Dear Reader,
Have you ever seen a sky that seems earthier than the earth? I happened upon one this week when I was out running by the ocean.
This issue is the final installment of our group gift guide, with a focus primarily on poetry, music, and art. Where possible, I’m linking to the bookshop.org site for the venerable Grolier Poetry Bookshop in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Here is a beautiful photograph of Tracy K. Smith (from whom more later in this issue!), doing a reading in its hallowed precincts. Buy some books from the Grolier!
Fiction
Before we proceed, I have two additional fiction ideas for you.
In the ongoing spirit of happy nepotism that pervades these scribblings, we begin with my daughter Grace Panetta, who reports on politics and elections for Insider. Grace has added some new words to my social media lexicon with these thoughts on Ghosts by Dolly Alderton.
Many of us are heading home for the holidays, and taking stock after a tumultuous year of navigating love, dating, and a digital landscape now peppered with terms like “ghosting,” (someone dropping off the map with no explanation), “breadcrumbing” (texting and engaging with your social media just enough to keep you interested), and “orbiting” (watching all your Instagram stories and liking all your tweets after the relationship is over).
Dolly Alderton’s novel Ghosts is pegged around the tale of an accomplished London food writer who, after a long-term relationship, downloads a dating app, meets a man, and gets—well, ghosted. But Ghosts is about so much more than dating, and it expertly plumbs so many familiar offline themes. With sharp storytelling and humor, Alderton brilliantly captures the destabilization of the protagonist as she sees her parents grow old, the longing (and betrayal) of her friends settling down, and the ups and downs of confronting all our own ghosts, past and present.
You may recall that Faye Hammill, Professor of English Literature at Glasgow University, was a true Friend of the Chariot when I was writing about Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm. Faye chimes in from Scotland with the following recommendation:
The Feast is a 1950 novel by Margaret Kennedy, who is best known for the controversial bestseller The Constant Nymph (1924). Her later works are a joy to discover, and The Feast is the first one to explore the post World War II situation in Britain. It is set in a Cornish seaside hotel and unfolds over the course of the week preceding a disaster. We learn at the start that the cliff collapses on the hotel, killing everyone inside. But we do not know which of the guests and staff members were there and which were absent. The story is tense and gripping from the start, yet there is also space for meditation on landscape and seascape, romance and war, virtue and vice. The structure of the story is ingenious – Kennedy's granddaughter, the writer Serena Mackesy, described The Feast as "one of the cleverest bits of metaphor-working ever."
The Feast doesn’t appear to be in print in the US, so I have linked to Blackwell’s of Oxford, who ship free to the US. Kennedy’s WWII novel Where Stands a Wicked Sentry is in print in America, with an elegant introduction by none other than Faye Hammill.
Poetry
In partnership with publisher Tin House, writer David Naimon hosts the superb literary podcast Between the Covers. Every episode is like going on a deep-sea diving expedition with Naimon and a single writer. Together they explore the depths of the guest’s work, ambitions, and preoccupations. Episodes can run more than two hours, and by the end of these conversations there is often a sense of real kinship between host, guest, and listener. David recommends Nikky Finney’s Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry: Poems & Artifacts.
By far one of my most memorable reads of 2020, I feel like this book flew under the radar that year. Love Child’s would be a great gift for the poetry lover in your life but would also be equally good for a reader who is curious about but also intimidated by poetry. I say this because this book abounds in and pulls you into its stories, into family and ancestral stories, into the story of becoming a poet, into the story of finding one’s way both within and apart from one’s family of origin. It is a book of strong women persevering against the odds, a book of the power of a father's love and example, a book that evokes the human in relation to nature and the land, a book that interweaves race, gender, and sexual orientation and self-becoming in beautiful ways and it is also a gorgeous object, a book of image-text, including photographs of art and artifacts, family mementos and more. Poet Ross Gay can and does say it better than I can: "This book is an astonishment . . . It is an archive of love, the likes of which the 'official archives' have often ignored or denied or, I would say, suppressed. This book reminds us that our eyes, our hearts, our love, our poems, make another archive . . . that holds us. That beholds us. An archive in which we are being held and seen by who loves us."
Speaking of Ross Gay, poet January Gill O’Neil thinks How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope, an anthology for which Gay wrote the foreword, would make a great gift.
It feels like a salve for what's ailing us. These poems remind us of the power of joy and resilience.
This title appears to be in somewhat short supply, so order it soon if you want it in time for Christmas. O’Neil’s most recent book of poems is Rewilding, and I recommend it highly.
Bookseller Amy Henderson from the Bookshop of Beverly Farms suggests Kate Baer’s I Hope This Finds You Well.
In this slim volume of erasure poetry (which I once thought gimmicky), Baer takes modern text from online posts, captured conversations, and private emails, some kind, some horrid (“Access Hollywood” anyone?), and uncovers thought-provoking if not beautiful ideas. Read one a day to ponder and savor.
Frances Evangelista has worked in public education in Washington, D.C. for a very long time, teaching wee folks to read and matching them with their forever books. She once blogged at Nonsuch Book for a decade or so but began to balk at the time it took away from reading. So she just talks books briefly on Twitter now. Frances is characteristically thoughtful on the subject of giving a book of poetry to another person.
Poetry as a gift, especially to a serious reader, needs to reach beyond the ubiquitous end of year lists. It demands to be personal, special. Maybe a vintage copy of a favorite poet, a first edition, a signed copy. Maybe Nox by Anne Carson. A box of words that demands your attention as you literally unfold the stories she presents. Between the left and right, the classic Latin poem that slowly reveals itself and a story of grieving someone surprisingly little known, there exists an art of not just literal translation but an invitation to the reader to translate the experience themselves whether lexicographically or emotionally or any way they see fit. Nox is an art object and a wonderful gift.
And here is one from me: Tracy K. Smith, one of our great living poets, edited a slim anthology during her tenure as US Poet Laureate: American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time. She selected poems by fifty poets—including Ada Limón, Mark Doty, Natalie Diaz, and Terrance Hayes—which create a true chorus of American experience. In her introduction, she writes that these poems:
are contemplating what it feels like to live, work, love, strive, raise a family, and survive many kinds of loss in this vast and varied nation.
I received this book as a gift, and I treasure it.
Music
Here are a couple of smashing ideas for the music lover in your life.
Josiah Fisk, a longtime classical music reviewer, is the editor of the anthology Composers on Music, an outstanding and highly entertaining anthology of composers’ writings, from Hildegard of Bingen to the present. He is the founder of More Carrot, a company that specializes in “radically re-imagining” complex legal and technical documents for businesses, governments, and NGOs.
Craig Brown, I’m going to say, is one of the greatest living practitioners of that heady British art of combining rock-solid reportage and incisive judgment with full-on, Python-worthy satire. 150 Glimpses of the Beatles, published last year, is a thoroughly devourable book that can be read as a collection of delightful vignettes and equally as a substantive mosaic history. There’s plenty here for almost any reader, from dedicated fans to those who still aren’t quite sure what all the fuss was about. If you find yourself wanting more, there’s Brown’s earlier 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret, an equally entertaining and absorbing volume. We can only hope these are the beginning of a series.
Andrea LeBlanc is a historical performance specialist, and a flutist with the Handel and Haydn Society in Boston. She suggests First Nights: Five Musical Premieres, by Harvard Professor Emeritus Thomas Forrest Kelly.
This book has been on my mind as I've gratefully returned to live performances. Fascinating for any music lover who likes to think about how music and art are experienced, this book shares an enormous amount of detail about the premieres of five musical masterpieces, while making clear that it is only scratching the surface of understanding how the music was performed and heard at the time. Kelly relates how the same excitement, passion, intense effort, and often utter chaos has always gone into the making of musical masterpieces, and how some of the most lasting works of art have arisen out of the most unlikely circumstances.
For those of you who love books about journeys as well as music, I can heartily recommend Something of His Art: Walking to Lübeck with J.S. Bach by the multi-faceted UK writer Horatio Clare. In this slim volume, Clare retraces Bach’s 1705 journey by foot to meet and learn from the great organist and composer Dietrich Buxtehude.
I especially loved this book, as my own wedding to Professor Panetta was essentially a beautiful Buxtehude concert with a little religious ceremony nestled inside it. 😊
And don’t forget Matthew Aucoin’s new essay collection, as mentioned last week: The Impossible Art: Adventures in Opera.
Art
Kim McNeil is one of the most wide-ranging and astute readers I know on Twitter. Kim offers for your consideration Self-Portrait by Celia Paul.
Last year, on an unusually cold and rainy day in Southern California, I curled up by the fire for a few hours and lost myself in Celia Paul’s life and paintings. SELF-PORTRAIT is a beautiful, compelling collection of memoir, journal entries, letters, poetry and art. As both muse and painter, Paul candidly reflects on her turbulent relationship with Lucien Freud (37 years her senior), as well as selfhood, motherhood, the path of prioritizing art over all else, and the clarity of self we attain along the way. I was particularly enthralled with the passages about her paintings and her London studio which overlooks the front facade of the British Museum. (Sounds heavenly!) Her insight is clear-sighted and it is refreshing to hear her tell her own story, especially when her story has been obscured in Freud’s story for so long. I have a facsimile of her painting ‘Painter and Model’ hanging above my desk along with this description from SELF-PORTRAIT:
“In my own ‘Painter and Model’ painting, I have it all, I am both artist and sitter. By looking at myself I don’t need to stage a drama about power; I am empowered by the very fact that I am representing myself as I am: a painter.”
Honestly, I think we can all use a lot of COLOR right now, to take our minds off our journey through the Greek alphabet of Covid variants.
During the pandemic, the MFA Boston mounted a spectacular exhibition of art by Jean-Michel Basquiat and his contemporaries. The catalogue, entitled Writing the Future: Basquiat and the Hip-Hop Generation, is loaded with gorgeous reproductions that will make you reach for your 80s mixtapes, or at least for your Spotify app.
And how about the lavishly illustrated monograph Yayoi Kusama? Phaidon has updated this classic publication, which includes more than 200 illustrations and poems by the artist.
And finally . . . nothing says 2021 like a cookbook composed from hacked emails. Demetria Glace has combed through troves of digital missives, from Hillary Clinton’s to the those of Enron’s swindlers and Sony’s moguls, to create Leaked Recipes: The Cookbook.
To illustrate this minor masterpiece, photographer Emilie Baltz has created whimsical mashups of dishes and devices.
OK Dear Squad, that’s it for now. Sending seasonal cheer, and see you next weekend. xo Nicie