Do You Remember the First Poetry Book You Bought?

My mother was a great one for reading aloud to her young children. Some of my earliest memories, notwithstanding putting the dog in the oven or pouring shoe polish on the sofa, are of my mother reading to me. I learned many Mother Goose nursery rhymes sitting next to her on the (repaired) sofa. Story time involved a big green book entitled Stories Children Love by Watty Piper, first published in the 1920s with the kinds of illustrations popular for children at the time. 

I still have that book. I loved the stories filled big bad wolves, evil stepmothers, giants, and ogres. The binding is now wearing thin, but it’s still intact. You can find the listing on Amazon, but it’s “currently unavailable.” 

 

I was the middle child, with fairly large gaps between me and my two brothers. Mother read to all three of us, but for whatever reason, I turned out to be the major reader in the family. That became a lifelong habit, and I give full credit to my mother for instilling a love of reading and books in me. 

To continue reading, please see me post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Tuesday Readings

 

Light rain – poem and artwork by Sonja Benskin Mesher.

 

More of this, please: Ilya Kaminsky writes a poetic response to Giacometti – Janet Manley at Literary Hub.

 

A salvaged word – Kelly Belmonte at All Nine.

The Redemptive Eyes of "Don Quixote"

It is said that the novel The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes should be read three times – youth, middle age, and old age. I first read it at 17, in English literature class my senior year of high school. Our teacher, who dearly loved the book but knew better than to force the unabridged version on a class of 35 teenaged boys, gave us the option of reading the abridged or unabridged version. The difference was 600 pages, so you can imagine the results.

Two of us chose the unabridged version, and we had to read it in the same amount of time that the rest of the class was reading the unabridged. Neither of us regretted our decision, but we both had to carry that book everywhere we went, reading in any spare moment. The assignment was both a paper and an oral presentation in class.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Literary Life.

Illustration: Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, engraving by Gustave More (1863).

On Being a Writer: Rest

I’ve invented a word: “misculturalized.” It describes being born, raised and living in one culture when you’re probably better adapted to another culture. And the culture I should have been raised in? The one that celebrates naps. Spain. Mexico. Argentina.

How could I have been born in United States, the country that hates – hates – naps? Think of everything we miss when we succumb to temptation and take a nap: getting work done; staying busy, looking like we’re staying busy; and rest.

Rest.

While I love naps, I have a hard time with the word rest. And rest from writing? Can’t happen. It’s too much of who I am. At least that’s the excuse I make. To myself.

And yet.

We’ve several beach vacations – Gulf Shores and nearby Orange Beach. Some with kids, and once empty nest. On the empty nest beach vacation, I’d wake early each morning, walk down to the beach, rent my umbrella and chair, and sit, reading. To be honest, it was a project – the second time I had read the unabridged version of Don Quixote. And I was doing it because my high school English teacher who taught our class the novel said you should read it three times in your life – when you’re young, when you’re middle-aged, and when you’re old.

Sitting there on the beach each morning, listening to the sounds of the waves and birds, feeling the heart, smelling the salt of the gulf, I read the Cervantes classic. And it seemed like a very different book than the one I read when I was 17.

Even though I was technically doing something, it was still rest. Sitting for long stretches of time and reading, finding myself transported to Spain in the late 1500s, and tilting at windmills, was restful.

It was the kind of experience Ann Kroeker describes in On Being a Writer: 12 Simple Habits for a Writing Life That Lasts (co-authored with Charity Craig). She finally convinces herself to go with her kids to a family camp in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and she finds herself reading and resting.

“At camp,” she writes, “I sat a lot, often with a book but just as often with nothing. I sat at a picnic table. I sat in an Adirondack chair. I sat on a beach towel on the sand, on a couch in the lodge, and in a folding chair by the calm, cold water of Lake Huron.” She did go jogging one morning.

What she was doing was engaging in mental rest. We have to take time to let our minds rest and regenerate.

Our minds, like our bodies, need a Sabbath.

For the past several weeks, I’ve been discussing chapters of On Being a Writer by Kroeker and Craig. This chapter is entitled “Rest.” There’s one chapter left, and I’ll discuss it next week.

Photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Ten Books, Sort Of

It’s easier than the Ice Bucket Challenge, that’s for sure. Less wet, anyway. And less cold.

Sandra Heska King tagged me on Facebook. And it’s clearly one of those Facebook things. The question: What 10 books have most influenced you?

The easy answer (and the most Christian-ly correct one) would be to start the list with the Bible. And in my case, I would say that’s true. 

After the Bible, one book immediately – and I mean immediately – came to mind.

Although I think it would be more correct for me to list the authors who influenced rather than individual books (ask my wife; I tend to read clusters of books by authors I like).

Here’s my list, in no particular order. And I’ll stick to books. I’ll note at the end which one of them first popped into my head. (And the number of the books in the list are actually slightly more than 10.)

 

The Hobbit / The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien.

October Light by John Gardner.

The Source by James Michener.

David Copperfield / Great Expectations by Charles Dickens.

The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis.

The Death of Artemio Cruz by Carlos Fuentes.

 

Augustine of Hippo by Peter Brown.

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes.

The Habit of Being: The Letters of Flannery O’Conner, edited by Sally Fitzgerald.

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner.

The Gulag Archipelago and The First Circle by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

 

Conversation in the Cathedral / The War of the End of the World by Mario Vargas Llosa.

And the one that immediately popped into my head when I read Sandra’s Facebook post?

Don Quixote.

What about you? What 10 books would you say have most influenced you?

Top photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Brennan Manning: Healing

One of my favorite books, if not my most favorite book, is Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes. I first read it in high school – the entire unabridged edition that was one big fat paperback.

I loved the story. I loved the crazy elderly Spanish landowner galloping around the countryside, tilting at windmills, and recognizing only the nobility in common, everyday things. It was so wildly improbable – the prostitute Aldonza could really be the beautiful Dulcinea? And a barber’s bowl was the golden helmet of Mambrino?

I loved the 1972 movie with Peter O’Toole and Sophia Loren, too. I saw it while I was in college.

Some 20 years later, I read it again, during a week we spent in Gulf Shores, Alabama. Each morning, I’d carry the book down to the hotel beach, get my umbrella and chair from the attendant, and settle in to ride with Don Quixote across the landscape of early 1600s Spain.

It has lost none of its magic, but this time I could see the story was ultimately about redemption, and how people were reborn as the people they were meant to be when this crazy old gentleman on a broken down horse touched their lives.

It’s worth noting that Don Quixote was written during the Spanish inquisition, when many innocent people were arrested, tortured and killed.

In The Furious Longing of God, Brennan Manning recounts the story of Don Quixote and Aldonza. He draws a parallel between her redemption with the redemption of us by God, through the “healing of affirmation” by the crazy old man. Aldonza the prostitute indeed becomes the beautiful Dulcinea, her ugliness and sin washed away. Don Quixote saw her as the woman she was meant to be, and she believed.

A story can be powerful, even a much simpler (and less literary) story than Don Quixote. I was told that a woman who had been witnessed to for years by her husband, brother-in-law, and mother-in-law, had read my novel Dancing Priest and said to her husband, “I finally understand what you mean when you talk about faith.”

I’ve been touched by a healing hand of affirmation more times than I can remember – a pastor and his wife, cash sent anonymously through the mail to meet a need, a pastor who sat with us and prayed while my oldest son had brain surgery, by my pastor and a few elders who prayed over me and ruptured disc. Over and over again people have reached out and touched me with a hand of healing.

“According to that mysterious substitution of Christ for the Christian,” Manning writes, “what we do to one another we do to Jesus.”

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading The Furious Longing of God. To read more posts on this chapter, “Healing,” please visit Sarah at LivingBetween the Lines.

Jaime Manrique’s “Cervantes Street”

It is intriguing to think that at the same time William Shakespeare was writing plays in England, Miguel de Cervantes was writing Don Quixote in Spain. The two of them together transformed Western literature. Cervantes birthed the modern novel, influencing writers from Dickens and Dostoevsky to Garcia Marquez and Milan Kundera.

Before Don Quixote, Cervantes can best be described as an aspiring, and aging, writer, known by some for his poetry and by others for one (largely failed) novel, La Galatea. He had been a secretary to a cardinal in Rome, a soldier, wounded in the naval battle of Lepanto against the Turkish fleet, captured by Algerian pirates and held in Algiers for five years before finally being ransomed, and came home to Spain to fail at many careers. Then he wrote Don Quixote, and Western literature changed.

The book was published in two parts, separated by some years and by a rip-off entitled The Second Volume of the Ingenious Gentleman, Don Quixote de la Mancha. The rip-off was published under the pseudonym Alonso Fernandez de Avellaneda; the real identity has never been determined. The second volume by Cervantes was almost certainly a response to the “false Don Quixote” and an attempt to quash it, which it did.

It is this circumstance – the real and the false Don Quixotes – that novelist, essayist and poet Jaime Manrique uses to create the thoughtful, engaging and extraordinarily well-researched Cervantes Street. The novel is about a great work of literature and how it comes to be written, but it is also about passion, jealousy, rivalry, love and Spain, above all about Spain of the Golden Age, in all its supremacy, wonder and brutality, and the brutality of Spain’s Arabic enemies.

Cervantes Street is a kind of fictionalized biography, but it is also more than that. Some of what Manrique writes is speculation, because there are large gaps in what we know about the life of Cervantes. But enough is known, and much more on the history and culture of the era can be accessed and assimilated. And so Manrique succeeds in what every fiction writer hopes to do – he transports the reader to the time and life of its subject.

The novel is told from three viewpoints – Cervantes himself; his school friend Luis Lara; and Lara’s employee in government service and later personal secretary Pascual Paredes. Cervantes is unaware of the rage and jealousy he’s engendered in his friend; Lara is unaware of the disdain his personal secretary hold him in. Swirled together, it is a story of intrigue and suspense.

In a beginning note to readers, Manrique explains that he has “appropriated” certain scenes from various works by Cervantes, including Don Quixote. This was a common practice in the Golden Age; Cervantes himself “appropriated” scenes and materials from his own life and even the work of the “false” Don Quixote. This “appropriation” is not a wholesale borrowing or a kind of “inspired lifting” by Manrique, who shapes the scenes to fit his story.

Cervantes Street is inspired reading, resulting from inspired writing. It tells the story of a great author in his time, and helps us see ourselves in our own time.

Ten Books (15, Actually)

Several of the more serious/theological bloggers at Evangel picked up a meme in the past few days. It started with economist Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution, and then spread to Evangel. The meme was “the list of the 10 books that have influenced me in my worldview and outlook on life.” (You can’t list the Bible, either.)

I thought it was kind of a cool idea, until I read their lists.

I was totally intimidated. I mean, these guys – Adam Omelianchuk, Joe Carter and others – read some weighty stuff, mostly theological and mostly of the seminary-type of theological.

I felt like a pagan.

Then I wandered through my bookshelves, and put together my list. It was a good thing. When I looked at my list, I didn’t feel like a pagan any more. Just eight tenths of a pagan.

Anyway, here’s my list. No surprise, it’s heavy on fiction.

The 10 Books That Have Most Influenced Me, and Because I Get Carried Away, It's More Like 15

The First Circle by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. I read this early in high school, then I read everything he had written that was available. And then came volume 1 of the Gulag Archipelago in 1973, and you can trace a direct line from its publication to the collapse of the Soviet Union less than 20 years later.

The Habit of Being: The Letters of Flannery O’Connor, edited by Sally Fitzgerald. When she was asked why Southern authors always seemed to write about freaks, she said it was because Southern authors were still able to recognize one. That comment alone endeared her writing to me. These letters are gems.

The War of the End of the World, by Mario Vargas Llosa. If there is any writer who deserves the Nobel Prize for literature, it’s Peruvian-born Mario Varga Llosa. But he’ll never get it, because he long ago turned his back on radical leftist politics, very uncool by Nobel Prize committee standards. (I’d also place The Death of Artemio Cruz by Carlos Fuentes of Mexico in the same category of “unbelievably talented Spanish-speaking writers who probably won’t get the Nobel Prize because their politics is wrong.”)

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner. You can’t grow up in the South without being influenced by Faulkner. You just can’t. You can’t grow up anywhere in the United States and not be influenced by him, even if you don’t know it. And he’s been dead for almost 50 years.

Dickens by Peter Ackroyd. It’s the biography to end all biographies, and it’s 1,083 pages, not including notes and index. It’s heavy enough to be a weapon. (Amazon says it is currently unavailable, even through Amazon's used bookstore network.)

Augustine of Hippo by Peter Brown. My first entry in the “I’m not a total pagan contest.” Brown recreates the life and world of St. Augustine, and I felt like I was there in the room in Hippo when he was dying, the town under seige by barbarians invading from Europe. An extraordinary work.

They Stand Together: The Letters of C.S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves (1914-1963), edited by Walter Hooper. Greeves was C.S. Lewis’s friend from childhood, and Lewis could say things to Greeves that he couldn’t say to anyone else.

The Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. III: Tertullian. My second entry in the “I’m not a total pagan contest.” Tertullian was a lawyer (I forgive him for that) who is generally considered the father of Latin Christianity. He wrote a lot of apologetics at a time when it wasn’t exactly cool to be a Christian (roughly 200 A.D.). He also ended up with some air of disrepute for deviating from standard orthodoxy, although it’s not clear exactly what that deviation was. But his passion comes pouring though, even in translation.

The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis. I read this not long after I became a believer. Lewis is a great favorite of Christians, partially (at least) because he adds intellectual weight (see, we’re not all blathering yahoos). I first read it because people told me I should. But then I learned that Screwtape started out as radio addresses during World War II, and so this little volume actually straddles two media forms – broadcast and print. It was right up my communications alley.

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes. Someone once said you should read Don Quixote three times in your life – when you’re young, middle-aged and old. I first read it my senior year in high school, and I read the unabridged version. I loved it. I next read it in my early 40s, during a vacation week we spent at Orange Beach in Alabama. I haven’t read it a third time, because I’m waiting to get old.

The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings Trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkien. I read the pirated versions in college, and then my first year after graduation bought the authorized versions and read them as well. I reread all four right before the first movie came out in 2001. Quite simply, they are likely the greatest works of imagination of the 20th century.

So those are my 10, er, 15. What are yours?