NEWS – InDigest Magazine

POETICS

NARRATIVES

ERRATICA

INDIALOGUE

GALLERY

MUSIC

What We’ve Been Reading | 02.05.10

Dustin:
I finally got through The Sound & the Fury. I guess I talked about the talking things last week, but I’ve come to the conclusion that anyone who has had a hard time with the book before because of the first 150 or so pages, and then quit reading, has a totally false impression about the book. (Yes, it’s great, blah blah blah, I loved it, so did everyone else.) But it’s not as difficult as you think it is. If you can get through the first section the second isn’t that hard, and then Faulner reverts to standard narration and it’s easy to get through. No big deal.

I also just read Stranger by Laura Sims. All that need be said about how much I liked is that we invited her to read at 1207, she’s reading in April with Daniel Nester and CA Conrad. Excellent.

Finally, I’m currently re-reading The Lone Samurai: The Life of Miyamoto Musashi by William Scott Wilson. I happen to like the story of Musashi’s life quite a bit, so I’m a little biased. But this is one of my favorite biographies. Mostly because it’s one of the few times that a little bit drier of a biography actually works for me. Musashi’s life was so interesting and weird that the really factual style Wilson goes with in this book winds up working really well for him. If you’re not familiar with Miyamoto Musashi, he was a samurai (more-or-less, not in the strictest sense) who became a Japanese national hero. He never lost a match, was a big part of the Toyotomi side of the battle between the Toyotomi’s and Tokugawa’s just before the Tokugawa Ieysu unified Japan. Anyway, his stories are pretty crazy. First duel at 14, and he killed a well regarded (adult) samurai with a wooden stick. He killed everyone in an entire school in a series of duels, and then an ambush when they tried to regain their honor. If you don’t want to spend a week or two learning about his life I recommend watching Hiroshi Inagaki’s Samurai Trilogy, which is all about the life of Miyamoto Musashi. You’ll at least get the idea after the first one, Samurai I: Musashi Miyamoto.

American Life in Poetry: Column 254 | 02.02.10

by Ted Kooser, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

What might my late parents have thought, I wonder, to know that there would one day be an occupation known as Tooth Painter? Here’s a partial job description by Lucille Lang Day of Oakland, California.

Tooth Painter

He was tall, lean, serious
about his profession,
said it disturbed him
to see mismatched teeth.
Squinting, he asked me
to turn toward the light
as he held an unglazed crown
by my upper incisors.
With a small brush he applied
yellow, gray, pink, violet
and green from a palette of glazes,
then fired it at sixteen hundred
degrees. We went outside
to check the final color,
and he was pleased. Today
the dentist put it in my mouth,
and no one could ever guess
my secret: there’s no one quite
like me, and I can prove it
by the unique shade of
the ivory sculptures attached
to bony sockets in my jaw.
A gallery opens when I smile.
Even the forgery gleams.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2009 by Lucille Lang Day and reprinted from The Curvature of Blue, Cervena Barva Press, 2009, by permission of Lucille Lang Day and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2009 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

InDigest Picks | 02.01.10

Books:
The Boy Who Couldn’t Sleep and Never Had To by DC Pierson [Vintage]
+ Filmmaker, comedian, and writer DC Pierson is releasing his first novel this week. The Boy Who Couldn’t Sleep and Never Had To is a charming and hilarious novel. Darren is a pretty normal high school student. He like video games, comics, and the like. His friend Eric confides in Darren that he has never slept, he can’t. Darren’s inability to keep a secret leads to adventure of the brand he has always fantasized about. Pierson’s coming-of-age is totally unique and full of delightful oddities.

Watch DC Pierson give a tour of the book.

Point Omega by Don DeLillo [Scribner]
+ Don DeLillo is a constant no-brainer recommendation. Despite Esquire’s insistence that DeLillo lost his sense of humor and wit long ago it’s hard to deny that there isn’t at least something worth while in everything that has been done by the author of classics like White Noise, Underworld, and Mao II. In Point Omega DeLilo takes an aging documentarian and a politician who crafted war plans as they are shooting a documentary and admitting their wrongs. DeLillo is still in top form here, as always. No, it’s not as funny, it seems, as White Noise, but DeLillo still has an inherent sense of humor in all scenarios.

You can read a short excerpt from Point Omega here.

Read More »

And Now a Word From the Management | 01.31.10

Hello. We haven’t thrown up a little notice on here in a minute about how great the InDigest 1207 Reading Series has been lately and how great it is going to be this spring. We’re taking February off to focus on some big projects we’ve got in the works, and to welcome Fiona Day Doody into the world (congrats David). But we’re going to be back on March 9 with a reading from Matt Hart and Nate Pritts (word), and then on April 6 we’ve got Daniel Nester, CA Conrad and Laura Sims coming to LPR to read. The spring is going to be fantastic at 1207, and the readings coming after that are going to be just as good (but we can’t tell you about everything at once because then what would we have to talk about later?).

You can always check for updates to the reading series at the InDigest 1207 page.

What We’ve Been Reading | 1.27.10

Ashleigh

The Adderall Diaries by Stephen Elliott is every bit as addicting as the titular drug. It claims to be a “memoir of moods, masochism, and murder,” and while it certainly lives up to that description, Elliott uses his tawdry material — a murder trial, his unconventional sex life — to launch into an investigation of memory and authority. For a book that is ultimately comprised of a lot of waiting around and thinking, there is a tenseness and urgency to the prose; he writes as if his life were at stake, which it is. I don’t usually care for memoirs, but this one is a triumph.

American Life in Poetry: Column 253 | 01.26.10

by Ted Kooser, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

Animals are incapable of reason, or so we’ve been told, but we imaginative humans keep talking to our dogs and cats as if they could do algebra. In this poem, Ann Struthers looks into the mystery of instinctive behavior.

Not Knowing Why

Adolescent white pelicans squawk, rustle, flap their wings,
lift off in a ragged spiral at imaginary danger.
Read More »

InDigest Picks | 01.25.10

Books:
Three Days Before the Shooting by Ralph Ellison [Modern Library]
+ The massive compendium assembled here tracks the long arduous process Ellison went through trying to finish this novel. As with most unfinished novels Three Days Before the Shooting won’t have a widespread appeal and won’t be a nice weekend of easy reading, but the fantastic editing done here by John F. Callahan and Adam Bradley will make this an important piece of literature for Ellison enthusiasts, scholars, and anyone interested in the desperate search of writing a novel.

Other Notable Releases: Ordinary Thunderstorms by William Boyd [Harper], The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers by Thomas Mullen [Random House]

Read More »

American Life in Poetry: Column 252 | 01.19.10

My grandfather, when in his nineties, wrote me a letter in which he listed everything he and my uncle had eaten in the past week. That was the news. I love this poem by Nancyrose Houston of Seattle for the way it plays with the character of those letters from home that many of us have received.

The Letter From Home

The dogs barked, the dogs scratched, the dogs got wet, the
dogs shook, the dogs circled, the dogs slept, the dogs ate,
the dogs barked; the rain fell down, the leaves fell down, the
eggs fell down and cracked on the floor; the dust settled,
the wood floors were scratched, the cabinets sat without
doors, the trim without paint, the stuff piled up; I loaded the
dishwasher, I unloaded the dishwasher, I raked the leaves,
I did the laundry, I took out the garbage, I took out the
recycling, I took out the yard waste. There was a bed, it was
soft, there was a blanket, it was warm, there were dreams,
they were good. The corn grew, the eggplant grew, the
tomatoes grew, the lettuce grew, the strawberries grew, the
blackberries grew; the tea kettle screamed, the computer
keys clicked, the radio roared, the TV spoke. “Will they ever
come home?” “Can’t I take a break?” “How do others keep
their house clean?” “Will I remember this day in fifty years?”
The sweet tea slipped down my throat, the brownies melted
in my mouth. My mother cooked, the apple tree bloomed, the
lilac bloomed, the mimosa bloomed, I bloomed.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2009 by Seattle Arts & Lectures. Reprinted from Wake Up In Brightness: Poetry & Prose by Students 2008-2009, Writers in the Schools, 2009, by permission of Seattle Arts & Lectures. Introduction copyright © 2009 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

InDigest Picks | 01.18.10

Books:
The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris [Reagan Arthur Books]
+ Joshua Ferris has been everywhere lately. He’s following up his superb debut novel Then We Came to the End with The Unnamed. The new novel shares some similar themes with his debut, but it’s a more heartbreaking work that takes place outside of an office building. Ferris is one of the best young novelists working in America and The Unnamed will go a long ways to cementing his position as an author to watch. The Unnamed is a fine book that shows how great Ferris’ control of language is, the way he can clearly define a space with very little to go on and create a mood out of the most mundane of settings.

Other Notable Releases: Kisser by Stuart Woods [Putnam], Mr. Shivers by Robert Jackson Bennett [Orbit]

What We’ve Been Reading | 01.15.10

Brad
I’ve been reading Stephen King’s Under the Dome: A Novel. Like a lot of people, I loved Stephen King as a kid; this marks the first time I’ve read him as an adult. I’m not exactly sure why I decided to read this, though it looks like I’ll have a lot of time to figure out not only why I decided to read it, but also if it’s any good — I’m at page 200 out of about 1000. For right now, though, I’ll say this: for as cringe-worthy as some of his sentences may be, the plot moves with pretty surprising and swift economy. There’s something to be said for storytelling, I guess.