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How to Begin a Reading Journal

Posted by on September 29, 2008 in Uncategorized

How to Begin a Reading Journal

4 Ideas for Reading —-and Healing 1.    Make a list. This may well be the simplest way in the world to begin keeping a reading journal.  Begin a list of books you've read–or are reading.  Book and author.  Date. If you’d like to do this on-line, you can do it nicely at LibraryThing, a site where you can catalog up to 200 books for free.  And tag and sort them if you like.  And record a few comments.  Such comments becoming a way to ease in–if one so wishes–to keeping a slightly more elaborate reading journal. Setting up an account at LibraryThing is about as easy as it gets.  And the whole site is just kind of appealing.  (Link below.) An entry on LibraryThing looks like this:   2.    Make a two-column journal. This was the method for keeping a reading journal that I learned in grad school–and the kind of journal we were required to keep in a course on teaching literature.  A simple and surprisingly useful reading/learning practice.  So, two columns– In the left column something quoted directly from the text.  A brief passage.  A line.  A word.  Anything that jumps off the page or that you'd like to remember for some reason. In the right column a response of some sort to the quote, in your own words.  The two columns eventually creating a kind of dialog between reader and text.  Back and forth. 3.  Create a journal in two colors–or more. A modification of the two-column journal.  When I'm writing on the computer I find two columns awkward to use.  And I've sometimes found it helpful to use two different-colored fonts instead.  Or just two different fonts.  Or, even simpler, put brackets around my own thoughts and words.  I don't know why this seems easier and better than working with quotation marks—but somehow it does.  For me it encourages that sense of dialog with a text—-the back and forth.  For instance———- If the brain was changeable then we would change.  And if the brain made wrong changes then we would change incorrectly.  It was easier to believe there were no changes.Fred Gage, p. 7Sounds kind of like a poem.  The heart of the book? 4.  Open Google Notebook [Note: I have recently learned (thank you) that this fourth option only works if you've already uploaded and started using google notebook.  Otherwise, it would seem that they have stopped offering it.  And I'm not sure yet what a good substitute would be. Alas, there are always changes.] Have you ever had the experience where you found something on the web and then later you try to find your way back but you can't for the life of you get back there?  Google Notebook is a way to create a trail of pebbles.  And it can become, in the process, a way to keep a reading journal.  Because you can open a new note not just to clip a passage–or image–from a website—but for anything. If you open a note to clip something from the web you have a web journal. If you open a note to write something about a book you're reading you have a book journal. And the two can be combined. Setting up Google Notebook requires a few more steps than starting, for...

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Talking to Grief by Denise Levertov

Posted by on September 22, 2008 in Uncategorized

A poem in which grief takes the shape of a dog in need of a home 1978 This is a short poem—three stanzas.  Five short lines, five more, and then eleven. The first lines express—what?  Second thoughts?  Regret?  A kind of apology? Ah, grief, I should not treat you like a homeless dog who comes to the back door for a crust, for a meatless bone. I should trust you. I love that grief is taking the form of a dog here.  Not the black dog of depression.  This dog here seems a so much gentler dog.  A less frightening dog.  Yet, still, a hungry one. I just reread the last eleven lines. Ah, a dog that knows longing.  A dog that’s been living under the porch all this time.  Close but hidden.  A dog with such longings.  Who knew? You long for your real place to be readied before winter comes. You need your name, your collar and tag. You need the right to warn off intruders, to consider my house your own and me your person and yourself my own dog. I love that: my own dog. I wonder how the “I” of the poem got to this place. Where she came to know that the dog needed a name. And a person to attach itself to. And a place in the house. A rightful place. ___________________________________________________ See also: A bio of Denise Levertov at Poets.org At One Year of Writing and Healing, a brief piece on Rumi’s poem, The Guest House, a poem in which:  “This being human is a guest house./ Every morning a new arrival.”...

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(from) On Being Ill by Virginia Woolf

Posted by on September 15, 2008 in Uncategorized

An essay in which Ms. Woolf argues for illness as a topic for literature and makes a case for creating a new language for illness 1926 I’d been looking for this essay, couldn’t find it in any of my libraries, and was just considering perhaps a purchase, when I came across the essay in a book on my very own bookshelf.  The book is titled The Moment and Other Essays.  It’s a posthumous collection, much easier to find than the single essay. This is how the essay begins: Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to view, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us by the act of sickness, how we go down into the pit of death and feel the waters of annihilation close above our heads and wake thinking to find ourselves in the presence of angels and the harpers when we have a tooth out and come to the surface in the dentist’s arm-chair and confuse his “Rinse the mouth—rinse the mouth” with Heaven to welcome us—when we think of this, as we are so frequently forced to think of it, it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature. And that’s just the first sentence.  171 words if anyone’s counting.  I’m drawn in by the image of those ancient and obdurate oaks.  Uprooted.  I feel like I’ve seen illness do that.  I’m also drawn in by Woolf’s humor—the dentist as heavenly being.  But is this essay a bit dated now that so much has been written and so much is now being written about illness?  Maybe.  Maybe not. According to Judith Shulevitz, writing in the New York Times several years ago, this essay by Woolf came about when T.S. Eliot commissioned the piece for his literary review, The New Criterion.  Eliot, apparently, ended up not liking it much.  But here’s the interesting part.  A few years before this essay, in 1925, T.S. Eliot’s wife had “gone mad”.  And, again according to Ms. Shulevitz, Eliot had consulted Virginia Woolf’s husband on the matter, and he, Leonard, had advised Eliot to keep his wife from writing.  Hmmm.  Shulevitz argues that the subtext of this essay is an argument by Woolf for the act of writing in the face of illness—or, say, in the face of “madness”.  She concludes her review: “Woolf didn’t want sympathy; she wanted not to be silenced, and to prove to Eliot, and to us, that vulnerability has its own kind of genius.” Now that I like—vulnerability with its own kind of genius. For me, this essay by Woolf does have a kernel of genius.  And it comes on the third page of fifteen, a passage in which she laments the poverty of our illness language: Finally, to hinder the description of illness in literature, there is the poverty of the language.  English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for...

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(from) The Spell by Marie Howe

Posted by on September 8, 2008 in Uncategorized

Every day when I pick up my four-year-old daughter from preschool she climbs into her back booster seat and says, Mom–tell me your story. And almost every day I tell her: I dropped you off, I taught my class I ate a tuna fish sandwich, wrote e-mails, returned phone calls, talked with students and then I came to pick you up. And almost every day I think, My God, is that what I did? These lines are from the middle of Ms. Howe’s poem.  They offer a certain intimacy, one that I find appealing. It strikes me that a poet can use language to hold a reader at a distance–can perform acrobatic feats with language—look—be amazed—or a poet can use language to invite a reader in a bit—into a particular moment, or, say, into the poem itself. And this inviting, it can be terribly deft and skillful.  Achieving a kind of naturalness of tone—a sense of conversation—but, at the same time, it’s not literal conversation.  It’s a distillation of conversation—an essence of conversation.  Still, it has the sound of conversation, the cadence. Robert Frost does this.  William Carlos Williams sometimes. Deft but not showy. Ordinary in the way a Shaker chair is ordinary? The poem doesn’t actually begin with the “I” in the car with the young child.  The poem begins when the neighbor, Pablo, another four-year-old, has lost his wand and he’s trying to perform spells with his finger but that’s not working so well, and his mother tries to give him a chopstick to use, but—nope—that’s not going to do it. (A poet these days in Pablo’s predicament then?  Trying to perform spells without a wand?  Trying to weave magic with only the most ordinary language?) The poem continues with the daughter in the car.  It locates itself in a particular day—yesterday.  The daughter is not content with the mother’s account of her day–the sandwich and the e-mails.  She wants to know “the whole thing.” And the mother answers.  It’s one of the surprises of the poem, that turn.And I said, ok. I feel a little sad. And I said, ok. I feel a little sad. And she said, Tell me the whole thing Mom. And I said, ok Elise died Oh. The poem continues: Elise is dead and the world feels weary and brokenhearted. And she said, Tell me the whole thing Mom. And I said, in the dream last night I felt my life building up around me and when I stepped forward and away from it and turned around I saw a high and frozen crested wave. I love how this poem descends in layers.  Goes beneath the ordinary.  To a dream—this image of a frozen crested wave.  The daughter continues to ask for more.  New images are unearthed.  A goose.  A winged serpent.  Still, the daughter is relentless. “Tell me the whole story.” And I said, Elise is dead, and all the frozen tears are mine of course and if that wave broke it might wash my life clear and I might begin again from now and from here. Ah. if that wave broke. . . An image, I think, worth going down through layers for. And one of the many things I like about this poem is the way it seems to...

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