of its Scandinavian author and its cover.
• An entire John le Carre suite of Smiley books.
• The first of the Mist-Born series, on Middlebrow's recommendation.
• Game of Thrones. What? Is it trashy? I don't know.
• The beginning book of a series by Sjodahl and Wahloo, recommended by Radagast.

And then I ordered the library robot to find and deliver them to my local branch library (library robotics part 1). And then I crept into the library like a ninja and checked them out without talking to NO ONE (library robotics part 2).

(Not my library's actual robot.)

Now: of the above books, I have completed, as in "read":

• one Nesbo.

I am also partway through 

• another Nesbo. 

In my defense, first I had to read some books of poetry for my book group, and that one French detective novel, and that one English detective novel, and also Mindy Kaling. And also Diane Keaton.

I am now receiving notices from the robot (library robotics part 3), reminding me that some of my books might be coming due, to wit: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, which I had every intention of reading before I saw the movie, but whoops, too late. And there's the Nesbo middle, which I am still in! So I can't really start a whole other spy novel, especially when I have already seen the movie. I'm sure you see my dilemma.

Let me pause to deliver a short discourse on scarcity and excess: 

A Short Discourse on Scarcity And Excess.

Sometimes there is not enough of things, such as when I wander from room to room and say, "When will Fred Vargas/Arnaldur Indridasen/etc. write another book so I can read it?" This is scarcity, and it is intolerable, or nigh unto.

And sometimes there is more than enough of things, such as when someone says, "You should really read X," and I say, "Wait a minute while I dial up the library robot!" And as a consequence of the robot-dialing, there are piles of X, I mean books, the titles of some of which I am sure I'm forgetting, and I'm not sure where all of them even are in my house! and I have already seen the movie of some of them! That is excess, and I am in the middle of it, and don't even get me started on how much I may need or not a pair of pink ballet shoes, to go with my other ballet shoes, including my other pink ballet shoes, but not this particular color of pink. That is also excess, and I am (always already) in the middle of it. And it too is intolerable, or nigh unto.

Well, anyway, I am going to go dive back into the middle of Nesbo, because I finally got a running start at it and it's kind of exciting at the moment. At the moment, there is the exact right amount of Nesbo, and it is very good.

Key facts.

• My favorite kind of reading glasses

routinely break like brittle china.

• Ergo, I order a pile of them. So I have more when they break. Perhaps I should consider a new style/brand/Lasik? I don't know. They are my favorite.
• It is the historian's birthday today. He has a cold. Is that fair? I ask you.
• We are watching the Australian Open. Rod Laver and Roger Federer are talking. It's kind of great.
• My classes were awesome today. Sometimes it feels like, if you set things up right, your courses turn into little centers of industry, with all kinds of good things happening, humming along. Or, y'know, things could fall apart tomorrow. But I don't think so.
• Today this book arrived at my house: 

Vatnasafn/Library of Water
Roni Horn

it is awesome.

• Even though it was a birthday, it was a work day. Where is the birthday cake? I ask you. I guess that's why birthdays last a week. They do, don't they?
• Okay. Time to get you a little more DayQuil, honey.

(happy birthday to the historian, the best of the best of the best, sir! he is above the system, and he makes it--everything--look good.)