After the Readathon

As I type this, Bijou and I fight for access to the desk. Her dinner time is in thirty minutes, and she has begun her filibustering. So another day comes to a close, a time to think on my mother this weekend. I wish I knew what her thoughts on Bless Me, Ultima were. I knew she loved Wuthering Heights. Tomorrow, I will make a pot of beans, I will sip my tea, I will hit the gym, but the best thing is that, as I will have Wuthering Heights with me on the treadmill, some part of my mother will exist in the mundane.

Weeks slip into months, which will someday be years. I loved her so.

But a brief update on some of the books I read. I finished Christine Kenneally’s The First Word. I’ve always been intrigued by language origins, from my time as an undergraduate studying evolutionary anthropology and linguistics. It is something I hope to build my career on. So when I checked out this book on Libby, I was intrigued to see if Kenneally would advance her own theories on the “greatest mystery of science.” As it turns out, Kenneally doesn’t, but she does provide an articulate overview of the issues related to different philosophical and research approaches to the study of language. I am not a Chomskyan linguist myself, but seeing the ideas pressed on the page, as though they were ironed there, it was an entertaining way to spend the treadmill time. You see, I am a cognitive linguistics person myself.

I also finished Prelude to Bruise, which was an elegant book. I love poetry. What can a poem do for you that a novel cannot? Poems cradle the soul with silk gloves on. They soothe the soul in a different way than fiction or nonfiction, which feed the soul the earth. But poetry feeds the soul the stars. They are noble, they are humble, our wonderful, majestic souls. Joseph Campbell asserted that we are not different from the stories that we read about or watch, that we, too, will go on the Hero’s Journey, but I feel that there is another dimension worth exploring: Are we so different from the poems we read?

Digging in a box of things from my mother’s garage, Kailee found my childhood toy, Ooh Aah. He is a stuffed gorilla, and he was my companion when I was a child, along with my pillow, Homer. Incidentally, Homer’s fate has never been solved, but Ooh Aah sits with me now, looking down at the skirmish between myself and this cat.

I write about Ooh Aah because he is a story himself, a childhood sewn into his arms and leaning against his plastic eyes. I prop my books against his paunch for little bookish photoshoots. Gorilla for scale, you see. All of life, from our first toys to our questioning whether or not we can really afford Leaves of Grass, it is all a story that we tell ourselves. And thus that is the most important theme of my literary work.

So, Prelude to Bruise. I asked myself if this was the poetry that we tell ourselves at the end of the day. My favorite collection of poetry is Natalie Scenters-Zapico’s brilliant The Verging Cities. That should be required reading for everyone who thinks in poetry. Right, Ooh Aah? With his poems, Saeed Jones had a few standout pieces that I wish I could dogear (I checked it out from the library). I think he is a talent.

I didn’t make it to Beautiful World, Where Are You? Nor did I get to The House of the Spirits, but I will in time. I think that I mentioned in a previous blog that I read my first cozy book ever (The Pumpkin Spice Cafe) and this week will be finishing up my first thriller (The House Across the Lake), so that blog on these two is next. As for this readathon, I’m happy that I allowed myself time to pace, to think, to contemplate the literature that my mom loved, too. It’s a good thing to share.