Day 284 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project, and Jon Stewart is reading All the Devils are Here, by Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera, and we all know why.  As the subtitle announces, it details The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis and exposes the bad guys, who, according to Nocera in the Daily Show interview, still don't think they did anything wrong and blame it all on people who couldn't pay their mortgages.

You can find that episode and the extended interview, which made the authors late for their own book party, at Comedy Central, and you can find reviews out the wazoo.  What I'll riff on today is the epigraph that gives the book its title, "Hell is empty, and all the devils are here," which is not only an album by a heavy metal band, as I just learned from Wikipedia, but a line from Shakespeare's play, The Tempest, which I heard again this summer in the Illinois Shakespeare Festival production.

Ariel says it to Prospero, reporting on the storm and shipwreck that has just deposited on the island the very men who wronged Prospero in the past and on whom he might wish for revenge...but interestingly Ariel is quoting Ferdinand, the King's son, an innocent, horrified by it all.  And, since it won't spoil things to say so, revenge is not what happens.  There is forgiveness, love, and marriage; there is resumed responsibility to the human community.  There is a decision to leave off the magic that can rouse such a storm.  In Shakespeare's plays, everybody gets to learn something.

One hopes we learn something from the financial crisis, but we've been here before.  McLean and Nocera say the business world is already at it again, creating new "financial products," and starting up the money-and-power-greed machine.  Anyone who's read The Way We Live Now, by Anthony Trollope, or seen the fabulous mini-series, knows that's still the way we live now.

Still riffing.  But wait!  What about Eudora Welty and A Curtain of Green?  I'm getting there.  And I'm just now getting to the end of Saving Jesus from the Church, by Robin Meyers.  **pause to finish Epilogue**  Whew.  In this book, Meyers warns about the Gospel of Prosperity, that religion of transaction that's apparently still rampant in the land.  We've been there, too--televangelists and popular preachers taking your money, themselves "prospering" and/or telling you that God wants you to have yours.  That if you believe the right things, success will come your way.

"Success," said Martin Buber (quoted in Meyers) "is not one of the names of God."

Shouldn't we know that by now?  From life, and from books?! Elmer Gantry, by Sinclair Lewis, exposes a con man who's selling religion as a commodity.  Another customer in the store yesterday--and this is one of those times when it's a wonderful irony to work in a shop called Babbitt's Books--said, "Elmer Gantry is such a good book!"

But what he was walking out with, and what he's reading now, is the Selected Stories of Eudora Welty, containing A Curtain of Green and The Wide Net.  I happen to have the Modern Library edition of this, green hardcover, and it's got the real green world in it, not the facade of green that businesses like BP use to get you to buy their...gas.  No, not that gassy curtain of green, that cascade-of-money green.

Of A Curtain of Green, the New York Times reviewer Marianne Hauser said, back in November 1941, "Many of the stories are dark, weird and often unspeakably sad in mood, yet there is no trace of personal frustration in them, neither harshness nor sentimental resignation; but an alert, constant awareness of life as a whole, and that profound, intuitive understanding of life which enables the artist to accept it."  Welty shows you the world.  She doesn't judge it, but she loves it.  "On each page one senses the author's fanatic love of people."

This reviewer, who "feel[s] certain that her stories will live for a long time," also notes that they are cut out of time, and could happen anywhere.  "There are no wars going on behind the scenes, no revolutions or headline-disasters. The tragedies which Miss Welty invokes occur in the backyards of life."  They are occurring there now, too.  There are wars going on; there are headline-disasters; but people who couldn't pay their mortgages are having a hard time, people who lost their jobs are having a hard time, and people are still making it through in their quiet or desperate suffering, even if they lost their back yards.

Robin Meyers would say, "Help them."

Eudora Welty would say, "Love them."

According to McLean and Nocera, Wall Street would say, "F*!$ them."  And did.

***

And to carry on from yesterday, because "What is Reading, But Silent Conversation?", I will send you off to Drew Moody's Pulitzer blog, which invites you to a reading conversation!

Read more »

Day 11 of the “What are you reading, and why?” project, and I am writing this one in advance, to post on Day 11, early in the morning, if I can connect to the Internet, right before or right after I take my daughter way the heck south on U. S. 51 to her volleyball tournament and before I board the train north to Chicago for a birthday party poetry reading event there, a sort of house concert, with discussion, dance, and guitar!

(Happy Birthday to me! Yippee. I love my birthday. Since time is not linear for me, I don’t even mind growing old! I like it! It makes me younger, in a Merlinesque kind of way. Ah, who is reading The Once and Future King? Anybody?!)

Today I devote myself to books on reading (and some books on writing, which always include plenty about the importance of reading if you want to be a good writer). Behind me on my bookshelf is the wonderful book (another Babbitt’s find!), A History of Reading by Alberto Manguel. I love this book for its solid historical information, its pictures of the brain and the physiology of reading comprehension, and its wonderful contemplative tone. I used it to reference things I advocated to poets recently, in a little workshop on reading their poems aloud. Different parts of the brain are stimulated by reading and by hearing, so when we read aloud a poem that is also in the hands of our listeners, their brains are being stimulated in multiple ways. If they are just listening, we might want to read a poem twice, or slow it down, or give a little context, etc., to help the reader listen more attentively. When we read our work aloud, we are both seeing it and hearing it, so we are stimulated in the multiple ways, and can share some of that energy with our audience!

You can read and hear an interview with Alberto Manguel about his newest book at PBS! The Artsbeat on the Newshour!

Also on the shelf behind me is Reading Like a Writer, by Francine Prose, A Guide for People Who Love Books and For Those Who Want to Write Them. Oh, I do so enjoy reading about other people’s reading experiences, doing a bit of compare/contrast, getting inspired to read something new, just heard about, or to re-read something in light of what a writer like Prose has told me about a book. She provides a wonderful list of “Books to be Read Immediately” at the end, and it’s like that list of books that went around on Facebook, to be copied and pasted as a “Note,” checking off the ones you’d read, to compared with the lists of the friends you’d “tagged” or who had “tagged” you. (I remember when tag was a game we played in the park!)

A favorite book of mine is Eudora Welty’s One Writer’s Beginnings, which recounts her voracious and indiscriminate reading as a child, and how, gradually, eventually, she became the kind of reader Prose is talking about, “reading like a writer.”

One of the first things I did upon leaving my fulltime college teaching job was to read Jane Smiley’s book 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel, which is in large part a grand account of reading novels, with wonderful summaries provided at the end. I read this to get myself ready to return to writing my novel-in-progress (a novel in progress since before the birth of my second child, who is now 15), and I read everything but the chapter you are not supposed to read until you have completed the first draft of your novel. (Have I sighed lately? Sigh….) Of course I read Smiley’s novel Good Faith, because she uses it as a “case study” in this book. And I made mental notes to read many of the novels she writes about, and I see, looking back at my first edition, that I also made numerous pencil notes all over the text.

(Instead of finishing my novel, by the way, I sat in my back yard for 4 years and did a lot of reading and wrote hundreds and hundreds of poems. I am math-challenged and have not been able actually to count them, but I suspect it is indeed hundreds and hundreds. They are collected into 3 chapbooks, already out, 4 more chapbook-length sections of a longer manuscript in progress, and might sort of count as a novel-in-poems, which has been done by other writers, except that there is narrative arc only in one of the sections…and, sigh, who reads poetry?! Or, to be more apt, who actually buys poetry? Which is why I work part time in a used bookstore. Anyway, I am very happy. Reading and writing is good for my soul.)

So, as always, what are you reading? I’m talking books, here, in or out of print, but books you can hold in your hand and write notes on, or magazines and literary journals, etc. Print media. I am looking at the state of it. And, pertinent to today’s entry, what are you reading about reading?

I will be back, on the train, tomorrow, and will, at some point, tell you what people I saw at the birthday party are reading.

Read more »