I don’t have time to read . . .

and I could blame my new macbook, but I know it’s my own damn fault.

I am writing blogs, I am going over my next book, and I am being a dad (blogging in between tearing out coloring pages for my son to paint, and I did take the boy outside to play hide and seek, and get up with him in the night, twice, to smooth the hair from his fevered brow, and in the morning before six to lie down with him so he could rest some more and his mom could get forty more winks), and I am sort of teaching, and I have to be giving the devil of obligation his half-assed due in several areas.

What I most want to be doing is immersing myself in this novel that I am revising. I get a second wind after the kids are in bed and it keeps me up past the time I can really concentrate or trust the work.
But by then it is too late to read. I need immersion in reading as well as writing but I can’t fit both into the time. I miss Cordelia (This is All: The Pillow Book of Cordelia Kennby Adan Chambers). As soon as I hit post, I am going back to her for an hour–forget my own stupid book.

COME SUMMER! COME SOON! I’m going to get the DARK TOWER (the last one–I have been reading them after my birtday and Christmas for the past few years) for my birthday (even if I have to buy it myself) and I am going to read a ton of other books: King Dork, I’m with the Band, novels by Carrie Jones, Alex Richards, more Simone Elkeles, short stories by Denis Johnson and Stuart Dybek . . . the list goes on and on.

Come summer, before I become the kind of teacher who actually stoops so low as to count the days! I know everyone who isn’t a teacher hates me because of my summers, but I hate you becuase you don’t have to try to inspire and discipline in the perfect measure so that kids learn stuff they don’t give a good goddamn about. I love teaching and I love my students, but I LOOOOVE SUMMER!!!!!!

Hey, I just realized that I have NOTHING to complain about.
I get summer vacation, and you-hoo doh-hon’t!!

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Cordelia Kenn: Reading the Pillow Book

Now that I’ve read more than a third of THIS IS ALL by Aidan Chambers, I thought I’d write a little bit more about it.

I still love Cordelia, and her voice is stronger than ever in my ear. I sometimes worry about this when I’m writing because I have a great capacity to absorb the rhythms I read and a great penchant for subconscious imitation. Novelist Anna Quindlan says this is no problem for her–she just makes sure that she reads really good stuff, and then if she imitates it, all the better. I’m not really sweating it either. Cordelia’s voice is fresh and unique, real and true, and the style is different enough from the book I’m revising that I’m not concerned about excessive bleed-through.

Style, Voice, and Form:
19-year-old Cordelia tells her story in the form of a book she is creating for her unborn daughter, a gift she will present on the girl’s 16th birthday. She skips around from musings and narration in the present–6 months pregnant, looking back on her life–and her Pillow Book, a term she has borrowed from Japanese literature, which is a collection of her journals and early poetry dating back to when she was 15. Or maybe the current musings and narrative are actually part of the pillow book, too.

Cordelia likes to mix things up, and in the first section, she skips around as she tells her story. Chambers manages the various voices, ages, and moods of Cordelia so well that I can feel and hear the difference in her style without becoming overly conscious of it. And the transitions are handled so that, while I am sometimes confused, I appreciate not having the, annoyance of obvious indicators–Cordelia lets me figure things out on my own without insulting my intellegence.

In the next section, the form changes. We get currently written narrative on the right page, and straight pillow book on the left. This is a bit dodgy, but I manage the reading of it by holding my place with a bookmark for the pillow book as I read ahead on the main narrative. I tend to get carried away in the story, but when I get to a stopping place, I go back and read the left pages, where she writes poems, notes to her boyfriend, and musing on such subjects as: rain, things that make her heart beat faster, poetry, breasts, masturbation, etc.

Subject Matter
Oh, did I say breasts and masturbation? These are two separate sections, btw, and there are more topics here that I’ll leave alone. I’m not as brave as Aidan Chambers, at least not in this blog. (Wait until my second book, if it ever sees the light of day.) Chambers has balls, though. My editor, Andrew, calls him “fearless”, and he seems to be. Not only does Cordelia muse on anatomy, but in true Cordelia fashion, she very logically anwers all the objections people have about self-stimulation, countering each with her own arguments about how beneficial and healthy it is. And she makes me ashamed that I am so filled with trepidation at this mild summary. But this is blog, not fiction, and fiction is an easier form for telling the truth. Plus, I’m a teacher of adolescents *gasp*, so I exist in the world where, as one of my own characters put it, everybody pretends that sex doesn’t exist. Or the adults try to, and wish the students would, which usually seems for the better. Who knows when or if frank discussions are appropriate when maturity levels and family backgrounds are so varied. But this is about Cordelia, not about decency in the schools.

Cordelia loves to argue with common opionion, and it doesn’t have to be sex-related. I loved when she, again very logically, put forth the proposition that, contrary to common belief, we do NOT live only in the present moment, but in the moment just after that, because there must be a brief space of time between event and awareness of the event. For Cordelia, awareness, KNOWING, is everything. I’m not sure that the present isn’t that moment of awareness. The photon of a star may take years to arrive here on earth and be absorbed by my wide, staring pupils, and then there are nanoseconds from that moment until the awarenss is in my mind–so when IS now? I’m tempted to say that there is no present moment, but I might get into some sort of Mahayana Buddhist philosophical negativism in which I can’t argue that:
a. there is a present moment,
b. there isn’t a present moment,
c. there both is and isn’t, or
d. neither is nor isn’t a present moment.
I can’t argue any position at all, I just have to live in the present moment, or not in the present moment, or niether in the present moment or not the present–wait! Weren’t we talking about auto-eroticism? I might have fallen into a verbal form of it right there, so I’ll stop.

You go, Cordelia. Question authority.

And you go, Aidan. This book rules.

Oh, and I just had an idea for another Cordelia blog–or an essay topic for somebody: mother, sister, daughter roles in THIS IS ALL: THE PILLOWBOOK OF CORDELIA KENN–how Cordelia functions in all these capacities in relation to herself.

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Anticipation; Pre-reading Aiden Chambers’ THIS IS ALL: THE PILLOW BOOK OF CORDELIA KENN

Sunday afternoon–

My wife and daughter are at the library, and my son is refusing to nap. He’s in there talking to himself, quietly, happily–but I know it won’t last.

I want to be reading, I should be doing the kitchen floor, but I’m taking a break to write about the book I’m going to start reading. (Oh, great, he’s crying again! He gives just a couple of wails and then is still. Probably, I think—as I listen to the silence broken only by the dryer in the basement where a pair of overalls or some other loud garment is clacketing around–probably he’s only waiting and listening to hear if I am on my way. In a moment, he starts kicking the wall, the little varmint. Oh, well. Let him kick!)

Okay, back to the subject at hand:

I’ve been reading Crime and Punishment, just finished it last night, and the whole while, This is All, the Pillow Book of Cordelia Kenn, has been sitting on my bedside table, and every so often, before or after my Dostoyevsky, I’d pick it up, feel its weight, and put it down again.

Sunday Night, 10:22

Still haven’t read any of This is All, and as much as I would like to get to the subject at hand, I’ll indulge myself by saying that I’m just at this late hour finishing a dinner of salami, cheese (extra-sharp Tillamook and The Dubliner), assorted olives, and wine. The interim has been filled with the usual Sunday chores, and augmented by my daughter showing the chief symptom of “the stomach flu” which necessitated my cleaning vomit off her bedroom floor.

IT’S QUITE A BEAUTIFUL BOOK, THIS IS ALL, the kind that makes you thumb through it and caress the pages, which have a soft quality of fabric, a woven feel. The book is six hundred pages, thick and decidedly narrower than it is tall, and the only complaint I have is that the margins in the middle seem a bit small. I am hoping that the book will loosen up a little as I read. We shall see.

AMAZING that Cordelia’s voice is, already, a little bit stuck in my head. All I have done is read the first couple of pages in the bookstore, then hit a few random pages, including one in which she describes several ideal, perfect things: a dream kitchen, complete with favourite ingredients, and a new, well-made book, among others.

I like Cordelia already.

I ALSO LIKE THE BOOK ALREADY, or at least the idea of it. The jacket tells me that it’s “for ambitious readers” and “not for younger readers” and is “A huge book in every sense.”

I also like little books, shallow little books even, but most of all, I like a big, huge, vast, book. Teen literature is particularly awash in small books. Most titles seem to come in around 200 pages, and though there’s nothing wrong with that length, I like to get lost in something that meanders around like Raskolnikov through the streets of Petersburg. Ann Zwinger, whom nobody outside of natural history has heard of but who is an incredible writer and teacher, told me that I am an “encyclopedic” writer. This causes me some heartache in the revision process when I have to cut at least a quarter of what I’ve written, but maybe that’s what makes me love a long book so much. I want it all, and deeply.

That’s why I like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky–but more on the Russians later. I still have Raskolnikov on the brain, and I hope I get a chance to make a few notes before I am swept thoroughly away into the world of Cordelia.

And there we have it: to be swept away, transported, lost. That’s the thing! With a great, big, book, you’re in the fictional world longer, and the fiction is more real–if it’s true. A big book can give you more characters and can more closely elucidate the lives of those characters. The places and the movements of people through those places form patterns in the mind that sing and hum like memories of your own life in the “real world.” Or maybe they sing more clearly, with more truth, than your own memories.

Now it’s after 11:00, and I want to read, and maybe to get to sleep before it’s tomorrow. So I’m off to prop myself upon the pillow, and lose myself in Cordelia’s pillow book.

Because here’s the thing: I like a big, serious book. A big, real book. One that gives me characters that are not merely made-up fictions, but characters that are true, characters that exist so fully in their world that they live inside me, and so–as any beloved person does–they enlarge me. Dig that! To be enlarged. To extend the dimensions of heart and mind. To expand the soul.

Dig that.

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