I meant to devote yesterday to getting my weekly housework under control, and I did do that, but I also managed to write one of the best sonnets I've composed for a while--an unexpected boon in a prosaic day. And in other unexpected news, T's glue job did successfully repair the dishwasher--though he says he's still planning to bring home the foraged dishwasher, under the assumption that this one will probably go belly up soon anyhow. I find that expectation disheartening, given that we bought it new when we moved into this house and we haven't even been here ten years yet. But such is modern life.
It's seven degrees outside this morning--a heat wave compared to NYC, where I hear it's three. Still, temps are nippy here, and I've got to trek out to a reading up in Brunswick today. If you're interested in attending, it starts at 1 p.m. at the Moulton Union on the Bowdoin College campus. I'll be reading alongside two excellent poets: Gibson Fay-LeBlanc, the executive director of the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance, and Mike Bove, a professor at Eastern Maine Community College. It's been a few months since I've read in public, and I'm looking forward to it. I've got a mountain of new work, which of course is pushing me to rethink themes in my older work, and I enjoyed sitting down in my blue chair and putting together a 15-minute mashup.
I finished rereading Adam Bede yesterday. I felt, as I always feel when I reexperience a George Eliot novel, that I've been cleansed. There is no writer so kind, so honest, so serious in her observations, so sympathetic with human frailty, so inexorable about the damage such frailty does to others. Her novels are dense and demanding and irresistible. They are the great heart of the English nineteenth century.
What would my life be without rereading? I can't imagine. I can't imagine. These books are my blood.
5 comments:
Your essay about re-reading Malcom X, and the whole collection of essays about re-reading, are a staple in my literary collection. I'm starting to re-read a few things, myself. Must be age; I have forgotten some of the "good parts" in favorite novels. =)
Somehow, for me, it's more than revisiting plot. The cadences, the panoramic eye, the unfolding of character, the moral conundrums . . . these books have taught me how to be a writer, but that's the least of it. I think they've made me as a person.
. . . by which I mean struggling and questing.
❤️ this and the comments.
That's true for me with rereading poems; I have not ever really been a fiction re-reader until now, and I am starting to really notice the craft elements so much more. I think it's because of the intensive training in how to read poems with curiosity that you and others have helped me with. For example, I recently reread Hemingway's "The Short Happy Life..." and was gobsmacked by what I was noticing about sentences, verbs, etc. It was revelatory!
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