The holiday season left me sleeping minutes later into the predawn hour and with a large stack of reading material. I read as I am in life: consumptive, compulsive, following the peccadillos of mind over time; weaving fantasy, fiction, and fact into the fabric of my being; stitching new thoughts to old; seeding ideas fresh from history into this ever changing sphere of present hellos.
My reading list today How to Save Your Own Life Erica Jong, Best Food Writing 2011 Holly Hughes, Don't Push the River Barry Stevens, Scientific Progress Goes "Boink" Bill Watterson, creator of my heros Calvin and Hobbes, Tropic of Cancer Henry Miller.
Fitting together hand in glove this collection of books glimpse into the human mind of the late 60s. The momentous zeitgeist, that fire of human spirit Henry Miller lit upon decades before Erica Jong grabbed and used to throw open the minds and legs of women. This book Don't Push the River by Barry Stevens is the Gestalt mind on paper in ink and it reads like sunlight through leaves on a windy spring day, leaving me the reader knowing that the process of becoming human is hot, tangible, personal.
Holly Hughes manages to catch the current pornographic nature of our food obsessed culture in her gathering of international essays. And looking back it makes me wonder if we as a whole group, not the few separate individuals leaping into the clouds, have lost human intimacy, our ability to connect deeply with those around us, so we move our connection to ourselves and that which we cannot live with out.
Bill Watterson, Oh, that's what it meant to be a child of the eighties, thank you, I forgot. I knew this book was starting to get to me when I dreamed 'my personal gravity reversed polarity.' As hyper sensitive, overly active child and now adult (I think they call this ADHD...) I relate to Calvin. His frustration and imagination defines the solitude of the only child, the pain of isolation, and the fulfillment of fantasy. More than that the book makes me laugh and I read the best bits out loud to Sampson, by world traveling bear of the last twenty plus years.
These books, each fully rooted in their time, are not obsessed with the future. Rather they express perfectly their present with typewriters, babysitters, smoking indoors, no mention of HIV; they are clear pictures of time in time. Looking back and wondering how to define this ever changing sky of a hopeful tomorrow it appears that we become the adults we deserve from the children we were. Some of us are obsessed with food. In that, I am not alone.
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