Category: writing

For many years I kept a copy of Pride and Prejudice on my nightstand and re-read it regularly. And there have been other books I’ve read again, though not as often. Usually some time goes by before I re-read. Or even before I think I want to. With Happiness it was different. I knew as soon as I read the last word that I’d be wanting to re-read it. Soon.

Happiness, a novel by Aminatta Forna, was selected as a “best book” of 2018 by a long list of magazines and reviewers. But I didn’t hear about it in 2018. I didn’t notice when she was reading right here at the Harvard Bookstore—rats! My loss. But fortunately I caught up. I read it, loved it, and immediately began recommending it to every reader I knew. And planning to read it again, which I just did and loved it even more the second time around.

What makes a book you’d want to re-read? There are plenty of excellent books I’ve read—deep, complex, rewarding books–that I’ve never been tempted to open again. Why these re-chosen few? It may have something to do with the characters. Definitely in the case of Happiness. The American woman who designs rooftop gardens and studies urban wildlife and especially the larger-than life Ghanian psychiatrist who specializes in war trauma and who loves to dance are people I don’t want to say goodbye to.

In this case there was also the issue of how I was spending time with them. As a reader I’m mode-neutral. I love the physical book, the feel in my hand, the presence of books surrounding me in a room. But, unexpectedly, I also love reading on a screen, specifically the screen of my phone. So tiny, you may think, and yet I’ve read long books. The Forsyte Saga! Chernow’s Grant! David Blight’s biography of Frederick Douglass! (Ok that one was less satisfying on the screen, but I found it a less satisfying book anyway.) Close as I hold a book in my hands, the screen in my palm feels like a particularly private, intimate communion. It doesn’t feel right for every book. I read poetry only in hard copy. Something like Jill Lepore’s These Truths also hard copy. John Lewis’s memoir, Walking with the Wind.

But Happiness in my hand—perfect. In fact, I can’t let go of it. This second time around I haven’t finished it. I’m on the next to last page. Next to last screen. I know what’s next and it makes me teary. But for now here I am, with an ant carrying a crystal of sugar across a table. The noticing, the savoring. Yes, definitely happiness.

If I repeat an “occasional recipe” is it a leftover? This is what Dr. D is having tonight even though he has an (outdated) reputation for not liking leftovers. But in this case it’s the recipe that’s left over, not the dish. The dish, in fact, is demanding to be made because it’s late summer and the tomatoes are the best they’ll ever be. I made one change—had no French bread at hand, so used white*. I baked a loaf of white. It only took about five hours longer than it would have taken me to buy one–reminded me of the late wonderful novelist and food writer Laurie Colwin’s recipe for a perfect chicken sandwich that says, “…first of all you must roast your chicken but second of all you must bake your loaf of bread…”

Here, from late summer 2013 and repeated for the first time in 2016:

In mid-summer it’s hard to avoid coming home from the farm markets without too much of something that looked delicious. My downfall is tomatoes. Off-season I don’t buy fresh tomatoes: the world is too filled with heartbreak as it is. So during the summer I tend to go a little overboard. Ok, a lot overboard.

On this particular day I had beautiful ripe tomatoes and was thinking of panzanella, that summery Italian bread salad. It seemed easy enough…some tomatoes…some bread…olive oil…..let’s see. I looked through my three shelves of cookbooks: nothing. (Really, “Nigellissima”?? Really, “VB6”??) I looked online: too much. Too many ingredients, serving too many people. Maybe in the summer you’re always supposed to be cooking for a crowd. Tonight I’m cooking for two. So, as often happens (admittedly, not always with marvelous results) I made up a recipe. And I’m sharing it with you as I made it. No specific amounts, no specific proportions–you’re in charge. I’m just telling you there are ripe tomatoes out there–go make panzanella.

What you need:
tomatoes
red onion
basil
cucumbers
dried cubes of French bread*
olive oil
salt/pepper

I cut the tomatoes, bread, and cucumber in nice-size chunks; you can do the same depending on your idea of nice size. I cut some red onion in smaller pieces, because that’s what I prefer. I added a little olive oil and salt and pepper. I tore a bunch of basil leaves. Not “a bunch” as in what Whole Foods puts in a rubber band, but a “bunch” as in what my plants were offering and what I thought looked like a good amount. I tossed it all and took a moment to enjoy how it reminded me of the Italian flag. And then I set it aside in a (non-metallic) bowl for a few hours. Do not refrigerate it. Refrigeration does terrible things to tomatoes.

At this very moment it is still in progress, the tomatoes’ juices and the olive oil doing their magic on the bread cubes. I plan to taste a little throughout the afternoon because the one amount I was unsure of was the olive oil. But I’m thinking this is going to be very good. And I’m hoping that if you find something that could make it better, you’ll let me know.

I keep thinking about the baby’s broken fingers.

A wise friend said to remember one victim of the shootings, remember the name, and act on that person’s behalf to end this nightmare. And so I think about Jordan Anchondo. She was 25. Shopping for school supplies. With her husband and their two-month old son. They had dropped their 6-year-old daughter at cheer-leading practice. They were having a birthday party for her later that day.

How do we think about this? She and her husband were shopping on an ordinary summer Saturday. An American summer day. A summer day in America 2019.

Don’t you find them in random pockets, too, those shopping lists—reminders—milk, cereal, butter, coffee? Or notebook, pencils? It’s what we all do. You pull into a shopping mall parking lot with errands to do and think you are lucky to find a parking space. You have to get the errands done quickly so you can pick up your daughter when her practice is over. You have to get the errands done quickly because you have to rush home to prepare for the party, the guests arriving. School supplies, maybe some last-minute snacks for the party. There is always a lot to do on a summer weekend. Especially when it’s your daughter’s birthday and school is starting soon.

It’s what we all do—trust the tree limb will not break off as we are walking underneath, trust the sidewalk will not crumble under our step, that the cars will not move forward until the light turns green. And, with each other, that the people on the street do not wish us ill, or, not caring about us in particular, wish ill on anyone they pass, and have the means in hand to do that ill. Living without that trust would be too painful to contemplate, and yet our habits change, we become wary, we think of what is possible.

Jordan Anchondo must have heard the gunshots. Did she know right away they were gunshots? Who thinks about gunshots when they hear noise in a store? The sound must have been loud. Nearby. People running, panicking around her while she was thinking about her errands. Maybe she was puzzled, then comprehending, then terrified.

Who realized later that her daughter needed to be picked up?

Jordan fell to the floor, on top of the baby, protecting him. She died. Her husband died. The baby was unhurt. Except for two small fingers, broken in the fall.

You know the feeling when you encounter a work of art that touches you so deeply that, even after you are out of its presence, you remain in its world? It feels like a gift when that happens. A touching of soul to soul or heart to heart across centuries, perhaps, or cultures. I felt it with an Adriean Coorte painting that I had to revisit several times while it was on exhibit at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem. A “Magic Flute” a few years ago at Glimmerglass. The brilliant Sarna Lapine’s “Sunday in the Park with George,” my favorite Sondheim that finally felt as if it had gotten its due. “Hamilton, of course.” And many, many works of fiction and poetry, most recently Li-Young Lee’s “The City in Which I Love You.”

And, unexpectedly, the current rebirth/reimagining/revival of a musical that had its Broadway debut in 1943 and was made into a movie 12 years later—“Oklahoma.”

It should feel dated with all that maneuvering about which cowboy is going to bid on which farmer’s daughter’s picnic basket. Instead it feels like a powerfully modern look at not only unspoken wishes and complicated urges but also about who society decides to turn its back on and who our system of justice works for.

Dr. D. and I saw it in May and—self-indulgently—again Tuesday night. It felt even more powerful the second time around. In fact, I am finding myself continuing to live in its world so much that I just saw a friend’s Facebook post of two clearly amicable people wearing Red Sox and Yankees T-shirts and my immediate thought was, “the farmer and the cowman should be friends.”

And I’m thinking about that pioneer spirit and manifest destiny and all that. The wind comes sweeping down the plains as I read the day’s news. Everything’s up to date in Kansas City.

I’ve been having a run of good books. One after another of books I need to read parts of aloud to anyone in the room—usually the indulgent Dr. D., who is usually doing reading of his own that I am interrupting. Book after book that rewards my time and attention and that I want to recommend to everyone I know.

Where to start? With a book I almost didn’t read. “You have to read it,” I kept hearing. “It’s about trees. It’s a novel.” Hmmm. Maybe not. Then I picked it up. Two pages into “The Overstory” I could hardly breathe for all its gorgeousness. I worried that this would be like Zadie Smith’s books, with so many delicious words that I just stop at some point because I’m full. “The Overstory,” by Richard Powers, has the delicious words, but somehow also the staying power, like his subject. Maybe it’s the sheer astounding mystery of reading about trees and then starting to look at them as beings I wish I knew better. So, yes, the novel about trees.

Then “The Flight Portfolio,” historical fiction about Varian Fry and if you don’t know who Varian Fry was—as I didn’t until just a year or two ago—you need to. Unlike “The Overstory,” this is not magnificently crafted prose, but simply a story well told. And it’s a story most of us have never heard. It’s a cautionary tale for this moment in history. And it’s also a reminder of the power of one person trying to live by his or her principles.

While I was reading these and several other books, I was also reading the new biography of Frederick Douglass, written by David Blight. Blight is a major authority on Douglass and he has won a shelf-full of awards for this, including the Pulitzer Prize. But I hated it. As I read it, I kept wishing Ron Chernow had written it. Chernow is, I think, the biographer Douglass deserves: someone who would fall in love with his subject and let us into his company, rather than keeping us fenced off while we take in an impressive load of facts. Show, don’t tell, I kept thinking. Blight tells.

So while I was reading that, I was also reading Douglass’s autobiographies. There are three, beginning with one written just a few years after he escaped slavery. While these may not include every fact, they show the passion and intellect not on view in Blight’s 900-plus pages.

Just the other day I practically inhaled Ruth Reichl’s newest memoir, “Save Me the Plums,” about her time at the late, lamented Gourmet Magazine. It’s a delicious, gossipy, fascinating read. With recipes! I gobbled it right up. There are also words of wisdom. On a budget trip to Paris, she and her staff—sophisticated eaters, all—rediscover the pleasures of more simple fare. As a wise and elderly Parisian tells her, “When you attain my age you will understand one of life’s great secrets: luxury is best appreciated in small portions. When it becomes routine it loses its allure.”

And I am only a few chapters in to Jill Lepore’s “These Truths.” It’s very long and it’s going to be very slow going, not because it’s densely written, but because nearly every sentence is telling me something new, something I have to stop and think about. So, though it’s not lightweight either in message or poundage, that’s probably my summer reading.

Maybe one of these will be your next favorite!

It was serendipity. It was a Saturday morning and Dr. D. and I thought we’d check out an exhibit at the Peabody Essex Museum. At the door was a table where tickets were being given out for “Mr. Joy,” a one-person play that had started just a couple of minutes before we arrived. We could still see it. Did we want to go? We knew nothing about it, but sure. Let’s see it. Good decision. Fortuitous timing. An unexpected knockout experience.

“Mr. Joy” is produced by Arts Emerson and written by Daniel Beaty. The play’s eight characters were played by Debra Watson. We met them on a Harlem street in front of a shoe repair shop owned by Mr. Joy, a Chinese immigrant. One by one they told their stories and the story of Mr. Joy’s influence in their lives. The missing piece was Mr. Joy himself who was not at his customary place in his customary outfit; he was in the hospital, the victim of a vicious attack. The people in the neighborhood felt his absence. Each of them had come to him with their needs and each had a story they shared with him.

The play’s power lies in great part in the diversity of its characters, all knit together through a single person who went about his days simply interacting one at a time with the people who came to him, whoever they were. Mr. Joy was a quiet and unassuming man who would have been surprised to see that he was a central figure in the neighborhood.

I was thinking about that as I walked around my Boston neighborhood where, as in my Cambridge neighborhood a few years ago, I regularly notice how people do not look at each other as they pass on the street. Even on a very small street . Even when no one else is on the street. A few years ago when Dr. D. and I spent a few days in Philadelphia, we were astounded at the number of smiles and hellos we got and we tried to bring that little friendliness to Boston….to no avail. So I was thinking about that and about Mr. Joy when I came to a bench across the street from my building. It’s a bench where, years ago, a man named Richard Harmon, used to sit and hand out treats to the passing dogs. He seemed to live on the street and I can only imagine what percentage of the small change he had went to making friends with the dogs. It clearly brought pleasure to him and to the dogs, too, who tugged at their leashes as they neared him. When Richard died, the neighborhood dog owners had a plaque put on his bench and, next to it, a small metal can they continue to keep filled with treats in his memory.

Yesterday as I was walking I saw that the bench had a sign on it and a picture of a dog. “Treats donated in memory of Maxine,” the sign said, “RIP, Sweet girl.”

Today my tai chi instructor said that, in addition to tai chi practices that are done alone, there are also those done with another person. Those, he noted, are being done less frequently.

It’s a small newspaper– just 8 pages–in a small town–Linden, Alabama, population 1,936 at most recent count. This week it’s caught wider attention, and not in a good way. After its editor-publisher wrote an editorial calling for a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan and lynchings, I found myself thinking not for the first time about the brilliance of Frederick Douglass.

Frederick Douglass has fascinated me since I saw an exhibit of photographs of him. He was the most photographed person of the 19th century; a poem in my newest book is based on his belief that the democracy of photography would mean the end of prejudice and hatred. Well….anyhow…

So in the past few weeks I’ve been reading both a new biography, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, by David W. Blight and Douglass’s own work, the first two of his three autobiographies, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave and My Bondage and My Freedom. Blight is a major authority on Douglass and his book has won rave reviews everywhere. I’m not sure why it doesn’t seem as outstanding to me, but it feels far from the intellectual, moral, and emotional power of Douglass’s own writings. So I turned back to them, and found the cautionary tale I was reminded of by the Alabama editorial

Douglass points out over and over how the system of slavery degrades both slave and slaveholder. He writes of how his “owner’s” wife, who had never before held enslaved people, was kind to him when he first arrived in the household at about age 8. She even began teaching him to read. But, as Douglass described, slaveholding was incompatible with kindness, eroding the souls of slaveowners as it devastated the bodies and spirits of the enslaved. She ended the reading lessons became a harsh and unforgiving taskmistress.

He writes of the overseers, the class of men, too poor to own slaves themselves, whose economic value rested entirely on how much work they could get out of the slaves they managed and who, therefore, were focused on using whatever horrifying level of cruelty could drive that production. Said Douglass, “They have been arranged and classified by that great law of attraction, which determines the spheres and affinities of men; which ordains, that men, whose malign and brutal propensities predominate over their moral and intellectual endowments, shall, naturally, fall into those employments which promise the largest gratification to those predominating instincts or propensities. The office of overseer takes this raw material of vulgarity and brutality, and stamps it as a distinct class of southern society.”

But Douglass saved special condemnation for slaveholders who clothed themselves in religious piety. Only a few decades ago Martin Luther King called 11 o’clock on Sunday “the most segregated hour in America.” Only a hundred a years before that, Douglass wrote that the worst fate that could befall an enslaved person was to have a religious person as his or her “owner.”

“Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ,” he wrote, “I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked… The man who robs me of my earnings at the end of each week meets me as a class-leader on Sunday morning to show me the way of life, and the path of salvation….He who proclaims it a religious duty to read the Bible denies me the right of learning to read the name of the God who made me. He who is the religious advocate of marriage robs whole millions of its sacred influence and leaves them to the ravages of wholesale pollution. The warm defender of the sacredness of the family relation is the same that scatters whole families—sundering husbands and wives, parents and children, sisters and brothers…. We see the thief preaching against theft, the adulterer against adultery. We have men sold to build churches, women sold to support the gospel, and babes sold to purchase Bibles for the poor heathen! “

It’s not hard to imagine any eager readers or the editor-publisher as the logical spiritual descendants of those self-righteous slaveholders and vicious overseers. To their credit, the citizens of Linden, Alabama don’t seem to be reading the local paper very much these days. And on the current issue’s masthead the position of editor-publisher is listed as, ”to be announced.” It’s a start.

I admit I was right there. I saw that photo of the MAGA-hatted boys and the Native American veteran and I made the same assumption that filled cyberspace. I re-posted the photo with sad thoughts about what we have become as a country. I read with scorn the outrage of the mother who said the boys were provoked by “black Muslims.” And now, to my chagrin, I am seeing the subsequent stories the indicate that there is much more to that story.

Is it just self-defense to say that the MAGA hat, as a symbol of the current president, raises immediate thoughts of the kind of hatred and divisiveness purportedly pictured? Is it a weak justification to say that there are pictures that do appear to be accurate, picturing boys from that school in a different incident of racial bias? Is it perpetuating the offense to say how believable that picture was in this current environment and that even the thought that it could now be considered “fake news” is something I find abhorrent: that whole idea seems, again, connected very specifically with an attempt to discredit journalism. But this picture wasn’t journalism. This was social media being used in the service of a purpose, and the purpose in this particular case remains unclear, with new details emerging pointing to a now-deleted Twitter account and possibly to a blogger based in Brazil. The story is still in process, with the truth being pursued by, yes, journalists.

But most upsetting for me personally is how I have let my fear of what this administration is doing cloud my own perception. I read where someone called the red MAGA hat the new white hood, and I know that that’s how I see it. I look at that slogan and its creators and magnifiers as the antithesis of what I hope this country is. That’s made me ready to assume the worst about those who appear to hold opinions different from mine.

I was a political science major in college. What I took in—maybe wrongly, maybe naively—was the thought that politics involved the coming together of people with differing opinions to find solutions for the common good. I thought of it as a noble endeavor. Was that ever truly the case, where elected officials put country above party? I do find it shocking to have a president in office who considers his constituency not “Americans, “ but his base.

And I find it shocking to see how divided we are, divided enough so that we see what we expect to see when it’s hateful behavior by those we disagree with. That’s what so many of us have done with that picture. I can’t answer for anyone else, but I am sad that I did.

The other night I did a reading and, as I listened to the venue host introducing me (with information I had provided), I had a question that remains with me. One of my credits involves the name of a man now tainted by #MeToo accusations. Well, the accusations had enough credibility that he lost his popular radio program and the newer, smaller radio spot that focused on poetry. I was one of the poets whose work was selected to be featured on that spot and, later, be included in an anthology alongside other poets whose work I admire. And I’m left with a credit that doesn’t shine as brightly as it once did. It was a credit I was rightly proud of. And now it leaves a small sourness and a question: should I continue to use it? Mine is the most minor of damages, but it makes me wonder about the fallout for others.

Of course I am sure my answer is yes, I will continue to list that credit. And my puny discomfort, in the face of his misdeeds, is small potatoes. Not even half a french fry. But what about all those innocent others? Not only the other poets whose credit, like mine, carries this unseen asterisk, but the people who worked for him, whose livelihood was upended by his selfishness in being a thoughtless jerk. And, of course, all the other perpetrators and all the others who to any extent depended on them? My experience was at a complete distance; my contact with the office of the man in question was a woman, who now possibly is without that job because of his actions.

Someone close to me worked for years for the man whose name most symbolizes the #MeToo outrages. We haven’t specifically discussed this but I’m guessing that, unlike me, she is comfortable with that credit on her impressive resume, maybe because her employer’s sins were so outsize, like his personality, that it was a badge of honor to have worked for him and survived.

There were those who were complicit, who, cowed by the power of the violators, took no action to protect or support real and potential victims. But with those men who acted like jerks and worse, their bad behavior rippled out to touch innocent men and women. My career and my income did not depend on someone else’s behavior, but other people’s did.

I live in a building where I think often of the Paul Simon line, “One man’s ceiling is another man’s floor.” Yes, this too, in actions as in construction. I only have this tiny injury if I could even call it that, inflicted at great distance from someone I will never have actual contact with. Still, along with my minor accomplishments I carry this less than minor scar, the tarnish of a credit discredited.

At first I didn’t quite get it. It seems like a regular issue, dated this week, but a little odd. The people in the cartoons wear my parents’ clothes. Then there is the lineup of authors—John Updike, Frank McCourt, Theodore Roethke, Veronica Geng. I had to turn to the Contents page, called here New York Stories, to see that what I had just pulled from my mailbox was “The Archival Issue.” Perfect timing.

And filled with treats. On page 31 is a Richard Avedon portrait I would have found stunning even if it hadn’t been of James Baldwin. Would it be shallow of me to mention first that, in the portrait, Baldwin’s haircut looks like one you could, if you knew, get right this week in some trendy place in Brooklyn? Or that I would rush out to buy the tee shirt he is wearing? Or that the plaid jacket folded on his lap would probably, in another moment in another magazine, get its own caption, ending “price upon request”? I am a pushover for 1940’s Style. Capital S. But yes shallow, sorry, given that the picture accompanies Baldwin’s essay, “Letter from a Region in My Mind,” which is a letter we desperately need right now. He’s writing about God, church, and heaven at a moment when Martin Luther King called 11 o’clock on Sunday morning “the most segregated hour in Christian America” and we are re-reading it at a moment when evangelical Christian voters helped put the current administration in place. Baldwin’s essay ends, “If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.”

Indeed, much of the old material in this issue has time-traveled a little too well. There is a cartoon in which a woman asks a travel agent, “Which country is the least mad at us” and another in which a man turns from his newspaper to sputter at the reader, “I’d just like to know what in hell is happening that’s all! I’d like to know what in hell is happening! Do YOU know what in hell is happening?” That one reminds me of a friend’s Facebook post the other day, “Ever wake up in the morning thinking how the fuck could it be that Donald Trump is Pres?”

But there is also a fun Nora Ephron piece ostensibly on cookbooks, in the way “Car Talk” is about ostensibly about cars, and a Nancy Franklin story on her first Manhattan apartment that recalls movies starring Rosalind Russell or Vera Ellen that even I am barely old enough to remember. The issue’s cover, by the Mexican artist Matias Santoyo, ran on April 2, 1927; eight other vintage covers are grouped inside.

Then another stop-you-in-your-tracks moment: Hannah Arendt beginning a piece on W.H. Auden, “I met Auden late in his life and mine—at an age where the easy, knowledgeable intimacy of friendships formed in one’s youth can no longer be attained, because not enough life is left, or expected to be left, to share with another.”

But for me the absolute treasure is Elizabeth Bishop’s “At the Icehouses” in its initial public appearance, sprawling across two pages. This one truly felt like a gift, a chance to look at this poem as if for the first time. And wow.

In an archival moment, I’m thinking, thanks for the memories.