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I’m reading William Gass’s Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife. Is it good? It’s a Gass!! I’m sure that gag's been pulled before.
I’m currently reading The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb with all of my English 111 students. Taleb argues that our world is shaped predominately by what he calls “Black Swans”—events that are rare, have a large impact, and are retroactively made to “make sense” in our lives, such as 9/11 and the stock market crash of 1929. Beyond defining and exploring various Black Swans across all disciplines, Taleb believes that things are made worse because our brains are hard-wired to ignore their very existence, which only creates more Black Swans. Ultimately, he argues that the most important information to know is that we don’t know nearly as much as we think we do, and therefore create dupes of ourselves. It’s a mind-bender of a book, but one that calls into question how we organize societies, study the past, and prepare to move forward.
Over the summer I read Peter Matthiessen’s Shadow Country, a revision and reworking of his Killing Mister Watson trilogy. The product of many years of research, composition, and now revision, it is the story of the historical outlaw Edgar J. Watson on the Florida Everglades frontier and the mystery surrounding his murder by the hands of his neighbors. Mark my words: Matthiessen will be the next American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Shadow Country is his masterpiece, the culmination of his lifelong commitment to issues of race, history, cultural memory and the American environment.
I'm reading two short story collections at the moment: The End of the Straight and Narrow by David McGlynn and Typical by Padgett Powell. I really enjoy the in-your-face wackiness of Powell's prose, but the images and metaphors used by McGlynn are quite powerful.
A lifelong friend recently loaned me a hardback copy of Wells Tower's Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned. In picking it up from time to time over the past few months, I've realized that I read a book loaned by a friend a little differently than one I've bought or borrowed from the library. I'm more likely to graze, to read it one story at a time. I'm also more likely to hold the book farther from my face. Tower writes with humor and precision. One story, "Wild America," begins this way: "The bell on the cat's collar roused her. He'd bought her something: a baby pigeon stolen from its nest, mauled and draped on Jacey's pillowcase. The thing was pink, nearly translucent, with magenta cheeks and lavender ovals around the eyes. It looked like a half-cooked eraser with dreams of someday becoming a prostitute." What will I loan my friend in return?
For the last couple of years, I’ve become interested in regional authors that mirror distinct cultures in their works. Zora Neale Hurston’s short story “Sweat” intrigued me with her gutsy southern African-American dialect. I’ve sampled more of her short stories from her collection Spunk, and this year hope to read her non-fiction biographical works. After two summer trips to the South Carolina and Georgia sea islands around Charleston, S.C. and Savannah, Georgia, I’ve been intrigued with the Gullah and Geechee cultures that are dying out. I’ve read a memoir of the saltwater Geechee settlement on Sapelo Island, Georgia by Cornelia Walker Bailey, God, Dr. Buzzard, and the Bolito Man, as well as a few non-fiction anthropological studies. Last summer I read a short story, “A Gravestone of Wheat” by Will Weaver that was adapted as a screenplay for an award-winning independent film, Sweet Land. I’ve continued reading more of Weaver’s works on Minnesota farmers, their culture, and farming in general. I’m currently reading a novel by a Nebraska and Missouri-based writer, Jonis Agee, Sweet Eyes.