From a Purple Hill

Distances are purple.
It’s something to do with the air –
The way it piles up between your eyes and the far hills,
Accumulating violet as it goes –
Something like that.  I never studied eyes.
But I know purple distances, and how
They speak a fairy story to the soul
Which the wise mind, all crusted from its work,
Cannot believe, nor ever set aside.

Here it isn’t purple.  Not from here, it isn’t.
But on that purple hill – who knows? –
Some other watcher may be watching me,
And may see magic where I nothing see.

On God and Doors

Every time God closes a door, He opens a window. And you're like, "Uh, God, I kinda wanted to go through that door." And He's like, "Yeah, but now we have this nice breeze!"

Night Blessing

Rain brings up the smell of dirt

Into a grateful asphalt world;

The tame water gleams, as coyly as a lake,

And moonlight makes mountains out of towers.

This world is still the world,

However we mar its skin,

And even our glass monstrosities

Are things of nature, wrought by her through us.

Rain brings news of enduring dirt;

Stars flicker behind the flickering signs;

A cool breeze ghosts along the water, and

I thank all gods for the world.

Pay It Backward

Idea: the next time someone does something nasty to you, do something nice for someone else. That way, the balance is restored, and you get to feel smug.

Commonplace Things

One of my least favorite quotations is this popular one by Jack Kerouac:

“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars...”

To be fair, it’s beautifully written, and Kerouac is perfectly entitled to his own preferences.  I dislike this quotation because so many people seem to feel it’s a laudable and relatable sentiment, and I just couldn’t disagree more.

People who “never yawn or say a commonplace thing” are exhausting – and, ultimately, dull.  The best people don’t care about what is, or is not, commonplace; they are concerned only with what is funny, beautiful, useful, or true.  They’re not constantly chasing a high, drug-induced or otherwise; they understand that the lows have meaning, and the middle places have value, and that life is not a highlight reel.  The best people are not terrified of mediocrity or convention, or even a certain amount of complacency.  They strive for balance, they’re interested in process, and they’re willing to invest deeply, and consistently, in unspectacular but important things.

The mad ones can be enormously stimulating, especially when you’re a teenager.  But it’s the sane ones you want to give your heart to.  They’re the ones who know what to do with it.

The Drunkard's Prayer

 

Let him find me when I am drinking –

That God with the bloody mind;

Let him beckon me up to heaven,

Where souls are winged and kind;

Let him speak to me of mercy,

That God who craves my death;

Let him sing his own sweet praises

With his own sweet wasted breath;

I’ll hear him out politely

(The drink will help me to);

Then I’ll tell him where I’m going

And where he can go, too.

This New England

Most of us are not farmers

Here, in this late century;

Yet still we live and still we breathe

To the ancient rhythm of the farm.

Time comes on in harvests

And crop-shocking frosts,

And though we sleep through dawns and roosters,

Our days are long when the wheat is long,

Short when the dull cattle sleep,

Warm when the earth has need of warmth,

Cold when our mother is barren.

Now the manure smells of apples,

And the last blaze of heat fades;

Barns fill up with the summer’s yield,

And the Yankee soul is glad again;

Swelled with the bounty his neighbors reap;

Eased gratefully into the winter.

Opinion

When the corpses became embryos,
Long-dormant genes firing into life,
Dead flesh ablaze with crackling purpose,
We assumed

That it was only a siren song –
A final throe, a last hurrah –
And that the comfortable quiet of decay
Would settle softly, like a shroud, in time.

But six months later, when the streets
Were crawling with newborn aberrations,
All unaccustomed limbs in untoward places,
And eyes on stalks that tracked us avidly,

We had to reevaluate.  In rooms
Where treaties had been signed, we had to ask
If these new things were human, and if so,
What rights, what burdens, their warped selves might claim.

It was a complicated process.  Now,
With benefit of hindsight, we can see
That what horrific violence did ensue
Was plain misunderstanding, and both sides
Could claim some culpability for that.

The dead turned into monsters.  True enough.
But monsters have their uses – and besides,
What purpose does a body serve if not
To incubate the next new life to come?

Of course, we’re still adjusting.  But with time,
I think we’ll see that this “apocalypse”
Was more an opportunity to learn
What’s better than to bury or to burn.

Heh., Part 2

"Wifi" is short for "wience fiction," right?

Heh.

Aren't rhetorical questions kind of manipulative?

The Dreaming City

Palm trees are not practical.
They crane their straining necks aloft,
Thrusting their tufted tops into the sky,
Like nothing so much as birds –
Teetering, ungainly birds –
Chimerical, unlikely birds –
With heads too small and necks too big
And bodies buried in the pregnant sand.

This is a palm-tree city.
It isn’t practical.
It sprawls between mountain and ocean,
Dreaming its hope-fueled helium dreams,
Gorging itself on saltwater and sun,
Wheeling its dealings endlessly,
Believing its own mad myth.

The veins of the dreaming city
Pulse with gleaming cars;
Its tufted spires brush the sky;
It dreams the dreams of the world.

Book Report 2015

My goal was to read 36 books in 2015, but – largely due to an unfortunate dalliance with One Hundred Years of Solitude – I only made it to 31.

Here they are, in order of preference, and handily subdivided for your convenience.  Don’t say I never did anything for you.


First-Rate

Books I would recommend to anyone who loves reading.

1. Brat Farrar, Josephine Tey (1949)

    One of my new favorite novels – a work of deep humanity, compassion, artistry, and suspense.

2. Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, Douglas Adams (1987)

    A tour de force of plotting, humor, and imagination.  Adams has many imitators, but his work is in a class by itself.

3. The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion (2005)

    Beautiful, honest, and heartbreaking.  A masterpiece of emotion and restraint.

4. The Tiger in the Smoke, Margery Allingham (1952)

    The detective thriller as spiritual parable.  Exceptionally vivid and atmospheric.

5. The Daughter of Time, Josephine Tey (1951)

    Part history lesson, part mystery story, part character study – and all fascinating, despite the fact that novel’s action is entirely confined to a single hospital room.  (BONUS: This novel led indirectly to the recent discovery of Richard III’s remains.)

6. Tales of Adventurers, Geoffrey Household (1952)

    Household’s Rogue Male is one of my all-time favorite novels, but this book of short stories is almost equally impressive.  Ranging from the humorous to the chilling, with many notes in between, these stories are the work of a master.  There isn’t a dud in the bunch.


Excellent

Books that fall just short of the above standard – but still vivid, fully realized, and well worth taking the time to read.

7. Rim of the Pit, Hake Talbot (1944)

    A dexterous and thoroughly mystifying mystery, set in the forbidding North Woods, and saturated with a delightful feeling of supernatural dread.

8. Motherless Brooklyn, Jonathan Lethem (1999)

    A clever hybrid of “literary” and genre fiction – vividly written, and evoking a not-very-long-ago Brooklyn that already feels exotic and remote.

9. And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie (1939)

    Ruthless, ingenious, and masterful.  A classic for a reason.

10. Kidnapped, Robert Louis Stevenson (1886)
   
    A rollicking old-fashioned yarn like this is as close to pure literary pleasure as anything I know.

11. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain (1884)

    Not nearly as coherent – or as didactic – as its reputation would suggest.  In truth, Huckleberry Finn is barely a novel; it’s really just a collection of strung-together incidents, but for all that, it’s engaging as hell.

12. The Human Factor, Graham Greene (1978)

Distinguished by a chilly beauty and a kind of remorseless compassion, this is a hard book to love, but it’s impossible not to respect.


Enjoyable

Solid, pleasurable reads, but perhaps not truly memorable or inspired.

13. The Problem of the Green Capsule, John Dickson Carr (1939)

    A particularly tidy and elegant mystery, with a nicely understated love story underneath it.

14. The Blind Barber, John Dickson Carr (1934)

    A farcical madcap of a mystery story – which somehow manages to end rather chillingly.

15. Greenmantle, John Buchan (1916)

    Deliciously, vibrantly, breathlessly naive – in everything from its worldview to its prose to its coincidence-laden plotting.  Buchan sure knows how to tell a lively, preposterous yarn – though it’s never quite clear to what extent he knows it’s preposterous.  Ultimately silly, but hard to resist.

16. The White Spider, Heinrich Harrer (1959/1964)

    It’s strange how unlikeable Harrer manages to be in the course of what should be a fairly straightforward narrative of various attempts on the Eiger’s North Face.  He comes across as self-serving and hypocritical – but his subject is riveting, and his mountaineering descriptions are captivatingly sharp.

17. Till Death Do Us Part, John Dickson Carr (1944)

    This is perhaps the most fully developed example of Carr’s “Am I in love with a madwoman?” subgenre.  It all looks quite thoroughly damning – until, of course, it doesn’t.

18. The Case of the Gilded Fly, Edmund Crispin (1944)

    Genteel as they come, and perfectly solid, but it didn’t leave me fascinated, or craving more.

19. The Sleeping Sphinx, John Dickson Carr (1947)

    The ending isn’t particularly satisfying, but the opening is one of Carr’s best, and the love story is particularly affecting.

20. The Deep End, Fredric Brown (1952)

    Just a lean, blunt, hard-boiled mystery novel – lively but ultimately disposable.

21. Manalive, G.K. Chesterton (1912)

    Chesterton writes gorgeously, but his treacly carpe diem philosophy – conveyed through an endless series of coy paradoxes and boisterous eccentricities – is a tough pill to swallow.  The prose is delicious, the content irritating.  It makes for a strange experience.

22. The Bride Wore Black, Cornell Woolrich (1940)

    Compellingly lurid, though in the end it doesn’t add up to much.

23. The Murders in the Rue Morgue (published with “The Mystery of Marie Roget” and “The Purloined Letter”), Edgar Allan Poe (1841/1843/1844)

    All three are plodding, and “Marie Roget” is unbearably pointless, but it’s interesting to observe the mystery story in its first throes of life.


Flawed

Books that, for one reason or another, fall a bit shy of the mark.

24. Last Stand at Papago Wells, Louis L’Amour (1957)

A spare, slender Western, curiously blending realism and melodrama.  Sometimes elegant, sometimes clumsy.  An odd beast.

25. The Problem of the Wire Cage, John Dickson Carr (1939)

    Almost every detail of the “solution” feels arbitrary – but the characters are sharply drawn, and the book does boast one of the most thoroughly unlikeable murder victims on record.

26. The Cat’s Table, Michael Ondaatje (2011)

    The flashbacks that compose the main body of the narrative are charming, but the present-day stuff is an annoyance and a distraction.  A miscalculated book.

27. A Wreath for Rivera, Ngaio Marsh (1949)

    Unobjectionable, forgettable jazz-themed mystery.

28. In Spite of Thunder, John Dickson Carr (1960)

Carr is always fun to read, but this is one of his paler efforts, and the resolution is distinctly disappointing.


Weak

Books with more against them than in favor.

29. One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez (1967)

    Yes, I know it’s a masterpiece, but it’s numbingly redundant and grossly overlong.  I admit I felt an unexpected surge of emotion on the last page, but it wasn’t worth the 800 pages I slogged through to get there.

30. Hallowe’en Party, Agatha Christie (1969)

    Some lovely passages, but this is the weak-tea version of Christie – and worse, it’s bewilderingly repetitive.


Lousy

The worst of the worst.  Books that should never have been born.

31. 44 Scotland Street, Alexander McCall Smith (2004)

    A miserable trudge through a series of meaningless trivialities that lead inexorably to nothing – all rendered in smug, self-satisfied, wince-inducing prose.  One of the worst books I’ve ever had the stubbornness to finish.  Avoid at all costs.