Childhood obsessions never really leave us, do they? My biggest one involved horses and, for a time, horse racing. Reading biographies of jo3.5 stars.
Childhood obsessions never really leave us, do they? My biggest one involved horses and, for a time, horse racing. Reading biographies of jockeys and trainers and horses themselves, reading the racing page, making predictions based on pedigrees. My parents and grandmother humored me as I stood as close as I could to the track, chin on bar, to see and photograph the horses in the home stretch at Del Mar and Santa Anita. We still have albums of my pictures and newspaper cutouts. I loved it, until it became traumatic and I realized the industry had been unethical and unsupportable all along, never mind the good intentions.
Kick the Latch is a swift, vivid, luminous read. Sonia observes but does not dwell on the personal and broader tragedies. She’s clear-eyed, trustworthy, compassionate. She loves horses, and they shape most of her life.
What’s perhaps most compelling about this book, though, is Scanlan’s assertion at the end that this is a work of fiction. It consists of a series of mini-essays (that glowing blurb from Lydia Davis is no accident) derived from interviews between Sonia and Scanlan.
I wish she had elaborated on this claim, providing supporting details. But boy, is it thought-provoking: what marks the divide between truth and fiction? We view a biography as the author’s interpretation of what they’ve learned, through research, interviews, etc., about the book’s subject. But this is technically true of autobiographies, as well, riddled as they must be with concerns about self-presentation, what one is willing to share (or not), and the inevitable self-delusions. And here’s an uncomfortable twist — it’s also true of academic and scientific work, the primary task of which is to present and interpret available data. Truth, in writing (and in life?), is not simply a statement of facts, but a series of choices.
I imagine that Scanlan has distilled those interviews, refined the text into coherence, emphasizing Sonia’s voice, enhancing the poignancy of the anecdotes. It’s certainly more than curation. Is it fiction? (Is there anything without a touch of fiction?)...more
(It doesn’t feel appropriate to rate these poems.)
It’s rare that I’m grateful for bonus content in a book — in general I adhere firmly to the convict(It doesn’t feel appropriate to rate these poems.)
It’s rare that I’m grateful for bonus content in a book — in general I adhere firmly to the conviction that art ought to speak for itself. But what about art catalyzed by unimaginable experiences, art that represents an attempt to make sense of an unimaginable lifetime of experiences? How can I even begin to understand what Mosab Abu Toha has gone through? What does communication look like when the imagination fails?
These poems document what it means to watch as one’s homeland and one’s people are diminished and destroyed, bit by bit. The fear and pain are relentless. Every word is haunted by decades — generations, now — of oppression. So I deeply appreciate the frank glimpse into the life underlying the words that manage to find beauty and strength in horror. The Q&A helps readers to connect where we might otherwise be tempted to look away, overcome. If there’s anything I’m convinced of in these strange and terrible times, it’s the vital importance of witnessing and listening — and learning to combat injustice in big and small ways alike....more
Mary Oliver is one of those poets whose work seems like it ought to resonate, and there are certainly lines and stanzas and even entire poems herein tMary Oliver is one of those poets whose work seems like it ought to resonate, and there are certainly lines and stanzas and even entire poems herein that move me. But I can’t quite shake off the sensation that the strings are swelling and I’m feeling by design, because I ought to. There’s an uncomfortable sentimentality that makes me suspicious over and over again....more
I’m learning that a miracle isn’t a miracle without sacrifice, because when the birds brought manna, we ate the birds.
Paige Lewis documents the magic anI’m learning that a miracle isn’t a miracle without sacrifice, because when the birds brought manna, we ate the birds.
Paige Lewis documents the magic and the tragedies of the everyday. She notices what’s happening within and around her — and also what might happen. What happened already, what’s still hurting us years later, the memories in a constant state of being experienced over and over again. No need to rewind.
She knows that the foxes are back, that humans are animals, too, that the world is self-devouring and full of beauty. She’s beautiful, too, I guess, a girl who casually asserts that “[e]very man I meet dreams / of fucking me in star-clotted fields.” (The female body as tilled soil, y’know?) She’s the sort person who gets a visit from Saint Francis, patron saint of my adopted home, only to find him perpetually undressing in the corner of her apartment.
Confession: As a girl who has spent most of her life feeling not just undesired but undesirable, I struggle sometimes with sexy poets. What must it be like to write like Atalanta runs, fleet of foot and word and the knowledge that those guys in the fields would be her undoing? To be hunted by the love of astronauts smitten enough to leave their post in space (“Watching you chew your mint, the men / forget about their gritty toothpaste”)? To be struck by space itself in the form of a meteorite?
I wouldn’t know. (I do know about shadows as a love story, at least.) But I love that Lewis lingers in the darkness of these lights some of us have wondered about and longed for. She thrusts us into discomfort, like swallowed tadpoles or the regurgitation of a life, and cultivates our empathy and affection with lines like “I’m / the vice president of panic, and the president is / missing.”
My favorite:
SO YOU WANT TO LEAVE PURGATORY
Here, take this knife. Walk down the road until you come across
a red calf in its pasture. It will run toward you with a rope tied
around its neck. Climb over the fence. Hold the rope like a leash.
You haven’t eaten in years. Think— are you being tested? Yes, everything
here is a test. Stop baring teeth upon teeth and leave the calf
to its grazing. Lift your arms toward the sky and receive nothing. Keep
walking and think about the rope around that calf’s neck. Consider
how fast its throat will be choked by its own growing. Walk until you
understand what the knife was for. Now forget it. Here, take this knife.
Finally, a shout-out to Joachim Bandau’s exquisite watercolor cover art....more
Before I forget — this is all over the place, the mycelial language is a little heavy-handed, and there are a number of claims about intention that I Before I forget — this is all over the place, the mycelial language is a little heavy-handed, and there are a number of claims about intention that I think lessen the power of applying stories to our shifting lives in new ways. But it's also such a delight, and so full of rich ideas that I know I will return to again and again in bits and pieces.
Those who find it disappointingly disjointed may want to consider snippets, one chapter at a time like a tarot card for the day. Give the material time to resonate; give your brain time to process and make connections....more
So many of these poems sting with the absent weight of unborn children. We're forever discounting language, but imagine the perpetual twining of womanSo many of these poems sting with the absent weight of unborn children. We're forever discounting language, but imagine the perpetual twining of woman and mother in our society, the point at which the relationship is inextricable, and then imagine what it's like not to grow life in that way.
The suffering that ensues is so often silent, unshared because we are so bad at grief in this culture. What happens when someone is brave enough to confess to the babies wanted so badly but never born? Well-meaning awkwardness that stings even more. Because it's not meant to be, and having bodily autonomy is no balm when you want more than anything to be nurturing a person.
Limón documents what it means to grow, to bear another life, in so many ways. The nurturing of a garden. The experience of grief as a thing we carry. Romantic love as a splay-legged foal, ready to run upon birth. (There are many horses in these bluegrass-rich poems. I love them all, but the American Pharaoh shout-out felt particularly special. I waited 35 years for a horse to win the Triple Crown, a life goal over which I had no control, the fruition of which gave me permission to walk away from horse racing and never look back.)
Reading this felt like walking through her garden, gathering word-flowers that make you gasp at their beauty or truth.
I hated the world, the pain of it that circles in us, that makes us want to be the moon, the treasure, and not the thing on the sea floor.
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Tell me what it is to be the thing rooted in shadow. To be the thing not touched by light (no, that's not it)— to not even need the light? I envy; I envy that.
Desire is a tricky thing, the boiling of the body's wants, more praise, more hands holding the knives away.
I've been the one who has craved and craved until I could not see beyond my own greed. There's a whole nation of us.
To forgive myself, I point to the earth as witness.
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You were standing on the steps, staring out at the sky's ominous openings, a mouth of terrible red, like a tongue that'd been bitten so often it was not a tongue but a bloody wound with which the earth tried to speak.
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Will you tell us the stories that make us uncomfortable, but not complicit?
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He doesn't answer so maybe I don't exist.
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...How can you not fear humanity, want to lick the creek bottom dry, to suck the deadly water up into your own lungs, like venom? Reader, I want to say: Don't die.
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I am a hearth of spiders these days: a nest of trying.
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Look, we are not unspectacular things. We've come this far, survived this much. What
would happen if we decided to survive more? To love harder?
What if we stood up with our synapses and flesh and said, No. No, to the rising tides.
Stood for the many mute mouths of the sea, of the land?
What would happen if we used our bodies to bargain
for the safety of others, for earth, if we declared a clean night, if we stopped being terrified,
if we launched our demands into the sky, made ourselves so big people could point to us with the arrows they make in their minds,
rolling their trash bins out, after all of this is over?
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Funny thing about grief, its hold is so bright and determined like a flame, like something almost worth living for.
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I can't help it. I will never get over making everything such a big deal.
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Perhaps we are always hurtling our bodies toward the thing that will obliterate us, begging for love...more
I'll focus on the positive first: the two connected stories here are crafted lovingly, reflecting Lowry's enduring facility with character and story. I'll focus on the positive first: the two connected stories here are crafted lovingly, reflecting Lowry's enduring facility with character and story. Though we just barely get to know them, both Estrild and Varick evoke humanity across the centuries. I would have enjoyed more time with them.
The "history" sections were, for me, a bit of a disaster. On the one hand, it's always interesting to gain insight into a writer's approach to creation — and inspiration. (Bog bodies, man. Deeply, profoundly, forever fascinating, on physical and metaphorical levels. Persistence and decay. Will o' the wisps.) My disquiet began when she struggled to tell the story knowing it would end in death.
I paused because I found myself terribly sad. Despite what adventures I might give to her, what friends, what girlish laughter I might describe—still, I knew the story would end in tragedy. [...]
No matter what details and activities I could create to give her an imagined life, it would still end when she was thirteen years old, dead in a bog, with a woven blindfold over her eyes. Why?
Well, Lois, because you decided to imagine the story behind the Windeby Child, who inspired you in part because of that premature death, the alienness of the past, and made you want to know more. But death doesn't render a life meaningless, nor does killing a character, in the telling, rob that vivid idea/person of the joy or passion or laughter a writer can offer before letting go. The knowledge that we'll all die sooner or later doesn't make the lives preceding those deaths any less meaningful. After all, we get to create the meaning.
Lowry goes on to base her Iron Age setting almost exclusively on Tacitus’s first-century account of Germanic tribes, adding... a significant amount of judgment. One theory held that the bog body "had an illicit love affair with a married man."
A frightening and dramatic story that made me cringe. But I also found it hard to believe. I looked again at the photograph of the doomed girl and to me there seemed no hint of sophistication or worldliness. Estrild was a child on the threshold of adolescence. If she has any experience with girlish romance, it would have been no more than shy, awkward flirtations. [...]
So the story I was creating for my Windeby girl would not find her getting caught in the forest with someone's husband. It didn't ring true to me.
So... my background as a historian is situated a good millennium and a half after the Windeby child lived, but even then it wasn't especially unusual for thirteen-year-old girls to find themselves married and bearing children.
I can imagine a different story here, one where we don't thrust modern sensibilities on someone for whom they have no context, because perhaps this girl was married — for family connections, for political reasons — to an older man whose previous wife, or wives, died from the complications of constant childbirth. Perhaps she loved someone her own age, a relationship that never had the chance to flourish. Perhaps not. But the idea of seeing "no hint of sophistication or worldliness" in someone's face and concluding that nothing hidden in that person's rich inner life could possibly contradict that impression seems unfair. A small injustice to a life not just imagined, but lived, however briefly.
I'm not entirely clear on why both stories are presented here except as an exercise. The research that revealed Windeby I to be not a thirteen-year-old girl but a sixteen-year-old boy was published in 2006. Was Estrild's story written prior? Were these written decades apart? They don't read that way; one flows almost seamlessly into the next, introducing us to and then leaving us bereft of both characters.
In the final history section, Lowry tells us about the owl who features in Varick's story:
Today, in northern Germany, a huge owl with orange eyes and a wingspan of over six feet makes its nest in rocky areas near the edges of forests. They call it the European eagle-owl.
Would the eagle-owl have existed there two thousand years ago? There is simply no way to know.
LOIS! There are ways to know, and we call them fossils. This bird, bubo bubo, is actually named the Eurasian eagle-owl (its territory is broad), and fossils of these birds in Germany date back millions of years. I searched the internet for five minutes for this information....more
It's funny to observe your own biases while reading. Like many, probably, I've had bell hooks on my radar for years and years without reading her direIt's funny to observe your own biases while reading. Like many, probably, I've had bell hooks on my radar for years and years without reading her directly and in context. Given more options at my local library, I probably would have chosen to begin with a different book — one that tackles race and politics more overtly. Still, this slight 2000 work is full of insight about what it means to be human and how our society is structured to make self-reflection more challenging than it needs to be.
My major issue is that I feel gross reading quotes from self-help books. The cognitive dissonance of finding, for instance, that M. Scott Peck's definition of love is... pretty good, actually. Paired with authors I'm more comfortable trusting, like Erich Fromm, whom I've previously read in an academic context, and James Baldwin (also on my Need To Read list), I felt a lot of discomfort in the push and pull of reading this work.
As an increasingly animist non-Christian, I found the last two chapters less compelling than the rest — unless I replaced the word “angel” with “nature.”
I'd recommend this to anyone who has ever experienced love and its dark twin, grief, and have pasted a grab-bag of favorite highlighted passages below.
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On parenting (and on being a child, once upon a time):
Care and affirmation, the opposite of abuse and humiliation, are the foundation of love. No one can rightfully claim to be loving when behaving abusively. Yet parents do this all the time in our culture. Children are told that they are loved even though they are being abused.
In a society like ours, where children are denied full civil rights, it is absolutely crucial that parenting adults learn how to offer loving discipline. Setting boundaries and teaching children how to set boundaries for themselves prior to misbehavior is an essential part of loving parenting. When parents start out disciplining children by using punishment, this becomes the pattern children respond to. Loving parents work hard to discipline without punishment. This does not mean that they never punish, only that when they do punish, they choose punishments like time-outs or the taking away of privileges. They focus on teaching children how to be self-disciplining and how to take responsibility for their actions.
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On gendered experiences:
Most men feel that they receive love and therefore know what it feels like to be loved; women often feel we are in a constant state of yearning, wanting love but not receiving it.
Women who have only named their erotic hunger in the wake of the permission given by the feminist movement and sexual liberation have always been able to speak their hunger for love.
Women have endeavored to guide men to love because patriarchal thinking has sanctioned this work even as it has undermined it by teaching men to refuse guidance. It sets up a gendered arrangement in which men are more likely to get their emotional needs met while women are deprived.
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On longing:
Everywhere we learn that love is important, and yet we are bombarded by its failure. In the realm of the political, among the religious, in our families, and in our romantic lives, we see little indication that love informs decisions, strengthens our understanding of community, or keeps us together. This bleak picture in no way alters the nature of our longing.
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On ethics and society:
Refusal to stand up for what you believe in weakens individual morality and ethics as well as those of the culture. No wonder then that we are a nation of people, the majority of whom, across race, class, and gender, claim to be religious, claim to believe in the divine power of love, and yet collectively remain unable to embrace a love ethic and allow it to guide behavior, especially if doing so would mean supporting radical change.
(I am writing this on MLK day 2024 and these words resonate with his comments about the problem of white moderates.)
Cultures of domination rely on the cultivation of fear as a way to ensure obedience. In our society we make much of love and say little about fear. Yet we are all terribly afraid most of the time. As a culture we are obsessed with the notion of safety. Yet we do not question why we live in states of extreme anxiety and dread. Fear is the primary force upholding structures of domination. It promotes the desire for separation, the desire not to be known. When we are taught that safety always lies with sameness, then difference, of any kind, will appear as a threat. When we choose to love we choose to move against fear — against alienation and separation. The choice to love is a choice to connect — to find ourselves in the other.
Patriarchy, like any system of domination (for example, racism), relies on socializing everyone to believe that in all human relations there is an inferior and a superior party, one person is strong, the other weak, and that it is therefore natural for the powerful to rule over the powerless. To those who support patriarchal thinking, maintaining power and control is acceptable by whatever means.
If all public policy was created in the spirit of love, we would not have to worry about unemployment, homelessness, schools failing to teach children, or addiction.
The basic interdependency of life is ignored so that separateness and individual gain can be deified.
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On what love is — and is not:
Love is an act of will — namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love. (M. Scott Peck)
Thomas Merton contends: “The expression to ‘fall in love’ reflects a peculiar attitude toward love and life itself — a mixture of fear, awe, fascination, and confusion. It implies suspicion, doubt, hesitation in the presence of something unavoidable, yet not fully reliable.” If you do not know what you feel, then it is difficult to choose love; it is better to fall. Then you do not have to be responsible for your actions.
When we feel deeply drawn to someone, we cathect with them; that is, we invest feelings or emotion in them.
We can acknowledge the “click” we feel when we meet someone new as just that — a mysterious sense of connection that may or may not have anything to do with love.
We are all continually attracted to folks (we like their style, the way they think, the way they look, etc.) whom we know that, given a chance, we could love in a heartbeat.
The essence of true love is mutual recognition — two individuals seeing each other as they really are.
True love is unconditional, but to truly flourish it requires an ongoing commitment to constructive struggle and change. The heartbeat of true love is the willingness to reflect on one’s actions, and to process and communicate this reflection with the loved one.
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On death, grief, and loss:
...whenever there is, in fact, a choice between the living and the dead, between men and money, or men and power, or men and bombs, the choice will always be for death, for death is the end or the goal of life. (Thomas Merton)
Merton contends: “If we become obsessed with the idea of death hiding and waiting for us in ambush, we are not making death more real but life less real. Our life is divided against itself. It becomes a tug of war between the love and the fear of itself. Death then operates in the midst of life, not as the end of life, but rather as the fear of life.” To live fully we would need to let go of our fear of dying. That fear can only be addressed by the love of living.
Sustained grief is particularly disturbing in a culture that offers a quick fix for any pain. Sometimes it amazes me to know intuitively that the grieving are all around us yet we do not see any overt signs of their anguished spirits.
Now and then when I find myself forgetting to celebrate life, unmindful of the way embracing death can heighten and enhance the way I interact with the world, I take time to think about whether I would be at peace knowing that I left someone without saying what’s in my heart, that I left with harsh words. I try daily to learn to leave folks as though we might never be meeting again. This practice makes us change how we talk and interact. It is a way to live consciously.
Love knows no shame. To be loving is to be open to grief, to be touched by sorrow, even sorrow that is unending. The way we grieve is informed by whether we know love. Since loving lets us let go of so much fear, it also guides our grief. When we lose someone we love, we can grieve without shame....more
The older I get, the taller my to-read stack, the closer to death, the easier it is to give up on books that don’t speak to me. But this author’s workThe older I get, the taller my to-read stack, the closer to death, the easier it is to give up on books that don’t speak to me. But this author’s work was recommended by a coworker who knows her, and whose perspective as a reader I trust, so I pushed past my misgivings about the lackluster writing that opens the book and settled into discomfort.
“Can you do that for me? Try to be happy?”
For anyone whose mental health has impacted their relationships — for anyone who has loved someone whose mental illness makes that person “harder to love” — (this is most of us, I think) — Starling Days is a challenge. Sympathy only goes so far, and true empathy is impossible coming from the perspective that trying to be happier will produce happiness.
Oscar wanted to sigh too. But you didn’t get to sigh when you were the healthy one.
“Do you have any idea how tiring it is to always be wondering if you’re okay? I need you to meet me halfway. I’m doing everything I can. What else do you need?”
The passages I highlighted all connect to the ways we diminish ourselves and one another, the despair, the gaslighting, the way we lash out when fatigued or uncertain. The truth is that we will always run out of energy; certainty and stability will elude us forever.
We have to learn to listen and to talk, to recognize that hard times will follow the good, and be prepared not to give up. Marriage doesn’t have to be a prison of our own making, confining us to promises that clash with our dreams. We can treat love as a verb, changeable and powerful, rather than objectifying it as a noun meant to fix us. We won’t be repaired or kept still. But we can learn.
Overall, not my jam — there are moments of beauty, but mostly this has the feel of middle-grade fiction featuring adults communicating poorly, which I think we experience enough in life. It made me reflect in new ways on past lives I’ve largely chosen to leave behind, but I kinda would have preferred to read the monograph on the mythological women who survived that Mina spends, like, three seconds researching and five minutes referencing but never actually writing.
P.S. - Read Ursula Le Guin’s take on Lavinia before dismissing her as devoid of personality. Sometimes it just takes the right storyteller....more
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