LITERATURE

Reading Raymond Carver

Reading your lean stories makes me want to drop everything and charge outside to change the air filter on my ‘82 Mustang. Listening to your lank verse inspires me to repaint the patio furniture, go fishing with a down-and-out friend, write seven poems about something I stopped seeing a long time ago, and describe a waterfall to a blind man.

Reenter the real world, you say. Do some truth-telling.

That’s what I heard you talking about when you talked about love in Odile Helier’s Paris bookstore the summer of 1987. I saw that home-from-hell look on your face when you followed your friends Richard Ford and Jonathan Raban to the front of the room and shyly read your poems.

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M.F.K. Fisher’s Avocado

Mary Frances’s room at 17, Rue Cardinale, was at the top of a beautiful 18th century building, just steps away from a Gothic church, St. Jean de Malte, the first cathedral in Aix. The bells of St. Jean would ring in the morning—Matins—and sound to her like the word avocado:

…I still transfer common sounds into real or imaginary languages, even subconsciously. Once, in a repaired attic room in Aix-en-Provence, I awoke to the Matins from St. Jean-de-Malte, which rang a few dozen feet from me, and I was saying aloud, “Avocado…ah-vo-caa-doh.” It was beautiful. I was making progress. It lasts, so that now deep bells sound very softly when I see the fruit or taste it.

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War, Quakes, and Crashes

No one captures our need for sanctuary and grace better than the award-winning novelist Carol Edgarian. Her books center around our need for a fixed foot of the compass—a safe and nurturing place that shields us from the pressures of the outside world.

Vera, Edgarian’s most recent offering, shows how San Francisco residents rebuilt their homes after the 1906 earthquake. Strangely prescient, this book gives us a spiritual roadmap for reinventing ourselves in the wake of a pandemic.

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The Night I Drove Kerouac Home

By Phil Cousineau Photo by Matthew Ronder on Unsplash The amber lights flicker past as we slip across the long stretch of the Golden Gate Bridge.  The twin towers loom above us like colossal sentinels.  Foghorns moan across the Bay. Jan stares mournfully at the neon redley twinkle of the

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Coming to California

I think that I have a sort of foreigner trauma. I have never felt really comfortable in a place except for a very few years when I was a newlywed mother in Chile. We had a little prefab house where for a few years, I felt that that was really home. But as a child, and as a young adolescent, we were moving all the time, we were leaving behind countries, friends, sometimes a language.

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Graham Greene: Doubt in Many Places

Greene liked to live on “the dangerous edge of things.” Whether researching a story in Uruguay about the Tupamaros —a terrorist group, covering a civil war in Panama, or the French war in Indo-China, he believed in seeing the action for himself— like his character, Fowler, in The Quiet American–a journalist who does not attend the French press briefings but goes upcountry to experience the fighting for himself.

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The Book of Qualities

Courtesy loves conversation and all kinds of musical instruments—old, rare, and new. He knows who wants a simple thank you note and who wants a more elaborate expression of gratitude. He still likes to address envelopes. He writes condolence notes by hand.

Grieving our war-torn, speed-mad world Courtesy is often melancholy. Still, he takes great delight in the simple rituals of daily life.

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Coveting the Writer’s Cat

True Confession: I married a man who co-opted my cat and stole my identity as a writer. Darcy, who had earned his nickname for his aristocratic airs, at first refused to sit on my pristine linen couch, saying it was “redolent of dander.” Then when my wizened Maine Coon leapt upon on the bed, he hissed at her like an Old Tom, decreeing that when we lived together, there would be no cats.

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Refuge for a First-rate Mind

Samuel Butler was one of the greatest literary intellectuals of the Victorian age. After a miserable childhood, his life was, in large part, a search for a happy home. Butler was raised at the Rectory at Langar, a scrap of a village in Nottinghamshire, in a gracious, spacious, pleased-with-itself Georgian mansion with an ill-tempered clergyman father who was home all week, and a fluttery, manipulative mother who trapped him on the sofa until he confessed to some infraction.

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