Trains, Strange, and Branches

In two weeks the travel starts. Me on a train. Me at my aunt's wedding in Monmouth, then me on a train for a day and a half, a two-hour layover in LA's Union Station, then another two days on the train, this time with lie-down and feed-me accommodations (as in, I got a room). I get a room when I go to Kansas because the train ride ends for me at 3am. Then I get to hope my rental car is waiting there in the station dark, parked someplace I can find, key handed to me by the disinterested party of the station attendant (after all his other chores of off-loading and loading passengers is done). The last time I waited 25 minutes in the blue station light, watching the child's-fist-sized flying midwestern bugs beat themselves senseless against the overlarge lights on the platform outside. 

I get the keys and I drive for an hour and a half. I hope my grandfather has left the door unlocked. Otherwise I look for the key, if I remember he keeps one hidden outside. I will get to his house at 5am. If I can't get in I go to the all night Walmart and try on sunglasses and drink chocolate milk and sit under a light in the parking lot where fist-sized bugs beat themselves 20 feet above me. I read a book or I nap. I hope the right people travel through the parking lot, if any travel through at all. I am afraid of small towns in the middle of the night. I am right to do so. I grew up in a small town. I grew up gay in a small town. I am right to be nervous. 

But nothing has ever happened to me there. My grandfather's town feels good to me. I get to his house a few hours later when I know he is up and drinking decaf and reading the morning paper if the morning paper has found its way inside to him. Now he is less mobile though, and no longer takes the paper; he told me last week. What I will do without the crossword and sudoku and jumble, I do not know. What I will do without the local news to educate me on their ways. I will eye the big bottle of bourbon too early. I will talk about the ice road truckers. I will show pictures of my dog. I will listen to him breathe, and listen to his oxygen machine breathe. I will wish things had been different, and that I had known him for more than just these past several years. He's a good guy. Interesting and smart. And so am I. We get along. Laugh at the same things, vote the same way. We think the same women are beautiful usually.

My parents separated when I was five. And it was ugly. And then none of us lived in Kansas anymore. And everyone hated everyone. And I saw my grandparents when I was ten and then never again. Until I made it happen when I was 27. My grandmother died a month later. Now I go back every year.

This isn't what I meant to talk about.

I meant to say what I was reading. Partly in preparation for the journey. 

I just finished reading Michael Newton's Savage Girls and Wild Boys and am typing up notes. (An odd relation: I get off the train in Newton, KS.) I am reading Andrew Zawacki's Anabranch. Slowly, the way I read things that are good. Things that stun me. 

From the page I am on, this...

14

Nor were we immune to such evolve and overwhelm. A diminishing match the frontier of unbreaking, we vexed oscura to spark, hearing it inhabit a new constellation: neither the sisters who cluster for beauty nor Sirius in a bid for omnipotence, but wax flower and ironbark, plainchant of a diesel engine coruscating rock at the edge of across. Where--razorwire spiraled to prevel the dead from defecting, or ghosts from insinuating when least required--a flood lamp broiled the salt flats torn from a page too charred to read, as we wagered who the photographer was, cutting our hearts on the hours until sunrise, on anything not expired. The soul opting out through its second-hand lens: the eye that eroded from lexis to shadow, azure by estrange, or the eye beset by a looking-glass inlet, a mile ago dark but now dazzling.

Odd how well that random grab fits with this post. It's such a good book.

And this, I read today by Anna Journey: http://atlengthmag.com/prose/strange-merchants/

In either scenario, a stranger flees in mortal fear through an exit. 

and

In the classic anthropological text, The Stranger (1908), German sociologist Georg Simmel articulates his concept of a unique sociological form. A “peculiar tension” arises, Simmel suggests, from “the stranger,” who manages to be both close to and remote from us at once. The value of such figures in society, then, stems from the strangers’ “objectivity.” Because they aren’t intimately connected with our lives, we feel freer to confess to them our secrets. In pre-modern societies, Simmel writes, most strangers within a group made their living as traders or tradesman, those “‘strange’ merchants” who move closely among us in a crowd, performing necessary tasks, even as they remain enigmatic.

I have more to say, but no time to say it. The dog deserves a walk. 

creeping, four-footed

The dog is kicking in her sleep, taking up four fifths of the sofa. I am slouched in my one-fifth, getting kicked, too lazytired to get up and finish my hurtheavy eyes into sleep. I wrote another poem tonight, but I'm not sure if I like it. Something in me is getting into the plain speech of things and relying more on repetition. I am not used to this. I also use "empire" in the poem, personified, well house-ified, it's a house in the poem. And I want to use a different word because "empire" is overused. This whole century so far it's a little darling of a word and I've used it too. In this poem it is repeated too many times. There are also monkeys. 

Photo courtesy of http://3scape.com

Tonight I am reading a few things, of them Anne Boyer's My Common Heart. This is from that:

TWO CITIES

Two cities have been formed by two loves. The one seeks sustenance, shelter, and the maintenance of objects and environments, but the greatest glory of the other is when the one lifts up its head in its own glory and says "hey" to the other and then the other says to the other "hey." Also when the two cities, earthly and ideal, say to one another "hey, you other city, you are really my glory, and the lifter up of mine head." In the one, all the princes, kings, queens, presidents, prime ministers, bosses, and the nations they subdue are ruled by the love of saying "hey" to the other; in the other, the princes and the subjects shout in the middle of the square about ruling and love and some citizens take dictation. The one delights in its own strength, represented in the armies, defense contractors, urban planners, and banking systems; the other says, "hey, I will love thee, the other city, with my strength, too." And this love is reciprocated! And the two cites are in love! And therefore the wise men and women of the one city, living according to love, have sought the profit of their own bodies or souls, or both, and those who have known the ideal city and the earthly city also became their imaginations and in becoming this became the glory of incorruptible everything and they became together birds and they become together pilgrims and they become together four-footed beasts and they become together creeping things.

the in-betweens

I recently read Srikanth Reddy's Facts for Visitors, and also Voyager. Which I really enjoyed. And read another book I didn't really care for, that I won't bother to name, although it too was interesting to look at in order to further understand what it is poets are doing when they cross the border between lineated and prose poems, why they make the decisions they make to break or not to break. I have a stack of books and I'm working through them. Because, really, there's not much else going on. And because I want to get as far on my critical thesis as possible before fall. Before late summer travel really. 


Today I read the first of two Barbara Jane Reyes books I will read. Poeta en San Francisco. In it I found the sounds to be a mixed bag of stunning and lackluster. Sounds to be the first stick by which I measure any writing, of course. Leaving that aside, the project of the book and the execution of it is incredibly powerful. A look at war. And war culture. About that I am still thinking / not yet in a position to comment on. 


From the book I will share an excerpt of a poem, which I am rudely taking out of context, but which (out of context) moved me today. Because it's where I am. The second I will include whole-cloth.




--




(from one of the epistolary prose poetry parts... p 92)



there are times that missing you is a matter of procedure. now is not one of those times. there are times when missing you hurts. so it comes to this, vying for geography. there is a prayer stuck in my throat. douse me in gasoline, my love, and strike a match.




-




[agimat kinabukasan]


one day she will build a temple from detritus, dust of your crumbling empires’ edicts; its walls will hold with blood and spittle, brackish water and sun-dried grasses. within these walls she will inscribe her own terms of worship, upon every pillar and column, glyphs resembling earth and ocean. once she had no sharpened stone, no reason for stone, for once the wind bore her words upon its entire wingspan. carved into bamboo, banana leaf, her river poems, her birdsong.


you came then, with your devices, and you will come again, believing yourself to be some cipher, some illuminati, plunder-hungry in secrecy. she will not appease you, but with the fire you once took to her flesh, she will melt down your weapons, forge her own gods, and adorn her own body.


it is for no glory, no father, no doctrine. as it was in the beginning, so shall it be again. in plumes of ash blanketing sky, the land expels that with which she was poisoned. 

a little bit more Schuyler

So what happened is this. I have a notebook where I keep things I like from things I've read. I mean I have many notebooks. I fill one every couple of years. I can't find the most recent one where I put things, so for now I will put things here. That will solve my current indexing issues. But there is something inherently satisfying about writing out by hand the things I love. There is an intimacy to physically forming the words that is not replicated in the experience of typing.

Or maybe I just like hand cramps.

This is the rest of what I loved from James Schuyler's The Home Book.

The second of "Two Meditations" - there is something magical that happens when Schulyer boxes words into prose poems. Through compression that one doesn't generally get in his lineated poems (perhaps this is a natural inclination in prose poetry? toward compression?), the words push and shove at each other, the sounds explode. At least this is my experience.

From "Two Meditations"

Out of the gray bay gray rocks, close spaced and each a little black green north tree forest. This became denser until it was the color of a hole. The trawler anchored and they scrambled ashore in an inlet closed by a little white sand beach like a Negro's very white palm, the guide experienced and dignified last in laced boots with moccasin bottoms. The clarity of the water reelected a dead tree while he boiled great lake trout in a galvanized bucket on a resinous fire. A green flame. Everyone has planned to change his "way of life" until he tasted the fish, which was tasteless. Scales on the dull sand like garbage, or rain. It began raining, a drop at a time, big as cod liver oil capsules. The two boys' knees lichened and their shrills faded high and out into the falls of shot grouse curving into a November wet matchstick field. Burrs, unfinished houses.

Like that: ending on the parataxis of a two-item list... Burrs, unfinished houses. And the sentence before. (And not just for the use of the word "lichened.") The end seems that much more truncated by the volley of small (I would generally argue in poetry and for the sake of compression, unnecessary) words in the previous sentence. "The two boys' knees lichened and their shrills faded high and out into the falls of shot grouse curving into a November wet matchstick field." November wet matchstick field. Resinous fire. A green flame. The fish was tasteless. Out of the gray bay gray rocks. To say "gray waves" would be too much, but it's where the mind goes when presented with the triple rhyme, the mind bends naturally to the fourth slant rhyme. Or this mind does. I'm glad it didn't happen. In not happening, it happened anyway.

I should say this is a weirdly cohesive book for being a smattering of unpublished work (prose, poetry, prose poetry, drama even, a sonnet) from the 1950s and 60s.

From the title piece "The Home Book," which is unspecified prose.

"I know what troubles me. It is so simple: I don't want to give myself away. I don't want to confess, to say I am my history and it is mine, something I made, because as long as I don't I can pretend that I could change and become some other person I won't ever be. I don't want to give myself because to give is to lose and that is like dying; I don't want to lose any human love or pleasure through a deal with that which is invisible and by which I may gain nothing."

The speaker is talking about religion, but it strikes home pretty hard out of this context for me.

And then (from "Four Poems for Frank O'Hara"...

It's quarter of five

and the Fucking Tree has birds in its hair.

I wonder if I can claim influence after the fact. This happened while reading The Cantos also, that something was a nearly word-for-word echo of something in MFS.

(image "Fire Walk With Me" by Martin Wittfooth)

The Half-Year List

1. Where We Think It Should Go – Claire Becker

2. Doctor Copernicus – John Banville

3. The Book of Frank – CA Conrad

4. The Irrationalist – Suzanne Buffam

5. Bobcat Country – Brandi Homan

6. The Book of Questions – Pablo Neruda

7. The History of Violets - Marosa di Giorgio

8. Octopus – Tom C. Hunley

9. The Planets – Dava Sobel

10. Accident – Nicholas Mosley

11. A Natural History of the Senses – Diane Ackerman

12. Crash Dome – Alex Phillips

13. The Country of Loneliness – Dawn Paul

14. Dayglo – James Meetze

15. ----------FEBRUARY----------Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrl Revolution – Sara Marcus

16. The Terror of Living – Urban Waite

17. Tocqueville – Khaled Mattawa

18. The Island of the Colorblind – Oliver Sacks

19. Black-Eyed Heifer – Shelly Taylor

20. Stalin in Aruba – Shelley Pahuk

21. Breaking the Map – Kim-An Lieberman

22. The Last Waltz in Santiago: And Other Poems of Exile and Disappearance – Ariel Dorfman

23. What Kind – Martha Zweig

24. Sasquatch Stories – Mike Topp

25. Coming Through Slaughter – Michael Ondaatje

26. Gallowglass – Susan Tichy

27. Models of the Universe: An Anthology of the Prose Poem – ed. Stuart Friebert & David Young

28. Nox – Anne Carson

29. A Moveable Feast – Earnest Hemingway

30. Hunter Mnemonics – Deborah Woodard

31. Easter Rabbit – Joseph Young

32. ----------MARCH----------The Worse-Case Scenario Survival Handbook: Travel – Joshua Piven and David Borgenicht

33. Recipes for Endangered Species – Traci O’Connor

34. Blue for the Plough – Dara Weir

35. The Bodyfeel Lexicon – Jessica Bozek

36. The Myth of the Simple Machines – Laurel Snyder

37. Green Cammie – Crysta Casey

38. Mad to Live – Randall Brown

39. The Nightyard – Stephanie Anderson

40. The Energy of Slaves – Leonard Cohen

41. Pee on Water – Rachel B. Glaser

42. ----------APRIL----------The Tiny Wife – Andrew Kaufman

43. Chelsea Girls – Eileen Myles

44. Hinge & Sign – Heather McHugh

45. A History of the Human Family – Sasha Steensen

46. Man’s Companions – Joanna Rucco

47. Sing, Mongrel – Claire Hero

48. The Bugging Watch & Other Exhibits – Kim Gek Lin Short

49. One More Theory About Happiness – Paul Guest

50. The Spell of the Sensuous – David Abram

51. Cut Away – Catherine Kirkwood

52. Chicken, Shadow, Moon & More – Mark Strand

53. Autobiography of Red – Anne Carson

54. The Field Guide to Flash Fiction – ed. Tara Masih

55. Alive and Dead in Indiana – Michael Martone

56. The Long-Legged Fly – James Sallis

57. The Father of the Predicaments – Heather McHugh

58. People are Tiny in Paintings of China – Cynthia Arrieu-King

59. ----------MAY----------Invitation to a Beheading – Vladimir Nabokov

60. The Art Lover – Carol Maso

61. The CIA and the Cult of Intelligance – Victor Marchetti & John D. Marks

62. Halfsteps + Cloudfang – Daniela Olszewska

63. Strange as This Weather Has Been – Ann Pancake

64. Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives – David Eagleman

65. Soot- Jeff Walt

66. The Inquisition Yours – Jen Currin

67. The Tears of Eros – Georges Bataille

68. Advanced ELVIS Course – CAConrad

69. Theory of Religion – Georges Bataille

70. Vertical Hold – Jeff Simpson

71. The Dragonfly: A Selection of Poems 1953-1981 – Amelia Rosselli

72. How the Broken Lead the Blind – Matt Bell

73. ----------JUNE----------Reality Hunger: A Manifesto – David Shields

74. At the Point – Joseph Massey

75. Rust Or Go Missing – Lily Brown

76. Reasons to Live – Amy Hempel

77. Dunstan Thompson: On the Life and Work of a Lost American Master – Kevin Prufer & D.A. Powell, eds.

78. Goat Song – Brad Kessler

79. Deviant Propulsion – CAConrad

80. 2666 – Roberto Bolano

1/3; 15; 286.75

We're 33% of the way through the year. Can you believe we're hurtling so fast towards the apocalypse? Okay, maybe the Mayans didn't mean we'd all be dead by destructive and deadly weather, earthquakes, nuclear fallout, dark planets aligning weirdly with our world. But I for one am going to keep living it up on the off-chance I'll be offed. What that means to me? Well, reading. Yeah, I know. But I am getting out to live a little tonight. CA Conrad and Jeremy Halinen are reading at Open Books in Seattle. I've been totally geeking out about it for the past month. I've even requested poems. Such a nerd.

This is what I've read so far this year, strangely some of it has be revisiting favorites. I don't often re-read because there are SO MANY BOOKS IN THE WORLD. Anyway: pink is for poetry, blue for fiction, green for nonfiction:

1. Where We Think It Should Go – Claire Becker

2. Doctor Copernicus – John Banville

3. The Book of Frank – CA Conrad

4. The Irrationalist – Suzanne Buffam

5. Bobcat Country – Brandi Homan

6. The Book of Questions – Pablo Neruda

7. The History of Violets - Marosa di Giorgio

8. Octopus – Tom C. Hunley

9. The Planets – Dava Sobel

10. Accident – Nicholas Mosley

11. A Natural History of the Senses – Diane Ackerman

12. Crash Dome – Alex Phillips

13. The Country of Loneliness – Dawn Paul

14. Dayglo – James Meetze

15. Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrl Revolution – Sara Marcus

16. The Terror of Living – Urban Waite

17. Tocqueville – Khaled Mattawa

18. The Island of the Colorblind – Oliver Sacks

19. Black-Eyed Heifer – Shelly Taylor

20. Stalin in Aruba – Shelley Pahuk

21. Breaking the Map – Kim-An Lieberman

22. The Last Waltz in Santiago: And Other Poems of Exile and Disappearance – Ariel Dorfman

23. What Kind – Martha Zweig

24. Sasquatch Stories – Mike Topp

25. Coming Through Slaughter – Michael Ondaatje

26. Gallowglass – Susan Tichy

27. Models of the Universe: An Anthology of the Prose Poem – ed. Stuart Friebert & David Young

28. Nox – Anne Carson

29. A Moveable Feast – Earnest Hemingway

30. Hunter Mnemonics – Deborah Woodard

31. Easter Rabbit – Joseph Young

32. The Worse-Case Scenario Survival Handbook: Travel – Joshua Piven and David Borgenicht

33. Recipes for Endangered Species – Traci O’Connor

34. Blue for the Plough – Dara Weir

35. The Bodyfeel Lexicon – Jessica Bozek

36. The Myth of the Simple Machines – Laurel Snyder

37. Green Cammie – Crysta Casey

38. Mad to Live – Randall Brown

39. The Nightyard – Stephanie Anderson

40. The Energy of Slaves – Leonard Cohen

41. Pee on Water – Rachel B. Glaser

42. The Tiny Wife – Andrew Kaufman

43. Chelsea Girls – Eileen Myles

44. Hinge & Sign – Heather McHugh

45. A History of the Human Family – Sasha Steensen

46. Man’s Companions – Joanna Rucco

47. Sing, Mongrel – Claire Hero

48. The Bugging Watch & Other Exhibits – Kim Gek Lin Short

49. One More Theory About Happiness – Paul Guest

50. The Spell of the Sensuous – David Abram

51. Cut Away – Catherine Kirkwood

52. Chicken, Shadow, Moon & More – Mark Strand

53. Autobiography of Red – Anne Carson

54. The Field Guide to Flash Fiction – ed. Tara Masih

55. Alive and Dead in Indiana – Michael Martone

56. The Long-Legged Fly – James Sallis

57. The Father of the Predicaments – Heather McHugh

58. People are Tiny in Paintings of China – Cynthia Arrieu-King

What I do when I'm down:

I go to the library.


And take pictures of books.


Also read.




I drive a long way to somewhere else, have coffee. Read.


Walk in the rain. By the river. Take pictures.


Happy to be not in my town for a minute.

All in all, it was a good day. I read Alex Phillips's Crash Dome, most of Dawn Paul's The Country of Loneliness, and some of Sara Marcus's Girls to the Front: True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution. One comment for each. A. Alex Phillips rides into (almost entirely appropriately) weird territory here, talking the problem of accurately assessing reality and coming to terms with various ends of the world; the language was not always as beautiful as I wanted it to be, but I loved 90% of the book. B. It is brave to name a book the anything of Loneliness (thanks to Radclyffe Hall); the structure of the book is well done, something to learn from, as is the fictionalizing of the life of a family member. C. On Marcus: Read this book. I'm taking my time with it, so you'll have to get your own copy.

from Nicholas Mosley's Accident

All caring was risky: you exposed yourself. It was better to be like this than the other. I was justifying myself. With the sun out. In the summer. (26)

We remember in envy, not regret; what we are now needing the past for its colour, tolerance. We know all this. The dangerous men are those with no memory; the ancient babies. Wisdom is a bit of cloth with the warp and woof breaking. The dust settling in the air; the people below choking. (67)

Charlie said "Shall we play tennis? There are millions of things happening in the world! People are starving. Murdering. Seeing visions." (74)

It might be better if we ruined ourselves. (80)

When you are too much on your own you have a feeling of profusion, of intensity. I had become obsessed with this split between our public face and our private helplessness. The men on television. The brain in the Oxford frigidaire. (88)

...the people in the courtyard began to regroup in a protective way against the stranger: a chromosome formed of things that were not alive ut which acted as if they were: the group, aristocrats. A survival of the fittest. The men had small heads and hands; the girls were smooth-bottomed cylinders with little taps and dials at the top. (88)

The words came out. There was painted furniture, sweetness, shadow. Her long and lovely back. This had happened. We make a god of it. Defeat. I am almost gutted. Let me become that thing, empty, floating past the walls of crumbling buildings. No more a person. Quick. Let me remember it. (105)

I held her. Her eyes on the edge of the precipice. Horses. The wind in fir trees. We were going deep. I thought--I am no good at this. This is what matters. (120)

"This is what I think about, what I think is important. Either you turn into some sort of gutted thing, automaton, or you have to become involved with pain and birth again, the roots, and all that nonsense. I keep on saying this. But I do feel this sort of crack-up, everything exploding, we're one person one moment and another person the next; no continuity because no illusion. I'm a different person with you than I am with Charlie or in college. I don't know if this is good or bad--" (145)

I was about to step into the car. I was about to smash something. I would pull up the stones with my fingers. I said "Thank you Mrs.--" I couldn't remember her name. I sat behind the driving wheel. I could not drive. I could not get the car into gear. I would drive it into the wall. Fast. Now this was the moment. Quietly. (171)

Also... from the Afterword (by Steven Weisenberger):
Mosley too is suspicious of received knowledge in all its effects on everyday experience. Still more significantly he is suspicious of how our everyday experiences are rationalized, plotted, from the moment they slide away from us. Stephen [the main character, the "I"] claims: "You live in the present, which does not exist; it exists in memory." And Accident argues that what is "real" is not a text--for it is essentially non-narrative, accidental. But Mosley adds the priviso that as "reality" becomes past it is accessible only as a "text"--when it is known through episodic memory, in story-telling.

***

I want Nicholas Mosley to be my literary daddy. Or something. To Shane McCrae I will forever be in debted for introducing me to this author. Nothing excites me more than to have a new favorite writer. Especially someone with soo many books.

2010: The Year in Reading

1. Trust – Liz Waldner
2. Counterfeit – Christine LeClerc
3. A Thief of Strings – Donald Revell
4. Plato’s Bad Horse – Deborah Woodard
5. The Most of It – Mary Ruefle
6. A Season in Hell and The Drunken Boat – Arthur Rimbaud
7. The Totality for Kids – Joshua Clover
8. The Lack Of – Joseph Massey
9. Jane: a murder – Maggie Nelson
10. Wrong – Reginald Shepherd
11. The Red Parts – Maggie Nelson
12. Bluets – Maggie Nelson
13. Angle of Repose – Wallace Stegner
14. Fifty Poems – Liana Quill
15. Old Souls: The Scientific Evidence for Past Lives – Tom Shroder
16. Are We Lucky Yet? – Jane Bradley
17. The Black Swan – Thomas Mann
18. The Mere Future – Sarah Schulman
19. I is to Vorticism – Ben Mirov
20. ----------FEBRUARY----------Otherhood – Reginald Shepherd
21. Other Prohibited Items – Martha Greenwald
22. Minimum Heroic – Christopher Salerno
23. The Muse is Always Half-Dressed in New Orleans – Andrei Codrescu
24. Housekeeping – Marilynn Robinson
25. Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story – Paul Monette
26. Six Seconds in Dallas: A Microstudy of the Kennedy Assassination – Josiah Thompson
27. The Book of Frank – CA Conrad
28. Letters to Wendy’s – Joe Wenderoth
29. Sudden Fiction: American Short-Short Stories – ed. Robert Shapard & James Thomas
30. ----------MARCH----------Personationskin – Karl Parker
31. Spar – Karen Volkman
32. Fast Lanes – Jayne Anne Phillips
33. Half Girl – Stephanie Dickinson
34. The Preservationist – David Maine
35. Savage Love – Dan Savage
36. Ka-Ching – Denise Duhamel
37. Silk Screen Techniques – J. I. Biegeleisen and M. A. Cohn
38. Family Dancing – David Leavitt
39. The Housekeeper and the Professor – Yoko Ogawa
40. OK, Goodnight – Emily Kendal Frey and Zachary Schomburg
41. I Have to go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl – Karyna McGlynn
42. World Famous Love Acts – Brian Leung
43. ----------APRIL----------The Blue of Her Body – Sara Greenslit
44. Fire on the Mountain – Anita Desai
45. When to Go Into the Water – Lawrence Sutin
46. Tell Me, Tell Me: Granite, Steel, and Other Topics – Marianne Moore
47. Selected Stories – Lu Hsun
48. Requiem for the Orchard – Oliver de la Paz
49. 10:01 – Lance Olsen
50. Hornet Homily – Patrick Culliton
51. Dearest Creature – Amy Gerstler
52. How – Emily Pettit
53. Goodbye to Berlin – Christopher Isherwood
54. Amorisco – Khaled Mattawa
55. Catalogue of Comedic Novelties – Lev Rubinstein
56. Team Sad - Emily Kendal Frey and Zachary Schomburg
57. ----------MAY----------My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer – Edited by Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian
58. Dick of the Dead – Rachel Loden
59. The Last 4 Things – Kate Greenstreet
60. Await Your Reply – Dan Chaon
61. Texture Notes – Sawako Nakayasu
62. Veil – Rae Armantrout
63. Fernhurst, Q.E.D., and Other Early Writings – Gertrude Stein
64. Living Must Bury – Josie Sigler
65. Man in the Dark – Paul Auster
66. Star Dust – Frank Bidart
67. Something Has to Happen Next – Andrew Michael Roberts
68. ----------JUNE----------Want – Rick Barot
69. What Begins With Bird – Noy Holland
70. Elements – Deborah Poe
71. The Wild Things – Dave Eggers
72. Why We Do It: Rethinking Sex and the Selfish Gene – Niles Eldredge
73. A Belonging Field – Andrew Grace
74. Shadeland – Andrew Grace
75. The World’s Greatest Book of Useless Information – Noel Botham & The Useless Information Society
76. Unaccustomed Earth – Jhumpa Lahiri
77. The Principles of Uncertainty – Maira Kalman
78. Dharma Girl – Chelsea Cain
79. Notes from the Underground – Fyodor Dostoevsky
80. ----------JULY-----------Rhapsodies of A Repeat Offender - Wayne Koestenbaum
81. Shiner – Maggie Nelson
82. Wonder Bread & Ecstasy: The Life and Death of Joey Stefano – Charles Isherwood
83. Frances Johnson – Stacey Levine
84. The Morning News is Exciting! – Don Mee Choi
85. Anil’s Ghost – Michael Ondaatje
86. Advanced Elvis Course – CA Conrad
87. Outline of My Lover – Douglas Martin
88. Queer and Loathing: Rants and Raves of a Raging AIDS Clone – David B. Feinberg
89. ----------AUGUST----------The Truant Lover – Juliet Patterson
90. Children of Darkness and Light – Nicholas Mosley
91. Tracer – Richard Greenfield
92. The Colossus – Sylvia Plath
93. Quarantine – Brian Henry
94. Divisadero – Michael Ondaatje
95. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
96. Crush – Richard Siken
97. ----------SEPTEMBER----------Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys
98. With Deer – Aase Berg
99. Haunted House – Marissa Crawford
100. Zephyr – Susan Browne
101. Complaint in the Garden – Randall Mann
102. The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art – Eileen Myles
103. Just Kids – Patti Smith
104. Zorba’s Daughter – Elisabeth Murawski
105. Scavenge – R.J. Gibson
106. Cosmos – Witold Gombrowicz
107. Pornographia – Witold Gombrowicz
108. ----------OCTOBER----------The Corrections – Jonathan Franzen
109. Thirst for Love – Yukio Mishima
110. Taste of Cherry – Kara Candito
111. Clamor – Ann Lauterbach
112. In Canaan – Shane McCrae
113. Tinkers – Paul Harding
114. Cocktails – D.A. Powell
115. ----------NOVEMBER----------Tender Buttons – Gertrude Stein
116. Ways of Dying – Zakes Mda
117. Exquisite Pain – Sophie Calle
118. If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting – Anna Journey
119. The Tenth Parallel – Eliza Griswold
120. Plainwater – Anne Carson
121. Faulkner’s Rosary – Sarah Vap
122. Passing World Pictures – Valerie Coulton
123. Hotel Imperium – Rachel Loden
124. ----------DECEMBER----------Great Topics of the World – Albert Goldbarth
125. What Other Choice – Jeremy Halinen
126. Sexually Speaking: Collected Sex Writings – Gore Vidal
127. Shore Ordered Ocean – Dora Malech
128. Say So – Dora Malech
129. Color Plates – Adam Golaski
130. Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster – Mike Davis
131. Room – Emma Donoghue

I wonder if at some point I'll hone the magpie reading method into something more focused and determined. Generally I try to read through what I've got stacked around my office, also reading what comes recommended from friends, and whatever catches my eye in trips to the library. Maybe I'd have a better sense of the history of things if I became more purposeful. I think this at the end of every year when I look at the list. But really, part of the adventure is the wildness. If reading can be considered wild.

And, as always I choose the ten that were game-changers in some way for me. As in, when I think back over 2010, the year would not have been as meaningful without them. (And as always I won't include friends' books in the top ten, though those are always at the top of my list of favorites. I will get to know you more through what you write than anything you say.)

The top 10:
Bluets – Maggie Nelson
The Book of Frank – CA Conrad
Spar – Karen Volkman
Goodbye to Berlin – Christopher Isherwood
The Last 4 Things – Kate Greenstreet
Children of Darkness and Light – Nicholas Mosley
Just Kids – Patti Smith
Hotel Imperium – Rachel Loden
Say So – Dora Malech
Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster – Mike Davis

6 from othertimes; 4 from 2010
6 women; 4 men
6 poetry; 4 prose (2 fiction; 2 nonfiction)

Maybe it would be worth telling what each did for me. But that's for another post. Maybe. Happy New Year, y'all. Get reading.