High winds are plucking the last shriveled leaves off the branches while professional reading piles accumulate, isolating as snow-drifts: student papers, dossiers and writing samples from job applicants, scholarly mss I’ve promised to evaluate. At war with myself about whether I really need a Sunday off or a Sunday making a dent in it all, I decided to collect evidence from my Twitter account of what I’ve read and watched for fun since July. Some surprises: first, even when school’s in session, I read plenty of novels and feel no guilt about tossing off some half-baked remark about many of them. I’m actually less likely to tweet about a book that cuts deep—I reread Erdrich’s Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, for example, and it really impressed me, but that’s not in evidence here. Second, I’m less likely to tweet about poems. I read and liked Dean Young’s Falling Higher and Sally Rosen Kindred’s Darling Hands, Darling Tongue during the past few months, as well as revisiting older collections including Langston Hughes’ Montage of a Dream Deferred, but didn’t have pithy observations about them. Is poetry less susceptible to summation? Or am I just more loyal to its complexities? I also would have told you that I prefer full poetry collections to the fragments in magazines, but that’s not borne out by what I’ve actually done lately—I read a single-author volume a couple of times a month this fall, but absorbed much more poetry online, through anthologies, or via the journals I subscribe to. I know we all consume media in part by convenience and happenstance—watching the mediocre movie that plays locally rather than the great one featured in some Hip But Distant Metropolis—but I wonder about that gray area between laziness and actual preference. I don’t always like the things I’m supposed to like, but rooting out those prejudices and admitting what I actually personally enjoy in a piece of art can be surprisingly hard. I haven’t kept a proper journal in decades so Twitter-as-reading-diary actually turns out to be sort of revealing.
Poetry and nonfiction:
On Jean Valentine’s Break the Glass: hairline crack in a bowl of light but the light doesn’t leak away
From Quiver, Nat Anderson on sleep as her squeeze: “he turns that key so soft, I won’t know he’s come/ until he’s left me.”
& today’s other delight: the cranky connoisseurship of Fry’s Ode Less Travelled. He didn’t even have to write it for tenure!
If unpersuaded about deep links between EB Browning and Battlestar Galactica, check out the essays in Derek Furr’s Suite For Three Voices
Sf and adjacent territories:
No sf in Karen Joy Fowler’s wonderful We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, but it is all sf: sneaking up on the unknowable
Jo Walton’s Sulien walks in god-haunted woods between familiar versions of the world. I mean, she REALLY does.
Jo Walton’s Among Others made me wonder if I’ve been practicing magic for years. It’s brill.
Want to visit 2312‘s version of post-global-warming NYC and float along canals between skyscrapers #sfvacationdestination
Traversed @GrahamJoycebook‘s weird alt-world Silent Land through weird alt-world of headphones. Ears still feel packed with snow
@EmilyCroyBarker‘s #RealMagic, a scholar finds a portal. Turns out ice demons really like WC Williams, but Ashbery, not so much
What woke me up about #DoctorSleep is the poetry: incantation, sure, but also Eliot, Auden, and a kickass poet-great-grandma
Movies:
The excellent Much Ado reminded me cynics (Beatrice) morally trump idealists (Claudio). Also made me envy @josswhedon’s beautiful house
#Gravity proves my mom right: it’s crucial to wear nice underwear on field trips because accidents do happen
For the theory behind these tweet-length assessments see “Reviews the Length of an Irritating Splinter.” For another kind of conversation about art we love and how it worms into our brains, go to the latest issue of Midway, scroll down, and see some works of visual art by Carolyn Capps and the poems I wrote in response to them. The real landscape at hand when I drafted them were the Virginia hills around the VCCA.
LESLEY WHEELER 
3 responses to “What I really read, and why, and what it means (Splinter Reviews Part 2)”
“I say it’s the making,
not the architectural sketch but the feel
of a pencil in the hand, that saves us.
A tool that is not a weapon. The relief
of holding water in your mouth
for an effervescent moment before
releasing some brief, brilliant cascade.”
The joy is in the making: so important to remember when rejections feel like weapons themselves. We are, as another of these poems says, such tender monkeys! This poem quoted here had me racing to my Collected Stevens, as if to introduce the poems to each other: look, Wallace, you’d like this – your Ariel should read Wheeler: the idea of commitment to art, of what it’s for, of why we persist, of how to glean something from information overload….
“Ariel was glad he had written his poems[…]
What mattered was that they should bear
Some lineament or character,
Some affluence, if only half-perceived,
In the poverty of their words,
Of the planet of which they were part.”
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Whoops, from ‘The Planet on the Table’.
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Wow, I hadn’t thought of a Stevens connection, but I hear it. Thank you! I WAS thinking about modernism because of Duchamp, so it makes sense those issues and intonations would have been banging around somewhere in my head.
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