Chekhov’s Mistess

Literary Maineac

Returned Sunday from our trip to Maine’s Mt. Desert Island. The Maineacs are very friendly and seem to have a great sense of humor; for instance, they pronounce Desert Island like dessert, as in “I’ll have a Moose Droppings (a local ice cream flavor) sunday with hot fudge on top,” and some of the (private) roads are named things like Pork Chop Road, Memory Lane, and my favorite, Bubba Blvd.

As you can see here

our 8 month old had a great time. He slept a lot and we think it was the decibel level difference between NYC and Maine. Who knows?

Needless to say, the landscape was beautiful at every turn, from the seascapes, where we found a lot of folks with chairs on the rocky coast, mostly reading books, to the mountains (big hills really) and carriage roads. The island’s proximity to the ocean brings a lot of very evocative fog which made for some great walks through the forest. Naturally, I ate some lobster and we made the obligatory trip to the town of Bar Harbor, which is really a mall even though they call it a town.

Anyway, this is a place for book-talk:

I went to two bookstores on MDI, one of which, The Cottage in Southwest Harbor, carried a respectable selection of new and used books.Most of the used books were a bit expensive, but it was still a nice store. The other store, Port in a Storm only had new books but was pretty impressive too. Both had some local authors. At Port in a Storm I thought it odd that they would have Julia Child’s classic French cooking book displayed prominently, until I came home and discovered that she had died.

I managed to fit in some reading: Henry James’ Lesson of the Master – brilliant; Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener which was quite good and nothing like I expected; I read several essays on Lolita, most of which were only moderately interesting and I started Nabokov’s Speak, Memory – only made about 70 pages into it. I also read a very long article on Balkan Poetry from Contemporary Poetry Review and sadly an archive article from the NY Review of Books on the Death of Literature. By the way, both the James and Melville came from Melville House Books.

I also read Christopher Hitchen’s obscenely-not-a-review review of Kerry books. Thanks NYTBR for the polemic in the guise of a book review. I’ll be glad when election season is over and otherwise smart people can stop making a mockery of themselves.

Lastly, I managed to get in some good iPoding in the car (when the baby was asleep, we all donned our “cones of silence” (Get Smart fans out there?)). I listened to some of Poetry Speaks

Poetry Speaks is a book which includes original recordings by famous poets reading their own work. It’s interesting to hear each poet’s distinctive timbre and rhythm. Not all are great readers, but I think it is revealing to hear their own interpretation of their work. One that struck me beyond what I would have thought was Sylvia Plath’s reading. I always thought her Hitler references were enigmatic in “Daddy,” and that was offputting, but hearing the anger in the poem as she read it was wrenching, as was “Lazarus.” By the way, she sounds just like Gwyneth Paltrow. Ezra Pound’s singing/chanting of “Cantico Del Sole,” “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,” and “With Usura” from the Cantos was unsurprisingly dramatic.

I also listened to Borge’s Norton Simon Lectures (Harvard):This Craft of Verse

These are recordings of lectures that Borges gave the smarties at Harvard in 1967 and ‘68. The lectures are titled “The Riddle of Poetry,” “The Metaphor,” “The Telling of the Tale,” etc. They are not really lectures, but reminiscences of a loving and voraciously ruminative reader. He speaks pretty slowly (I think he was nearly blind by then), so you may find the book more interesting than the recording, although you do get used to it after a while. Also, there aren’t any conclusions as such, so don’t expect anything like a manual on verse, but they’re pleasant to listen to and make you want to go and read or re-read a lot of really old literature.

And that’s the bookish report from my summer vacation.

Read widely, think well, and write often.

comments

Hey Bud,

Isn’t it always fun to check out used book stores in a new locale? I always feel a slight compulsion to buy something, and apparently the farther I travel to get there the more I feel compelled to purchase something.

    – Scott Esposito (08/24  at  01:54 PM)

While I am not a fan of Poetry Speaks (most often hearing the poets read their own verse ruins it for me), I am absolutely in love with Borges lectures which I read several years ago and then received the cds for my birthday a year after that. The chapter about how he considers himself a “reader” more than a “writer” with all of his memories of his father’s libraries really hit home with me. His lectures absolutely mesmerize me.

    – Miss Laura (08/24  at  05:35 PM)

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About this Post

• Posted by: Bud Parr
• Date: August 24, 2004
• Filed Under:
  Song of Myself: Diary

• Comments:2
• Links to this Post: Technorati

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